PROPAGANDA. The Art of Political Indoctrination

Fondazione Cirulli together with Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò is pleased to present a documentary exhibition that investigates the inner workings of propaganda through the lens of 20th century Italian politics. Its focus is on fascism, with works from the two decades of Mussolini’s dictatorial government (1922-1943, followed by two additional years at the helm of the Italian Social Republic, a Nazi puppet-state in northern Italy), plus selected pieces from the edges of this period that help contextualize the exhibition.
The exhibition illustrates how fascist political propaganda coopted modernist aesthetics, mass communication, marketing techniques, and popular culture to manipulate society and muster support for its totalitarian endeavors. Considered together, the propaganda emerging from fascism, as well as from the particularly tense democratic times surrounding the fascist period, provide an opportunity to deconstruct the rhetoric of political communication in its entirety, and represent a call to engage critically with the multitude of competing political narratives that surround us today.

4 March - 17 April 2020
PROPAGANDA. The Art of Political Indoctrination. Works from the Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli
Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York City