Artissima 2017

Artissima 2017 runs from Thursday 2 November to Sunday 5 November at the OVAL Pavilion in Torino. This edition is directed by Ilaria Bonacossa, appointed director in December 2016.

Known internationally for its focus on experimental practices and its capacity to renew its vision with each edition, in 2017 the fair introduces a series of new developments that have an across-the-board impact on its programme and structure.

Artissima now includes a new section, Disegni, joining the other existing curated sections Present Future, for emerging talents, which began in 2001, and Back to the Future, inserted in 2010 with a focus on the major pioneers of contemporary art.

In the words of Ilaria Bonacossa, “2017 marks an important anniversary, not just for Torino but for the entire art world: 50 years have passed since the first Arte Povera exhibition (in 1967), the most revolutionary, thrilling and poetic avant-garde movement of the postwar era, which reflected the contemporary spirit of this city. To celebrate that creative energy today, in the spaces of the Oval Artissima evokes two surprising and still little known experiences of those years: the Piper Club of Torino (1966–69), and the Deposito dell’Arte Presente (1967–68). The story of the Piper discotheque, home to a vivacious subculture, is narrated in the project “Piper. Learning at the discotheque”, in which a programme of lecture-conferences becomes an unconventional school. The revolutionary experience of the Deposito, an industrial space opened up to present the works of the nascent Arte Povera outside of “bourgeois” venues, becomes the cue for the project Deposito d’Arte Italiana Presente, in which a warehouse is transformed in an exhibition space to present a selection of works made from 1994 to 2017 by Italian artists of different generations.”