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Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea is delighted to announce Mutual Aid – Art in collaboration with nature, a major exhibition dedicated to sustainability curated by Francesco Manacorda and Marianna Vecellio, which opens to the public on Thursday 31 October 2024 until Sunday 23 March 2025.
 
The exhibition explores the creative collaboration between humans and the non-human world by gathering a selection of artists who have addressed the interdependence between humans and nature from the 1960s to today.
 
The show profiles different phases of artistic reflection on ecology, culminating in concerns around the current climate crisis and the theoretical developments which put into question the centrality of man in the natural system. The project focuses around the act of sharing the creative process between artists and natural elements (animal, vegetable and inorganic), interpreted by the works of artists such as Maria Thereza Alves, Michel Blazy, Bianca Bondi & Guillaume Bouisset, Caretto/Spagna, Agnes Denes, Hubert Duprat, Henrik Håkansson, Tamara Henderson, Aki Inomata, Renato Leotta, Nicholas Mangan, Yannis Maniatakos, Nour Mobarak, Precious Okoyomon, Giuseppe Penone, Tomás Saraceno, Robert Smithson, Vivian Suter and Natsuko Uchino.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by the concept of mutual support proposed by Russian philosopher and zoologist Piotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) in his book Mutual Aid – A Factor of Evolution, published at the beginning of the last century. Kropotkin claims that the survival of species does not only benefit from competition, as Charles Darwin argued; on the contrary he demonstrates that, when a system has few resources and is unstable, survival is more likely if the elements in play collaborate and share a common plan. This makes ‘mutual aid’ a key factor in evolution, particularly in times of crisis. This attitude is highlighted in the exhibition by a selection of works of art started by humans but ‘finished by nature’ or co-created thanks to the contribution of non-human elements and agents.
 
Mutual Aid – Art in collaboration with nature invites us to reconsider the validity of the separation between nature and culture, reinterpreting them instead as collaborating elements called upon to support and nourish each other. The exhibition proposes to the public an ecosystemic vision and an innovative and urgent approach to major environmental issues, based on coexistence, sharing and the value of multi-species collective creativity and planning.

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Two group exhibitions from the Frac des Pays de la Loire collection.

A powerful vector of emotions and alliances across centuries and cultures, the kiss changes its meaning according to era and context. Through the filter of the kiss, a plural vision of the body, of desire, of ritual, of courtship or even of care is summoned up. But what about younger generations? In a post-covid world, can we still kiss? What is the durability and topicality of this gesture, whose representation seems as old as art itself?

Taking as its starting point the collection of the Fonds régional d’art contemporain, augmented by loans and previously unseen productions, this exhibition brings together over thirty French and international artists. Sur tes lèvres traces an intimate or societal journey through films, photographs, installations, performances and poetry from the 70s to the present day.

Image: Jean-Michel Sanejouand, Le baiser, 2000 (Sculptures-Peintures). Acrylique sur papier encadré sous verre / Acrylic on paper (framed), 36,1 × 44,1 × 2,5 cm (14 ¼ × 17 ⅜ × 1 inches). Courtesy the Artist Estate and Art : Concept, Paris.

Is this title a nominal proposition, which one imagines could constitute a kind of description of what is, if not any exhibition, at least this one, specifically? A place capable of being open to the breath of the winds, yet welcoming to those who come to visit it, an exploded but engaging house, gracious and hospitable? Or should we read this title as a paradoxical injunction, an almost brutal, pocket philosophical precept, urging us to free ourselves from what encloses us? Wouldn’t it be more simply a gentle, vibrant invitation to be whispered or sung over and over again, a mini-poem of just four feet, which manages to create a musicality through the subtle play of repetition, and slight variation, which phonetically brings together the syllables [mœʁ]” and [myʁ]?

If the title of this exhibition by Vidya Gastaldon can teach us anything about her work, it’s that here, as elsewhere, there’s no need to choose between different interpretations, that they’re all valid at the same time, and that the serpentine forms of the question mark are always better than that little black hole that is the dot. Demeure sans murs is thus an invitation, an injunction and a description, a simple and beautiful title, perfectly open, from which it becomes possible to unfold and understand some of the laws that govern this highly visual and spiritually rich work.

Excerpt from the tex by Jill Gasparina

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10/10 : 10 artists for 10 designs on Sèvres porcelain. Sèvres showroom.

With Ulla von Brandenburg, Philippe Cognée, Lionel Estève, Monique Frydman, Fabrice Hyber, Myriam Mechita, Françoise Pétrovitch, Nathalie Talec, Barthélémy Toguo, Thu-Van Tran

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Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles illuminates the diverse roles textiles play in artistic practice.

The exhibition brings together artists who take the intimate and domestic quality of textiles and transform them into theatrical, bold, unsettling and humorous artworks that inspire, challenge and offer new ways of thinking.

Featuring work created predominantly over the last decade by 15 UK-based artists, Material Worlds highlights their deep awareness of textiles’ cultural history and a shared desire to challenge its traditional associations, testing the material’s expansive and subversive potential.

The familiar fabric of everyday life is reimagined into the unexpected – the ordinary made extraordinary – to reflect on ideas of gender, identity, community, race, technology, and myth; demonstrating the medium’s potential to transform in the hands of different artists.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Caroline Achaintre, Jonathan Baldock, Phyllida Barlow, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Alexandre da Cunha, Holly Hendry, Tonico Lemos Auad, Paul Maheke, Anna Perach, Yelena Popova, Paloma Proudfoot, Yinka Shonibare, Rae-Yen Song, Tenant of Culture and Zadie Xa.

Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles is curated by Caroline Achaintre with Hayward Gallery Touring, in partnership with Mead Gallery, Djanogly Gallery, The Wilson Gallery and Pitzhanger Gallery.

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Group show at the Vincent Van Gogh Foundation, Arles, from October 5, 2024 to February 9, 2025

with Richard Artschwager, Paul Blanchet dit Le Sauvage, Louise Bourgeois, Vittorio Brodmann, Claude Cahun, Martin Disler, Valie Export, Markus Gadient, Bruno Jakob, Asger Jorn, Martha Jungwirth, Karen Kilimnik, Verena Loewensberg, Albert Oehlen, Thomias Radin, Pipilotti Rist, Klaudia Schifferle, Pierre Schwerzmann, Hyun-Sook Song, Vincent Van Gogh, Dominique White

The “high yellow note” sought by Vincent Van Gogh and so many artists in his wake explores the limits of expressivity and attempts to go beyond them – whether formally or emotionally.

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Ulla von Brandenburg is a German artist whose work explores the relationship between body, space and materials, particularly through the use of fabric. Her work “Solid Earth, Liquid Wind”, presented at BASE, is a particularly striking example of this research. In this installation, the body is conceived as a living material, capable of shaping and transforming the surrounding space. von Brandenburg’s works highlight behaviors and interactions that transcend conventional norms.

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With Héloïse Bariol and Nick Oberthaler.

Ample, espace d’art contemporain’s mission is to create a dialogue on contemporary art in a rural setting in the heart of the Beaujolais region. The association focuses on encounters – between artists’ work, between artists, the region’s network of professionals, local residents, school audiences and local institutions – through vernissage events (lunches/dinners) and private visits dedicated to particular audiences. In particular, the program aims to highlight the reciprocal influence of works of art on one another, through a variety of hanging arrangements

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The group exhibition Déliquescence brings together works by Quebec and international artists on the theme of entropy. One of the fundamental principles of physics – the 2nd law of thermodynamics – postulates that entropy represents the inevitable degradation of everything. The subject is therefore reflected upon in this exhibition through its definition as an energy that measures deterioration, quantifies the intensity of transformation from one ordered state to another uncontrolled one, quantitatively establishes a system’s degree of disorder, its capacity to change state or even its amount of instability. Whether it’s the collapse of ruins, the organic transformation of perishable materials or chemical processes that alter an object to the point of dysfunction, entropy represents the tendency of all matter and energy in the universe to evolve towards a state of disorder before reaching neutrality, inert uniformity or radical transformation to another condition.

Left to their own disruption, the result of chemical or biological mutation, fusion or melting, each of these artistic proposals submits to an evolution towards decomposition, the abandonment of its defined form and the acceptance of its dissolution.

This exhibition was inspired by my lifelong interest in industrial wastelands, which are themselves subject to a form of entropy. My fascination with their status as ruins that slowly decay over time, and my desire to reverse this trend by rehabilitating them, is part of an ongoing negotiation with this form of obsolescence. Déliquescence is also an opportunity to revisit a theme that had a profound impact on the artistic milieu of the 1970s, which used it as a conceptual and aesthetic tool, particularly in North America.

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