Image: Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin
The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation is highlighting the 200th anniversary of photography with 'Before it happens', a group exhibition at Palazzo Re Rebaudengo in Guarene, Italy. The show runs from 13 June to 26 July 2026 and is open on Saturdays and Sundays from 12 to 7 pm, with free admission.
Curated by Filippo Maggia, 'Before it happens' brings together eight international artists whose work uses photography, moving image and hybrid installation practices as tools for political, social and cultural inquiry. The artists are Alia Farid, Hit Man Gurung, Vinit Gupta, Uzma Mohsin, Musuk Nolte, Ashfika Rahman, Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Ishan Tankha.
According to the foundation’s exhibition text, the project focuses on some of the most urgent issues of the present, including social inequality, economic transformation in the Global South, postcolonial legacies, migration, ecological crisis, the protection of Indigenous communities, gender discrimination and the persistence of patriarchal models. The exhibition frames these concerns through works that are described as either new or rarely shown in Europe.
The curatorial approach links these themes to the broader condition of instability that shapes much contemporary life. The exhibition text describes the works as reflecting pressures on societies confronted by systems still oriented toward Western paradigms, as well as political and bureaucratic structures that struggle to respond to collective demands. It also points to modernization as a force that can generate displacement, environmental degradation, labour precarity and desertification, with particular consequences for younger generations.
Each artist’s contribution takes up these concerns from a different angle. Sheelasha Rajbhandari’s works, developed in dialogue with the Nepalese collective Artree, revisit family memories and private trauma in relation to heteropatriarchal expectations imposed on women. Hit Man Gurung’s 'The Revolutionary Dreams' addresses contemporary Nepal through photographs set against a wallpaper of overseas job advertisements, evoking forced migration and the tension between survival and identity.
Vinit Gupta documents the farmers’ mobilisation that encircled Delhi in 2020 and 2021 to oppose agrarian reforms, while Uzma Mohsin’s installation 'Stick no Bills' gathers damaged election posters into what the foundation describes as a forest of suspended faces, reflecting distrust in India’s democratic system. Ishan Tankha’s 'Submerged' and 'A Peal of Spring Thunder' focus on conflicts over land and natural resources, and Musuk Nolte’s ongoing 'Geographies of Water' considers climate change in the Amazon and the Andes through water as a transnational link between environmental catastrophe and local resistance.
Ashfika Rahman’s 'Behula, Those Days…' builds a poetic archive of women’s stories gathered along the rivers between Bangladesh and India, while Alia Farid’s two videos look at the Chibayish marshes between the Tigris and Euphrates, threatened by oil industry pressures, and the Iranian island of Qeshm, where collective rituals and modernity are said to coexist in fragile balance. The exhibition is presented as part of the SNODI - Colline co-creative di Langhe Monferrato Roero project, funded by the European Union NextGenerationEU and managed by the Italian Ministry of Culture.
