Paolo Monina and Christian Boltanski Exhibition Explores Memory and Absence Through Photography

An exhibition at the Museo Ghergo in Montefano, Italy, features the work of Paolo Monina alongside references to Christian Boltanski, exploring themes of memory, loss, and the limits of representation. The show, titled 'Dialoghi visivi del presente' and curated by Monina, runs until April 6. Monina's photographic project presents images as poetic archives that interrogate reality rather than merely documenting it, focusing on aquatic landscapes as symbolic thresholds between presence and absence. His work engages with migration, identity dislocation, and historical wounds, treating the image as a space of ethical responsibility. The exhibition draws parallels with Boltanski's practice, which also uses traces, fragments, and incomplete archives to evoke absence, particularly in relation to the Holocaust and anonymous victims. Both artists employ strategies of rarefaction—Monina through visual subtraction, Boltanski through dim lighting and seriality—to destabilize perception and emphasize what remains unseen. Monina references the Shroud of Turin as a paradigm of the image-as-residue, reinterpreting it in contemporary terms to address migrant bodies as indirect presences. The exhibition positions photography not as consolatory documentation but as a critical device that opens spaces for questioning and collective memory.