Mestre, M9 Museum introduces new director Serena Bertolucci and exhibitions. It starts with Banksy

Presented to the press was the new director of M9 - Museo del ’900 di Mestre, Serena Bertolucci, who took over with a three-year term from January 1. On the occasion, the 2024 cultural programming was illustrated, which will focus on the two temporary exhibitions dedicated to British artist Banksy Banks y. Painting Walls, from February 23 to June 2, 2024, and Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky BURTYNSKY: Extraction/Abstraction, from June 21, 2024 to January 12, 2025. Despite the interesting programming already known about 2024, the year 2023 of M9 - Museo del ’900 ended with high numbers: 100,000 total admissions, between exhibitions and the more than three hundred days of events organized during the year, a considerable increase from the 70,000 in 2022 (+43%). In contrast, there are 45,000 visitors to the Museum’s exhibitions, a figure that is 50% higher than the 2022 figure (30,000). The goal indicated by Bertolucci in order to strengthen M9 - Museo del ’900, is to enhance the Museum’s excellence and expertise through the creation of networks and synergies at the national level. An action that will be integrated with the intensification of relationships and offerings for the proximity public, consolidating M9 as a place of all-round culture that, around the narrative of the permanent exhibition, is a garrison of citizenship and an aggregating factor around a shared and inclusive identity.

Five years after the creation of the work Migrant Child in Venice, Banksy. Painting Walls, produced by Metamorfosi Eventi in partnership with M9 - Museo del ’900, will be presented as an experience of decoding public art that will relate the mural in Rio Novo to the works on display at the Museum. Key works in the exhibition are the three original walls on display in Mestre, painted by Banksy in 2009, 2010, and 2018, made in London, Devon, and Wales. The protagonists of these three works are three teenagers, representatives of a new generation that seems to be the most sensitive ever to the issues around which the British artist’s interests revolve. The first, Season’s Greetings, 2018, which appeared in Port Talbot, Wales, was chosen as the exhibition image. It is a large portion of wall on which Banksy has painted a little boy with his arms wide open and his tongue sticking out of his mouth to savor the snowflakes falling from the sky. Flakes that, however, turn out to be ash rising from a burning garbage can. Port Talbot has been named the most polluted city in the United Kingdom by the World Health Organization (WHO). The second mural is Heart Boy painted on a building on Goswell Road in Islington, London in 2009. It is a mural nearly two meters high and features a boy who, with a deeply troubled look toward the viewer, expresses a universal plea for peace and love: on the same wall, behind him, with a brush still wet in his hands, he has painted a pink heart. The last one, Robot/Computer Boy, originally created on the exterior wall of a restaurant in Devon in 2010, urges reflection on issues of digitization and human-machine relations. Through an eerie mirror composition that leads to the dehumanization of the subject, the mural depicts a boy disguised as a robot as he draws a stylized robot on the hotel wall.

Following the worldwide success of the Anthropocene exhibition, a multimedia exploration documenting the indelible human footprint on the earth, photographer Edward Burtynsky continues his exploration of the impact of human action on the planet. The exhibition BURTYNSKY: Extraction/Abstraction, is the largest retrospective of the more than 40-year career of Burtynksy, who has dedicated his life to witnessing the environmental impact of the industrial system on our planet. Curated by Marc Mayer, director of the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, the exhibition features more than 80 photographs, 13 murals, 1 Augmented Reality experience, and a never-before-seen section, called Process Archive, which will show the tools and cameras Burtynsky used over the years. Finally, the exhibition also includes the award-winning 22-minute immersive multimedia projection of In the Wake of Progress, which will be shown in the new M9 Horizons room. Burtynsky invites his viewers to look at places that exist beyond our common experience, places that fulfill our present wants and needs but at the same time determine the future of our habitat.

“We are happy to present today Serena Bertolucci as the new Director of M9 - Museo del ’900,” commented Michele Bugliesi, President of Fondazione M9 - Museo del ’900. “An appointment strongly desired by virtue of Serena Bertolucci’s demonstrated abilities in the enhancement of cultural heritage, which marks another decisive step forward for the Museum, aimed increasingly at being a local and national reference as a place of critical reflection on a fundamental century to which we still need to look in order to understand the present and the challenges that await us.”

“It is with the greatest enthusiasm that I begin my adventure in a unique museum in Italy,” said Serena Bertolucci, Director of M9 - Museo del ’900. “M9 is a place that tells everyone’s story and, for this reason, has a special responsibility: to listen and include, in a process of continuous dialogue. We will do this in the territory and in the territories, designing new forms of involvement for local communities and speaking to the national public with major exhibitions that can provide the tools to read the present time and the time to come. This year’s two exhibitions, dedicated to Banksy and Edward Burtynsky, respond precisely to this objective.”

Mestre, M9 Museum introduces new director Serena Bertolucci and exhibitions. It starts with Banksy

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