November in Turin means two things: white truffle season and Artissima art fair. Their shared calendar isn’t a coincidence, if the stalls upon stalls of some of the finest contemporary art isn’t enough to draw the world’s art dealers to the northern Italian city, then the ultra rare white truffles surely are. Over the past 30 years, Turin has become the centre of Italy’s contemporary art scene, not just because of Artissima, but also thanks to the efforts of Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, a modern-day Peggy Guggenheim and the grande dame of Turin’s art scene. Her gallery, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, was built from the ruins of an old tyre factory, which feels like a very literal metaphor for Turin’s transformation from Italy’s car capital to its art capital.

As part of Artissima, one artist is awarded the Illy Present Future Prize. Selected by an international jury, the prize is seen as a platform for the discovery of new talents who are awarded with a solo exhibition in the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo during the following year’s Artissima. Last year’s winner, the Amsterdam-based artist Peng Zuqiang, presented his exhibition Vestiges this year.

Vestiges is made up of two works, both of which are film installations. In the first work, Déjà vu (2023), a projector sits on the bare floor. A looped reel of 16mm film spools through it from a roller on the ceiling. The film is projected only a couple inches from the floor on a nearby wall. At first, it seems as if there is nothing being displayed, just the rectangle of light being beamed from the projector, but now and then a thin black shadow disrupts the projection. Made using the photogram technique, which is the process of making a photographic image without using a camera, Peng exposed a 30-metre wire directly onto the same length of negative film. The line that emerges is the vestige left by the object on the celluloid material. 

When discussing the piece, Peng spoke of the Covid restrictions that happened in China which saw people essentially locked into their high-rise apartment buildings. Some residents, in order to combat the isolation and cabin fever, took to throwing wires and ropes out their windows to climb out. The country’s zero-Covid policy eventually ended in protests when a fire at one of these high-rises saw firefighters unable to save some residents due to the physical barriers that had been put up to keep people inside the building.

This piece is contrasted by the exhibition’s other work, a three-channel video installation called Autocorrects (2023). Taking the form of an ambient, down-tempo Cantopop song with a suitably grainy and dream-like music video, Autocorrects is both a pastiche and an evocation. It plays with the music Peng associates with growing up, but the lyrics are disjointed and melancholic. The video follows Peng through Amsterdam’s non-places, spaces designed solely for the circulation and consumption of the individual such as an airport, an underground, a lift, a corridor. In this imagery composed of urban feeling, intimacy and lacerations, the subject’s identity seems to gradually blur in favour of an untranslatable affective interconnection.

Peng Zuqiang’s Vestiges runs at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin until January 7th, 2024.