The “Artist at GNAMC” initiative, promoted and organised by Renata Cristina Mazzantini, Director of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, features Marinella Senatore as its artist for 2026. On this occasion, the museum has dedicated the gallery at the beginning of the visitor route to the artist, presenting an exhibition project conceived not simply as a temporary show, but as a dynamic space for artworks, activities, learning and exchange, designed to unfold over the course of an entire year.
One of the most influential figures on the contemporary Italian art scene, Marinella Senatore is a multidisciplinary artist and one of the foremost international voices in participatory art. Since 2012, through her School of Narrative Dance, she has engaged more than eight million people across over 23 countries, developing a practice in which participation is a structural element. Workshops become spaces for self-directed learning, where the body—through movement, voice and presence—functions as a tool for generating knowledge.
The gallery brings together more than 40 works, including drawings, collages and tapestries, marking a significant evolution in the artist’s research by introducing landscape and weaving, for the first time, as central axes of her practice and visual language.
The series of 32 drawings It’s Time to Go Back to the Street translates the idea of embodied landscape into visual form: mindful movement, parkour and collective choreography shape a dynamic topography inscribed through action. This section also includes five drawings from the series dedicated to the Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy), executed in graphite and charcoal on acid-free paper. The two previously unseen collages The Creation of a Context interweave word and image: texts developed during workshops with different communities emerge as distilled expressions of experience across layered surfaces. At the heart of the installation are four monumental, previously unseen tapestries from The Theatre of Commons, created in collaboration with the Chanakya School of Craft in Mumbai, founded by Karishma Swali. In these works, weaving becomes a means of constructing autonomy and identity: each thread records a passage, while each layer results from a negotiation between individual gesture and the collective dimension. The tapestry becomes a site in which tradition and contemporaneity, individuality and collectivity converge. The exhibition is completed by the illuminated sculpture Remember The First Time You Saw Your Name, a distinctive element of the artist’s practice.
Marinella Senatore’s practice operates at the intersection of aesthetics, pedagogy and community building, functioning as a framework capable of generating forms, relationships and possibilities for experience simultaneously. She creates environments in which knowledge emerges through shared experience rather than being transmitted hierarchically. The exhibition marks a significant stage in the development of this trajectory: a point at which participation, drawing and embroidery converge in a new configuration, taking shape in forms of considerable visual and spatial power. In keeping with this approach, the GNAMC will serve not only as an exhibition venue, but as the focal point of a year-long programme of lectures, workshops and encounters that Senatore conceives as an integral part of her practice—an extension of a body of work that seeks to engage communities traditionally situated at the margins of cultural institutions. The GNAMC thus becomes a space capable of activating these processes and extending them into the wider social fabric, continuing to trace new trajectories and redefine the relationship between art, community and the production of meaning.
Biographical Notes
Marinella Senatore (Cava de’ Tirreni, 1977) has developed a multidisciplinary artistic practice that explores the aesthetic and political potential of collective processes. Her work encompasses installations, tapestries, collages, films and collective performances. In 2012, she founded The School of Narrative Dance (SOND), a free, nomadic educational platform that has engaged more than eight million participants in over 23 countries to date. Her work has been presented at major international institutions including the Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Kunsthaus Zürich, The High Line (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Berlinische Galerie (Berlin), UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Shanghai), Castello di Rivoli, MAXXI (Rome), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Hayward Gallery (London) and BOZAR (Brussels). She has taken part in numerous international biennials, including the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennial, Manifesta 12 and the Chengdu Biennale. Her awards include the New York Prize, MAXXI Prize, Italian Council Award and ACACIA Prize.
The Artista alla GNAMC: Marinella Senatore, Protagonist 2026 initiative is supported by the GNAMC’s institutional sponsors: Autostrade per l’Italia, Banca Ifis, Enel, Fondazione Roma, Gruppo Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, Intesa Sanpaolo, Maire and Webuild. Their support has made the project possible.
