The Unpredictable Certainty Exhibition Opened at PhMuseum Lab
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Published6 Dec 2022
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Author
Showcasing the projects of Finnish artist Henri Airo and the Italian duo Camilla Marrese and Gabriele Chiapparini, the show can be visited on Thursdays until 12 January.
Braving a chill autumn breeze that blew leaves onto the streets, more than 200 visitors came to enjoy the exhibition and meet the artists, who presented their works and chatted about their creative processes during a pleasant aperitivo evening in Bologna, Italy.
The exhibition marks the closing of the PhMuseum Lab 2022's cultural offering, showcasing two projects that implicitly play with the objectivity of the photographic medium, ultimately leaving us to meditate on a constantly evolving landscape where truth and post-truth coexist.
Continuing on the left walls of the main space, we find Airo's visual interpretation of the night of the tragedy. Based on the reconstruction made by the police and the accounts of witnesses, his images are charged with an unresolved tension brought about by the nocturnal landscapes lit by street lamps and by an almost forensic use of flash to illuminate objects, scenes and people linked to that fatal evening.
On the opposite side of the main exhibition space we find 10:33, the project by Camilla Marrese and Gabriele Chiapparini that traces the plane crash which hit a school in Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna) in 1990 and took the lives of 12 students, injuring 88 others.
The right walls are occupied by compositions of archive images, photographs that symbolically refer to the accident and impactful passages taken from the accounts of surviving students, other witnesses and relatives of the missing children. On the next wall, the archival image of the hole left by the plane's impact against the facade of the school is printed on a mosaic of 49 sheets of paper.
In the centre of the main exhibition space, visitors are invited to interact with a table full of documentation about the accident, the plane's trajectory and the weather conditions, interrupted here and there by other small images produced by the duo as an emotional response to the tragedy.
Artist Camilla Marrese
The second room introduces a site-specific installation composed of 3 videos. The two TVs alternately show material from both projects. In them, reproduced in a loop are clips from both Italian and Finnish news that covered what happened at the time of the events. Always starting from these news images, the projection on the wall wishes to act as an internal filter, a more metaphorical and internal multimedia elaboration that intervenes with the original materials giving them new meaning.
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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All images © PhMuseum
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Where: PhMuseum Lab, Via Paolo Fabbri 10/2a, Bologna, Italy
Admission: Free
When: from 24 November until 12 January
Opening Times: Thursdays from 17:30 to 19:30
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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 video director (Gabriele) and graphic designer (Camilla), they strongly believe in collaboration as a path to transform and process individual, personal thinking into 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 Information Design at Design Academy Eindhoven. Their individual work has been shown in galleries and festivals such as Fotografia Europea.
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PhMuseum Lab, founded in 2020, 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.
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Criticae, PhMuseum’s Online Contemporary Curatorial Practice Masterclass, is a program that aims at fostering photography as a vehicle for individual storytelling. It delves into different modes of "personal" stories, by questioning documentary and its different media (stills, sound, moving images & text). Its participants explore the critical and poetic, collaborative and idiosyncratic, philosophical and intuitive, emotional and analytical over the course of 8 months, with the goal to complete a personal project and acquire valuable skills to keep developing their careers. So far, Criticae teachers have been Max Pinckers and Laura El-Tantawy. Applications for the 3rd edition will open in 2023.
