Artist Talk: In conversation between Michalengelo Pistoletto 

Venue: Mehaboob John Talkies, Uru Art Harbour, Jew Town, Mattancherry + Online
Date: 15 December 2025 5:00 PM

Speaker: Michelangelo Pistoletto

Moderated by Grazina Subelyte

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s conversation with curator Grazina Subelyte marks the first major presentation of his works in South Asia. The dialogue revisits the two series featured in the exhibition: The Free Space, first conceived in his 1976 book One Hundred Exhibitions in the Month of October and later realised in 1999 with inmates at Milan’s San Vittore prison, and Division and Multiplication of the Mirror (1978), where reflection becomes a metaphor for growth, exchange, and collective experience. Tracing the motif of the cage and its counterpoints in openness and participation, the conversation, framed within Amphibian Aesthetics, will engage Pistoletto’s current thinking on climate justice and the role of art in society today.

Michelangelo Pistoletto is an influential Italian artist and a central figure of the Arte Povera movement, renowned for his mirror paintings that collapse the boundaries between artwork, viewer, and environment. His practice extends into social sculpture, using art as a catalyst for collective reflection and civic transformation.

Gražina Subelytė is an art historian and curator at Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, known for curating exhibitions that explore the intersections of Surrealism, magic, occultism, and 20th-century art.