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

Curated by Barbara Casavecchia
OGR Artistic Director: Nicola Ricciardi

Social Facts is the title chosen by Susan Hiller for her exhibition at OGR. It starts from an expression that she often uses to describe the cultural artefacts from our society, which she uses as her basic materials.

Hiller (b. 1940, American-born, London-based since the 1960s) is one of the most influential artists of her generation. With her pioneering installations, multi-screen videos, sound works, ‘group investigations’, photographs, sculptures, online interactive projects, writings and lectures, spanning nearly five decades, Hiller devotes her attention to what is ‘other’, out of sight, unimportant, and often relegated to the margins of the mainstream. The artist says: “What I’m interested in is invisible, in a strange way. I don’t mean that it is literally invisible. I just mean that nobody pays any attention to it, and therefore they don’t see it.”

In her explorations of the subconscious or unconscious mind, she has used dreams and memories, telepathy, automatic writing, protest songs, exctinct languages, supernatural or visionary experiences, sightings of unidentified flying objects. She is fascinated by how technology affects our perception of the world and how much the Internet is today a gigantic global repository of tales, stories and confessions.

She investigates the boundary between ordinary and extraordinary, credible and incredible, rational and irrational, but leaves it to her audience to witness to the contradictions of our values systems, and to orient themselves according to their own convictions – a frequent contemporary condition, now that news can be “fake”, facts can be “alternative”, and communication travels through individual or collective social media bubbles.

At OGR, Hiller offers an immersive experience that centres around a new project entitled Illuminazioni (Illuminations, 2018), a 30-minute videoprojection featuring the voices of individuals describing experiences of mysterious and unexplained luminous phenomena.

Hiller has held solo exhibitions in the most important international museums. Among the most relevant, the anthological mid career at ICA, London (1986), Tate Liverpool (1996) and Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2007); the retrospectives at Baltic, Gateshead; Museu Serralves, Porto (2004), Kunsthalle Basel (2005), and at the Tate Britain in London (2011). She participated in Documenta 13 (2012) and Documenta 14 (2017), in Athens and Kassel. In Italy, Hiller exhibited at Castello di Rivoli (2006, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev) and at Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como (2011), where she was Visiting Professor.

Link to exhibition page: https://ogrtorino.it/en/events/susan-hiller-curated-by-barbara-casavecchia

Link to a brochure of the exhibition

Curated by Luca Cerizza
OGR Artistic Director: Nicola Ricciardi

Ten years after his first and only solo show in an Italian institution, Tino Sehgal returns to Italy with an exhibition specially designed by the artist for OGR.

For the large industrial spaces Sehgal has created a complex choreography with the participation of more than 50 interpreters, conceived as one big movement in continuous change during the course of the exhibition. A series of specific situations originate from what Sehgal defines a swarm of bodies and from a choreography that presents movements designed specifically for the occasion. In this presentation the individual works of the artist—considered as discrete entities that can be separated from each other and from the process of their production—become scenes or moments, elements that take shape temporarily in a game of encounters that respond to specific circumstances such as the number of viewers, their way of interacting, or the moment of the day when these meetings take place. In the spaces of OGR once dedicated to heavyproduction, an expression of the first industrial revolution, Sehgal’s work suggests new forms of light production based only on the transformation of behavior, not materials. Through these situations, Sehgal starts a series of meetings and relationships to form new temporary communities that reflect the one in the spaces.

In doing so, Sehgal aims at overcoming the idea of separation on which the modern notion of a work of art is based and on which Western thought itself is based: modes of separation that take shape in the very concept of the single individual and are nourished in the modern idea of the autonomy of the work of art. Tino Sehgal has held individual exhibitions at the most important international museums: Fundação Serralves (Porto, 2005), MMK (Frankfurt, 2007), ICA (London, 2005, 2006 and 2007), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, 2007), Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2010), Tate Modern (London, 2012), Ullens Center (Beijing, 2013), CCBB (Rio de Janeiro, 2014) and Fondation Beyeler (Basel, 2017). A year-long retrospective took place at the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam (2015). Two other big exhibitions were dedicated to him by Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin, 2015) and by Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2016).

Luca Cerizza (Milan, 1969) is a curator and art critic. He is responsible for the Research Centre of Castello di Rivoli and teaches Museology at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan.

Link to exhibition page: https://ogrtorino.it/events/tino-sehgal-curated-by-luca-cerizza

Curated by Tom Eccles, Mark Rappolt and Liam Gillick
OGR Artistic Director: Nicola Ricciardi

Come una falena alla fiamma (Like a Moth to a Flame) is the title of the great exhibition project realised together by OGR Torino and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, which opens next 3^rd November at the premises of the two cultural institutes of Turin.

Come una falena alla fiamma is an ambitious project, signed by three outstanding international curators, for the first time called to work together and interact with Turin and itsimportant artistic heritage: Tom Eccles, director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at the Bard College of New York, Mark Rappolt, chief editor of the British magazine Art Review, and the artist Liam Gillick.

The exhibition aims at providing a portrait of Turin through the objects that the town and its residents have collected. Come una falena alla fiamma develops as a path through the Collection of Fondazione per l’arte moderna e contemporanea CRT and the Collection of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, interacting with a number of exhibits coming fromsome of the town’s most important public museums like the Egyptian Museum, Palazzo Madama- Museo Civico d’Arte Antica, MAO – Museum of Oriental Art, GAM – Modern Art Gallery and Castello di Rivoli – Contemporary Art Museum, for theoccasion all displayed at Officine Grandi Riparazioni and at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, blending contemporary art works and exhibits from past centuries.

The intersection of different languages will continue in the venues of some of the partner museums: Museo Egizio and Palazzo Madama will become exceptional exhibition spaces for some contemporary artworks.

The ensemble of the displays testifies Art’s capacity to continuously renovate ideas and generate new proposals. And with ideas of rebirth and renewal in mind, the exhibition exploits the coincidence of a birth and two anniversaries: the OGR inauguration, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collection of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and the sixtieth anniversary of the Situationist International, which was founded after a gathering inAlba, not far from Turin.

With over 70 works of contemporary art and hundreds of artefacts coming from many collections of Turin, Come una falena alla fiammaprovides a reflection over the importance of private bugs and individual obsessions and on the way in which, over time, these find their way into society, becoming part of the town’s cultural life.

The displays are arranged as a journey through space – with works and objects made in the five continents – and time – from Egyptian sculptures of the second millennium b.c., like the huge head of the Pharaoh Tuthmose, a Bible from Bologna of 1280, the II century b.c. funerary statue of a Chinese dame and some installations realised in the last year. Yet, as all the works are part of collections kept in Turin and its surroundings, the impression is that, in spite of its breadth, the journey ends where it began, and that the visitors, like the objects, have always been there.

The title of the exhibition originates from a work by the British artist Cerith Wyn Evans, a neon light circular text, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (2006) hanging at the entrance of the OGR exhibition. The title of the work is a palindrome, that is a phrase which reads the same backward as forward, saying the same thing with no preferential direction. The phrase contains a riddle: what “goes around at night and is consumed by flames? A possible solution is a moth.

Wyn Evans named his work after the title of the last film by Guy Debord (made in 1978, released in 1981 and later broadcast by the Italian TV) which is the starting point of the exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. More political in nature, this part of the exhibition continues by exploring themes linked to the rebirth and renewal, among which the destruction that may accompany them (be it necessary or pointless).

Overall the exhibition, attempts to test Nietzsche’s notion that to endure the idea of recurrence one needs: freedom from morality; new means against pain […]; the enjoyment of all kind of uncertainty, experimentalism as a counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition of the concept of necessity; abolition of the ‘will’; abolition of ‘knowledge-in-itself’.” As is well known, in Turin Nietzsche was overwhelmed by insanity: in realising a portrait of the town, the works displayed at OGR and at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo draw a map of the way in which generations of artists and collector have seen, built and rebuilt the world, to avoid this fate.

Artists on display:
Pawel Althamer, Lina Bertucci, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Maurizio Cattelan, Gianni Colombo, Enrico David, Tacita Dean, Guy Debord, Georges Demenÿ, Cecil B Evans, Valie Export, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Katharina Fritsch, Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, Liam Gillick, Liz Glynn, Guan Xiao, João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Rachel Harrison, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschhorn, Damien Hirst, Carsten Höller, Marine Hugonnier, Pierre Huyghe, Ragnar Kjartansson, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Liu Wei, Sarah Lucas, Mark Manders, David Medalla, Shirin Neshat, Catherine Opie, Lari Pittman, Paola Pivi, Charles Ray, Tobias Rehberger, Thomas Ruff, Collier Schorr, Tino Sehgal, Simon Starling, Hito Steyerl, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nanni Valentini, Adrian Villar Rojas, Jeff Wall, Rachel Whiteread, Cerith Wyn Evans, Yang Fudong, Artur Zmijewski.

Link to exhibition page: https://ogrtorino.it/en/events/come-una-falena-alla-fiamma