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ATLANTE
curated by James Lingwood
Igshaan Adams, Teju Cole, Luigi Ghirri, Emma McNally, Claudio Parmiggiani, Anri Sala, Tatiana Trouvé and Akram Zaatari
3 February - 5 May 2026
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Luigi GhirriModena, 1973 -
The drawings, paintings, weavings, sculptures and photographs in Atlante moveback and forth between the descriptive codes of the diagrammatic map and more intimate, imaginary cartographies. Whilst the artists in the exhibition are not indifferent to the allure of maps, they question its pretence at objectivity and its ties to a geo-politics of power, expansion and control. The starting point for the exhibition is two works made in Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, one by Claudio Parmiggiani, the other by Luigi Ghirri. Both works share the same title, Atlante, the Italian word for atlas. It’s a word rich with connotations, summoning up the vast expanse of the ocean, the lost city of Atlantis, and the heroic figure of Atlas condemned by Zeus to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders. (1)
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Claudio ParmiggianiGlobo, 1968
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Claudio Parmiggiani
Zoo Geografico, 1968-70
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In the late 1960s, hundreds of millions of people had been captivated by photographs of the earth viewed from space, such as the iconic ‘Earthrise’ image from Apollo 8 as it orbited the moon in December 1968. Planet earth looked serene from space, silhouetted by the darkness of the cosmos. Back on the ground, the world was convulsed by massive social upheaval. In response Parmiggiani asked his friend Luigi Ghirri to take photographs of a crumpled plastic globe. Six images of the deformed sphere were brought together in an edition titled Atlante, published in 1970, challenging centuries-old conventions of cartography together with the world view it had been instrumental in shaping. In 1970 Ghirri had decided to give up his job as a surveyor, spending time out ‘in the field’ mapping and measuring spaces and places, so he could focus fully on his photography. Three years later he made his own Atlante. To make the work, he turned to the pages of the atlas he had at home. Using a macro lens, he zoomed in on pages of the atlas, taking increasingly close-up details of deserts, mountain ranges, oceans and archipelagos. Lines marking borders, meridians and parallels, and numbers indicating heights and depths become detached from geography. A mapped and measured world progressively unravels as the images move away from representation. Of this poetic subversion of cartography he wrote, “I endeavoured to carry out a journey in a place which effaces the journey itself – because, within the atlas, all possible journeys are already described, all itineraries already traced.” (3) Ghirri thought of his work as a ‘journey through images’. He framed his project through the idea of the ‘open work’, grouping and sequencing images to generate a multiplicity of reflections and associations. Atlante is both one of the most tightly framed of his works and one of the most open, its free-floating signifiers inciting a drift towards reverie and the pleasures of “the journey across the map” which he considered “one of the most natural gestures of the mind, from childhood onwards.”(4)
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Akram Zaatari
[YM KTBT] Alphabet Sea, 2025
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Zaatari’s reflection on what the Mediterranean represents, and how it has been represented, continues in a group of works titled Mediterranean Ruins (2024–ongoing). Here the Mediterranean is reimagined as a land without water: a continuous geological topography. To create the work, Zaatari commissioned three wooden stamps depicting the relief of three distinct regions around the Mediterranean basin – one encompassing Lebanon, another Constantinople, and a third including Paris. These sites were chosen as symbolic nodes: Lebanon as a source of numerous archaeological Phoenician finds, many of which ended up in France and Turkey after crossing the sea. The stamps function as tools for producing raised maps on thin sheets of copper. This post-apocalyptic vision of what was once a vital sea retains a stain; the water that once facilitated exchange is no longer there and only topographic fragments remain.
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Anri Sala
Untitled (Raja Clavata/Thailand), 2019
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“In these engravings, species submit to the frame of reference… Echoing each of the engravings, I did the same thing with maps of different countries and regions. I made these cartographies, these geographical and geopolitical entities, ‘enter’ into the same frame.” (5)
In his Maps/Species series (2018–ongoing), Anri Sala brings together zoological engravings of fish and other sea creatures from the 17th to 19th centuries with his own ink and pastel drawings of nation states. Sala distorts the familiar contours of countries and reshapes their borders, defined both by coastal geography and imperial power. The ‘unnatural’ shapes mimic the apparently objective descriptions of sea creatures, contorted to fit within the borders of the page, just as the traditional map provides a mask of objectivity.
The intense curiosity of the Enlightenment in every aspect of the natural world went hand in hand with a new era of colonial expansion. The project to identify and classify was closely allied with the desire to possess — colonies were often called ‘overseas possessions.” To mark out the territories they claimed dominion over, colonial powers drew straight lines across previously unbounded lands, creating the arbitrary borders of many nations and states. Speaking about this body of work, Sala said:
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Igshaan Adams
Keeping Light, 2025
Igshaan Adams’s work is shadowed by borders and shimmers with possibility. His tapestries are often based on satellite views of areas of Bonteheuwel, a district of Cape Town where the artist grew up that was classified as ‘Coloured’—a legal category for people of mixed-race heritage—by the apartheid regime in South Africa.
In Adams’s new tapestry Keeping Light (2025), an aerial view of a section of the district showing a tarmac road and ‘desire lines’, pathways created over time by people moving across a patch of land on foot, is transformed into a fluid evocation of place. The weave shifts between dense clusters of highly coloured beads—plastic, wood, glass—and more open areas where the vertical lines of the warp form only a partial screen. A multitude of small charms and curios are threaded into the surface. Some of them, such as dragonflies and hummingbirds, evoke a sense of quicksilver movement. A cluster of ‘clouds’ loosely formed with copper wire drift away from the tapestry and out into the gallery space, accentuating the sense of fugitive movement.
Whilst the title Adams has given the work could refer to ‘keeping the lights on’, to the idea of being resilient, it could also allude to lightness as a state of being. In the first of his Six Memos for the New Millennium Italo Calvino celebrated lightness as the desire “to remove weight from the structures of stories and language.” (6) Keeping Light could be thought of then as an invocation to shed baggage, to free body and mind so it can move fluidly through space, slip across borders, transcend fixed identities.
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Emma McNally also charts a fugitive geography in her large graphite drawings. If maps are concerned with demarcating and mastering space, even as it gestures towards conventions of mapping, McNally’s work scrambles fixed notions of territory and identity. Geometric lines partition the white space of the paper, whilst more wayward ones could delineate routes or rivers, the contours of islands or ice caps. These lines are overworked by a multiplicity of marks—clusters and shoals, scribbles and smudges—that summon up movements of various kinds. Some, like clouds or ripples on the surface of water, are visible to the human eye, others such as dust clouds, forest fires and migrations from satellites, and still others like sonar pulses sensed but not seen until data is translated into a language of signs. The surface of the paper has been sanded, hammered and scraped, the graphite in places smeared. It is as if everything is in motion in a field of convulsing forces. Aya Nassar has written of McNally’s drawings as “an invitation to look for ways of making meaning when the parameters of knowledge crumble… Perhaps this encounter might be received as an invitation to chart a geography that folds into itself. So that what is neighbouring is swallowed, and what is distant sits in awkward intimacy to where it was not near before. Where what we typically orient ourselves towards ceases to exist… This is an unknown geography.” (7) The largest drawing in the exhibition is part of an extended series titled Choral Fields. With her polyphony of graphic marks, McNally draws a cartography of a turbulent geo-political present.
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Emma McNallyChoralfields, 2019
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Tatiana Trouvé begins the drawings in her series Les dessouvenus (the word refers to a Breton term for the ‘unremembered’) by embracing an element of chance. She applies bleach to coloured paper to create accidental, amorphous forms. Like the stains on walls or ashes from fires that Leonardo da Vinci suggested artists might look at for inspiration, Trouvé takes the forms on the paper as a ground over which to draw forms with ink, linseed oil, coloured pencil and mica (to add an occasional copper element to the surface) that amplify the volatile origins of the work. Building worlds that are as elusive and as vivid as dreams, Trouvé’s drawings oscillate between form and formlessness, between emerging and dissolving states.
In a recent drawing from the Les dessouvenus series, the perfect sphere of the moon, perhaps reflected on the surface of water, appears as a witness to some momentous, possibly cataclysmic event; an underwater eruption or all-engulfing fire. Geometric lines radiate from the epicentre of the drawing, taking soundings of the turbulence. In these drawings, Trouvé charts not so much a place as a state of being, where interior and exterior fold into one another and boundaries dissolve. A haphazard tangle of lines disrupts the geometric forms in another new drawing, 11-01-2026 TT. The title refers to the date the drawing was completed and to the origins of the strands of hair dropped on to the canvas over which Trouvé has attached tracing paper before accentuating some of the lines with pencil. The triangular forms in the drawing could reference signs on a topographic map indicating high points on land or depths in the ocean, over which the lines trace their errant currents.
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In his book Fernweh, Teju Cole orchestrates an extended sequence of photographs interspersed with fragments of text from Karl Baedeker’s Swizerland: Handbook for Travelers, published in 1872. (8) Cole shares with Luigi Ghirri the idea of photography as a form of mapping and Fernweh surveys not just the topography of Switzerland, the forms and features of its mountains, lakes, cities and villages, but also how the experience of a place is always framed and filtered by the ubiquity of the image – in photographs, postcards, magazines, books and maps. Fernweh opens with a sequence of six photographs of a small map of the Alps pinned to a wall in a room in Zürich where Cole was living at the time. The composition of each photograph is the same, with the exception of diagonal lines of light that sharpen and grow on the wall in each successive image. The light illuminates an evanescent moment, an affective encounter that quietly calls into question the historic authority of the map. In his new series Light Sleeper, Cole turns his attention to another historic frame for knowledge. Over several years starting in 2019, he has photographed blackboards in classrooms at Harvard University, where he teaches, when the lesson was over. Initially drawn to the evocative fragments remaining on the blackboards, half-erased signifiers of teaching and learning, he decided to focus on “the fugitive quality of the surfaces without the distraction of the words.” (9) The palimpsestic spaces Cole photographed seem to bear a heavy load, both of a long history of struggle and a deeply troubling present in which ideals of free enquiry are being challenged and erased. The scratches, stains and chalk marks in the large-scale photographs hint at the grids and star fields of celestial maps and raise questions about who speaks and who is silenced in a turbulent world.
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Emma McNally
cs10, 2021 -
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Sutton Communications, Khuroum Bukhari: khuroum@suttoncomms.com, Ginevra Berghinz: ginevra@suttoncomms.com
Atlante: curated by James Lingwood
Current viewing_room
