She emerged an anarchist after an education by Jesuits. Like her speculative fictions, Italian artist Chiara Fumai’s mythologization of her early life between Rome and Bari is full of oppositions revealed to be continuities. Thus, Fumai – the Milan then Brussels-based artist known for her occultist experiments – explained how an early fascination with Catholic ritual led her to the radical ‘spirituality’ of Aleister Crowley and Madame Blavatsky: Crowley, the painter who led the controversial Thelema cult in Sicily; Blavatzky, co-founder of Theosophy, the syncretist movement established with the late 19th century founding of the Theosophical Society in New York. Theosophy counted many artists among its followers and, imagining herself in their tradition, Fumai used theosophist magic to upset the antiseptic aesthetics of contemporary institutional critique. Indeed, it was the theosophical journal Lucifer, named after the Bible’s rebellious angel, that initiated her into the nexus of individualist anarchism, socialism, occultism and feminism she brought to dOCUMENTA (13) in 2013.
More on frieze.com
