Curated by Irene Calderoni and Maria Teresa Roberto.

May 29th, 2012 will see the opening of the third exhibition in the Greater Torino cycle, devoted to younger generation artists that have been educated or currently work in Turin. The city is seen as an extended territory, a place of birth or an adopted home town, but primarily as a platform for developing a research path, supported by opportunities for growth, mobility and external relationships. An open city that can embrace the “round trip” dynamics that is essential in defining the career of an artist. This year, as in the two previous editions, the choice of a duo exhibition is part of a curatorial strategy aimed at studying and highlighting a path that is currently being explored, through a selection of significant works and new productions – resulting in a whole picture that can reflect the topics of interest, project types, practices and tools of the two authors.

The artists invited to the third edition of Greater Torino are Rä di Martino and Laura Pugno. Rä di Martino was born in 1975 in Rome, studied in London, lived in New York and, for two years now, she has chosen Turin as her place of residence and work. Laura Pugno was born in Biella in 1975 and was educated at the Accademia Albertina in Turin, where she still lives and works. On exhibit will be recent works by the two artists who, despite using different approaches and means of expression, both focus their research on the theme of landscape (natural or architectural), viewed as a space for physical and mental experience, as a cultural construct, and as the object of visions and representations containing multiple poetic and political connotations.

The work of Rä di Martino has always explored the expressive and symbolical field of cinema as a heritage of images, stories and memories (individual and collective), from which the artist draws to create new narratives, layers of recurring signs that transform themselves, traveling through time and space. The exhibited works are built around a series of old film sets in the deserts of Tunisia and Morocco – fictitious structures, born to be temporary and abandoned in the middle of the North-African landscape, where they have acquired, over time, a new, unstable identity. The artist analyzes it with the help of various materials, photography, slides, installations and a new video work.

The look of Laura Pugno turns to closer, more usual natural environments, such as the Monviso mountain chain, which forms the object of a number of her works, among them drawings, engravings and interventions on photo works. Here the landscape is subjected to a process of decomposition, aimed at denying all one-way, unitary visions, and instead revealing fragmentary perspectives and unusual points of view, tensions, or the predominance of one element (be it natural or expressive) over another. Through processes that are quasi-scientific or, on the contrary, centered on a completely subjective experience, Laura Pugno tears down the landscape-system, putting it through a process of liberation and transformation.

Special project

The stage of the exhibition production will be followed by the just as important stage of visitor relationship, though the varied offer of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The exhibiting artists of Greater Torino will be asked to design a workshop addressed to adult, non-school public groups. They will do this in collaboration with the Educational Department and the cultural mediators, who are working daily in the exhibition space, interacting with visitors and talking to them. The active presence of the Greater Torino artists in the Foundation spaces is thus regarded as a resource, an opportunity to experiment with new ways of relating to contemporary art. The workshop is open to everybody via application, and will take place on June 6th and 13thstarting from 8.30 p.m. (dip.educativo@test.fsrr.org – 011. 3797631) .

A special project curated by Giorgina Bertolino.