Save the Date! CIMAM 57th Annual Conference, Turin, November 28-30, 2025

20 January 2025

January 20, 2025 - Barcelona: CIMAM, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art, announces the dates of its 57th Annual Conference, set to take place in Turin from November 28-30, 2025. This marks CIMAM’s return to Italy after almost 50 years, with its last Italian edition held in Bologna and Prato in 1976.

The announcement was made during the CIMAM General Assembly on December 8, 2024, in Los Angeles. Suhanya Raffel, CIMAM President and Director of M+ in Hong Kong, and Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, President of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, unveiled Turin as the conference’s host city.

The conference will be co-hosted by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Fondazione Torino Musei, and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, with the generous support of Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT. This collaboration among Turin’s leading cultural institutions emphasizes the city’s commitment to fostering contemporary art and cultural dialogue.

Suhanya Raffel
Suhanya Raffel, CIMAM President and Museum Director, M+ Hong Kong at the CIMAM 2024 Annual Conference in Los Angeles

Suhanya Raffel remarked on the conference’s ambitious goals: "In Turin, we would like to propose a dynamic and very open and participative exercise consisting of exploring together the difficulties of enduring game-changing hardships while breeding new paradigms in our field. A case study based conference oriented towards providing us with a collectively made tool kit 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 Turin: our doing and the relevance of practice-based culture to guarantee a life-intelligent, caring future."

Patrizia Sandretto
Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Founder and President of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, during CIMAM 2024 General Assambly in Los Angeles

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. Turin has experienced and embodied, through centuries of history, the importance of culture for human society and what it means to move from theory to fieldwork. Turin is a learning city where 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 explore together, the new alliances among fields and also economic sectors to guarantee a central position of art and culture in our societies."

Chus Martinez
Chus Martínez, Director of the Institute Art Gender Nature in Basel, at the CIMAM 2024 Annual Conference in Los Angeles

The Content Committee for the 2025 Annual Conference will be chaired by Chus Martinez, CIMAM Board Member and Director of the Institute Art Gender Nature in Basel. Martinez shared a compelling vision for the conference: “An old proverb says: ‘Knowledge is like water; if it doesn’t flow, it becomes stale.’ This is why we attend conferences and why we should gather in Turin. In times of systemic unsteadiness, we have the opportunity to understand and act better on the conditions that make our work possible. The future of the field depends on our ability to articulate why museums and their teams are essential for social well-being and why art and artists are vital resources for solace and inspiration. Expect an active gathering. Bring a notebook and start a diary during those days.”

Martinez will collaborate with a distinguished panel of international and local experts, including CIMAM Board members Kamini Sawhney, an independent curator from Bangalore. Malgorzata Ludwisiak Ph.D., Museum Management Expert / Freelance Curator / Academic Teacher, Warsaw. Leevi Haapala, Dean, Academy of Fine Arts, University of Arts, Helsinki. Victoria Noorthoorn, Director, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 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).

Mark Your Calendars

The 57th CIMAM Annual Conference will serve as a unique platform for modern and contemporary art museum professionals to exchange ideas and tackle pressing issues in the field. Registration will open in mid-April 2025, with the Call for Travel Grant applications available from early May 2025.

This year’s CIMAM Travel Grant Program celebrates its 20th anniversary, providing exceptional opportunities for museum professionals to participate in this landmark gathering.

Stay tuned to CIMAM’s official communication channels for updates and secure your spot in this essential event for the international museum and art community.