Hanna Rochereau: Data Divas

For her first solo exhibition in Italy, French artist Hanna Rochereau transforms Mare Karina into a compressed archive in which bodies, analogue data, and remnants of a fabricated past are quietly put under pressure. The exhibition reflects the renewed attention that both art and fashion are directing toward archives, not only as engines of creation and display, but as sites where hierarchies of value are constructed, contested, and re-coded.

“Data Divas” carries the bright, slightly claustrophobic glare of a back room where information is sorted, classified, flattened, but also the tenderness and absurdity of mannequins attempting to reclaim agency.
The space reads simultaneously as showroom, storage, and back-end: a small-scale fashion archive that feels less like heritage and more like a machine.

The “divas” and their stage, main characters of this new cultural ecosystem that increasingly pushes the back end to the front end, are suspended between visibility and erasure. In this process, the fiction of neutrality that often surrounds archives and databases is exposed: the gendered and racialised biases underpinning search tools, fashion imagery, and algorithmic forms of attention, and the ways in which archives can reinforce hierarchies even as they promise access and preservation.