TURIN.- An archipelago

This year, Hans Ulrich Obrist gave me a perfect image to describe Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. During a long and intense conversation, we were reflecting on the history of the Fondazione, on its venues and exhibitions: Hans Ulrich thinks that all together they form an archipelago. The idea of the archipelago is excellent. I like to think of an archipelago of different places -each with its own soul, its own architecture, its own territory- where, from time to time, to invite the artist best suited to interpret them.

Our conversation is now published within the pages of Reaching for the Stars, the catalogue of the exhibition celebrating the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, curated by Arturo Galansino in the rooms of Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, from March to June 2023. Midnight blue cover and silver lettering, the catalogue Reaching for the Stars. From Maurizio Cattelan to Lynette Yadom-Boakye retraces the paths of my choices, going back over the long journey of the collection I started in 1992.

I love travelling, I love travel as an exercise in thinking and looking, in discovery, in encounters. I think the Fondazione resembles a journey. Today it is an archipelago of exhibitions and works that inhabit real places: cities, a park with a vineyard and an orchard, an island. The 2024 programme is a calendar full of dates, but it is perhaps even more a map. It is an invitation to set out on a journey, following the routes that bring us closer to a painting, an installation, a sound. It is an invitation to cross real or mental borders, those between regions and countries but also between thoughts, beliefs, and certainties. Contemporary art is an extraordinary vehicle for this kind of expedition.

Outdoors

I start with open-air projects, designed to create a close relationship with nature, the landscape, the environment.

On 19 February, Precious Okoyomon’s solo exhibition will open in Madrid, promoted by the Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid. The Nigerian-American artist and poet will build a garden within a garden, bringing their sculptures interwoven with lush vegetation to El Retiro Park. This historic site, founded in the 17th century, joins the special places that have hosted us in the Spanish capital in recent years: the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and the Ateneo Library.

On 18 April, on the Island of San Giacomo, in the middle of the Venice Lagoon, there will be a performance by Eun-Me Ahn, a Korean artist, dancer and choreographer. On the opening days of the Biennale, we will therefore return to the island, in the new headquarters of the Fondazione that is under construction, to follow the artist’s choreographies, suspended between joy and gravity, discords and shamanic rituals.

Over the course of the year, the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Art Park on the Hill of San Licerio in Guarene will be enriched by a new work that will join the twelve large sculptures that we have begun to place here in 2019. Commissioned by the Fondazione, the project on which the American artist Tauba Auerbach is working is an optical installation, developed on a wall of over ten metres, conceived to capture the gaze and bring to light the mechanisms of perception and the poetic nature of visual language. Also in Guarene, from May to November, the programming of Palazzo Re Rebaudengo continues, in particular with the annual appointment of the final exhibition of the Young Curators Residency Programme, which will reach its 18th edition in 2024.

Stories, signs, and painting

At the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, in Turin, spring kicks off an exhibition season under the banner of narration, developed in the stories that artists tell, using the surface of a canvas or a screen. On 19 March, four shows open in the exhibition halls of the Turin venue, offering a chorus of gazes, themes, and postures.

With Je Vous Aime, the Italian artist, performer and deaf activist Diana Anselmo presents an installation born from research in pre-cinema archives, which reconstructs the long path of sign language recognition throughout Europe. In the room of Danielle McKinney, painting is a key that leads us into the dimension of silence, spirituality, and dreams, evoked in a sequence of intimate portraits of solitary female figures.

In the paintings by Mohammed Sami, gathered under the title Isthmus, the human presence disappears but lingers on the canvas in the form of a trace and a poignant memory. Painting enters the sphere of cinema with the video by The Otolith Group, the collective founded in 2002 by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, which works with the means of video, curating and writing. Dedicated to Lynette Yadom-Boakye, What the Owl Knows is a poetic documentary that explores and brings out the concreteness of the activity of painting, with its gestures, movements, rhythms and even sounds.

On 20 June, the immersive installation by the Italo-Senegalese artist Binta Diaw, a commission by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in collaboration with Associazione Genesi, will be presented. The project deals with the theme of migration, getting to the heart of its history between Africa and Europe.

The 2024 programme will be completed in November, during Turin’s Contemporary Art Month, with the three solo exhibitions of Klara Hosnedlova, Stefanie Heinze and Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, winner of the illy Present Future 2023 Award. Meanwhile, the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection continues its journey through museums and international institutions, arriving on 21 September at the Consorci Museus in Valencia, Spain.

This is the map of the journey I invite you to make, connecting the dots between the exhibitions and the works we have chosen to draw our archipelago. In closing, I would like to wish you a beautiful 2024.