Oval Lingotto Fiere, Via Giacomo Mattè Trucco 70, 10126 Turin (Italy)
Artissima’s theme this year, Fancy: A Flexible, Acrobatic Body, is about imagination as the power to reach beyond what we know. The works that made it concrete for me were set in motion by something outside them: a heartbeat in one, the air of the hall in another. The first was Vadim Fishkin’s, and he explained three of his works to me himself.
This was the 33rd edition, in the Oval Lingotto in Turin, with more than 180 galleries from 35 countries. I arrived for the Thursday preview at about five and stayed until closing.
Gregor Podnar, of Vienna, showed Fishkin in Back to the Future, the section for artists who made decisive contributions to the history of contemporary art. Fishkin, born in Penza in 1965, trained as an architect in Moscow and has lived in Ljubljana since 1992.
Lighthouse, 1996, is a red bulb on a chrome mount, alone on a single outer wall of the booth, with a thin silver rod running down the wall beneath it. It pulses with his heartbeat; a smart bracelet connects the two. Fishkin told me it has changed with the technology: in the nineties he had to carry heavy devices around to make it work. The next day it won the first Seletti Wonder Award, and the jury singled out its “simple pulse of light.”
His light box Houses, 1995, shows the block of flats in front of his home at night, balconies green, windows amber, a few dark; on the back is his reading of the lit windows as a constellation, pale rectangles scattered across grey. Fly, 1991, is an aeroplane made of the artificial flies anglers use for fly fishing, arranged as he imagined real flies would form one, standing on a thin black wire under a glass bell jar.
Žilvinas Kempinas, who represented Lithuania at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and has lived in New York since 1997, works with magnetic tape and moving air. His Fulcrum, 2026, was at (AV17) Gallery, from Vilnius. A thin steel ring stands on a black drum. Ribbons of magnetic tape, so fine they show only where they catch the light, rise from the drum around it and draw long, almost transparent arcs wider than the drum, so that the arcs appear and vanish as they turn. A fan moves them, and so does the air of the hall: the staff told me they were still tuning the piece against the draught from the passage.
At Galleria Continua, Leandro Erlich’s The Cloud (France), 2016, holds a white cloud inside a glass case with a dark wooden base and top. Walking along its side, I saw that it is made of thin panes standing one behind another, each printed in ceramic ink, and that the cloud can be seen only from the front. The work depends on where you stand. Through the glass, visitors on the far side stayed in view.
recursive, 2024, by Rhizomatiks, a collective led by Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi, was the work that dealt with AI most directly. It was shown by the anonymous art project, a Japanese programme for contemporary art, under the title Panta Rhei, “Everything Flows”, with a text by Namiki Serizawa, and a woman at the booth walked me through the installations. A camera feeds a square LED screen, and the model keeps training on what the camera shows, its own output included, along with the people in front of it and the light. A model trained only on its own output loses variety; Rhizomatiks adds chance to the loop to test how to keep it varied. When I filmed it, the screen began as a mosaic of blue and white cells on black and within seconds had turned a dull green made of coarse pixels.
The announcement that the fair was about to close set people moving, and I left with them. Outside it was dark and chilly, ten minutes on foot to the metro station, and many of us walked out together, like a procession.
Artène visited the Artissima 33th preview, 29 October 2026. All photography by Elasse.
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