Museo Riso di Palermo unveils new permanent collection installation with international artists

Museo Riso di Palermo has inaugurated a new permanent collection installation titled 'Percorsi di memoria', featuring works by international artists with ties to Sicily. The installation includes pieces by Vanessa Beecroft, Shay Frisch, Regina José Galindo, Hermann Nitsch, and Aldo Palazzolo, acquired through the PAC 2020 (Piano per l'Arte Contemporanea) funding program promoted by the Direzione Generale della Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura. Riso was one of 33 Italian institutions to win the grant. The new display occupies the museum's first floor and connects to the original collection nucleus, exploring themes of life, death, and the body. Key works include Beecroft's photo and video documentation of her 2008 performance at Spasimo, Nitsch's pieces selected before his death (he had a major retrospective at ZAC in 2015), Galindo's 2015 performance video at the Orto Botanico, Frisch's work created for his 2020 solo show at Riso, and Palazzolo's depictions of mummies from the Catacombs of Savoca (Messina). The installation also engages with Christian Boltanski's site-specific piece and Richard Long's 'Circle of life'. Director Maddalena De Luca stated that the PAC support allowed the museum to acquire works by artists who have marked cultural and exhibition activity over the past twenty years, in connection with the permanent collection's conceptual cores. The project was curated by Rosaria Raffaele Addamo.