Castello di Rivoli Has Rehung Arte Povera. Sung Tieu’s Ruin Complicates the Story
At Castello di Rivoli, new works by Sung Tieu, Haris Epaminonda and Christelle Oyiri enter the galleries alongside a rehung Arte Povera Collection. One reconstructed corridor makes the distance between preservation and loss difficult to ignore.
The corridor is narrow, the light dim. On the walls, mosaics display graffiti and tags that dissolve into individual tiles upon closer inspection. Sung Tieu (Hai Duong, 1987) has reconstructed a 1:1 scale replica of a hallway from the East Berlin residential building where she lived after her family arrived in Germany in 1992. Located on Gehrenseestraße, the building is now abandoned and partially demolished. At the end of the corridor, one enters a room bathed in yellow light. On the floor lies a heap of rubble brought from the Berlin site. Visitors encounter it right after walking through the replica of a domestic space: the gap between the still-traversable hallway and the home falling apart carries the weight of the installation on its own.
Sung Tieu and the Ceiling of Castello di Rivoli
Tieu is also exhibiting this year in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale alongside Henrike Naumann. At Rivoli, she returns to the Plattenbauten of former East Germany, which were also home to Vietnamese contract workers. The mosaic reproduces images from the Berlin walls, including political graffiti of differing ideological persuasions. Walking through the corridor means stepping inside that memory before encountering the rubble.
The exhibition catalogue adds a crucial detail: the debris is placed on the exact spot where a section of the Castle’s ceiling collapsed in the 1970s. The protests triggered by that collapse contributed to the building’s preservation and its eventual transformation into a museum. One ruin was restored; the other continued to deteriorate. For a few moments, they occupy the very same place.
Epaminonda’s Room at Castello di Rivoli
Haris Epaminonda (Nicosia, 1980) intervenes in the Room of Bacchus and Ariadne. Large, sand-coloured surfaces hang from above and unroll onto the floor. Blue and white panels obstruct the view of the stuccoes. Between the openings appear a globe, horse heads and small forms; a decorated fabric is placed next to a column. A recess opens within the white surface: one must step closer to see what lies underneath.
Some objects originate from Casa Mollino. The link between Juvarra and Mollino, separated by nearly two centuries yet both active in Turin, is the work’s declared point of departure. In the room, however, what matters most is the viewer’s movement. A panel conceals what was visible a moment earlier; an object reveals itself only as one walks around the installation. Epaminonda never allows the contemporary staging and the historical decoration to completely detach from one another.
The Fire in Christelle Oyiri’s Film
Christelle Oyiri (Nogent-sur-Marne, 1992) brings to Rivoli Hauntology of an OG, a film made with Neva Wireko that traverses Memphis through its monuments, rap and urban memory. In the footage, Clayborn Temple appears in flames. The scene was unplanned: Oyiri recounted that on the final day of shooting, she went out early with her crew in search of extra shots and found herself in front of the burning church.
Clayborn Temple had served as a hub during the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike, the struggle that brought Martin Luther King Jr. back to Memphis. His last speech was delivered at Mason Temple, a different church. This distinction matters, as the film records the burning of a place that supported the protest in daily life. Oyiri captures it as it happens, while the voice of rapper and poet Darius Phatmak Clayton weaves it back into the narrative of the city.
Alighiero Boetti and the Name “Arte Povera”
The display at Castello di Rivoli also includes the rehanging of its Arte Povera Collection. Alighiero Boetti, Piero Gilardi and Michelangelo Pistoletto are located on the first floor; on the second, one encounters, among others, Giovanni Anselmo, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone and Gilberto Zorio.
During the presentation, Marcella Beccaria recalled a detail concerning Boetti’s works. They were acquired by the Castle in the 1980s, at a time when the artist was seeking to distance himself from the “Arte Povera” label, which back then could already sound outdated. Beccaria noted that in the exhibition documentation from that period, the term does not appear. Today, however, it serves as the title under which the museum gathers and renders readable a fundamental portion of its Collection. A single body of work can inhabit multiple narratives without its history coinciding entirely with any single one. I had felt something similar while visiting the Pino Pascali Museum: a familiar movement name can help us find an artist and still leave part of the work outside the frame.
The museum’s programme also features the Piero Siena Prize. The Castle presents works by Stefano Bernardi and Samira Mosca; Bernardi’s work enters its permanent collection through the prize’s acquisition and donation arrangement with the Autonomous Province of Bolzano.
I leave the Boetti room with Tieu’s corridor still on my mind. The museum preserves artworks and reorganises the terms used to present them. It managed to repair its own ceiling. The Berlin corridor, to become walkable once again, had to be reconstructed inside here.
Antonino La Vela
Further reading: Arte Povera
Arte Povera: 300 millions d’années offers another way to spend time with the movement and its history.
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