11.10.2024 – 06.01.2025
Vera Lutter
Spectacular
An exploration of light · curated by Francesco Zanot
- Opening hours
- Tuesday–Sunday, 10 am – 7 pm
- Where
- MAST.Gallery, Via Speranza 42, Bologna
- Status
- Exhibition closed on 6 January 2025Now on until 6 January 2025Coming soon, from 11 October 2024
FreeFree admission, no booking needed
The exhibition
For the first time in a single show, the photographs that the German artist Vera Lutter (Kaiserslautern, 1960) has devoted since the 1990s to industry, work and the infrastructure that moves goods and people.
Twenty large works, each one unique because of the way it is made, on loan from museums and private collections, together with an installation and largely unseen material on the artist’s working process, covering her whole career.
Among the subjects: the Zeppelin, the largest flying machine ever built; the Effelsberg radio telescope, with its record 100-metre dish; the Pepsi-Cola factory on Long Island. Lutter brings out the monumental character of places and objects, a matter not only of scale but of time.
The camera obscura
Each picture is made in a room-sized camera obscura, built anew in front of the subject every time. The result is a negative and a one-off, like a daguerreotype, with the image fused into the paper it is printed on.
- The hole
A small hole in one wall of the chamber lets the light in.
- The paper
On the opposite wall hang one or more sheets of light-sensitive paper, which record the image of the world outside.
- Time
Exposures last from a few minutes to whole days, sometimes months: anything that moves too fast leaves no trace.
- At MAST
At the top of the entrance ramp to the Photo Galleries stood a camera obscura: a studio for visitors and for children’s activities.
Works
Interviews
InterviewVera Lutter, part 1
InterviewVera Lutter, part 2
InterviewVera Lutter, part 3
InterviewVera Lutter, part 4
InterviewVera Lutter, part 5
InterviewFrancesco Zanot, curator, part 1
InterviewFrancesco Zanot, curator, part 2
InterviewFrancesco Zanot, curator, part 3
InterviewFrancesco Zanot, curator, part 4
InstallationInstalling the exhibition
Talk · 2015Vera Lutter, Inverted worlds light
Tours and families
- Guided tours
Free with booking: Tuesday to Friday at 5.30 pm, Saturdays at 11 am and 5.30 pm, Sundays at 11 am; up to 20 people, about 70 minutes. A gallery mediator led visitors through the twenty works, explaining the camera obscura and the pinhole.
Participants also saw, in MAST.Academy, the video “Dentro la camera oscura” (Inside the camera obscura), in which Vera Lutter talks about her technique.
- Family Tour Day
“The world in black and white… plus other colours”. On Sundays: a visit to the exhibition and the camera obscura, a workshop in MAST.Academy where children made up stories and brought the photographs back to life, a snack in the Caffetteria and, at 5 pm, a film from the Future Film Kids series in MAST.Auditorium.
15 children aged 6 to 11, up to 2 per family; parents joined the visit and the workshop.
Catalogue
Every work in the exhibition and a wide selection of other pictures of industry, work and large infrastructure. Edited by Francesco Zanot, published by Fondazione MAST.
- Pages
- 108, with 47 black-and-white illustrations
- Edition
- Cloth hardcover, Swiss binding, 21 × 27 cm, Italian/English
- Price
- €40.00
- Where
- MAST.Point
