EXTRAORDINARY VISIONS. L’ITALIA CI GUARDA

40 Italian and international masters of photography; 150 images describing Italy in its multiple and at times contradictory guises.

The exhibition EXTRAORDINARY VISIONS. L’ITALIA CI GUARDA opens to the public on 2 June, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the birth of the Italian Republic to which MAXXI is paying tribute. EXTRAORDINARY VISIONS. L’ITALIA CI GUARDA – through to 23 October 2016 – has been curated by Margherita Guccione, director of MAXXI Architettura, together with a MAXXI research group composed of Simona Antonacci, Ilenia D’Ascoli, Laura Felci and Monia Trombetta.

Starting out from the works present in the MAXXI collections, the show will feature images of sublime landscapes and others compromised by decay, ideal cities and rundown suburbs, great architecture and marginal urban spaces, behaviours and customs, protagonists in the worlds of art and work, contradictions and pluralities that make up the identity of the Belpaese, immortalised through the lenses of, among others, Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Letizia Battaglia, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Franco Fontana, Giovanni Gastel, Luigi Ghirri, Mimmo Jodice, Armin Linke, Ugo Mulas, Ferdinando Scianna, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Massimo Vitali.

The exhibition will also feature the project Corpi di Reato by Tommaso Bonaventura, Alessandro Imbriaco and Fabio Severo: 35 small format photographs and the large print Fascicoli del Maxi Processo 1986-1987, Palermo that recounts the invisible yet diffuse mafias and that will be added to the MAXXI Architettura collection thanks to the support of the Amici del MAXXI.

“MAXXI is celebrating seventy years of the Republic of Italy with a major photographic exhibition – says Giovanna Melandri, President of MAXXI Foundation -, poetic, documentary, social and institutional “atlas” of the Italy of the last thirty years”. As Margherita Guccione says: “The exhibition is a visual journey via over one hundred photographs of the natural and cultural landscapes of the Italy of the last 30 years; photos that present an image far from the stereotype of the Belpaese and also construct a journey in terms of the idioms and the most advanced experimentation of contemporary photography.”

The exhibition layout presents four sections (Art, architecture, culture; Res Publica; Paesaggi contemporanei; Comunità, Lavoro), enriched by videos and photo projections and by the special project Inside Out by JR, installed in the museum piazza.