EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival 2025

The second edition of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival will take place from April 16 to June 2, 2025, organized by the Fondazione per la Cultura Torino, under the artistic direction of Menno Liauw and Salvatore Vitale.

Overview

Beneath The Surface explores how the physical world connects to the forces that shape our lives. Materials aren’t just static objects—they shift and evolve, shaping and responding to systems like nature, politics, and technology. By looking at how materials change, we can see the stories they carry about power, control, and resistance. In a world that often feels abstract and overwhelming, paying attention to the physical world helps us make sense of these forces and how they impact us.

EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival is the international photography festival in Turin that reimagines the role of photography in shaping sustainable and critical futures. Through a dynamic program of exhibitions, public discussions, and a series of public events—developed in collaboration with Turin’s leading cultural institutions—EXPOSED offers a critical space to examine how photography is produced, understood, and mobilized today. To confront the urgent realities of our time and construct new possibilities, the festival embraces experimental visual languages and pioneering forms of collaboration.

Defined by its multidisciplinary and city-wide presence, the festival permeates Turin’s urban fabric, activating diverse exhibition sites and modes of engagement. From state museums to private foundations and independent spaces, the festival transforms the city into a platform where different perspectives, artistic practices, and research intersect. This convergence of public and private entities underscores the festival’s commitment to fostering an open dialogue between institutional and independent voices.

Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin will be the core hub of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival, hosting a series of exhibitions by international artists. Curated by Lucrezia Cippitelli in collaboration with MAO Museo d'Arte Orientale, Georges Senga’s Décalquer tells the story of neocolonial mining in Zaire's (today's DRC), and its human impact. Supported by LOOCK Galerie, Gregory Halpern's Omaha Sketchbook is ultimately a meditation on America, on the men and boys who inhabit it, and on the mechanics of aggression, inadequacy, and power. Valeria Cherchi multimedia project RE:Birth addresses the hidden, overlooked form of abuse that is obstetric and gynecological violence. Using photography, archival material, illustrations, video and sound she connects personal loss to societal issues, portraying childbirth as a transition between life and death. In Disintegrata, Silvia Rosi investigates the connection between photography, memory, and diaspora. By questioning the relationship between family history, the body, and public space, she invites us to rethink personal archives not only as records of the past but also of the future. Running Fast – Senses Off by Lisa Barnard delves into the intricate interplay between humans, ecology, and machines during the post-human shift, in an assemblage of elements drawn from three distinct bodies of work.

OGR Torino will present the group show Almost Real. From Trace To Simulation, curated by Samuele Piazza and Salvatore Vitale. Featured works are Empty Rider by Lawrence Lek, exploring existential and spiritual themes through sci-fi installations; The Post-Truth Museum by Nora Al-Badri, investigating politics and technology with AI and data sculpture; and The Garden Of Architecture by Alan Butler, reflecting on digital culture and reality construction through traditional and new media.

Gallerie d’Italia - Torino, an innovative and expansive space for art and culture with five floors primarily dedicated to photography, offers diverse pathways that invite continuous discovery. Here, Intesa Sanpaolo will present the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems. The Heart Of The Matter, organized in collaboration with Aperture and curated by Sarah Meister. A compelling retrospective featuring Weems’ works from her most famous photographic series, showcasing a journey through her entire career and her commitment to social justice, addressing themes of identity, sexism, and class.

CAMERA and Azienda Vinicola Garesio present the unpublished work created in the Langhe by Olga Cafiero, winner of the first edition of the Garesio Wine Prize for Documentary Photography. The project, developed during a residency and research period in the region, explores the landscape of the Barolo Langhe and the local wine culture, offering multiple perspectives on social and territorial innovation. It combines aerial photography, archival materials, off-camera processes, and dynamic recordings.

On view at Palazzo Carignano, Climate Tribunal is Paolo Cirio's latest installation, addressing climate justice from legal and economic perspectives. It includes Alps Glaciers Memorial, a metal sculpture listing thousands of vanishing Alpine glaciers, Climate Ecosystems Plaintiffs, displaying glacier photographs on semi-transparent fabric, and Climate Culpable, featuring oil-blackened flags with fossil fuel company logos, demanding accountability for the damage they have caused.

GAM, Italy’s oldest modern art museum, will display artist River Claure, winner of the 2024 Exposed Grant, a Bolivian photographer and visual artist known for his meticulously constructed portraits and magical landscapes which question dominant notions of cultural identity and the importance of photographic images to our reality. Once Upon A Time In The Jungle addresses current issues in the Ecuadorian Amazon through its everyday life. The project unfolds in visual narratives that engage with its inhabitants, avoiding exotic or ethnographic gazes, to represent an internal struggle between ancestral and communal ways of life and the advantages and threats of the Western world.

Exhibited at the Archivio di Stato di Torino, and curated by Zoé Samudzi, To Be In And Out Of The World explores the socio-cultural, emotional, and bureaucratic transformations linked to exilic and diasporic movements. Through the works of Tiffany Sia, Ahlam Shibli, and Nolan Oswald Dennis, the exhibition examines post-colonial dispossession and displacement in Hong Kong/China, Palestine/Israel, and South Africa. Themes of belonging, loss, and reclamation emerge in the narratives, as the artists reflect on spatial awareness, memory, and geopolitical power, unveiling state intrusions and the fragility of the world. Curated by Daria Tuminas, Not Bad Intentions. Attempts To Coexist by Sheng-Wen is his first monographic show, in collaboration with FOTODOK, collecting a few projects in one space and bringing together videos and photographs that challenge anthropocentric perspectives, sparking critical reflection through video, photography, and participatory projects.

What unites the festival’s diverse projects is a forward-looking approach that uses photography to interrogate both local and global dynamics. By rethinking our spatial relationships and reconsidering the systems that shape our environments, EXPOSED invites new interpretations and perspectives on the role of images today. The festival’s artistic direction is grounded in the belief that photography is not just a tool for documentation but a medium of transformation, capable of shifting perception and generating new narratives. Encouraging a fluid and horizontal exchange between artists and audiences, EXPOSED creates a space for critical engagement and collective imagination.

This initiative is made possible through the support and collaboration of the City of Turin, the Piedmont Region, the Turin Chamber of Commerce, Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT under the delegation of Fondazione CRT, and Fondazione per la Cultura Torino, which oversees the festival’s organization.More info coming soon.