CIMAM 57th Annual Conference Announced for Turin, Italy
Image: Leevi Haapala, Dean of the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Arts in Helsinki, Kamini Sawhney, Independent Curator in Bangalore, Davide Quadrio, Director, Museo d'Arte Orientale (MAO), Francesco Manacorda, Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea; Chiara Bertola, Director of GAM – Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, President of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Suhanya Raffel, President of CIMAM and Director M+ Hong Kong, Chus Martinez, Director of the Institute Art Gender Nature in Basel, Bernardo Follini, Senior Curator at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
At the CIMAM General Assembly, held on December 8 in Los Angeles, Suhanya Raffel, President of CIMAM and Director of the M+ in Hong Kong, together with Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, President of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, announced Turin (Italy) as the new city to host CIMAM's 57th Annual Conference. The event will be co-hosted by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Fondazione Torino Musei, and Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, and will be supported by Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT. This collaboration promises another compelling edition, bringing together professionals committed to shaping the future of modern and contemporary art institutions.
Suhanya Raffel, CIMAM President and Director, M+ Hong Kong, commented, "In Torino, we would like to propose a dynamic and very open and participative exercise consisting in thinking together the difficulties of enduring game-changing hardships while breeding new paradigms in our field. A case study based conference oriented towards providing us a collectively made tool kid to counteract the multitude of challenges that too often leave us feeling overwhelmed and disempowered in our daily tasks as art professionals. Epictetus —a Greek Stoic philosopher—wrote: "Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing." Indeed, this is what we would love to analyze together in Torino: our doing and the relevance of practice-based culture to guarantee a life-intelligent, caring future.
Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo commented: "We are delighted to be hosting CIMAM's Annual conference in Turin—where we will be framing the collective discussion among the members and external experts around an attempt to identify how art and culture still can shape the form of our future. Torino has known and embody through centuries of history— the importance of culture for human society and what it means to move from theory to fieldwork. Torino is a learning city, and there we would like to host the transnational art community that CIMAM embodies and invite all the members to embark on the exercise of thinking about the structural transformations of our field, the new beginnings we are compelled to think together, the new alliances among fields and also economic sectors to guarantee a central position of art and culture in our societies."
The Contents Committee for CIMAM's 2025 Annual Conference was also announced, consisting of CIMAM Board Members Chus Martinez, Director of the Institute Art Gender Nature in Basel – who will chair the contents committee– Kamini Sawhney, Independent Curator in Bangalore, Malgorzata Ludwisiak, Artistic Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and Leevi Haapala, Dean of the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Arts in Helsinki, Victoria Noorthoorn, Director, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and museum directors and curators from Turin's host institutions, including Francesco Manacorda, Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea; Chiara Bertola, Director of GAM – Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, Bernardo Follini, Senior Curator at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and Davide Quadrio, Director, Museo d'Arte Orientale (MAO).