The exhibition “Retroscena” by Chiara Bettazzi explores the threshold between stage and backstage, composition and disintegration. Her photographs and installations capture everyday objects in continuous transformation. Using materials from past exhibitions, she creates a space where memory, process, and form intertwine.
The exhibition “Violent Images” explores how violence becomes visible in and through images—whether through their depiction, their production, or their circulation. Instead of showing explicit representations of suffering, the works focus on subtle forms of visual violence and their cultural, social, and political contexts. By refusing full visibility, they create counter-images that activate doubt, reflection, and responsibility in the act of seeing. In doing so, the artists highlight that engaging with images of violence is always inherently political
Foto Forum presents two exhibitions exploring the relationship between people and built spaces: In “L’albergo della lontananza / Far Far Stay”, Federica Mambrini reflects on distance and encounter between Italy and Chile, while Valeria Simonini, with photographs by Luca Matassoni, investigates in “One like many others
” the railway workers’ houses along the Bolzano–Brenner line and their everyday transformations
Grandmother said it’s okay is a playful investigation of Stefanie Moshammer’s grandparents’ house in the countryside of Upper Austria, a place shaped by tradition and layered with stories of identity
DURCHGANGSLAND – TERRADIPASSAGGIO is Francesca Cirilli’s solo exhibition, concluding a residency series in Fortezza in 2024. Her images and Stefano Riba’s texts explore the history of the 15 km stretch of the SS12 between Fortezza and Mules, shaped by infrastructure projects and foreign labor.
In “I Have Done Nothing Wrong”, Mika Spreling confronts the sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of her late grandfather. Through archival images, drawings, and photographs, themes such as shame, anger, and guilt are explored unflinchingly, while family complicity and the erasure of memories are critically examined
Today’s wars are defined by images competing as visual reports on an information battlefield. In his work over the past decade, Mykola Ridnyi explores how violence can be depicted without reinforcing it, using metaphors of blindness to highlight dehumanization in the media—particularly in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine since 2014
Diminishing Returns – Sara Bezovšek, Matteo Antoniazzi, Melanie Kasal. Our bodies, ideas, and desires are consumed and monetized daily, just as we consume ourselves. The exhibition “Diminishing Returns” questions visual excess in times of global crises and offers counter-narratives as well as performative activities that challenge stereotypical notions of excess. The displayed works create spaces for reflection and critically examine the personal, cultural, and social implications of abundance.
Sisto Sisti (1906-1981), an employee and self-taught photographer, left over 13,000 images, now preserved at the Provincial Archive of Bolzano. The board of Foto Forum, together with Elisa Cappellari, selected more than 500 of them to present the “Microcosm of Sinigo.” Sisti’s photographs do not only depict the factory and work but also the village, offering a precious glimpse into the lives of thousands of workers and their families in an area that previously did not exist.
On Tuesday 14 May at 7 pm, Foto Forum will inaugurate “Torno indietro un attimo”, an exhibition by Italian artist Antonio Rovaldi curated by Angelika Burtscher and Daniele Lupo and produced by Foto Forum together with Lungomare.
The project tells the story of the Adige River through a series of photographs, a sound and video installation and a book.
Home – Where can it be found? Has it ever been? Did it once exist in an unscathed state? Or has it always been a longing, a shimmering reflection of light in the shards of fragility lying before us, in the cracks of unsustainable dreams of bliss and salvation? Landscapes of destroyed matter are visible in the photo series “Zuhause” by Émilie Delugeau. The intact, the surface has shattered, forming the natural shapes of the impact of uncontrollable force.
“Skyglow” refers to the glow of the night sky, caused by artificial lights, which is the reason for the disappearance of stars from the lives of billions of people. The English term gives the title to Francesco Del Conte’s solo exhibition and encompasses two new photo series – 16 shots of the starry sky and photographs of “Photo Optical Measuring Tools”. The exhibition moves at the intersection of contemporary art, astronomy, and environmental science, questioning the photographic medium by examining, in a two-part event in collaboration with the Planetarium South Tyrol, the effects of light pollution on sky observation and the impacts on the physiology of humans, animals, and plants.
“Impossible Horizon” is the first exhibition in Italy of Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko – a Polish duo of intermedia artists. In their latest works (photographs, sound installations, photographic objects, videos), the Doroszenko duo deals with a classic theme in art – landscape. To better understand the causes of the current environmental crisis, the artists look at the history of the Western tradition of landscape painting, in which the concept of natural landscape was defined according to the dominant worldview – as a detached component, outside the subject. In their works, Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko aim to question the separation between the issue – the observer – and the separated environment.
Reverse Gazes is the inaugural edition of the exhibition series JOINTS, curated by Eva Leitolf and Giulia Cordin (Studio Image of the Faculty of Design and Arts | unibz) and Jeva Griskjane (Foto Forum). It showcases photographs by renowned US artist Haley Morris-Cafiero and multimedia works by upcoming artists Carmine Auricchio, Pia Deppermann, Sophie Krause, and Luca Piscopo. The group exhibition reflects contemporary conflicts of values within the patriarchal system in the technologized age of media manipulation, thereby opening up new perspectives on alternative life models for a more equal and independent coexistence.
Starting from the autobiographical experience, in Please, don’t ever come down, Zanin explores the father-daughter relationship through the metaphor of the falcon with its prey. It is a poetic tale of legacies, evolutions, and metamorphosis that delves into blood and familial bonds, dreamlike and imaginary connections and the relationship between man and animal.
French-Dominican artist and photographer Karla Hiraldo Voleau investigates notions of intimacy, love and gender representation, combining (auto-) fictional and non-fictional elements between photographic and written storytelling.
Curated by: Mila Palm, Nicolò Degiorgis From a collection of: Mila Palm A book by: Rorhof Exhibition Design: Flaim Prünster Architekten Opening: 12.4.2023, 7 p.m. Exhibition: 13.4. – 6.5.2023 Finissage & Book Presentation: 6 May 2023, 10 a.m. Gehfotografen, literally…
About 350 bunkers were built before the outbreak of the Second World War along the border between Italy and Austria, on the disputed territory of South Tyrol. A huge system of fortifications was decommissioned by the army in 1993. In a preview for Foto Forum Bolzano, the photographer presents a selection of 31 photographs taken in South Tyrol between 2018 and 2021.
Foto Forum Bolzano presents Stanze by Viviane Sassen, an exhibition bringing together images from – Flamboya, Parasomnia, Pikin Slee, Umbra and Of Mud and Lotus.
Works from different chapters in the artist’s oeuvre intertwine in configurations prompted by affinity of shapes, colours and oneiric atmospheres; the gallery walls are each a self-contained visual poem, a stanza in which the images are words and sequences have their own distinct rhythm.
For many years I have tried to narrate a valley where I was born and where I’ve spent a lot of time since when I was a child even if I grow up in a big city like Milano. This valley is a place that I loved and hated, a place I’m tied to by an emotional link that involves me, my father passed away when I was fifteen and my mother disappeared few years ago.
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