Chiara Baima Poma / Botto&Bruno / Fatma Bucak / Roberto Casti / Paola De Pietri / Francesca Ferreri / Eva Frapiccini / Giulia Iacolutti / Emily Jacir / Marguerite Kahrl / Lala Meredith-Vula / Laura Pugno / Victoria Stoian / Flaminia Veronesi / Morigen Yan.
Breathe In. Hold. Breathe Out. inaugurates the gallery’s new space and marks a moment of transition, transforming it into an occasion for encounter and shared experience. It is an exhibition, but also a celebration: an invitation to inhabit a new space and to recognise the sense of time it evokes, turning it into a shared ritual.
In this sense, the celebration is not a noisy exception that interrupts everyday life. It is a shared time, removed from productivity, speed and urgency, creating space for encounter and presence. It is a moment in which a community comes together not simply to look, but to recognise itself through a shared experience.
The gallery has now found a new home within Palazzo Scaglia di Verrua, one of the few surviving Renaissance palazzi in Turin. Crossing its courtyard naturally slows the pace. The city remains just beyond the entrance, while the interior opens onto a space of quiet, contemplation and attention. Not a space removed from the world, but a place from which to return to it with greater awareness.
It is from this experience that the exhibition takes its title. Breathing marks life with an essential rhythm, shared by every living being: to breathe in, to hold, to breathe out. A simple gesture, often unconscious. Breath does not interrupt time; it reveals its rhythm. It reminds us that a pause is not a suspension of life, but the condition that makes it possible to continue observing and imagining.
The works brought together in the exhibition reflect the plurality of perspectives that has come to define the gallery’s programme. Through different media — photography, sculpture, sound, installation and video — the artists engage with some of the most pressing questions of our present: environmental transformation, conflict, migration, borders, and the fragility of political and social systems. They do not seek to represent the world exhaustively, nor to offer definitive answers. Rather, they open up a space for perception.
The exhibition brings together one work by each of the artists represented by the gallery, alongside works by artists with whom the gallery has begun a dialogue, recognising the significance of their practices. It is a gesture that looks simultaneously towards the path built so far and towards what has yet to take shape. Each work carries its own history, yet together they become part of a broader narrative, capable of tracing a shared direction without relinquishing the plurality of individual practices. A perspective that holds memory and possibility, rootedness and transformation, in tension and dialogue.
The opening evening will feature The Outsider (live), Roberto Casti’s site-specific sound performance. The project takes shape from the sounds of the urban environment: the soundscape of the surrounding neighbourhood is recorded and brought live into the gallery, intertwining with an analogue and digital improvisational set shaped by the sonic presences emerging from outside.
Each performance is unique, taking form through its relationship with the place in which it unfolds and the soundscape that moves through it. The work does not bring the exhibition to a close, but extends its inaugural gesture, bringing what lies outside into dialogue with what lies within and imagining their boundary as a space of exchange, interdependence and alliance.
The breath of the city thus encounters the breath of the gallery.
Breathe In. Hold. Breathe Out. is an invitation.
To make time a practice of attention.
To share a moment of transition.
To celebrate the beginning of a new story through a shared breath.
