The must-see exhibitions and events in June

Bergamo: “Thinking Like a Mountain”
Thinking like a mountain is the widespread cultural program promoted by GAMeC - Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bergamo for the two-year period 2024-2025. In addition to the museum spaces, it involves the territory and communities of the province, creating a path for sharing artistic experiences on the themes of sustainability and community. The program involvestwenty artists or groups of artists, and the first cycle is held with appointments ranging from now to the beginning of September, with Sonia Boyce, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Chiara Gambirasio, Lin May Saeed and Studio Ossidiana in collaboration with Frantoio Social, which are activated between Bergamo, Brembate, Castione della Presolana and Dalmine.

Where: GAMeC and various locations
When: until September 22nd

Torino: “Ecology is social, basically”
The Circolo del Design presents Ecology is social, basically, an exhibition that places design at the intersection between the environmental crisis and contemporary political and social issues, through 10 collective design actions led by Italian and European designers to reflect on new ways of inhabiting the planet, also the protagonist of this edition of Earthrise - Design for a Living Planet, whose 2023 edition saw design and scientific research work in tandem. The event, also aimed in this case at disseminating visions, research and projects from the world of design to impact the sustainability of life on our planet, investigates multiple themes under the lens of social ecology: the collective actions exhibited produce a transformative effect on communities in which the projects operate. On display are works by: Marginal Studio, Alvaro Catalán De Ocón, Studio Gisto, Floating University, Makramé APS, Atelier NL, Post Disaster, Station+ (s+).

Where: Circolo del Design
When: from 6 June to 16 December

Louise Bourgeois UNTITLED (NO. 7), 1993-2009. Ph. Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by SIAE, Italy and VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Roma: “Louise Bourgeois. The unconscious of memory”
Louise Bourgeois. The Unconscious of Memory is the first exhibition dedicated to a contemporary female artist at the Galleria Borghese, and the first Roman exhibition of one of the most influential Franco-American artists of the last century. Conceived by Cloé Perrone and curated with Geraldine Leardi and Philip Larratt-Smith, the exhibition focuses on Bourgeois' great contribution to sculpture and the profound connection between her artistic practice and the Borghese Gallery. The exhibition itinerary passes through some rooms, the Secret Gardens and the Uccelliera pavilion – places that Louise Bourgeois had explored with admiration during her first visit to Rome in 1967. Around 20 sculptural works that dialogue with the unique architecture of the Casino Borghese and with his collection, are focused on the themes of metamorphosis, memory and the expression of emotional and psychological states. These themes, also explored by the artists of the Borghese collection, are reinvigorated by Bourgeois' contemporary lens, which offers new perspectives on the human experience, thanks also to its extraordinary diversity of forms, materials and scales, which have allowed it to express a range of emotional states. On the occasion of the exhibition, the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici also hosts a work by the artist, set up in the historic apartments of Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici: No Exit, an installation made up of a staircase framed laterally by panels and by two large spheres located at its base.

Where: Galleria Borghese
When: from June 21st to September 15th

Merano: “The Insubric Line”
The exhibition The Insubric Line a is the first exhibition project of the three-year program conceived and curated by Lucrezia Cippitelli and Simone Frangi entitled The Invention of Europe: a tricontinental narrative (2024-2027). The curatorial project borrows the formula The Invention of Africa from the Congolese philosopher Yves Valentin Mudimbe to carry out a critical investigation into the idea of ​​Europe as an ideological and physical construction. This first exhibition takes the form of a choral narrative dedicated to deepening the relations between Europe and Africa through the contributions of eleven contemporary artists: Liliana Angulo Cortés, Sammy Baloji, Binta Diaw, Abdessamad El Montassir, Ufuoma Essi, Alessandra Ferrini, Kapwani Kiwanga , Francis Offman, Vashish Soobah, Betty Tchomanga, The School of Mutants. The exhibition places the artists in a dialogic relationship with the speculative image of the Insubrian line, a geo-point that crosses the city of Merano, a seam in the earth's surface that emerged following the collision between the European and African tectonic plates. The Insubric Line creates a multidisciplinary journey which, starting from the spaces of Kunst Meran Merano Arte, extends to the entire city between installations, videos, pictorial works, performances and sound interventions, and further expands with a rich multidisciplinary public program.

Where: Kunst Meran Merano Arte
When: until October 13th

Ph. Alessandro Saletta - DSL Studio © Triennale Milano

Milano: "Gae Aulenti (1927- 2012)"
The exhibition - created in collaboration with the Gae Aulenti Archive and curated by Giovanni Agosti with Nina Artioli, director of the Gae Aulenti Archive, and Nina Bassoli, curator for Architecture, urban regeneration and the city of the Triennale - pays homage to one of the most representative of Italian and international architecture and design of the late twentieth century and early 2000s, with the first major monographic exhibition on his entire career, which lasted over sixty years.
The exhibition retraces his human and professional history in a synthetic but spectacular way thanks to the installation designed by studio Tspoon, with an eye to the connections between architecture and the other arts, as well as between culture and politics. The exhibition reconstructs, in 1:1 size, segments of Gae Aulenti's works selected from a sample of typologies (exhibition and museum installations, private homes, showrooms, subway stations, theater scenes...), which present a sequence of environments that the visitor can explore.

Where: Triennale Milano
When: until January 12, 2025

Sesto San Giovanni: “Campari: the Art of Industry”
Campari: the art of industry, a journey through photographic images through the history of Campari is the new exhibition that inaugurates the gallery of the most famous bitter in Lombardy, highlighting the roots of the industrial history of the group and reaching up to the present day . The exhibition unfolds through two photographic itineraries, one dedicated to the historical dimension through 29 archive shots and the other focused on the present, portrayed in the unprecedented project created for the occasion by the American photographer Jill Mathis (Texas, USA). The story of the production activity of today is entrusted to the shots of the Novi Ligure plant, the largest active plant of Campari Group, which, displayed in diptychs and triptychs, retrace the spaces from the warehouses to the rooms of the infusion department where they are processed the aromatic herbs, to the bottling lines, to capture the elegance of the gestures that animate the production processes taking place every day.

Where: Galleria Campari
When: until September 30th

Marcia Hafif, Roman windows, 1969. Courtesy Marcia Hafif Studio

Roma: “Roma, 1961 – 1969 ” e “The Suspicion of Paradise”
Two monographic exhibitions opened simultaneously at MACRO. The first is a retrospective dedicated to the American painter Marcia Hafif (Pomona, 1929 – Laguna Beach, 2018), which tells of her relationship with Rome, and with her artistic community, through works created during the artist's long stay in city. Hafif arrived in Italy in 1961 via a research trip to Florence, before arriving in Rome where he remained until 1969. Rome, 1961 – 1969 presents works on canvas and vinyl, created between 1964 and 1968 and characterized by a which Hafif defined as "pop-minimal", in which the geometric patterns progressively give way to hill shapes, the hilly shapes among the most representative of the artist's Roman period, ending with four series of black and white photographs. The Suspicion of Paradise is instead the first exhibition that a museum institution dedicates to the poet Patrizia Cavalli, a key figure of Italian poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, whose Roman home was an important meeting place for the cultural environment of the capital. The exhibition project allows us to get to know, through over 200 photographs by Lorenzo Castore, the house in Via del Biscione near Campo de' Fiori, where Cavalli lived for almost 50 years, and also includes a selection of typescripts, manuscripts, and editorial projects related to art.
The exhibition Self-portrait at work by Elisabetta Benassi also remains on show, with the installation The Dry Salvages 5729 Aureole 1.

Where: MACRO
When: until August 25th

Luca Nostri, Buenos Aires Matanza Riachuelo, 2022, courtesy Ghella

Roma: “New Underground Adventures”
The exhibition and the related publication, both curated by Alessandro Dandini de Sylva, provide an extraordinary point of view on the construction of large underground infrastructures in Italy, Canada, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand through the gaze of five authors of contemporary Italian photography (Stefano Graziani, Rachele Maistrello, Domingo Milella, Luca Nostri, Giulia Parlato), thanks to Ghella, an infrastructure engineering company founded in 1894. The exhibition itinerary includes over one hundred and fifty images: those of the artists who observed and interpreted the infrastructures, leaving a "poetic distance" between the construction sites and their representation, and those coming from the Ghella archives, which document infrastructures built between the end of the the sixties and the beginning of the 2000s.

Where: MAXXI
When: from 14 June to 25 September 2024