M9 Museum in Mestre Opens Major Banksy Exhibition with Original Street Walls

The M9 – Museo del '900 in Mestre has inaugurated its 2024 exhibition season with 'Banksy. Painting Walls', a major retrospective featuring over 70 works, including three original street walls physically detached and relocated inside the museum. Curator Sabina de Gregori expressed initial skepticism about staging yet another Banksy show but emphasized the unique conservation effort, comparing the wall removal to archaeological preservation of monuments like the Pergamon Altar. The exhibition runs from February 23 to June 2, 2024. New director Serena Bertolucci aims to engage the local territory through free guided bicycle tours from Mestre to Venice (where Banksy's 'Migrant Child' is located), a parallel show 'Dialoghi Urbani. Street art vs museo' featuring Veneto street artists, and weekly live painting sessions on the museum's exterior walls from March 2 to June 1. The monumental corner wall 'Season's Greetings' (2018), originally painted in Port Talbot, Wales—named the most polluted town in the UK by the WHO—depicts a child playing in snow that is actually ash from a burning dumpster, directly resonating with Mestre's history of industrial pollution from Porto Marghera, one of Europe's most contaminated sites. Other original walls include 'Robot/Computer Boy' and 'Heart Boy'. The exhibition acknowledges the inherent contradiction of removing street art from its urban context but justifies it as a conservation and educational effort.