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8/11/2011

Sguardo italiano

Fotografins Hus, Stockolm

Sguardo italiano
Through Italian eyes

An exhibition entitled « Sguardo italiano » (“Through Italian eyes”) is opening in Stockholm at Fotografins Hus (house of photography), Skeppsholmen from 9th November to 20th December. The exhibition focuses on new Italian photography and Elio Grazioli, artistic director of the Fotografia Europea (European photography) festival in Reggio Emilia is curator; the Italian Institute of Culture is organising the exhibition within the 150th anniversary celebrations for Italian Unification. The exhibition features the works of three photographers: Paola Di Bello, Giorgio Barrera and Armin Linke. It would be contrived to attempt to find a common denominator in the experiences of these forty- to fifty-year-old creative artists. As Elio Grazioli highlights, the situation of Italian photography nowadays is epitomised more by the eccentricity of single creative artists than by recognised schools or trends. His selection of artists and of works does not offer up an orderly story but rather a constellation of intents and concerns, of sensitivity and attitudes: and the identity of an Italian gaze or « sguardo italiano » actually comes from playing with blends and references.

Paola Di Bello combines great attention to design and form with a strong social content. She draws on the formal principle of the ongoing contemporary presence of opposite parameters, be they in space, in time or in composition: inside/outside, front/back, horizontal/vertical, break/continuity, day/night, light/dark... The social content can be seen in such subject matters as the homeless, garbage, the urban space, through to the involvement of both nomadic and local communities in various projects: homeless people stretched out asleep on benches displayed vertically; an object thrown out and knocked over is put back in its correct position, thereby upending the view of the background; a photograph, a video form a “bridge” between the community members of one place and those of another, between the ones who stay and the ones who leave, the ones who are here and the ones who are elsewhere; two shots by the same person at two different times but in the same place, underscore the passage and transformation marked by time; the continuity of a road is recognised with photos taken at different times and in different situations. The effect of the resulting pictures is never predictable at all, on the contrary it is disorienting enough to always allow art to exhibit real life differently and to visually invite you to think and to think again.

The works by Giorgio Barrera on exhibition alternate between « interiors » and « exteriors ». In some of them he simulates a curious eye staring through the window into the home opposite. A situation that most people know well, tapped into our consciousness by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film, Rear Window without this depleting its effectiveness in any way. Indeed, the window has been the key metaphor of the collective imagination since the Renaissance – we look at a picture as if we are looking through a window – so that what we see is beyond the glass, namely a transparent, invisible surface that forms the medium onto which the image is projected. What we see on the other side is inaccessible, and all we can do is build up our own fantasies and examinations around it. So, when “spying” through a window, in particular: what is happening in that other home? What does it mean? So, Barrera directs the observer’s position. Conversely, in other works, we can see what we would normally call a « landscape », but these photographs are not just any landscapes, they are the battlefields of the wars of Italian independence as they appear today. As a result of the artist’s gaze, of his project, of the title of the work, it is filled with the ghosts of History, with a capital H. We see something that is not there, but we feel as if we can make out its traces, which have actually disappeared but that look to us as if they are still “in the air”. In truth, both the landscape and the history – and the photograph – are a human construction and a result of projections. Indeed, this is the true nature of photography – the imprint of something that is in the past, that “is” no longer, but that is given back to us in some magic way: a battlefield

The works by Giorgio Barrera on exhibition alternate between « interiors » and « exteriors ». In some of them he simulates a curious eye staring through the window into the home opposite. A situation that most people know well, tapped into our consciousness by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film, Rear Window without this depleting its effectiveness in any way. Indeed, the window has been the key metaphor of the collective imagination since the Renaissance – we look at a picture as if we are looking through a window – so that what we see is beyond the glass, namely a transparent, invisible surface that forms the medium onto which the image is projected. What we see on the other side is inaccessible, and all we can do is build up our own fantasies and examinations around it. So, when “spying” through a window, in particular: what is happening in that other home? What does it mean? So, Barrera directs the observer’s position. Conversely, in other works, we can see what we would normally call a « landscape », but these photographs are not just any landscapes, they are the battlefields of the wars of Italian independence as they appear today. As a result of the artist’s gaze, of his project, of the title of the work, it is filled with the ghosts of History, with a capital H. We see something that is not there, but we feel as if we can make out its traces, which have actually disappeared but that look to us as if they are still “in the air”. In truth, both the landscape and the history – and the photograph – are a human construction and a result of projections. Indeed, this is the true nature of photography – the imprint of something that is in the past, that “is” no longer, but that is given back to us in some magic way: a battlefield.

Image: Paola Di Bello

Vernissage: wednesday 9 november 5pm-8pm in presence of the artists and the curator.

Fotografins Hus
Slupskjulsvagen, 26C - Stockolm
Hours: wed-fri 12-18
sat-sun 12-16
Free admission

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