The uncanny cosmos of Rebecca Horn

Drawing, performance, video, film, installations and kinetic works. Machines that interweave the human, the animal and the mechanical to create what Marcella Beccaria - curator of the exhibition Cutting Through the Past, until 21 September at the Castello di Rivoli - defines as "a disturbing performative cosmos, in which states such as desire, obsession, hope and fear are the protagonists.

We are inside the Manica Lunga, the highest floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art located half an hour's drive from the centre of Turin. The protagonist Rebecca Horn (1944-2024), to whom the exhibition is dedicated, is not physically there, but her presence - made up of objects, images, colours, drawings, lines, music and the most diverse emotions - continues to speak (of and) for her.

Cutting Through the Past - the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to her in an Italian museum and the first major exhibition after her recent death - "is a journey through more than 50 years of her work," the curator explains, "recognising the value of her highly topical research, anticipating contemporary multi-species thinking and the possible new behaviours and emotions that derive from interacting with the complex and pervasive technologies we live with.

Once inside, drawing our attention to the left is Pfauenmaschine (the peacock machine), conceived by Horn for her participation in documenta Kassel in 1982, not far from the Bodylandscapes, a group of rare large-format drawings from 1964, characterised by a rounded shape and circles, symbols of time understood as a cyclical and non-linear entity with frequent allusions to endless regeneration. The title of the exhibition is also that of one of his most significant installations of the years 1992-1993 with five wooden doors that recreate a domestic environment where a sharp metal rod makes a rotation, reaching out to touch each of the doors and digging out one end with a slight but cruel gesture, like a pointed weapon that always insists on the same wound.

Continuing along the path, we find Hauckhkorper (Breathing Body), the installations Inferno (1993-1994), Turm der Namenlosen (Tower without a Name) and Concert for Anarchy, presented in a 2006 version and coming directly from the artist's collection. This machine originated as a dinner party object for the film 'Buster's Bedroom' (1990), set in a psychiatric clinic, and is an upside-down grand piano that cyclically explodes in a thunderous sound emission, revealing its interior or releasing its keys towards the floor. It is a piano that embodies the purity of a music that the artist is no longer able to create within the limits of his real life. What emerges are concerts of the imagination that still embody freedom and the ideal. Horn has always rejected the surrounding society, preferring to live anarchy in the imagination and has done so by thinking, drawing, creating, building, destroying and creating again. For herself and for the general public.