A rich program of exhibitions for Siena Awards 2020 international photography festival

From October 24 to November 29, 2020, Siena Awards, the international photography festival, returns. This year a full schedule of exhibitions, exhibition events and tours, shots from 161 countries around the world, and for the first time the festival is leaving Siena to present Bren Stirton’s solo exhibition in Sovicille.

It will start on Saturday, Oct. 24, at 10:30 a.m. with the online opening ceremony of the Siena International Photo Awards exhibition.

Numerous exhibitions are planned, from Imagine all the People Sharing all the World, featuring the best photos submitted to the Siena International Photo Awards competition, to five exhibitions set up in some of the city’s most evocative locations to the exhibition in Sovicille that will feature South African photographer Brent Stirton, who will prsesent some of his reportages taken around the world on social and environmental issues. The 2020 Siena Awards will be completed by the traveling exhibition We Could Not Imagine the Unimaginable, which aims to unite real and virtual in a journey through the streets and squares of Siena’s historic center.

The heart of the 2020 edition will be the group exhibition set up in the exhibition spaces of the former Stellino distillery, featuring the most striking shots from the Siena International Photo Awards competition. The exhibition, which can be visited by small groups and preferably by reservation, will bring together more than one hundred photographs taken by photographers of forty different nationalities. Also inside the former Stellino distillery, it will be possible to visit Burning Dreams, a solo exhibition by Italian freelancer Carolina Rapezzi dedicated to the Agbogbloshie scrap yard in Accra, capital of Ghana, which has become one of the world’s largest open-air e-waste dumps.

The historic center of Siena will then present exhibitions and exhibition events that will gather the images and reports made by important international photographers. Two exhibitions will be hosted in the Cloisters of the Basilica of San Domenico: Hong Kong Democracy Protests by Kiran Ridley, dedicated to the Hong Kong protesters’ struggle for freedom amid pacifism, violence and social pain, and Saving Orangutans, a reportage by Alain Schroeder made in Sumatra documenting the contradictions of human behavior with respect to the environment. The spaces of the historic Accademia dei Fisiocritici will host Above us only Sky, where the most beautiful aerial images submitted to the Drone Awards, a competition reserved for aerial photography unique in the world, will be exhibited. The bastions of Siena’s Fortezza Medicea will instead host I Wonder if You Can, an exhibition of Fine Art photography featuring collage, double exposure and images in which photographers reveal hidden truths of the world around us. Finally, Camollia Green Area 85 will host an exhibition by Chilean photographer Pedro Jarque Krebs entitled The Other Refugees and dedicated to the silent drama that, day after day, affects the lives of countless chimpanzees who are abused in circuses, exploited in advertising campaigns and imprisoned in inhumane conditions.

For thefirst time, moreover, the Siena Awards 2020 will leave the city of Siena to come to the premises of the former Tinaia in Sovicille, which will host Brent Stirton’s solo exhibition composed of a selection of striking images belonging to the numerous reportages made in different countries around the world, particularly Africa, Asia and South America, which will lower visitors into environmental and social issues that are often hidden and forgotten.

Finally, it will be a virtual journey that starts from a real exhibition the exhibition that will unfold in the historic center of Siena We could not imagine the unimaginable: large panels distributed along the streets and squares of the city depicting men and women photographed in different contexts and eras. On the mouth of each ’character’ there will be, as if it were a mask, a QR Code that, when activated through a smartphone or tablet, will refer to the original image and, for each character, to one of the twenty-five unedited videos shot in cities around the world during Covid-19 by photographers participating in the Siena Awards. The exhibition is intended to be a virtual and real journey through the period of the Covid-19 emergency.

For all info and reservations: festival.sienawards.com

Image: Brent Stirton, Akashinga (June 2018)

A rich program of exhibitions for Siena Awards 2020 international photography festival

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