Italian artist Leone Contini’s collaborations with migrant communities open up discussions about local food resilience in the face of the climate crisis
Category Archive: Art in Turin and Milan
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
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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
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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
I can’t get enough of those hairy people. The portraits start as found images, Carrubba then paints over them and constantly reworks the image
On Thursday i was in Turin and visited For President at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The timely, informative and a tad star-struck exhibition examines the American election campaigns, its calculated emotional moments, theatrical strategies and incestuous relationship with media. Part of the show is also looking at the interest Italy (and with it, the rest of Europe) is having for the American event, from a very brief article on page 3 of a daily newspaper in 1868 to the current front pages
Milica Tomic decided to produce the non-existing war image. The images would not only be fake, they would also be made in other locations and contexts. And with every reconstruction, Tomić came across new information linking host countries to various war zones or episodes of local violence
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
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
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
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