26/09/2001
by Celso Fioravante

From the 29^th of September to the 4^th of November, the exhibition of the Regione Piemonte Prize, dedicated to emerging international contemporary art and promoted by the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, will be held at Guarene d’Alba, near Cuneo in Northern Italy. The foundation’s curator and artistic director, Francesco Bonami and the art critic Gianni Romano, have selected four artists who will each receive a study grant of $ 5,000 (€ 5,420). The selected artists are Laylah Ali (USA), Muntean/Rosenblum (Austria), Gabriele Picco (Italy) and Thomas Scheibitz (Germany). The winning prize of $ 15,000 (€ 16,270) will be awarded by a committee made up of Dan Cameron, Flaminio Gualdoni, Kasper Konig, Rosa Martinez and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The Foundation will also oversee see the opening of a new centre for the visual arts in June 2002. Celso Fioravante interviewed the founder and president of the Foundation, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, to learn some more about the venture.

Celso Fioravante: What is the Foundation’s working strategy?
Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo: One of the Foundation’s main aims is the promotion of artists. The artistic director is Francesco Bonami while Filippo Maggia is in charge of Italian photography. We have already agreed on the exhibition programme for the new space which will open in 2002 in San Paolo, a working class area of Turin. The building has an exhibition space of 3,000 square metres and has been restored by the Italian architect (resident in the UK), Claudio Silvestrin, who did the projects for the Anish Kapoor exhibitions at the Hayward gallery in London. The new space will be inaugurated by a show of contemporary Italian art curated by Francesco Bonami and Nancy Spector, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. We will also be hosting the Doug Aitken exhibition from the Serpentine Gallery in London.

C.F.: Will the Turin and Guarene spaces be open at the same time?
P.S.R.R.: The Guarene site will open between May and November, but the site in Turin will be open the whole year round. The Foundation is a self-financing enterprise. The only funding we get is from the Piedmonte Regional Council. Since opening the new space will send our expenses higher, we’ll probably have to find new sponsorship deals to help us carry out our plans.

C.F.: The Foundation sponsored one of the Venice Biennial special projects: Maurizio Cattelan’s installation in Palermo. What do you think of this project?
P.S.R.R.: Amongst those who exhibited at Venice, the artist who affected me the most was, without doubt, Maurizio Cattelan. Not just because of his provocative and disruptive works like La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), but for the courage and intelligence he showed in pushing back the boundaries of the Biennial to include Palermo. His installation Hollywood rises above the Bellolampo Palermo rubbish tip to show that the Biennial isn’t just about Venice, but also Sicily, California, and the world. The Foundation has believed in him from the start and sponsored a plane trip with 160 museum directors and international journalists to inaugurate the work.

C.F.: Which did you think was the most interesting national pavilion at the Venice Biennial?
P.S.R.R.: In this year’s Biennial, where video prevailed over all other media, I couldn’t help but be struck by the video installation of Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Spectators find themselves in a small movie theatre and get caught up in the dialogue between two spectators superimposed on the film. You are completely surrounded by the audio and visual effects, and that’s both extremely entertaining, and at the same time, conceptually very stimulating. I find this idea very inspiring - so much so, that I have one of these works by the same artists in my collection.

C.F.: Which artists would you like to see in the next Venice Biennial?
P.S.R.R.: I was pleased to see several artists at the Biennial who have in the past, taken part in the Guarene art prize, organised by the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation. Apart from Maurizio Cattelan, there was Mark Manders from the Netherlands, Keith Tyson from England, Tracey Rose from South Africa, Eliezer Sonnenschein from Israel and Magnus Wallin from Sweden. In the next Venice Biennial, therefore, I hope to see the four artists who will be running for the Guarene Prize this year, starting on the 29^th of September – (Laylah Ali, Muntean/Rosenblum, Gabriele Picco and Thomas Scheibitz) as well as artists from my collection such as Piotr Uklanski.