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Ph by Mehdi Moghimnejad

Broken Forms
Spazio Millepiani, Rome | November 8 – December 12, 2024

Broken Forms is a collective exhibition arranged at the Spazio Millepiani in Rome, showcasing photographic, video, and digital works by international artists. At the heart of the exhibition is fragmentation as a departure from a complete form, a concept rooted in the early artistic avant-gardes. This break from completeness can lead, depending on the perspective, to either destruction or the multiplication of identity: of a place, a person, or a gesture. Each fracture implies a change in state, location, or appearance.

The break presupposes fragility—of a material, a bond that has been severed, or an object that has fallen and shattered, decomposing in the process. When something breaks, it becomes unusable, revealing its connection to the life cycle that once belonged to it. Sometimes, the particular transforms into a universal metaphor for degradation and abandonment: a broken form lying on the beach, for example, becomes a symbol of environmental pollution and the inevitable process of decay.

However, a broken form does not only reveal intrinsic fragility; it can also manifest deeper symbolism—fractures that concern not only the material world around us but also our inner world. Fragments of a mirror multiply and reflect who we are, pushing our image to the extreme. They present us with mosaics of faces that represent who we were, who we are, and who we might become. These fragments accumulate and transform until they become something else—something that transcends the original self.

The body, too, emerges as a manifesto of identity fracture. Immobile bodies, or conversely, mobile bodies that move to unknown places, will never again be the same “self” they once were. This otherness crystallizes in movement, changing them forever.

It is interesting to note how many artists have interpreted the breaking of forms through a lens that renders images strictly in black and white. This black-and-white aesthetic seems to evoke a nostalgic dimension—a past that no longer exists but continues to live through these snapshots.

Others, however, have chosen to explore the process of reconnecting broken forms, pieced together with “hard” materials like wire. This creates a clear contrast between fragility and hardness, perishability and permanence—a tension between what is destined to break and what, against all odds, endures.

Finally, the fragments may also represent remnants of what has been built and has ceased to exist: ruins of houses, buildings, or places now abandoned, which testify to a past existence. In this process of destruction—whether intended or not—painful experiences such as conflicts, wars, migrations, and displacements in time and space intertwine.

The Broken Forms exhibition ultimately reflects on fragility and resilience, on otherness, and the continuous transformation of forms, whether material or identity-based.

Text by Silvia Colombo

Works by Glen Martin Taylor; Briana Platt; Mari Saxon; Conrado Krainer