Artissima 2018. 25th Edition: Time is on our side

In 2018 Artissima art fair celebrates its 25th anniversary. For the second year running, Ilaria Bonacossa is the director of the event, which will run from Thursday, November 1 up to Sunday, November 4 at the OVAL in Turin, Italy. As every year, Artissima 2018 will offer the possibility for people to come and encounter the brand new artistic tendencies. Artissima is not your usual art fair, the event is not purely commercial, because it has been transformed into a broader and eclectic cultural event.  The Turin art fair has always been very mindful of new galleries, young artists and brand new art. It has a rich program of performances, concerts, and happenings produced by the fair and presented in several spots all around the city of Turin. The fair is curated by Artissima Srl, a company connected with the Fondazione Torino Musei.

HALL OF FAME, Artissima 2018, Turin, art fair, Artissima

HALL OF FAME – Artissima 2018

Artissima 2018 is titled Time is on our side – Il tempo è dalla nostra parte; with it, Bonacossa wishes to investigate the notion of time in a wider perspective. Listening to the words of Bonacossa during the fair’s presentation was a good way to understand a bit better what lies behind this edition of Artissima. Before the publication of the theory of special relativity in 1905 time was considered absolutely stable, and phrases like “time is on our side” (quoting Bonacossa) were inadmissible. Hence, we can say that time before special relativity was different from time after it. Thus, the idea of time being on our side can exist only in relation to the qualitative notion of time. Thus, time is not only a matter of size, in the case of length we know that there exists a length standard and we know that any body has its particular length. This is quite different in the case of time and in the case of the time evoked by the director in her conception of the fair. The time that Artissima aims to retrieve is the result of an illusion, something that completes, or better improves, the process of mechanical time, based on the Earth’s rotation and on the synchronization of clocks. Here is the power of art, that states that any process has its time and any time has its own features. In my personal opinion, it resembles the great work of Christian Marclay that in 2010 released The Clock, a moving-image installation based on a looped 24-hour video montage of scenes from film and television that feature clocks or timepieces. A work that evokes the intrinsic power of art, its capability to speak about time.

HALL OF FAME, Artissima 2018, Turin, art fair, Artissima

HALL OF FAME_Artissima 2018

For Artissima 2018 the board confirmed and enlarged the fair’s format with a brand new section. The fair is composed of eight art sections, headed by a board of international curators and museum directors, devoted to emerging artists, drawings, to rediscovering the great pioneers of contemporary art, and to sound projects (a new section). Looking closer at the fair’s structure we may see that the more traditional part of Artissima is divided into four sections overseen by the fair committee: Main Section, for established galleries on the international contemporary art scene; Dialogue, reserved for emerging galleries or galleries with an experimental approach, applying with either a monographic booth or with works by 2-3 artists in dialogue; New Entries, devoted to galleries that have been open for less than five years and are at the fair in Turin for the first time; Art Spaces & Editions, devoted to galleries and non-profit spaces presenting editions, prints, and multiples by contemporary artists. Thus, the main section is flanked by four more sections: Present Future, Back to the Future, Disegni (dedicated to drawings, and inaugurated last year by Ilaria Bonacossa) and Sound (the brand new section of this year). These four last sections are curated and present, respectively, emerging talents, great pioneers of contemporary art (in 2018 Back to the Future will focus on the period of 1980–1994), drawings and monographic sound projects in the contemporary art scene. Rich as always is the section dedicated to prizes that award the artists present in the fair: the EDIT Dinner Prize; the Campari Art Prize, the OGR Award; the Refresh Irinox Prize; the Ettore and Ines Fico Prize; Illy’s Present Future Prize; and Sardi per l’Arte’s Back to the Future Prize.

, Artissima 2018, Turin, art fair, Artissima

Artissima 25yrs

This year, Droste Effect magazine will proudly be a part of Artissima 2018, in the project #ArtissimaLive, together with ATPdiary, KABUL, and Widewalls. We ask all of you to come and join us on November 2nd at our stand. #ArtissimaLive is a platform coordinated by ATPdiary’s Elena Bordignon with the function of involving Italian and international online magazines in the production of live and original contents related to the fair, with interviews, special social media projects, and artists’ talks. Among the special projects (DAF Struttura, Artissima Stories, Artissima Junior, Alberto Treccani, The Edit Dinner Party, Carol Rama and Drawing the Invisible) a particular mention goes to the one dedicated to Carol Rama that this year aims to narrate the close friendship between Carol Rama and Edoardo Sanguineti.

Victor Ciato, Galeria Plan B., Artissima 2018, Turin, art fair, Artissima

Victor Ciato, Variations in the spirit of the Tang system, 1973, Galeria Plan B.

We hope that the time we spend at Artissima won’t merely be a feature of a physical process. We hope it will be the journey that we all need, and that only art and culture can provide. Artissima 2018 art fair, November 1 – 4, OVAL Lingotto Fiere, Turin

Discussion Un commento

  1. October 15, 2018 at 10:04 pm

    […] year, Droste Effect magazine will proudly be a part of Artissima 2018, in the project #ArtissimaLive, together with […]

Leave a Reply

by Vincenzo Estremo
in News

Wed Development by THX88.net Digital Art Factory