What’s new in the Twenty-Second Edition
Artissima, International Fair of Contemporary Art, will return to the Oval in Torino from 6 to 8 November 2015. Artissima 2015 will involve curators and collectors in the fair’s programme, to a degree unprecedented within Italy or elsewhere. Art collecting is a crucial driving force for the country’s cultural and economic life. Having combined attention to the international art market with the promotion of the most innovative research for 22 years, Artissima is the ideal venue for acknowledging and enhancing its role.
Major Italian collectors will join critics and curators in each of the juries for the prizes awarded at the fair. In 2015 there will be six, as the five of the past editions (illy Present Future Prize, Sardi per l’Arte Back to the Future Prize, New Entries Prize, Fondazione Ettore Fico Prize and Prix K-Way® Per4m) will be supplemented by the Reda-Artissima Prize, awarded to a young artist whose research explores the language of photography. Italian and international collectors will also be central to the Walkie Talkies programme, informal dialogues held by experts as they wander through the works displayed at the fair, an initiative that has proved highly successful in previous years.
To underline the attention that it lavishes on its guests, Artissima 2015 will completely redesign the VIP Lounge on the balcony overlooking the Oval that has been welcoming them for years. A fully fledged curatorial project, the first of its kind for an art fair, will turn it into an “Opium Den” offering an immersive and sumptuous aesthetic experience, an artist’s
visual essay, and intertwining suggestions, collections, images and visions.
More than fifty curators and museum directors from all over the world
In addition to encouraging a high presence of collectors, Artissima’s programme for 2015 will involve more than fifty curators and museum directors from all over the world, confirming its vocation as a crossroads of art in our country. The fair’s curated sections will be coordinated by four young Italian curators, further proof of Artissima’s commitment not
only to showcase great art, but also to foster exchange and dialogue between Italy and the international scene.
The six sections that comprise Artissima 2015 (three fair exhibitions and three curatorial– Present Future, Back to the Future, and Per4m, the first stage in an art fair focussed on performance art) will be accompanied by a radical reinterpretation of the In Mostra project. Created to bring together outstanding art from the contemporary collections in Piedmont, this year in Mostra will be a true museum exhibition within the fair, constructed around the concept of “inclination” – in its literary, scientific, philosophical and political sense. During Artissima 2015 Castello di Rivoli will open a solo exhibition by Rachel Rose, recipient of the illy Present Future Prize 2014. The young American artist has subsequently won a Frieze Award at New York and is due to present a personal show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, further proof of Artissima’s ability to pre-emptively intercept the best energies on the contemporary scene. The 2015 edition of Artissima will mark the fourth consecutive year that the direction has been entrusted to Sarah Cosulich Canarutto.