31 October 2026 - 31 January 2027
Opening on 31 October 2026, in conjunction with Artissima, MAO, Museo d’Arte Orientale, Turin, presents the fourth edition of Contemporary Expressions, the programme of artist residencies and site-specific commissions that brings contemporary art into dialogue with the museum’s collection and spaces, rereading the past through the perspectives and language of the present.
The project continues the direction undertaken by MAO in recent years, transforming the museum into an active space that generates new types of experience and collaborative, participatory and emotional relationships with visitors.
The artists’ works reactivate the works in the collection, removing them from their apparent immobility and putting them back into circulation through different narratives. Not artefacts to be observed from a distance, but elements that, when reread with a critical and poetic eye, reacquire their intrinsic value – mainly religious, ritual, funerary – and return to interrogating the most urgent matters of our time.
Contemporary Expressions #4 brings together five international artists – Gala Porras-Kim, Elif Uras, Dayanita Singh, Sissel Tolaas and Driant Zeneli – who, although differing in sensibility, practice and artistic languages, share an interest in interrogating the ways in which museum collections are preserved, displayed and communicated.
Site-specific installations, pottery, photography, video, scientific and olfactory research reshape and, at the same time, destabilise the collection and Palazzo Mazzonis itself, which is transformed into a receptacle of narrative interventions: a blank page ready to welcome new stories and Eurasian cultural trajectories.
