site.btaSofia to Host Paolo Woods, Gabriele Galimberti's Photo Exhibition about Offshore Zones

An exhibition of photographers Paolo Woods from the Netherlands and Gabriele Galimberti from Italy will be on display at Sofia's Synthesis Gallery from April 18 to June 15. The Heavens is a large-scale artistic project with a critical view at offshore zone that combines years of journalistic investigation, photography, financial analyses, and infographics, said the organizers from Synthesis Gallery and the French Institute in Bulgaria.

The exhibition's curators are Nadezhda Pavlova and Nikola Mihov.

"In the course of over two years, Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti visited 13 offshore centres embodying tax evasion, secrecy, offshore banking, and extreme wealth. The authors are led by their strive to give a photographic face to this rather disembodied topic. From the US state of Delaware to the British Island of Jersey, from the British Virgin Islands to London City, from Panama to Hong Kong and Singapore, the two photographers reveal to us a rarely seen and secretive world that strongly differs from our idea of it," the organizers said. In their words, the offshore zones are not an eccentric tropical exotic but a main instrument in the global economy's structure. These zones help natural persons and companies circumvent financial regulations and reduce their tax obligations. The Heavens raises fundamental moral questions about the relations between public and private, countries and corporations, rich and poor, the organizers also said.

Paolo Woods was born in The Hague in 1970. He grew up in Italy and has lived in Paris, London, Haiti, and Cote d'Ivoire. He holds many award. Woods has published eight photo books. In 2023, he became one of the five founders and photo editors of the French magazine Kometa, dedicated to long-term journalistic projects, photography, and discussions with a focus on Eastern Europe. 

Gabriele Galimberti was born in Val di Chiana in 1977. He worked as a commercial photographer before joining the Riverboom artistic collective and taking up documentary photography. In the last years, he has been working on long-term projects, some of which published as photo books. His last project, The Ameriguns, which reviews the deep connection between Americans and their weapons, won first prize in the portrait category of World Press Photos in 2021. Photos of his have been featured in exhibitions across the globe.