Sebastião Salgado
Glaciers ("ghiacciai")
At the Mart – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rovereto and at the MUSE – Museum of Science in Trento a widespread exhibition of mostly unpublished photographs.
The project represents a unique opportunity to get to know and explore the work of Sebastião Salgado, one of the greatest and best-known contemporary photographers, who for fifty years has been committed to documenting the life of human beings and the planet; at the same time, it offers the possibility of tackling one of the most urgent issues of our time, that of climate change. In fact, the exhibition is part of a broader context: the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the proposal to declare 2025 the International Year for the Conservation of Glaciers.
With Glaciers, Salgado captures the breathtaking beauty of the glacial masses in a gallery of exclusive images. From the Antarctic Peninsula to Canada, from Patagonia to the Himalayas, from South Georgia to Russia, these striking photographs portray, in a black and white rich in contrasts, places that over the years are increasingly being studied by researchers investigating the geological history of our planet, as well as the short- and long-term consequences of the climate crisis and global warming.
The exhibition project consists of two complementary sections set up in two different museums whose fields, art and science, correspond to the themes of the exhibition. For the MART in Rovereto, Salgado has chosen over 50 large and very large format photographs of glaciers from all over the world, while for the MUSE he has designed a large site-specific installation in the spaces of the ‘Great Void’ that architect Renzo Piano has imagined as the beating heart of the museum. All taken in Canada, in Kluane Park, the photographs exhibited in Trento form a single large nucleus.
The exhibition is the brainchild of the Trento Film Festival and is curated by Lélia Wanick Salgado, produced in collaboration with Contrasto and Studio Salgado, and coordinated by Gabriele Lorenzoni (Mart) and Luca Scoz (MUSE).