Jérôme Sessini: Ukraine, Inner Disorder
1 October 2015 – 10 January 2016
The exhibition
The first contact of Mr. Sessini with Ukraine took place in February 2014 during the protests in Maidan Square in Kiev. Since then, the photographer returned to the country again and again for long time, documenting life in the Donbass region: in-depth work on the social consequences of violence, which opens up a door on a country plunged into a real civil war, in an atmosphere of Cold War and tensions between the East and the West.
Mr. Sessini addresses the Ukrainian situation very seriously and with thinking skills, all that becoming tangible in his images, capable of establishing a deep dialogue with the observer: photographs not looking for sensationalism, but rather able to make you feel silences and fear, so alive that you seem to perceive even the humidity in the air. In Sessini’s Ukraine you can find the blood of the dead, but also the poetry of Natalia, to which the war has taken everything away, but yet capable to play Brahms and Chopin so sublime at the piano; there are gunshots and the screams of Maidan, but also the rain slowly falling on the silence of a landscape deprived of its dignity.
The exhibition consists of 38 images of different sizes, divided into three distinct sections – Mariupol, East Ukraine and Maidan. Four monitors will also display videos documenting the project, as well as interviews and slide shows of the photographs themselves. In support of all that, the public will have access to a touch panel with direct link to the website dedicated to the exhibition.
The exhibition, curated by Alessia Glaviano, Senior photo editor of “Vogue Italia” and “L’Uomo Vogue”, aims to present the progress of the photographer’s work about Ukraine, with a multimedia setup in which still images ‘converse’ with video contents, sounds, interviews and texts. In order to make the whole contents of the exhibition accessible to everybody, Mrs. Glaviano designed the jeromesessiniukraine.com website, that will be online the day after the opening and that will reflect and complement the multimedia project core with footage, photo galleries, interactive maps and video interviews Jerome Sessini.
Jérôme Sessini
Jérôme Sessini, French and born 1968, is a member of the prestigious Magnum Photos agency since July 2012. Before working on Ukraine, he focused on the shaded areas on the border between Mexico and the United States, and especially in Ciudad Juarez, documenting a no-man’s land in the hands of drug cartels, and capturing with stark realism a previously unseen reality, whose protagonists – degradation, youth crime, corruption, drugs and prostitution – make a poignant and truthful show in his refined images.
Winner of several international awards such as the Getty Image Grant, the Olivier Rebbot Award and the World Press Photos for his latest work on Ukraine, has published his work in magazines such as Time Magazine, De Standaart, Stern and Le Monde. He held several solo exhibitions at the Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, and at the Bibliothèque Nationale François-Mitterrand in Paris.
His book ‘The Wrong Side’ (Contrasto 2012) was appointed by Aperture as one of the best books of the year.