From the Home to the Museum
From the Museum to the Home
Homages to the Works of the Cerruti Collection
Chapter 2

CASTELLO DI RIVOLI

From 08 July 2019 to 06 January 2020
Castello di Rivoli
Museum of Contemporary Art
Piazza Mafalda di Savoia 
10098 Rivoli - Torino

Castello di Rivoli inaugurates the second chapter of its program of contemporary art commissions in homage to the Cerruti Collection, initiated in May 2019 to celebrate the opening to the public of this extraordinary collection. New artworks by Ed Atkins, Alex Cecchetti, Nalini Malani, and Michael Rakowitz join the works by Anna Boghiguian, Camille Henrot, Liu Ding, Giulio Paolini,Giuseppe Penone, Susan Philipsz, and Seth Price, presented last May in the first chapter of the series.

Interested in the unseen side of the Cerruti Collection – the collector’s “desire” –, Alex Cecchetti presents a delicate fabric made using some of the artist’s paintings – stitched together like precious cloth. They portray plants and sensual flowers valued for their healing properties, yet commonly considered as undesirable weeds to be ripped out. Another work by Cecchetti also addresses the erotic nature and intelligence of plants. Both a cabinet and a collection with over sixty erotic drawings, it is displayed as a counterpoint to the fabric and resonating with the Cerruti Collection. Untitled (2019), a painting on board realized for the occasion by Ed Atkins, offers another, personal interpretation of the art collector’s “desire” – an ironic and uncanny image of the collection as a self-portrait by proxy, an autobiography and public display of one’s inner world.

Inspired by one of Francisco Goya’s renowned etchings from the series Los caprichos (1799) in the Cerruti Collection, a new video by Nalini Malani interprets a tragic episode of recent Indian news. Goya’s figures and Malani’s silhouettes overlap and uncover each other, merging just to then dissolve into the cry of protest of a society where violence and oppression seem never-ending. Trough collaborative processes and rituals that involve the repair or transformation of damaged objects, the reactivation of lost memories and intangible cultures, Michael Rakowitz implements new means through which overcome war trauma – from the destruction of works of art to the fleeing of entire communities. In homage the wealth of expertise Francesco Federico Cerruti brought to Italy in the late 1950s thanks to his bookbinding business Legatoria Industriale Torinese (LIT), the artist had a book from his personal collection whose binding had been destroyed re-bound in Turin. This prayer book, written in both Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic and printed in 1935, belonged to the now departed Jewish community of Iraq, from which the artist himself hails. Since the original binding is damaged beyond repair, according to tradition, it must be buried. However, Rakowitz decided to have it sent to Turin to renew the pages proximity to one another, and “repair its words” in order to give birth to a new work.

Conceived by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev with the curatorial coordination of Sara Catenacci and the assistance of Elena D’Angelo to the production.