The Maramotti Collection presents the largest exhibition on Ivor Prickett

On the occasion of the Fotografia Europea 2023 festival, entitled Europe Matters. Visions of an Unquiet Identity, the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia presents, from April 30 to July 30, 2023, No Home from War: Tales of Survival and Loss, the first exhibition in Italy by Irish photojournalist Ivor Prickett (Cork, 1983). With more than fifty photographs taken in conflict scenarios from 2006 to 2022, No Home from War represents the most extensive exhibition on Prickett’s work to date. With a particular interest in post-conflict situations and their catastrophic humanitarian consequences, Prickett focused his early projects on the stories of displaced people in the Balkans and Caucasus. In recent years, working exclusively for The New York Times, he has spent several months between Ukraine, Syria and Iraq, documenting conflicts on the ground through images and words. He has won many major honors and awards, including: The World Press Photo, The Pulitzer Prizes, The Overseas Press Club Awards, Pictures of the Year International, Foam Talent, The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and The Ian Parry Scholarship. He was a finalist for the Pulizter Prize in 2018 and the Prix Pictet in 2019. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous institutions, including The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Sotheby’s, London; Foam Gallery, Amsterdam; and The National Portrait Gallery, London.

After his studies in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales Newport (UK), Prickett began to focus on Europe and the Middle East with an urgency to restore and expose the effects of wars on the civilian population, on the lives of devastated and uprooted people, regardless of affiliation with either side. Starting from an intimate and domestic dimension of the social and humanitarian consequences of conflicts in the long run, over the years Prickett’s gaze has shifted to the places of forced migration, to the lands of sought-after refuge, to the front lines in combat zones. Home - real space and primary inner place of protection, belonging and rootedness - is a central element that returns, in different configurations, in his work.

The exhibition is structured following Prickett’s path and the chronology of the shots. From 2006 to 2010 his work in the Balkans and Caucasus focused primarily on individuals and small family groups as nuclei of resistance and embodied attempts at re-existence. In the photographs of the Serbian minority in Croatia, displaced in the 1990s by war, as well as in the portraits of the Georgian Mingrelian population in Abkhazia, a loneliness emerges that is as ordinary as it is abysmal, radiating from precarious, suspended scenarios and individuals, left alone to come to terms with their history and rebuild it, starting with the search for a sense of home, family and community in still very fragile situations.

The humanitarian crisis stemming from the war in Syria, the millions of refugees in the Middle East and migrants in Europe are the subject of a body of work made by Prickett between 2013 and 2015, moving the lens from the private experience outward, at the very moment when people were being forced to move, to live in refugee camps or to put their lives at risk to survive, facing journeys of uncertain outcome.

Following the brutal war against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria between 2016 and 2018, Prickett zeroed in on the distances of space and time with the war scenario, shooting on the front lines following Iraqi military contingents. In this deflagrated landscape, in images filled with rubble and destruction-in which everything seems to be pulverized or covered by the remains of a recent explosion-delicate shreds of human (extra)ordinariness emerge.

With the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022, Prickett’s eye initially dwells on the collapse of buildings, on the emptiness produced by the bombing: the large architectural wounds become material and metaphysical signs of the destruction of domestic and personal space, opening a glimpse into the atrocity of the war situation going on in Europe today. Through the photographer’s eyes the Ukrainian military stand out as solemn figures shrouded in night, their profiles emerging only when struck by the light of their own flashlights. The existences of civilians, once again, are united in a condition of pain and uncertainty, in the disbelief of the repetition of horror.

In the choices of cut and composition of the shots, in the non-artificially altered light from which figures, environments and details emerge, Prickett creates iconic images in which classic subjects and forms of religious iconography and art history echo.

The love and virtues of nameless saints, the contemporary expressions of Pieta, the simplicity of a bucolic scene, the mystery of crossing to an undefined Isle of the Dead, the drama of Caravaggio and the earthly spirituality of Rembrandt: for Prickett, symbolic and aesthetic force is at the service of a reflection on present history. In the short circuit generated by the impression of being confronted with a form of staged photography and the awareness of the dramatic reality of the subjects, these fragments of worlds rise to universal metaphors and urge a stance. A book with a text by Arianna Di Genova, art critic, journalist and editor at the newspaper il manifesto, will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.

Visit with free admission during the opening hours of the permanent collection: Thursdays and Fridays from 2:30 to 6:30 pm, Saturdays and Sundays from 10:30 am to 6:30 pm. Information: tel. +39 0522 382484, info@collezionemaramotti.org, collezionemaramotti.org Image: Ivor Prickett, Slavica Eremic feeds her baby Nikola while her husband Nebojsa sleeps, 2006, Jurga, Croatia, from the series Returning Home - Croatia

The Maramotti Collection presents the largest exhibition on Ivor Prickett

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.