Highlighting contemporary art exhibit, Vatican holds ‘Restoring a face to the human’
September 19, 2025
Two Vatican dicasteries organized “Restituire un volto all’umano” [Restoring a face to the human], a September 16 evening event with five speakers.
The event was “born in relation to Adrian Paci’s solo exhibition ‘No Man is an Island,’“ according to the Dicastery for Culture and Education. “The initiative, which is part of a broader process of reflection promoted by the Holy See, intends to propose a space for dialogue between art, communication and culture to understand how to restore centrality and dignity to the human person in a time marked by profound changes,” added the Dicastery for Communication.
In June, the Dicastery for Culture and Education announced Paci’s exhibition in its new contemporary art space, Conciliazione 5. At the time, the dicastery paid tribute to Paci’s work as “a work with strong symbolic value, referring to loss and to the Mediterranean as a mass grave holding the remains of tens of thousands of migrants.”
The prefects of the two dicasteries, the curator of Conciliazione 5, Paci, and journalist Laura Silvia Battaglia spoke at the September 16 event.
“We need not just reporters but artists, people capable of feeling and making others feel,” mused Andrea Monda, the director of L’Osservatore Romano, in his editorial on the event.
Monda wrote that it is important to go “to Gaza, but also to Kyiv, Sudan, Congo, Myanmar, Syria, to all the places in the world where there are armed conflicts, and collect the stories of those killed.”
“And here, not even artists would be needed; simple men, provided they are sensitive, would suffice,” added Monda. “Go there to those who survived, hear their stories, and learn by heart those broken lives so that they can tell them again, thus overturning a destiny seemingly already written and definitively concluded.”
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Further information:
- Restituire un volto all'umano (Dicastery for Culture and Education)
- Cultura e dialogo: il 16 settembre il convegno “Restituire un volto all’umano” (Dicastery for Communication)
- Nomi, volti, storie: questo è un uomo (L'Osservatore Romano, 9/18/25)
- Curial dicastery hosts art exhibit on migration (CWN, 6/12/25)
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