Artissima 2015 has just finished in Torino’s Oval, showing 207 galleries from 35 different countries. Many of the booths had an immersive feel to them; some flooded with light, others plunged into darkness but for a single large screen. The four that caught Elephant’s attention varied pretty wildly in content, but all chose to focus quite strongly on a single or very limited number of artists.
Galleria Allegra Ravizza, Lugano
The Swiss gallery represents a modest selection of artists; Nanda Vigo, Gianfranco Zappettini, Christian Megert and Alberto Biasi. For Artissima the gallery exhibited a solo booth of the work of Vigo, the Italian artist who is now in her late seventies. This booth was hosted in the aptly named Back To The Future area of the fair, a section which this year focussed exclusively on practices from 1975-85. Vigo’s isosceles mirrored forms shed light and electric colour onto the surrounding walls–inherently futuristic yet also comfortingly familiar.
London’s Carroll / Fletcher took a similarly singular look at one practice, loading their booth floor-to-ceiling with the works on paper of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Appearing as somewhat of a school classroom, the booth also featured a selection of 60s furniture. The artists have an open practice, working together with sound, performance, installation, image and text that often explores a central narrative. Both artists are currently based in Palestine’s Ramallah.
Daiga Grantina was displayed in Artissima’s Present Future 2015—a dedicated area of the fair that focuses on solo shows by emerging artists. 20 different projects are selected for this area, with galleries from Warsaw, Dubai and Chicago among others. The young Latvian artist (1985) is currently based between Berlin and Paris, and works with a range of manmade materials, creating organic shapes that appear as a terrible meeting of the natural and industrial world—with a side order of glitter. The gallery also displayed works from Jo-ey Tang in the main section, and performance by Julie Béna in Per4m.
Lisson, London, Milan, New York
Broomberg & Chanarin was another solo exhibit, at Lisson Gallery’s booth. The pair–from Johannesburg and London respectively–showed their 2015 film, Rudiments large screen in a darkened booth, along with work from their most recent exhibition of the same name, which closed in Lisson’s London space at the end of October. The film focusses on a group of Army Cadets in a Military Camp near Liverpool, the staging or spontaneity of each scene not fully clear to the viewer. As is to be expected with Broomberg & Chanarin, the work raises questions of politics, systemic violence and discipline.
