Michela Palermo (Creative Practices '08) is one of 40 artists exhibiting in NO PLACE LIKE HOME, the first major retrospective exhibition to explore the evolution of Italian photography since the 1980s, showcasing how the country, emerging from the postwar economic boom, developed its own photographic visual language.
Some 300 works show Italy as seen through the eyes of about forty photographers. The spectrum of works on display includes portraits, conceptual and serial works, socially, politically, and societally situated photographs, and landscape photographs, which occupy a special place in Italian art. The exhibition addresses topics such as migration and the country’s imperialist past. Urban and rural spaces appear as places of both personal memory and collective identity. Photographs of people offer a diverse panorama: a confused elderly man wearing a skirt and diving goggles, teenage skateboarders, two lovers in an intimate embrace, a child holding a toy gun.
In addition to internationally renowned photographers of the 1980s, such as Guido Guidi, Gabriele Basilico, and Luigi Ghirri, the exhibition also focuses on the artistically significant phase of the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as on a younger generation that has provided important new impetus over the past two decades.