Exhibitions

This exhibition is something like the ‘Book of Sand’ itself. Only, instead of the endless pages, here the image continues uninterruptedly, creating the illusion of an ‘infinite image’ while telling us one big story.

This story is about us and the times we live in.

The world order, shaped over the decades since the end of World War II - is now shifting. Political, economic, cultural and now technological domination is taking the form of  neo-colonialism. Nationalist and radical aspirations are replacing liberal ideas, thus reshaping the contours of the new world order.

This story is about people, who stand at the centre of historical and geographical realities, acting as sensitive barometers of progress or decline; People, who find a refuge from political and social injustice in different ways - some in resistance, some in escape.

This story is about books and their power, too. Composed of endless pages, like the ‘Book of Sand’, they piece together the fragments to form a whole - one without beginning or an end.

This story is about the image as well. Precisely, the ways that it offers to observe humanity, modernity and its darkest layers.

It’s about the matter, that ‘what we see, is not what we see but what we are’.

It is about the power of the image, when it transcends the act of seeing and becomes a position.

It is about photography, as a form of approaching other people's secrets and pain, as well as the chance to acknowledge our own fragility and exercise empathy.

Swimming in the murky waters of our times, alongside those who mastered the secrets of coming closer to the pain of others, might be the only way to get to the imaginary shore.

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The starting point of this exhibition, “With Those Who Know the Secret Stories, or Else Alone,” is the interplay between book and image: a synthesis of two primary media through which we understand the world and human nature.

Here, photobooks by three generations of Magnum photographers are united in two formats: a nine-screen video installation and a photobook exhibition.

These books trace the world of the past eight decades, with its realities and changing moods: a postwar Europe in the 1950s, filled with hopes for a brighter future; the 1960s and its transformations; the great political upheavals at the end of the 1980s; the turbulence that followed in the 1990s, marked by chaos and the collapse of communist regimes. And in the 21st century, the revolutions of the Arab world; an unending flow of migrants from border to border; a brutal war launched by Russia against Ukraine; the Ukrainian resistance; the rise of a newly-empowered conservatism across continents as a tool to restrict and manage human freedom… and the loneliness of the modern individual.

This exhibition, which brings together works by Magnum photographers of different generations and different “écriture photographique “, offers an opportunity to observe the world through fragments of history and geography, from the latter half of the 20th century to today. This began with the creation of the Magnum in 1947, when its founders and first members established the agency with the aim of observing the world and its transformations through photographic imagery.