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.

OGR Cult | Foyer
FRAN.K, Living in the Space Between, 2020
‘Living in the space between’ is a 4 hour durational work originally created for Tramway TV via Zoom. A meeting of bodies on the dancefloor in a continual dance mimicking our fleeting interactions in clubs, this show explores the experience of clubbing in the absence of having a live space. Over 3 duets and a journey through a 4 hour soundtrack this is an ode to the Glasgows Queer club scene and a celebration for all these spaces, dancers and music genres gave me.  

Guest Dancers; (In order of appearance): David Ronan, Bronze, Rosana Cade / Photography & Live Stream – Daniel Hughes / Fashions & Styling – Asia Apolonia / Music editing by Simon Howard – DJ RyanAir / Lighting Design – Jared Hutsby / Image Make Up – Sorcha Clelland

FRAN.K is a mixed- race, non-binary performance artist working with choreography, persona and visual art in club spaces. Through the mediums of durational based art and cabaret, their work interrogates identity, time, intimacy and dance as a form of healing. Their interests also lie in the intersection of fashion, technology and dance, creating highly striking live art dance work. I believe in the importance of connection and the shared experience of dance we have in club spaces. Clubs as a space of sanctuary and protection for queer communities and how dancing and celebrating  can be used as a transformative tool and one for healing.

OGR Cult | Binario 3
Urara Tsuchiya, Give us a Meow, 2019
Film by Urara Tsuchiya and Ben Toms, performed by Urara Tsuchiya ‘Give Us A Meow’ is set in a remote country cottage and shows the artist dancing alone in a variety of self-made costumes, in what appears to be an entranced or captivated state. 

edited by Adam Aftanas/ Music by Jack Brennan, Costume by Urara and Zephyr Liddell.

Urara Tsuchiya (b. 1979 in Japan) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Urara Tsuchiya works mainly with performance, video, and live events, often incorporating soft sculpture, costumes, ceramics and home cooking. These function as props to set up an alternate environment for out of the ordinary behaviours to take place. 

OGR Cult | Binario 3
Christian Noelle Charles
CC TIME – Popping Kareoke; CC TIME – Procrastination time; CC TIME – This Is Your Bad Side; CC TIME – Top Hat, 2017
TOP HAT is a video project, a personal portrait exploring the ideas of performance using the Top Hat as the subject. Using 1930s aesthetic references. 
 Films are juxtaposed with the artists to share a distant dream and an unravelling stage of thoughts demonstrated through the layers within the video. While the video unravels it reveals the audience’s thoughts to bring conversations about race and gender. 

FEEL THE MUSIC is an ongoing series of works created habitually by artist Christian Noelle Charles (CC) since 2015, that feature her dancing and lip-synching to music. Through these works CC explores self-love in a contemporary world, taking inspiration from pop culture, modern performance techniques and personal experiences to look at the ‘selfie’ as a millennial form of portraiture, taking in character development, black female representation, and the act of performing to the camera as a form of radical self-love. 

Christian Noelle Charles is a Black Female Artist currently living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. A Syracuse, New York native, Christian’s work is an exploration of female representation and self-love in a contemporary world. 

OGR Cult | Binario 3
Claricia Parinussa e Rowdy SS, (this) silence is also deafening. and sometimes there are no words for that,2020 

Claricia Parinussa e Rowdy SS
(this) silence is also deafening. and sometimes there are no words for that 
…it’s whether the suspension can acknowledge the ‘being’ in and of itself, in this position, before having a decision, or been reduced; to spin this way or that way. 

Sometimes it’s making new. Shifting [the narrative] if only in retrospect, precisely in retrospect; it’s (still) important. 

A live collaboration between Rowdy SS and Claricia Parinussa through Tramway’s spaces, captured in a single take by Paradax Period. Commissioned by Tramway for Continuum. 

because if we can all make ourselves anew, all the time, start again, make new decisions, we can never undo but we can redo, do again, with knowledge, do again, with context, apologise, take space, heal, reform, raise again, rise again, of this vibration. 

and these things were always there; we were always there, and remain, and aren’t yet; and we aren’t yet, and will be. Ingrained, now too. 
 
and even now it’s not empty; it speaks louder than usual. 

Concept & performance: Rowdy SS & Claricia Parinussa / Sound: Rowdy SS / Movement: Claricia Parinussa / Film: Paradax Period / Camera assistant: Thierry Fotso / Producer: Zoë Charlery – ID.Y / Lighting and cabling: Sam Burnley / Sound technician: Sam Randerson

OGR Cult | Binario 3
David Dale Gallery, (Caitlin Merrett King and Max Slaven) Curated Program:
Ashanti Harris, Doll Thomas, 2019
Winnie Herbstein, Studwork, 2018
Stasis, Faux Pas, 2018

David Dale will work with 3 artists to curate a program for OGR based on the last two years of their program.

Established in 2009, David Dale Gallery and Studios is a space that promotes pioneering contemporary visual art through the commissioning and year round programming of new work and projects by early career international and UK based artists. Maintaining a commitment to providing opportunities and supporting the development of artists, curators and writers, David Dale Gallery and Studios intend to encourage professional development, education and community participation whilst delivering our core aim of presenting outstanding contemporary visual art. Additionally, the organisation operates an affordable artist studios facility, for the production and development of new work by emerging artists. 

OGR Cult | Binario 3
Poisonous Relationship, Ash Land, 2020
‘ASH LAND’ is the first music video from LITTLE CALF, the latest album by Poisonous Relationship. It’s a song about hometowns, regrettable affections, and glory.
Poisonous Relationship is the musical project of Glasgow-based artist Jamie Crewe, who sings, writes, produces, and directs. LITTLE CALF, released in July 2020, is their fourth album: inspired by diverse niches of UK garage, by the spartan disco remixes of John Morales, and by the textures of British folk music, the album weds delicate songwriting to production that swings, lurches, and flares to make idiosyncratic dance music. 
Over the past ten years Poisonous Relationship has released four albums and six EPs, made remixes for Holly Johnson, Alexis Penney, and The 2 Bears, and produced tracks for Cakes Da Killa, Big Momma, and Karnage. Their discography is available for download at poisonousrelationship.bandcamp.com. 

OGR Cult | Binario 3
LAPS, Who me?
‘Who Me?’ is the title track from Glasgow duo Cass Ezeji and Alicia Matthews a.k.a Ladies As Pimps, (LAPS), debut EP.  Full of Spirited percussion and bass smothered in tape delay, the song and album beat through Dub, RnB, House, and way beyond, mashing absurdity with dread. Recorded at Green Door studios in Glasgow (where the two met) and layered with the analogue production techniques ‘Who me?’ is one of the most focused and vital club singles to recently emerge from the Glasgow underground, with their unique and thoroughly danceable fusion of dub, house, and trip-hop.  

“WHO ME?” performed by LAPS
Written and produced by Alicia Matthews and Cass Ezeji
Video directed by: Kristina McCormick (DIET CLINIC)
Under exclusive license to MIC Records and in North America DFA Record 

Curated by Nicola Ricciardi

Architecture, and Modernism in particular, has always been a source of inspiration for Brazilian photographer Mauro Restiffe. In his career the artist has traveled and captured the oevre of well known architects around the world, from Philip Johnson to Oscar Niemeyer. In his photos Restiffe reveals the unexpected combinations between architecture and landscape, indoors and outdoors, focusing on unobserved details and traces of human presence: architecture serves as stage for history, may it be public or private. Restiffe’s images are often embedded with historical value and present intimate perspectives on a Country’s history, such is the case of his well known series Empossamento (2003) and Oscar (2012). For his show at OGR Restiffe has taken his survey to Italy, researching the projects of Carlo Mollino, Piero Portaluppi, Franco Albini and Carlo Scarpa among others.
Curatorial text:

Consider this exhibition as a novel about architecture – a novel in the Proustian sense (that is, of the writer who more than anyone else wanted to make his literary work coincide with an architectural work). In a famous passage from the Temps retrouvé, Proust sustains that “literature that is content with ‘describing things’, to give us only a miserable extract of lines and surfaces, is the one that, although it is called realistic, is further from reality, one that most impedes us and saddens us, since it abruptly cuts all communication between our present ‘I’ and the past”. In a similar fashion, Restiffe – on the surface moved by the desire to recount the adventure of Modernism – do not describe palaces, houses, rooms, but rather translate for us the experience of living inside them, today as yesterday. It is a game of focus, in which the contours of the history of architecture slowly lose clearness while bringing out the details of the many and minute personal histories of the people and object that are pictured in the photographs, as well as of those of the observers. Those portrayed by Restiffe are fleeting geographies: his pictures are not a meticulous and scientific account of the places he visited but rather the transposition of environments that originate from collective memory and that are constantly shaped and re-shaped by personal reminiscences. Just as the name Parma in Proust does not merely designate a city in Emilia, situated on the Po river, founded by the Etruscans, but rather evokes “the essential oil of violets and all the Stendhalian fragrance”, likewise the cities of Turin, Milan, Genoa portrayed by the Brazilian artist do not materialize through their description but emerge due to hints, situations, circumstances. These glimpses of architecture and life, collected and neatly arranged on a large wall inside OGR’s Binario 2, visually and ideally represents the very concept of ​​a landscape — a “literary” landscape, where the visitor is invited to match the lines of modernist structures with the silhouette of his or her own interior space. In the end, one could say that – just like any good novel – Restiffe’s wall is nothing but a mirror.

Mauro Restiffe (São José do Rio Pardo, 1970) lives and works in São Paulo.
Recent solo shows include: São Paulo, Fora de Alcance, Instituto Moreira Salles (São Paulo, 2018 – Rio de Janeiro, 2014); Álbum, Estação Pinacoteca (São Paulo, 2017); Post-Soviet Russia 1995/2015, Garage Museum (Moscow, 2016); and Obra, MAC-USP (São Paulo, 2013). Restiffe participated in major group show such as: Gwangju Biennial (2018), Aichi Triennial (Nagoya, Japan, 2016); Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador, 2014); São Paulo Biennial (2006); and Panorama de Arte Brasileira (São Paulo, 2013 and 2005).
His work is part of the following collections: MoMA (New York), Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York), SFMOMA (San Francisco), Tate Modern (London), Inhotim (Brumadinho), Instituto Moreira Salles (Rio de Janeiro), MASP (São Paulo), MAC-USP (São Paulo), MAM (São Paulo), Pinacoteca do Estado (São Paulo), among others.

Link to exhibition page: https://ogrtorino.it/en/events/mauro-restiffe

Curated by Nicola Ricciardi

OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni is pleased to present the solo exhibition As Walls Keep Shifting by Monica Bonvicini, a large scale intervention into OGR’s former industrial premises.

The new installation delves into Bonvicini’s interest in architecture, its history, its memory, imposed regulations and habits. Her research materializes in site-specific installations in which the architecture of the exhibition space is taken as a starting point for institutional critique and spaces are curated to engage the audience on a direct and physical way.

The title As Walls Keep Shifting is taken from a line by Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves: the novel offers a powerful metaphorical image of the relation with the built environment. The reference to walls is particularly poignant in relation to the artist career: in the last twenty years, Bonvicini has often reflected on walls, producing them, destroying them but also taking them as the starting point for installations, sculptures, videos or photographs.

As Walls Keep Shifting takes the gesture of “building a house” as an artistic exercise and performs it in diverse ways and manners, continuously shifting its forms and concepts. The project provides a timely questioning of individual place-making as the establishment of private space altogether with its resulting discontents, such as isolation, exclusionary dynamics, disappointment and the rise of reactionary feelings.

For this show Bonvicini is literally cutting the exhibition space in two, using theatrical lights to create a stage for her sculptures and photographs. She builds a large structure in the form of a house inside the former railway workshop of OGR. Built out of a wooden skeleton, in the California fashion, the house is left empty of walls, windows, cabling and facilities. Bonvicini has borrowed the structure’s architectural plan from a typical residential two-families house built across northern Italy in the 60s and 70s. The original plans are cut in half, and the artist builds only one part: the gesture decisively creates a negative space where the lack of the mirroring part of the house prompts visitors to consider the venue’s hall.

Inside the house, there is a new work: White Out (2019). The piece is emblematic of Bonvicini’s light works: questioning the legacy of late modernism and its adherence to industrial production methods, the work assembles mass-manufactured items into a fully functioning yet chaotic, intentionally flawed structure.

Structural Psychodrama # 4 (2019), a flight of concrete stairs, tied with a chain adorned by lots of padlocks, is installed outside the house, as to create an illusional situation of an outdoor piece. The collection of padlocks locked together – with its immediate association to an urban kitsch symbol of romance – is confronted with the raw appearance of the horizontally lying slab of the concrete stairs. The former’s connotation of merry ending is paired with the latter’s appearance as something unfinished, abandoned and then forgotten.

At the far end of the exhibition space stands the actual starting point of the show: the photographic series Italian Homes (2019) Bonvicini has been working on for the last two years. Each photograph differs from the others only in the way in which the houses have been modified (remodeled, repainted or decorated) by their inhabitants. The new variety of facades contrasts with the foundational idea of the social project of these architectures, conceived to provide equal conditions of dwelling for homogenous social groups. As such, the series discusses individuality and singularity set against the standardization and homogenization of ‘practical life.’

While Bonvicini’s photographic choices for the series may recall a rich art historical background, referencing a broad artistic context, the artist has also been inspired by a series of literary works that describe domesticity as The Collected Stories of Diane Williams. The suburbs, rural areas and various peripheries, the idea of revisiting the places of origin as a way to trespass the thresholds of economic, social and political bubble are at the core of a reflection on the current fractured
state of society.

The artist is also working on a catalog with new essays responding to the installation and documenting the complexity of the research. The book, published by OGR, will be released in 2020.

 Link to exhibition page: https://ogrtorino.it/en/events/monica-bonvicini

Curated by Andrea Bellini & Andrea Lissoni
OGR Artistic Director: Nicola Ricciardi

On the occasion of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève started a new partnership with OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Turin. This is an unprecedented collaboration, at least in this form, in the long history of the Biennale. The dialogue between the two institutions has taken place on three different levels: the co-production of works such as those by Meriem Bennani and Tamara Henderson, the creation of a comprehensive catalogue, upcoming in the Fall of 2019, and most importantly the realization of a brand-new, site-specific version of the Geneva exhibition, purposely designed by Andreas Angelidakis for OGR.

The Turin’s show, opening on June 21st, 2019 and titled, as in Geneva, The Sound of Screens Imploding, is conceived as a series of individual environments. The concept for the show revolves around a fundamental principle: that moving images now dwell outside the screen, lingering on in a fascinating kaleidoscope where vision can be shaped by sound as much as by the image itself, or even more so.

Inevitably, the show explores the status of the moving image and its exhibition format, building on the idea that the long era of projection on screens is coming to an end and will give way to environments that reverberate with the radiant echo of their implosion. The curators, Andrea Lissoni and Andrea Bellini, have decided to dream up an immersive exhibition, presenting a series of contiguous, differing worlds that alternate within a densely packed space that is a unified whole, yet teeming with eclectic forms. As visitors are sucked into these universes, they may begin to lose their grip on reality and their sense of time. The future could start to blur into some vague, digital present, while primeval sounds bear echoes of a past that struggles on, refusing to fade away.

Emphasizing the innovative potential of new languages connected to the moving image, the exhibition forges an intense dialogue with a generation of artists from a wide range of countries and backgrounds. The artists featured in the exhibition are Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic, Meriem Bennani, Ian Cheng,  Elysia Crampton, Tamara Henderson, Kahlil Joseph; meanwhile, Andreas Angelidakis has been entrusted with tying all of these installations together into a single, cohesive project that dialogues with the post-industrial architecture of the century-old Officine of Turin.

Link to exhibition: https://ogrtorino.it/en/events/biennale-of-moving-images

Curated by Catherine Wood
OGR Artistic Director: Nicola Ricciardi

Carousel – a site-specific project commissioned by OGR for the spaces of the former Turin’s train factory – represents a new chapter in the institution’s investigation on and around the relationship between bodies in motion and architectural spaces, between performance and the dynamics of the use of space. The exhibition continues in the baroque Music Room of the Ospedaletto Complex in Venice, which will become OGR’s outpost during the 58th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

OGR Torino 
03.05 – 09.06.2019
Pablo Bronstein’s Carousel, takes the historic form of the zootrope – whose optical illusion creates rudimentary moving images– as a low-fi metaphor for the circus of mirrors and screens that makes for our contemporary interrelations.  In this new commission, and performance installation, Bronstein considers the structures of physical reality – city planning and architecture, the theatre, and the human body – through the lens of the extreme close-up, self-regard – or narcissism – endemic to our post-iPhone universe. The installation takes the form of a provisionally built, plywood maze that indicates a sequence of architectural spaces. These low-rise demarcations of built form allude, in turn, to an open, public piazza, a 17th century court, an early proscenium theatre, an opera house, and a circus arena, within with sits the folly-cum-zootrope, at its centre.

Rather than critiquing the hyper-exaggerated reality of this 21st century Society of the Spectacle, Bronstein builds on the fertile foundations of its delusions and seductions. Through this installation, video and performance, he conjures – instead – a world of malevolent fairy-tale power and aesthetic possibility.

Taking a new quasi-narrative direction, Bronstein imagines the Grey Witch: an enigmatic, neutral figure personifying the silver material behind a mirror’s glass that is invisible to us precisely because of its reflective properties, and is only ever revealed as a thin layer when the mirror is cut through, in cross-section. All-seeing, this figure remains, for us – however – mostly elusive and un-seeable, aside from her occasional, eruptive flash of presence via video screens.

Mirrored panels line Bronstein’s central folly: a projection machine-cum-surveillance tower that is positioned at the far end of the gallery space. Its inhabitant, the Grey Witch, is an uncanny figure between life and death, whose presence is only occasionally glimpsed within the real-time experience of the installation.  The placement of a number of digital screens intrudes into and regulates Bronstein’s uniquely designed maze: a flimsily constructed sequence of implied performance ‘scenes’ and audience positions in which a number of dancers, choreographed by Bronstein, enact looped iterations of folk and courtly ritual for visitors. These choreographies appear as exercises in the seduction and attractions of watching and being watched. The artist’s theatre-maze takes us, as visitors, on a journey from participatory dances to formal balletic spectacle and beyond, but via truncated gif-style repeats of movement that resemble the avatars who manifest symptomatic tics of an enthralled, networked contemporary attention span in which social reality and virtual landscape are fluidly entangled.

Building up on earlier works such as the hallucinatory, revolving mirrored chamber of Constantinople Kaleidoscope (Tate Live, 2012), or the queering of public space in Plaza Minuet (ICA London,  2006), the relationship between historical architecture, mirrors, digital screens and dancers in Bronstein’s looped and repeated live installation summons a fictional territory that initiates trans-historical flow, opens up wormholes and leaps of imagination, and speaks to questions about how to inventively inhabit the constrictions of the space, time and image of the present. Bronstein’s Carousel propels his viewers into a ceaseless cycle of moving, and looking, and being looked at, all the while underwritten by the static threat of the Grey Witch’s unmoving, and all-seeing eye. Channeling Jack Smith, John Waters, and Peter Greenaway, Bronstein’s take on the audience’s pedestrian path through a reflexive potted history is extra-ordinary: every angle, pose, glance might constitute a selfie.

Sala della Musica del Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice
07.05 – 24.11.2019
The Venice iteration of Bronstein’s Carousel is smaller in scale, but condensed in significance. It functions as the equivalent of the seventeenth century King’s bedroom (an apparently private place, but in fact the centre of ritual courtly life) in relation to the piazzas, theatres and circus of the OGR maze. Whilst the installation in Turin represents a sequence of public spaces through which the public navigate, under the gaze of the Grey Witch, her mirrors and screens, the Venice exhibition is imagined as a private chamber into which visitors are invited, but held at a certain distance from the image that is created.

In this piece, we see two dancers, doubled by the use of a large-scale video projection; the figure of the Grey Witch, and a figure with a red-painted face, played by Bronstein himself, whose ability to see, and move exceeds the rules and parameters of the mirror-inflected city world. Both driving force and disruptor, symbolic of the devil or of desire, Bronstein’s red made-up mask appears as a counterpoint to the cool surveillance of the Grey Witch.

Appearing behind the grille of a balcony behind viewers in the space, his own viewpoint is relayed to a video screen below, and he occasionally enters the main space to interrupt the ritual loops of danced movement. Bronstein has often appeared in his own work as both author and agent, playing fictional selves who are as much subject to the fantastical delusions that he is creating in his pictorial vision as the characters with which he co-exists in the work.

Catherine Wood is Senior Curator, International Art (Performance) at Tate Modern.  Wood initiated the contemporary performance programme at Tate in 2002, and ran the online project Performance Room in 2012 – 2016. Her live projects at Tate have included working with Fujiko Nakaya, Isabel Lewis, Jumana Emil Abboud, Mark Leckey, Joan Jonas, Tania Bruguera and Anne Imhof.  Wood is author of Yvonne Rainer: the Mind is a Muscle (MIT, 2007) and Performance in Contemporary Art (Tate, 2018).

Link to exhibition page: https://ogrtorino.it/en/events/pablo-bronsteinogr

Curated by Valentina Lacinio & Judith Waldmann
OGR Artistisc Director: Nicola Ricciardi

“It is not so much about the performance in and of itself or even the idea that we perform something for others, but much more the space that’s opened up by this intersection between audience, musician, and music.”
Ari Benjamin Meyers, 2016

Ari Benjamin Meyers’ first institutional solo exhibition in Italy, In Concert, curated by Valentina Lacinio and Judith Waldmann, fills the space of OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni from March 1 to April 14, 2019 with something that goes beyond music: a variety of social interactions and experiences. Originally trained as a conductor and composer Meyers carries the visitor past the limits and boundaries of classical western music, overcoming the distance between performers and listeners, here no longer understood as active senders and passive recipients. Meyers aims to create “a real relationship among the audience and performers and with the music.”

In Concert brings us back to the Latin roots of the term concert – meaning playing or singing together, without originally implying any division between performer and listener. Meyers creates an immersive space for musical encounters, exchanges, and experiments, involving everyone present in the given moment.
During the six-week exhibition, a group of eight performers will enact a selection of Meyers’ works. A meta-score composed by the artist provides the structure for the entire exhibition and gives rhythm to the succession of the arrangement of performances. Starting from the central piece of the show, the large-scale performance Serious Immobilities (2013), the unique path of In Concert unfolds. InDuet (2014), for example, the visitor is invited to sing along, face to face, with one of the performers.The New Empirical (840hz) (2013), consists of a modified grand piano. Solely through its presence, an invitation is extended to the audience to take the stage by playing it.

Meyers’ will also present a new work, K Club (2019), specifically conceived for In Concert and designed in dialogue with OGR’s twofold mission of art and concert space. K Club reverses the experience of clubbing: instead of being part of a multitude, the visitor finds him or herself alone in the spacious, post-industrial concert hall, protagonist of an intimate pas de deux with the DJ.

Ari Benjamin Meyers – In Concert at the OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Turin, Italy follows Ari Benjamin Meyers – Tacet at Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel, Germany (18.01. – 03.02.2019) curated by Judith Waldmann.

Link to exhibition page: https://ogrtorino.it/en/events/variazioni-ari-benjamin-meyers

Curated by Samuele Piazza
OGR Artistic Director: Nicola Ricciardi

There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself
H.P. Lovecraft, The Street, 1920

L’Atteso, Mike Nelson’s first solo exhibition in an Italian institution, transforms the OGR into a “different place” thanks to a large-scale installation that occupies the entire hall of Binario 1 with a powerful intervention.

The first work you encounter is an older small sculpture: Untitled (intimate sculpture for a public space) (2013), in the foyer of the Officine Nord. The sculpture, with its intimate and discreet presence seems to be at odds with the scale of the work beyond and yet the two have many themes in common, preparing you for the possible readings of this vast floor made from crushed buildings and contained, vitrine-like by the glass wall that demarcates the exhibition space of Binario 1.

The space beyond is dimly lit and the dusty cars emit a sense of abandonment but appear to offer no explanation. The memories of their previous owners, both real and constructed are conjured through the patina of these banal objects mixed with the occassional intervention and manipulation of lighting.  The immersive nature of this work evokes a spatial and temporal suspension that encourages thoughts of the existential.

A disparate narrative structure emerges in relation to the history of the building, while the everday objects carefully selected by the artist, are transformed into sculpture.  The resultant landscape is akin to the earths surface it alludes to, a metaphorical stratification of meaning whose  fissures lead to many possible levels of reading, a dreamlike journey akin to science fiction.   Ultimately a conclusive understanding is purposefully denied and avoided, drawing the viewer into the voids that these possible dead ends suggest.  Visitors are invited to navigate their own personal path to build an individual narrative tied to their own understanding of the site.

L’Atteso brings together different sources of inspiration in a continued game of cross-references in which various suggestions expand and contradict themselves. Different temporalities seem to collide within the installation: a recent past re-examined in an almost archaeological way, a potential vision of the near future or a dystopian present.

Link to exhibition page: https://www.ogrtorino.it/en/events/mike-nelson

Curated by Abaseh Mirvali
OGR Artistic Director: Nicola Ricciardi

“Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home”, presented at OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni in Turin, aims to unveil the artistic practice of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian by focusing on their methodology, communication, and construction of their works. Over the past few decades, Ramin, Rokni, and Hesam have shared a life philosophy that has allowed for mutual creation, during which their individual practices interact with their collaborative ones and which is informed by the understanding and technical skills of other people. From the dialogues they build among themselves and with other artists, friends, and collaborators—including stage director Joan Baixas, robotic engineer John Cole, community artist Niyaz Azadikhah, and writer and film producer Mandana Mohit—these artists have established a personal language that has enabled them to present different layers of content and texture in their work.

Aware that their practice does not only encompass what they do but also the contributions of other individuals, from other artists to carpenters, technicians, and lighting designers, these artists refuse the concept of the genius Artist. They prefer to acknowledge everyone who becomes part of their working process, as they believe that through their individual participation, everyone, collaboratively, creates a shared environment that enables them to coexist while contributing to the making of something new; for instance, an exhibition. In other words, these participants share their methodologies, ways of thought and working, and thereby build up a unique sensibility, which allows for the creation of something new.

As part of their collaborative practice, the artists create a series of alter egos that allow them to play with their individual identities, working with themes related to language, empty space, power, transformation, belonging, displacement, exile, pain, and destruction. Their creatures, as they call them, live in documentary videos about their creative processes but also in video performances that constitute artworks in themselves. These characters tend to be anthropomorphic—phytomorphs or zoomorphs—with some kind of sensory or motor limitation that, according to the artists, allows them to hone their other senses. Thus, little persons with rodent noses and ears, fish tails, or lettuce heads become protagonists in a fictitious world that enters the realm of the viewer via a live performance or the physical presentation of an artwork made by the creatures. Reinterpreting the practice of the objet trouvé, when they are creatures, the artists select a series of well-used objects from their everyday life in order to tell their story. Worn, battered, or forgotten objects are reinvented in a parallel world where they acquire new meanings. As they materialize the fictional in their reuse of discarded objects, the creatures provide subtle, sometimes opaque, readings of our contemporary societies.

The current exhibition does not seek to be a retrospective or a survey of the artists’ oeuvre, but rather a demonstration of how they embrace their practice and heterogeneous sense of creation. “Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home” is an attempt to show the work of Ramin, Rokni, and Hesam from a perspective that observes the mechanisms through which their collaborative practice is conveyed but also how it is formed during a creative process that exalts a working philosophy based on a shared reality and the inclusion of others.

Link to exhibition page: https://ogrtorino.it/en/events/forgive-me-distant-wars-for-bringing-flowers-home-ramin-haerizadeh-rokni-haerizadeh-hesam-rahmanian