Artissima, Italy's fair devoted exclusively to contemporary art, opened its 33rd edition in Turin with a VIP preview on 29 October, with 183 galleries from 35 countries at the Oval Lingotto Fiere. Founded in 1994, it has built its identity on experimentation, emerging artists and younger galleries. Director Luigi Fassi told Artsy the fair aims to highlight discoveries unfamiliar even to well-travelled collectors. A €300,000 acquisition fund supports works for Turin's museums.

Artsy singled out five booths. At Night Café, Dutch artist Mandy Franca's first solo outing in Italy, In a State of Being, prints dramatic orange-cloud images onto fabric lengths that hang, fold and spill towards the floor. The collages, made from her own photographs and reworked with oil pastels, reference climate change; prices run €4,500 to €15,000. Munich's LOHAUS Gallery presents The Presence of Absence, paintings by Melanie Siegel and Sarah Zagefka, who record empty pools, deserted tennis courts and modest shopfronts, including Zagefka's oil-on-wood AQ.19-3 from the Middle East.

At Bremond Capela, visitors crouch to peer into 15 weathered metal boxes on the floor, each holding part of French Vietnamese artist Louise Vo Tan's installation Pendant que les champs brûlent, combining archival footage, soundscapes and family photographs saved from a fire that destroyed her home. Quiet paintings by Kosovo-based Valdrin Thaqi hang on the surrounding walls. Secci's pastel-pink booth is a solo show by Italian artist Emma Scarafiotti, spanning video, photography, AI-assisted imagery and performance, with lightboxes of video stills like microscopic studies of skin, a morphing AI form on a lilac-framed monitor, and Baccanti, a three-act film inspired by the followers of Dionysus.

At Matèria, Stefano Canto has built a makeshift site of terracotta bricks, cement bags and concrete blocks, topped with two pigment-coloured ice heads. As the ice melts, water seeps into the cement below, hardening it around the disappearing forms. José Angelino's glass sculptures use electricity and argon gas to make shifting colours inspired by the Northern Lights, while Mario Cresci revisits his 1967 heliographic prints in abstract photographic compositions. Prices range from about €3,000 to €35,000, and the fair runs until 1 November.