Location: Palazzo Ducale, Cortile degli Svizzeri,1
Opening times: Monday – Thursday 3pm – 7:30pm / Friday – Sunday 10am – 7: 30pm


INTARGET PHOTOLUX AWARD 2022
MICHAEL SWANN – AN ASCENSION

An Ascension is a body of work that explores queerness, love, hope and devotion.
In March 2020 the artist and his same-sex partner got engaged; having been in a relationship for five years, they agreed to the commitment of life-long unity.

As a child, Swann received a Catholic education, one that outwardly taught the sins of deviation from the heterosexual path. About the time he began to move away from faith, he experienced his first homosexual feelings, or at least the first feelings he understood to be so. From this point on, the understanding of his own sexuality and the directions in which his orientation would point developed; however, the influence of Catholic guilt lingered. Despite being openly gay with close friends and family by the age of 18, Swann couldn’t escape the vision of himself one day marrying, and starting a family with a woman. While the relationship to his own sexuality has evolved since then, he still feels the lingering shadow of the Catholic view on sexuality over his shoulder.
An Ascension is a way to delve into these shadows, filling them with the light of hope that is the devotion to his partner.

The series combines metaphor with diaristic imagery of the spaces he built together with his partner and the bodies they unite. While looking back to the eleven years old self, with this work Swann look ahead to the promise of marital bliss and the potential of queer unity.