GIORGIO CIAM – Essere un altro (Being Someone Else)

From 16 April the Reggia di Venaria hosts the exhibition GIORGIO CIAM - Essere un altro conceived by the Archivio Giorgio Ciam and curated by Elena Re.
The exhibition is part of the EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival.

An iconic feature of Giorgio Ciam’s work is transformation, a field he explored between 1972 and 1974. The artist turns into someone else, making two worlds coexist and using photography as if it were painting.

This exhibition presents a major work by Ciam titled Sulla pelle (On the Skin), 1974, from the series Essere un altro (Being Someone Else).
It comprises a sequence of twelve large photo canvases using photomontage and pictorial intervention, where Ciam’s face turns into that of his friend the artist George Segal. From one canvas to the next, a new portrait appears: that of another individual, slowly emerging from Ciam’s portrait. Identity thus lies at the heart of a research project that generates profound reflections on the material and mutable nature of reality, pre-empting various issues that remain open to this day.

The programme includes the conference Materialità e mutabilità ovvero Giorgio Ciam, on transformation and the figure of Giorgio Ciam himself (Pont-Saint-Martin, 1941 – Turin, 1996) in the light of the debate triggered by EXPOSED. The conference will take place at Reggia di Venaria on Thursday 22 May 2025, at 6 p.m.; speaker: Elena Re, independent curator and head of the Archivio Giorgio Ciam.