The mystery of the world lies beneath the visible, not the invisible. And the artists selected by Irene Calderoni with Erica F. Battle – both curators at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin – exercise at best their reactions against surfaces soaking in conventional visual codes.

Three separated exhibitions that opened during Artissima art week, are most definitely called upon to test and try ourselves against the utmost. But probably, as visitors, we are also bound to keep silence regarding this perceptible utmost, to beware of sharing it in order to find its vision in the artwork and reveal the law, the coded language in it.

In Wil-o-Wisp (2018), Rachel Rose’s sixth video, the American artist, who was born in 1986, makes a decisive move, unfolding a historical fiction of magical healing and persecution against the backdrop of the enclosure of common lands in England at the turn of the seventeenth century. In a tale set amid a process that Karl Max deemed instrumental in the transition from feudalism to capitalism and that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution. A tale that must be understood in dialogue with the artist’s established interest in the experiential texture of late modernity. Rose delves into the looping temporalities of the past, finding there both the enduring possibility of enchantment and the roots of our current condition.

At the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, an enormous, single hall hosts Wil-o-Wisp projected on a wide screen, set in the centre. The sound is partially absorbed by a coagulative, pearlescent and velvety moquette flooding the floor, while the video’s track is enhanced and boosted by several speakers, hanging all around the walls, installed beyond a hazy, white voile. The video encompasses a very polished, very high-tech and responsive setting, being the inaugural recipient of the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media, a collaborative initiative between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione. It is a platform to support, on a biennial basis, the production and co-acquisition of work created by compelling new voices in video, film, sound, and performance.

In this almost ten minutes video the artist uses a documental medium (the story of Elspeth Blake, a wife and mother in 1570 and a mystic, healing a man in 1630) to develop another one. Each element of this work send us back to a particular cultural code, all them combined to create a critical message on consumer of historical culture. It is a hyper-textual narration, highly aware of any medium it is drawn from. Here we can point out the most significant difference with remediation, this defining characteristic of new digital media, a representation of one source into another, where women’s history tends to be transparent.

In the subsequent room at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Andra Ursuta (Romania, 1979) showcasesVanilla Isis, achieving the conviction and substantiality of contemporary Islamic communicative strategies, a reality intensified and potentiated to the point of indestructability by her explicit experience on objectivity’s interpretation.

The artist conveys brand new works on the wall, while the installation Stoner (2013) is strategically set in the centre. The renowned work’s title quotes the diabolical use of a crane in the hanging of an Iranian woman. Inside an high black metal net enclosure, a machine, built especially for slow destruction, hurls grey, slightly irregular homemade balls made of acrylic at a tiled wall about 12 meters away. Several thumping impacts have broken many tiles both within the strike zone and outside of it.

The imperfect balls exit the machine differently, occasionally clearing the fence, revealing human hair and filth. On the wall, a dark, recast series (Vanilla Isis, 2018) of jovial pool inflatables shapes (a palm leaf, a bone, an hang loose and two fried eggs) push the Isis black flag out exposing a proclamation of faith, a refrain from the Guns’N Roses song Welcome to the Jungle from the album Appetite for Destruction: “Welcome to the jungle/ Watch it bring you to your/ Shana… knees, knees/ I wanna watch you bleed”. Language devolves into repetitive, meaningless vocalization, reduced to adorning deflated objects of leisure, while Ursuta tested herself against the myriad permutations of pictorial treatments of a terrorism sign, against the utmost expression of mystical dark colour, sublimating the experience of her own vision all the way to the end, where at this stage no one can follow her.

Last but not least, in a separated environment, Monster Chetwynd (UK, 1973) introduces a massive brand new world map of her imagery, titled The Owl with the Laser Eyes. The central device of the exhibition is a theatrical space designed to host two different marionette. One show was inspired by Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies and his use of tarot cards as a linguistic device. The second show is the one after which the exhibition is named: The Owl with the Laser Eyes. Drawing from sci-fi films that focus on perverse TV shows, such as Running Man or The Hunger Games, the marionettes crafted by Monster Chetwynd are the protagonists of an epic combat between the cruel Laser-eyed Owl and the crew of contestants gathering around Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Right when the only-girls punk rock band Chlamydia performs alive.