Adrian Paci's sea waves land at Mudec

Every journey should change your life, but it doesn't happen to everyone. To Adrian Paci it does, and he remembers this in all his work. He was one of the first artists to introduce the theme of travel, abandonment, crossing and waiting as hope for a better future into his work.

At Mudec in Milan (Museo delle Culture) until 21 September 2025 the installation by the Albanian artist: "Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu cielo" curated by Sara Rizo and Katya Inozemtseva. Adrian Paci transforms the large window of the Agora into greenish blue chiaroscuro evoking the colours of the sea. The artist's intervention interprets the iconic space designed by Chipperfield, whose organic shape is reminiscent of a "flower", as if it were an immense sheet of water.

The texture of these blues is that of the typographic screens of images printed in newspapers. They are images associated with tragic news of shipwrecks that tell of lives broken in the attempt to cross the seas. Born in Shkodra, he left Albania on 13 July 1997, with his wife and two daughters, for Bari. Today the eclectic artist lives and works between Milan and Shkodër. His most significant solo exhibitions include those at Jeu de Paume in Paris, Pac in Milan, Mac in Montréal and MoMA PS1 in New York. He has participated in numerous international biennials, including the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennale and Manifesta 14 in Kosovo.

Adrian Paci chooses to recount the tragedy of the voyages through the printed and digital photographs published in Italian and foreign newspapers, including Il Sole 24 Ore, Corriere della Sera, Il Manifesto, The New York Times, I Kathīĩmerini, Die Zeit; an in-depth and obsessive search to find news and images that correspond to the visual realisation of the work. Adrian Paci does not decide to focus on people, on the bodies of women, men and children, he does not want to film "that moment of death", nor does he want to recount the news, their despair. From those images he extracts only a fragment, a portion of the sea, and enlarges it to the point of erasing all informative connotations. Pieces of an infinite blue that cross the windows of Mudec's Agora, transforming it into an immense aquarium laden with silently ignored misfortunes. Is that the blue sea that every missing person sees before dying?

Adrian Paci's artistic intervention highlights the limitations, the impotence of the media in narrating, bearing witness to these catastrophes, the difficulty in inserting these news items scattered among pages that talk about politics, sport, crime and pink news. "When I saw this space, I immediately thought of the waves of the sea even though it was conceived as 'a flower'", explains the artist. "A building like this cannot be seen only as a place to create an installation; here each work must adhere to the space and produce a displacement of the space itself towards the elsewhere. And the elsewhere must enter this space". Here at Mudec is Adrian Paci's tragic sea "I wanted to get out of the explicit, I deliberately erased any reference to the shipwrecks that occurred. These windows contain pain, they do not ignore it. My vision is meant to suggest reflection". Adrian Paci's journeys are real, imaginary, immense: moments of initiation, indissoluble truths.