At Artissima 2026, Curatorial Attention Becomes a Prize
Artissima has presented the final programme for its 33rd edition, with new awards, projects across Turin and 183 participating galleries. After the fair, Fondazione Torino Musei will announce the next directorial mandate. Yet the most revealing development is a programme that makes curatorial attention itself a prize.
Artissima 2026 had already been announced in July. The official press conference on 17 September completed the picture with final figures, special projects, new awards and the initiatives that will accompany the fair inside and beyond Turin’s Oval from 30 October to 1 November.
The first update concerns scale. The 180 galleries announced during the summer have become 183. Monographic projects have risen from 60 to 66, while first-time participants have increased from 33 to 37. The changes are modest, but they show that the programme was still moving after its initial announcement. The final map now covers 35 countries and four continents, although Italy remains by far the largest presence, with 86 galleries.
More important than the numbers is what will happen around the booths. Artissima continues to extend its reach through residencies, publishing, children’s projects, commissions and partnerships with museums, foundations and companies. The fair no longer confines itself to bringing galleries and collectors together. It intervenes directly in the production of works and in the opportunities that may follow their presentation.
From the VIP lounge to residencies inside companies
Among the new projects is Delizie, the VIP lounge entrusted to Edoardo Piermattei. Its point of departure is the Medici pleasure villa, a place of leisure that also functioned as an instrument of territorial control and representation. Piermattei will bring three monumental works into the fair’s most exclusive area: Ninfeo, Delizia and Fontana triste, together with the five pigmented-concrete panels of Giudizio senza soggetto.
The choice contains a useful contradiction. An artist will examine the architecture of power inside the space reserved for the fair’s privileged guests. Whether that tension remains visible once the lounge fills with collectors, sponsors and conversations is another matter.
Artissima Junior will be led by Francis Offman. Children will use sportswear, advertising banners, letters and other materials from the Juventus world to create a collective work. These objects are not treated as neutral waste waiting to be recycled. They retain signs of use, origins and memory, in keeping with a practice in which matter always arrives with a previous history.
MADE IN also returns, placing four artists in direct contact with local companies. Dario Capello will work with Blue Engineering, Roberto Casti with Galup, Lucia Cristiani with Oscalito 1936 and Marco Schiavone with Ferrino. Four Turin galleries, Franco Noero, Simóndi, Mazzoleni and Luce Gallery, will accompany the projects, which will be brought together in a dedicated booth.
WoW – Worlds of Words will create a small publishing landscape inside the Oval, with magazines, publishers, a bookshop and public conversations. The programme will include Artribune. The encounter between poetry and visual art also continues through Laura Accerboni’s residency with six artists working in Turin. The full programme of Artissima’s special projects shows how much of the fair is now produced outside the conventional booth.
New prizes at Artissima 2026
The Seletti Wonder Award and Archivorum Unwritten join Artissima’s existing programme of prizes and funds. Archivorum Unwritten will provide €20,000 to develop an editorial project emerging from the work of an artist in the Monologue/Dialogue section. The result may become a book, record, catalogue or another form suggested by the selected research.
The award matters because it does not treat publishing as the final container for an artwork that has already been completed. Publication becomes part of the work, with its own time, collaborations and skills. At a moment when too many catalogues survive as unread evidence of exhibitions that have already disappeared, Archivorum Unwritten attempts to reverse the relationship. It does not merely publish what has happened. It allows something to happen through publishing.
Artissima moves beyond the Oval
Artissima will occupy several locations across Turin. At Gallerie d’Italia, Alice Motard will curate NO FUTURE, a programme of artists’ films and videos produced between 2000 and 2026. The exhibition follows the transformation of the punk slogan from an individual rejection of society into a contemporary perception of collective ruin, driven by democratic crises, wars, technology and ecological collapse.
At the former zoo in Parco Michelotti, the duo Hedda Roman will present I Left Something in the Woods, a short film in which generative artificial intelligence contributes to the construction of unstable bodies and environments. Franco Mazzucchelli will bring an inflatable sculpture to the Principi di Piemonte hotel. Iris Touliatou will create a new intervention for the Pista 500 billboard, while Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo will host Louis Morlæ’s first solo exhibition in Italy. Morlæ won the 2025 illy Present Future Prize. At the Oval, Gallerie d’Italia will also preview the Massimo Vitali exhibition scheduled for 2027.
This expansion across Turin does more than multiply the number of events. It gives some projects a duration and a spatial condition different from those of the booth. The real test will be whether this network creates lasting possibilities for artists or simply produces an intense concentration of activity that disappears when art week ends.
The Curators’ Choice and the value of discovery
The initiative that best explains how Artissima works occupies less physical space than the others. The Curators’ Choice is a hospitality programme for a selected group of international curators. Each curator will be asked to identify a gallery they did not know before visiting the fair and award it a critical mention.
There will be no cheque, residency or acquisition. The prize will be the curator’s attention and the visibility generated by that choice. Artissima is formalising something that usually happens quietly in the corridors of an art fair: an encounter in front of a booth, a conversation, a name entering the field of vision of someone preparing an exhibition, collection or biennial.
The recipient will not be the artist directly, but the gallery that brought the work to the curator’s attention. The programme therefore recognises the research, selection and long-term support carried out by galleries, particularly younger ones. It also makes an uncomfortable mechanism unusually visible. In the art world, attention is never simply attention. It accumulates authority, strengthens reputations and can eventually affect market value.
I have already examined how the art world decides who becomes visible. The Curators’ Choice brings that process into the fair itself and turns it into an official device. The decision may be symbolic, but symbolic capital is rarely harmless or economically neutral.
The counterargument is clear. Artissima is giving international curators a reason to move beyond familiar names and spend time with galleries they might otherwise overlook. For a young gallery, one serious encounter may matter more than a small cash award. That is precisely why the programme deserves attention rather than easy dismissal.
The real question comes later. Will a critical mention generate exhibitions, institutional relationships and opportunities for the artists, or will it become another badge in the gallery’s communication? The answer will not arrive during the days of the fair. The programme’s credibility will depend on what follows the mention.
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Art and Its Market
A useful companion for readers interested in how artistic value, institutional recognition and market structures continually reshape one another.
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Artissima’s next directorial mandate
During the press conference, Fondazione Torino Musei stated that Artissima’s next directorial mandate would be announced immediately after the conclusion of the 2026 edition. The decision will therefore arrive at the end of Luigi Fassi’s fifth year at the head of the fair and will define Artissima’s direction from 2027 onward.
The 17 September presentation added many names and projects to what was already known. Yet its most interesting aspect is not the addition of three galleries or the proliferation of events. It is the attempt to transform an informal and often decisive encounter into a declared mechanism. At Artissima, attention itself has become a prize. Its consequence will be measured only after the Oval has emptied.
