The GAM – Turin Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art is among the institutions selected under the PAC 2026 Public Call —Plan for Contemporary Art (Area 1)—promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and dedicated to the acquisition of works created over the past seventy years. The project, curated by Elena Volpato, involves the addition to the museum’s collections of *I quaderni di Hannah Arendt* (Hannah Arendt’s Notebooks), a work created by Sabrina Mezzaqui between 2017 and 2021.
The work consists of 29 hand-bound notebooks, featuring fabric covers embroidered with motifs inspiredby the Bauhaus aesthetic. Inside, the texts are transcribed in midnight blue ink on paper typically used for legal and administrative documents. *Hannah Arendt’s Notebooks* represent one of the most significant works in Sabrina Mezzaqui’s recent research. The work reflects the artist’s focus on the written word and, at the same time, a practice grounded in reading and writing, which she considers authentic creative and contemplative acts. Through calligraphic copying, thought is, in fact, reworked and transferred into the material. Writing thus becomes a tool for reflection, in a slow and meticulous process in which the manual gesture takes on central importance.
Mezzaqui’s work brings to the forefront the relevance and urgency of Hannah Arendt’s thought, particularly the texts collected in the volume *In the Desert of Thought: Notebooks and Diaries 1950–1973*. This critical dimension is counterbalanced by the need to identify forms of resistance. For Arendt, writing constitutes one such possibility; Mezzaqui takes up this gesture and brings it to life through her own artistic practice, transforming the act of copying into a path of meditation and reflection. Suspended time and the dimension of isolation become an integral part of the creative process, in which the repetition of the act of writing allows for a renewed engagement with the author’s thought.
Hannah Arendt’s Notebooks constitute one of the most ambitious works created by Sabrina Mezzaqui in recent years and are part of a broader project dedicated to the calligraphic transcription of notebooks and diaries by 20th-century female thinkers. Using the same methodology, the artist created *The Notebooks of Simone Weil* between 2010 and 2013. In the coming years, Mezzaqui also intends to devote herself to transcribing the diaries of Etty Hillesum, continuing her research focused on the relationship between writing, memory, thought, and matter.
The work acquired by the GAM will be presented as part of an exhibition held in the GAM’s Video Library, where it will engage in a dialogue with a video work currently in production. In this new work, Mezzaqui returns to the theme of *The Sense of Order*, the title of Ernst Gombrich’s well-known essay on the decorative arts, published in 1979. The artist had previously dedicated a large-scale work on paper to this very text in 2002. The exhibition will be open to the public from December 3, 2026, to April 4, 2027, as part of the “Quinta Risonanza” program at the GAM. To mark the exhibition, Edizioni Corraini will also publish a booklet dedicated to *Hannah Arendt’s Notebooks*, documenting the work’s entry into the Turin museum’s collection.
Sabrina Mezzaqui was born in Bologna in 1964 and lives and works in Marzabotto, where she leads a collaborative practice through the Tavolo di Lavoro di Marzabotto. She teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and collaborates with the Massimo Minini Gallery and the Continua Gallery. Throughout her career, she has exhibited in numerous Italian public spaces, including the Luigi Rovati Foundation, Palazzo da Mosto – Palazzo Magnani Foundation, the Pilotta – National Gallery of Parma, the Civic Art Museum of Modena, the GAM in Turin, and the Milan Triennale. His work has also been presented at major international institutions and venues, including PS1 in New York, INOVA in Milwaukee, the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Saint-Étienne, One Severn Street in Birmingham, Raid Projects Gallery in Los Angeles, the Italian Cultural Institute – MOCA in Buenos Aires, and the Bengal Art Lounge in Dhaka. His works, other than the one recently acquired by the GAM, are held in the collections of the GAM in Turin, the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the MAMbo, Castel Sant’Elmo in Naples, and the Galleria Civica in Parma.
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| Turin’s GAM Among the Winners of the PAC 2026: Sabrina Mezzaqui’s *The Notebooks of Hannah Arendt* Acquired |
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