Evolving Soundscapes at MAO: Tamanaramen Expand Chiharu Shiota’s World with a Live Performance of Sound, Image, and Identity

On the occasion of the major exhibition Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles, MAO – Museo d’Arte Orientale in Turin presents a new edition of Evolving Soundscapes, the public programme curated by Chiara Lee and freddie Murphy that transforms the exhibition visit into an immersive experience, expanding the Japanese artist’s universe through the language of sound.

Tamanaramen

The new edition of Evolving Soundscapes embraces an even broader collaborative vision: for 2025–26, the programme expands beyond MAO’s walls with concerts co-produced with OGR Torino, giving life to a shared series, and with Combo, which hosted the inaugural event on 21 October. This network of cultural institutions further strengthens Turin’s role as one of the most vibrant hubs for contemporary musical experimentation.

The second event in the programme brings Tamanaramen to MAO—an audiovisual duo based between Tokyo and London, formed by sisters Hana, a visual artist, and Pikam, a singer and producer. After individual artistic journeys, in 2021 they decided to merge their practices into a shared project that moves between electronic music, intimate vocals and striking visual compositions. Their performances blend abstract soundscapes, whispered voices and imagery inspired by skin textures, fluid colours and vibrating movements: a unique aesthetic universe where sound and image merge seamlessly.

The Tamanaramen’s poetics resonate strongly with several themes central to Chiharu Shiota’s work: presence in absence, the fragility of identity, memory woven into everyday gestures. Their live performances unfold as delicate meditations on solitude and human connection, alternating with vibrant, dancefloor-driven energy. The result is a subtle yet powerful dialogue with Shiota’s installations, amplifying the sensorial experience of the exhibition.

MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale

Via san Domenico 11, Torino

Date

Giovedì 4 dicembre 2025 ore 19:30

Alberto Giacometti: Faces and Landscapes of Home. An Intimate Exhibition of Faces, Mountains and Memory in St. Moritz

This winter, Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz presents Alberto Giacometti: Faces and Landscapes of Home, an exhibition that brings the Swiss artist back to the places that shaped him: Stampa and Maloja, in the remote Bregaglia Valley.

Alberto Giacometti at his worktable in Stampa, 1964 © Succession Alberto Giacometti / 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich

Curated by Tobia Bezzola, the show brings together paintings, sculptures and drawings that reveal Giacometti’s profound bond with his family and with the Alpine landscape of his childhood. It is a return to origins that is not only geographical, but also emotional and creative.

Alongside Giacometti’s works, the exhibition includes photographs by Ernst Scheidegger—his close friend and lifelong companion—who, from the 1940s to the 1960s, documented the artist’s everyday life between Paris and Switzerland. Scheidegger’s images reveal a quieter, almost domestic side of Giacometti: moments at the easel, silent exchanges with his mother or his wife Annette, contemplative pauses inside the house-studio in Stampa.

Giacometti grew up in the Bregaglia Valley in a family immersed in art: his father Giovanni was one of Switzerland’s leading modern painters, famed for his luminous Alpine scenes. It is no surprise, then, that Alberto’s earliest subjects in the 1910s and ’20s were his parents and the surrounding landscape. These early sketches—both austere and intimate—already define the central themes of his future research: the human figure, light, and the observation of reality.

Alberto Giacometti Monte del Forno 1923 Oil on canvas 60 x 50 cm Private Collection, Switzerland © Succession Alberto Giacometti / 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich

In 1922, the artist moved to Paris, determined to free himself from a tradition he felt too constraining. There he encountered the avant-garde: Cubism, tribal art, Surrealism. He experimented, questioned himself, and changed direction. But as the exhibition shows, his connection to Switzerland never broke. During the Second World War he returned to work in Geneva, and throughout his life he made frequent returns to Stampa and Maloja—places where he obsessively portrayed those closest to him: his mother, Diego, Annette. These figures would eventually become true archetypes of his sculpture.

The exhibition features finely modelled bronze works such as Tête au long cou and Petite buste de Diego, shown alongside late drawings of the mountains he visited throughout his life. These works testify to a constant dialogue between departure and return, between cosmopolitan Paris and the intimate refuge of the Alps.

Scheidegger’s photographs enrich this narrative, capturing the daily rhythm of Giacometti’s life: a restless, urban artist, yet also a son of the mountains—bound to that landscape by a deep and almost secret sense of belonging.

Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz

Via Serlas 22, 7500 St. Moritz

Date

13 dicembre 2025 – 28 marzo 2026

Laura Villani at Sala Biffi: “Anatomy of Contemplation,” an intimate journey through landscape, memory, and vision

From December 6, 2025 to January 10, 2026, Sala Biffi opens its doors to Anatomy of Contemplation, the new exhibition by Laura Villani curated by Chiara Cardini.

Laura Villani, Sempre nuovo è il giorno, 2025

In this intimate space—almost a small reading room suspended in time—the Pavia-born artist presents twenty-four new works on paper: a visual diary, an imaginary Grand Tour where the most ancient past meets familiar objects from the present.

Villani works with pastel on fine paper, each sheet prepared with a different acrylic ground, as if every piece were an independent page yet still part of a single narrative. The palette is minimal and understated, illuminated by delicate highlights or by sudden iridescent accents. Her drawing—precise yet intuitive—becomes the tool through which the artist explores the deep relationship between humanity and nature.

The title of the exhibition suggests that contemplation may indeed have a form, an inner architecture that Villani invites viewers to explore. In her suspended landscapes, classical ruins, temples, and marble fragments dialogue with domestic elements—chandeliers, armchairs—creating poetic short circuits. In The Song of Orpheus, for instance, the columns of a temple stand before a white mountain, evoking a mythical elsewhere; while in The Dialogue of Days, still waters, ancient architecture, and a soft light source coexist in meditative harmony.

Laura Villani, Vestale, 2025

Among the most emblematic works, Each Day Is Always New stages the hand of the Colossus of Constantine beside a modern armchair perched on a precarious rock: a disorienting encounter that transforms archaeology into contemporary experience. It is in these unexpected juxtapositions that Villani crafts her reflection—a passage between what endures and what changes, between the visible and the invisible, between what we know and what we only sense.

The works become spaces of silence and revelation, where the landscape is not merely a backdrop but a mental territory in which memory, desire, and spirituality converge. They invite us to pause, observe, and allow ourselves to be guided into a suspended time.

Laura Villani, il canto di Orfeo, 2025

The exhibition is also an opportunity to rediscover the artist’s trajectory. After a musical past and a long experience with printmaking, Villani has in recent years found in drawing and painting the most complete expression of her research. Her works, now included in major public collections and museums, confirm a refined poetics capable of blending classical themes with contemporary sensibilities.

Galleria Biffi Arte

P.zza sant'antonino - via chiapponi, 39, Piacenza

Date

6 dicembre – 10 gennaio 2026