SEEING IS BELIEVING
Fondazione Ago, Modena, ITFriday 6 March — Sunday 3 May 2026
Press Preview: Wednesday 4 March 2026
Seeing is Believing is a four-part exhibition moving from language to light in four chapters. The show explores the role of the photographic image and belief systems in a world where photography is no longer tied to the camera. Together, these works ask how belief flows through images and what it now means to say that seeing is believing.
THE WORD
A 4-hour durational reading of La Fotografia
è, an Italian remake of Photography Is comprised of thousands of found definitions in the Italian language, turning photography into time and voice. THE RELIC
Polaroids of Biblical events fabricated from scripture, medieval paintings, and archaeological research on clothing, landscape, and material culture.THE ICON
Contemporary photographic portraits of saints modeled on medieval Italian medieval painting.THE LIGHT
New Light (Lux Nova), a single large screen that drifts almost imperceptibly, through the entire digital colour gamut, bathing the gallery in slowly changing hues like a modern stained‑glass window. THE WORD
The Word introduces Seeing is Believing by stripping photography back to its linguistic core.
At the centre is a new Italian edition of Photography Is, La fotografia è ..., which gathers thousands of found sentences from the Italian language that begin with those words. Each phrase is a fragment of belief, doubt, or desire about what the medium should be. In the gallery, this restless chorus becomes a 4-hour performance in which every sentence is spoken aloud with subtitles, turning definition into endurance and transforming photography from an image into an experience of time. Here, before we encounter any pictures, we begin with language itself; its contradictions, rituals, and the unstable ground on which our trust in images is built.
Listen to La Fotografia è una Lettura Duratura (3 minute sample)
At the centre is a new Italian edition of Photography Is, La fotografia è ..., which gathers thousands of found sentences from the Italian language that begin with those words. Each phrase is a fragment of belief, doubt, or desire about what the medium should be. In the gallery, this restless chorus becomes a 4-hour performance in which every sentence is spoken aloud with subtitles, turning definition into endurance and transforming photography from an image into an experience of time. Here, before we encounter any pictures, we begin with language itself; its contradictions, rituals, and the unstable ground on which our trust in images is built.
Listen to La Fotografia è una Lettura Duratura (3 minute sample)
THE RELIC
Polaroid photographs depicting Biblical events from the New and Old Testaments; images that could never have existed, yet look as though they have endured centuries of wear and tear. Generated using combinations of biblical text, medieval painting, archaeological research, and historical reconstructions of clothing and landscape, these works mimic the material authority of sacred artefacts while remaining entirely contemporary. Here, the relic becomes a lens for examining our appetite for authenticity, and the fragile boundary between faith, fiction, and the photographic record.
THE ICON
Photographic portraits of saints that both echo and depart from their medieval predecessors. Whereas fourteenth-century painters distilled the holy into signs (flattened space, gold ground, symbolic attributes) these photographs do the opposite, bringing the saints into the present as fully embodied, recognisably human figures. The faces are textured, the lighting natural, the expressions intimate in a way medieval painting never permitted. By shifting from the symbolic to the corporeal, these images collapse the distance between viewer and subject, inviting us to imagine the saints not as remote, idealised figures but as people who might have stood before a camera. With this work, photography becomes a tool for humanisation, challenging the conventions of medieval iconography and asking what happens when devotion meets realism, and when the divine is rendered with a face that feels unmistakably human.
THE LIGHT
New Light (Lux Nova) is a single large screen that moves slowly and continuously through the full range of colours a digital display can produce during the lifespan of the exhibition. Like a contemporary stained-glass window, it bathes the room in shifting hues, transforming the space through colour alone. But whereas medieval stained glass channelled divine narratives, this work reveals the quiet theology of the present: the screens, interfaces, and devices through which we now understand the world. Here, photography dissolves into its most elemental form and the spectrum becomes a kind of scripture; an index of all the possible images that could appear on our glowing surfaces.
New Light (Lux Nova) ︎︎︎
