From 29 October to 1 November, Turin shifts gear. With contemporary art fairs, light installations, photography, exhibitions and electronic music, the city becomes a meeting point for anyone in search of new forms of expression. Here’s what to see during Torino Art Week 2026, beyond Artissima.
This is the time of year when Turin seems to run on a different set of coordinates. Galleries fill up, independent spaces throw open their doors, artworks leave their conventional venues and the music moves from one stage to the next, deep into the night. This is Torino Art Week, the event that brings together some of the most interesting happenings on the Italian and international cultural scene, turning the city into a route to wander rather than a checklist to tick off.
The fairs you can’t miss, beyond Artissima
Artissima remains a key stop for anyone who wants to discover the latest developments in contemporary art. From 30 October to 1 November, at the Oval Lingotto, the fair brings together 183 galleries from 35 countries, showcasing both established artists and new voices from the international scene. The theme of the 2026 edition, Fancy: A Flexible, Acrobatic Body, points to an interest in the body as a space of transformation, movement and experimentation. But stopping there would mean missing a big part of what makes this week so special.
From 29 October to 1 November, The Others Art Fair puts the spotlight on emerging practices and independent players at the Parcheggio Lancia, in Piazzale Chiribiri. The fair is a chance to get closer to projects that often operate outside the more established circuits, putting new perspectives and ways of producing art front and centre.
On the same dates, Flashback Art Fair, at Corso Giovanni Lanza 75, takes an approach that challenges the traditional divide between ancient and contemporary. Its very identity rests on the idea that art shouldn’t be read through rigid time categories, but as a territory of connections and echoes, capable of setting different eras, languages and sensibilities in conversation.
Also widening the week’s scope is Paratissima, from 30 October to 1 November at the Real Collegio Carlo Alberto in Moncalieri, with its focus on emerging creativity. Venturing outside central Turin becomes a chance to meet artists and projects in a setting far from the big fairs, where discovery can begin with a practice that is still taking shape.
The exhibitions to see during Torino Art Week
Beyond the fairs, Turin offers an exhibition trail that crosses languages and periods. From 29 October 2026 to 4 April 2027, Marisa Merz’s exhibition La danza delle ore (The Dance of the Hours) celebrates the centenary of the artist’s birth across three venues, Fondazione Merz, GAM and Castello di Rivoli, bringing together different aspects of a body of work that spanned sculpture, drawing and installation.
From 30 October, at the Pinacoteca Agnelli, Laure. Chris Ofili & Édouard Manet takes Manet’s 1862 portrait as its starting point to reflect on representation, identity and memory, giving Laure, the woman depicted in the painting, her rightful place at the centre.
At OGR Torino, from 31 October, Yayoi Kusama‘s Infinity Mirrored Room – The Eternally Infinite Light of the Universe Illuminating the Quest for Truth turns mirrors and lights into an immersive environment where the boundaries of space seem to dissolve.
Among the events to mark in your calendar is also Where It Plays, the second exhibition organised by Chiaromonte, an editorial platform dedicated to the intersections between art and contemporary culture. The exhibition brings together two video installations by Dora Budor and Nicole-Antonia Spagnola. The show opens on 29 October at 5:00 PM and will be on view until 30 November 2026, at Via G. Barbaroux 5H, Turin.
For those who would rather explore the relationship between photography and reality, CAMERA is showing Letizia Battaglia. L’opera 1970-2020 until 7 February 2027: a journey through fifty years of work, from images of the Mafia in Palermo to portraits and scenes of everyday life, capturing the full complexity of the photographer’s vision.
Rounding out the trail is Luci d’Artista, which from 23 October 2026 to 10 January 2027 brings light installations to the city’s streets and squares, turning Turin into an open-air exhibition. Five different projects, all offering a chance to look at space, history and images from a fresh perspective.
C2C Festival: where art meets electronic music
From 29 October to 1 November, C2C Festival brings to Turin one of its most recognisable sides: a festival where electronic music meets experimentation, sound research and contemporary culture. Originally known as Club To Club, over the years C2C has built an identity that goes beyond the line between club culture and the avant-garde, opening up to musical languages that are hard to pin down to a single genre.
During Art Week, its presence adds a dimension of rhythm, listening and bodies in motion to the visual programme. While the fairs and exhibitions invite you to linger over the works, C2C shifts the focus to collective experience: music becomes a way of inhabiting spaces, meeting people and discovering new sonic trajectories. It’s this interplay that makes Turin so compelling at this time of year. The city doesn’t just offer a series of events, but an ecosystem where visual arts and music can meet, cross-pollinate and reach different audiences.
Evolving Soundscapes: hearing sound from other perspectives
On 31 October, the MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale launches Evolving Soundscapes, a public programme curated by Chiara Lee and Freddie Murphy that brings together artists from the experimental sound and performance scene, with a particular focus on Asian and diasporic perspectives. The project puts listening at the heart of the cultural experience, exploring sound not just as musical composition but as a space where identities, geographies and memories meet. In this context, sonic experimentation becomes a tool for connecting different experiences and opening up new ways of interpreting them.
The MAO as a venue adds another layer of meaning: inside a museum dedicated to Asian cultures, the programme challenges the notion that traditions are fixed or confined to the past. Sound, by contrast, is a living practice, able to travel across places and generations, absorb influences and generate new languages.
Sin Control Vintage and Olfattorio: the city beyond the museums
Torino Art Week also reveals itself away from the exhibition venues, in places where fashion, aesthetic research and independent culture blend into everyday life. On 29 October, Sin Control Vintage hosts an in-store DJ set by @ruizosc1, adding an informal stop to the week’s calendar. It’s an event that links vintage and music, two worlds where the past is not just something to be recovered, but a repertoire to be reworked and transformed.
From 29 October to 1 November, Olfattorio, at Piazza Bodoni 4/f, presents Forme Invisibili (Invisible Forms). The project turns the spotlight on scent, a language that often stays on the margins of artistic experience, yet can evoke memories, spark associations and change the way we perceive a space. Smell thus becomes a starting point for exploring forms of sensitivity that don’t necessarily rely on sight. These events differ in scale and language, but they all help broaden our view of the city: contemporary culture isn’t found only in major institutions, but also in shops, independent spaces and experiences born at the boundaries between disciplines.
Turin, four days to shift your perspective
Torino Art Week 2026 is a chance to explore a city that can’t be captured by a single event. Artissima, the independent fairs, the exhibitions devoted to Marisa Merz and Chris Ofili, Letizia Battaglia’s photography, Yayoi Kusama’s immersive universe, and the sonic experiments of C2C Festival and the MAO make up a programme where different languages, audiences and ways of experiencing culture live side by side. Our advice: don’t try to see everything. Instead, pick a route that alternates a fair with an exhibition, or a daytime visit with an evening gig, and leave room for unexpected detours. After all, beyond the most anticipated events, the most interesting part of a week like this may be exactly what you stumble upon without having planned it.
