EXHIBITION OPENING | Italy @ Contact Photography Festival 2024

I Made Them Run Away is a multi-layered story recurring the complicated triangle relationship between the artist, her mother, and the “man.” Zanin weaves together family photographs and contemporary imagery with texts written by her mother.

The poetical and wistful writing from her mother’s diary clashes with the torn family photographs from which her mother tore off all her ex-boyfriends. Captured by Zanin are objects, gestures, animals, body parts, and idyllic visions, symbolic images that reconstruct feelings and sensations that emerged from the past.

The interplay of perspectives created a dialogue between mother and daughter in two different moments in time, reflecting on the role of the past, and exploring the coexistence of opposite feelings within relationships, such as compassion and anger, attraction and repulsion, vulnerability and strength.

Curated by Ask Again; exhibition design by Melissa Pallini.

Presented by the Contact Photography Festival and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto.

Host or Publisher Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto