Jeff Wall. Living, Working, Surviving

The exhibition

Twenty-eight works by Jeff Wall – lightboxes and large-format colour and black-and-white prints made between 1980 and 2021, on loan from private collections and international museums.

They are pictures of everyday life: the gestures of people working, moving about, going through daily tasks. They look like snapshots taken from their subjects’ lives; in fact they are enigmatic, complex scenes of events that never happened, deliberately ambiguous compositions that ask viewers to question what they see and find their own meanings.

Wall’s photographs distil the aspirations and contradictions of the Western world. He watches people’s habits and social interactions in an urban, industrial setting of economic and cultural contrasts, paying equal attention to those on the margins and to the middle class.

For the last two weeks, from 24 February to 8 March 2026, the exhibition took on a new form: projection-mapped video, slow motion and macro textures were shown alongside the photographs, without altering them.

It was the eleventh exhibition of Foto/Industria 2025, Fondazione MAST’s biennial of photography of industry and work.

Wall brought lightboxes into his practice in 1978, and for some thirty years they stayed at its centre, together with large-format transparencies. Black-and-white photographs followed in 1997, colour prints later. Of black and white, the artist says:

The artist

Jeff Wall was born in Vancouver in 1946 and lives and works there. Since the late 1970s he has done much to establish photography as an art form; he is regarded as one of the pioneers of staged photography and is among the artists who have explored the affinities between photography, painting and cinema.

His pictures often show events he witnessed himself, reconstructed through a process he calls “cinematographic”: everyday incidents shot in real places, or imagined situations rebuilt in the studio. He taught art at Canadian universities for twenty-five years, and his critical writings have been published in many languages.

Works

Travellers with suitcases and bags on a raised walkway under a cloudy sky — Jeff Wall, work shown in Living, Working, Surviving

Black-and-white photograph of a man lifting a barbell in a bare gym — Jeff Wall, work shown in Living, Working, Surviving

A girl crouching beside a hole dug in the grass, with a water can and a bucket — Jeff Wall, work shown in Living, Working, Surviving

An adult crouching with two girls in front of a large Jeff Wall lightbox showing a garden and a person walking up a path — Living, Working, Surviving at MAST: a family in front of a lightbox

Videos

Tours, families, schools

Guided tours

Free, on booking, every week from 16 December 2025 to 8 March 2026. Groups could book a dedicated tour.

Family Tour Day

Every Sunday: a visit to the exhibition, a workshop in MAST.Club where a child and a parent invented together, in drawings and words, the stories that might lie behind one of Wall’s pictures, a snack in MAST.Caffetteria and an animated film from the MAST.CineKids series in MAST.Auditorium. Up to 15 children aged 6 to 11, each with an adult.

Education: families

For schools

Guided tour and workshop for primary, lower and upper secondary schools, 2½ hours, Tuesday to Friday, 10 am – 12.30 pm, for one class of up to 25. Four programmes:

Lightbox. Shedding light on the everyday · primary, lower and upper secondary
Inspired by the illuminated advertising panels of 1970s cities, the lightbox is Wall’s tool for exploring the role of light in images. Starting from photographs taken by the students, the workshop asks what light does to the way we look at a picture.

One photo, a hundred stories. The open image · primary and lower secondary
Wall does not fix a narrative in advance: he leaves the reading open. Using a creative digital app, students add hidden details and surreal elements to his pictures.

Inside the scene. Hearing what you can’t see · lower and upper secondary
Wall’s pictures look like film stills: what would they sound like? Students build a soundscape for one of his photographs with an audio-editing app.

I shoot, you shoot. Repeat to see · lower and upper secondary
Wall divides photographers into hunters, who wait for the perfect picture, and farmers, who cultivate it by building the scene. Students take turns as actors and photographers, repeating an action until it becomes believable.

Education: schools

Catalogue

Introduced by a critical essay by Urs Stahel, the book sets Wall’s lightboxes against his black-and-white photographs and colour prints.

Pages: 88, with 28 illustrations
Edition: Hardcover, bilingual Italian/English
Price: €50.00
Where: MAST bookshop and online

PressPress releases and imagesRestricted press area

Jeff WallLiving, Working, Surviving

Jeff Wall
Living, Working, Surviving