Like a Moth to a Flame

The wide-ranging survey exhibition Like a Moth to a Flame, curated by Tom Eccles and Mark Rappolt with Liam Gillick, will officially inaugurate the Visual Arts Program at the renovated OGR in Turin—a 20,000 square-meter arts and innovation center opening in the fall of 2017.

The show will explore the eternal compulsion to produce and to collect works of art, displaying “objects” ranging from a 2nd century BCE Egyptian sculpture to works created for the last Venice Biennale, drawn together from Turin’s most prominent collections of art and antiquities. The exhibition title derives from the answer to a riddle—In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni—attributed to Virgil, which is also the title of two artworks—one by French theorist Guy Debord and one by British artist Cerith Wyn Evans—that are included in the exhibition.

Like a Moth to a Flame offers a portrait of Turin and its engagement with the world through the collecting habits of the city and its citizens. Assembling these objects provides an overview of the enduring appeal of art: its ability to renew ideas and generate fresh discourse. With rebirth and renewal in mind, the exhibition exploits the coincidence of one birth and two anniversaries—the inauguration of OGR, the 25th anniversary of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s collection of contemporary art and the 60th anniversary of founding of the Situationist International following a meeting in Alba, not far from Turin.

The exhibition, with more than 50 major artworks and hundreds of individual objects from the collections of Turin, demonstrates the importance of private passions and individual obsessions which, over time, find their way into the civic realm and the public cultural life of the city.

OGR Torino
OGR, a brand-new 20,000 square meter Innovation Hub + Arts Center will be opening in Turin on September 30th, 2017. OGR is a project aimed at regenerating and reopening Turin’s Officine Grandi Riparazioni, a site built between 1885 and 1895 once dedicated to the maintenance of railway vehicles and now committed to the promotion of culture and technological innovation in the fields of visual and performing arts. The main building covers an area of 20,000 square-meters and consists of two long wings, almost 200 meters long, which are connected transversely by a third much lower structure, creating its characteristic “H” shape. In 2013, the OGR-CRT consortium (of which Turin’s Fondazione CRT holds a controlling stake) purchased the land from RFI Sistemi Urbani with the aim of restoring and giving it back to the city as a versatile, inclusive and accessible space.

Located near the city center and just 500 meters from Porta Susa Railway Station (with high speed connections to Milan in under an hour), OGR aspires to become one of the main driving forces behind the creative development of the city of Turin: a hub of excellence paying special attention to the local context, capable of attracting artists, audiences, professionals, and institutional partners from around Europe and beyond. An area of some 9,000 square-meters—the so-called “South Wing”—will house a state-of-the-art innovation hub including tech labs, research centres and smart-working spaces, while the “North Wing”—which itself also covers a total area of 9,000 square-meters—will provide a home for contemporary art exhibitions, concerts, theatre, dance, talks and training opportunities.

Following Like a Moth to a Flame, in 2018 OGR Torino will present a series of site-specific solo exhibitions by internationally renowned artists including Tino Sehgal (curated by Luca Cerizza), Susan Hiller (curated by Barbara Casavecchia), and Mike Nelson. OGR will also host a series of Performing Arts events including music shows by electronic music pioneers such as Giorgio Moroder (in September 2017) and Kraftwerk (in November 2017). The Performing and Visual Arts Programs are run by curator and contemporary art critic Nicola Ricciardi, who was appointed Artistic Director in May 2016 by OGR’s Managing Director Massimo Lapucci.