Facts and Fictions

Contemporary photographs from the UniCredit Art Collection

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.

«It has become a good tradition to celebrate the Bank’s anniversaries with large-scale exhibition projects,» says Mikhail Alekseev, Chairman of the Management Board of UniCredit Bank, «This year we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the bank’s operations in Russia and, thanks to the support of our shareholder, UniCredit Group, we have an opportunity to invite all art enthusiasts to the remarkable Facts and Fictions Exhibition. In the modern world, it is very important to be able to distinguish between facts and fictional stories that are portrayed as factual. Often, this is necessary just to be able to understand what is happening in our world. Visitors will be able to judge the works of photographers presenting their vision of the world, but structure of the exhibition will allow people to discern whether or not the situations depicted in the photographs are accurate depictions of the truth. We are confident that our Exhibition will become one of the most interesting cultural events in the capital this autumn.»

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 first section, Documenting Reality, special attention is given to Düsseldorf School photographers. The key place is taken by the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who have left their mark in the history of art not only as artists but also as teachers. It was due to their efforts that the whole generation of artists of the so-called Becher School was formed in Düsseldorf. This section also features works by innovative European and American artists who created the tradition of direct capture of reality in portrait and landscape styles. The photographs of Gabriele Basilico, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, Olivo Barbieri, Francesco Jodice, Taryn Simon, Anastasia Khoroshilova and others are included in the exposition.

The second section of the Exhibition, Transforming Reality, includes the photographs of Andreas Gursky, Mimmo Jodice, Luigi Ghirri, Sabina Horning, Giuseppe Penone and others. All of these artists focus on presenting a more subjective take on reality. Even when reality fixed by the camera, the photographers create images open to personal interpretations. Many of the works connect the experience of the body with its representation, as this is the very point of transformation, both physical and symbolic. Other sections of the Exhibition include photographs by artists whose works are presented in this section if the nature of their work changed due to the evolving nature of their work. For example, the works of Olivo Barbieri, the Italian master of urbanistic landscapes, gradually transformed from realistic photographs to surreal images.

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.

«The Facts and Fictions Exhibition of works from the UniCredit Art Collection is a unique and significant event for us,» says Olga Sviblova, Director of Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, «It’s not just about big-name artists, but also because of the concept of the project, which demonstrates the universal formula of photography. Contemporary photography in particular has ceased to be an act of non-interference; it modifies and invents new reality, especially with the use of innovative technologies. And as there are no irrelevant works in the thoroughly amassed collection of UniCredit, we are pleased to share with the Moscow audience the exposition of photographs that vividly demonstrates first the documentary nature of photography, and then its evolution into a more complicated relationship between fact and fiction and finally the ever-diminishing connections between reality and its artistic representation.»

UniCredit’s collection is considered to be one of the main European corporate collections and includes over 60,000 works of art. The Facts and Fictions Exhibition presents only a minor part of the photographic works created by modern artists. The collection includes 4,000 photographic works in total.

Photography has been featured as key item at different international exhibitions. Since 2009, photographs from UniCredit Art Collection have been exhibited in Austria, Italy, Germany, Poland, Turkey, and Russia. Nevertheless, Facts and Fictions is the first exhibition devoted entirely to photography.

On October 19, a lecture on the topic «History of Modern Photography» will be delivered by Professor Walter Guadagnini as part of the Exhibition program.