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 Gallerie d’Italia – Torino.
Diana Markosian. Replaced
Up to 6.09.2026
Immersed in a red light that floods every surface, two bodies lean their foreheads together inside a bathtub: eyes closed, a hand reaching for the other’s face as if to trace its contours before they dissolve, in a gesture that is at once a caress and a farewell. This is one of the most charged images in Replaced, Diana Markosian’s project, which expands from a bathtub into a room, and from a room multiplies into an entire hotel corridor, lined with numbered doors and walls that shift from pink to blue, where every threshold holds the frame of an intimacy suspended between memory and fiction.
This is the installation of Diana Markosian. Replaced, an exhibition curated by Brandei Estes on view until September 6, 2026 at Gallerie d’Italia – Torino, a museum of Intesa Sanpaolo, as part of the third edition of EXPOSED – Torino Photo Festival, organized by Fondazione CAMERA. Commissioned originally by Intesa Sanpaolo and presented here in its world premiere, Markosian’s project (Moscow, 1989), an American artist of Armenian descent, springs from a question both intimate and universal: what happens when a love story ends, and what does it mean to watch yourself being quietly replaced, not only in someone’s life but in the very places that once seemed sacred. To navigate this territory, the artist engages an actor with whom she relives moments from the past, reconstructing scenes of tenderness alongside moments of rupture: re-enactments that inhabit the unstable terrain of memory, where desire alters, embellishes, erases. Completing the exhibition, a film conceived for the museum’s immersive room alternates single images with split screens, heightening the dramatic effect of the photographs and extending over time that same emotional tension, in that fragile space between presence and absence.
Nick Brandt. The Day May Break. La luce alla fine del giorno.
Up to 6.09.2026
A family arranges itself like a fragile monument in the middle of the desert. Bodies are stacked upon a geometric structure resembling a pedestal, yet instead of celebration there is waiting; instead of heroism, vulnerability. Some figures gaze toward the horizon, others lower their eyes, while two children fall asleep nestled against their mothers. All around them, nothing but sand and rock. In Nick Brandt’s large black-and-white photograph, the monumentality of the composition coexists with a sense of precarity that runs throughout the exhibition: that of lives suspended in a time of crisis, forced to continually redefine their place in the world.
This photograph encapsulates with particular clarity the themes at the heart of Nick Brandt. The Day May Break, an exhibition curated by Arianna Rinaldo and on view until 6 September 2026 at Gallerie d’Italia – Turin. For the first time, all four chapters of the eponymous project that the British photographer has been developing since 2020 are brought together, forming an investigation into the consequences of climate change and environmental devastation on the human and animal communities most exposed to their effects.
The exhibition design guides visitors through a sequence of galleries distinguished by different colour fields, where the succession of large-scale prints creates an immersive and coherent narrative. For more than twenty years, Brandt has explored the relationship between humanity and nature, but in this body of work he moves beyond the exclusive centrality of the animal world to focus on a shared condition of vulnerability. Carefully constructed and far removed from traditional documentary approaches, his photographs present people and animals as participants in a common fate. The impeccable aesthetics of the images—solemn compositions, soft light, and a monumental scale that recalls history painting—do not soften the severity of the subjects addressed; rather, they make it even more palpable. Across deserts, aquatic landscapes and territories marked by environmental crisis, Brandt constructs a narrative that continually oscillates between loss and resilience. His is not a shouted protest, but a visual reflection capable of transforming data and statistics into tangible presences, giving faces, bodies and relationships to a crisis that too often remains abstract. It is within this tension between tragedy and hope that the project finds its most compelling strength.
– Text by Guia Agazzi