Chiara Bertola presents the guidelines for her GAM in Turin. This is what the GAM of the future will look like

The new director of GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino Chiara Bertola presented the guidelines of her mandate, her vision for the museum’s future and the rich exhibition program for 2024. Together with Fondazione Torino Musei President Massimo Broccio, the first steps of the space overhaul were also outlined, in anticipation of the upcoming design competition that will involve the entire building designed in 1959 by Carlo Bassi and Goffredo Boschetti.

“With the appointment of Chiara Bertola, not only does her new vision for the museum and its rich 2024 program get underway, but also the path of redevelopment of the building, pending positive determinations from the Ministry of Culture,” said Fondazione Torino Musei President Massimo Broccio. “By the end of the year, the International Design Competition will be held, but we announce today as an absolute novelty what we have called Lot Zero, that is, targeted interventions of temporary redevelopment of the premises, preparatory to the future construction site, conducted in the foyer and on the second floor, accompanied by the important reopening of the second floor, where a Living Repository will also be located. The appointment of Chiara Bertola and the other changes affecting the building are the first concrete step in a long-awaited and necessary transformation, which invests both the museum’s cultural project and its architecture, drawing a bridge between a now ancient history of the museum and an awareness of future cultural horizons that will change its role. I would like to thank the qualified selection committee for its valuable work that has allowed the identification of a professional with solid experience who will ensure the change necessary to meet future challenges, the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation for its irreplaceable ideational confrontation and financial support, and the Mayor for his valuable proximity and support for the Foundation’s ambitious Strategic Plan.”

“GAM is the oldest museum institution in Italy dedicated to modern and contemporary art,” said newly appointed director Chiara Bertola, “and, as such, it is the ideal place to put into action the realization that preserving and exhibiting works of art is a central and essential mission, but not sufficient to interpret the new functions of the museum today. The goal is to create an institution that can relate to the world, inside and outside its walls. Therefore, I would like GAM to transform itself as much as possible into a complex, living and inclusive place that is able to ignite and reactivate the works and ideas of the inherited heritage, proposing them in a new light and repositioning them in a new constellation of meaning.”

Reflecting on the GAM of the future, the museum proposes itself as a wise and welcoming organism, one that is not only visited by people, but that itself visits the territory and its cultural institutions, explores it, and permeates it with its own works and forms of expression. The goal will be to involve as much as possible, with active participation, cultural associations, the realities of small museums, artists, curators and the underground world. GAM also intends to position itself as a place where important works are collected, housed and exhibited in a proper and exemplary manner. In programming exhibitions of contemporary and historical authors, it proposes the existence of an experimental, vital, joyful soul that is attuned to visitors, especially young people, but also to the territory, its history, its reasons, its present, its artists and its creativities.

GAM’s new course intends to start from an awareness of the history of the building and the institution, making it the imaginative root of the museum’s cultural development. The goal is to harmonize each season the different exhibition projects presented at the same time, giving rise, through all the spaces of the museum, to a Resonance that knows how to make its fulcrums, namely the collections, exhibitions and events, vibrate with each other. Each exhibition season will revolve around an ideal common thread that will set the tone for the overall accord of the Resonance: it will be about highlighting through time poetic, thematic, and linguistic affinities. It is about emphasizing, igniting and reactivating works and ideas, but proposing them in a renewed way, bringing out unusual interpretations of habitual facts, letting languages slip into each other and letting forgotten solutions come back to surprise artists of new generations. The first Resonance will start in autumn 2024.

Scheduled from October 16, 2024 to June 30, 2025 The Collection: the museum’s rich and historic collection must nurture new interpretive work that can go beyond the ordinary functions of historical memory and chronology. It must be a vital legacy that gives its own imprint to the themes of the Resonances and that, through exhibitions, reverberate back into the fabric of the Collections in parallel thematic displays. This will also be made possible by the reopening of the second floor.

Part of the collections will be presented in the form of a Living Repository: a number of heritage holdings will be on display from October 16, 2024 to March 9, 2025 and open for viewing by the public, artists, and scholars as a space for the germination of ideas and research. The concept of the Living Repository gives the opportunity to set up many works-rarely or even never seen-in the form of a contemporary display. The variation in its display, as with the collections, will involve the input of artists and young curators, with the aim of making the museum a laboratory where experimentation is continually taking place.

In collaboration with the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, an exhibition dedicated to Berthe Morisot is scheduled, curated by Maria Teresa Benedetti, Giulia Perin and Chiara Bertola and produced by 24 ORE Cultura. The exhibition will present her connection with the poetics of movement and her highly personal stamp in capturing the transience of the moment, to symbolize the fragility of existence, capable of gracefully capturing the elements of nature and reality. The layout of the exhibition will be given by a display by Stefano Arienti, who in some rooms will create a comparison with Morisot and the values of Impressionist language.
Then posing in dialogue with the historical exhibition and the collections will be Stefano Arienti himself.

And again, from October 30, 2024 to March 15, 2025, there will be an exhibition on the work of statuninse artist Mary Heilmann, curated by Chiara Bertola. The exhibition will go through her production, from her early works in the 1970s to her latest productions, touching on founding passages and thematic cores of her work, where each chapter - room will propose the emotion and a certain color sound of that period. Finally, scheduled in the Spazio del Contemporaneo is the first major museum anthology dedicated to Maria Morganti. Curated by Elena Volpato, the entire exhibition will unfold as a single performative installation made of the slow settling of time and colors.

Thanks to the technical support of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo and its investee, Società Prisma, and with the contribution of the Cultural Back Office Centro Conservazione e Restauro “La Venaria Reale” (CCR), it will proceed through an international design competition aimed at the realization by lots of the redevelopment of the entire GAM building. By next May, the Foundation will publish the call for bids to select the group of professionals to design the intervention, with the aim of awarding the competition by the end of 2024. The ambitious project requires significant resources for its implementation and could not be carried out without the fundamental contribution of the Entities and Foundations and in particular the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation, which will support the investment for the design of the entire intervention and the execution of a first part of the work. Fondazione Torino Musei is confident of the support of the Ministry of Culture, to which it has applied, through the Piedmont Regional Secretariat, for the national funds provided in the Strategic Plan for Major Cultural Heritage Projects (PSGPBC) of the MiC.

Lot Zero, the first nucleus of the work, will be completed by autumn 2024 and will take the form of targeted interventions of temporary renovation of the premises with the logic of Stripping, preparatory and anticipatory of the future construction site, conducted in the foyer and on the second floor, accompanied by the reopening of the second floor where a Living Depot will also be located. In the original design by architects Bassi and Boschetti, the museum foyer was an open and welcoming space. Today, pending the final restoration, the foyer will be opened up as much as possible to facilitate public access and stay while restoring the original airiness of the spaces. On the second floor of the museum, the Short Channel is currently dedicated to temporary exhibitions of a historical nature. The Manica lunga, now without any facing to the outside, will be given back to the dialogue with the outside: in the two parallel rooms that face Corso Galileo Ferraris with a small balcony and on the external staircase, toward Via Fanti. Sunlight will also be restored in an equal manner by opening the back header overlooking Via Vela. After years of closure, the second floor of GAM will reopen to the public by 2024. The second floor allows GAM to return to displaying a heritage that has long exceeded the volumes envisioned by the architects in 1959; it will not be made up exclusively of an exhibition route but also of a Living Depository where the works will be visible to the public through a look from the inside, from behind the scenes, just as insiders are used to seeing them: hanging on racks, lined up on shelves, kept in crates. The counterpoint between the display of the rooms, the studied exhibition mise en scene, and the raw deposit of works, typical instead of the storage spaces, will be another way for visitors to learn about the museum machine and the countless ways in which GAM unravels the meaning of what it holds.

Chiara Bertola presents the guidelines for her GAM in Turin. This is what the GAM of the future will look like

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