Another edition of the Artissima art fair just ended in Turin, another Artissima report on wmmna. I’ve always found Artissima brainier, edgier and less art supermarket than other art fairs. I thought my first visit to Frieze in London last month would dethrone the Turin fair from its pedestal but that didn’t happen. Frieze is noy as avant-garde as its reputation wants it. At least not anymore
Category Archive: Art in Turin and Milan
The drama is set in a fictional future that looks very much like today’s London. Here, however, all exchange transactions and social interactions are overseen by a system called ‘the Spirit’. The film explores a world in which the self is reduced to physical biology, directly subject to the needs of capital. Hotels offer bed-warming servants with every room, people are fined for not preventing foreseeable illness, weight watching foods eat the digester from the inside and the unemployed repay their debt to society in physical energy
In 2009, Jens Haaning went to Albania, caught dozens of pigeons, put them in cardboard boxes, loaded the boxes in the truck of his car and drove to Greece. He released the birds in a square of Thessaloniki where pigeons usually gather. Simple. Yet he had performed an illegal act: bringing live animals inside the European Union borders is forbidden to avoid “the transmission of diseases to either the public or other animals” unless you carry the relevant health certificates. Yet, pigeons, migratory birds, even seeds cross borders every day
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Favourite paintings, drawings, installations, performances, photos in images and links but with hardly any text
The last edition of Artissima was good. But then i’d usually say such thing because i love art fairs. The booth ladies always wear fancy, sexy attires, none of them has ever heard about the existence of art blogs, i see free booze in my fancy press bag, the concept of a fair makes it possible to ask questions you’d never dare to ask in a gallery or museum, and there are more artworks than even i can absorb
Beware! May contain ants scratching vinyl, a Cousin Itt alter-ego, Bruce Sterling and Carla Bruni
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The walls of this experimental museum are built with compressed stacks of plastic, paper, metal, fabric and wood. All the material is recycled. The books of the library are kept inside disused fridges, tables are installed on top of upside-down washing machines. A huge fan regularly blows wind that moves the fabric walls of the corridor. A rudimentary skywalk allows visitors to get a better idea of the architecture of the museum
The show is indeed disturbing. Not so much for the images but for the issues they uncover: domestic violence, decaying corpses, mass graves for livestock, post-war trauma, pollution, nonconformist sexual practices, etc. Curators Germano Celant and Melissa Harris have hung on the white walls of the Triennale 260 pictures from 24 contemporary photographers. Each of these images follow the footsteps of the photos which emerged from Vietnam in the ’60s and ’70s and were so shocking that they played a crucial role in changing public opinion about the conflict
I spent the afternoon at the press preview of Artissima, Turin’s contemporary art fair. Since i’m still uploading the hundreds of pictures i took, going through the catalogue, trying to identify the performances and screenings worth attending over the coming days and wondering whether i shouldn’t get away from this screen and head to the Share festival, i’m going to do the lazy thing and give you an easy preview of Artissima using a selection of the press images i received a few hours ago
After the moving and now iconic series The Hyena and Other Men and the stunning
Nollywood, Hugo’s latest work, Permanent Error, portrays the people, animals and landscape of a dumping ground for computers and electronic waste from Europe and the US. The area, on the outskirts of a slum known as Agbogbloshie, in Ghana, is a shocking contrast to the better faster shinier life promised by the advances of technology
“Not for Nothing” is a typical expression in Philadelphia. It is not by chance that the three artists exhibiting represent the various facets of the human mind: Ben Woodward expresses an existentialism diluted with irony, Kris Chau expresses a pungent and cutting femininity, AJ Fosik represents an atavistic and purely masculine force; eccentric visions of individual contemporary intimacy
Last Saturday i finally dragged myself out of the armchair and visited the ‘Park of Living Art’ in Turin. Although the ‘interactive’ displays i saw in some of the rooms were appalling, I’ll be forever grateful to the place for bringing to Turin exciting artists: Michel Blazy, Andrea Caretto and Raffaella Spagna and now Brandon Ballengee
There are few themes that bear the rubber stamp of moral and aesthetic prohibition, even though they find expression in a world where all ideological and ethical limits seem to have been left behind. But domestic eroticism, parental unions and filial love represent a few black holes in the fabric of common morality – uncomfortable voids that do not even dare thinking about
Emily Jacir’s public intervention for the Venice Biennale was canceled by the municipal authorities without explanation. Stazione would have seen the 24 piers for the Route 1 water bus (the vaporetto that starts at the Lido stop and ends at Piazzale Roma) display the names of the stops in both Arabic and Italian, creating a bilingual transportation route up and down the Grand Canal. The Alberto Peola gallery in Turin is showing what the work would have looked like
Wind knitting factory, washing machine in the park, CCTV chandelier, furniture covered in fungi, a Pavlov’s Dog system to train a man to be a caring father? It must be RCA again!
A few tips if you’re going to the Salone del Mobile, Milan’s international furniture fair this weekend. Zona Tortona smells a bit of a hasbeen area now that the big guys, the heavy glitter and the trashy panini di porchetta have moved in. The cool kids are showing their magic elsewhere in the city
The Reverend Ethan Acres has made it his mission to “put the fun back into Fundamentalism.” He has more verve than a tv preacher, more charisma than a whole drive-in chapel and far more dynamism than a gospel aerobic instructor. The Reverend uses art to accompany his sermons and spread the Word large and wide, linking it to ancient traditions of sacred art
Since 1955, the World Press Photo Foundation is awarding the most striking and representative images that have documented and illustrated the events of our times in the press. The winners of the photography contest are exhibited this year in 100 cities in 45 countries and is still expanding. The plethora of exhibition venues hardly justify why World Press Photo is so wantonly careless about the way the images are exhibited
Artissima never disappoints. It is decidedly the edgiest and most exciting contemporary art fair in the country. In fact, you’d almost think that people come here because they love art, not just because they want to buy, invest and speculate
The exhibition, located in the beautiful but cruelly un-heated Fondazione 107, uses photographic works, videos, installations and sculptures to document a moment of extraordinary transformation for an area that is five times bigger than Europe. The result is bold and exciting with its mix of “globalization”, acceleration, pre-soviet and islamic traditions
Letizia Battaglia’s pictures, because of the corruption, silence, violence and suffering they laid bare, played a crucial role in the anti-mafia campaign. They show anti-mafia Judge Cesare Terranova shot in his car, corpses of mafiosi found by the road, tears of the wives and mothers when they discover the scene of the crime, arrests of the mafia boss, teenagers pretending to be though guys with attitude and guns
Calculating Space is a delicate sculpture made of sticks, strings and little plumbs. The fragility and transparency of its structure reveals as much as it hides the logic and functioning of the machine. Its units operate like a very basic artifical neural network
Martin Kersels took his plumpness for an absurd and dramatic ride nto the pants of acrobatic, charismatic, muscle-tastic and 60-something Iggy Pop. The result is both endearing and even more rock ‘n’ roll than Iggy himself
This exhibition at the Triennale in Milan shows knitting, embroidery and all those (mostly) feminine crafts that are now so much in favour. I’ve seen quite a few exhibitions on that very theme over the past few years and this one is definitely not the best but it has merits
Ericailcane’s bestiaries depict this as an awakening after a dream. Anthropomorphic creatures are an allegory of human weakness, wondrous animals that re-emerge from our childhood memories to illustrate fairy tales that are morally crude and disenchanted
Pressures and complaints about the video installation entitled ‘Don’t Trust Me’, which documents the practices of butchers in the Mexican countryside, prevented the Fondazione Rebaudengo to open the exhibition according to the original plans
Tombstones as a path to re-asses our relationship to communication
Robert Kusmirowski’s UHER.C is a classical, archaic sculpture that has gone berserk: it is both the nightmarish and joyous side of machine
A quickie on painted and drawn goodies seen at Artissima, the international fair on contemporary art that closed on Sunday in Turin
In 2008, artist Regina José Galindo organized a 36 hour performance to protest against the U.S.’ booming industry of private prisons and in particular T. Don Hutto, a ‘residential center’ authorized by the state of Texas to lodge whole families: men, pregnant women, adolescents, children, women, and even babies
A merry and evil atmosphere where cute hooded characters steal the bourgeois, little girls stick out their tongues, skeletons dance and kill
C.STEM 2008: Breeding Objects – Computational Design, from Digital Fabrication to Mass-Customization
The conference and exhibition present a selection of visionary projects anticipating future developments in design process and technologies. What happens when design, creative coding and digital fabrication meet mass-customization?
Exhibition of past and contemporary dwelling solutions, from emergency housing to self-built home, houses for specific users (student housing, hostels for girls, nomads’ houses, workers’ housing, the wearable house, etc.), including research by artists who have put the affordable issue at the centre of their work
The always very stern and morose Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin is currently running a retrospective dedicated to Ugo Mulas. The focus is on the photographer’s relationship with the art scene of his time
Weegee gained fame for his photos of crime scene and villains, his documentation of life in the city from the 1030s Depression to the postwar period, but he was also keen on bringing into light social problems
This year Turin is the World Capital of Design, a title that the city is not holding with much panache. No critical design, no interaction design, nothing really progressive nor challenging either. Still, there’s a couple of interesting exhibitions going on throughout the city. The one i visited on Thursday might actually be the best show about design i’ve seen in a long time
An exhibition in Turin challenged 11 architectural studio to design a prison cell and from then on engage in a reflection about the prison system and its corollaries: the restriction of freedom, human rights, instruments of surveillance and control
Antarctica is the first complete and organic public showing of the artworks created by the artists as a result of their experience to the edge of the world
Humanity made even more upsetting and menacing than ever through the innocent magic of plasticine
There’s art in Second Life, it just took me a couple of years to realize it