News from the Near Future: 30 Years of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo : Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy

Articulated across two venues—Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile in Turin—the exhibition retraces three decades of artistic research through a selection of works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection.

The Collection, which started in 1992, has had a close reciprocal relationship with Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo since the latter was founded in 1995, taking on the status and role of a research instrument. Today the Collection reflects the institution’s exhibitions, tracing a unique history of art from the 1990s to the present, with antecedents in earlier decades.

Within the Fondazione’s spaces, historical works are presented alongside recent or never- before-shown pieces, as well as an archive section dedicated to the thirty-year history of the Fondazione, through documents, media materials, videos, images, and artworks.

The section hosted at Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile connects recent art history with the Fondazione’s own development through iconic works from the Collection that emphasize diverse dialogues, lineages, and tensions.

More than one hundred works, created by the most representative artists from the institution’s journey, explore the development of different artistic languages and media over a broad timeframe: video and video installation from Doug Aitken and Steve McQueen to Ian Cheng; sculpture from Urs Fischer to Berlinde De Bruyckere and Andra Ursuta; installation from Tobias Rehberger to Adrián Villar Rojas; photography from Cindy Sherman to Wolfgang Tillmans; painting from Glenn Brown to Tauba Auerbach and Ambera Wellmann. The exhibition is not a chronological narrative, but a visual, affective, and conceptual archive, reflecting how the Collection and Fondazione were built over time through exhibitions, commissions, institutional collaborations, residencies, educational and training projects.

In continuity with Bidibibodibiboo (2005), held at the Fondazione and the Cavallerizza Reale for the first decade, and Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue (2015), set up in the industrial spaces of Asja Ambiente Italia in Rivoli for the twentieth anniversary,

News from the Near Future reaffirms the role of artists in addressing the issues and urgencies of the present, offering critical readings of society, capable of transcending temporal coordinates and opening new reflections and interpretations. With both a historical and emotional perspective, the exhibition recognizes today as the future foretold by the works presented at the dawn of the Fondazione, while at the same time reconfirming its role as an observatory of imaginaries for the years to come through more recent works.

Alongside the exhibition, a selection of works from the Collection will be disseminated throughout Museo dell’Automobile’s permanent display — recently updated in content and completely rethought in terms of narrative methods and tools — to highlight institutional interaction and dialogue between the respective collections. Convergenze, curated by art historian Giacinto di Pietrantonio, aims to offer an updated reading of the history and culture of the automobile, reinterpreting its heritage through new narrative paradigms that highlight numerous and unexpected resonances. What arises from the union and collaboration between the two institutions goes beyond simple cohabitation, defining a curatorial gesture that expands the codes of museum storytelling and invites the public to engage in new forms of interpretation and dialogue. This endeavor is part of a broader structural innovation of MAUTO, which involves content, exhibition devices, and communication languages.

The exhibition title derives from the video installation by artist Fiona Tan, created in 2003 and shown at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Composed of excerpts from early 20th-century newsreels drawn from the Amsterdam Film museum archives, Tan’s News from the Near Future is a visual repertoire exploring the relationship between human beings and water — from its domestic role to its destructive power, amplified by the climate emergency. Like the artwork, the exhibition seeks to weave together fragments of different stories, materials from a collective archive and active memory, to offer new visions and possibilities, always attentive to the urgencies of the contemporary world.