Karen Knorr’s Academies in Moscow – 14/10/14 – 9/11/2014

Facts and Fictions

Contemporary Photographs from the UniCredit Art Collection

Multi Media Art Museum
Moscow House of Photography
Ostozhenka Street 16
Moskva 119034

On October 13, 2014, the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow is opening an exhibition called Facts and Fictions. The exhibition will feature works by famous contemporary photographers from the UniCredit Art Collection.

The Exhibition is arranged by UniCredit Bank in celebration of its 25th anniversary of operations in Russia and will be open for visitors from October 14 to November 9, 2014. The event will be held under the patronage of the Year of Tourism Italy-Russia 2013-2014 for which we would like to thank H. E. Cesare Maria Ragaglini, Ambassador of Italy in Russia.

The Exhibition presents about 90 works selected from the UniCredit Art Collection, some of which date back to the 1980-s. Professor Walter Guadagnini, Chairman of the UniCredit Artistic Commission is the project curator. The photographs included in the exposition have been specially selected to represent two-side nature of photography: exact analytical representation of reality (facts), on the one hand, and creation of artificial, but at the same time probable parallel reality (fictions), on the other hand.

Facts and Fictions is a title that sums up two key elements that characterize photography since the moment of the field’s inception, or rather, that are an integral part of the very nature of photography. On the one hand, photography is capable of documenting facts and the finest details, which suggests truthful reflection of reality. On the other hand, by exploiting this very supposition, photography can manipulate reality, construct and invent it, and correspondingly, lie in a way that no other information medium or art form has ever been able to do before, Walter Guadagnini, the exhibition curator explains.

The Facts and Fiction exhibition consists of three sections: Documenting Reality, Transforming Reality, and Inventing Reality. The photographs presented at the Exhibition are not separated by chronological order, school or style.

In the section called Inventing Reality, the visitor’s attention is drawn to the role of manipulation in the art of photography, which due to digital technologies has become more and more utilized lately. In this section of the Exhibition, reality has been invented or newly created using distortion and special effects. Inventing Reality reveals a more playful side of photography, which in its turn makes us think about the ways of manipulating information and the need of verify the origin of the images and photography’s vast power of persuasion. Here one can see the works of Adrian Paci, Grazia Toderi, Karen Knorr, Shirin Neshat, and Vanessa Beecroft.

http://www.mamm-mdf.ru/en/exhibitions/future/