Pinacoteca Agnelli
2021-2024
As Chief Curator and Head of the Curatorial Department of Pinacoteca Agnelli (2021-2024), I have been responsible, together and under the Direction of Sarah Cosulich, for the design of the new mission and identity of the museum, articulated in three main trajectories: the temporary exhibitions programme, the project Beyond the Collection, aimed at reactivating the permanent collection of the museum, and the outdoor installation project and public programme on La Pista 500.
Exhibitions
Salvo. Arrivare in tempo, 2024-25
Lee Lozano, Strike (travell. to La Bourse - Pinault Collection, Paris), 2023-24
Sylvie Fleury. Turn me on, 2022
La Pista 500
Shirin Aliabadi, Allora & Calzadilla, Nina Beier, Julius von Bismark, Monica Bonvicini, VALIE EXPORT, Sylvie Fleury, Liam Gillick, Marco Giordano, Nan Goldin, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Shilpa Gupta, Aljicia Kwade, Mark Leckey, Louise Lawler, Chalisee Naamani, Finnegan Shannon, Cally Spooner, SUPERFLEX, Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Beyond the Collection
Lucy McKenzie and Antonio Canova, 2023-24
Simon Starling x Tiepolo, 2022-23
Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar, 2022
SELECTED PROJECTS
Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, PISTARAMA, 2023.
Curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti
Curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti and Sarah Cosulich
Curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti
Exhibitions: Salvo. Arrivare in tempo
Salvo. Arrivare in tempo
01.11.2024 – 31.08.2025
Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin
Curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti and Sarah Cosulich
Arrivare in tempo is the most extensive exhibition dedicated to the Italian artist Salvo (b. Leonforte 1947 – d. Turin 2015). The exhibition offers a path through Salvo’s oeuvre, emphasising how his approach to painting – in its recurrent thematic cycles, attention to art historical references and exploration of light – has always been in continuity with his early conceptual research.
Born in Sicily in 1947, Salvo moved to Turin as a child in 1956 where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. After an initial phase in which he worked as a conceptual artist in close contact with the Arte Povera movement, from 1973 Salvo dedicated himself exclusively to painting, an unconventional choice for the cultural climate of the early 1970s. A maverick of the art scene, for the next forty years, Salvo pursued a unique exploration and critical reflection on the medium of painting. The exhibition reveals how his painting practice was never in contrast to his initial conceptual phase, but instead absorbed the latter’s nature and intentions as part of a consistent artistic path.
A pioneering artist of the second half of the twentieth century in Italy, Salvo worked independently from currents and trends while looking at traditional art historical subjects and languages. Developed in close collaboration with the Archivio Salvo, the exhibition focuses on some of the fundamental motifs of his artistic exploration: the concept of repetition and probing recurring motifs both as painting technique and conceptual urgency; the reflection on painting as a language and language as art; the relationship between art history and the representation of the everyday.
Derived from a quote by the artist, the title Arrivare in tempo refers to Salvo’s painting methodology, describing his desire to capture the essential on canvas. It also plays on his supposed anachronism with the contemporary art scene, as he favored the slower temporalities of art history over the fashion-driven timelines of his peers. Additionally, it refers to an anecdote in which, after causing a minor car collision, Salvo apologized by saying he was trying to arrive in time to see the sunset.
1. 1973
The exhibition begins with a focus on 1973, a significant year in Salvo’s career, as it is traditionally considered the year of his transition to painting. It is the year in which his work was included in various exhibitions, including two particularly significant ones: a solo show at John Weber Gallery in New York, in which he presented a group of photographic works that still employed a conceptual language; and one at Galleria Toselli in Milan, dedicated exclusively to painting, in which he presented two monumental works on paper. The comparison between the two exhibitions, both reconstructed in the first room of the show, reveals the tensions within Salvo’s oeuvre, and how the divisions between the various aspects of his practice are much less clear-cut and more permeable than the way in which they have been described by much of the criticism to date. Despite the differences in the mediums used, there are many points of contact between the two exhibitions. The importance of self-representation and the relationship with the tradition of art history are two of these, as well as a degree of essentiality that exists in both the photographs and the paintings, which evokes the aesthetic canons of conceptual language. It could be said that the early period of Salvo’s work already contained the elements of originality and distance from the dominant currents of Arte Povera and Conceptual Art that the artists close to him clung onto.
6. Nocturnes (A Night, a Street, a Lamp, a Drugstore)
A series of canvases produced between 1978 and 2000 offers an overview on a recurring genre in Salvo’s production: the night landscape. The artist dedicated himself to capturing with great precision the luminescence of the moon, which serves as a protagonist against a background of backlit palm trees in a series of exotic settings, shines softly on the rooftops of mountain villages, or appears as a crescent moon that illuminates ancient ruins set in imaginary Arcadian landscapes. Human skin provides an opportunity for a point of warm light in the cold palette of the night scene, as can be seen in a self-portrait, in a portrait of his wife Cristina, and in that of Aleksandr Blok, a poet much admired by Salvo, and whose poem A Night, a Street, a Lamp, a Drugstore inspired both the title of the work and that of the room.
7. Mediterranea
The journey continues The room is dedicated to the series of the capricci, San Giovanni degli Eremiti, and the ottomanie paintings. These groups of works are brought together in a journey that follows Salvo’s passion for architectural motifs and styles from various geographical areas and eras, which he combined in an eclectic way. These landscapes trace a journey that focuses specifically on the Mediterranean region. Alongside the paintings, a series of sketches on letterheaded paper from his travels are also exhibited. In these quick, spontaneous drawings, Salvo captured the outlines of houses, trees, and church towers, reducing them to their basic geometric forms, laying the groundwork for the paintings he would later create in his studio.
8. San Giorgio e il Drago
Salvo’s work is characterized by a constant dialogue with tradition and the great artists of the past, to whom he refers for inspiration, or with explicit dedications. An emblematic cycle of works illustrating this approach is the one dedicated to Saint George and the Dragon, a recurring theme in the paintings of artists such as Paolo Uccello, Carpaccio, and Raphael, from whom Salvo took his inspiration. In line with Salvo’s conceptual approach, these works are often also self-portraits: by replacing the faces of the saints with his own image, Salvo reflected on the role of the artist in relation to the construction of myth.
Published by JRP | Editions
2. Lapidi
Referring to the commemorative plaques placed on buildings and monuments, and Roman epigraphs on church walls, the series of pieces that Salvo referred to as lapidi [headstones] represents significant evidence of his work’s proximity to the language of Conceptual Art and Arte Povera, but it is equally important for understanding its divergences from those same languages. In contrast to the conceptual artists in the United States, who used language in an impersonal and informative way, frequently in the form of simple typewritten words on paper, Salvo proceeded using serif inscriptions, inspired by a long tradition of plaques an epigraphs. At the same time, Salvo chose marble, a noble and long-lasting material, in contrast to the Arte Povera milieu in Turin, which was predominantly interested in the use of soil, wood, iron, or scrap materials.
3. Studio
This room aims to offer a speculative representation of Salvo’s studio through works and documents that throw a light on the artist’s creative processes, his methodological reflections, and his points of reference. The studio was the primary place where Salvo’s pictorial activities took place, and also where his practice was intertwined with his research and critical reflection. Displayed in the Pinacoteca Agnelli exhibition for the first time in its hand- and typewritten versions, Della Pittura is a treatise he wrote in 1980–1982, his philosophical positioning on this medium. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s condensed writing style, the essay consists of 238 short paragraphs relating to painting, which open up questions of poetic and philosophical nature. Phrases such as “In how many ways can a rose be painted?” or “You need many winters to eliminate winter,” highlight how the repetition of certain subjects in the artist’s work was part of a search to capture a deeper sense of reality. In the exhibition, the text is in dialogue with a series of works that have books as their subjects.The repetition of the same subject is typical of Salvo’s formal research, and testifies to his constant reflection on historical-artistic, literary, and philosophical traditions.
4. Bar Sport
The exhibition continues with an idealized journey around the places and subjects that characterized the artist’s production—the depiction of light at different times of the day and in various environments being the common thread through them all. “Salvo has light in his sights. And he has an excellent aim,” Lisa Ponti stated in an interview with the artist in 1990. Arrivare in tempo follows this trajectory and accompanies the audience through the various phenomena of luminosity that the artist sought to describe. The dim light of the candles in his studio is followed by the electric lights of the urban landscape, with almost solid beams penetrating the interior of bars, or the suffused gradients of light emitted by neon shop signs. Created between 1980 and 2015, the works in Bar Sport explore the motif of the bar at night, a subject to which Salvo frequently returned throughout his life, considering it equivalent to a genre painting subject such as a domestic scene or a depiction of popular life.
5. La Grande Sera
The path then opens onto a grand sunset that leads from city streets to stations and highways, skirts factory sites in industrial areas, and ultimately arrives at the port, also lit by twilight. The title La Grande Sera [The Great Evening] draws inspiration from the novel written by Salvo’s friend, the writer Giuseppe Pontiggia. Through the careful selection of many works depicting different subjects, the exploration of the same moment of the day emphasizes Salvo’s thorough chromatic research in his quest for the perfect sunset. La Grande Sera connects to the exhibition title, Arrivare in tempo, by means of an anecdote linked to the artist’s life. Following a minor car accident in which he rear-ended the car in front of him, Salvo justified his lack of attention by claiming that he was trying to arrive in time to see the sun setting. The episode is narrated by Salvo in a letter to Pontiggia, which accompanied a canvas gifted by the artist to the writer. Both the canvas, which in Salvo’s words presents “unprecedented results in the depiction of the sunset,” and the letter that accompanied it, are displayed in this section of the exhibition.
Exhibitions: Lee Lozano. Strike
Lee Lozano. Strike
08.03.2023 – 23.07.2023
Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin
Curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti and Sarah Cosulich
Strike is the first monographic survey in Italy dedicated to Lee Lozano (1930–1999). The exhibition brings together a broad selection of works by the artist, spanning her brief but extremely prolific career from 1960 to 1972. Trained as a painter, Lee Lozano swiftly rose to recognition in the New York art scene of the 1960s, with a multifaceted oeuvre that incorporated an original experimentation with painting alongside a deeply conceptual practice. Despite being actively involved in the social and artistic context of the time – dominated by Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptualism – Lozano maintained throughout her life a creative and political stance that radically rejected all labels, culminating in her choice to abandon the art world altogether in 1972.
Divided into seven thematic rooms, the retrospective explores various stages of her career, primarily in chronological order. The first three rooms present figurative drawings and paintings in which vivid, sometimes grotesque depictions of the human body push the limits of traditional nude iconography, with a deliberately satirical stance. The core of the show is dedicated to Lozano’s Tools series, in which hammers, screwdrivers and other utensils become the anthropomorphic subjects of large-scale oils on canvas. In another room, her Airplanes series presents various flying objects interacting with human orifices and body parts. The exhibition concludes by tracing Lozano’s shift towards minimalist abstraction, with her monumental paintings accompanied by a rarely seen selection of preparatory sketches. Lastly, the booklet accompanying the exhibition brings together a significant number of “Life-Art” Pieces, works that mark her transition to an exclusively conceptual phase, which ends with her definitive rejection of the art scene through Dropout Piece (1970).
The exhibition reflects Pinacoteca Agnelli’s new contemporary mission, aimed at highlighting unprecedented artistic perspectives that dialogue with the historical and symbolic legacy of the exhibition site, a former car factory. The depiction of tools and machinery in Lozano’s works is just one of several threads connecting her practice to the broader themes of production and labour. In the artist’s visual vocabulary, machines and human bodies constantly overlap, as they are both technologies aimed at generating either pleasure or violence. Together, they become a representation of the strict, overwhelming patriarchal society Lozano lived in – which she obsessively investigated through meticulous order or unabashed chaos. Machines, bodies and objects become representations of power structures, which sometimes hinder and sometimes channel Lozano’s obsessive search for a connection to higher energies.
The artist’s feverish artistic experimentation went hand in hand with a constant questioning of her own identity, radically rejecting every form of established order. Through this approach she attempted to break the shackles of a deeply sexist and conservative society, to challenge the production mechanisms of a merciless art world, and finally to defy the limits of her own body.
In homage to the key role of language and puns in Lozano’s work, the exhibition title plays on all the meanings of the word “strike”. As a verb, it implies a violent action, an uncontrollable outburst of energy that can be generated by a body, tool or weapon. The act of striking also refers to “stroke”, suggesting that a paintbrush, too, can behave like a body or weapon against the canvas. As a noun, the term implies a radical refusal to work, and it is a literal citation of General Strike Piece (1969), Lozano’s first act of withdrawal from the art world. The latter is presented at the entrance to the exhibition, as an invitation to look at the artist’s oeuvre through the radical points of rupture that marked it. Provocative, playful, yet lethal, Lozano’s “strikes” are aimed both at art and at the social, emotional and political dimensions of her life. As art critic Lucy Lippard has noted, “the kind of things other people did as art, she really did as life – and it took us a while to figure that out”.
Conceived and developed by Pinacoteca Agnelli, the exhibition travelled to the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris from September 20, 2023.
4. Tools: I'd rather be a hammer than a nail
In a series of paintings made between 1962 and 1964, the vivid bodies that Lozano portrayed up to that moment definitively turn into tools. The large-scale works that she develops in this period show giant hammers, clamps, screws, and various other utensils, as those featured in the famous photograph of the artist in her studio taken by Hollis Frampton in 1963. Lozano’s tools evoke images of the factory, but also remind an approach to sculpture that, during those years, increasingly relied on industrial techniques. At the same time, they are clearly anthropomorphic objects, which seem to channel the energy of the subjects Lozano portrayed up to that point, crystallising it into monumental forms of power.
5. Airplanes: Let worries fly out all holes at once
The room presents a series of works from 1962 and ’63, which partially overlap with the period of the Tools, yet explore a set of recurring concerns in a new and different way. These pieces revolve around the motif of airplanes – or, rather, of flying objects portrayed with varying degrees of abstraction – that interact with various bodily orifices, especially noses, mouths and ears. The rendering of the airplanes’ trajectory is in keeping with Lozano’s effort to grant a physical shape to forms of energy that are not immediately visible. After the bold expressionism of her early drawings, this endeavour of hers gradually shifts towards an abstract representation of movement and energy. The artist’s interest in the forces that allow the human body and the world around it to function – or malfunction – grows deeper in this period, as she begins to introduce an increasingly scientific approach and language into her work.
6: All Verbs: Become a gas, a charge, a force
In 1964 and ‘65, Lozano’s work as a painter took a clear step towards minimalist abstraction. From then until 1967 she created a series of large-scale works; a selection of them is presented here, along with rarely seen preparatory drawings. In the paintings from this period, the broad fields of colour that characterise her Tools and, to a lesser degree, her Airplanes series, gradually turn into autonomous shapes: a definitive attempt to channel through abstraction the energy conveyed from the beginning in Lozano’s paintings and drawings. In keeping with this mission, most of the paintings from this period have a verb as their title. Examples such as Spin, Clamp, Crook, Swap, Cram, Shoot, Hack and Stroke suggest that the functions of the tools and other objects that inhabited Lozano’s visual universe up to then have been abstracted from their physical representation, becoming language, action, pure power.
7. Life-art Pieces: Total personal and public revolution
The exhibition closes with the notebook containing Dropout Piece, Lozano’s definitive abandonment of the art world and social life in general – “the hardest work I have ever done.” Dropout Piece is part of a broader arc of experimentation that leads Lozano to the complete fusion of her artistic practice with her life, as summed up by her “Life-Art” Pieces, most of which are from 1969. In many cases, the field of reference for these actions is the art world: the pieces try to expose – and combat – its competitiveness, hypocrisy and classism. Other pieces are aimed at testing out ways to expand the senses, such as in Grass Piece, where she transcribes the experience of being uninterruptedly high on marijuana for a month, while in the immediately subsequent No Grass Piece she investigates the effects of total sobriety.
Lozano’s intertwined experimentation with her own body, behavioural patterns, and society at large eventually leads her to a series of boycotts – or, rather, self-boycotts. General Strike Piece is followed by Boycott, her controversial decision to stop talking to women, and finally by Dropout Piece. Lozano’s three “strikes” are a gradual rejection of the systems imposed on her at the time: a rejection of capitalist expectations about her work, a rejection of the defining system of patriarchy, and a final rejection of society at large.
1. Drawings: I want to push these walls out with my elbows
The first room in the exhibition presents a vast selection of drawings that Lee Lozano made between 1959 and 1964. Conceived as sketches, preparatory drawings, but also standalone works, they show the transition from her academic exercises at the Art Institute of Chicago to her early studio practice in New York. The various series on view emphasise the recurring motifs that Lozano explores also in her paintings. This extensive installation is a microcosm unto itself, which offers important keys to understanding the artist’s work throughout the first part of her career in New York.
The drawings seem to centre on a blunt, grotesque portrayal of the human body, often shown in sensual or violent interaction with its surroundings. The metropolis to which she has just moved intersects with the private sphere of her studio and the boundaries of the human body, an encounter narrated through polymorphic and often perverse imagery: dismembered bodies interact with bits of the city, as they incorporate, penetrate or are penetrated by objects, consumer products and scrap material collected in the streets. Tools turn into sexual organs; suburban scenes are infested by nail clippings that seem to be laughing; the usual functions of bodies and objects are altered, castrated or perverted, in choreographies that often suggest sexual undertones.
2. Body = Machine: Keep the machine well greased to function smoothly
The paintings in this room were made in 1962 and ’63. The depiction of dismembered, faceless bodies sheds light on the evolution of Lozano’s approach, in which painting is always invested with the concrete consistency of the material world. In contrast to the lofty, transformative vision of painting suggested, for instance, by Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism, Lozano sees paint as a solid, dirty, visceral compound, so interchangeable with the body’s own output that she called herself a painter “whose bowels function magnificently”.
In Lozano’s visual language, the modernist trope equating the human body to a machine veers towards extreme, disturbing imagery. The functioning of both is often twisted and corrupted, channelled into a rampant production of power that can spill out in the form of pleasure or enraged acts of aggression. For Lozano, depicting the relationship between machines and bodies is a way to visualise how power structures operate, and the indiscriminate violence carried out by any form of established order.
3. Pun Value: blow your nose to breath clearly, blow your mind to think clearly
The room includes a selection of drawings from 1962, which are particularly significant because they testify the role that language – and puns in particular – hold for Lozano from the outset of her practice. As the artist explained, “great puns are metaphor in its purest form”: rhetorical formulas that sum up two different spheres of meaning in one image, offering a commentary that is both comical and striking. In this series, Lozano’s approach of fusing pornographic images and advertising slogans, already found in previous works, is taken to an extreme. The drawings and accompanying puns tap into the traditional power of caricature, often presenting a polemical reading of the social context in which Lozano is operating.
Lozano’s satirical output shows the complex tension between her open criticism of the system, on the one hand, and her refusal to commit to collectively organised forms of struggle, on the other. Although Lozano’s political position is often explicit – as in the case of her support for the Black Panthers – her critical stance is ultimately expressed through a radical individualism, with a reluctance to fully participate in any shared initiative.
Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris
Marsilio Editori
Exhibitions: Sylvie Fleury. Turn Me On
Sylvie Fleury. Turn Me On
27.05.2022 – 15.01.2023
Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin
Curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti and Sarah Cosulich
The exhibition Turn Me On by Sylvie Fleury is an immersive journey through the core themes of her practice, which, since the late 1980s, is articulated through video, sculpture, neon, painting, sound and performance. Turn Me On is Fleury’s most extensive project in Italy to date, and it inaugurates Pinacoteca Agnelli’s new programme, which is dedicated to exhibitions of artists whose works constitute fundamental points of contact between twentieth-century art history and contemporary artistic practices.
The Swiss artist’s eclectic production consists of seductive and radical images that question the sexist stereotypes promoted by mass culture and art history, turning them into a weapon in the hands of those who are usually its victims. In her works, Fleury often uses pre-existing sources to construct new meanings: objects, symbols and images from the fields of fashion, cinema, pop subcultures, motoring, science fiction and contemporary art are absorbed into the artist’s visual vocabulary and used to compose unexpected narratives.
A “punk feminist in disguise”, as she calls herself, Fleury confronts the contemporary mechanisms of the construction of value, and how they interact with gender politics and the forms of patriarchal power. At the same time, she appropriates and distorts the traditional languages of Western art history, such as Pop Art and Minimalism, to engage in an ironic and sharp critique of their historical and political implications – from the idealisation of the male artist to the complicity of art with the dynamics of consumerism.
Created specifically for the spaces of the Pinacoteca, the exhibition project Turn Me On also opens up a dialogue with the imagery of Lingotto, the former FIAT car factory that now houses the museum alongside cinemas, shops and other commercial venues. The title of the exhibition, just like an advertisement slogan, embraces two universes of meaning linked to the production of desire: the invitation to start a car on one hand, and the sphere of eroticism on the other. The phrase “turn me on” exposes the tension between the fetishisation of the vehicle and the objectification of the woman’s body pursued by commercial jargon. Appropriated by Fleury, Turn Me On is transformed into a demand, challenging both the stereotypically masculine imagery associated with the car and the sexism of contemporary consumerism.
1. Please, no more of that kind of stuff
The room Please, no more of that kind of stuff presents a series of showcases containing an unlikely variety of objects. The sculptures in the vitrines might resemble, in equal measure, mass-produced products, minimalist works or unlikely weapons, such as a revolver that turns out to be a hair dryer, high heels studded with spikes, and a pair of Gucci-labelled golden handcuffs. These objects are juxtaposed by Fleury through a standardised form of display that is as typical of museums as of luxury shops, mimicking the processes of categorisation and normalisation enacted by the market and by the museum institution alike.
The artworks and articles stored under the showcases turn out
to be equally objects of desire, whose value is inversely proportional to their accessibility. The installation is illuminated by one large neon piece, bearing the phrase that gives the room its title: ‘Please, no more of that kind of stuff’. The sentence sounds like a critique on the over-production regimes typical of neoliberal societies, but is in fact a bitter comment left by a visitor in the guest book at the entrance of one of Fleury’s first shows.
5. The Eternal Wow
Fleury’s reappropriation of the great contemporary art movements continues in the room The Eternal Wow. The four walls house a
pattern of parallel vertical stripes, the signature motif of conceptual artist Daniel Buren since the 1970s. In the case of The Eternal Wow, however, the stripes occasionally open up into soft shapes that interrupt the rigorous verticality typical of the artist’s work. In the centre of the room, Gold Cage LKW reproduces the iconic image of a golden cage that has been forced open, creating a direct formal and conceptual tension with the painting on the walls. The Eternal Wow is an invitation to ‘free Buren’, while breaking free both from the mythology of the genius artist (male, white), and from the structural forms of power that insist on reproducing it.
On the walls are an eyeshadow palette, enlarged to look like a minimalist painting, and two of Fleury’s ‘crash tests’, leftovers from performances by Fleury consisting in the artist interacting violently on car shells and on their macho symbologies. The ironic and sexy outlook of Fleury’s works hides a provocation: if minimalist art has historically been made by and for men, perhaps the only way in which female subjects can access artistic production and aesthetic enjoyment is through its translation into the language of make-up or through exercising sabotage and disfigurement, such as the act of scratching a car. The validation of women passes through the acceptance of their status as consumers, the claiming of forms of violence, or – in Fleury’s work – a combination of the two.
6. First Spaceship on Venus
The room First Spaceship on Venus is dedicated to a series of works by Fleury that look at the science-fiction imagery of outer space and its exclusively male prerogative. Inspired by a science fiction film from the ’60s, the title refers to the saying “men are from Mars and women are from Venus”, playing with the cliché of the irreducible cultural opposition between men and women to highlight its fallacy. First Spaceship on Venus consists of rockets made in a wide range of media that parodistically deform the shape of the spaceship, and the phallic symbols it represents. In the room, the audience is greeted by three large rockets covered in white fur that stand out against a wall painting of stylised flames, similar to those found on customised cars, motorbikes and trucks.
The virile symbols of high-speed vehicles are juxtaposed with colours and materials culturally associated with the female gender, such as the shocking pink of the flames and the white fur of the rockets. The fun as well as metaphysical landscape of the room hosts a stretch of soft rockets made out of foam rubber, lying defeated and helpless under a neon light stating: ‘High Heels on the Moon’. Fleury’s exuberant and post-apocalyptic B-movie-like imagery meets the possibility of a feminist futurity: the playful gesture of walking in high heels on the surface of the moon represents a liberating demand for access to space by all those subjects who were excluded by the patriarchal narrative of its conquest.
8. She-Devils on Wheels
The last room of the exhibition is dedicated to She-Devils on Wheels,
a car fan club open only to people who identify as women, founded
by Fleury in the 1990s and inspired by a 1968 cult film featuring a
biker gang called the Men-Eaters. Objects, symbols and imagery from machismo car subcultures are absorbed into Fleury’s post-feminist vocabulary and used to construct unexpected narratives: customised Formula 1 dresses, lacquered car parts and oil barrels materialise in the exhibition the club’s messy headquarters. The installation is also the projection set for some of the artist’s videos: just as Fleury’s sculptural research gathers objects and approaches from different fields, so too do her videos, in which she appropriates disparate filmic languages, adopting codes characteristic of performance art, cinematographic imagery and narrative formulas from television commercials.
In Between My Legs (1998–2001), the erotic allusion in the title is belied by a performance in which Fleury is filmed driving her car, alternately holding between her legs a bottle of Coca-Cola, a pack of cigarettes, and a sandwich. SF430 (2009) shows a sort of orgiastic choreography between a group of women, a Ferrari that breaks down in an expanse of mud and a horse that seems to come directly to life from the car brand’s famous logo. Finally, Cristal Custom Commando (2008) shows Fleury herself visualising, with the help of a crystal ball, a biker-gang gathering in a forest to shoot Chanel handbags. In Fleury’s words: ‘What interests me the most is usually not immediately visible— something beyond appearances. Sometimes all you need to do is scratch the surface, other times you have to blow it to pieces...’.
in Sylvie Fleury, Turn Me On, Corraini Edizioni
2. Walking on Carl Andre
Sylvie Fleury often uses fashion as a tool to satirise the fetishisation of female glamour, playing with the ways in which consumerism reiterates gender stereotypes. The second room of the exhibition welcomes visitors to an environment that suggests a fitting room. Here, a television broadcasts the video Walking on Carl Andre, consisting of a collection of sequences of women in heels walking over a series of Squares, the floor-pieces that made the minimalist sculptor famous.
The work introduces a recurring theme in Fleury’s practice: appropriating and distorting the tropes and languages of prominent contemporary art from the ’60s and ’70s to critique the historical and political context in which these works were created. Although Andre encouraged audience interaction with his work, the video identifies an unexpected, unintended public of his sculptures. Exuberant, colourful shoes confront the rigidity of Squares, creating a visual as well as conceptual antithesis. With this simple and powerful gesture, Fleury turns high-heel shoes, stereotypically related to femininity, into a weapon that visually overpowers the straightness of Andre’s art.
3. Be Good, Be Bad, Just Be!
Be Good, Be Bad, Just Be! is the reproduction of a cave, which Fleury imagines as a space for self-transformation. The work contrasts
the literary and philosophical connotation of the cave as a spiritual place for purification with the advertising slogan of self-awareness suggested by the title. The audience’s passing-through the cave refers both to a mystical rite of passage and to the commercial concept of customisation as the adaptation of a product to the needs of a specific customer. In the case of Be Good, Be Bad, Just Be!, the product addressed consists in the interiority of the people who enter the cave, to live an experiential process of self-improvement.
The entrance of the installation recalls an organic and natural form, which contrasts with the cold composition of the first room. The possible reference to the female body of the cave enters into a direct dialogue with the dressing room of Walking on Carl Andre, uniting two seemingly distant imaginaries in their proposal for spaces of interiority, dedicated to self-reflection and associated with the female universe. Be Good, Be Bad, Just Be! closes this first section of the exhibition inspired by the forms of contemporary consumerism with a reflection on how the construction of our identity is often mediated by the products we buy – the clothes we wear, the objects we surround ourselves with. The cave reminds us that the space of spirituality has now been absorbed by the production system, for which the transformation of our subjectivity is as much a commodity as a pair of shoes.
4. Fur Fetish: Silver Screen Survey
The room takes its name from Fur Fetish, Silver Screen Survey (1997), a collection of dozens of handkerchiefs on which the artist has type-scripted scenes from Hollywood movies. Each handkerchief bears the title of a film and a brief description of one or more of its scenes, all of which have in common the presence of a female protagonist wearing a fur coat. The work is produced and displayed according to the classic dictates of ’60s conceptual art, suggesting that the appearances of the fur-wearing actresses through the movies could be a sort of organic performance. At the same time, the use of the typewriter recalls the imagery of secretarial work, while the meticulous investigation carried out on a single subject reminds us the obsessiveness on which fetishes are nourished. Fur Fetish, Silver Screen Survey confronts us with the power of fashion and cinema as tools for creating and disseminating models and stereotypes. In this case, the association of the female protagonist with fur suggests an overlap between the figure of the woman and that of the animal, belonging to two different spheres and yet both often subordinated to the role of object for someone else’s pleasure or entertainment.
The works are set up on four walls entirely covered in white fur, one of Fleury’s cuddly rooms, at the centre of which stands Labrisrynthe, an enormous silver-plated shark tooth. Worshipped as a talisman in Pacific Islander cultures, the shark tooth was appropriated in the 1990s and 2000s by Western fashion as a summer necklace accessory. Enlarged and positioned in the centre, Labrisrynthe crowns this room dedicated to the relationship between femininity and animality, and the commodification of both by Western pop culture.
Corraini Edizioni
La Pista 500
Pista 500
2022-2024
Curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti and Sarah Cosulich
Pinacoteca Agnelli’s programme expands outside the spaces of the museum through an ambitious outdoor art project which transforms the former car-testing track on the roof of the factory into a park featuring a series of artistic and environmental installations.
The programme features projects by international artists, often conceived specifically for the spaces of the Pista. The works draw on various sculptural languages: audio and environmental installations, light and sound works, video and expanded cinema, as well as sculptures that experiment with urban materials.
The works invite the visitors of the Pista 500 to reflect on what public space means today, and what stories and monuments we want to inhabit it with. They confront the legacy of the factory to explore the social, cultural and political implications of its transformation, activating unexpected dialogues with the industrial archaeology of the factory.
Nina Beier, The Guardians, 2022
Nina Beier + Bob Kil, All fours, 2022
Guardian lions are the product of a long and extensive cultural history. The ancient motif travelled over the millennia from Greece to India to China and on to Italy, picking up new forms and meanings along the way. In Western culture, the marble lion ended up becoming a representation of power, positioned at the feet of monuments as a sign of authority, or at the threshold of buildings, cementing the boundary between private property and public space.
On the Pista 500, five monumental guardian lions are caught lying on their side. Detached from their human-made function as architectural ornamentation, the lions are returned to their untamed state and allowed to rest. The Guardians act as an ode to the afterlife of monuments, testifying to the human illusion of dominance over nature and the clumsy journey of symbols pushed through contemporary global markets. In this unlikely pride of lions, traditional iconographies of power encounter formal features borrowed from such disparate influences as Disney movies and Chinese Foo dogs, unveiling the collective, accumulative logic behind the production of our commodities and the imaginaries they convey.
Performance by Nina Beier and Bob Kil activating the work The Guardians by Nina Beier. Performed by: Brianda Carreras, Bob Kil, Sara Leghissa, Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin, Franca Pagliasotto, Valerie Tameu
Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, PISTARAMA, 2023
PISTARAMA is a site-specific environment conceived for the north parabolic curve of the Pista 500. PISTARAMA consists of a monumental collage, which takes its cue from the political and cultural history of Turin and extends to illustrate episodes and figures linked to social struggles across different times and geographies. Inspired by the tradition of Muralism, PISTARAMA gathers historical and fictional characters, works of art, documents, photographs, film references and the artist’s visions, to explore the ways in which collective bodies claim the space of the city and give rise to counter-narratives.
PISTARAMA narrates and celebrates the way in which the union of people and their collective action can become agents for social change starting from two fundamental modes: the practice of writing in public space, and the shared movement of bodies marching in demonstration. The parabolic curve of the Pista opens up to host a collection of graffiti and writings, testimonies of people and social movements which, through words, reclaim the public space to write a collective history. The writings range from graffiti found on the walls of Turin to Roman engravings to contemporary demands of worldwide importance. Climbing up the sides of the parabolic curve, one reaches the central part of the mural, which instead encompasses a large collective portrait, in which the history of the city of Turin becomes a starting point to address important contemporary themes, such as resistance movements against authoritarian powers, pacifism, feminist and anti-racist struggles, as well as the struggles of workers, captured by Gonzalez-Foerster from an inclusive and intersectional perspective.
Gonzalez-Foerster’s research began by studying the workers who organised forms of anti-fascist resistance in the Lingotto factory in 1943. The artwork thus contributes to the historiographic mission of the new Pinacoteca, which aims to bring to light sometimes little-known episodes from the former FIAT factory, creating a dialectical space for reflection within the history of the institution. Far from aiming to be an exhaustive historical description, PISTARAMA aspires, instead, to become a collective tool to engage with a history that must not be forgotten. The project is an invitation to the visitors of the Pista to look at the past together, bringing it to life in contemporary times: a place of memory to be completed together and a stimulus for new shared narratives.
Download the booklet with the full list of charachters featured in the work.
Julius von Bismark, Die Mimik der Tethys, 2023
Die Mimik der Tethys (The Expressions of Tethys) consists of a buoy seeming to float high in the centre of the iconic helicoidal ramp of the former FIAT factory at Lingotto. Its movement evokes that of the waves, and is achieved through a sophisticated engineering system that connects Die Mimik der Tethys to a sister buoy located in the Atlantic Ocean. The original buoy continuously transmits motion data via satellite to its double, and the information guides eight electric motors and cable winches, reproducing its motion in real-time. The artwork thus becomes a kind of hypnotic machine; a surreal presence that leads one to imagine that the monumental space of the ramp could contain the waves of the ocean.
The work seems to stage a legend related to the architecture of Lingotto, which, due to its shape and colossal scale, used to be referred to as ‘the transatlantic.’ The title is inspired by the figure of Tethys, the sea goddess of Greek mythology, daughter of the sky (Uranus) and of the earth (Gaia). The literary inspiration that this personification carries evokes a romantic conception of the sea, tied to the aesthetic and emotional experience of humanity in the face of the sublime grandeur of nature. Von Bismarck wants us to confront precisely our understanding of the concept of nature, emphasising that it is not innate but culturally constructed. The majestic and untamed ocean of the romantic tradition clashes with the idea of sea we know today, at the centre of urgent geopolitical issues; the one whose rise is a symptom of contemporary climate crisis; the one where thousands of people lose their lives on migration routes. Die Mimik der Tethys is therefore a presence with strong poetic significance, but it is also a direct witness of our troubled times.
The Billboard
Nan Goldin (2022), Shirin Aliabadi (2023), Chalisée Naamani (2024)
The Billboard is a project by Pinacotca Agnelli dedicated to the display of visual and photographic contributions. The billboard mimics the ones usually placed on the sides of streets, evoking, through the works it presents, the multiple imaginaries that this format carries.
Nan Goldin, Monopoly Game, New York, 1980 (2022)
The photograph presents a series of subjects—in some cases figures who were famous in the East Village at the time such as the poet, artist and critic Rene Ricard—gathered in a tiny living room, where they are playing, with extreme concentration, the game of Monopoly. The domestic situation depicted by the photograph makes it atypical and almost surreal compared to the scenarios of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Presented in the form of a poster on a motorway billboard, the photograph takes on a monumental dimension, creating a contrast between the intimate space of the home and the public space of the Pista 500. The intense seriousness of the figures around the table seems to remind us how the model of society represented by the game, based on capitalist economy and private property, is the same one that operates outside the room in everyday reality. This metaphor is exacerbated by the visual relationship created between the Monopoly game's boxed path and the street circuit of the Pista 500. The moment of bewildered suspension portrayed by the photograph suggests the transformation of the mundane moment of the game into a commentary on the precariousness of the present time, while embracing the strong sense of community that makes Goldin's work so relevant and necessary today.
Shirin Aliabadi, Girls in Car, 2005 (2023)
The photograph Girls in Car (2005) is part of a series in which Shirin Aliabadi (1973, Iran – 2018) documented the social phenomenon of evenings spent in cars, characteristic of the young urban middle class in Iran in the 2000s. Young Tehranis, restricted in their social interactions with the opposite gender in public spaces, used car rides as a pretext to interact with each other, causing massive traffic jams in the streets of the northern part of the city. The project offers an intimate and precise reflection on unforeseen forms of social interaction and the preconceptions that influence most people's perspective, especially in contexts that go beyond the Eurocentric norm. “This image of women chained by tradition and the hijab is not even close to reality here. They all had music on and were chatting to each other between the cars and making eyes and conversation with boys in other vehicles.”
In the nearly twenty years that have passed since the photos were taken, Aliabadi's work has acquired many layers of complexity, becoming a testament to a specific historical moment within the long and complex history of women's emancipation in Iran. Looking at this image today inevitably brings to mind the major protest movement that arose following the death under suspicious circumstances of Mahsa Amini, arrested by the religious police in Tehran for improper hijab use in September 2022. Suppressed with violence by Iranian security forces, the manifestations were the largest and most substantial in the country since 2009 and garnered significant international participation. The international community joined the Iranian population in protest under the common cry of "woman, life, freedom." One year after those events, facing an ongoing battle for human rights that is far from over, the billboard aims to act as an echo of Aliabadi's voice, resonating with narratives from the past that are essential to understanding today's complexities.
Chalisée Naamani, My Mother Was My First Country, 2023
My Mother Was My First Country engages with the propagandistic function of billboards, conveying political messages in public spaces as though they were products for purchase. The image presents a deliberately domestic scene that contrasts with both the industrial setting of the track and the typical urban context of billboards. The artist depicts herself in front of a voting booth with her newborn son at her feet, engaging with art history by evoking traditional mother-and-child iconography. The booth’s curtain is decorated with the names of various world capitals and worn by the artist, creating the illusion of classical drapery.
The composition recalls Renaissance traditions, where every detail holds precise meaning, as well as the perspectival construction of Persian miniatures, in which the image is flat and there is no hierarchy among depicted elements. As the title “my mother was my first country,” suggests, the theme of motherhood is intertwined here with the idea of civic rights, offering a contemporary reflection on the relationship between the personal and the political. A quote at the bottom of the image provides interpretive insight: “We clutch our ballots like love notes,” a line by journalist Anna Garofalo, describing the emotion of Italian women voting for the first time on 2 June 1946. Romantic love, once prescribed as a woman’s sole devotion, becomes a different form of love, an emancipatory force on the path to female self-determination. In the image, each object, garment, or product is a deliberate choice, serving as both a cultural and political statement. The phrase “Make Europe Anti-Fascist Again” on the hats is a reworking of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan; the chains on the floor reference both the protest methods of early 20th-century suffragettes and activists still fighting for human rights today, such as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, who remains in prison. The Mona Lisa, displayed on the wall beside the artist’s smile and printed on a boxing bag at the centre of the composition, is a significant presence, representing both the most famous female face in art history and a distinguished foreigner in her current country of residence.
Artists (2022-2024):
Shirin Aliabadi, Allora & Calzadilla, Nina Beier, Julius von Bismark, Monica Bonvicini, VALIE EXPORT, Sylvie Fleury, Liam Gillick, Marco Giordano, Nan Goldin, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Shilpa Gupta, Aljicia Kwade, Mark Leckey, Louise Lawler, Chalisee Naamani, Finnegan Shannon, Cally Spooner, SUPERFLEX, Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Sylvie Fleury Yes to All, 2022
The phrase ‘yes to all’ was taken by Sylvie Fleury from the common computer message prompting the user to select between the commands ‘ok’, ‘cancel’ or ‘yes to all’. The sentence reminds us how the user-friendly interfaces of our devices are based on the extreme simplification of very complex processes, that while facilitating our daily procedures they also pressure us to recklessly accept ‘terms and conditions’ we haven’t read. While referring to a familiar, mundane act that often goes unnoticed, the sentence points to the fragility of human nature, ready to accept anything without realising that we are taking part in an unsafe transaction of data.
Turned into a massive neon light and placed at the top of the new entrance of the museum, the message gains a new, confident meaning. Yes to All points to the possibility of turning our lazyness into a political statement, extending that same acceptance to a principle of radical inclusivity. Pinacoteca Agnelli borrows Fleury’s message to signal a new vision for the museum, decidedly open to everyone.
Cally Spooner, DEAD TIME (Melody's Warm Up), 2022
Conceived for – and together with – the spaces of the former FIAT factory, one might say that DEAD TIME (Melody’s Warm Up) is a score for a cello, a building and anything that happens to be in between them. The sound piece is designed to reverberate throughout the five stores of the ramp that workers originally used to bring cars from the assembly lines to the testing track on the roof of the Lingotto. The work only operates in the possibility of the building's participation in it: while the cello plays, the architecture of the factory performs as an enormous resonance box, and the echo of cars crossing through the building gets incorporated in the score. The melody we hear is familiar, though anti-narrative and episodic: the cellist is playing tonalisation exercises starting from Bach’s Cello Suite No.1 in G (Prologue), a training inspired by the natural expression of the human voice, performed by musicians to find their ‘tone’ through scales or improvised repertoire. A brief, intermittent digital ‘beep’ clicks at regular intervals, marking the path of visitors down the ramp while hinting at the transformation of work from the model of the factory to new forms of labour, where it is increasingly harder to distinguish free time from productive time, life from work. Through the exploration of temporalities that are usually hidden from our sight, DEAD TIME (Melody’s Warm Up) incites a reflection on different forms of time control and possible modes of withdrawal.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (1991), 2023
“Untitled” (1991) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Cuba, 1957 – Miami, 1996) consists of an image depicting an unmade double bed, installed in multiple outdoor billboard locations, as required by the instructions of the work. When it was first exhibited across the boroughs of New York City in 1992, the work prompted an exploration of the boundary between public space and private life in an era marked by the HIV pandemic, stigmatised by homofobic public opinion. Despite its direct relationship with this genealogy, Gonzalez-Torres welcomed the openness of the work to ever-changing interpretations and associations, influenced by the historical and social contexts in which it would be displayed each time. Twenty years after the work was firstly exhibited in town, it raises still-relevant questions about the collective processing of loss, in a historical moment that has disrupted our habits regarding mourning and absence.
Alicja Kwade, Against the Run, 2023
Against the Run is a new commission created by the artist for the Pista 500. An apparently ordinary clock, similar to those found on city streets, stands in one of the garden's flowerbeds. At first glance, its hands appear to move backward, reversing the clock's mechanism and thus the linearity of time. In truth, it is the clock's face that is moving while the hands continue to mark the exact time. Through this small trick of perception, Kwade opens up a reflection on our dependence on an arbitrary convention in daily life, such as that of time.
The project connects to the history of the Lingotto factory. In fact, the design of Against the Run is inspired by the clock model that has been used historically in FIAT factories, evoking the central role that time measurement played in the factory as a primary indicator of the productivity of the workers. The artwork also seems to reference the famous "clock’s hands strike" of 1920 when, in opposition to the implementation of daylight saving time, the workers of FIAT Brevetti in Turin decided to set all the clocks in the plant back by one hour. The workers' action was a small one, yet it challenged a massive rule, that of coordinated universal time – which, in Italy's case, was historically set in the city of Turin. It was from here that, until 2016, the time signal was transmitted, namely the famous chime broadcast by RAI (the Italian state broadcaster) to mark each hour. In the workers' gesture a hundred years ago, as in Kwade's work today, the questioning of the measure upon which our days are based exposes the instability of the modern concept of progress as well as human fragility in the face of its unraveling.
Mark Leckey, Beneath My Feet Begins To Crumble, 2022
The site-specific piece Beneath My Feet Begin To Crumble presents a monumental LED wall along the south parabolic curve of the former FIAT factory testing track. The video installation recalls a jumbotron, a kind of large-screen television display usually installed in stadiums to enhance fans’ experience of the game. Either zooming in and enlarging the action, or replaying key moments of the match in slow motion, jumbotrons allow a real-time cinematic mediation of the sporting event. The protagonist of Beneath My Feet Begin To Crumble is the iconic, postcard-like Alps mountain range surrounding the Lingotto area. Leckey transports the mountains onto the track to produce a CGI simulation of their peaks, whose transformations hint at the possibility of the mountains being engineered much like the mass-products once made in the factory. The juxtaposition of the mechanical memories of the Lingotto with the cinematic spectacle of the mountains produces the feeling of a post-industrial sublime, in which the enjoyment of majestic magnitude coexists with the presentment of indefeasible doom.
OHT, LITTLE FUN PALACE, 2023
What is a strike - a claim, an interruption or both? What is left of the strikes that wrote the history of the Lingotto - the voices, the words or the silence of an interruption? And what does it mean to strike in the arts?
In the context of its public programme, Pinacoteca Agnelli invites OHT [Office for a Human Theatre] to realise LITTLE FUN PALACE. Performances, workshops, readings on the Pista 500 that takes place from Friday 26 to Sunday 28 May on the roof of the Lingotto.
During the three-day event, the Little Fun Palace caravan moves round the track as an open-air mobile forum and meeting place for the promotion of interpersonal exchange. In a mixture of performances, talks, music, readings, picnics, workshops and cinema under the stars, the caravan will be the centrepiece of a conversation with many voices revolving around our imagination of strikes in art, as well as the legacy of the Lingotto. Words such as resistance and demands echo with the desire of people to make their voice heard by acting in public space through an individual and collective body.
With Annamaria Ajmone, Nanni Balestrini / Nicolò Porcelluzzi, Giulia Crispiani & Coro delle Mondine di Novi, Silvia Bottiroli & Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Sofia Jernberg, Marie Moïse, Harun Morrison, Edoardo Mozzanega, Luisa Passerini, Ettore Scola, Ula Sickle