A Raceway on the Roof of a Former Fiat Factory in Turin Is Now Home to a Lush Open-Air Art Space

The Pinacoteca Agnelli artwork hub is nestled on the major flooring of the Lingotto, a single of Turin’s most recognizable buildings, a sprawling bolstered concrete and glass framework that is relatively of a nightmare to navigate.

The previous Fiat car or truck factory, which shuttered in 1982, was when hailed by Le Corbusier as just one of the most remarkable sights in background. Indeed, it has a individual winning characteristic: a rooftop pista the place new vehicles ended up at the time tested at high speeds along a pair of parabolic bends.

4 decades later on, that test monitor has now been provided a intent as soon as yet again. To marks its 20th anniversary, the arts institution has introduced La Pista 500, a new public artwork room that usually takes around far more than a kilometer of the previous highway on its roof together with a revamped plan that seeks to redress some of the omissions of its in-home selection. 

Of course TO ALL by Sylvie Fleury (2022). Photograph: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

Some 40,000 verdant crops share space with the open-air exhibition area, which is now available to the general public. Performs by Shilpa Gupta, Louise Lawler, Valie Export, and Cally Spooner are on perspective as element of a relaunched application that seeks to emphasize female techniques. Resting on major of the new entrance to the museum to greet guests is a do the job by feminist artist Sylvie Fleury, a huge-scale installation exclaiming “yes to all” in pink neon letters.

“The plan definitely commenced with the pista and reworking it into a park,” reported the Pinacoteca’s president Ginevra Elkann. “We needed the prospect to not just be an isolated museum, but be component of a greater fact.” Given that opening its doors in 2002, the Pinacoteca Agnelli, which is funded by Fiat, has had a most important mission to current a element of the esteemed non-public assortment of the late Fiat founder Giovanni and his spouse Marella Agnelli, who are also Elkann’s grandparents. By and large, however, the museum has remained fairly market.

All three grandchildren, together with Elkann, are on the museum board, presiding over the family’s outstanding selection of artworks which includes performs by Giacomo Balla, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. 

Agnelli Collection. Courtesy Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino. Photo: Mybosswas

Sarah Cosulich, the a short while ago appointed inventive director of Pinacoteca, has been instrumental in environment a revamped agenda for the museum, which include setting up out a more contemporary, international, and general public-struggling with application. The dynamic and esteemed curator introduced a wealth of encounter from the latest stints as artistic director of La Quadriennale di Roma and at Artissima artwork honest.

“I beloved the plan of working with a museum that has a historic tradition with a selection, and opening it up to the modern with no forcing it, but making an attempt to make a bridge in the method,” said Cosulich. That is one particular of the factors that the rooftop is obtainable with no needing to attain access to the principal selection, and it expenses a nominal sum of 2 euros. 

In an impressively quick time-span of 6 months, the all-female workforce introduced together 8 international artists for their inaugural out of doors challenge which is highlighted by two new commissions, together with Cally Spooner’s mesmerizing Lifeless TIME (Melody’s Heat Up) (2022), a audio piece the place cello routines from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 are interspersed with the sounds of cars the operate echoes all-around the car ramp which reacts like a soundbox.

Beneath My Feet Begins to Crumble (2022) by Mark Leckey. Photograph: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

In other places, Mark Leckey’s outstanding video Beneath My Ft Starts to Crumble (2022) is mounted on monumental LED screen, which embraces the parabolic curve of the monitor and characteristics shifting views of the Alps which transform from chic snow-filled mountains into a write-up-industrial barren landscape.

“The artists had been all fascinated by the historical past of this space—the actuality that it’s a place of automobiles but also the place of a factory,” mentioned Cosulich.

In a reflexively patriarchal place, with the lowest stage of office gender equality in the European Union, gender politics have been put at the heart of the new Pinacoteca programming, and it is a person of its most interesting facets. Elkann and Cosulich chose to tackle the customarily male narratives which are seeped into the background of these kinds of a building—not just in the automobile factory itself, but also in the Agnelli collection, which notably only consists of male artists.

Cosulich explained the new plan will be “opening” the establishment up “to presences not normally affiliated with the room.” This is indeed extremely seen, in particular in its inaugural solo exhibition, a wildly entertaining and razor-sharp retrospective of the pioneer feminist artist Sylvie Fleury. Its title, “Change Me On” is a cheeky pun on the eroticism and the output of wish, as properly as turning on the ignition a car or truck. 

See of Sylvie Fleury’s exhibition “Turn Me On.” Photo Credit rating: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

On the fifth ground of the Renzo Piano-built museum wherever the permanent assortment finds its home, the determination to subvert standard narratives is also evident in its new display “Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar. A Dialogue with the Fondation Beyeler.

The exhibition focuses on Maar’s sizeable affect on the male painter’s apply, setting up off with Picasso’s portrait Homme appuyé sur une table (1915-16) hung in conversation with a few will work by the artist on personal loan from the Swiss Fondation Beyeler that all depict artist Dora Maar. On equal footing are Maar’s photographs. It is the initially in a sequence of annually exhibitions named “Beyond the Selection,” which will use a solitary get the job done in the selection as critical instrument to talk to the absences in the selection.

Elkann credits the feminine workforce for the important transformation having area at the Pinacoteca Agnelli. “It’s resourceful, it is caring, and it seems at the foreseeable future, the group, and its requirements,” she reported of the new plan. “Bringing together mother nature and art are essential to the soul. I feel we genuinely have to have that suitable now a lot more than at any time.”

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