Modena, 12 March. (askanews) – Lot’s wife transformed into salt, Jonah into the whale, the Creation of the world: Photographs taken with a Polaroid long before Polaroid existed. This is the paradox that inhabits “Seeing is Believing”, Mishka Henner’s first Italian solo exhibition at the Ago Foundation in Modena. An artist who uses artificial intelligence to question everything we think we know about the photographic image.
“2026 – explains the curator Chiara Dall’Olio – marks two hundred years since the invention of photography and Modena, a city of photography and recognized by UNESCO for media arts, wanted to pay homage to this art. We therefore combined the two things, asking an artist who works with new image creation tools – from artificial intelligence onwards – to answer a question: what is photography today?”.
Four sections: from the word – with 1,400 definitions of “what is photography” collected on the Italian web – to the biblical episodes rendered in Polaroid, up to the portraits of Saint Francis, Saint Peter, Saint Brigida: icons generated by AI which are more realistic than the medieval paintings from which they are born. Credible. But not real.
“I am fascinated by the idea that with artificial intelligence photography has finally freed itself from the camera – says Mishka Henner -: in theory it is now possible to go back in time and photograph events that happened long before cameras existed”.
The journey ends with a single work: a screen that slowly scrolls through all the sixteen million colors that digital light can generate. Like a stained glass window. But contemporary. “The way we use screens and devices today – explains the artist – we carry them with us almost like reliquaries. They are sacred objects.”
“We – concludes Dall’Olio – ask the visitor to act as a clean slate and first of all ask themselves, almost before entering, what photography means to me today”.
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