Turin is a real hub for photography, so much so that it’s launching a new festival: the Exposed Torino Foto Festival. About 20 exhibitions in some of the city’s most iconic locations, thus allowing an uncluttered look at the creativity both enacted and preserved in Piedmont’s capital city. It is worth noting that the city is home to one of the earliest daguerreotypes ever taken in Italy, dating back to 1839 and displayed at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.
The festival’s theme, New Landscapes, opens up many possibilities for exploration, starting with an attempt to understand what photography is today, how it is changing and how this change is perceptible, through an overview of current trends. The artistic directors, Salvatore Vitale and Menno Liauw, sought to elucidate this concept, by investigating above the relationship between image and society and emphasizing the artistic process and the research aspect.
In a world of images, a festival of photography offers an opportunity to examine the potential for interpreting reality. Moreover, in Turin, this is inevitably intertwined with contemporary art. So Exposed is dividing and multiplying into rivulets with exhibitions that prompt us to reflect and question, which is one of the main purposes of art. It would certainly take more than one day to fully appreciate the complexity of the proposal, which encompasses works and projects by established and emerging names, different languages, techniques and experimentation. As is often the case, a map (physical and mental) can help people discover original paths according to their interests.
Thus, the OGR Torino presents A View from Above, with a world seen from a vertical perspective, which challenges the common sense of vision, with images by Mario Giacomelli and Hiwa K. (among others), at the Polo del ‘900, there is Mónica de Miranda, the winner of the first edition of Exposed Grant for Contemporary Photography 2023, with As if the world had no East, while at Palazzo Birago, Tender Loving Care by Kalina Pulit is on.
We can only list a few of the exhibitions at the kermess, but Torino is well worth a visit this late spring, as it takes in trends in international photography. At Camera – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, South Korean artist Dongkyun Vak explores the tension between man, nature and technology in Heatwawe (in collaboration with Vontobel Art Collection), and a project featuring previously unpublished works by Arianna Arcara, Antonio Ottomanelli and Roselena Ramistella on the landscape of linguistic minorities in Italy.
Queer Icons, a project by the Oslo Fotogalleriet, includes an exhibition at the Ex Galoppatoio della Cavallerizza Reale – Paratissima, and a public program that celebrates, thanks to the life stories collected by photographer Fin Serck-Hanssen and authors Bjørn Hatterud and Caroline Ugelstad Elnæs, Norwegian traditional underground queer culture.
American photographer and architect Erin O’Keefe brings to the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali her project, Non fiction, on the perception of nature of spatial perception and the optical tools, as well as the unavoidable misalignment that the camera produces when it turns 3-D shapes and spaces into a 2-D image. At the Cucine storiche di Palazzo Carignano, Lebohang Kganye presents Shall You Return Everything, But The Burden.
State of Emergency – Harakati za Mau Mau kwa Haki, Usawa na Ardhi Yetu, a fictional documentary project created by photographer Max Pinckers in collaboration with both Mau Mau and Kenyan war veterans, in an attempt to fill in the historical gaps related to the official narrative of the colonial period is on at Palazzo Madama – Museo Civico d’Arte Antica.
The Villa della Regina is hosting True Colors by Mathieu Asselin, a project that questions the ecological narrative perpetrated by contemporary industry. It’s inspired by the Dieselgate case of 2014, with prints made by recycling production waste.
The EXPOSED programme continues with co-produced exhibitions developed in collaboration with institutions and independent spaces in Turin. Like Expanded, a project from the Collection of the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT. It’s an exhibition in three chapters, a coherent path which starts with Expanded With at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, with works by pioneers of Land Art, Arte Povera and Body Art: the photographic medium is the starting point for investigating different ways of relating to the landscape. Stage two, Expanded Without at OGR Torino, with installations created without any traditional photographic media and in which the viewer becomes part of the image construction process. Then, Expanded – I Paesaggi dell’Arte at the GAM- Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, which deals with the Italian history of photography dedicated to art.
The video installation Chimera (2022) by Lena Kuzmich, is presented at the Fondazione Merz as part of the exhibition Sacro è, in which the languages of a young generation of artists suggest a reflection on the concept of the “sacred”. The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, is showing works by Diana Anselmo (Je Vous Aime), The Otolith Group (What the Owl Knows, a video installation dedicated to the writer and painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye) as well as When We Were Old. Opere dalla Collezione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The Pinacoteca Agnelli presents “Untitled” (1991), by Felix Gonzalez-Torres for EXPOSED: an image on the Pista 500 billboard, on the Lingotto building rooftop, branching out into the city with six others. Cripta747 is showing Cosmic Radiation by Graeme Arnfiel, while Across the Ocean in the Mucho Mas! space is the installation by the Vietnamese Hiền Hoàng. Fabio Barile is at Witty Books with his Works for a Cosmic Feeling.
Exposed is promoted by the City of Turin, the Piedmont Region, the Turin Chamber of Commerce, Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo and Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT on behalf of Fondazione CRT and is organised by Fondazione per la Cultura Torino.
Just a note: during the opening, the “photographic density” was even greater, with The Phair, Paratissima and other events, many of which are still ongoing, such as the Cristina Mittermeier. A Greater Wisdom exhibition at the Gallerie d’Italia or Robert Capa and Gerda Taro: Photography, Love, War at Camera – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, And many others…
Paola Sammartano
Exposed. New Landscapes
From May 2 to June 2, 2024
10100 Turin
Italy
https://www.exposed.photography/en
