Exhibition Program 2018

Metamorphoses – Let Everything Happen to You

Curated by Chus Martínez

5 March – 24 June 2018

The Metamorphoses exhibition in the Manica Lunga explores the concept of transformation in art through the works of emerging international artists, including Nicanor Aráoz (Buenos Aires, 1980), Ingela Ihrman (Strängnäs, 1985), Eduardo Navarro (Buenos Aires, 1979), Reto Pulfer (Bern, 1981), Mathilde Rosier (Paris, 1973), Lin May Saaed (Würzburg, 1973) and Ania Soliman (Warsaw, 1970).

These seven brand new projects feature alongside the works I Have Left You The Mountain by Simon Battisti, Leah Whitman-Salkin and Åbäke, displayed in the Albanian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016, and the video Army of Love by Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann commissioned by the 9th Berlin Biennale in 2016.

“Metamorphoses represents the exercise of thinking of life with imagination, free from hierarchies and restrictions. Drawings, flowers, an army of love, a cloud of magical fabrics, songs, voices, loaves of bread like beads, upside-down dancers on canvases, Babylonian-style bas-reliefs in polyester … Works that elude the constraints of form and definition. Metamorphoses exposes us to the unforeseeable, the material of life itself, of its inexplicable beauty and its mysterious energy as revealed in a raindrop on a leaf of an ancient fossil tree.” (Chus Martínez)

 

Giorgio de Chirico. Major Works from the Collection of Francesco Federico Cerruti

Drafted by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marcella Beccaria

With the support of Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti per l’Arte and BIG – Broker Insurance Group

5 March – 27 May 2018

International Symposium: 6 March 2018  

Castello di Rivoli is presenting an important group of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings from the Francesco Federico Cerruti Collection for the very first time. The exhibition will feature eight early paintings by the Metaphysical artist, which until now have remained hidden in Villa Cerruti in Rivoli, the home built by the Turin industrialist in the 1960s exclusively to house his private collection.

In keeping with the spirit that characterizes the Cerruti Collection and its encyclopaedic vision, which ranges from medieval paintings with gold leaf backgrounds to contemporary art, the exhibition at Castello di Rivoli proposes a brand new journey through time, establishing a link between the works of de Chirico and key pieces of contemporary art in the museum’s permanent collection. “The exhibition narrative,” writes Marcella Beccaria, “presents visitors with a dizzying thematic blend of similarities, references and contradictions, but also surprising links, which cast new light on the meaning of de Chirico’s art and on his rich cultural heritage.”

Set within the baroque castle, where the past continuously renews its encounter with the present, the exhibition comprises a series of dialogs between paintings by de Chirico and the works of contemporary artists such as Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Maurizio Cattelan. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev states: “In de Chirico, the rediscovery of classical mythology does not unfold as it did in the Renaissance in order to reconstruct a story of the past, but instead to escape history, the same history that has led us from the Renaissance to that dangerous and uncontrollable modern acceleration that has continued right up to the present day. De Chirico is Nietzschean, anti-modern and against historicism. By renewing the concept of circular time, the artist looks back to mythology and the pervasiveness of the concept of metamorphosis that characterizes it.”

With a view to the forthcoming opening of the Cerruti Collection in early 2019, Castello di Rivoli is organizing the international conference, The House as Museum, The Museum as House: The Making of Great Collections a day-long symposium on 6 March 2018, exploring the theme of house museums and single owner collections, which will involve a number of leading national and international figures from this sector. It will examine the relationship between art and contemporary society, between personal and public, in places that originally housed private collections, such as: The J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., the Judd Foundation in Marfa and New York, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, the Jacquemart-André Museum in Paris, the Villa Borghese in Rome, the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli in Turin and the Villa e Collezione Panza in Varese.

 

Nalini Malani

Curated by Marcella Beccaria

In partnership with the Centre Georges Pompidou

17 September – 6 January  2019

A pioneer of video art, installation and painting in India since 1980s, Nalini Malani (Karachi, 1946) explores the theme of femininity, time and life cycles, from political and emancipatory perspectives through drawing, painting and other experimental forms. Deliberately theatrical and based on archetypes from different cultures, her works involve the observer in dynamic and multisensory environments. The exhibition includes some of the most important installations created by the artist over recent years, including The Tables Have Turned, 2008 and In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012, as well as a number of brand new works, in which the artist continues her analysis of time and the impossibility of inverting its incessant progress. The exhibition and catalog are developed as part of an international partnership with the Centre Georges Pompidou.

 

 

Hito Steyerl

Drafted by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio

31 October 2018 – 30 June 2019

Hito Steyerl focuses on the role of media, technology and the circulation of images in the era of digital nativism. The artist creates installations in which film production is associated with the construction of architectural environments.

For her exhibition at Castello di Rivoli, she premieres The City of Broken Windows (2018), stemming from research into the practices of Artificial Intelligence industries, surveillance technologies and the contradictory roles Museums often play today. The City of Broken Windows revolves around neural sound recordings that, like an atonal and discordant symphony, document the process of teaching artificial intelligence how to recognize the sound of breaking windows, a practice that symbolizes social disruption. Steyerl explores how AI affects our urban environment and how alternative practices may emerge through pictorial acts in the public space. Chris Toepfer, protagonist of the new work, will board up Castello di Rivoli with trompe l’oeil window paintings. Steyerl’s new project offers an intriguing perspective on how the digital contemporary imagination shapes our emotions and experience of reality.
Screens, windows, liquid and non-liquid crystals all tie together in this first new installation since Hell Yeah We Fuck Die in 2016 looked at Robot performativity and precariousness.

 

 

Cally Spooner. illy Present Future Prize 2017 Exhibition

Curated by Marianna Vecellio

2 November 2018 – February 2019

On the occasion of the annual illy Prize and alongside Artissima 2018, Castello di Rivoli presents the winner of the illy Present Future Prize 2017, Cally Spooner (London, 1983). Awarded by an international panel, the prize is given to an artist from the Present Future section of the show, dedicated to emerging research.

The performances and the investigations undertaken by the artist through the use of different languages reveal the absurd repetitions of political, economic and media rhetoric today and analyze the influence of invisible violence in the digital era. The artist draws upon her background in philosophy and uses texts, sounds and choreography to explore how our subjectivity and our own bodies are the object of continuous changes dictated by our technological condition. In the Castello di Rivoli Project room, Spooner will present a new work created specifically for this museum space.