Poet and magnetic performer, John Giorno (New York, 1936–New York, 2019) transformed the spoken and written word into an art form. From February 5 to May 3, 2026, MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, part of the Civic Museums Department of the Municipality of Bologna, dedicates John Giorno: The Performative Word to him. Curated by Lorenzo Balbi, the exhibition is the first major institutional retrospective devoted to Giorno, staged in the Sala delle Ciminiere, and celebrates one of the most radical and visionary protagonists of contemporary culture.

A key figure in avant-garde New York, poet, artist, and activist John Giorno broke down disciplinary boundaries, turning poetry into a living body, a gesture capable of inhabiting unexpected places. His friendships and collaborations with some of the most significant figures of those years—including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, William Burroughs, John Cage, and Patti Smith—and the founding, in 1965, of Giorno Poetry Systems, the non-profit platform that revolutionized the circulation of poetry by intertwining it with music, visual arts, political engagement, and community practices, testify to Giorno’s essential impact on the history of art.

The exhibition retraces John Giorno’s multifaceted practice through several groups of works, showing how the artist enhanced poetic language in its plastic, relational, and performative dimensions, pushing the word beyond itself into the realm of the visual arts and telecommunications networks. Much of his artistic production reuses excerpts from his poems, replicated across different supports, with the use of carefully selected colors and an iconic font created specifically for the artist by Mark Michaelson.

At the heart of the exhibition is Dial-A-Poem, the iconic interactive work through which the artist made available to the public, via a telephone number to dial, recordings of the voices of poets, artists, musicians, and activists reading their own compositions. The pioneering project, which transformed the telephone into a tool for the large-scale dissemination of poetry, was originally produced in 1969 and subsequently presented in 1970 in the exhibition Information at MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work became an emblematic example of participatory conceptual art, expanding over the years to include 282 recordings by 132 authors, among them Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka, and generating international editions in several countries, such as Dial-A-Poem France, Dial-A-Poem Mexico, Dial-A-Poem Brazil, Dial-A-Poem Thailand, and Dial-A-Poem Switzerland.

On the occasion of John Giorno: The Performative Word, an Italian version of the work has been created specifically for MAMbo: Dial-A-Poem Italy. The project involved more than thirty contemporary Italian poets, selected by Caterina Molteni, curator at the museum, who lent their voices to the sound project that leads the public into the pulsating heart of Giorno’s vision. Among them are Antonella Anedda, Domenico Brancale, Milo De Angelis, Valerio Magrelli, and Patrizia Valduga. As in the historic work, listening remains unpredictable in its Italian version as well: a call, an unexpected voice, a poetic fragment that transforms the experience into a private performance. A new telephone number, +39 051 0304278, is active for the duration of the exhibition and can be reached free of charge twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, by anyone.

Within the exhibition, a section dedicated to archival materials is curated by Nicola Ricciardi with the collaboration of Eleonora Molignani, and features an exhibition design by EX. (Andrea Cassi, Serena Giardina, Michele Versaci).

Caveau at Gallerie d’Italia, Milano

Curated by Nicola Ricciardi

In the 1960s, between New York and Rome, two seemingly distant practices—painting and jazz—shared a common urgency: to refound language from within, without destroying it. This was not a matter of wiping history clean, but of shifting its weights, reducing its assumptions, making visible the conditions of making, and finding in repetition the exact point at which form ceases to be formula and becomes research once again. It is within this field of forces that the project Standard / Variations relates the work of Robert Ryman (1930–2019) and Mario Schifano (1934–1998), taking the evolution of modal jazz—and in particular the turning point represented by Miles Davis (1926–1991)—as both a key for listening and an operative model.

Modal jazz emerged when traditional harmonic progression—the chain of chords guiding improvisation—became rarefied, leaving space for one or two stable modes: an essential structure that does not prescribe, but enables. In Kind of Blue, the seminal 1959 album often considered the first modal album in jazz history, as well as in contemporaneous explorations, Davis inaugurated an idea of freedom that did not coincide with excess, but rather with breath. Here, micro-variation, intensity distributed over time, attention to timbre and to the quality of attack ask the listener to draw closer, to accept that “almost nothing” can be “a great deal.”

Although today they are considered as belonging to very different critical contexts—Schifano close to Pop Art and European post-Informel, Ryman to American Minimalism—their painting, in those same years, was carrying out an analogous transformation. For both artists, the study and application of monochromy was neither an endpoint nor a gesture of neutralization, but rather the choice of a reduced grammar through which minimal differences, surface decisions, and margins of possibility could become legible. In both cases, the painting was reconfigured as a temporal field, where what matters is not what it represented, but how it happened.

For Ryman, the choice of white—already stabilized by the end of the 1950s—was a device of concentration, allowing him to bring the constitutive elements of painting to the foreground: support, grain, thickness, density, the layering of applications, and the physical relationship with the wall. The painting is not a window, but an object: for him, “the image is the color, the process, the brush, the way the painting is made.” This principle is particularly legible in the three works from the Luigi and Peppino Agrati Collection, displayed in the vault of Gallerie d’Italia in Milan, all three titled Untitled (1961, 1962, 1963). Linen canvases not tamed by traditional preparation; edges that allow the raw canvas to emerge; differences between compact and rarefied applications; minimal chromatic insertions—a chalky blue, an orange, or a gray that appear as accents. Each painting is a variation on a set of almost constant conditions, like a modal chorus traversed by infinitesimal changes in phrasing.

Schifano, in a different context and with a more exposed intensity, made a related move: after an Informel phase still perceptible at the end of the 1950s, around 1960 he arrived at monochrome painting—or painting reduced to two colors—often in enamel on mounted paper, with drips and marks that do not erase manual execution, but place it in tension with the idea of the “screen.” In works such as Propaganda (1960)—which symbolically opens the route through the vault—the surface seems to construct a virtual frame with rounded corners. It is a rectangle within a rectangle that evokes cinema, television, and the slide. It is not yet Pop in the fully iconographic sense, but an earlier reflection on the technical and public conditions of the image, on the way painting might once again measure itself against the outside world without falling back into traditional representation.

The years 1961–1963—also represented in the exhibition by Untitled (1961) and by works on paper in which the palette is reduced to black and white with minimal chromatic additions—show Schifano pushing painting toward a productive tautology: titles and inscriptions, such as Enamel on Paper, that name the technique and, in doing so, shift meaning beyond the visual limits of the work. In Le cose che appartengono a tutti (The Things That Belong to Everyone, 1963), fragments of signage and almost indecipherable words—up to the re-emergence of “Coca Cola”—function as samples. They are not yet pop icons to be consumed, but clues to a collective, impure, continuously rewritten language. Here the relationship with modal jazz becomes precise: Davis, too, works on common material—the standard—in order to produce shifts in perception; Schifano, in his own way, works on public alphabets and screen-surfaces so that painting can absorb the rhythm of the present without illustrating it.

The vault of Gallerie d’Italia thus becomes a close listening chamber, an environment in which reduction is not austerity, but sensitization. On the one hand, Ryman refines painting as a practice of attention: a discipline of the how—“it is never a question of what to paint, but only of how to paint.” On the other, Schifano transforms the surface into a montage device: from monochromes and technical tautologies, within a few years, he moves toward shifts into landscape and writing, arriving at works such as Paesaggio anemico (Anemic Landscape, 1965) or Il vento era il fiato che usciva dagli alberi, composto e salubre (The Wind Was the Breath Coming Out of the Trees, Composed and Healthy, 1965), where the natural datum is mediated and broken down into analytical, almost semiotic fragments, between description and schematism.

This first section of the exhibition project then enters into dialogue, in the Manzoni Room located on the floor above the vault, with a point of maximum intensity and clarity: Robert Ryman’s monumental Surface Veil IV, also from the Luigi and Peppino Agrati Collection. Immersed in such a museum and institutional context, the work makes it even more evident that painting is not simply a genre or an image, but a spatial and material fact, almost spiritual, in a relationship among light, physicality, gesture, and viewing time that makes the experience not unlike that of listening to live jazz.

Finally, just as jazz by its very nature tends to diverge from predetermined tracks, this exhibition also moves beyond its own museum standard to enter another context. The exhibition continues inside miart, the international modern and contemporary art fair organized by Fiera Milano, and specifically in the Intesa Sanpaolo Group lounge area, where two pure monochromes are presented: Mario Schifano’s red Analogo (1961) and Robert Ryman’s white Winsor 20 (1966). If the vault focuses on research as laboratory, here a dialogue is activated in keeping with the curatorial theme of the fair’s thirtieth edition, New Directions, which takes jazz not as a conceptual decoration but as a paradigm: stimulating controlled improvisations within a shared structure, preserving the intelligibility of the fair-form while at the same time preventing it from stiffening into formula.

After all, in the history of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, few artistic practices have embodied the idea of modernity as precisely as jazz: a form capable of transforming tradition into a laboratory, of making rule a premise and deviation a method. In this tension—between structure and risk, between repertoire and invention—we can also recognize a fertile matrix for contemporary art, still grappling with the same question after more than sixty years: how to innovate without severing the conditions of intelligibility; how to push a language beyond its own standards without dissolving it. In this sense, the relationship among Ryman, Schifano, and Miles Davis is not a game of analogies, but a proposed reading.

There is, finally, a biographical detail worth mentioning, one that turns the parallel into a real contiguity: Ryman arrived in New York in 1952 with the ambition of becoming a jazz saxophonist, later bringing into painting that form of “structured improvisation,” made of calibrated variations and measured gestures. For Schifano too, who often conceived the painterly gesture as a visual action in dialogue with sound, an interest in music was anything but marginal, as demonstrated by the band he founded in the second half of the 1960s—Le Stelle di Mario Schifano—and by his frequent collaborations with the Italian experimental scene, beginning with Stormy Six.

Taken as a whole, this project asks us to recognize that modernity does not coincide with novelty at any cost, but with the ability to transform the rule into a field of experimentation. In the rooms of Gallerie d’Italia in Milan, as well as in the space inside miart, the canvases of Ryman and Schifano celebrate the standard not as a cage, but as a threshold. This is the fixed point of Standard / Variations, and the aspect that makes it timely: in today’s art ecosystem, traversed by constant economic, technological, and generational transformations, the works of these artists remind us that the spark of innovation can often be found by working not “against” structure, but “within” it—transforming a language from the inside and turning limitation into a resource.

Rauschenberg & Novecento

Curated by Gianfranco Maraniello & Nicola Ricciardi with Viviana Bertanzetti

On the centenary of Robert Rauschenberg’s birth (Port Arthur, 1925 – Captiva Island, 2008), the Museo del Novecento pays tribute to one of the most innovative and influential artists of the 20th century, forging a bridge between his works and some of the most significant masterpieces housed in the museum’s collections.

A pivotal figure in the transition from modern to contemporary art, Rauschenberg saw every work as the result of encounters, discoveries, and fragments of the world reassembled into a new order. This very approach guides the narrative of the exhibition, which unfolds across multiple galleries, weaving an unprecedented dialogue between Rauschenberg’s relentless drive for experimentation and the artistic movements that shaped Italy’s 20th century, from Futurism to Arte Povera.

Through overlapping visions, materials, and artistic intentions, Rauschenberg’s works engage directly with the museum’s collections, creating resonances, formal affinities, and thematic connections. The outcome is a journey that mirrors the daring explorations of artists who, like Rauschenberg, invented new languages, challenged materials, and revolutionized the conventions of painting and sculpture.

From his iconic assemblages to the fusion of images and found objects, from mirrored surfaces to the evocative power of the simplest materials, unconventional approaches stand at the core of Rauschenberg’s artistic practice. This innovative spirit infuses every section of the exhibition, recently enriched by a meticulous curatorial reorganization.

Organized on the occasion of the 29th edition of miart, the international fair of modern and contemporary art by Fiera Milano, and with the support of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the exhibition celebrates art as a space for connection and dialogue. It invites visitors to rediscover the 20th century–and the museum itself–through the same fierce curiosity that has always defined the American artist.

Link to exhibition page: https://www2.comune.milano.it/web/museo-del-900/-/rauschenberg-e-il-novecento

“John Giorno: a labour of LOVE” is the first exhibition in Italy dedicated to the wide-ranging and far-reaching archive of the American artist John Giorno (1936-2019). A poet of profound impact and a performer with a commanding stage presence, Giorno has journeyed through sixty years of cultural history — from the Beat Generation to AIDS activism, via Warhol’s Factory and Experiments in Art and Technology — leaving his indisputable mark while elevating spoken word to an art form.

Curated by Nicola Ricciardi and hosted in “Cuore”, the archives and research center of Triennale Milano, the exhibition focuses on Giorno’s numerous collaborations and friendships with some of the most significant figures in art, literature, and music of the 20th century. These include Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Allan Kaprow, Jasper Johns, John Cage, Keith Haring, Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, just to name a few. The emphasis on friendship and cooperation among artists makes “John Giorno: a labour of LOVE” a direct extension of the theme chosen for the 29th edition of miart—the international modern and contemporary art fair organized by Fiera Milano, which — inspired by the title of a Rauschenberg exhibition, “Among Friends” — aims to explore forms of dialogue, support, and virtuous alliances within the art world.

The exhibition features a selection of approximately 100 documents, made accessible by Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS), a non-profit organization founded by the artist in 1965 to  support artists, poets, and musicians,  and that now also oversees the artist’s estate and his vast archives. These documents highlight Giorno’s approach to poetry as a tool for personal exploration and transformation, as well as his commitment to art as a medium of authentic and visceral communication. The selection includes first editions of his poetry books, LPs released on the record label GPS Records, as well as unpublished documents related to the relationship between Giorno, Rauschenberg, and other collaborators.  Included in the display are a variety of posters, private correspondence, contracts, archival video footage, and original flyers related to  public poetry events, GPS’s AIDS Treatment Project, and other happenings in the 1960s and 1970s.

“John Giorno: a labour of LOVE” also includes Dial-A-Poem, Giorno’s iconic interactive artwork where he recorded the voices of poets, artists, and musicians and made them available via telephone. Originally produced in 1968, Dial-A-Poem evolved and expanded to include hundreds of recordings that visitors can hear by picking up the phone.

Lastly, an installation of John Giorno’s paintings, presented on the Grand Staircase of the Triennale, further underscores how the artist liberated poetry from the page, transporting it into the realm of visual art. In a monumental installation, a selection of Giorno’s colorful “Perfect Flowers” paintings are hung on top of a mural of some of the artist’s best-known poetic phrases.

The exhibition design is curated by EX. design studio (Andrea Cassi, Michele Versaci), which has created a display intended to engage both art enthusiasts and casual visitors, with the aim of making “a labour of LOVE” an ever-active, welcoming, and free platform to discover and explore Giorno’s enduring relevance in contemporary discourse.

Link to exhibition page: https://triennale.org/en/events/john-giorno-a-labour-of-love

Opening on the occasion of the twenty-eighth edition of miart, the international modern and contemporary art fair organized by Fiera Milano, Abbandonare il locale is the first major solo exhibition in Italy dedicated to David Horvitz. It takes place inside an abandoned office at BiM – an ambitious urban regeneration project in Milan’s Bicocca district that is transforming an iconic building by Vittorio Gregotti into a cutting-edge work destination – and it’s curated by Nicola Ricciardi, artistic director of miart, who has selected together with Horvitz over 20 works covering almost 20 years of the artists’ career.

Born in Los Angeles, where he lives and works, Horvitz uses a disparity of media – from photography to performance, from artists’ books to sound, from gastronomy to mail art – to examine questions of distance between places, people, and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining or even erasing these distances. His works have been exhibited across the world, from the New Museum in New York City to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and today he’s present in some of the most prestigious collections, from LACMA in Los Angeles to the MoMA in New York City.

The Milan exhibition stems from the desire of giving a tangible form to the expression no time no space, chosen as the theme and title of the 2024 edition of miart to underline the fair’s aspiration to increasingly broaden its geographical and temporal boundaries. Matter of fact, Horvitz’s works try to complicate and subvert our standardized idea of time – as in the case of A clock whose seconds are synchronized with your heartbeat (2020), or Evidence of time travel (2014), for which the artist lived in Europe, regulating his life on the California time zone — and to defuse the concept of borders, opening portals towards new dimensions — as in “For Kiyoko” (2017), in which Horvitz photographs the stars that he imagined his grandmother looked at 75 years earlier from the Japanese internment camp in Colorado where she was forcibly relocated during the Second World War, or in the installation The Distance of a Day (2013), in which the artist exhibits two videos made simultaneously by him and his mother in California and the Maldives, one at sunrise and one at sunset on the same day.

Combining a site-specific approach with a performative attitude and mixing historical works with new productions and found objects, Abbandonare il locale also offers an unconventional take on the ethics and aesthetics of the workplace, filled with alternative imaginaries and possible ways out. Take the plastic bottles of “Imagined Clouds (Milan)” 2024, which can be mistaken for waste abandoned after a day of work, but in the artist’s intention are both a contemplation of water as a commodity in circulation and of geography, imagining the very material physical geographical sources of the liquid. Or “Mood disorder” (2012), a self-portrait based on stock photographs that depict depression and sadness that Horvitz uploaded on the Wikipedia page dedicated to mood disorders (and which, as it is free of copyright, has been reused for years by news sites, blogs and magazines, circulating outside of his control).

Abbandonare il locale is organized by BiM – Bicocca incontra Milano and it is made possible with the generous support of ChertLüdde, Berlin with special thanks to Variant3D. The exhibition lighting is designed by SPECIFIC – a multidisciplinary creative production studio founded by Patrick Tuttofuoco, Nic Bello, Alessandra Pallotta, Andrea Sala, and Stefano D’Amelio – that adapted original office elements. 

Link to exhibition page: https://chertluedde.com/exhibition/abbandonare-il-localecurated-by-nicola-ricciardibim-milano-bicocca-milan12-april-30-june-2024/

Ten years after withdrawing from the art world, from June 10, 2022, GAMeC in Bergamofocuses on Christian Frosi (Milan, 1973) with the solo show La Stanza Vuota, curated by Nicola Ricciardi.

On the occasion of this first anthological exhibition of his work after so many years, GAMeC has brought together over 30 works to display, produced in a little over ten years of activity, describing the sense of transience: a constant element in his artistic production.

The exhibition path includes works that have become iconic, such as the cloud of foam produced for his first solo show in Milan (Foam, 2003) and other lesser known works, all articulated according to principles of precariousness, fleetingness, and evanescence, which also characterized the artist’s early career.

The start of Frosi’s career is easily documentable and coincides with the conclusion of his studies at Brera in 1999, while since 2012, his professional development has been ever less traceable. In that year, although in no precise moment, Christian Frosi ceased to be an artist: he chose not to produce, not to participate, to subtract himself from the history of art, the art scene and its players.

Frosi slowly but surely made himself unreachable, cutting off all communication with the art world, for no obvious reason joining the ranks of the dropouts, of those who, in Alexander Koch’s definition, “at given moment X were locatable in the field of art, and at moment Y, later in time, were no longer so.”

Frosi’s moment X coincides with numerous solo exhibitions both in Italy and abroad and with his participation in some of the collective exhibitions that have come to define the Italian artists of his generation: from the first Turin Triennial, curated by Francesco Bonami and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2005), to Sindrome Italiana, la jeune création artistique italienne at the Magasin – Centre National d’Art contemporain in Grenoble (2010), to Fuoriclasse, the exhibition at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan curated by Luca Cerizza and dedicated to the students of Alberto Garutti. His moment Y, however, coincides with the present day.

The decision to focus on Frosi after almost ten years of silence and inaccessibility, stems first of all from the need to remember, protect and preserve his work so that we can continue to observe, contextualize, and perhaps better understand the artist. The second reason lies in the will to interpret his invisibility in the light of an artistic and social present in which one is called upon to always be there, in which silence is an increasingly impervious and rare choice.

Observing these practices helps us to understand the countless nuances that disappearance and emptiness may take on in art, which in the case of Christian Frosi find compensation in his enigmatic and transient production, capable of dominating the Italian scene for ten years and which is now presented at GAMeC.

La Stanza Vuota is accompanied by a publication, published by Lenz Press and GAMeC, bringing together the work of Cristian Frosi with the human and artistic vicissitudes of other famous dropouts over the last 50 years: from Marcel Duchamp to Agnes Martin, and from Lee Lozano to Charlotte Posenenske.

Link to exhibition page: https://www.gamec.it/en/christian-frosi-la-stanza-vuota/

A group exhibition reflecting on the transformation of labor in the post-industrial and digital era, between awareness and disillusion, precariousness and empowerment, curated by Samuele Piazza and  Nicola Ricciardi.

At OGR Torino – which embodies the transition towards new models of productivity – the installations, sculptures, videos and performances of thirteen international artists invite the audience to observe the remains of a recent industrial past and the ambivalence of today’s working conditions.

Fifty years after the publication of Vogliamo tutto – a novel by Nanni Balestrini about the struggles of the working class in 1969 Turin – does it still make sense to want it all?

The exhibition includes works by: Andrea Bowers, Pablo Bronstein, Claire Fontaine, Tyler Coburn, Jeremy Deller, Kevin Jerome Everson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Elisa Giardina Papa, Liz Magic Laser, Adam Linder, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Mike Nelson, and Charlotte Posenenske.

Adam Linder’s performances take place in OGR Torino’s Duomo, from 2 to 8 PM, according to the following schedule:

25-26 September 2021 |Choreographic Service No. 1: Some Cleaning (2013)
2-3 October 2021 | Choreographic Service No. 1: Some Cleaning (2013) + Choreographic Service No. 5: Dare to Keep Kids Off Naturalism (2017)
30-31 October 2021 |Choreographic Service No. 1: Some Cleaning (2013)
5-7 November 2021 | Choreographic Service No. 1: Some Cleaning (2013) + Choreographic Service No. 5: Dare to Keep Kids Off Naturalism (2017)
15-16 January 2022 | Choreographic Service No. 1: Some Cleaning (2013)

Choreographic Service No. 1: Some Cleaning – performer: Delphine Gaborit

Choreographic Service No. 5: Dare to Keep Kids Off Naturalism – performers: Leah Katz, Justin F. Kennedy, Robert Malmborg, Noha Ramadan, Stephen Thompson
Sound: Steffen Martin
Costume design: Adam Linder with Natalia Gattini
Artistic Assistance: Cooper Jacoby, Anna von Glasenapp
Management: Andrea Niederbuchner

Choreographic Service No. 5: Dare to Keep Kids Off Naturalism (2017) is a commission of Kunsthalle Basel, co-produced by Kunsthalle Basel  and South London Gallery.

]]> https://www.nicolaricciardi.com/vogliamo-tutto-an-exhibition-about-labor/feed/ 0 https://www.nicolaricciardi.com/nina-canell-hardscapes/ https://www.nicolaricciardi.com/nina-canell-hardscapes/#comments Fri, 22 May 2026 08:49:21 +0000 http://www.nicolaricciardi.com/?p=816

Organised by OGR’s Nicola Ricciardi and curated by Samuele Piazza and Lorenzo Giusti, in collaboration with GAMeC, Bergamo, the exhibition brings together two large-scale works that draw attention to circulation, transformation and unexpected forms of cohabitation.

Energy Budget (2017-2018), made in collaboration with Robin Watkins, is a silent video work that alternates between two sites. Situated in a basement, it shows a leopard slug slowly navigating an electrical enclosure. Seemingly blending into a hybrid form, the slug’s muscular fluctuations respond to defunct circuits and palimpsest electric fields, almost becoming a part of the infrastructural environment. The screen itself, a wall of Light Emitting Diodes, relays the intimate moving images of the slug by way of voltage variations.
The sequence that follows is captured up high, framing portal-like openings in massive, curved buildings on the waterfront in Telegraph Bay, Hong Kong. These passageways are known as “dragon holes” and are the result of human engineering, allowing dragons to pass through dense apartment blocks, as they descend from the mountains to drink and bathe in the ocean below. Focusing on the apparent emptiness that constitutes the dragon’s path, the camera steadily zooms out using compressed air to control the motion of the lens.

The absence of sound in the video allows for the floor-based sculpture to speak up from the ground, filling the space with presence. Broken downand transformed by the density of moving bodies, Muscle Memory (16 Tonnes) (2021), literally crumbles under the shoe-soles of visitors. While brittle in comparison to our constructed environment, the seashells from marine molluscs are in fact the raw material which form the basis of most of our own buildings, including the original floor of the Officine Grandi Riparazioni. As such, calcium carbonate is not just a fundamental component of concrete, but also an essential condition for various forms of cohabitation. Material stress is part of the slow geological processes and animal-mineral transformations that feed the construction industry, but here it becomes a means of sculpting. The work gives way to a sudden fracture, reminding us of the ineffable amount of bodies that hold us up. Muscle Memory (16 Tonnes) was originally commissioned by GAMeC, and has been repurposed into a new spatiotemporal installation that takes the history of OGR as a site of repair into consideration—as ruin and resource.

BIOGRAPHY
Nina Canell once made a sculpture for ten people that caused the electricity in their homes to go out simultaneously and unannounced once every month for a year. The transfer and distribution of energy has been an integral preoccupation of her work since the beginning, often working with situations that are highly sensitive to spatio-temporal variables. Grounded as much in the chance encounter as in close study, her sculptural process foregrounds material agency.
Nina Canell was born 1979 in Växjö, Sweden, went to art school in Dublin, and currently lives and works in Berlin. She has had solo museum exhibitions in Switzerland, Mexico, Belgium, South Korea, Sweden, France, Germany and England. Canell has taken part in the Venice, Cuenca, Sydney, Lyon, and Liverpool biennials, as well as group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Witte de With, Rotterdam; the ICA, London; and Guggenheim, Bilbao among others. Nina Canell frequently collaborates with Robin Watkins on installations, artist’s books and publications.

Curated by Nicola Ricciardi & Samuele Piazza

Commissioned by Secession and Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, and co-produced with OGR Torino and Onassis Foundation, Athens

With the support of Milvus Artistic Research Center (MARC), Knislinge, and Onassis Stegi, Athens
The live installation HERE invites visitors to share time and presence with six dancers.
During the month-long exhibition, six dancers will perform a choreography that unfolds at a decelerated pace within a sculptural environment.
The movements of the performers will be backed by a sound composition, a female voice counting every passing second, from 1 to 14399, underlining the eternal succession of time. Immersed in this constant continuum, the dancers’ movements create a situation of everchanging presence unveiling the slippery nature of the “here and now.”

Since the early 2000s, Maria Hassabi has created a unique choreographic practice focused on stillness and the empty space in-between movements. In her works, the artist takes cues from conventions, hierarchies, and codes common to theater, museums, and public spaces, which she then reworks to reflect the given contexts and develops in dialogue with a site’s unique architecture. At the core of Hassabi’s choreographies, stillness and deceleration are used both as techniques and as subjects of representation, while the performing bodies oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, live body and still image.

Performers: Elena Antoniou, Maria Hassabi, Michael Helland, Alice Heyward, Oisín Monaghan, Robert Steijn.
Sound design: Stavros Gasparatos, Maria Hassabi
Outfits: Victoria Bartlett
Architectural Study: Maria Maneta, Maria Hassabi
Production Management: Eva Theofanidou, Natasha Katerinopoulos

BIOGRAPHY
Maria Hassabi (b. Cyprus) is an artist and choreographer working with live performance, installation, sculpture, photography and video. Her works have been presented worldwide in theaters, festivals, museums, galleries and public spaces including Secession (Vienna); Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis); Centre Pompidou (Paris); K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); Museum of Modern Art(New York); Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art(Melbourne); Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva); The Kitchen, New York, amongst others. Her works have also been featured in group exhibitions such as documeta14 (Kassel); Performa (New York); 55th Venice Biennale. Hassabi has received the 2019 Performa Malcolm McClaren Award; a 2016 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award; 2015 Herb Alpert Award; 2012 President’s Award for Performing Arts from LMCC; 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship; 2009 Grants to Artists Award from Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She holds a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and is an Onassis Decade Resident 2019-2029. She’s based in NY and Athens and works internationally.

Organised by OGR’s Nicola Ricciardi and curated by Ilaria Bonacossa with Valentina Lacinio, “Unseen Stars” is an original site-specific project by Trevor Paglen. For the occasion, the US artist has created a series of non-functional satellites that are both sculptural and evocative of our relationship with Space and the politics that govern its colonization.

Developed in collaboration with aerospace engineers, the Satellites are Space-worthy sculptures designed as small, lightweight satellites that expand to become large, highly reflective structures. Placed into low-earth orbit these objects would become sculptures in the night sky, visible from earth after sunset and before dawn as a bright, slowly moving star. The formal aspect of these sculptures articulates a response to the question of what aerospace engineering would look like if its methods were decoupled from the corporate and military interests.

In partnership with Goethe-Institut of Turin, the exhibition in OGR becomes an answer to the discussions on Paglen’s Space investigation questioning the relationship between contemporary art and science by pushing the audience to “re-envision” Space as a place of possibility.