The largest exhibition ever showcasing over 40 years of the great Canadian artist’s career is open to the public from June 21, 2024, to January 12, 2025. Edward Burtynsky’s extraordinary photographs and a series of initiatives with the participation of CMCC will be at M9 – Museum of the 20th Century in Mestre. BURTYNSKY: Extraction / Abstraction offers a new perspective on major themes and urgent challenges of the present through the language of art, focusing on the landscape, climate change, and the interactions between humans and the environment.

BURTYNSKY: Extraction / Abstraction explores the environmental consequences of the industrial system, a distinctive theme of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who gained acclaim in Italy in 2019 with Anthropocene, a photographic project that traveled worldwide, receiving enthusiastic reviews. In this new exhibition, Burtynsky, showing a deep historical understanding of 20th-century industrial processes, and of different geographical and cultural contexts, invites viewers to look beyond the photographed places, our experiences, and expectations to truly grasp the human impact on the future of Earth’s habitats.

At first glance, Burtynsky’s large photographs appear as fascinating and indecipherable fields of colors and abstract shapes. They leave observers suspended before natural or human-made objects, often not immediately intelligible, but capable of drawing them into the artwork.

The photographer’s artistic and expressive research intersects with the scientific research themes of CMCC, including land use, water management, and the carbon footprint of heavy industrialization. For this reason, the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change is participating in the exhibition with a series of initiatives that will take place over the coming months.

“When I started my work in the early ’80s,” Burtynsky says, “climate change was beginning to be discussed but was perceived as a distant hypothesis. It wasn’t something on my mind. I was thinking more about biodiversity loss, deforestation, land consumption, agricultural land, urban expansion, and the expansion of the human footprint at an industrial level. Energy is the driver of all this: agriculture, transportation, industry, urban expansion, internal combustion engines – all these things use our energy.” This is how the photographer explains the integration of climate change into his work.

Curated by Marc Mayer, former director of the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, with an exhibition design by Alvisi Kirimoto, BURTYNSKY: Extraction / Abstraction is the largest exhibition ever created on the photographer’s over forty-year career. After a successful debut at the Saatchi Gallery in London, it arrives in Italy for the first time.

The exhibition consists of six thematic sections that illustrate all Burtynsky’s main fields of action, with over 80 large-format photographs, 10 huge high-definition murals, and some of the main photographic tools that have made Burtynsky famous, including the drones that have allowed him to further expand the lens of his cameras. These are supplemented by additional elements integrated into the spaces of M9, the result of a conceptual dialogue between the exhibition and the museum’s narrative on the social, economic, and political transformations of the 20th century.

On the second floor, visitors can find nine photographs from the photographic campaign commissioned to Burtynsky by the Sylva Foundation in 2022, documenting the effects of Xylella on Apulian olive trees: an environmental disaster that allows us to concretely grasp and measure the effects of climate change in our country.

Moreover, the new room M9 Orizzonti houses the award-winning short film In the Wake of Progress (2022), screened in an immersive environment, making its Italian debut. The short film is co-produced by Burtynsky together with renowned music producer Bob Ezrin and featuring original music by the late Phil Strong.

Complementing the exhibition, a public program of meetings and screenings on the major themes of the Anthropocene, energy transition, and environmental sustainability will take place in the “Cesare De Michelis” Auditorium between summer and autumn 2024. The program starts on Saturday, June 22 – on the occasion of Art Night promoted by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in collaboration with the Municipality of Venice – with the documentary Manufactured Landscapes by Jennifer Baichwal (Canada 2006, 90′), which follows the photographer in his early documentation campaigns in China, among mega manufacturing factories and new hydroelectric dams that have forced the displacement of residents in the surrounding areas. This will be followed by Watermark (2013) and the award-winning ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch (2018), the project that brought Burtynsky international acclaim.

The highlight of the autumn program will be Edward Burtynsky’s return to M9 on Thursday, November 14, for a conversation with Giovanna Calvenzi, a renowned photography historian.

The exhibition is supported by the Veneto Region, the Municipality of Venice, the Embassy of Canada, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and the CMCC Foundation – Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change; it is officially partnered with the Venice and Rovigo Chamber of Commerce, BRT, and Trenitalia.

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Sylva Foundation, Intesa Sanpaolo, Confindustria Veneto Est, Vela / Venezia Unica, Gruppo Save. Contributors include Taittinger, Consorzio Vini Venezia, Select, Power Sustainable, and educational laboratory partners Primo / Morocolor Italia.

The media partners of the exhibition are Rai Cultura, Rai Radio 3, and Domus; the communication partner is the creative agency Multistudio (Treviso).