current exhibition 
 

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Under the title ‘Kanakenkinder’ Luigi Toscano presents his latest group of works: large-format portraits of people with migrant perspectives. The aesthetic of his pictorial language has changed; what remains are the faces we step up to and whose gazes hold us transfixed. Here, Toscano forges links with his large-format portraits of survivors of the Holocaust – frontal, face to face, inescapable – which he exhibits around the world in public spaces.

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‘Lest We Forget / Gegen das Vergessen’ has become his ongoing life project, in a way. Luigi Toscano travels – in order to meet the contemporary witnesses, to photograph them, to hear and record their story. He depicts people who were children at the time, when they were robbed of their childhood. And he tells their stories, so that they are not forgotten, so that we will never forget. With the photographs on ‘Lest We Forget / Gegen das Vergessen’, Luigi Toscano journeys the world over in order to tell of encounters, to educate, and to converse with people.

There is almost no getting away from an exhibition in the public space, and there are all kinds of reactions. Something that began small has now become a globally encompassing project: Luigi Toscano has become the ambassador for remembrance and against forgetting. For, talking to one another, listening to one another – that is the starting-point for living together peacefully and respectfully. Toscano was appointed Artist for Peace by UNESCO.

So far, so familiar. But who is Luigi Toscano? The person behind the project? He has written up his life.  The book ‘Luigi Toscano. Kanakenkind’ was published by Herder Verlag in March 2026. It is painful to read: The child of Italian immigrants – ‘guest workers’ – born in Mainz in 1972, taunted as a Kanakenkind (‘dago kid’), handed around in homes and institutions, discovers via photography an escape from violence, neglect, drugs and street. It is a search for himself, painful, full of lows, but also full of highs and there is, above all, hope. In the book, Toscano associates his story with the search for identity undertaken by Anna Strishkova from Kyiv, who as a small child was abducted by the Germans in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz.

Here, too, the Who am I question is raised. In the exhibition, Luigi Toscano combines the book – his life story – with the story of the people portrayed. Children, women, men, from Syria, Egypt, Puerto Rico and other regions of the world. People who live in Mannheim and the surrounding area. What stories do they have to tell? Who listens to them? And what do these stories say about our society? About us?

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Luigi Toscano. Kanakenkind, (Herder Verlag, 2026), ISBN 9 78-451-39907-7, €30.
Available at the PORT25 bookstore.

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