Mediations
in collaboration with Magnum Photos
“The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.” —Susan Meiselas
Susan Meiselas (1948, Baltimore, USA), a member of Magnum Photos since 1976, became known for her work in the conflict zones of Central America (1978–1983), and in particular for her powerful photographs of the Nicaraguan revolution. Endlessly exploring and developing narratives, she involves her subjects in her works, often working over long time spans and covering a wide range of subjects and countries, from war to human rights issues and cultural identity to the sex industry.
This exhibition, entitled Mediations after an eponymous work published by Damiani, is the most comprehensive retrospective ever held in Italy, bringing together a selection of works from the 1970s to the present day.
Mediations (1978–1982) is based on Meiselas’s initial experience during the popular insurrection in Nicaragua. The selection process of her images for the publication Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 and the use of the same photographs by the mass media left her with many questions about how images are used in different contexts. Towards the end of the 1990s, Meiselas started to use archive material that she collected, published and exhibited as part of multimedia installations, thereby giving a voice to individuals and communities subject to violence and oppression.
Meiselas often adopts different approaches to extend her work in various forms: photographic essays, installations, books or films. For example, the documents used in the book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997) became an online archive of collective memory, akaKURDISTAN (1998), which is currently shown as an on-going project in the form of a “Storymap” created by contributors from the global Kurdish diaspora.
This exhibition reveals Meiselas’s unique approach as a photographer who has constantly questioned the status of her images in relation to the context in which they are perceived, showing how she moves through different scales of time and conflict, ranging from the personal to the geopolitical dimension.
The Mediations book is available at the Festival bookshop