Intesa Sanpaolo

Intesa Sanpaolo is Artissima’s Main Partner. The fair and Intesa Sanpaolo share the idea that art is a fundamental driver to reactivate virtuous mechanisms of social dynamism and cultural enrichment.

The collaboration 2025 presented the fourth edition of the film and artist video exhibition, hosted in the spaces of Gallerie d’Italia – Torino. The exhibition – entitled The screen is a muscle – was curated by Luca Lo Pinto and conceived as a score of video works that did not follow a theme but develop a visual and rhythmic sound trajectory that is both heterogeneous and coherent. The project brought together experiments with moving images created by artists with imaginations in which reflections on the body, the digital world, gender stereotypes and urban nature are expressed in a sensual, emotional and poetic way, offering visitors a space of freedom, free from rhetoric. The title paid homage to the famous work, The Mind is a Muscle (1968) by Yvonne Rainer, a pioneer in producing an emancipation of the human subject in the context of dance, eliminating all gestural conventions and profoundly articulating the action of looking and being looked at.

The exhibition space lended itself to being used as a gym where the works dictated the movements of the viewers and imposed a duration on the experience of the works themselves. The videos were projected one after the other in a circular pattern, forcing viewers to move around and creating an immersive and dynamic experience. Adding a further layer of drama, the viewing was punctuated by short sound interventions designed specifically by artist Martina Ruggeri, which broke up and introduced new rhythms into the score.

Galleries and artists: Bruce Conner (Thomas Dane, London, Napoli); Low Jack & Invernomuto (Pinksummer, Genova); Tommy Malekoff (Zero…, Milano); Vijay Masharani (Clima, Milano); Eva & Franco Mattes (Apalazzo, Brescia); Shahryar Nashat (Sylvia Kouvali, London, Piraeus); James Richards (Sylvia Kouvali, London, Piraeus); SAGG Napoli (Import Export, Warsaw, London e Zazà, Milano, Napoli); Julia Scher (Esther Schipper, Berlin, Seoul, Paris); Anastasia Sosunova (Eastcontemporary, Milano).

The dialogue with Intesa Sanpaolo also continued at the fair with the presentation of a selection of works by photographer Anastasia Samoylova, an American artist who explores the relationship between the environment and cultural identity through documentary photography. After moving to Miami in 2016, she developed an immersive approach that culminated in the monograph FloodZone. In the project Image Cities, she examined how media saturation affects global urban landscapes. Her work will be featured in an exhibition, commissioned by Intesa Sanpaolo, at the Gallerie d’Italia in Torino starting in 2026.