Acrobazie

Good morning, and welcome to Artissima 2026. This is the AudioGuide project and you are listening to tour number 01 entitled Acrobazie. This tour will introduce you to works by artists from different generations, spanning a wide variety of techniques and styles. The 33rd edition features 183 galleries from 35 countries. As in previous years, there are three curated sections: Back to the Future is dedicated to historical research, Present Future to more current research, and Drawings is dedicated to works on paper, which are collected in the centre of the Oval. The theme of this edition is “Fancy: A Flexible, Acrobatic Body ”. Drawing inspiration from the concept developed by philosopher Martha Nussbaum, the fair presents contemporary art as a multifaceted and dynamic organism. As Director Luigi Fassi explains, art is understood here as “a crucial public intelligence, capable of nourishing and enriching the democratic institutions of a community”. This itinerary will take in various practices, united by the acrobatic aptitude of vision and creative action: we will encounter artists capable of seeing beyond known limits to propose new relationships and shared futures, inviting us to leave the realm of the already known and to rethink the world from new perspectives. The audioguides were developed for Artissima by the mediators of Arteco. This tour was curated by Sergio Manca. We are ready to go. The first stop will be the Herald Street gallery, in the Main Section, at stand number 15 on Pink A aisle. Now pause your player and press play once you are there.

Is it possible to paint without using what we commonly call “paint”? Can a painting tell dozens of stories without depicting figures? We need to start with these questions to approach the work of Francis Offman, an artist born in Rwanda in 1987 and now living in Italy. The gallery exhibiting his work is Herald Street, which has two locations in London and one in Bologna. It was in Bologna that Offman trained and decided to settle. His years of study at the Academy gave him the opportunity to gain a thorough understanding of the language of painting, including through exposure to works by 16th- and 17th-century masters. However, as he absorbed concepts of technique and composition, the artist wondered how he could convey the breadth and complexity of human experience onto a flat surface, starting with that of his family, who had emigrated from a country that had suffered a genocide when he was a child. At the same time, his multifaceted curiosity led him to take an interest in materials and their physical properties. Every object, every material, carries with it a story or, perhaps, many stories. One recurring element in Offman’s compositions, for example, is coffee. The idea came to him when he opened the last packet of coffee that his mother had brought from her native country. Symbolically associated with Italian identity in terms of consumption and daily rituals, but also with the colonial history of the African continent and the exploitation of Rwandan workers, coffee becomes a bridge between cultures in his work, intimately linked to his personal history. However, when reading the labels on coffee packs, the artist realises that the coffee we consume comes from all over the world: each blend carries with it the memory of the people who grew, cleaned, processed and transported it. Offman sees layers of stories, experiences and memories in every material. He therefore decides that his pictorial medium cannot be limited to oil or acrylic paints, but that in order to depict the world he lives in, he must consider everything that carries with it the story of a human experience. His dialogue with Bolognese builders led him to use plaster and cement; the wounds left by the pandemic led him to select expired gauze; his reflection on the amount of tarmac that separates our feet from the earth in city parks led him to consider the paper that wraps new shoes. Every part of his paintings has a dual significance: on the one hand, it is the result of an ethical choice regarding the reuse of waste materials, and on the other, it is the memory of an encounter, of a relationship. In fact, the artist uses almost exclusively materials that are given to him. His work is therefore three-dimensional painting that, although abstract, contains the narrative of an individual dimension built on connections with other people, whether near or far, but still in contact with him. And with us. The next stop will be the Annet Gelink gallery, at stand number 2 in the Drawings section, in the White aisle. Pause your player and press play when you are there.

The Annet Gelink gallery from Amsterdam presents a series of charcoal works on paper by the Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi in the Drawings section. Koizumi was born in Gunma Prefecture in 1976 and trained in the Netherlands. Koizumi, too, is interested in the individual stories that help to build a collective memory. Cross-media practice leads him to create performances, videos and installations, also engaging with contemporary technologies such as virtual reality and generative artificial intelligence. The artist’s main focus is Japanese culture’s complex relationship with the themes of trauma and guilt. Maintaining social harmony can lead to the creation of social taboos and the repression of shame associated with nationalist and wartime history. His works often depict subjects filmed under intense psychological pressure, subjected to verbal abuse and coercive actions that replicate the toxic and manipulative patterns of militarist governments. This creates a sense of unease in the audience, who are compelled to witness the taboo being brought to light. In an experience that is both therapeutic and cathartic, the viewer is confronted with the harshness and meaninglessness of the rhetoric of sacrifice and dishonour. In the series exhibited at Artissima, Koizumi works in a less brutal way and brings the reflection to a symbolic level. The charcoal drawings present us with seemingly serene images, yet they are permeated by an unsettling element. Each drawing is a technically masterful transposition of a frame from a film by the Japanese cinema maestro Yasujirō Ozu, director of masterpieces such as Tokyo Story or Late Spring. Ozu had served in the army during the Sino-Japanese War, which began in 1937. In his diaries, he recorded the horrors of war for a certain period, including the use of lethal chemical gases against enemy troops, and then stopped writing altogether. In his films made after the end of the conflict, however, there is never any reference to the violence and suffering of war. His films offer a slow, gentle narrative of bourgeois domestic life. Koizumi sees Ozu’s biography as the perfect example of the repression of guilt that afflicts Japanese society. After drawing the scene, he intervenes by erasing certain parts of it. The erasures seem to bring out a mist in the images that seeps into the settings and surrounds the characters, impalpable yet inexorable at the same time. This mist, which gives the series its title, is at once the product of cinematic influences and a reference to the gases used by Ozu’s military division against Chinese soldiers. Paradoxically, it is precisely the act of erasure that leads to the unveiling of a repressed past, of violence that has been swept under the carpet, of guilt that has never been processed. We now head to the nearby Back to the Future section and go to the Fonti gallery at stand number 1, in the Lilac aisle. Pause your player and press play when you are there.

The relationship between video, images and the cultural codes of society is also at the heart of Michel Auder’s research. This year, the Fonti gallery from Naples is presenting a key work from the oeuvre of the French artist, a pioneer of autobiographical video art. Born in 1945, he made his first films in the 1960s, inspired by the innovations of the Nouvelle Vague style. In 1969, he bought his first portable video camera, a Sony Portapak, and moved to New York, where he came into contact with the cultural ferment of Warhol’s Factory and the underground scene. The choice of the tools for his work is essential to the development of his artistic vision. The lightweight video camera, as well as the Polaroid camera, allowed him to take a direct, diary-like approach to everyday reality. The instant-development photographs provide us with a continuous and immediate record of the artist’s life. The central work on the stand is Gulf War TV War, made in 1991. Auder decided to record the television experience he had in his New York apartment during Operation Desert Storm. Amid channel-hopping and frequent commercial breaks, Auder recorded the content of the television screen in real time, showing how media language empties and flattens everything. Starting with an appropriation of images, he then decided to work on the footage through editing to amplify the alienating sense of the experience. Auder was able to perceptively capture the first signs of infotainment, an approach that has since dominated television, thanks to the use of striking fonts and graphics to frame the news and make it more spectacular. Viewed today, the continuous stream of dramatic images mixed with adverts and light-hearted content is strongly reminiscent of the experience we have on social media every day. A similar process had already underpinned the work entitled Olympic variations. In 1984, Auder filmed the television screen broadcasting the Los Angeles Olympic Games. Through editing, the artist presents us with an incongruous and non-linear narrative, in which the focus is on shots that expose the parts of the body that mass media has helped to hyper-sexualise. The aim is to highlight the voyeuristic approach of the media. It is also interesting to reflect on this work today: in 2026, the European Union drew up guidelines for the first time that prohibit TV channels from using invasive shots and sexualised footage during the broadcast of sporting events. Michel Auder's career, which sets the pursuit of spontaneity against the detached and manipulative nature of media images, allows us to appreciate the value of an artist who was not only pioneering but almost prophetic – someone who could see beyond what we take for granted. Let's now head to the Yehudi Hollander-Pappi gallery space, number 2 in the Present Future section, right opposite the entrance to the fair. Pause your player and press play when you are there.

The research of artist and musician Juliana Frontin is fully in keeping with the acrobatic challenges of this edition of the fair: a continuous attempt to establish and resolve a dialectical confrontation between sound and matter. The Yehudi Hollander-Pappi Gallery from São Paulo presents a new project by the artist, who was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1990. Her work analyses the material dimension of sound, its ability to define and modify the surrounding space. At the same time, her investigation considers the possibilities of isolating sound and transforming it into a solid, sculptural element, subjecting it to a transformative process that can be compared to a change of state. Frontin has been working as a DJ for over 10 years, creating extensive, continuous and immersive soundscapes that make bodies dance and perceptions become more blurred. The repertoire of materials she draws on for her installations is closely linked to the world of music and clubbing: indeed, a recurring element is the cases used to house musical equipment, such as mixers, cables and synthesisers. These are objects imbued with symbolic significance. As Thomas Kaufmann writes in the critical text that accompanied the exhibition Trance Continuum: “When it is closed, the case keeps its contents inside; you never know exactly what it is carrying. It is the core charged with latent energy: something that will be used, but that remains protected, invisible.” In the work Hardcase, hardcore, a copy of Beckett’s Happy Days was embedded in the concrete in the centre of the gallery, sealed like a coffin and buried like the protagonist of the play. The character’s predicament is inescapable. Frontin is fascinated by Beckett’s ability to work not only on situations, but also on rhythms and words, weakening and freezing them through repetition. The artist’s work has much in common with Beckett’s theatre, starting with the fascination with trapped situations that are both suspended and inescapable in their meaninglessness. This is the origin of the attempt to capture sound in a material form. As a DJ, she creates sequences of sounds that expand into space and pass through bodies, but as an artist, she instead seeks ways to constrain sound, compressing it or muffling it through blocks of sound-absorbing foam. The aim is to make sound a tactile experience, even alluded to and anticipated when it is inhibited. After all, the whole of human existence revolves around this duality between the material and the immaterial, and, as any music teacher will tell you, there is no sound without silence. Let us now move on to our final stop and head to the Yellow aisle, to stand number 3, which jointly houses the Societé Interludio and Strina galleries.

Our engagement with materials brings us to the Monologue/Dialogue section, where the Societé Interludio Gallery from Cambiano and the Luisa Strina Gallery from São Paulo present a monographic exhibition of the sculptor and painter Brisa Noronha, born in Belo Horizonte. Despite sharing her nationality and year of birth with Juliana Frontin, Noronha takes us on a totally different experience. We leave behind conceptual speculations on sound and clean, industrial forms to enter an intimate studio, permeated by a relaxed pace, where the protagonists are gesture, experimentation and organic forms. The work entitled Alfabeto Afetivo immediately catches our eye, featuring around three hundred porcelain elements arranged in rows on the wall, following a calm and orderly rhythm. The title of the work provides us with useful guidelines for its interpretation. The word “alphabet” (“alfabeto” in Portuguese) refers to a linguistic code made up of free signs that, when combined, can form words, sentences and infinite narratives. The term “affective” (“afetivo” in Portuguese), on the other hand, expresses the sense of the creative process and the potential for relationships that are established between each element, but also a central component of the artist’s work: memory. Noronha chooses a material that carries with it the memory of the gesture, a malleable entity in which the two extremes of a poetic ambivalence coexist: on the one hand, its apparent fragility and, on the other, its incredible strength, achieved through extremely high temperatures. Noronha’s relationship with the material is profound and takes the form of a kind of collaboration. Although the artist starts with an intention, her planning is not absolute: the process that follows is an exchange in which intuition, her hands and the properties of the material being worked – whether clay or porcelain – all come into play. The result of this dialogue is clear, archaic forms in which organicity and purity coexist. When arranged in space, her sculptures rest on the ground or on plinths, rejecting supports that confine them to the ornamental dimension. The artist’s creations are open, living systems that carry memory and are ready to embrace new identities, entering into relationships with each other or with the carefully considered, rarefied paintings inspired by the same worldview. We hope this tour has helped you appreciate how materials, images, and sounds are all equally capable of conveying stories, concepts, and tensions. The artist’s gaze is one that can see beyond and through things, giving us insights to rethink the past, understand the present and look to the future with new eyes. If you’d like another perspective on the art fair, go back to the info point or the AudioGuides landing page and select another podcast! See you soon and enjoy Artissima!