Naima Morelli

It’s always good to be published on paper! My latest piece for the literary magazine Mekong Review is a piece on contemporary art in Bali beyond tourism, featuring Satya Cipta, Marco Cassani, Citra Sasmita, CushCush Gallery and more.

Get a copy of the magazine here

For Palestinian artist Rana Samara, intimacy is not just about love and sex, but is rather a mixture of connection, comfort and feeling at home, as her latest exhibition at Zawyeh Gallery in Dubai in 2022, Inner Sanctuary, aptly demonstrated. I spoke with her for The Markaz Review.

Here is the link to the interview

Finally we are in that part of the year where we start looking back and planning for the future. As everyone who has been around me lately knows too well, this year I went all in into the reviewing and the planning. Never was I so serious about it – I guess because it’s so much fun for me!

The reflecting phase started already from the 1st of December. I had just came back from a swirlwind of trips in end of October beginning of November – Paris, Budapest, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh literally one after the other – and even had to say no to two more, very enticing press trips to Khazakistan and Qatar. But I was exausted. I had to stop and digest all my experiences. So as soon as I put my suitcase on the parquet of my home in Pigneto, Rome, I de-installed the social media from my phone, and decided to go full into the reviewing/planning process. 

I wrote an article for The New Arab about the Paris Art Week. Unquestionably one of the most important art events in Europe this year, the Paris Art Week, happened from 16 to 22 October.

Given the international climate, what was expected was for shows and art fairs to have an emphasis on the situation in Gaza, but this was not the case.

Here is the link to the article

It has been such a long time since I last indulged in some personal reflections on this blog, and let you readers know what’s up with my life and my different practices. I felt it was high time, so I have started writing this personal essay on the train ride from Naples to Venice, and I have finished it in my hometown Sorrento, in preparation for being back in my turf, Rome. 

The train journey from Naples to Venice was six hours, which I usually spend reading, listening to music, podcasts, and calling friends sometimes. But six hours of uninterrupted trip, crossing Italy from South to North, are a gift of sorts. You are launched at full speed in a beautiful landscape, there is movement and stillness, a precious time to gather your thoughts, in preparation for a fresh start. A time for aimless pleasure, for allowing reflections to form. What will come will be the time for activity, and both the leisure – the otium of the Romans – and the action-filled, execution part, need to be appreciated fully. If you train your sensitivity, you’ll know when and how to flow from one state to another. This is ultimately the sense I’ve been sharpening these past few months.

What a pleasure to chat with Joana Alarcão from Insights of an Eco Artist podcast. The first part was released a few weeks ago, and now the second part is out!

Here is the link to the second part of the podcast

I have been researching and writing about Indonesian contemporary art since 2012 – for almost ten years now – and it’s incredible to see always new exceptional talent emerge from this country.

Balinese artist Citra Sasmita has been on my radar as one of the most interesting emerging artists out there. Her work is visually captivating and luring, and so important in terms of bringing forth new narratives of freedom, empowerment and liberation, for women and beyond. These are the stories, the art we need.

By now, if you follow my writing, you’ll know that I’m mesmerized by works that reinterpret old mythologies in the contemporary context, delve into history by mixing high brow and low brow, eastern and western archetypes. And in that, Sasmita’s work is quite something.

I have spoken to Citra Sasmita for Singapore-based Plural art magazine.

Here is the link to the interview

Every time I write something for the webmagazine Art a Part of Culture, it’s always like a coming home. This was one of the first magazines I started writing for, more than 10 years ago now, and the amazing team of Barbara, Isabella and Gianpaola still lovely supports my every project.

This time I got the chance to delve into the back story behind my new graphic novel “The Mighty Hour”. I explored a period in history – that of the Italy of the ’30s, where women were reclaiming room for themselves as athletes.

It’s quite interesting and timely to look at this part of women empowerment, as the Olympics just drew to a close

Here is the link to the article (in Italian)

A steamy cup of black tea and a blank piece of paper. That’s all I need for my favourite end-of-the-year tradition. This December felt called to reflect back at 2020 already in the first half of the month – maybe because I was once again in my family home because of a new lockdown. I started by sorting the pictures for my other blog Gioco di Donne. The photos are testimonies to all the beauty experienced in this year, as of course the ugly parts are seldom captured on camera. Though this is also how my mind works – remembering first and foremost the good – for this year in review I want to look at all the lessons, to get a clearer path for next year.

Ça va sans dire that this year was quite particular. We are all aware of the toll that the pandemic took from all of us – in Italy the situation was particularly severe, especially in the beginning. Like many others, I have spent a good part of this year indoor. The first three months quarantine which started in March, and the second “red zone” from mid-October to December, I moved back to my family home in Sorrento. It wasn’t uncomfortable as I imagined. The disappointment lasted only in the few days before making the final decision to leave my house (and life) in Rome. Back to my hometown, I quickly adapted to the new situation, and the opportunities that it brought forth. There are some things I dropped altogether, some other things I dived into.