Elisabetta Benassi (b. 1966, Rome, Italy) uses a range of media, including installation, sculpture, photography, and video, to question modernity through the materials of its artistic, cultural, and political dimensions. In her work, Benassi engages histories local to global, fleeting to tragic, through conversation and dialogue. Material and metaphor are psychologically engaged to expose how the construction and destruction of ideologies unfold through the artifacts and archives in which we preserve events. With investigation and query, Benassi’s work finds forms with which to challenge the clean lineages of memory, to attend to contested histories and obscured through-lines, in order to question both how and whose modernity perseveres.
Benassi lives and works in Rome. She has had solo exhibitions at the Fondazione Adolfo Pini, Milan (2021); Galerie Jousse Entreprise, Paris (2018); Collezione Maramotti, Italy (2017); Magazzino, Rome (2016); and CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (2013). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at MAXXI, Rome (2022); The National Gallery, Rome (2021); Middelheim Museum, Antwerp (2021); Wellin Museum of Art, New York (2020); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and West Bund Museum Project, Shanghai (2019); Palazzo Reale, Milan (2018); and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2017). Benassi’s work can be found in the collections of the Castello di Rivoli, Turin; MAXXI, Rome; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. She has featured in the 2011, 2013, and 2015 editions of La Biennale di Venezia.