We are proud that Jacob Aue Sobol is on display at MUDEC. The work is on loan from the Ettore Molinario Collection.
Curated by Denis Curti, in collaboration with Alessio Fusi and Alessandro Curti
Photography is a language that holdsthe world: it preserves memory, reveals transformations, and bears witness to wounds, rebirths, changes, and hopes. It embodies fascination and knowledge, falsehood and truth –as an instrument capable of articulating what we have been, what we are, and what we may yet become. It is the language of contemporaneity and, simultaneously, humanity’s visual memory.
The exhibition 100 Photographs to Inherit the worldoriginates from this awareness. Rather than a straightforward anthology of masterpieces, the project unfolds as a critical and reflective journey into the visual and cultural legacy that photography has handed down to us.
The notion of “inheriting the world,” which gives the exhibition its subtitle, serves as a lens through which to consider the present: a complex era shaped by technological transformation, environmental crisis, hybrid conflicts, emerging identities, and an unprecedented saturation of images. Within this landscape, photography becomes a means of orientation—an instrument for cultivating awareness and for situating oneself within collective memory.
The selection of 100 photographs – a necessary choice to delimit an extraordinarily vast visual field – does not adhere to hierarchies of historical, aesthetic, political, or cultural value. Each image belongs to a shared and indivisible heritage. The curatorial vision thus charts a journey through human history as seen, preserved, and transformed by the photographic medium.
Structured into six sections, the exhibition spans two centuries of photographic practice, from its earliest experiments, including the magic lantern and daguerreotypes to its entry into modernity, when photography ceased to function merely as a record of reality and became a space of invention through the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Figures such as Man Ray, Aleksandr Rodchenko, André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Philippe Halsman are presented alongside the poetic inquiries of Mario Giacomelli and the conceptual provocations of Joan Fontcuberta.
A broader narrative then unfolds, in which photography becomes memory, introspection, metaphor, and a projection toward the future. Images that have marked contemporary history, including Joel Meyerowitz’s photographs of Ground Zero affirm the photographer’s role as the “eye of the world,” capable of transforming epoch-defining events into shared memory.
Concurrently, the exhibition highlights how artists such as Claude Cahun, Pierre Molinier, and Robert Mapplethorpe reconfigured photography as an intimate diary, establishing the image as a site of psychological and symbolic introspection.
The photographic language further expands into an evocative dimension, where reality is reimagined through fiction and staging. The works of Newsha Tavakolian, Sandy Skoglund, Nancy Burson, David LaChapelle, and Mat Collishaw demonstrate photography’s capacity to function as metaphor, visionary narrative, and ethical inquiry.
Finally, contemporary practitioners articulate new imaginaries for the twenty-first century, engaging directly and uncompromisingly with the issues that define our time: multiculturalism, gender, migration, civil conflict, environmental crisis, and evolving models of belonging. The works of Ebrahim Noroozi, Carlos Ayest, Guillaume Bression, Gohar Dashti, Alba Zari, and Carlos Idun Tawiah portray an unstable and hyperconnected present, in which the real and the post-digital intersect to envision new possibilities.
Produced by 24 ORE Cultura – Gruppo Il Sole 24 ORE and supported by Zurich as Main Sponsor and Turisanda1924 – Alpitour World’s travel brand – as Sponsor, the exhibition interweaves the grand history of photography with the urgencies and questions of the present, reaffirming MUDEC’s vocation as a site for understanding cultures through the image.