VILLA MALPENSATA
The exhibition presents 145 refined black-and-white photographs printed with silver salts on baryta paper, from negatives preserved in the artist’s Berlin archive. This is the first major retrospective devoted to Berger, whose entire career, from the early 1970s to the present day, is covered by the Lugano project. For the occasion, the rooms on the piano nobile of Villa Malpensata are restored, after almost thirty years, to the magic of natural light that floods the architectural volumes, enhancing a highly refined setting. Berger’s photography has always focused on the investigation of identities, both personal and cultural. The common thread of the project slowly emerged through a long dialogue with the artist. As the curator, Francesco Paolo Campione, explains, “Hans Georg Berger has consciously chosen photography as an existential remedy, as a solid tool, to give substance to his own identity and his own universe of senses and dreams; something that alleviates, through art, the suffering generated by a hostile social context. His incessant research has allowed Berger to bring into play the richness of his own inner world. His exploration has thus gradually broadened from the intimacy of his relationship with the French writer Hervé Guibert (1955-1991), to the social dimension of the inhabitants of Rio in Elba, and finally, after a long journey through Asia, to the representation of Theravāda Buddhism and Shia Islam. Both the journey and the landing are marked by the exercise of an iron intellectual discipline that, applied first of all to his own life, has been transformed into a language capable of grasping the essential features of reality. An approach, Berger’s, that is based on the ethical, and not just aesthetic, centrality of the photographed object. An extraordinary journey, probably unique, within great contemporary photography.
The exhibition route
The photographic tour is divided into thematic sections and presents 145 photographs accompanied by a poetic narration and counterpointed by a selection of artworks (Manzù and Susanne Besch) that recall Berger’s intellectual experience and allow the visitor to experience a highly meditative atmosphere.
The exhibition concludes with a multivision of around eighty portraits by Hervé Guibert, which illustrate an intimate artistic and personal complicity and allow us to delve into the original substance that fuelled Berger’s entire photographic experience, characterised by the sharing of the image between the photographer/subject and the individual and culture/object photographed.
Biographical notes
Hans Georg Berger was born in Trier in 1951. After studying Philosophy of Religions at the University of Munich and the University of Vermont (USA), in the early 1970s he was an actor, scriptwriter and director in the group Rote Rübe and, from 1977 to 1983, director of the Internationales Festival des Freien Theaters in München and co-founder of the Münchener Biennale. At the end of the 1970s, he initiated the restoration of the Hermitage of Santa Caterina on the Island of Elba, transforming the ancient Franciscan monastery into an international art centre and creating a botanical garden dedicated to the spontaneous flora of the Tuscan Archipelago. Alongside his Elba experience, Berger started a series of long-term photographic projects in the 1980s, mainly focusing on the cultural dimension of ritual and meditation as a source of spiritual research. The privileged field of his research and training activities have been Laos, Thailand and Iran, countries in which he has stayed on several occasions and for long periods, weaving an extensive network of relationships that has also favoured the realisation of important international cooperation projects. In the city of Luang Prabang, the former capital of the Kingdom of Lan Xang and, until 1975, the residence of the King of Laos, Berger founded the Buddhist Photography Archive in the late 1990s with the aim of preserving and enhancing a unique heritage of more than 35,000 images taken by monks from the birth of photography to the end of the 20th century. To date, Hans Georg Berger has produced over forty volumes and has more than sixty solo exhibitions to his credit in all the major countries of Europe, the United States, Japan and South East Asia. His works are included in the collections of some of the world’s most important art museums.
«Esovisioni» is a cycle dedicated to the peculiarities and paths of the vision of cultures through the photographic lens. The working hypothesis is that the photographer, taking the exotic image as a pretext has, consciously or unconsciously, returned his own inner vision, fertilising the collective imagination with artful images and stereotypes of different cultural realities.