Giovanna Silva. Borderline Modernity

Borderline Modernity is an exhibition by Italian photographer Giovanna Silva, who explores architecture and contemporary cities in Sicily and Poland. These two geographical areas, located on the peripheries of the European Union, share a complex relationship with modernity and with the architecture developed after World War II. In Sicily, such architecture is often associated with unregulated urban and industrial expansion, not without fraudulent or speculative undertones, while in Poland during the same period, architecture also served as a political tool, closely tied to socialist ideology.

Giovanna Silva’s photographic work offers an original and anti-monumental perspective on architecture. The artist seeks the essence of spaces and buildings in seemingly minor details that reveal the true life unfolding within them. Silva has photographed modernist architecture in various cities across Italy and abroad, and has published numerous books on the subject. In recent years, she has documented modern architecture in Sicily—works that, for the most part, have not yet been shown. The landscape captured by Silva encompasses bold and expressive, sometimes quiet postwar architecture designed by both local and international architects. It represents an idea of modernity that distances Sicily from the stereotypes associated with its Greek, Roman, Arab-Norman, or Baroque past.

The photographs from Sicily, presented at the Italian Cultural Institute in Warsaw, are shown alongside a body of work focused on postwar architecture in five Polish cities—Warsaw, Wrocław, Kraków, Katowice, and Tychy—taken during the artist’s research trip between March and May 2025. In Poland, Silva investigates socialist architecture built between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Her work offers an interpretation of the architectural output and stylistic developments of this period, from rationalism and socialist realism to postmodernism, providing insight into Poland’s shifting political eras, from Stalinism to the rise of the Solidarity movement. The Polish section of the project is presented at the Archeology of Photography Foundation, where Silva’s photographs are juxtaposed with archival images of the same buildings taken by Polish photographers—Maria Chrząszczowa, Mariusz Hermanowicz, Tadeusz Sumiński, and Antoni Zdebiak—whose work is preserved by the Foundation. The exhibition captures the historical evolution of the depicted architecture.

The exhibition is curated by Pietro Airoldi and Izabela Anna Rzeczkowska-Moren, members of the collective :AFTER, which focuses on architectural discourse in Sicily. This photographic project between Italy and Poland is organized by the Italian Cultural Institute in Warsaw, with the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Italian Cultural Institute in Kraków. The exhibition is held in collaboration with the Archeology of Photography Foundation in Warsaw.