New Collective Exhibition Opening at PhMuseum Lab on 24 November
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Published17 Nov 2022
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Author
Featuring works by Henri Airo and the duo Camilla Marrese and Gabriele Chiapparini the show will play with the objectivity of the photographic medium, ultimately leaving us to meditate on a constantly evolving landscape where truth and post-truth coexist.
To complete PhMuseum's 2022 rich program of exhibitions, next Thursday 24 November we inaugurate Unpredictable Certainty at PhMuseum Lab in Bologna. The collective dialogue established by the two presented works will be pushing us to challenge the boundaries and tensions between fact and fiction.
Henri Airo starts his research with the urge to understand how the police and the media have dealt with the incident that took his sister's life away in 2012.
For his analysis, the Finnish visual artist retraces the perpetrator’s day of the crash, using him as the central character of his narrative. Creating a non-linear timeline, Airo combines archival material with re-enactment, revisited sites and imaginative images to fill the investigations’ interludes. This constructed narrative interrogates the enabling factors behind the crash, such as the perception of alcoholism in Finnish society, while simultaneously dismantling narratives built by the media - who presented the case as an entertainment persona-driven drama - and the police - who concentrate their research on irrelevant details.
On a similar level, Camilla Marrese and Gabriele Chiapparini are retracing the event of a plane crash that on 6 December 1990 hit a school in Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna, Italy) and took away the life of 12 students, wounding 88 other people.
Years after a personal experience that saw Chiapparini being on a flight shaken by strong turbulence, the Italian duo started in-depth research on the story of the Istituto Salvemini and questioned the possibilities of fate. While reading newspapers and looking at online pictures of the crash, they couldn’t elaborate all this info smoothly, feeling that paper and screen were an imposed perimeter that separated them from those involved. With these assumptions, they combined a personal visual examination with archival photographs and footage covering the event. A creative act that wishes to challenge the perception of “us” - those who carry on living - as compared to “them” - those affected by fate - as if the two entities were living and acting in an environment following different physical laws.
The speculative nature of these works sets the stage for open-ended questions that reflect on the severe precision of fate. Each investigation is tied to the current questions about the ontological (explicit) and epistemological (tacit) nature of photography.
The two works received this exhibition prize thanks to Criticae 2021, PhMuseum Online Documentary Photography Masterclasses, one of PhMuseum’s educational initiatives where the projects were developed under the guidance of Max Pinckers.
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The exhibition is opening next week, the artists are going to be present on the opening day. Below you can find all the practical info.
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Where: PhMuseum Lab, Via Paolo Fabbri 10/2a, Bologna, Italy
Admission: Free
When: 24 November 2022 - 12 January 2023
Vernissage: 24 November | 6pm-10pm
Opening Times: Thursday 5:30pm-7:30pm
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Henri Airo (Finland,1996) is a visual artist addressing social phenomena through documentary narratives. His researched-based methods often combine photography and other lens-based mediums, text and archival material. Characterised by the dialectical document, Henri's works engage a subject matter but at the same time inquire about the constructions and incongruities within the medium he uses to represent that subject. His research often takes the form of polyphonic, ambiguous and contradictive documentary narratives presented in the form of exhibition installations and publications. Graduating with a BA in photography at the Lahti Institute of Design and Fine Art in 2021. His work has been exhibited at festivals and museums such as Krakow Photomonth and Amos Rex.
Gabriele Chiapparini (Italy, 1980) e Camilla Marrese (Italy, 1998) are an artistic duo focusing on the photographic form. Bringing together their backgrounds as a video director (Gabriele) and graphic designer (Camilla), they strongly believe in collaboration as a path to transform and process individual, personal thinking into the matter for collective elaboration. In this process, they aim to use photography as a tool to explore territories and identities, and to articulate open, complex questions. After publishing their first book “I Might Have Seen Something” in 2019 (Artphilein Editions), their work as a duo has been featured in collective publications and exhibitions in different venues, such as Kranj Photo Fest, Focus Artphilein and Spazio M.A.D. With a background in sociology, Gabriele works as a video director and DoP for documentaries and commercials between Bologna and Milan. After a BA in Graphic Design and Visual Communication at ISIA Urbino, Camilla now attends MA in Information Design at Design Academy Eindhoven. Their individual work has been shown in galleries and festivals such as Fotografia Europea, Kranj Photo Fest, Focus Artphilein e Spazio M.A.D.
PhMuseum Lab, founded in 2020 in Bologna, is a multi-purpose project that seeks to create a place to gather and learn, so as to share the online experience of the PhMuseum and stimulate a dialogue between digital opportunities and physical interactions. It pursues the same mission, which is that of working to discover, educate, and promote talented photographers whilst spreading visual culture. Follow PhMuseum Lab on Instagram.
