Runway 500 is enriched with a new work by Danish artist Nina Beier

A month before the opening of its new course, Pinacoteca Agnelli presents a new installation on the Pista 500. It is The Guardians, a work by Danish artist Nina Beier (1975).

The work joined the installations already on Runway 500 by Valie Export, Sylvie Fleury, Shilpa Gupta, Louise Lawler, Mark Leckey, and Cally Spooner. In the 28-meter-high green lung populated by more than 40 thousand plants of over three hundred native species, art and environmental installations dialogue with the architecture, landscape and symbols of an emblematic place in Turin. Some works measure themselves against the Lingotto’s legacy to present the social, cultural and political implications of its transformation; others initiate a reflection on the monument, confronting the tradition of art history and the symbols still present in the public spaces of our cities. Finally, some of the works on display complicate traditionally masculine imaginaries related to the factory and the automobile, bringing plural perspectives to a place historically marked by iconographies and narratives made by men.

Commissioned and produced by Pinacoteca Agnelli for the Pista 500, the installation The Guardians features five monumental lions, stripped of their function as architectural ornament, that seem to rest, returning to their wild condition. The work suggests the possibility that lion guardians may leave their designated places and invade new spaces.

Dialoguing with the industrial archaeology of the former Fiat factory in Lingotto, Nina Beier thus proposes a reflection on the life of monuments after the loss of their original function. In Beier’s devised herd of lions, traditional iconographies of power meet formal features borrowed from disparate domains, ranging from Disney films to Chinese Foo dogs, revealing the collective logic behind the production of commodities and the layering of imaginaries they enshrine.

Pinacoteca Agnelli’s programming, curated by Sarah Cosulich and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, extends outside the museum’s spaces, with a new work commissioned specifically for the spaces of Pista500.

The Pista500 can be visited Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Photo by Mybosswas

Runway 500 is enriched with a new work by Danish artist Nina Beier

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