Jaguar Land Rover – the new automotive partner of the fair – and Artissima have established a dialogue, conceiving and organising JaguArt, a project that starting from the fair will involve 10 Italian cities in the discovery of new talents, to be presented during Artissima 2020.

A biennial dialogue triggered by the shared desire to support emerging art and to create successful long-term synergies between the players involved. Art schools, galleries and car dealerships will be the protagonists of a true road show in major Italian cities.

…ma l’amor mio non muore is the title of the site-specific project by Marcello Maloberti (Codogno, 1966) set up in the magical ballroom of the Principi di Piemonte di UNA Esperienze, the historic 5-star hotel in the centre of Turin, from 27 October to 3 November, 2019 . Thanks to a new partnership with Gruppo UNA, during the days of the fair it was possible to see a large performative and sculptural installation on the theme of power, in an exceptional location.

The ballroom – Salone delle Feste – a work of architecture from the 1930s conserved in all its splendour and elegance, has been transformed to become a stage for a symbolic, violent performance revealed to the audience by the remains of a sculptural and destructive fury.

Fragments like archaeological relics scattered on the ground, the remains of destruction that became a symbol with a thousand overtones. A poetic act of performative impact.

HEAD is a new, innovative project in which Artissima has established a dialogue with Franco Curletto, a hairstylist renowned in the world of fashion, cinema and art, who with his team created the hair concept for a performance by the irreverent artist Tomaso Binga (Salerno, 1931).

In his career Franco Curletto has often collaborated with the world of contemporary art, with artists like Vanessa Beecroft and Francesco Vezzoli. In line with this constant, intense contamination with the world of the performing arts, communication, design and fashion, Franco Curletto supported the work of Tomaso Binga  in the creation of a collaborative performance in the context of the fair. Inside a “creative bubble” physically suspended in the air, which once contained the referee’s cabin for Olympic events, a team of skilled hairdressers worked on the preparation of the actions performed by Binga.

An ironic and irreverent forerunner of feminist themes through performances connected with the body and its social interpretation, Tomaso Binga, with her male pseudonym chosen as an act of protest, has developed her work in the field of visual and sound poetry since the early 1970s. Her performances stem from the desire to unmask male chauvinism and its multiple forms. Her projects conceived to shock and amuse are often based on her private life, as in the work from 1977, when she staged the marriage between herself, Bianca Pucciarelli, and her male alter ego, Tomaso Binga.

Artissima expands the interaction with Sky Arte, becoming the guest curator of the new installation for the lunettes, the windows of the Cracco Restaurant in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. Giovanni Ozzola (Florence, 1982) has been selected for the fourth installation of the three art showcases, freely visible to all from 22 October, 2019 to April 2020. Tuscan by birth but a tireless traveller, Ozzola has chosen to capture the passing of time through images of abandoned industrial spaces, covered with graffiti but lit by three “circles of sky” that trigger an unexpected trompe l’oeil effect.

Galleria Cracco is a project conceived by the chef Carlo Cracco together with the communication agency Paridevitale and Sky Arte, which also curates its contents.

Special thanks to Galleria Continua
Light design: F/Art

CONCRETE is a project initiated by VANNI occhiali, a brand Made in Italy operating in over 40 countries, which has always invested in the world of art and creativity, to contaminate the styling of its products with the visions of an artist.

Making its highly specialised know-how, finest machinery and innovative techniques of colouring and workmanship available, VANNI occhiali has invited the artist Cristian Chironi (Nuoro, 1974) to create a capsule collection of 400 metal eyeglasses with photochromic lenses. Two men’s/unisex and two women’s models take their cue from the various locations in the world where the artist has lived and worked: Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido; Unité d’Habitation, Marseille; Villa Pierre Jeanneret, Chandigarh; Casa Victoria Ocampo, Buenos Aires. Colour, composition, aesthetic form and inclination link back to the mental impressions and life experiences of these places and works.

Visitors who wore the glasses at the fair have been involved in a direct interaction with the artist, which was sudden, without preliminary agreement, unpredictable; revealed by quick approaches, intimate domestic gestures, confiding gazes.

In this project Cristian Chironi developed a new relationship among design, architecture, installation, performance, visual dimension and narration. The eyewear, besides being worn by selected guests of the fair, journalists, curators and gallerists,  were on sale for the public.

At the VANNI eyewear showroom in Piazza Carlo Emanuele II, the artist also created a project space with an installation to display the collection and to narrate the whole project.

The Vip Lounge returns as a location of new developments and unexpected projects. For the 2019 edition, 100x100factory partnered with Artissima, presenting Together, a research project that triggered new synergies between excellent Italian companies to organise an initiative of furnishings and design contaminated with art to give rise to a perfect combination of functional quality and beauty. The bookcases and tables of 100x100factory, the sofas and armchairs of Montbel and the fabrics of Floranth welcome guests of the fair into a new atmosphere coordinated in collaboration with Studio Vudafieri Saverino Partners, which invited the artist Nick Devereux (Panama, 1978) to generate a series of transparent and at the same time intimate spaces using his tapestries, thanks to the know-how of Floranth, a leader in the field of textile production.

Devereux has organised his project around the myth of Arachne, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the young weaver defies the goddess Minerva and is transformed into a spider as punishment for her boasting. The tapestries connected with this myth were seen through veils of tulle that created spaces that were both intimate and exposed, thanks to the transparency of the materials.

Starting from a “magical” story of Made in Italy developed by 100×100 group with Vudafieri-Saverino Partners (in which the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris is the protagonist of a process of renewal of its spaces thanks to a new look conceived with the support of “enlightened” Italian managers), Together underlined the strong connections between art and design, and the way culture and the market can collaborate to maximize the potential for the promotion and spread of Italian style.

K-Way, a long-term partner of Artissima, has sponsored Portrait of Corporate Space, a project that rethought the central staircase of the fair leading to the Vip Lounge, updating it with five large site-specific canvases by Miltos Manetas (Athens, 1964). An insatiable experimenter and chronicler of the transformations of our society, Manetas is a figurative painter, a conceptual artist and theorist who explores the aesthetics and the representation of the digital revolution through his works. At Artissima 2019 his large canvases of computer cables and half-open laptops encountered the abysses, the sea, the earth, the air and the space: five positions from which K-Way explores the world and its transformations.

For its 50th anniversary, the film The Italian Job became the protagonist of a surprising installation, Hang On A Minute Lads… I’ve Got A Great Idea, realised by the British sculptor Richard Wilson. The project, curated by Mark Hinchcliffe with Heidi Donohoe, was produced in collaboration with Gruppo Building and was on view from 31 October until 2 December 2019 in via Lascaris 5, Torino.

Inspired by the final scene of the classic British heist movie, Wilson balanced a full-sized replica coach on the very edge of the roof at Domus Lascaris, a completely refurbished rationalist building from the 1950s, activating a series of artistic performances.

The original film, featuring Michael Caine and released in theatres in 1969, narrates an adventurous heist in Torino. Exhilarating plot twists and chase scenes make it captivating and unpredictable, precisely like this artistic initiative.

FPT Industrial, Main Sponsor of Padiglione Italia at the 58th Venice Biennale, presented the work of Christian Holstad (Anaheim, California, 1972) at Artissima, shown for the first time in May on the Grand Canal in Venice.

The large cornucopia, entirely made with plastic refuse, was the protagonist of a special outdoor installation that welcome guests to Artissima. The classic meaning of the cornucopia, an ancient symbol of fortune and abundance, is disrupted by the artist, taking on an unusual negative meaning of “excess”: the work is a reflection on the protection of the seas from plastic waste, and reveals the commitment of FPT Industrial to art, culture and environmental sustainability. FPT Industrial also demonstrates this commitment with projects like “Fishing for Plastic”, thanks to which about 40 fishing boats from San Benedetto del Tronto gathered and brought to shore over 14 tonnes of refuse recovered from sea during the summer of 2019.

Artissima continues its collaboration with EDIT, the innovative gastronomic centre that combines experimentation with sharing, opened in Turin at the end of 2017.

Se il Vino sa di Tappo is the title of the second appointment with The EDIT Dinner Party curated by Bruna Esposito (Rome, 1960), winner of the EDIT prize in 2018. The performative dinner was hosted at L’Osservatorio EDIT on 1 November 2019 and created in collaboration with prize-winning chef Mariangela Susigan, already the culinary maven of the fair, in charge of the gourmet Vip restaurant and bistro inside the Oval for the third consecutive year.

Concentrating on the theme of ideal beauty and goodness, the new performative dinner put a ban on boundaries between East and West, past and future, outlining a hybrid present that became a sort of choral experience of different cultures for the participants.

Se il Vino sa di Tappo was an all-around tasting, also featuring light sounds, that set out to respect the movements of the human body, rediscovering the same delicate, archaic gestures in technology, which in contact with certain natural elements with symbolic connotations regenerated the spirit of dance. Through this improbable combination, the fragments of nature can again demonstrate an archetypal gesture, an ancient but regenerated beauty of the human spirit. In this way, the atmosphere of the space, together with the courses prepared by the chef, transformed the harmony between nature and technology into small gifts and good omens for the audience.

Special thanks to carlorattiassociati