At the heart of the exhibition Jacopo Benassi Libero!, currently on view at Genoa’s Palazzo Ducale, is a deliberate dismantling of photography’s supposed authority. Curated by photography curator and director of Turin’s CAMERA—Centro Italiano di Fotografia, Francesco Zanot, this sweeping exhibition of over one hundred works created by Jacopo Benassi between 2018 and 2025 is not merely a survey of the Italian artist’s output over the period—it is a bold, confrontational manifesto about what photography can and perhaps must become in our over-saturated, image-addicted world.

In his practice, which can be described as sculptural, performative and conceptual—despite the fact that his primary medium is photography—Benassi rejects the single, self-contained image. Photographs are buried in cluttered frames made from reclaimed wood, strapped together, layered with paint, clay, glass or other found detritus and presented as clusters on wheeled crates. Image composites are built, bound, obscured, suspended or piled. Benassi frequently combines unrelated motifs into chaotic double, triple or multiple frames; these ‘stratifications’, or layered works, create precarious hybrids that speak to fragmentation and multiplicity. They are collisions, accidents, declarations. And this impurity—of medium, subject, intention—is the soul of the exhibition. (Don’t bother looking for individual work titles; the list of works includes every single image in the show, even those images that are buried out of sight at the bottom of a pile.) The works feel alive because they are unstable, and their instability mirrors our current relationship with images: omnipresent yet unreliable, seductive yet hollow.

His irreverence feels radical, if somewhat nostalgic—conjuring movements such as Fluxus, Dada or the experimental spirit of early-2000s Berlin—and as such, feels like an urgent reminder of art’s inherent freedom.

As such, the image becomes an object in Benassi’s hands—heavy and vulnerable, an artefact that insists on its own instability. But that’s not to say that his images are without impact. Some works are, in fact, confrontational: twenty portraits dangle inverted from a crane—faces deliberately turned away, exposing only the works’ backs and stretchers. Another small cluster shows a fit male torso, with one of the model’s arms placed lazily across his lower chest and the other reaching towards his crotch. But the crotch part of the image is obscured by another framed photograph, of a man’s ankle and foot—an obfuscation that becomes a tribute: to beauty, tenderness, masculinity and queer desire. Yet another work shows what the exhibition text describes as a photo of a wax museum’s Hitler figure, its visibility crushed under layers of glass so thick the very material it is meant to reveal becomes an opaque barrier. These gestures aren’t theatrical for their own sake—they are structural refusals of conventional visual consumption.

Born in La Spezia in 1970, Benassi emerged from Italy’s underground music scene as a teenager in the late 1980s, and that DIY, punk-infused spirit remains central to his practice. Across photography, performance, painting and installation, Benassi maintains a raw, confrontational aesthetic that is often anchored in collaboration. In an era of artificial images and algorithmic aesthetics, Benassi reclaims the photograph as something tactile, flawed and defiantly human. His irreverence feels radical, if somewhat nostalgic—conjuring movements such as Fluxus, Dada or the experimental spirit of early-2000s Berlin—and as such, feels like an urgent reminder of art’s inherent freedom. As for his photography style, his distinctive use of flash, harsh contrasts and repurposed materials lends his work an instinctive physicality—less concerned with documentation, more about impact. Indeed, Benassi wields his camera flash like a weapon, photographing “very fast… like a war reporter… as if there’s a sniper ready to take me out”, he told the Italian daily paper Il Foglio. That urgency courses through his images and installations: fragments of nature and quotidian still-life subjects stripped of romanticism, frozen in a flash that both illuminates and erases.

A drum set stands in the centre of one of the multiple rooms that house the exhibition. One of the cymbals has been supplemented with a used leather house slipper, a recurring motif in Benassi’s work (according to an Instagram post by the museum, there are a total of 45 slippers in the show.) These house shoes sometimes appear as sculptural ready-mades, sometimes they are photographed, face up, more like portraiture than still-life. One work showing a plastic slipper branded with a gaming console’s logo and worn on a socked plaster cast of a foot is placed against the wall, with ‘self-portrait’ scribbled on the wall above it in red and a long arrow pointing all the way down to prevent any mistakes in identification. The drum set was most likely used during the artist’s monthlong residency at Palazzo Ducale in preparation for his exhibition. From June 2025 until the opening in mid-July, Benassi undertook an intensive artistic residency there, transforming the exhibition space into both a studio and a stage. He moved his workspace from La Spezia into the Palazzo’s historic Loggia degli Abati, immersing himself in the architecture, atmosphere and rhythms of Genoa. Throughout his residency, he invited fellow artists and performers to stage happenings and events on several occasions, including Berlin-based musician Kahn of Finland, with whom Benassi recorded an album on site.

With these invited friends and other artistic collaborators, Benassi also constructed a site-specific installation titled Escape for freedom. Resembling a DIY fun-house, or a winding, messy corridor emblazoned with graffiti (‘*uck art let’s dance’, ‘Make War Not LOVE’), it serves as a show-within-a-show, a capsule exhibition of drawings, sculptures, paintings and sounds by Sicilian painters Francesco De Grandi and Francesco Lauretta, musicians Lady Maru and Kahn of Finland and artists Cristiano Benassi, Luigi Presicce, Nuvola Ravera, Lorenzo D’Anteo and Sissi Daniela Olivieri. At the end of the art-filled corridor, having attempted to perform the titular ‘escape for freedom’, the viewer ends up by the restrooms. There, Benassi has installed nine works—dramatically fragmented black-and-white photographs of the plants found in Genoa’s Parco di Villa Croce. But this is a dead-end, and to exit the exhibition, one has to walk back through the corridor, backtracking on said ‘escape’.

Two works are installed elsewhere in the Palazzo, separated from the Gesamtkunstwerk-style of the main installation. One, titled Mother (2022 – 2025), is installed inside the opulent Doge’s Chapel, a magnificently frescoed example of Genoese baroque, which is rarely accessible to visitors. Situated in a triangular frame which holds it up in the middle of the Chapel, and lit by a utilitarian spotlight of the kind used on construction sites, the work features graffitied wooden panels that seem to have been removed from their original context, a tagged ready-made facing an 18th-century marbled altar piece. The aristocratic grandeur of the Palazzo Ducale is turned inside-out by Benassi’s anarchic poetry, becoming a fitting metaphor for the city of Genoa: a gritty port city whose working-class edge contrasts with the charm of its ornate historical centre, a labyrinth of narrow alleys, faded palaces and centuries-old grandeur.

The second work, titled The Plants of the Villa Croce Park Are on Strike (2025), was created during Benassi’s one-month residency and is now on view inside the grand Sala del Minor Consiglio, or the council hall. Here, again, Benassi photographed the flora of the garden at the Villa Croce museum. He then projected those images onto canvas and painted over them, creating a hybrid work that fuses photography and painting, natural observation and manual intervention. In the notes accompanying the work, Benassi captures the state of the city which inspired the piece: “What struck me most here in Genoa is Villa Croce. An important museum, but today lifeless, almost forgotten. I decided to dedicate my work to that museum—partly as a gesture of love, partly as a critical stance on the state it’s in. It’s as if the plants in the museum's garden were rebelling. Going on strike. Burning themselves through spontaneous combustion.” As the exhibition closes in mid-September, this work will enter the permanent collection of the Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s a fitting end to a show that refuses closure.

‘Jacopo Benassi – Libero!’ is on view from July 12 – September 14, 2025, at Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, Italy.

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