BOOK LAUNCH: Gina Pane: Actions Through Time

A book launch and presentation by Sophie Delpeux and Alice Maude-Roxby.

 

During the 1970s Gina Pane (1939-1990, Italy/France) was well known for a series of live actions that took place in domestic spaces and galleries in Europe. Pane’s actions were meticulously orchestrated to communicate viscerally and visually, often putting her body at risk and marking an indelible exchange between herself and the viewer. 

 

Our anthology is the result of three years of close collaboration- our aim being both to show evolution in the perception of Gina Pane’s actions over the fifty years since the live performances took place, and the extreme diversity within that perception. Alongside writings and interviews by Gina Pane, the anthology includes multiple perspectives from writers, to historians, from curators and exhibition producers to artists who witnessed the actions in 1970s, to those re-encountering the works through re-enactments in the present. Our ambition with this publication is to make it clear that Gina Pane’s actions were addressed to the collective and that a collective is necessary to take them on. - Sophie Delpeux and Alice Maude-Roxby.

  

 

 

Sophie Delpeux is a senior lecturer (HDR) at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a former resident of Villa Medici Roma (2005–2006). Her research is the subject of two books and many articles in which she examines the links between representation, authority, emancipation, and care, focusing on representations produced in connection with Performance Art in the 1970s and ’80s, as well as in the medical field. In Le corps-caméra. Le performer et son image (Textuel, 2010) she examines the different ways in which performers use photography to record their actions, and to broaden their potential to deregulate normative regimes of representation. In Soigner l’image. Destin des beaux cas de dermatologie de l’hôpital Saint-Louis 1801–1979 (PUF, 2025), she studies the history of dermatological iconography in France, focusing on the place occupied by the poor patients who are represented in it, instrumentalised as a spectacle. She is currently the initiator and head of a research programme on an aesthetic of medical care supported by FMSH (Moments esthétiques en santé – un atlas – Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme, Paris).

Alice Maude-Roxby, previously Director of Research in Visual Arts at Middlesex University, researches uses of photography within histories of art. “Me and my cameraperson” in Art, Lies and videotape: exposing performance (Tate Liverpool, 2003), Advertising, architecture and the actions of Gina Pane (Artwords Press, 2004), and Live Art on Camera (John Hansard Gallery, 2007) focused on the role of the photographer of seminal performances. Research of photography as applied to establishing identities for 1920s/30s circle of Berenice Abbott’s women associates was explored within Resist be modern (again) (John Hansard Gallery, 2019) and Censored Realities: Changing New York (Camera Austria, 2018), both co-authored with Stefanie Seibold. Photography as a feminist tool in the 1970s and 80s is explored in her contribution to Pia Arke: Silences and Stories (John Hansard Gallery, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2024), and in the exhibition Channelling: body, image, viewer, at MoCP Chicago, 2025, co-curated with Joan Giroux.