An exhibition at Rivoli Castle on artists at war, from Goya to Ukraine

The new exhibition activity 2023 of the Castello di Rivoli - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea kicks off on the third floor of the Savoy Residence with a group exhibition curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio entitled Artists at War, featuring works by artists such as Francisco Goya, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Lee Miller, Zoran Mušič, Alberto Burri, Iri and Toshi Maruki, Fabio Mauri, Bracha L. Ettinger, Anri Sala, Michael Rakowitz, Dinh Q. Lê (with works by, among others, Le Lam, Phan Oanh, Nguyen Thu, Truong Hieu, Nguyen Toan Thi, Kim Tien, Quach Phong, Huynh Phuong Dong, Minh Phuong), Vu Giang Huong, Rahraw Omarzad and Nikita Kadan. The exhibition features more than 140 works by 39 authors made by artists who were or are in the war. The exhibition, which runs from March 15 to Nov. 19, 2023, takes its cue from Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War), an 1810-1815 work by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, and develops the theme of war and post-traumatic subjectivity through historical works and new projects by leading contemporary artists.

Artists at War includes loans from important Italian and international public and private institutions as well as two new commissions, unpublished works created for the occasion by Afghan artist Rahraw Omarzad (Kabul, 1964), and Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan (Kiev, 1982). Both artists share a practice related to that of cultural promoters offering a message of great emotional and human impact as well as social and political. Originating from scenarios of conflict and profound geopolitical change, their practices invite reflection on the importance of finding narratives of care and peace in creative expression.

"This exhibition, the latest in the artistic exhibition path of Expressions that has developed over the years, brings together a profound reflection on contemporaneity, thanks to the work of artists who through the centuries have been able to narrate the discontinuities of the present and conflict, interpreted through their personal sensibility in the time they were living," says Francesca Lavazza, president of Castello diRivoli. “The works exhibited thus succeed in shaking the public on controversial and difficult issues, representing the horrors of war, transversal to all conflicts. I thank Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio for this courageous project intended to make the collective consciousness reflect.”

"Initially conceived as the last chapter of the multi-year exhibition and research project Expressions,“ says director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, ”recent international events have led us to create a new ad hoc exhibition that investigates the meaning of war, to ask how some particularly empathetic human beings, artists, process the organized and only seemingly rational violence of war by highlighting its horror or by contrast its mystery - suspended as it is between maximum unpredictability and maximum calculation. For the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, being is revealed in war, ΠÏŒλεμος πάντων μá½²ν πατήρ ἐστι (polemos pantōn men patÄ“r esti - war is the father of all things). The French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, immediately after World War II, which he spent in part in a German prison camp, reminds us that being is revealed to philosophical thought as war, that is, in the contrast between the finitude of death - maximally perceptible in war - and the limitless immeasurability of existence. In this interval or interregnum between life and death, the artist finds in art a way to pull himself out of conflict and adversarial thinking and to infinitely expand time and space, even everyday. Through a series of examples from the past and some new works made by artists today at war, this exhibition aims to investigate the theme culturally, psychologically, aesthetically, historically, and philosophically. To open a reflection that goes beyond the mere removal of war, beyond the merely economic explanation of it, beyond fear or-other side of the same coin-its celebration as necessity and lesser evil."

The exhibition itinerary begins in the atrium on the third floor, with a selection of archival photographic images from the Collections of the GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, depicting the Savoy city destroyed by bombing during World War II. Also presented in this area is the work of Iri and Toshi Maruki, direct witnesses to the effects of the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In Room 34, the Spanish War of Independence (1808-1814) provides the backdrop for Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War), 1810-1815, first edition 1863, the famous cycle of 83 etchings made during the period marked by the conflict with the French Napoleonic invaders. Close-ups of bodies and faces battered by suffering depicted by Goya are set up in dialogue with the works of Slovenian artist Anton Zoran Mušič, who in the 1930s before the war had the opportunity to admire and study Goya’s works in Madrid. In the same Room 34 is a preview of the most recent painting by artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger, Medusa - Rachel - Pieta, 2017-2022, from which hallucinated faces but also profound beauty emerge.

World War II is also investigated in Room 35 through a selection of works placed in dialogue with Pablo Picasso ’s painting Tête de femme (Head of a Woman), 1942, made at the height of the conflict and derived in part from the famous painting Guernica, 1937, with which it shares the use of a palette of blacks and grays. The torn and split face of the figure of artist and friend Dora Maar likely the subject of the portrait, also resembles female figures depicted in Guernica. The large canvas was made in the spring of 1937 in memory of the tragic aerial bombing of the Basque town by the Nazi-Fascist air force on April 26, 1937. Picasso denounced the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and harshly criticized the conduct of General Francisco Franco.

The books with rare and unique bindings by Pierre-Lucien Martin from the Cerruti Collection Solidarité. Poème, 1938, and Au rendez-vous allemand, 1944, by French Surrealist poet Paul Éluard are also on display. Solidarité is published in April 1938 with an accompanying set of seven aquatints and etchings by anti-fascist artists, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy. Also in the same room is Salvador Dalí’s work, Composition avec tour, circa 1943: this painting is a sketch for one of the curtains he made for the choreography of his friend known as La Argentinita, the famous Republican dancer and choreographer Encarnación López Júlvez, who fled to the United States in 1936. This choreography of hers, made at the height of the war, was meant to be a hymn to the joy and freedom of the world before Franco’s dictatorship.

Part of Room 35 is devoted to the story of Alberto Burri, among the leading Italian artists of the 20th century who, with an unprecedented investigation of materials, revolutionized the artistic language after World War II through a strikingly material abstract art. Trained as a physician, he served in the Italian Army in North Africa where he was taken prisoner and transferred to the United States. While imprisoned in the POW (Prisoners of War) camp in Hereford, Texas, from 1943 to 1946, he decided to abandon the medical profession to devote himself exclusively to art. There were a number of Italians in the Hereford camp who were writers, artists and artisans, and it is possible that it was from them that the idea of devoting himself to art began. On display is Burri’s first painting, the oil on canvas Texas, 1945, one of the few works made while in the prison camp that he wanted to bring back to his native Città di Castello in Italy. The work is foundational, although it does not belong to the artist’s mature period, which he used to date to about 1948.

Also displayed in the same room are the military photographic exhibits from magazines of the time that make up Fabio Mauri’s conceptual work Linguaggio è guerra, 1974. Shocked by the discovery of the Holocaust, the Italian artist was interned in an asylum immediately after the war and until the early 1950s in the throes of mystical crises. Beginning in the late 1950s, he developed an art based on the inquiry between beauty, evil, ideology and power. In Language is War, he reflects in the early 1970s on the relationship between ideological manipulation (language) and war in general. The room’s display is completed with black-and-white photographs by Elizabeth (Lee) Miller, a surrealist photographer and student of Man Ray who later became a fashion photographer as well as a reporter. During World War II she became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue magazine, accompanying the U.S. Army into Germany and thus going so far as to document the first entry into the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. In this exhibition, for the first time Lee Miller’s Dachau photographs can be compared with Mušič’s drawings and accounts.

The exhibition continues in Room 36 with a section devoted to the artistic depiction of the Vietnam War. The installation Light and Belief. Voices and sketches of life from the Vietnam War, 2012, by Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê , who now lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), is being presented for the first time at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel. The artist fled in 1978 as a 10-year-old from South Vietnam after the seizure of Saigon by North Vietnamese troops (1975) and the unification of the country in July 1976 and came to the United States among the “Boat people” in the late 1970s. A work by Vu Giang Huong, a prominent North Vietnamese artist, is also on display.

The next room (36a) features a testimony dedicated to the war in Ukraine, which has been ongoing since the Russian invasion in February 2022. The war extends the conflict already underway since 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and parts of the Donbass, and is elaborated from the perspective of Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan in the large installation The Shelter II, 2023, which stands as a natural continuation of the work of the same name The Shelter created by the artist in 2015 for the 14th Istanbul Biennial and dedicated to the Donbass. The new work at Castello di Rivoli is inspired by images documenting the war in Ukraine found by the artist on the Internet. It expresses the drama and pain of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and resembles an air raid shelter divided into two floors.

In Room 37 is the artistic elaboration of the war in the Balkans (1990-2001), with Albanian artist Anri Sala’s video, Nocturnes, 1999, which uses documentary techniques of association between personal stories and historical realities to draw attention to the experience of loneliness and social pressure in wartime.

In the same room, conflicts in the Middle East are told through the film The Ballad of Special Ops Cody, 2017, by Iraqi-born American artist Michael Rakowitz, whose work investigates the contradictions of the wars in Iraq.

The exhibition on the Third Floor of the Castle concludes in Room 38 and the Museum’s attic space with echoes of the most recent wars in Afghanistan. This conflict with continuous reversals is evoked in the works of Afghan artist Rahraw Omarzad, founder of the CCAA center for contemporary art in Kabul and a school designed to give women access to art education, who fled in the fall of 2021 also thanks to the efforts of the Museum and the Italian government. The installation Every Tiger Needs a Horse, 2022-2023, is an environment created from the explosion of a cube containing dynamite and paint, an explosion carried out in a controlled manner inside a military base in Piedmont thanks to the collaboration of the Italian Army. The six canvases resulting from it and bearing its traces are set up for the first time in this exhibition.

The exhibition itinerary is complemented by the presentation in the Museum Theater of a video program curated by Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan and Giulia Colletti entitled A Letter from the Front with works by contemporary Ukrainian artists AntiGONNA (Vinnitsa, 1986), Yaroslav Futymsky (Poninka, 1987), Nikolay Karabinovych (Odessa, 1988), Dana Kavelina (Melitopol, 1995), Alina Kleytman (Kharkiv, 1991), Yuri Leiderman (Odessa, 1963), Katya Libkind (Vladivostok, 1991), Yarema Malashchuk & Roman Himey (Yarema Malashchuk: Kolomyia, 1993 / Roman Himey: Kolomyia, 1992), Lada Nakonechna (Dnipropetrovsk, 1981), R.E.P. (2004), Revkovsky / Rachinsky (Daniil Revkovsky: Kharkiv, 1993 / Andriy Rachinsky: Kharkiv, 1990), Oleksiy Sai (Kiev, 1975), Lesia Khomenko (Kiev, 1980), and Mykola Ridnyi (Kharkiv, 1985).

For all information you can visit the Castello di Rivoli website.

Image: Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Desastres de la Guerra (1810-1815; Collection Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti per l’Arte long-term deposit Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin)

An exhibition at Rivoli Castle on artists at war, from Goya to Ukraine

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