Published in 2020 with materials collected since 2014, The Beginning The End is a project that includes a collection of 424 quotes from classical, contemporary and genre literature.
The work develops through the creation of a book divided in two symmetrical parts, The Beginning and The End, which meet in the exact half of the book. Comani collected the first and the last sentence of 212 novels: The Beginning follows a collage structure and it originates a new story from the texts’ incipits organized according to a narrative sense; The End, instead, becomes a story of coincidences, created from the sequence of all the relative last sentences. In some cases, the artist chose to use an artifice, therefore expressing the quote in the first person, as an act of appropriation.
The project The Beginning The End is part of a research on the gender through appropriation and quotation strategies that Daniela Comani has developed since the beginning of her artistic research. Belonging to such research we see the works Novità Editoriali, My Film History, Coverversionen, Sono stata io. Diario 1900-1999.
The exhibition marks the publication of the new artist book The Beginning The End / L'inizio La fine, Monroe Books edition, available in Italian.
Daniela Comani (Bologna, 1965) lives and works in Berlin. History, identity, gender and language are the themes of her multimedia work. She won awards and scholarships, and displays her works in several group and solo shows in Italy and abroad. In 2011, she participated in the Venice Biennale for San Marino Pavillon. Her works are included in permanent collection at MAMbo, Bologna; Collezione Farnesina, Rome; Kupferstichkabinet, Berlin; Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem; Musée Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; University Art Museum in Albany, NY; Academy of Motion Picture, Los Angeles. Among her published books, we recall the publications with Corraini, Revolver, Edition Patrick Frey, Archive Books, Humboldt Books.