The anti-military tactics and subversive procedures presented in the show range from sabotage to deconstruction of military symbols, from desertion to grassroots resistance against economic macrosystems that feed military culture
Category Archive: Art in Turin and Milan
Photographer Max Pinckers collaborated with Mau Mau war veterans and Kenyans who survived colonial atrocities to give a visual existence to the fight for independence from British colonial rule in the 1950s
Inspired by the Dieselgate scandal, the work recontextualizes the industry’s own visual marketing tools to reveal the stark contrast between its professed environmental narrative and actual practices
advertising
Jumana Manna’s film exposes how Israel is weaponising conservation laws to alienate Palestinians from their histories, land and traditions
Queer theory, co-dependency, desire, hierarchies, possessiveness, vulnerability or feminism… Everything you wanted to know about the close connection between mother and son
An exhibition about contemporary art in Argentina presents different approaches to the representation of a culture often characterised by forms of violence
social
Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection, realised by David Cronenberg, provides an alternative gaze on the four female wax models on display in the anatomy museum, exploring themes such as the fascination with the human body and its potential mutations and contaminations
The exhibition presents artists who, at different times throughout the 20th and early 21st century, have investigated dematerialisation or whose works have echoed epochal changes in the perception of the material dimension and in the material culture itself
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s installation explores the concept of atmospheric violence, offering a historical and political reflection on the use of noise as a tool for oppression and control
The show addresses a series of themes including: gravity as “the greatest designer”, extraterrestrial architecture, deep space mysteries, future body modifications and other matters that raise more questions than answers
A collection of credible, collaborative tools that attempt to recalibrate the relationship between plants, fungi, microbes, humans and other animals
In her ongoing show in Milan, Anicka Yi highlights how our associations with smell, along with sight, breed prejudices and anxieties
Playing with gender tropes, stereotypes, sense of place, and future perspectives, artists interrogate individuality as we know it and as it might be
A group exhibition reflecting on the transformation of labor in the post-industrial and digital era, between awareness and disillusion, precariousness and empowerment
New connections between gamification, fantasy and political radicalization
“The recreational and tourist industry is constantly producing new sports models and trends which show a kind of detachment from the landscape context. Events that take place in a landscape that is in itself fragile due to its topographical configuration, such as glaciers, are only related to the place through the type of sporting activity practicised there”
What would aerospace engineering look like if its methods were decoupled from the corporate and military interests?
Italian artist Leone Contini’s collaborations with migrant communities open up discussions about local food resilience in the face of the climate crisis
Walls are no obstacle if you have the right technology
Rakowitz’s work is inhabited by ghosts, invisible and invisibilised communities, generosity and his own heritage as the grandson of Iraqi-Jews who were forced to emigrate from Baghdad to the U.S. in the mid-20th century
Thomas Hämén used coprolite from a dinosaur that lived about 140 million years ago to sculpt a device for anal stimulation, in an attempt to make us connect with geological or “deep time”
Within computer vision and AI systems, forms of measurement turn into moral judgments. Could these judgements in turn influence our own behaviour, our vision of the world and the individuals who inhabit it?
While Turin is famous for its innovations and manufacturing energy, it is also said to be the only city that is part of both the triangle of White Magic and the triangle of the Black Magic
It’s difficult not to contemplate the possibility of an arid future when you realize how much climate change is affecting the Alps. Snow season is shortening; tourism relies on artificial snow (which further depletes water reserves); glaciers have shrunk to half their earlier size, and by the end of the century all the Alpine glaciers may have melted away
The exhibition not only presents artifacts and information about tattoos in Japan, Pacific Ocean and in the South East of Asia through history but it also makes them dialogue with bikers, Russian and Italian criminals, the skin-heads, the Hollywood movies and Delvoye’s tattooed pigs
An exhibition at the Parco Arte Vivente, Turin’s experimental centre for Living Arts, aims to offer new perspectives and lines of inquiry about the Anthropocene
Using defective photographic material and a bit of photoshop, Barker shot the plastic bits of trash to make them look like plankton in water
Part 2 of my cursory review of the Artissima art fair which took place in Turin back in early November. Yesterday, i talked photos, today will be a rapid fire of paintings, drawings, installations, etc. In no particular order and with as little commentary as possible
I don’t normally write about art fairs but Artissima usually introduces me to so many new ideas, artists and way of representing the world that i can’t resist sharing some of the images of the event on the blog
And Now for Something Completely Different: two photo series by Chris Steele-Perkins: the iconic one that documents the teddy boys and a more recent one that looks at a football competition for Roman Catholic priests
Italian photographer Valerio Spada is interested in the daily existence of Mafia bosses who spend decades on the run. What do you carry with you when you decide to disappear? What do you take along when you are forced to move from one place to another?
This year, the Share festival in Turin shed its new media art skin and became a festival resolutely centered on design. The event was all about technology and creativity but this time in their most domesticated forms
Every single day and every single night, rain or shine, the movements of people living in Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan, are watched over by huge surveillance balloons. The U.S. army calls them aerostat or Persistent Threat Detection System
The exhibition seeks to investigate the historical and social implications of the plant world in light of the ever-increasing resurgence of “green” as an agent of change in relation to current economic processes. To place a plant within a historical context means to consider not only its biological constitution, but also the social and political factors which see it already positioned at the centre of the earliest forms of economic globalisation
a video archive of global dissent which explores four decades of social disobedience: from the uprising in Italy in 1977 to the anti-globalization protests and to the insurrections in the Middle East
There were a few works i didn’t care about (mostly the ones by Jeff Koons), a couple that surprised me (and that includes one by Jeff Koons) and many more i found rather uplifting. The Murderme collection is pure entertainment. Death is made dramatic and sometimes even cheerful. The artists have names most people have heard about. I found the exhibition curious and fascinating, it’s that contemporary art world I find charming but also utterly alien to me
Since the last post about the Artissima art fair was so verbose, this one adopts the opposite strategy.
An art fair is not the best place to discover works related to science, technology or politics. And when there are indeed such works on offer, they are not easy to spot. Galleries exhibiting at art fairs don’t usually accompany the artwork with a text explaining what the piece is about. In fact, several galleries don’t even write down the name of the artists they exhibit. You have to go and ask them. Which i do when i’m desperate but most of the time, i just want to keep on walking from gallery to gallery (there were 172 of them this year at Artissima) and see the rest of the show before my head explodes.
I did however, spot a few gems at Artissima this year
Almost two months ago, i wrote a couple of measly posts (Arnold Odermatt, policeman photographer and Artissima – Valerio Carrubba) about the 19th edition of Artissima, the contemporary art fair that takes place in Turin each year in November. I’ve finally decided to catch up with my reports from the fair
Odermatt never studied photography. He was a traffic policeman in Switzerland and part of his job consisted in taking photographs of road accidents and of other members of the police at work. From 1948 till 1990, when he retired, he would make one set for the insurance or police reports and a second one for himself