Letizia Battaglia. Without End
Seventy images to retrace the extraordinary career of the great photographer Letizia Battaglia. Until October 26th, the Palazzo di Città in Cagliari hosts 'Letizia Battaglia Senza Fine' with iconic and lesser-known images.
The exhibition, curated by Palo Falcone and organized by Electa in collaboration with the Letizia Battaglia Archive and the Falcone Foundation for the Arts, is promoted by the Municipality of Cagliari in collaboration with the Sardegna Foundation.
Letizia Battaglia is recognized as one of the leading figures in international photography history. She is universally remembered for her courage, demonstrated during her collaboration with the newspaper L'Ora di Palermo, for the images she captured during the bloody mafia war of the Seventies and Eighties.
Photography for Letizia Battaglia is an important tool for her emancipation as a woman and a mother. Over time, she understands the social and denouncing role it can have in society.
'Senza Fine' is a tribute to Letizia Battaglia. The exhibition, while offering a unified vision of a five-decade-long career, reflects her way of breaking the mould with a unique project spread across multiple spaces, where a wide selection of photographs tell the various aspects of her photography in a timeless, non-chronological, and thematic way.
'Senza Fine' is a constellation of Letizia Battaglia's works that revisit the main themes of her career. This exhibition in Cagliari maintains the tradition of breaking patterns, erasing themes, ignoring chronologies, and building a polyphonic work that offers a unified vision of a nearly five-decade-long career.
'Senza Fine' is also a tribute to the architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) and the exhibition she created in 1968 for the art collection at MASP-Museu de Arte de São Paulo in Brazil, suspending artworks with crystal horses. For Palazzo di Città, the crystals become a suspended forest, with double-sided large-format photographs, creating an open, non-vertical, and non-hierarchical installation of photographic works.
Letizia Battaglia's most famous images document one of the most bloody, poetic, heart-wrenching, and dramatic chapters in Sicilian history. But this exhibition aims to open up to a universe of photographs taken outside her homeland, essential stops in her journeys to gain a deeper understanding of her work and thought. Photography, reportage, and private life converge in a single path, highlighting the extraordinary sensitivity and humanity of the Palermo-born photographer. A selection of works created at the psychiatric hospital in her city is dedicated to her, where Battaglia involved and made patients protagonists. An event that she renewed multiple times over the years. 'Graziella' from 1983 is one of these shots and opens the exhibition.
