After taking up photography at the age of 60 in 2013, Sandra Cattaneo Adorno embarked on a journey with camera in hand, capturing glimmering flickers of daily life floating between reality and illusion like scenes from a dream. Like Dora Maar who reinvented her photography practice in her 70s, Cattaneo Adorno is drawn to experimentation and to innovative ways of printing and presenting her work.
On April 20, Cattaneo Adorno unveils Ten Years at the 7th edition of Personal Structures: Beyond Boundaries, which runs parallel with the 60th Venice Biennale. Organized by the European Cultural Centre, the 2024 edition focuses on the experience of foreigners, émigrés, exiled, and refugees, especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North.
Hailing from Brazil, Cattaneo Adorno’s life, work, and worldview have been shaped by a lifetime of travel, fostering a sense of belonging through the act of making art. Curated by the photographer and Andrea Verganti, Ten Years charts Cattaneo Adorno’s evolution as an artist and author that elegantly blends the essence of her previous series into a modernist masterpiece.
Resisting the notions of beginning and end, Cattaneo Adorno explores the cinematic possibilities of the image in a six-minute video installation that opens the exhibition. The photographs meld one another, unveiling the complex interplay between dislocation and interconnection. These glittering scenes of Mauritius, Egypt, Brazil, Thailand, Singapore, New York, London, Italy, Portugal, and Japan become surreal meditations of otherness as mysterious as existence itself.
At the center of the exhibition, Cattaneo Adorno’s new monograph, Ten Years (European Cultural Center/Radius Books, April 16, 2024) is a symphony of black and gold to celebrate her decade of photography. Drawing inspiration from artist scrapbooks and leporellos, the book adopts the accordion format to imagine the photographs as notes one would make in a diary.
Cattaneo Adorno envisions the book as a scroll where stories unfold in fragmented and layered narratives, much like traveling itself. The images are printed with the same gold metallic ink and black paper as the prints on view, transforming the photograph into a glimmering sliver of reverie that recalls the delicate splendors of Gustav Klimt’s symbolist paintings and the golden paint of Brazilian dancers at Carnival.
Sandra Cattaneo: Ten Years
On view April 20–November 24, 2024
Previews: April 18, 19
Palazzo Bembo, Riva del Carbon, 4793, Venezia
Published by European Cultural Center | Radius Books, April 16, 2024
Information
Biennale di Venezia
Palazzo Bembo, Riva del Carbon, 4793, Venezia
April 20, 2024 to November 24, 2024
