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 Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea.
Inserzioni: Gabriel Chaile, Lonnie Holley, Huda Takriti
Up to 23.08.2026
A Baroque room in the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea is transformed into a forest: red sand covers the floor, while primordial traces emerge across the walls. Around the castle’s ancient well—converted into a fireplace—anchors an unsettling camp. The well itself becomes a source of life and a gathering point for an improvised community, yet it also retains an ambiguous, potentially threatening presence.
This immersive environment is the work of Gabriel Chaile (San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, 1985), one of the three artists invited to the second edition of Inserzioni, curated by Francesco Manacorda and on view through August 23. The programme also features Lonnie Holley and Huda Takriti, with Takriti’s contribution curated by Linda Fossati. The artists are invited to actively contribute to the Museum’s evolving exhibition narrative, bringing their practices into dialogue with the historic rooms and generating new relationships between works, space, and memory.
In Chaile’s installation, hybrid presences, anthropomorphic clay figures with long metal legs and bodies resembling eggs or bricks interact with sculptural elements suggestive of a precarious encampment, evoking a condition of post-apocalyptic survival. These forms hold layers of cultural sediment and traces of both individual and collective memory, tracing back to ancestral narratives and processes of cultural transmission.
The perception of the exhibition space is further reshaped by a group of new sculptures and paintings by the artist and musician Lonnie Holley (Birmingham, Alabama, United States, 1950), conceived for the Sala dei Continenti, with its eighteenth-century decorations. Through an intuitive, improvisational approach, the artist transforms found and discarded materials into an ensemble of full of stories and meanings. His work draws attention to what is marginal or overlooked, prompting reflections on collective memory, social inequality, historical violence, and the possibility of spiritual and political transformation.
From the brightness of the previous spaces, the exhibition leads into the dim light of the final rooms, where Clarity is the Closest Wound to the Sun (2023) and two new works—including It Is Always Midnight In Their Minds (2026)—by Huda Takriti (Damascus, Syria, 1990) are presented. Her practice combines archival research, video, and performance, examining how history and memory are recorded, rewritten, or erased. In this project, the artist focuses on the relationship between the Italian National Hydrocarbons Authority (ENI) and former European colonies—including Italian ones—as well as countries still engaged in liberation struggles during the 1950s and 1960s, exploring the intersections of political support, economic interests, and film production within the broader context of decolonisation.
