Contemporary Expressions / Declinazioni contemporanee
MAO presents the second edition of “Contemporary Expressions / Declinazioni Contemporanee”. This programme of artist residencies and site-specific commissions uses contemporary art as a medium for interpreting, re-reading, and showcasing the museum’s collection, descending on the present to discover new meanings and connections across different periods and cultures.
The works by Marzia Migliora, Kengo Kuma, Lee Mingwei, and Francesco Simeti presented in 2023 are joined this year by installations from Qiu Zhijie and Charwei Tsai, along with Patrick Tuttofuoco’s “Ultraworld”, a light installation created for MAO’s facade as part of “Costellazione”, a fringe section of “Luci d’Artista”.
Charwei Tsai’s work features an installation of a hundred offering vessels, crafted by the artist in Taipei, Paris, and Turin, set on a base over ten metres long that traverses the museum’s grounds. Each vase was made using a sophisticated pottery technique and then hand-decorated by the artist with prayer inscriptions.
Patrick Tuttofuoco’s site-specific installation depicts two faces—one evoking Asian culture, the other Hellenistic—and occupies part of the facade of MAO Turin, specifically the corner with sides facing east and west, thus spatially uniting these two polarities.
In “Mappa Mundi” Qiu Zhijie’s maps project, the ink and brushwork of landscape painting are used to define a system of coordinates that condenses individuals, events, ideas, objects, and situations, intertwining them and offering the possibility of understanding them in relation to one another. The intelligently schematic nature of these maps has made it possible to use them as plans for various exhibitions.
Additionally, “Things that Death Cannot Destroy” Linda Fregni Nagler’s work, invites visitors to embark on an encyclopaedic journey into the past. This performance piece was conceived as a choreographed interaction between two nineteenth-century magic lanterns, operated by a projectionist and an actor reading the original captions on the glass slides aloud. In Nagler’s work, the images are organised to create a series of unexpected formal associations.
