5 things not to miss at Artissima 2021

With three exhibitions opening at the same time, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents, starting Friday 5 November, a new installation by Martine Syms, the American artist awarded the second edition of the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media, an award given by the Fondazione together with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Neural Swamp is the title of the immersive installation whose protagonists are three entities, respectively: Athena, Dee and the narrator. The images of the three characters are projected onto the exhibition surface and invade the space through their voices reading a script that is generated in real time by an artificial intelligence software dedicated to writing. In addition to Neural Swamp, two other exhibitions open on the same evening: Stretching the Body brings together ten international artists (including Jana Euler, Christina Quarles, Avery Singer, Anj Smith and Ambera Wellmann) reflecting on the theme of the human body through the medium of painting; Safe House, a group exhibition that inaugurates the second edition of Verso, the institution’s exhibition and educational programme for younger generations, reflects on secrecy and invisibility as forms of government and (self-)organisation of human lives.

6 CHAIRS is a new site-specific installation by Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas, designed for the ballroom of the historic Hotel Principi di Piemonte - UNA Esperienze, which is collaborating with Artissima for the second time and is one of the main venues hosting the city’s events. Consistent with the artist’s research, which focuses on the practices of play, 6 CHAIRS consists of six chairs made of different materials, iron, wood and plastic, raised to a height of almost two metres. Similar to the chairs of lifeguards or those of tennis umpires, they are assembled and put together as in a fantastic project of bricolage, where architecture meets DIY aesthetics, in a way that is reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters’ “merzbau”. The installation is also a further example of the link between the Fair and the city, as it will also be on display during the Nitto ATP Finals, one of the most important professional tennis tournaments in the world, which will be held in Turin for five years starting in mid-November 2021, immediately after Artissima. 6 CHAIRS transforms the sumptuous Salone delle Feste into a metaphorical court with silent umpires during an invisible tournament whose rules will be written and imagined by the audience.

OGR Torino presents two performances by Adam Linder in the framework of the group exhibition Vogliamo tutto. Can we still want it all?, curated by Samuele Piazza with Nicola Ricciardi and on display until 16 January 2022. Conceived in 2018, the two performances, entitled Service No. 1: Some Cleaning and Service No. 5: Dare to Keep Kids Off Naturalism, draw attention, through choreography and props, to the contractual implications behind the concept of a work of performing art and extend the reflection to the work of performers and dancers, exhibiting, to give an example, the very contracts between the professionals and the institutions hosting the project. You can see Adam Linder’s performances from 2pm to 8pm, from 5 to 7 November. They are part of the exhibition’s broader thematic reflection which, inspired by the title of a 1971 novel by writer and artist Nanni Balestrini, reflects on the transformations of work in the post-industrial and digital context, between awareness and disillusionment, precariousness and redemption, a theme for which the architecture of OGR itself, a symbol of new models of transition and productivity compared to the recent past, acts as a spokesman. On 3 November at 9 pm, the institution will also host a performance by Jacopo Miliani.

Friday 5 November, PAV will inaugurate Eugenio Tibaldi’s solo exhibition entitled Temporary Landscape. Herbaria, maps and diaries. Curated by Marco Scotini, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s graphic work as a hybrid method embracing aesthetics, photography, architectural design and reflections of theory. In this framework, as the title of the exhibition suggests, every landscape can only be temporary. The project revolves around Heidi, a graphic diary that the artist created during the pandemic, conceived as a reaction to the past year’s rhetoric about uncontaminated nature, but also as a rejection of neo-liberal policies, investigating in particular the unauthorised developments inherent in commercial building practices, those structures that, although intended to last only a few months, become definitive, part of a landscape, such as the seized construction sites, the illegal concrete constructions that are never finished, buildings that bear witness to an anomalous situation and which, due to their static nature, become landscape and lead us to modify our “aesthetic” boundaries. Tibaldi’s exhibition can be read as a graphic and “environmental” intervention capable of recording on a micro-scale the ecological transformations of our time, trying to find a precarious (and never definitive) correspondence between a fractured reality and its representation, between man and the environment.

Mucho Mas!, a non-profit space that opened in 2018 between the Barriera and Aurora neighbourhoods, is hosting the Space in Mirror Is Closer Than It Appears exhibition by the duo Stefano Comensoli_Nicolò Colciago. The Milanese artists, creating a dialogue with the industrial space, will present their poetics through site-specific installations, projections of film collage slides and a documentary video on a screen that, right in the centre of the room, will become a sort of door to pass through. In a bridge between two places, Comensoli and Colciago question the artistic process, creating juxtapositions of pre-existing materials. Working with disused objects or second-hand elements, they create works of art with high poetic potential, giving life to an action capable of finding beauty even in what apparently cannot be recovered. The two artists behave like “explorers, guided by the idea that getting lost is wonderful”, as the philosopher Davide Dal Sasso describes them in the critical text introducing the exhibition. In the exhibition, the artist highlights forgotten places which, treated as bodies and organisms, are freed from their original form and become modelling matter, thus opening up to a tangible imagination.