Sandra Cattaneo Adorno: 10 Years

On April 20, 2024, Sandra Cattaneo Adorno unveiled 10 Years at the 7th edition of Personal Structures, which runs parallel with the 60th Venice Biennale. Organized by the European Cultural Centre, the 2024 edition focuses on the experience of foreigners, émigrés, exiled, and refugees, especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. Throughout her practice, Cattaneo Adorno embarks on journeys around the globe with camera in hand, capturing glimmering flickers of daily life that evoke scenes from a dream, floating between reality and illusion.

Hailing from Brazil, Cattaneo Adorno’s life, work, and worldview have been shaped by a lifetime of traveling the globe, fostering a sense of belonging in multiple places by the act of making art. Curated by the photographer and Andrea Verganti, 10 Years charts Cattaneo Adorno’s evolution as an image-maker and author, creating a new space for experimentation that elegantly blends the essence of her previous series in The Other Half of the Sky, Águas de Ouro, and Scarti di Tempo into a modernist masterpiece.

Cattaneo Adorno’s new monograph appears as the centerpiece of her exhibition, which also features thirteen prints and a six-minute video installation. Drawing inspiration from artist scrapbooks and leporellos (accordion books), 10 Years adopts the accordion format to imagine the photographs as notes one would make in a diary to record feelings and impressions. The images in the book are printed with the same gold metallic ink and black paper as the prints on view, transforming the picture into a glimmering sliver of reverie that recalls the delicate splendors of Gustav Klimt’s symbolist paintings and the golden paint of Brazilian dancers at Carnival.

Resisting the notions of beginning and end, Cattaneo Adorno envisions 10 Years as a scroll where stories unfold in fragmented and layered narratives, much like travel itself. The photographs meld one another, unveiling the complex interplay between dislocation and interconnection equal parts enigmatic and profound. These glittering scenes of Mauritius, Egypt, Brazil, Thailand, Singapore, New York, London, Italy, Portugal, and Japan become surreal meditations of otherness as mysterious as existence itself.

Sandra Cattaneo: 10 Years is on view from April 20–November 24, 2024, at Palazzo Bembo, Riva del Carbon 4793, 30124 Venezia

Sandra Cattaneo Adorno (b. 1953, Rio de Janeiro) took up photography in 2013 at the age of 60 and has since gained extensive recognition for her work. Like Dora Maar, who reinvented her photography practice in her 70s, Cattaneo Adorno is drawn to experimentation and to innovative ways of printing and presenting her work. The author of The Other Half of the Sky, Águas de Ouro, and Scarti di Tempo (Radius Books 2020 and 2022). Cattaneo Adorno is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2003 American Photography Award, 2021 Lens Culture Street Photography Juror’s Pick, and the 2019 Portrait of Humanity Award in collaboration with Magnum Photos.

In 2022, Cattaneo Adorno launched her solo exhibition during the 59th Venice Biennale, organized by the European Cultural Centre. She has also exhibited in Women Street Photographers exhibitions in Kuala Lumpur and New York; Galleria del Cembalo, Rome; Lens Culture, New York; Photoville, Brooklyn; Sony Awards Exhibition, London. Her work has been published by The Washington Post, The New York Times, National Geographic, and The Guardian, as well as Women Street Photographers (Prestel 2021) and Portrait of Humanity (Hoxton Mini Press, 2019).