In conjunction with Artissima, MAO is opening the second edition of Contemporary Expressions / Declinazioni Contemporanee on Saturday 2 November at 6 pm. This programme of artist residencies and site-specific commissions uses contemporary art as a means for interpreting, re-reading and showcasing the museum’s collection, descending on the present to discover new meanings and connections between different periods and cultures.
The works by Marzia Migliora, Kengo Kuma, Lee Mingwei and Francesco Simeti presented in 2023 will be joined this year by installations by Qiu Zhijie and Charwei Tsai, and Patrick Tuttofuoco’s Ultraworld, a light project made for MAO’s facade that will be part of Costellazione, a fringe section of Luci d’Artista.
For the opening, the artist Linda Fregni Nagler will present Things that Death Cannot Destroy, a performance that will take place in the Salone Mazzonis at 6.45, 7.45 and 8.45 pm.
On Saturday, 2 November, entry at special fare of 1€ from 6 to 11 pm. Starting Sunday 3 November, visitors may see all the works in Contemporary Expressions with the purchase of a ticket to the permanent collections.
The Projects
Charwei Tsai
This work involves the installation of a hundred offering vessels, produced by the artist in Taipei, Paris and Turin, set on a base measuring more than ten metres that crosses through the museum’s grounds. The vases were made using a sophisticated pottery technique and then hand decorated with prayer inscriptions by the artist. Mixing ritual and artistic tradition, the work encourages the active and performative participation of the visitors, who are asked to leave small offerings in the vases.
In connection with her residency project, Charwei Tsai is also presenting two works in dialogue with MAO’s permanent collection, specifically, objects in the Himalayas gallery. The first work, Songs of Chuchepati Camp, 2017, documents the deplorable conditions in the camp for earthquake survivors in Chuchepati, Nepal. The second, a drawing from the Sky Dancers series, pays homage to the five dancers and represents female energy in the tantric tradition.
A set of 24 vessels as unique work will enter the permanent collection of MAO.
Patrick Tuttofuoco
‘Our experience on Earth is often defined in terms of a duality between opposing forces, a situation in which the existence or identity of something depends on the co-existence of at least two conditions that are opposed but also dependent on one another and presuppose each other. It might actually be through getting past these categories that we can grow and develop as individuals and as a community. Here, I am referring to a field of tension that stands between these polarities and can understand and get past them through growth and a new vision of the world.’
With this observation as a starting point, Patrick Tuttofuoco imagined a form that could unite apparent opposites in a single field (east/west, male/female, Kali/Dionysus), which become the basis for reflecting on overcoming gender barriers and knocking down stereotypes, labels and categories, in an attempt to redirect attention to and shed light on the essence of individual identity rather than its appearance.
This site-specific work depicts two faces, one evoking Asian culture, the other Hellenistic, and occupies part of the facade of MAO Turin, specifically the corner with sides that face east and west, thus uniting the two polarities spatially as well.
Qiu Zhijie
This new site-specific work for MAO is part of the artist’s decade-long project Mappamundi.
Almost ten years ago, Qiu Zhijie began drawing intricate maps of the relationships between his works of art. This synthesis of research, imagination, writing and action gave rise to his ‘Mapping the World Project’. In the maps that followed, 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 each other.
The intelligently schematic nature of these maps has made it possible to use them as plans for various exhibitions.
Mapping has served multiple functions in Qiu’s practice: self-aware gesture, exhibition plan, political topology, work-flow diagram, cultural research programme and intellectual exchange. It also ultimately eflects the composite identity of their creator: artist, curator, educator, eclectic cartographer and theoretician.
Linda Fregni Nagler
Linda Fregni Nagler’s work invites visitors to embark upon 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 out loud. In Nagler’s work, the images are organised to create a series of unexpected formal associations.
The performance creates a slow, hypnotic flow, its register intertwining narrative and didactics, documentary and fantasy. This montage of late nineteenth-century images is the manifestation of a world in which people, plants, objects, animals and even buildings and monuments are by now long gone. The image of the world as represented by modernity emerges from this ‘reactivated’ archive: a world bent and altered by human will. Here we find, for example, the great geographical conquests (the north and south poles, the highest summits, the most remote islands and more), the idea of exoticism and otherness (here, the relationship with the Museo d’Arte Orientale becomes very close), as well as the photograph as colonial document and the transformation of landscape (deforestation, mass agriculture, mine exploitation and intensive farming).
Artists’ Biographies
Charwei Tsai was born in 1980 in Taipei and lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in Industrial Design and History of Art and Architecture (2002) and completed the postgraduate research programme La Seine at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2010). Her recent exhibitions include: Himalayan Art Now at the Rubin Museum, New York (2024); 15th Gwangju Biennale (2023); World Classrooms at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2023); In the Present Moment at the Banff Art Centre, Canada (2023); SIGG: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Sigg Collection at the SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul, South Korea (2023); Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends at Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom (2023); Performance at Climat: quelle culture pour quel futur? Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022); screening and talk at Tate Lates, Tate Modern, London (2022); Refugees Welcome: Artists for Refugees at the Museum of Modern Art of Warsaw, Poland (2022); Buddha10, Museo d'Arte Orientale (MAO), Turin (2022); Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care: On Care and Resilience, Radio Lumbung, Documenta XV (2022) and online screening of the recently commissioned project Numbers at the Sydney Opera House (2022).
Linda Fregni Nagler works mainly with the photographic medium. She was born in Stockholm and lives in Milan, where she graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in 2000. Her work explores the origins of the modern gaze, concentrating on the photographic medium and its history. Her practice intertwines the characteristics of the work of artists, scholars and collectors. Her studio is not so much a place of production as a place of reception where, after a process of meticulous collection and selection, the photographs converge, to then be reformulated and reactivated, thus taking on new meaning. Her interests include the theory and materiality of the photographic image, the history of photography, the study of iconographic conventions and visual clichés, the anonymous, vernacular image and appropriation as contemporary artistic practice. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 55th Venice Biennale, the Palazzo Enciclopedico, 2013, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, and in institutions in Italy (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, MAXXI, Rome, Fondazione Olivetti, Rome, Triennale Milano, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin) and abroad (Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, Columbia University NY, Nouveau Musée National, Monaco, ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg). Alongside her work as an artist, she has also cultivated her practice as a historical researcher, developing a project between 2012 and 2017 on the pioneering photographer Hercule Florence and co-curating, with Cristiano Raimondi, the exhibition Hercule Florence, Le Nouveau Robinson at the Nouveau Musée National, Monaco. In 2007, she won the New York Prize, awarded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Columbia University. In 2008, she was awarded a residency at the Dena Foundation, Paris, in 2014, she was an artist-in-residence at Iaspis (Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists), Stockholm, and in 2016, she won the Premio ACACIA. Nagler is professor of photography at the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, and teaches ‘Photography: Theory and Method’ at IULM University, Milan.
Patrick Tuttofuoco (Milan, 1974) is a visual artist and teaches in the Faculty of Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA, Milan. His practice, which mixes modernism and Pop, is conceived as a dialogue between the individual and his capacity to transform the environment in which he lives, exploring the concepts of community and social integration. The artist pushes representation towards abstraction, using man as a paradigm of existence and as a matrix and unit of measurement of reality. This cognitive and interpretive process generates infinite versions of the human being and the context of his existence, which are translated into forms the give life to his sculptures. His most important solo exhibitions include: Abbandona gli Occhi, Palazzo de’ Toschi, Bologna (2024); Il resto dell’alba, Pininfarina Archietture e Patrick Tuttofuoco, MAN, Nuoro (2023); Tutto Infinito, OGR, Turin (2017); Welcome, Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2015); Focus On His Eyes, Italian Cultural Institute Madrid, in collaboration with Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2013); Patrick Tuttofuoco. Those Ghosts (with John Kleckner), Peres Project, Berlin (2011); Mirror and Windows, Pilar Corrias, London (2009); Revolving Landscape, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2006); Chindia, Haunch of Venison, London (2006).
Qiu Zhijie (Fujian, 1969) was born in Zhengzhou, in Fujian Province, China. He lives and works in Beijing and Hangzhou. He graduated from the Department of Printmaking at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1992. Qiu is professor at the Chinese Art Academy and in the Department of Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Qiu is primarily known for his calligraphic works and ink paintings, photography, video, installation and performance. His art represents a new kind of experimental communication bridging the Chinese literary tradition and contemporary art, social participation and the self-liberating power of art. His most recent solo exhibitions include The Grand Project, Fujian Art Museum, Fuzhou (2015); L’Unicorno e il Dragone, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2013). The artist has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including: Bentu, Chinese Artists in a Time of Turbulence and Transformation, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 56th Venice Biennale (2015); 31st São Paulo Biennial (2014); 53rd Venice Biennale, China Pavilion (2009). Qiu Zhijie also curated China’s first video art exhibition in 1996 and, between 1999 and 2005, ‘Post-sense Sensibility’, a series of exhibitions promoting young Chinese artists. In 2012, he curated the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Reactivation. In 2009, he was named artist of the year in China. His works are in the collections of many prestigious museums and institutions, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, the Neuer Berliner Kunstrerein and the White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney.
Charwei Tsai's project is realised with the support and collaboration of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the Taipei Representative Office in Italy. We also thank Mor Charpentier Gallery.
Ultraworld by Patrick Tuttofuoco is produced by Wonderglass for MAO. Ultraword is part of Costellazione, fringe section of Luci d’Artista.
Thanks to Qiu Zhijie studio.
Thanks to the Vistamare gallery for their collaboration on the performance Things that Death Cannot Distroy by Linda Fregni Nagler.
