The emerging artists thinking ‘beyond the booth’ at Turin’s Artissima fair

While it features hundreds of open-topped booths, an even greater number of chic gallerists, and takes place in a gargantuan convention center, Turin’s Artissima feels different from other contemporary art fairs in almost every other respect – with a strain of experimentation running throughout the art selections that felt especially in evidence at this year’s edition.

This attitude of thinking ‘beyond the booth’ was a spirit that ran through the curation of the Italian fair’s ‘Present Future’ section, curated by Léon Kruijswijk (of the KW Institute, Berlin) and Joel Valabrega (Galeria Municipal do Porto). “The red thread of the whole fair is, I think, this ambiguity between reality and fakeness,” said Valabrega, going on to explain how their choices for ‘Present Future’ fed into this thematic. What’s more, as Kruijswijk added, with everything going on in the world, focusing on a certain “sense of precarity and vulnerability” in the selections felt more important than ever. In order to better reflect the artmaking happening today, the curators took artists themselves – rather than, say, galleries with a certain clout factor – as their central starting point, exploring notions of interdisciplinarity, transition and in-betweenness from there.

Highlights included Louisa Gagliardi (with Rodolphe Janssen gallery), a Swiss artist whose digitally-printed, analogue-manipulated works provided the perfect Halloween viewing: female figures with glittering eyes peered through blinds and cross-windows (the sparkle was actual nail polish); Elyla (Giampaolo Abbondio), a Nicaraguan performance artist and activist who channels the traditional cultural practices of his country into his anticolonial, filmed ceremonies; and Welsh artist Angharad Williams (Fanta Milan) whose “Harder to Hide” presentation explored power mechanisms and surveillance structures through an installation combining a chair used for the investiture of the Prince of Wales, Drone Thermal Imaging, and an oversized, disconcerting glass baby’s rattle.

Present Future’s most ambitious – and unnerving – booth, however, had to be that of Bastien Gachet (with Enrico Astuni, Bologna). Crafting an uncanny space with a roof that went above and beyond the booth walls, the artist’s “object-based dramaturgy” – part bus-station, part-waiting room, part-abattoir – positions the visitor somewhere between the private and public, an open space and a closed one. Kruijswijk and Valabrega will return next year to curate Artissima’s ‘Present Future’ section once more but, in the meantime, we spotlight the highlights of their wildly expansive curation above.