THE PROGRAM OF THE YEAR 2023
Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino
The year 2023 at Castello di Rivoli
In 2023 the activities of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea include major new exhibitions, educational activities, research, care of the Collections and numerous public programs. As usual, the Museum will also organize exhibitions in venues in Turin and Piedmont.
“Programming a museum in the year 2023,” states the Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “means thinking of art as a bodily and sensual experience, a place of recreation and real happiness, but also thinking of art as a means to become aware of current traumatic historical events, from Afghanistan again under the Taliban, to the bombs falling in Ukraine, up to the protests and repression in Iran. Almost an oxymoron, art heals through aesthetics but also through the intelligence of artists and the critical thinking it generates in visitors. On the one hand we will see the immersive and psychedelic environment of Olafur Eliasson’s Orizzonti tremanti and the LITTLE CONCERT for The Sea by Renato Leotta, on the other, we will encounter the works of artists at war: this coexistence of pleasure and pain, this contemporaneity between the promise of a digital metaverse world that will save us, and the perception of cold, darkness and death, are the two opposites that can be composed in the reflections of the public today. It is no coincidence that at the end of the year, on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, we will open an exhibition of Michelangelo Pistoletto, protagonist of Arte Povera. With his concept of the Terzo Paradiso (where opposites coexist with their synthesis), the artist imagines a trinamic society and a regenerated world. To share this vision, the commitment of our Education Department will be important. The formation and dissemination of knowledge of contemporary art and culture will be expressed both at the Museum through countless activities for the public, for teachers, for families and for schools and in the areas outside the museum.”
Until 2 July 2023 the exhibition Olafur Eliasson: Orizzonti tremanti / Trembling horizons which was inaugurated in late 2022 continues in the spaces of the Manica Lunga. For the exhibition, the artist has specially conceived a series of site-specific immersive and sensorial works of art on the theme of visual perception and ecological thinking that invite the active participation of viewers.
Among the exhibition highlights of 2023, the large exhibition Artists in a Time of War opens to the public on 15 March. The exhibition features historical works and new projects by important contemporary artists such as the Ukrainian Nikita Kadan and the Afghan Rahraw Omarzad, artists who live in conditions characterized by war and who are therefore particularly sensitive to the role that art can play for peace. Among the historical works, an important nucleus of paintings by the Slovenian artist Zoran Mušič, interned in Dachau in 1945, is worth mentioning. In addition to a large number of works from the series We Are Not the Last, 1970-1976, the very first drawings of the artist made in the Dachau camp and never exhibited before will be on display.
In spring the Museum will also launch the project by the Sicilian-born, Turin-based artist Renato Leotta: LITTLE CONCERT for The Sea,which has its roots in the observation of the ecosystem of the Mediterranean seabed and which was previewed at the 17th Istanbul Biennial in 2022.
Castello di Rivoli, which houses the most important public collection of Arte Povera works in the world, periodically dedicates focus projects to its artists. In autumn 2023, to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of Michelangelo Pistoletto and in conjunction with the Turin Art Week, the Museum will present an important solo exhibition of this key Arte Povera artist whose work helped to redefine the concept of art from the mid-1960s onward. For this exhibition, Pistoletto has conceived a new, large-scale site-specific work of great visual impact which will take over the vast space of the Manica Lunga wing of the castle.
The exhibition activity of the CRRI – Castello di Rivoli Research Institute will launch in May 2023 with the exhibition dedicated to Paolo Pellion di Persano, one of the most important contemporary Italian photographers, who worked in close collaboration with artists, especially those of Arte Povera. Pellion di Persano documented the exhibition activity of Castello di Rivoli from its inaugural exhibition Ouverture (1984) until 2012.
Subsequently, in the spring, the CRRI will present an exhibition dedicated to Arte Povera artist Giuseppe Penone which presents the donation of 219 works on paper and precious archival materials which took place in 2021, as well as an exhibition version of Svolgere la propria pelle – finestra (To unroll one’s skin – window), 1970-2019. The donation to Castello di Rivoli, the only Italian museum to receive such an important gift, integrates and completes those made by Penone in June 2020 to two of the most important international museums: the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
In the autumn, the CRRI will organize an exhibition dedicated to the notebooks and works on paper of Fabio Mauri, an Italian avant-garde artist whose intuition on the relationship between art and ideology after the Second World War led him to consider the “screen” as the main symbolic form of the world, the sign of the consumer culture.
Thanks to the new acquisitions which over the years have constantly contributed to enriching the Museum’s Collection, in particular thanks to Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, and with the aim of showing works that have never previously been exhibited, in autumn 2023 Castello di Rivoli will present a rehang of the Permanent Collection on the first and second floors of the Museum. On this occasion, the new edition of the Permanent Collection catalogue will also be presented.
Among the most important public programs, in the summer of 2023, as part of the multi-year program COMP(H)OST, a performative action by Tabita Rezaire will be presented, as well as the fifth edition of Supercondominio. This annual assembly of new spaces for art in Italy will feature a program of live music and special digital projects specifically conceived for spaces of Castello di Rivoli and online.
Amongst the collateral exhibition activities in locations outside the Museum, on 24 January 2023 the new installation Of Grounds, Guts and Stones, 2022-2023, by Otobong Nkanga, will be presented in Pollenzo – Bra (Cuneo). This work is being created with the scientific collaboration of the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo and Slow Food, a few kilometers from the center of Bra, nearby Cuneo. This work concludes the A CIELO APERTO program, works commissioned by the Fondazione CRC on the thirtieth anniversary of its activity.
The programs of the DIGITAL COSMOS will also continue in 2023 with the presentation of new works created specifically for the Castello di Rivoli new website which, also by virtue of the technological upgrade of the Museum, supported by the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, will include a new archive the works in the Collection.
Finally, the programs of the Cerruti Collection will also continue in 2023 with the rotating exhibition of important works in the galleries of the Museum and with numerous conferences and thematic visits to Villa Cerruti. On 18 December 2023, the approach of the end-of-year festivities will be accompanied by the exhibition Stars, celestial spheres, cosmogonies. Works from the Cerruti Collection which explores how artists from the 16th century to today have been influenced by the planets, astronomical theories and, more generally, ideas about time and space. The exhibition presents a selection of precious atlases from the Cerruti Collection dated between the 16th and 18th centuries together with works ranging from the 16th century up o the 2000s.
Exhibition Program 2023
Temporary exhibitions
Olafur Eliasson: Orizzonti tremanti / Trembling horizons
Curated by Marcella Beccaria
Until 2 July 2023
Manica Lunga
Until 2 July 2023, the public can visit the exhibition Olafur Eliasson: Orizzonti tremanti / Trembling horizons curated by Marcella Beccaria, installed in the Museum’s Manica Lunga. The exhibition presents a new series of six immersive works of art inspired by optical devices and the movement of fluid forms. The exhibition itinerary opens with Navigation star for utopia, 2022, a suspended luminous work that welcomes visitors, followed by the series of works Your curious kaleidorama, Your power kaleidorama, Your self-reflective kaleidorama, Your hesitant kaleidorama, Your memory of the kaleidorama and Your living kaleidorama. On the mezzanine of the Manica Lunga, a room for which it was originally designed by the artist, the installation Your circumspection disclosed, 1999, is on display. During this exhibition, Eliasson’s work The sun has no money, 2008, will be rearranged in the 18th-century vaulted hall for which it was originally designed by Eliasson.
Artists in a Time of War. From Francisco Goya to Rahraw Omarzad and Nikita Kadan
Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio
15 March – 19 November 2023
Castello, third floor
The exhibition activity of the Museum will start on the third floor of the Castello on 15 March 2023 with the major exhibition curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio Artists in a Time of War, the new and final chapter of the multi-year project of exhibitions and research Espressioni which characterized the Museum’s activities from 2020 to 2023. Artists in a Time of War focuses on the theme of war and post-traumatic subjectivity, featuring the the practices of Rahraw Omarzad (Kabul, 1964), artist and reference figure of the Afghan cultural scene, and Nikita Kadan (Kiev, 1982) artist and Ukrainian curator living between Kiev and Bucha. Both artists offer a message of great emotional, social and political impact. Originating from scenarios of conflict and profound geopolitical changes, their practices invite us to reflect on the importance of finding new and potential languages and narratives of care in creative expression. On the occasion of the exhibition Rahraw Omarzad will present the installation Every Tiger Needs a Horse, 2022-2023, an environment born from the explosion of paint in a military base in Piedmont which deals with the regenerative and therapeutic power of art, and the video New Scenario, 2022, made during the months of the artist’s residence at Castello di Rivoli and filmed inside an air-raid shelter in Turin built in 1943, which proposes a reflection on the circularity of human destiny and on the difficulties of liberation from the logic of trauma, wound and conflict. Omarzad’s works arise from the artist’s reflection on his country, Afghanistan, the scene of explosions and deaths and where the Taliban government has recently returned to take office after twenty years. The exhibition will also include the installation The Shelter II, 2023, by Nikita Kadan which is prefigured as the natural continuation of a work created by the artist in 2015 for the 14th Istanbul Biennial. Composed of a structure with the shape and dimensions of a particular air-raid shelter, the monumental installation created for Istanbul lingered on the vital power of nature and culture to survive destruction and to emerge from the rubble; by contrast, in the new installation conceived for the spaces of the Museum, Kadan expresses the drama and pain of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Alongside these new productions, the exhibition includes the film by Michael Rakowitz (Long Island, New York, 1973) The Ballad of Special Ops Cody, 2017, part of the Castello di Rivoli Collections, and a nucleus of ancient works of art, the result of the exchange project between the Castello di Rivoli and the Royal Museums of Turin, curated agreed between Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Enrica Pagella, Directors of the two institutions. This section will include a selection of works of ancient art from the 1st to the 3rd century AD that portray bodies reduced to portions or so This section will create a dialogue with the new installations by Rahraw Omarzad and Nikita Kadan. Among the historic works displayed in the exhibition, we note an important nucleus of paintings by the Slovenian artist Zoran Mušič (Boccavizza, 1909 – Venice, 2005) who was interned in Dachau in 1945. In addition to a large number of works from the series We Are Not the Last, 1970-1976, will be on display the very first drawings by the artist made in the Dachau camp and never exhibited before.
Renato Leotta. LITTLE CONCERT for The Sea
Curated Marcella Beccaria
March – December 2023
Castello, second floor, North tower
The Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea presents LITTLE CONCERT for The Sea by Renato Leotta (Turin, 1982). Winner of the Italian Council Edition X, an international tender promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture in support of contemporary Italian creativity, the project LITTLE CONCERT for The Sea has its roots in the observation of the ecosystem of the Mediterranean seabed. Proposing a possible form of interspecies communication, the work attempts to translate the internal structure of the leaves of the common seagrass Posidonia Oceanica (known as the lungs of the Mediterranean” because it is one of the most important sources of oxygen provided to coastal waters) into a musical score that can be performed as a concert audible to the human ear. Bringing attention to the vital importance of an ecosystem in danger, LITTLE CONCERT for The Sea serves as an invitation to listen to the stories of migration, adaptation, encounters and struggles for survival of Posidonia through time, from a distant past to an uncertain future. The work was first shown in September 2022 at the Istanbul Biennial, where it was installed in the Çinili Hammam, an Ottoman building dating back to the 16th century. At Castello di Rivoli, the sound installation will be presented for the first time in dialogue with a series of photographs, unique works that the artist creates with experimental techniques.
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio
31 October 2023 – February 2024
Manica Lunga
In autumn, in conjunction with Turin Art Week and the thirtieth edition of Artissima, the Castello di Rivoli will present a major exhibition dedicated to Michelangelo Pistoletto curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio. Set up in the spaces of the Manica Lunga, the exhibition created in close collaboration with the artist on the occasion of his 90th birthday, includes a new, large-scale, site-specific work and offers an unprecedented journey through the art of Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, 1933), an important Italian artist, who has redefined the concept of art since the mid-1960s. Pistoletto’s art is open to dialogue and exchange. Since the first half of the 1950s, the artist has questioned himself about the nature of personal identity and embarked on the path of the self-portrait as an emblematic expression of his thought. In 1961 he painted the first mirror painting Il presente (The present) in which his life-size self-portrait stands out against a black background obtained with very glossy acrylic paint which makes it reflective. The real protagonist is the instantaneous relationship that is created between the viewer and his reflection on the canvas. This work opens up to life as an exchange of relationships and perspectives, it penetrates the world and lets itself be penetrated by it, determining a new space-time dimension. Overcoming the borders marked by the pictorial dimension represents for Pistoletto the opening to a landscape that overlooks the contemporaneity of existence. In the 1980s Pistoletto began to explore sculpture, which enabled him to further develop that relationship between past and present, that dialogue between memory and reality which, like a common thread, characterizes all his work.
CRRI temporary exhibitions
Paolo Pellion di Persano
Curated by Andrea Viliani
25 May – November 2023
Castello, Gallery 18
The exhibition program of the CRRI – Castello di Rivoli Research Institute – will launch in May with the exhibition curated by Andrea Viliani dedicated to Paolo Pellion di Persano. As part of the widespread photography exhibitions organized by the city of Turin and many local institutions, Castello di Rivoli is organizing an exhibition dedicated to Paolo Pellion di Persano (Castagneto Po, Turin, 1947-2017) which will include photographic works and documentary material. One of the most important contemporary Italian photographers, who worked in close collaboration with artists, especially those of Arte Povera, Pellion is connected to the history of the Castello di Rivoli, whose exhibition activity he documented from the inaugural exhibition Ouverture (1984) until 2012. This set of photographs is part of the digitization program of documentary materials conserved at the CRRI. In the context of the donation of the archive of Paolo Pellion di Persano, the museum has also acquired a nucleus of his photographic works. The exhibition will examine the photographer’s professional activity, starting from the 1970s, focussing on his interest in travel and social issues of the period, as well as his approach to Arte Povera both through his portraits of artists and his collaborations with them and with their galleries; it will then continue with his fashion photography and link with the director Carlo Quartucci, in addition to his lasting and fundamental experience at Castello di Rivoli. With the intention of creating a unified portrait of Pellion, a part of the exhibition itinerary will be closely linked to his personal biography, with the reconstruction of his work environment and the darkroom.
Giuseppe Penone
Curated by Filippo Bosco
In collaboration with CRRI – Castello di Rivoli Research Institute
Spring – Summer 2023
Castello, second floor and CRRI – Castello di Rivoli Research Institute
In spring, the CRRI exhibition program will stage an exhibition dedicated to Giuseppe Penone (Garessio, 1947) curated by Filippo Bosco. The donation by Penone of over 200 archival materials by Giuseppe Penone relating to all his permanent works located in the Piedmont region starting from Alpi Marittime (1968), constitutes the starting point for an exhibition dedicated to them, which will also be accompanied by the first scholarly publication on all the artist’s permanent works. The archival materials conserved at the CRRI include drawings related to his creative process, preparatory sketches, design renderings, working notes and installation photographs, all relating to the following works: a series of unpublished photographs documenting the actions of Alpi Marittime and sketches, drawings, plans relating to the two works created by Castello di Rivoli for the Park of the Reggia di Venaria Garden of Fluid Sculptures and Anafora (the latter work documented in its two versions, 2016-2019); relating to the project for the Turin railway link Albero Giardino; and to the work In limine located at the entrance of the GAM – Galleria Civiva d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin. In the museum’s Manica Lunga, the Library has a permenant installation of the exhibition version of the work Svolgere la propria pelle – finestra (Unroll One’s Own Skin – Window), 1970, donated by the artist, consisting of an artist book and UV printing plates on glass mounted on a horizontal metal support.
Fabio Mauri’s notebooks
Curated by Marianna Vecellio
In collaboration with Studio Fabio Mauri
December 2023 – February 2024
Castello, third floor
Growing up in an Italy marked by the Second World War and fascism, Fabio Mauri (Rome, 1926-2009), who lived in intellectual circles in dialogue with authors including Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Pier Paolo Pasolini, has an intuition: the screen has become the main “symbolic form” in the world, the sign of the new media civilization. In 1957, with the Schermi series, he began to analyze the way in which cinema and television become part of everyday life, modifying the experience of memory and the idea of fiction. The exhibition focuses on a large selection of the artist’s notebooks.
Stars, celestial spheres, cosmogonies. Works from the Cerruti Collection
Curated by Fabio Cafagna with the collaboration of Laura Cantone
Installation curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
In collaboration with Fondazione Cerruti
18 December 2023 – January 2024
Castello, Gallery 18
On 18 December 2023, the approach of the end-of-year festivities will be accompanied by the suggestions of the exhibition Stars, celestial spheres, cosmogonies. Works from the Cerruti Collection curated by Fabio Cafagna with the collaboration of Laura Cantone, who present a selection of works from the Cerruti Collection. The central nucleus of the exhibition is made up of the precious atlases, dated between the 16th and 18th centuries, which Francesco Federico Cerruti, a passionate bibliophile and attentive collector of ancient and modern books, as well as paintings, sculptures, furnishings, carpets and decorative arts, acquired over the years: from Ptolemy’s Geographicae enarrationis (1535) to Matteus Seutter’s Atlas Novus (1735), through Abraham Ortelius’ Teatrum Orbis Terrarum (1601) and Willem and Joan Blaeu’s Grooten Atlas (1642-1665). The spectacular tables of the celestial hemispheres contained in the Harmonia macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius (1661) are joined by: the first annotated edition of the Divine Comedy, edited by Cristoforo Berardi of Pesaro (1477); the famous Liber chronicarum, known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, by the physician and humanist Hartmann Schedel, a universal history illustrated by over 1,800 woodcuts (1493); the 13 volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu (1919-1927) by Marcel Proust with the 1951 binding signed by Paul Bonet; Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire with lithographs by Giorgio de Chirico (1930) and Les jours et les nuits by Francis Carco (1946) with binding by Lucie Weill. Alongside the books, the exhibition presents are exhibited works from the sixteenth century to today and which explore how artists through the ages have been influenced by planets, astronomical discoveries and, more generally, forms of time.
Off-site temporary exhibitions
Otobong Nkanga. Of Grounds, Guts and Stones, 2022-2023
Part of A CIELO APERTO: Four contemporary artworks and new commissions to celebrate the 30thanniversary of Fondazione CRC
Launch: 24 January 2023
Parco dell’Agenzia di Pollenzo, Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, Pollenzo – Bra (Cuneo)
For its fourth and final work, on 24 January 2023 the A CIELO APERTO project will launch the new installation Of Grounds, Guts and Stones, 2022-2023, by Otobong Nkanga,a collaboration between Castello di Rivoli, the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo and Slow Food, a few kilometers from the center of Bra. For the project, Otobong Nkanga (Kano, Nigeria, 1974) created a series of sculptures composing a sequence of seats and planters carved in stone, inside which she has placed local and seasonal aromatic plants, and connected to each other by metal pipes. Nkanga’s work addresses urgent issues related to sustainability, the climate crisis and the exploitation of resources and her aim is to restore the correct value to food in respect of those who produce it, in harmony with the environment and ecosystems, preserving traditional local the knowledge.