Curated by Giulia Turconi, and displayed as a single, flowing journey through the bright, curved space of the Fondazione Merz in Turin, the fifth edition of the Mario Merz Prize explores the liminal spaces where memory and imagination, biology and technology, gender and politics intersect.

The works of finalists Elena Bellantoni (Vibo Valentia, 1975), Agnes Questionmark (Rome, 1995), Mohamed Bourouissa (Algeria, 1978), Voluspa Jarpa (Rancagua, Chile, 1971) and Anna Franceschini (Pavia, 1979), on display until September 21st, are all preoccupied with the body in all its constructions, interpreted and translated in distinct ways. The winner, decided through a combined public and jury vote, will get a dedicated exhibition at the Fondazione in 2026.

The exhibition begins with Elena Bellantoni’s video installation On The Breadline (2023), which weaves a collective narrative of women putting their bodies on the line for bread, literally and figuratively. On separate screens, women in Italy, Greece, Serbia and Turkey (all sites of so-called “bread riots”) perform a choreography of mundane, repetitive movement in defunct work environments. Industrial “casualties” like abandoned factories and empty airports become places where a shared history of poverty and struggle comes into play through the bodies that once occupied them. The clips culminate with the women joining their voices to sing the political poem Bread and Roses in their own languages, bread becoming the universal medium through which these countries experienced solidarity but also protest.

As a direct reference to the cell line that enabled scientists to decode the human genome, Agnes Questionmark’s installation CHM13hTERT (2023) touches on how biomedical technologies are redefining the parameters of the human, and the body. The artist puts her own body inside the piece, presenting herself as a new hybrid being with no clear origin; a cross between a mermaid and a cuttlefish in shocking pink, suspended from a metal frame with a series of hooks and straps that turn the pure white of the gallery clinical. The space becomes a laboratory, inviting viewers to question whether they are witnessing an operation, an experiment, or simply evolution taking place. Questionmark transforms the body into a space where politics and science interfere; her work at once a speculation of what the future of bodies may hold, and a cry for bodily autonomy.

Taking a post-colonial approach, Voluspa Jarpa’s The Extinction Project (2025) weaves together sight, sound and movement to invite the viewer to reflect on how actions of the past continue to resonate in the present. The work, incorporating transparent textiles and video, uses cartography as a means of superimposing different moments in time at the same locations, reflecting on the existence of a “territorial memory.” Here, the still image becomes a membrane onto which more images can be projected.

The Chilean artist structures the piece around three distinct historical periods that marked Latin America: colonial extinction of indigenous populations in the 16th- 17th centuries, the dictatorships of the 1950s-80s, and today’s conflicts related to mining. Extinction is employed as a metaphor for the western “civilising” project, understood “not only in a biological sense, but also in cultural and social terms” in the artist’s words. At the same time, the work reminds us that beyond these Western extinction narratives, life has continued.

In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler examined the materiality of the body and the social and cultural forces that construct it. In her book, Butler quotes Donna Haraway’s Cyborg manifesto, which asks, “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?”. Anna Franceschini’s All Those Stuffed Shirts (2023) presents the body in the form of a machine using dressmen: anthropomorphic forms used for ironing shirts. Programmed into a sort of dance, the robots violently jerk upwards, filling with air, only to slowly, dramatically, deflate before the cycle repeats itself. Just as a “stuffed shirt” is a pompous, conservative person, the piece reduces the wearer of said shirt into mere stuffing, the only common ground between man and machine being the air that inflates them. Breath is seen as the body’s survival technology, raising questions about our relationship with machines and the “labour” we impose on them. In an accompanying video What time is love? (2017), toys are subjected to endurance tests to ensure their suitability for children, turning them into strange vessels for emotions reserved for living beings.

In the Fondazione’s dark basement, French-Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa confronts systemic racism through his video piece Généalogie de la Violence (2024). The work, inspired by the artist’s personal experiences of being stopped by French police for ‘random’ checks, speaks of police brutality that is felt beyond the physical. The film’s protagonist, a young man who is stopped and searched while driving with a friend, experiences the humiliation and psychological detachment that comes from being forced to let go of one’s bodily autonomy under the guise of law and order. The accompanying sculptures, Mehdi Anede and Iriss (2023), casts of body parts during a stop-and-search, visualise the body’s reduction to an object under state power.

Together, the five finalists chart the body as a contested site, shaped by memory, technology, politics, and power, yet also capable of resistance and reinvention. By moving between histories of struggle, speculative futures, and the intimacies of daily life, the exhibition refuses easy answers and instead opens space for critical reflection. In doing so, the Mario Merz Prize reaffirms its role as not only a recognition of artistic excellence, but as a platform for questioning what it means to be human today.

The Mario Merz Prize exhibition runs at Fondazione Merz in Turin until 21st September.