Torino Artscape is Artissima’s column highlighting current exhibitions in the city’s leading contemporary art institutions: a regular feature offering a glimpse into the most compelling exhibition programs, curatorial visions, and artistic expressions that animate Turin’s contemporary art scene. Torino Artscape invites you to explore Turin as an essential destination for art lovers, offering inspiration and cultural enrichment throughout the year.
This new episode is dedicated to MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale.
Chiharu Shiota.The Soul Trembles
Up to 28.06.2026
Hundreds of bright red threads explode from the hull of a boat, climb toward the ceiling, invade the space in a tangle that knows no boundaries and no end. The figures of visitors walking through it seem to dissolve into the red, to become part of the work, to lose their outlines. It is impossible to tell where the installation ends and where the body of those who move through it begins. The first thing to greet visitors in the opening room is Uncertain Journey (2016): the title is already a manifesto, a warning.
Chiharu Shiota. The Soul Trembles, curated by Mami Kataoka and Davide Quadrio with Anna Musini and Francesca Filisetti, is on view until 28 June 2026 at the MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale in Turin — a national premiere and the first time ever the show has found a home in a museum of Asian art. The exhibition traces the entire output of the Japanese artist born in Osaka in 1972, through drawings, photographs, sculptures and environmental installations, some of them site-specific. The project expands from the temporary exhibition rooms into the permanent collection galleries, opening a close dialogue with works that have always grappled with life, death and impermanence.
On the upper floor, where Shiota’s works enter into resonance with the Asian art collection, hundreds of worn suitcases hang suspended in the air, bound by red threads that fall toward the floor like severed roots. Accumulation – Searching for the Destination (2021) turns each piece of luggage into an archive of departures and abandonments: three hundred and fifty stories compressed into leather and metal, caught between the weight of memory and the lightness every journey requires. In a space already inhabited by Buddhas and Tibetan deities, the work finds an unexpected resonance — as if the question of the soul’s final destination had never felt so close to an answer, or so far.
At the heart of Shiota’s practice lies not representation, but experience. The threads — red or black, stretched to the impossible — are gesture before they are symbol: they draw invisible connections in the air between objects heavy with memory, boats and burnt pianos. Each installation holds traces of lives that came before and returns them to the viewer as a space to move through, where what remains — of a journey, of a person, of a sound — goes on existing beyond its end.
Declinazioni contemporanee #3
Up to 28.06.2026
Declinazioni Contemporanee reaches its third edition with a programme of residencies and site-specific commissions that invites international artists to enter into dialogue with the MAO collection, giving new meaning to objects that have remained silent for too long.
In the Tibetan section, filmmakers and artists Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam give voice to the sculpture of Virūḍhaka, Guardian King of the South, one of the four sovereigns who once watched over the stupas of Densatil monastery in central Tibet — founded in 1198 and destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, its fragments scattered across collections and museums around the world. In the Chinese galleries, Korean artist Sunmin Park presents Pale Pink Universe (2025), a video installation and series of drawings born from a residency at the CastelGiocondo estate in Montalcino: an immersion in the Tuscan landscape — natural, agricultural and historical — interwoven with a sonnet by Dino Frescobaldi, poet of the Stilnovo, which the artist herself recites as narrator. In the corridor between the Chinese and Japanese galleries, Francesco Simeti brings to a close the journey begun with the first edition of the project: Description Generale (A Historical Map of the Other) is a wallpaper accompanied by textile elements and luminous glass objects that retraces the history of the Silk Roads, reflecting critically on the Orientalist appropriations of this ancient Eurasian crossroads.
– Text by Guia Agazzi