This catalogue is published on the occasion of the finalists’ exhibition of the First Edition of the Mario Merz Prize, held at the Fondazione Merz from March 8 to June 11, 2017.
The Mario Merz Prize, created with the aim of launching a new project which, through the expertise of an extensive international network of experts, be able to identify new emerging exponents in art and, in parallel, enable young composers to present themselves for an innovative project of contemporary music, is now at its second edition.
Francesco Arena, Petrit Halilaj, Gili Lavy, Shahryar Nashat and Suha Traboulsi are the artists chosen for the final and invited to exhibit the works they consider to be some of the most significant of their artistic practice and suitable for presenting themselves to the public in the context of collective exhibition.
The finalists composers, Gabriele Cosmi, Geoffrey Gordon, Pierre Mariétan, Catherine Milliken have been invited to compose new pieces which are then performed in concert, enabling the final jury and public to choose the winner. The concert, which took place in the exceptional setting of the Villa della Tesoriera, home to the Biblioteca Musicale Andrea Della Corte in Turin, is available in the CD recording enclosed with this volume.

Within the splendid settings of the Italian Cultural Institute in London will be announced the winners on 5 July 2017.
During the event the presentation of the sound work I am Doctor Merz. A voice Opera on Mario Merz: a reading of a selection of texts by the artist, accompanied by electronic tracks will take place .

This booklet is the ideal complement to the catalogue of the solo exhibition that the Fondazione Merz dedicated to the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, winner of the first edition of the Mario Merz Prize, an international biennial award for art and music. The exhibition ran from 2 November 2016 to 5 February 2017. The book collects the images of the spectacular staging of the exhibition at the Fondazione’s spaces in Turin. The site-specific exhibition project, conceived by the artist himself, focuses on the Al Araba Al Madfuna film trilogy, presented for the first time in its entirety. Wael Shawky invites us to go through the physical elements that make up the film: stage architectures and sculptures, set in an artificial landscape of sand. The scenography thus produced, together with the projections, offers the possibility of an immersive experience between dream and reality, creating an original atmosphere that takes up the historical, literary and cinematographic references through which the artist has imagined his stories.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Wael Shawky: Al Araba Al Madfuna curated by Abdellah Karroum and held at Fondazione Merz from 2nd November 2016 to 5th February 2017.

“Shawky is an artist who embraces the exhibition space in a gesture of giving and sharing fragments of a world that is impossible to translate into controlled physical forms. […] Wael Shawky: Al Araba Al Madfuna invites the viewer to walk through elements of the films and their processes of production – architectural artefacts, sculptures, and drawings on animal skins – placed inside a built landscape of sand. The viewer moves in temporal reverse, beginning with the last film, Al Araba Al Madfuna III, in colour, followed by three-dimensional elements taken from the storyboard, and then, finally, Shawky’s older films in black and white. [...] The entire Al Araba Al Madfuna project was inspired by a journey, a place within history, and a personal experience of that place. The storyboards, drawings, sculptures, and films that emerged were made between Abydos, the place of the artist’s site of expedition, and the exhibition spaces and museums where the artwork is later made visible. His journey to Upper Egypt is marked and made of places and encounters, of archaeological sites, of the people who care for the memory of the past, the people who wait, the people who dig, and finally, of those who write. It is this latter category, embodied by the work of the Egyptian novelist Mustagab, that is the most influential for Shawky in this project. In a way, the artist looks at humankind’s experience of history as his own experience, of both accountability for some pressing issues in the world and watching as older values die or mutate into other forms of life.” (Abdellah Karroum)

This dossier is published on the occasion of the exhibition Mario Merz. La natura è l’equilibrio (Nature is equilibium) held at the Fondazione Merz from 4th July to 18th september 2016. After the Fondazione’s inaugural exhibition in 2005, and after three themed exhibitions about the drawings in 2007, about the paintings in 2010, and about his links with architectural design in 2011, and following a number of external collaborations, the Fondazione is now devoting an entire exhibition to present a careful selection of works by Mario Merz that are closely related to the theme of nature. This is a theme that is certainly not unusual for the artist who, with his watchful eyes, never overlooked the subject, either in private life or in his artistic development that saw him constantly asking questions.

An extreme desire, therefore, to observe the fundamental laws that govern the universe more closely because living on earth means observing and participating in its evolution.

The exhibition foresees the display of works from the Merz collection, including some not shown for many years. The selection will include paintings, installations and drawings, and each work has a selected text alongside by Mario Merz.

The idea is to focus the exhibition with a poetic tale of the earth as creator of life rather than exclusively on the concepts related to the work itself. As though it were a reading of forms, figures and words in an attempt to reorganise the pairing between culture and nature.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Society, you’re a crazy breed by Botto&Bruno held at Fondazione Merz from 9th March to 19th June 2016. “The exhibition in the spaces of the Fondazione Merz is the new stage of an artistic journey that starts as always with the history of the place, drawing the infinite possibilities enclosed in it. It is a place subjected to radical changes that time and man have impressed on it either deliberately or through neglect, but which continues to be a container of life and energy. Within this context, the reading of the new world brings with it a thousand fragments of various objects, both recognisable and unrecognisable, which daily appear before our eyes like the ruins of a past that appears to us all the more a lost eden the more time passes. The photographs pervade the exhibition space to the point of creating a new dimension, like a city of the future in which the remains of a civilisation mingle with the present, defining new possibilities of life.

Botto&Bruno have produced an accurate sounding, a powerful lens open and responsive to every detail, as though with a wish to give back to these abandoned objects, these violated places the dignity impressed on them when they were born”. (Maria Centonze)

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition DOPO by Christian Boltanski held at Fondazione Merz from 3rd November 2015 to 31th January 2016. “Christian Boltanski lays claim to his being an artist of the twentieth century, and indeed all his work takes us into the heart of the contemporary scene. But not the updated and temporary one but the real one made of choices and events that change the meaning of individual anonymous lives that become choral and paradigmatic. It is another way to tell the story that we are. Not the impressive and official one, never that of the winners but the story of all of us, with things desired and also suffered. With minimal language and one not prone to celebration he has succeeded in talking about everything without remaining anchored to anything”. (Claudia Gioia)

This book reproduces the photographic documentation of the exhibition and it is enriched by texts by Claudia Gioia (exhibition curator), Massimo Donà (philosopher), Beatrice Merz.

Christian Boltanski (1944-2021), French painter, sculptor, photographer and filmmaker, was born in Paris. He began to make his way in the art world with painting when he was only thirteen years old, towards the end of the 1950s. In the 1960s, he began to develop a 'personal ethnology' marked by the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Harald Szeemann, among others. At the same time, drawing on museology, Boltanski exhibited inventories of objects of anonymous owners (photos, clothing, bells, flowers...) creating an extraordinary hybrid between absence and presence, autobiography and collective imagination.