When We Were Old. Works from Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection

2 may – 2 june 2024

In the context of the EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival, “When We Were Old” proposes a dialogue among a series of photographic works selected from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection. The exhibition explores different perspectives through which the youth and imagery of the new generations were represented during the 1990s. As suggested by the oxymoron expressed in the title, the core of works presents youth as a space of already legitimate experience, diverging from the rhetoric that considers the “young” only in relation to their projection into the future. “When We Were Old” narrates the protagonists of the images as active subjects in their present time, engaging in a close and creative confrontation with the spheres of identity and desire.

The exhibition opens with Sherrie Levine’s Untitled (After Walker Evans: 6) (1990), a shot from the celebrated series in which the artist appropriates Walker Evans’s photographs dedicated to the U.S. Great Depression of the 1930s. The austere and passive representation of the child, originally portrayed in 1935 and re-presented in 1990 through Levine’s gaze, is in dialogue with Collier Schorr’s series, created in the mid-1990s in a German town. Schorr’s teenagers are captured in moments of leisure in natural and domestic landscapes, in poses that express serenity and comfort in their bodies and sexuality. Larry Johnson’s Untitled (Movie Stars on Clouds) (1983) focuses on the Hollywood star system, gathering and celebrating a series of iconic actors united by premature death. The cinematic register is taken up by Tracey Moffatt, who stages traumatic childhood moments within fictitious scenarios in the photographs of the Scarred for Life series (1994). Through the gestures of the portrayed children, the images construct small everyday commentaries on lives marked by social division based on class and race in Australia. Anna Gaskell’s Untitled # 2 (Wonder) (1996) portrays two teenage girls in a moment of intimacy between playfulness and tension, suspended in a dreamlike atmosphere inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Wolfgang Tillmans’ photographs construct, portrait by portrait, the imaginaries of English youth culture, especially of the gay community, between the music scene and nightlife. The exhibition closes with Sarah Lucas’ work Laugh? (1998), a mocking self-portrait that challenges gender stereotypes through the evocation of sexuality.