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The responsibilities of contemporary curating: an interview with Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti

IT

From her reflections on supporting artists’ rights, to her engagement with radical figures such as Lee Lozano, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti’s perspective places at its center questions of social justice, precarity, accessibility, and critical integrity, highlighting how curatorship today is inevitably intertwined with the cultural, economic, and ideological tensions that run through the present.

Curator and writer, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti (Desenzano del Garda, 1990) is currently Head Curator at the Istituto Svizzero in Italy, where she curates the artistic program of the Rome, Milan, and Palermo venues. She previously served as Chief Curator at Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, contributing to the redefinition of its mission in conjunction with its reopening in 2022. She curated exhibitions and institutional programs in Italy and abroad, working with artists such as Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Sylvie Fleury, Mark Leckey, Nan Goldin and Nina Beier, among others. Throughout her career, she has also curated the New Entries section of Artissima (2018-2019) and the main exhibition of the 6th International Biennale for Young Art in Moscow (2018). She has worked at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo as curator and head of the Young Curators Residency Programme, a research residency for international curators selected from leading curatorial schools worldwide. She co-founded CLOG Projects, an independent space oriented toward research and experimentation, and she is the co-founder and vice-president of AWI Art Workers Italia, the first association created to advocate for and support art workers in Italy. By moving between independent practices and institutional contexts, her experience allows for an internal interrogation of the contradictions and possibilities of the contemporary art system.

Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti. Photo Federico Masini per Evergreen Design House

In his 2006 essay Notes from the Field: Early Globalism, Museum Residencies and Artists as Mediators, artist Ernesto Pujol wrote: “This is the age of the curator: everybody wants to be a curator”. Do you believe this reflection is still valid today?
I doubt that curating is as widely desirable today. Twenty years ago, it possessed an aura tied to the promise of an independent and radical vision, accompanied by a healthy dose of prestige and (cultural) power. And this narrative was partially true, at least for a while. Let’s consider the history of major international exhibitions and the role they played in shaping a global cultural and political discourse, or the artistic direction of research-driven institutions that served as international benchmarks for many years. These models are now in a deep crisis. For instance, documenta has carried out a progressive decentralization of curatorial power through collective or shared curating, instituted mechanisms of preventive censorship, and chosen not to defend the artistic or curatorial vision when under attack, thereby abdicating its role as a guarantor. On the other hand, artistic directorships are often short-term appointments, a condition that makes it difficult to trigger structural institutional transformations, while decision-making is increasingly centralized in the hands of boards of directors and administrative figures created ad hoc. The curatorial vision or the artistic direction are almost seen as a nuisance to the ordinary running of the institution’s business. And it must be said that this is not entirely incorrect either, because within the curatorial figure coexist both belonging to and misalignment with the institution, and that is precisely where its importance lies: it is a fundamental role of negotiation within the structures on which the production of contemporary art is built. This makes the profession look far less like the glamorous intellectual role once associated with curating in Pujol’s time, and more like a comb that constantly catches everyone else’s knots.

THE CURATORIAL PRACTICE ACCORDING TO LUCREZIA CALABRÒ VISCONTI

Today, there are numerous training programs dedicated to curating. You participated in the De Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam, in CAMPO at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, and in the CCC ‒ Critical Curatorial Cybermedia Master at HEAD in Geneva. What role do you attribute to these courses in the training of a curator? Is curating truly a practice that can be taught?
Curating can and must be taught, especially in a field like ours where improvisation ‒ both in the sense of adapting to ever-changing dynamics and in the sense of pretending to be something you are not ‒ is so common. Romanticizing the curator as a sort of agent who operates by infused knowledge ultimately risks endorsing forms of approximation and incompetence. Of course, there is originality of thought, inspiration, and vision, but just like in all “creative” jobs, these traits must be trained and substantiated. Curating is now a discipline with its own reference literature, case studies to look to, specific skills to acquire, and a precise language to use, refine, and transform. It is a complex job with a rather serious responsibility, given that exhibitions and public programs are the primary way art is historicized, and considering that the organisations we work for are reaching an ever-wider audience. So, curatorial programs are very welcome, as they help to build a solid theoretical foundation and contribute to creating communities ‒ even if the technical, administrative, and political skills of the job are often acquired on the field. The real problem with these programs is that many of them (I am thinking of those in the UK or US especially, but also of private universities in Italy) are extremely expensive, and thus inaccessible to most people. This is detrimental both to the profession’s credibility and to the general trend towards elitism in the sector that we are currently witnessing. Fortunately, there are still opportunities to train without getting into debt, but the lack of accessibility is certainly an issue we need to address.

What skills do you consider fundamental for anyone wanting to embark on a curatorial career today? What advice would you give to an emerging curator?
There are many important skills required in this job, but one that perhaps takes a back seat during training is an understanding of one’s role as a cultural, political and social agent. To expand on what I said in my first answer, here is a specific example: let’s think about how the tragic absence of curator Koyo Kouoh at this Venice Biennale contributed to its crisis, leaving a lack of an authoritative reference point to protect the project’s vision, demand integrity from the institution, and guarantee awareness of the political role that the Biennale has always had. I wonder to what extent what happened ‒ the resignation of the jury, the first major coordinated strike of pavilions and artists since 1968, their refusal to submit to the so-called “Audience’s Golden Lion” ‒ would have been different if Kouoh had been present. This is just the most striking example that comes to mind today, but curating is inevitably intertwined with very different goals and agendas, and it often takes on the burden of understanding how, under given conditions, to build a conscious, urgent, and critical discourse. I would suggest to an emerging curator to carefully evaluate whether this side of the job interests them or not, because the risk is ending up enduring it instead of directing it.

Art Workers Italia (AWI), of which you are a co-founder and vice president, was created to give recognition and protection to cultural work. Six years after the launch of AWI, do you believe that working in the arts is more legitimized today compared to the past?
Yes and no. I believe that, within the sector in Italy, awareness and recognition of work in the contemporary art world have improved, partly thanks to the tools we have developed and the awareness-raising work we have carried out with Art Workers Italia. For instance, no institution today would even think of inviting an artist without paying them, whereas that was the norm until a few years ago. Due to guidelines, minimum fee charts, support groups, templates of contracts, vademecums, sector surveys, educational meetings in schools, letters to the Ministry, letters to institutions, demonstrations, petitions, manifestos, work on calls for proposals, local, national and international working groups, and so on and so forth, I believe we are in a healthier place than we were when we started. That being said, globally, working conditions ‒ especially in the cultural sphere ‒ are increasingly precarious, and politics seems more and more disconnected from the dynamics of our work and its importance. Meanwhile, the genocide in Palestine and the connivance or helplessness of a large part of cultural institutions in the face of the catastrophic global political situation has shifted our attention toward emergencies other than just the issue of labor protection. This year, the new board of Art Workers Italia will be voted in, and I believe it is an important moment to look at the goals achieved and understand what the new ones should be, and what alliances and struggles to engage in within the changed political and social context we find ourselves in.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, how we always survived, Installation view, Istituto Svizzero, Rome, 2025. Photo Annik Wetter

LUCREZIA CALABRÒ VISCONTI AND THE ART SYSTEM

In Qual è il tuo vero lavoro? (What is your real job?), a text published for Diario italiano (Fondazione Imago Mundi), you highlighted how, in the art system, the need to combine various jobs is increasingly widespread. Has this condition changed in recent years, or has it simply become normalized? What difficulties did you personally have to face?
That text dates back to 2021, when I was asked to write a statement to accompany a survey of Italian art. I decided to draw attention to the working conditions of artists, and especially the fact that, for a lot of people, their artistic practice was secondary to other jobs (79% according to the sector survey we conducted with AWI in the same year). My point was that this was a structural issue with significant consequences, such as less ambitious projects, poorer media, intermittent activities, and difficulties travelling abroad, and that it should therefore be taken into account in the artistic and aesthetic analysis of the works. I fear that the data, although the situation has improved from several points of view, would not look too different today. Regarding the difficulties I had to face, I believe they are the same as everyone who does not come from a privileged background (there are more of us than it seems). Becoming economically independent as quickly as possible was essential for me, and the reason I got interested in curating was that it seemed like a more solid job than others to achieve that goal ‒ while being able to work within the cultural field, which I knew was what I wanted to do. Needless to say, it was not that simple. For many years, I accompanied the projects I did as an independent curator with two or three parallel jobs (various assistant roles, project management, coordination, publishing, journalism, teaching, sometimes ghost-curating and ghost-writing). I was lucky because these were all para-curatorial activities, and in the end, even now that I hold institutional positions, I continue to write and teach (the type of security that working for an institution gives you is almost always temporary anyway, so it is hard for me to imagine leaving the rest of the things I do).

Contemporary art fairs like Artissima, where you curated the New Entries section in 2018 and 2019, act as platforms that accelerate visibility and the circulation of value. What room is there today to maintain a critical distance or introduce forms of resistance without being immediately absorbed by the logic of the system?
I believe that fairs, especially their “emerging” sections, are not a real threat to the integrity of artists’ work – certainly not Italian fairs, which operate on a reduced scale and influence. If the biggest problem facing Italian art were that its massive commercial success were jeopardising artists’ autonomy, that would be a wonderful problem to have! Besides, fairs with a strong curatorial direction, such as Artissima, often succeed primarily at the level of institutional circulation, thanks to the curatorial juries participating in the fair, museum acquisitions, and the museum directors and curators who attend. The fair structure should therefore be understood in continuity with the rest of the sector. In fact, I believe one of the key issues is precisely dismantling the idea – still very much alive – that the economic health of the system can rest exclusively on the buying and selling of works by private collectors, when so few artists manage to sustain themselves solely through the sale of their work. Take, for instance, the 5% VAT rate on artworks, introduced last year after a long period of lobbying. It is an important achievement, which closes the gap that existed between Italy and other European countries and provides relief to galleries that are themselves in serious difficulty (as the worrying number of closures and bankruptcies in recent years makes clear). Yet this measure has often been described as one that was implemented in order to support artists. This is misleading, because even in the best-case scenario, where it might generate a virtuous cycle that ends up actually supporting some artists, it essentially delegates to the collector the power to support (or not) the weakest actors in the sector, through a trickle-down mechanism. And this is without even considering that Italian artists represented by a gallery in Italy make up a minimal percentage of the total. I don’t want to be misunderstood: it’s great that this measure exists, it will certainly give some breathing room to the economies revolving around collecting, and will reach some artists too ‒ but it cannot substitute for a serious, structural project in support of artists. What is needed are direct forms of support, inclusive and sustained forms of redistribution, and above all, funding that does not depend on the interests or tastes of individuals. There are many case studies abroad worth looking to for examples, but I won’t go into them here otherwise this will turn into an essay.

Is the concept of the “emerging” artist still useful, or does it risk being a category functional to market dynamics? How much space really exists for non-aligned practices within an art fair?
The concept of “emerging” is not only used in a commercial context, but also in an institutional one, and especially in the design of policies and forms of support (often calls for funding, residencies, and training opportunities have an age limit). It is a principle that considers a person’s professional growth as progressive and linear, based on the assumption that after a certain age there is not gonna be any need for support Yet, in the precarious field of contemporary art, there is an ever-widening gap between a person’s anagraphical age and the circumstances in which they find themselves. In Switzerland, for example, the attempt often being made is to find other formulas, such as “within X years from the end of training”. Personally, I wouldn’t disdain ‒ especially in the case of financial support ‒ a more realistic reasoning based on the type of production and the income the artist can derive from it (do they make hundreds of canvases a year and have a gallery, or do they make immaterial, non-sellable site-specific work?), the context in which they operate (in a city or a peripheral context, how many other forms of support are available to them), and, quite simply, the real condition of financial security a person is in. But I realize that this position is too socialist for many of the committees and juries I find myself working in (the filter of social justice is often not considered very sexy). In the commercial sphere, the concept of “emerging” has a different meaning, as it is used in terms of investment, perception of how much the work should cost, and the stability or instability of the artist’s practice. I believe the answer is not to eliminate the category entirely, but rather to ensure that the artist’s path is protected despite the category ‒ which perhaps brings us back to what you mean by “forms of resistance”: through the gallery’s choice of presenting a consistent form of the work (without asking the artist to distort it to make it more market-friendly); maintaining an appropriate valuation of the work (no fire sales, no secondary market flipping); controlling where the work ends up (a reliable and prestigious private collection, a museum collection); modulating the pace of the artist’s career growth; properly contracting the production of works, and so on. The space for “non-aligned” practices, on the other hand, depends a lot on the vision of the fair’s direction and the selection committee in encouraging them or not, and primarily on the risk the gallery wants to take regarding its target collectors. At the root of it all should be an education towards collecting experimental and radical work, and consequently, an education in contemporary art and a critical gaze that starts in schools, but here we risk getting a bit far from your point…

Gina Fischli and Gianfranco Baruchello in Con lo zucchero in bocca, Installation view, Istituto Svizzero, Rome, 2025. Photo Daniele Molajoli

ITALY AND SWITZERLAND: A COMPARISON

You mentioned how the Swiss system differs in the way it supports cultural production. With regard to your work at the Istituto Svizzero, how do these differences manifest themselves compared to the Italian context, particularly in terms of working conditions for artists?
The system of support for cultural production in Switzerland is structural and widespread: public support operates at national (federal), regional (cantonal) and municipal levels, with various types of funding – ranging from project-based grants to annual grants for artists, to funding for the production of new works or for their circulation and distribution (dissemination), as well as for residencies, research and publications. Private support is much more common and, above all, is largely formalized through procedures that make it more transparent, straightforward and inclusive than is the case in Italy. You have a project, you apply for funding, a committee assesses the project, you receive the funds. Full stop. The Italian system is often personalized, more akin to a vision of charity or patronage (but without the long-standing culture of philanthropy that exists in the United States, for example, so it’s still a bit skewed). Working conditions are very different as a result, although they are by no means resolved (there are problems inherent in the way artistic work operates which, even in Switzerland, make it precarious for the artists). In relation to my work at the Istituto Svizzero, this means developing a program based on a healthier environment, where artists can devote themselves to their work with greater peace of mind and independence, and can afford to take more risks in their research; it is also more international, as Switzerland is attractive to people from abroad; and, fundamentally, it is underpinned by the confidence that comes from institutions genuinely valuing culture and the contemporary arts.

Your curatorial practice often interacts with radical figures, as in the case of Lee Lozano at the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin and the Pinault Collection in Paris. How did you manage the tension between the need to historicize such an iconoclastic artist and the risk of “institutionalizing” an artistic gesture that wanted to escape the system?
In the context of the exhibition, the way I decided to account for Lozano’s ambivalent position regarding the structures of the contemporary art system was to frame the narrative of her practice starting from General Strike Piece, her first strike against art, in 1969. The “piece” ‒which is a handwritten sheet later reproduced in several copies, in which Lozano declares that from that moment on she will no longer participate in “art ceremonies” to dedicate herself solely to a form of “private and public revolution” ‒ was located at the entrance of the exhibitions both in Turin and Paris, and gave them their title, Strike. The idea was for it to establish a fundamental premise but also a methodological principle through which to view the exhibition. Another choice was to give space (in the booklet in Turin and physically in Paris) to her written conceptual production, which I believe does justice to her thought more than any form of mediation – yet, in any case, I am sure some open contradictions certainly remained. After the 2023 and 2024 exhibitions, I had the opportunity to continue working on her by writing the book Lee Lozano. In the studio, and at that point, the questions multiplied on how to respect her thought ‒ starting from the fact that from 1972 she stopped speaking to women, so I asked myself many times how she would take my writing about her. Regarding the institutionalization of a gesture that wanted to escape the system, however, I feel rather at peace, because the alternative was not leaving a radical work in a radical context, but leaving a radical work on the walls of the homes of a large number of collectors who purchased it. Temporarily removing the works from these private homes to exhibit them in spaces open to the public, and by doing so including them into a more coherent narrative of the artist’s work and giving them the chance to continue shocking and radicalizing other people, would, in my opinion, have made Lozano less angry than leaving them sitting around on livingrooms’ walls.

How does the desire to reclaim a critical and political discourse through art manifest itself in practice? What does it mean for you to take a stand as a curator?
I believe that every person carries a political posture, which manifests itself in the choices they make, the way they interact with people, and their contribution and adherence to certain lifestyles rather than others. Working in a field where what you do has a public resonance amplifies your responsibility toward that political posture, as simple as that. For me, it has always been very natural to bring and support critical positions regarding what I feel does not work in the world ‒ positions influenced by transfeminism, the defense of social justice, a critical discourse on contemporary forms of colonialism and imperialism, and the hegemonic forms of capitalism. This does not mean I am only interested in militant research; these are positions that can be expressed in a myriad of different ways, and I have also worked on projects that look at entirely different things, but it is true that there is tendentially a certain political undercurrent in what I do. That said, “taking a stand” lies in what we as curators decide to program, but it also and foremost lies in the way we work and act in the world.

Have you ever felt radically changed after working with an artist? Is there a specific encounter or relationship that acted as a turning point, marking a before and after in your career?
Sometimes, when I talk about my work, especially to a class of curatorial students, I start from a concept that has always been very close to my heart, which is that of metanoia. It is a term that Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig borrow from the mystical sphere to apply it to reading: metanoia describes a profound and irreversible change in a person’s way of thinking, which can occur, for example, through reading a book. I have always recognized myself in this definition, thinking about how there have been many encounters that have marked me, both with people and also with books, artworks, and exhibitions that radically changed my view of the reality around me. And every time I build a project, or write a text, I have the hope that it could be a metanoic experience for someone else in turn, marking a before and after in their vision of things. There are really many metanoic encounters I could list in my journey. Perhaps the most recent is with the work of Ida Applebroog, on whom I am writing an essay for Fruitmarket in Edinburgh. What stays with me most from her reflection, I think, is the analysis of the relationship between feminism and humor (often absent at the time she was writing, in the 1970s), and the way this tension emerges in her work in an absolutely dark, hilarious, and perverse way.

Paola Caudullo

https://www.istitutosvizzero.it

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, how we always survived, Installation view, Istituto Svizzero, Rome, 2025. Photo Annik Wetter
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, how we always survived, Installation view, Istituto Svizzero, Rome, 2025. Photo Annik Wetter
Oderbolz and Milva Stutz in Con lo zucchero in bocca, Installation view, Istituto Svizzero, Rome, 2025. Photo Daniele Molajoli
Gina Fischli and Gianfranco Baruchello in Con lo zucchero in bocca, Installation view, Istituto Svizzero, Rome, 2025. Photo Daniele Molajoli
Lee Lozano, Strike, Installation view, La Bourse ‒ Pinault Collection, Paris, 2023. Photo Aurélien Mole / Pinault Collection
Lee Lozano, Strike, Installation view, La Bourse ‒ Pinault Collection, Paris, 2023. Photo Aurélien Mole / Pinault Collection
Gonzalez-Foerster, Installation view, PISTARAMA, Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, 2024. Photo Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Gonzalez-Foerster, Installation view, PISTARAMA, Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, 2024. Photo Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Latefa Wiersch, ATLAS STUDIOS, Installation view, Istituto Svizzero, Rome, 2026. Photo Daniele Molajoli
Latefa Wiersch, ATLAS STUDIOS, Installation view, Istituto Svizzero, Rome, 2026. Photo Daniele Molajoli
Gabriele Garavaglia & Miriam Laura Leonardi, Deadline With The World, Installation view, Istituto Svizzero, Milan, 2025. Photo Giulio Böem
Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti. Photo Federico Masini per Evergreen Design House
by

Paola Caudullo

June 4 · 26
A house draped in fabric. Dora Fiammetta Perini’s exhibition in Venice

IT

Curated by Charlotte Laubard, the exhibition on the island of Giudecca unfolds within a private home where the artist will carry out her practice and her life without distinction between the time of one and the other. The house, entirely clad in milky white fabric, will be manipulated and painted by Dora Fiammetta Perini, who invites visitors to interact with this space in continuous transformation.

CA’DORA is the exhibition ‒ the house, the body ‒ by Dora Fiammetta Perini (New York, 1995), curated by Charlotte Laubard in the heart of the Giudecca island and open to the public until 22 November 2026. After completing a Master’s degree in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art in 2023 and a residency at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in 2024, Perini leaves her exhibition spaces behind and takes refuge in a private home with soaring windows, through which, for now at least, one can glimpse only milky-white fabric and a few faint, bluish painted figures. Laubard describes the project as a domestic Gesamtkunstwerk, in which the intimate becomes universal, and the radical subtraction of the space’s identity corresponds to a hyper-extension of recognition between human and object. The house is personified through an ongoing and unexpected series of pictorial and manipulative interventions, carried out by the artist throughout the entire duration of the exhibition.

Ca’ Dora, exhibition view, Venice 2026. Photo Giulio Favotto (@giulio.favotto)

THE EXHIBITION BY DORA FIAMMETTA PERINI IN VENICE

The site-specific work is totalizing, visceral, unstable. Inside the house, which the artist will inhabit as if it were her own, walls, objects, and furnishings have disappeared, concealed beneath pure white yet rough-textured cloth. The kitchen, seating, surfaces, stovetops, lights ‒ even the toaster ‒ have become epidermis; wall joints are veins, cables arteries beneath the skin. The folds carve into space like a vulnerable yet tough wound, a rind that resists time and life. Thousands of staples pierce and hold the fabric in place, echoing surgical instruments that once pierced the artist’s body, in a profound and courageous autobiographical metaphor recalling the manipulations that changed her form: the shell, the dwelling that demanded to be razed and rebuilt ‒ as Perini writes ‒ “joining the edges of the canvas, narrowing a threshold between inside and outside, giving a desired shape to a body, a house, which are the same thing”. This is precisely what will unfold in the months to come. To sew, staple, or constrict a surface is never a neutral gesture: it means deciding what remains outside and what is retained, what emerges and what is buried. The house becomes an extension of the body and the body an extension of space; both subjected to a regime of continuous transformation oscillating between control and loss of control, construction and dissolution, urgency and boredom. “An unpainted canvas seems unnatural, like cut skin”, Perini says: color, indelible, will continue to stain the house’s epidermis and alter it forever, from the fabric-covered chairs in the garden to the very heart of the space, at the highest and innermost point possible.
The experience thus becomes a free yet contemplative path: abundant light at the exit, especially on sunny days; no light in the empty niche at the end of the tiny spiral staircase, invisible from the ground floor and reached alone, physically and mentally, in the most radical sense of the term.

Ca’ Dora, exhibition view, Venice 2026. Photo Giulio Favotto (@giulio.favotto)

TIME AND CURATORSHIP

CA’DORA is a process of permanent creation and exhibition. Living within the work does not assume the tones of performance, but rather those of a cohabitation tending toward structural codependence: to inhabit means to be inhabited. Perini will continue to cook, wash her clothes, sleep, receive friends, host dinners, and store her oversized rings in a fabric-lined jewelry box. Everyday life persists in the work and, while Perini is its protagonist, those who orbit around her will inevitably leave traces on the fabric. “I am every kind of visitor”, she says, extending the body-house personification to the guests as well. Who will have “kissed the cuts”? Who will have felt overwhelmed? In this sense, time becomes curatorial material.
Laubard and Perini work on interior and exterior landscapes and on the possibility that a practice allows itself to be curated and consumed even as it consumes and cares. This is perhaps the project’s most intuitive trait: a call for continuous, curious engagement by all those involved. Every gesture in the coming months will be absorbed by the milky-white sheets until the initial whiteness disappears. Color will likely reach the ceilings; dust will take possession of every crack; there will be the inevitable marks of those who come and go. Perhaps some staples will come loose and certain tears will widen, as real wounds do. Something may break, as happens in all houses; an attempt will be made to fix the damage, and if it fails, help will be sought ‒ or the trouble will simply be lived with, as anyone does. Perini calls herself “the witch of the Giudecca island” and offers blue candies at the entrance, like in Hansel and Gretel. She reminds visitors not to accept them from strangers ‒ but she can no longer be one: she has opened the doors of her home to everyone, when the house is herself.

Vittoria Colagiovanni

Dora Fiammetta Perini

The text has been translated in English using AI

Ca’ Dora, exhibition view, Venice 2026. Photo Giulio Favotto (@giulio.favotto)
Ca’ Dora, exhibition view, Venice 2026. Photo Giulio Favotto (@giulio.favotto)
Ca’ Dora, exhibition view, Venice 2026. Photo Giulio Favotto (@giulio.favotto)
Ca’ Dora, exhibition view, Venice 2026. Photo Giulio Favotto (@giulio.favotto)
Ca’ Dora, exhibition view, Venice 2026. Photo Giulio Favotto (@giulio.favotto)
Ca’ Dora, exhibition view, Venice 2026. Photo Giulio Favotto (@giulio.favotto)
Ca’ Dora, exhibition view, Venice 2026. Photo Giulio Favotto (@giulio.favotto)
Ca’ Dora, exhibition view, Venice 2026. Photo Giulio Favotto (@giulio.favotto)
Ca’ Dora, exhibition view, Venice 2026. Photo Giulio Favotto (@giulio.favotto)
Ca’ Dora, exhibition view, Venice 2026. Photo Giulio Favotto (@giulio.favotto)
by

Vittoria Colagiovanni

June 4 · 26
Research, experimentation and relationships in bruno’s editorial practice

IT

An exhibition space, bookshop, publishing imprint and graphic design studio based in Venice, bruno tells its story through the voices of its founders, who reflect on the role of unpredictability and error as generative elements in the creative process. Through concrete examples and references to collaborative practices, working methodologies emerge that intertwine the material production of books, content curation and the construction of an ongoing dialogue with local and international communities.

Andrea Codolo and Giacomo Covacich are the creators of bruno, a Venetian studio that, since 2013, has combined the logic of graphic and editorial design with that of the exhibition space, establishing collaborations with artists and local and international institutions. We interviewed them.

bruno Andrea Codolo e Giacomo Covacich, Venezia 2019
foto © Matteo de Mayda

Let’s start with the name bruno, which seems capable of referring to many things at once. Among these is also the bear, a figure that appears more or less explicitly in your communication. For you, is it one of the many possible natures of the project, a narrative key, or a presence that more radically shapes your way of working?
Andrea Codolo: The process of choosing the name was quite complex. We were looking for something that would not be too strongly associated with only one aspect of the activity we wanted to establish, so from the beginning our project was conceived in its multiple natures. We liked the idea that it could be a somewhat ambiguous, perhaps even old-fashioned name; bruno is also an adjective, a shade of color, perhaps a little gloomy. It is a simple word for the audience we have always wanted to address, which is not exclusively Italian but also international. That is how bruno came into being. Then, when we opened the shop, we put a teddy bear in the window that a friend had given us, and from that moment people kept giving us more. We became collectors of teddy bears of all kinds and it became a mascot. In reality, it also helps us, especially in online communication, to be less serious and not take ourselves too seriously.

Your space in the center of Venice is at once a workshop, a bookshop, an exhibition venue and a place of passage. Do these different identities interact naturally with one another or do they sometimes coexist in a productive tension?
Giacomo Covacich: The name intentionally reflects the possibility of embracing multiple dynamics. Obviously, the project is still evolving: when we opened, we were a graphic design studio and a bookshop, then after a year and a half we started publishing. The space aims to embrace and be contaminated by this degree of uncertainty, by this unpredictable variable. It is something we sought out, but at times also endured. Sometimes it is difficult to manage, while at other times it is highly productive. There are moments when we are working and, at the same time, presentations are taking place; everything is very open, there is no real control. But this has also allowed us to meet stimulating and interesting people. It is a variable that, at first, we merely theorized, and then experienced in our daily lives. Over time, we learned to transform this unpredictability into an added value.

BRUNO’S PROJECTS

In your projects, craftsmanship often coexists with technical experimentation, particularly in the fields of printing and independent publishing. How do these elements relate to one another?
Giacomo Covacich: There is certainly, as you say, a somewhat artisanal component. We consider ourselves designers in every sense of the word: we want to work in harmony with all tools, both digital and production-oriented, and then give ideas a concrete form. We really enjoy working with the book format and understanding how different types of binding and printing can best help enhance content. We always seek a very direct relationship between content and the graphic form of the project; in some respects, bruno is also a place of research for us, something we can draw from. Having access to a broad panorama of work by our colleagues is extremely stimulating. Everything here revolves around the book object, and this allows us to pursue theoretical research related to the profession. This applies to all the events and presentations we organize, as well as the books we produce. The goal is to balance different aspects, ranging from authorship to functionality.

Are there any processes that you have decided to explore and continue developing over time?Andrea Codolo: We enjoy experimenting on the technical side because it allows us to better understand the production process. We have an almost symbiotic relationship with Grafiche Veneziane, our main supplier. Almost all our books have been printed by them, and this allows us to engage with the production process in much greater detail. Going into the bindery, testing things on the printing press… These are all experiences that help us pay closer attention to both industrial and artisanal processes, while also advancing the research at the heart of our project.

In your experience, are there projects that originated from a production mistake, a leftover element, or an unforeseen circumstance?
Giacomo Covacich: I could say all of them and none of them.
Andrea Codolo: Mistakes are part of the game, and on some occasions something better than what we had imagined emerged from them. That said, given the type of work we do, errors are always a great source of suffering; we carry them with us forever. Even if you are mentally prepared and know they can happen, especially in publishing, it is still difficult. After all, a book without errors does not exist.

And when, in your opinion, does an error stop being something to correct and become perhaps a method, or even a recognizable feature of your work?
Giacomo Covacich: Thinking about errors and their capacity to generate creative deviations, there was a time when we wanted to produce a small book with a super glossy effect achieved through photographic development. In the end, we applied such a glossy lamination that the sheets would no longer stay still, and the bindery could not gather them because they kept slipping everywhere. Binding it was a nightmare. Another time, we accidentally cut off a flap, then stamped the books along the edge pretending it was a decorative edge treatment. The final result is beautiful, if you do not know the story behind it.

After all, very often only the final result remains visible from these processes.
Andrea Codolo: Exactly. Error is also a challenge: finding a way out of it and turning it into experience and memory so that it can be avoided in the future. Especially because it is not fun at all when it has economic consequences.

In this regard, is there any past work of yours that you would like to revisit today? Not necessarily to correct it, but perhaps to reinterpret it or take it in a different direction.
Giacomo Covacich: At the moment, no. What happens more often is that we have to deal with reprints, and in those cases we need to make choices, such as changing the paper because the second print run needs to be more economical than the first.
Andrea Codolo: Like all things in life, if I look back there are decisions we made with the awareness we had many years ago, and that awareness has changed over time. There have certainly been occasions when we thought, “This specific thing would have been perfect for that project,” but I think that is simply part of the experience one gains in every situation.

There’s No Calm After the Storm
Matteo de Mayda, bruno, Venezia 2024
foto © Matteo de Mayda

BRUNO AND VENICE

Era Mare stands as an emblematic project within your work, both for its theme and its methods. In the face of the high tide of 12 November 2019, you avoided direct reportage and instead constructed a fragile collective narrative that invites reflection on the city’s future. What urgencies prompted you to initiate it?
Andrea Codolo: Era Mare emerged from a dramatic and shocking event for everyone who was in Venice at that time, including us. In the end, our studio withstood the flooding very well, but we were closed inside it thinking about our own fortress and how to defend it, without realizing that we might have been able to help others. That was the emotional backdrop we carried with us in the weeks that followed.

How did the project develop in practical terms?
Giacomo Covacich: In the days that followed, we were among the few places that remained fully operational. This allowed us to host Matteo de Mayda, a dear friend and excellent photographer, who was documenting the situation in the city for several European newspapers. He spent his days photographing Venice and returned to us in the evenings to process and send the images. The idea arose from seeing the material Matteo was producing. We began thinking that we, too, could do something. Shortly before that, an association of residents and shopkeepers from Campo San Barnaba and Campo Santa Margherita had been established, and it seemed interesting to contribute with a project that narrated what was happening. Rather than focusing exclusively on the tragedy, we wanted to propose a perspective that was also constructive. That is how the project was born. We invented this particular format that allows you either to perceive the fragility of the situation or almost pretend nothing is happening. As you turn the pages, the photographs appear to show people playing with architecture, when in reality they are holding onto walls to move through the water. An intentionally unusual, almost dystopian text suggests a future in which water has become a permanent condition, where ground floors no longer exist and public squares are constantly flooded.

In what way does this curatorial gesture reflect your approach to publishing, where political positioning, care for relationships and formal experimentation coexist?
Giacomo Covacich: The project involved many people and reflected the spirit of that moment, a strong need for community and connection, a way of asking one another, “How are you? Do you need anything?” In this sense, the production process itself encouraged sharing. The outcome was very positive. We produced 750 copies, which were distributed through donations supporting the association.
Andrea Codolo: To facilitate its circulation, we also helped with communication, through social media and public presentations, contributing to the distribution of all the copies.
Giacomo Covacich: We raised more than €8,000, and with those funds we were able to install flood barriers for the most vulnerable places in the neighborhood. The project also received excellent media coverage; several newspapers talked about it, helping spread awareness. We produced it by trying to do the best possible work with the resources available, collaborating with a high-quality Venetian printer, using papers we had already employed in previous editions and not seeking to cut costs but rather aiming for the best possible result.

Era Mare is not an isolated case: many of your books emerge from relationships and dialogues with artists, designers, photographers and researchers. How important is curatorship in choosing who to involve and how to combine materials, images and texts?
Giacomo Covacich: For us, designing also means opening a dialogue, so understanding other people’s thinking is fundamental. The most interesting aspect of this profession is that you can engage in conversations and continue learning. For us, bruno is the key to creating connections with other realities working within the city and the territory. Over the past year we have collaborated with Simone Carraro, Amalgama, Tocia, Barena Bianca and others. Venice is where bruno was born and we chose to remain fully involved in it. Having a network is part of a vitality that is necessary not only commercially but also relationally. The goal is to have a space frequented by people who share our interests.

Dieci di bruno – Grafiche Veneziane, Venezia 2023
foto Grafiche Veneziane

DIALOGUE AND COLLABORATION ACCORDING TO BRUNO

During the latest Art Biennale, you presented for the third time a collaboration with UC Studio that took shape as Morning Rituals: an invitation to slow down, to come together in a deliberately non-productive moment through a collective breakfast. How did this experience interact with your daily practice?
Andrea Codolo: Morning Rituals has a clear impact on our daily practice. First of all, it makes us wake up earlier so that we are ready when guests arrive; moreover, it allows us to enjoy both the presentations and the collective breakfast. It is something we care deeply about, so much so that we will do it again this year. It allows us to invite people into a convivial setting while maintaining focus on what we are presenting. During the Biennale opening week, so much happens and there are always many events in the evening, so we were interested in finding a balance. We think it works.

If we think of bruno more as a practice than as a studio, what is the aspect you would defend even if it became unproductive, inefficient, or non-performative? Is there something that, precisely because it is fragile or not optimized, you consider essential to preserve?
Andrea Codolo: I would say the very essence of bruno. After all, the balance that emerges between an open space like a shop and a more private space like a studio contains certain fragilities, but it is also the essence of what we do. It would not work any other way; its added value is unpredictability.
Giacomo Covacich: There was a project that we later discovered had originated during an Architecture Biennale through meetings between curators of various pavilions who came here to browse books. Two years later they asked us to present the resulting publication and told us that bruno, entirely on its own, had acted as a catalyst for the project.The same applies to us: we like the idea that someone can come in, see interesting projects condensed into book form, and think, “I could do this with my own project,” thus beginning a new challenge.
Andrea Codolo: In a sense, it makes us very accessible. It creates opportunities that over time have become friendships, but also work opportunities. Of course, sometimes it also creates incredible annoyances because, just as an interesting person can walk in, so can a complete nuisance. In the end, even if we sometimes complain about it, we have become accustomed to it. It is part of the fragility and the essence of bruno.

Camilla Credendino

bruno

Lucia Marcucci. Tutto qui? Frida Carazzato, Francesca Verga (eds.) bruno, Venezia 2025 foto © Giacomo Bianco
Inhabited Dissonance: Bozen Bolzano 1922–2025 Roberto Gigliotti, Elisabetta Rattalino (eds.) bruno, Venezia 2025 foto © Giacomo Bianco
Lives Shaping Works Making Life Xavier Le Roy, Giulia Casartelli, Daniel Cordova, Livia Andrea Piazza (eds.) bruno, Venezia 2025 foto © Giacomo Bianco
There’s No Calm After the Storm Matteo de Mayda, bruno, Venezia 2024 foto © Matteo de Mayda
Era un cavallo elettrico Simone Carraro, bruno, Venezia 2025 foto © Giacomo Bianco
Dieci di bruno – Grafiche Veneziane, Venezia 2023 foto Grafiche Veneziane
bruno Andrea Codolo e Giacomo Covacich, Venezia 2019 foto © Matteo de Mayda
by

Camilla Credendino

June 4 · 26
Curating against erasure. An interview with Bukola Oyebode

IT

The Lagos-born independent curator, writer, and researcher Bukola Oyebode opens up about her research-driven curatorial practice, writing as a curatorial tool and her critical position towards this year’s Venice Biennale.

“Who came before us?” is a question that runs deeply throughout Bukola Oyebode’s curatorial research. Close to fifteen years in the contemporary art scene, she has developed a strong awareness of historical continuity and has made highlighting marginalised narratives a fundamental aspect of her practice. Working across Nigeria, Europe, and Asia, her projects perfectly combine writing, research, publishing and exhibition-making. Conscious of the responsibility curators hold towards artists, Oyebode’s work actively challenges forms of institutional hierarchy and erasure that so often manifest within the current global art system.

Bukola Oyebode. Photo credit: Wain Wu

In 2020 you were recognised with the Apollo 40 Under 40 Award. Apart from the recognition itself, do you reckon this award has helped shed more light on your curatorial practice, perhaps giving it greater visibility?
Absolutely. But I would like to say that this award mostly relates to my work in the editorial field, publishing about contemporary African art in the TSA Magazine, and my active involvement in the African art scene, which began in Nigeria and expanded across Africa and the diaspora. That’s what the award was really highlighting. Beyond feeling recognised, it also motivated me to keep working and to push the magazine’s vision further, despite the limited resources available to us. In a sense, it led to some of the things we did between 2020 and 2023, in particular the Collector’s Series: Artists & Cities, which focused on artists and artist collectives from six cities in Africa and a few from the diaspora. We did our best to make it a selection of artists based in those cities, although you cannot always draw a fine line between those living on the continent and those based in the diaspora, because artists occupy multiple urban spaces, and we were conscious of the continent’s migratory history. However, although it was not directly linked to my curatorial practice, I have always considered my editorial work from a curatorial perspective. If you remember, I was part of the Curatorial Studies program in 2017, and prior to that, I had been interested in curating and exhibition-making, so I often borrow methodologies from the field for my work as an editor. I do not consider them completely separate practices. But indeed, the recognition must have motivated me to keep working, knowing it contributes meaningfully to artistic practices on the continent.

Do you feel like writing really helps articulate the ideas that you then encapsulate in the space? Since you said that the two practices are connected in some way?
The curatorial practice is more intellectual, or, let me say, it’s an ideological practice in which you are constantly thinking, formulating your own ideas, engaging with the ideas of others, and transforming these ideas into presentations that people experience, the publications that accompany them, and the critical dialogues too. Writing is a crucial part of that process. Thinking and writing. You don’t just stop at having the idea; you have to do research, write proposals, and pitch them. Writing is how you eventually connect the idea and the art, and how you translate or communicate that to the world. Writing mediates how the public encounters your thoughts about that project. So, in a sense, you cannot exclude writing from this work.

Regarding writing, I’d like to ask a bit more about the magazine. You said it’s an amazing contribution and an important platform for contemporary African artists. Since it has, in a way, come to an end, I was wondering if you have been able to find other spaces where you can express yourself.
Yes, I have. I think that when the magazine started to slow down, I began to see my work transform and to consider independent publishing in a format other than a magazine. With the magazine, I worked with a small team and a group of contributors, focusing on editing, so I did not always write the articles. I was also handling management and strategy development while constantly looking into how we could raise funds. But as that came to an end, I found myself working more on the creative or conceptual side and felt inclined to work directly with artists. After closing the TSA magazine, I went on to publish the monograph of Nigerian-German artist Ngozi Ajah Schommers, Tracings of Time and Place, and worked with Okhiogbe Omonblanks Omonhinmin, a multifaceted creative, to publish Kids from the River. He had written a memoir that combined poems, essays, and family photographs on the transformative power of loss and grief, as well as the redemptive nature of devoted love and responsibility, which needed thoughtful editorial work and publishing guidance.

And then what happened?
From here, the magazine transformed into TSA Ideas Lab, which I have been using to experiment and think differently. It also aligns with how I work to fill what I consider gaps in the African art ecosystem. Of course, within the global art ecosystem as well. How can I enrich what is there already from another perspective, or from where I stand? And where I stand can be from Nigeria or Africa, or as a woman, or as an international professional. Also, I am not just organising programmes. I am careful about what I am organising, where, and for whom. For example, last year, I co-organised a one-week Listening Academy workshop in Lagos as part of The Listening Biennial’s third edition. Typically, the Listening Academy is nomadic and has been held in places such as Hong Kong, Brazil, the UK, and various cities in Europe. In Lagos, the one-week workshop was called “Go-Slow: Engaging the Imperceptible”, where we looked at what it means to slow down in a city that is fast-paced and encourages hyperactivity, and people are always in a hurry. But the gathering went beyond slowing down in relation to time to looking at hidden experiences, which we examined through the concepts of the ‘imperceptible’ and the ‘inaudible’.

And what about the other projects you’ve worked on?
I also curated a satellite exhibition for the biennial called Wind Chimes, Gongs and Bells. For whom is this call? a multisensory installation of video and sound works and live actions engaging with ideas of interdependence, relationality, and ways of co-existing that continue to escape us in the present. The underlying question was: how can we be attentive to the realities of others? The different projects brought together multidisciplinary artists, emerging sound artists, performance artists, researchers, and curators into one space and into an uncommon way of learning, being together and exchanging. We invited scholars and artists who use alternative pedagogies and are from diverse art fields to facilitate different sessions of the program. Likewise, between the end of 2023 and 2025, I contributed to online exhibitions by Textile Culture Net as a guest curator. TCN has a network that extends across Europe, Asia, Africa and the US, and the curatorial process disrupts the traditional model of authorship. I have to say I enjoy seeing my work manifest in these different ways: from online to offline, from the magazine to publications to exhibition-making and organising, and in transnational conversations. It’s not a closed way of working, and I enjoy that malleability.

THE CURATORIAL PRACTICE ACCORDING TO BUKOLA OYEBODE

Going back to the gaps that you mentioned, I would like to know how that relates to women. And how do you find a way to highlight their work without overpowering their voices, considering African women are often spoken over in that way?
This is an interesting question. The art world is a place where we say there are no hierarchies, but there are hierarchies. Things are often organised top-down, and we are always juxtaposing entities, right? Ironically, artists occupy central positions within this flow (they are at the very centre of the work that we do), but often have the least power or autonomy. Because I am aware of this, I make conscious efforts to work collaboratively. My work is shaped by seeing others as equal to me, or equal in what we can bring to the project, even when the scale of input is not the same. It is important that we complement each other. I think that because I did not enter the art world through an academic background or an institutional setting, I formed a horizontal relationship with artists. I do not come to artists feeling I have authority over their work or how they want to present it to the world. Making direct interaction with the artist front and centre of an exhibition was one of the reasons I enjoyed the Tavola Aperta feature of the 2017 Venice Biennale. And there’s a quote by the late Koyo Kouoh that comes to mind now. “I’m an exhibition-maker who completely depends on the knowledge of the artist.” Although I do not fully see myself in this way, I recognise where it comes from. When I started out in the art world, I learned a lot from artists through studio visits. I showed up at many art shows and had discussions with various artists. These interactions formed the foundation of my passion for this field, alongside my first job at an art gallery. I had many questions that I felt only artists could answer, long before I turned to books, critical discourse and art history. Thus, I am always conscious that, though my role may involve presenting the art and the artist, it does not speak for them. Emphasising their voice or their message is crucial to the success of our work together. But how that is designed shapeshifts depending on the project.

What stance, then, should a curator adopt so as not to overshadow the artist’s voice and vision?Though the curatorial text is essentially the curator’s voice and it is where you shine, you cannot shine if your ideological framework silences the art and artists you are translating to the public. To overpower their voice is to silence the impact your work can have. And because I am a woman, an African woman, I know a lot about silencing and erasure, and I would not like to replicate that in my work. I pay extra attention to how I’m translating or transmitting another woman’s voice. I would not want to directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, erase another woman’s voice because I want my idea to shine. So, for me, that is more important. I am careful about how I present women artists and artists in general. I am also wary of the strange erasure that’s going on in the art world, particularly in art media and publicity. For example, how we are over-pushing the ‘first this and that by a Black or an African artist or curator’ stories that essentialise their identity and their work and erase our collective efforts. When I come across such narratives, I always ask myself, “Is this really the first person from this community to be here or to do this?” Are we erasing someone in history for this momentary applause? I know this form of publicity began as part of the demand to restructure representation within cultural institutions and to redistribute power and positions, but the way it is eventually delivered changes little structurally and comes at the expense of erasing some of the work and success that marginalised people have achieved in the past.

It’s interesting what you said about not wanting to erase precious history, especially relating to African women. So, I wanted to understand a bit more your methodological approach to research and history, since it’s not always easy to trace who came before us and who did something before us.
In Poland, when it became clear that I would curate one of the collateral exhibitions for the 18th International Triennial of Textile, alongside my role as co-curator of the main exhibition and that it would focus on women artists from Africa, I started to think that somebody in the media would use the “First time women artists from Africa are presenting works in Poland” thing. I said to myself, “No, that’s not going to happen” (she laughs, ed.). You are going to show me somewhere in your archive who has been here from Africa, regardless of what capacity. So, imagine my joy when I discovered Madame Zo had shown at the triennial twenty years back.

What makes Madame Zo’s work so important?
Remembering Madame Zo, who recently passed away, was important within this context. I had turned to her work not so much to include it in the show but to highlight her presence in the institution’s history. And this took an interesting turn when the museum confirmed she was an artist in the 2007 edition, and they have the records in their archives. Including the homage to her also enriched Rhizomatic Portals in other ways. It expanded the show’s intergenerational dialogue, and some of the older artists already had contacts with her work. Amina Agueznay, from Morocco, spent time researching Madame Zo’s work in Madagascar during a residency there. Bringing them together in this show was a beautiful coincidence, one that aligns with my agenda of continuity. Madame Zo’s work deserves greater recognition, as the retrospective exhibition by Fondation H in Madagascar shows. The work Madame Zo presented at the 2007 triennial marked her transition from a textile designer or craftswoman to a contemporary textile artist. She had challenged herself to reconsider the notion of fibre and turned to her environment for inspiration, working with found materials while still using traditional weaving techniques. As such, she holds an important position in African art history as one of the foremost women artists in textile practice, working from a contemporary perspective. The homage was placed in a part of the exhibition space where it was in dialogue with the other artists, rather than in a way that would overshadow the other works. The archival presence gave meaning and context to rethinking history and traditional knowledge systems, which were among the ideas present in the other artists’ works.

How did you interact with the institution on that occasion?
At first, the museum and triennial leadership wanted the collateral exhibition to be an African art show, but I felt that was too broad, so I said no until we narrowed the focus to women. This made sense to me because of the connection we could make to the museum’s history and to Łódź in general. The museum used to be a textile factory, and textiles are closely connected to women’s labour. This created a solid background to lay the groundwork for an exhibition emphasising women’s knowledge systems, experiences and other narratives, not as a site of new discovery, but rather within a continuous agenda and framework.

Installation view of Generational Trauma (2022), Pain of the Defeated (2024) and Patriotic Subjectivity (2024) by Gvantsa Jishkariani in Deconstruction/Reconstruction, 18th International Triennial of Textile. Photo: HaWa / Courtesy of the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź

BUKOLA OYEBODE’S APPROACH TO HISTORY

It’s really fascinating how you keep asking yourself, “Who came before us?”. It feels like you really emphasise historical continuity over the rhetoric of a ‘first time’.
I had been asking this question since I was invited as co-curator of the main show. I first checked who has been shown at the triennial in recent times and, for example, discovered that Karo Akpokiere, a Nigerian artist based in Hamburg, was presented in the 2022 edition. I was also keen about the history of artists from Africa in different art institutions across the country. Although African artists are still not regularly represented in Poland, I recalled that TSA magazine had published an article about Bob-Nosa Uwagboe from Nigeria, who was stuck in Gdansk at a residency program during the pandemic. Senegalese artist El Hadji Sy had been shown at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in 2016. It wasn’t for nothing that I wanted to be aware of this history; questions about this came up during press conferences for the triennial. It is important for us to correct the perception that whenever someone from Africa shows up somewhere, it is the first time. This notion is very wrong, especially in the twenty-first century. I guide myself and my work with questions like this often: Who was here before me, what did they do, and how can we or I not participate in erasing that? And that’s where the reference came from. I always try my best not to erase precious history because, though it might be hidden, it is still significant, right? Not being aware of something does not mean it doesn’t exist, and once you become aware, it should become an empowering foundation to build on, whether through direct connection or by proximity.

Staying on the textile topic, it’s clear there’s been a rise in the use of textiles in the contemporary art scene, especially in recent years. How do you hypothesize this way of research is going to develop in the next few years?
It’s a beautiful thing to see textile art practices or art integrating textiles become prominent and enjoy central displays at larger international gatherings, notably biennials that typically favour contemporary media and political discourse. I think this is because textile practices are no longer seen solely as craft and technique but as relevant to querying and reconstructing history and material memory, among other things. It has also advanced significantly from its initial position as a women-based practice to one that represents resistance and increasingly takes on political messages, as seen in some of the works in the 18ITT Deconstruction/Reconstruction exhibition. Sometimes, the political message emphasises softness, or radical softness, and at other times it goes so far as to address topics such as labour exploitation, war, conflict, migration, and repatriation. Additionally, it is now more emphasised how textiles relate to identity, and how artists from non-Western regions are using this to reclaim their heritage, traditional practices, and history. But, by hypothesising, I’m sure you are asking me to predict how things will evolve. Naturally, in the art world, trends always recede, and other forms of artistic expressions will surface and overtake our attention for another block of time. I imagine this will be the case. Ultimately, the current focus will take a back seat. But this itself is not new. Textile art has enjoyed multiple spotlights in the past. We can trace one of these moments to the late 1960s and 1970s, when it became part of the radical expressions of feminist art practices.

You are now based in China, even though you continuously move across continents. How has working from different places influenced you and your curatorial practice?
Working from different locations and spaces enriches my life and work significantly; from a short stay in Venice to living in Tehran for almost three years, then Amsterdam for five years, and now Southern China. Being present in these places exposes me to how art is organised there, and over time, I identify what the place can offer me, and vice versa. For example, it was in Tehran that I produced the special journal The Past in the Present, focused on Nigerian artists, which we took to Dakar in 2018. Being there offered me the quietness I needed to work and access to a good designer and high-quality printing at an affordable cost. You know, almost everyone who received the journal asked us, “Where did you print this, not in Nigeria, right?” I also discovered the exhibition An Introduction to the Art of Black Africa, a result of an exchange between West Africa and Iran in 1977, the same year as FESTAC ‘77. I arrived at this history and the photos from different exchange trips between West African and Iranian artists in the archive of the famous Iranian artist Mr Parviz Tanavoli, because I was present in Tehran and had built a network that opened up conversations about art in the country before and after the Islamic Revolution. Just being present at a particular place offers something. The Collector’s Series was produced in Amsterdam alongside three other publication projects. It was there that I explored the intersection of contemporary art, image history, performance and opera, and I was invited as a guest teacher at re:master Opera at Sandberg Institut. Being part of re:master Opera was how I came to understand and properly appreciate William Kentridge’s work as a fusion of multiple art disciples and techniques, and see him as the master artist that he is. I also want to say that when I was in Amsterdam, my work was not limited to the Netherlands. I worked on the publication for MOMENTUM 12 (Norway’s contemporary art biennial) from there, as well as most of the work for the textile triennial in Poland. It was my home and my base (and where I studied again), but my work was connected to other places in Europe and back home in Nigeria and Africa. In this sense, my career or practice has been kind of portable. It comes with me everywhere I go, and wherever there is internet, I can connect with the rest of the world.

Do you reckon living in China will help you further develop your curatorial work or maybe shed light on new perspectives?
I think that China will be beneficial to me in that way, too. It gives me the opportunity to explore another world, especially as I am disenchanted with Europe and its politics right now. My outlook here is to be present in the wider Asian art scene, because language and knowledge of local art history play significant roles in the different local art hubs. Regarding carrying out my work here, time will reveal what is possible, and I will be happy to share it then.

Dunja Herzog, Instruments For The One Who Dances With Jiggling Brass (2018 – 2025) and Listening Devices (2025) in “Wind Chimes, Gongs and Bells. For whom is this call?”, Satellite Exhibition of The Listening Biennial 2025. Photo courtesy of TSA Ideas Lab

BUKOLA OYEBODE’S PERSPECTIVE ON THE VENICE BIENNALE

Regarding the current Venice Biennale, earlier you mentioned a quote from the late Koyo Kouoh. I was wondering if you consider her a mentor. Also, are you planning to attend this year’s edition of the Biennale?
Indeed, I considered the late Madame Koyo a mentor, although she did not directly mentor me. To me, she was a paramount example of the kind of leadership needed to galvanise and inspire new thinking in the African art ecosystem and to build new institutions. I wrote on Instagram to thank her for her leadership when she passed away. She, like the late Bisi Silva, paved the way for some of us to dream and explore differently in the sphere of curatorial and critical dialogue. But, to be candid, I will not be attending the Venice Biennale this year. I will honour her work and carry on this essential message of dreaming differently elsewhere, maybe here in Asia. I increasingly find it uninspiring to put myself through the dizzying performance we do in the opening week, and with all the current developments around this year’s Biennale, it does not seem necessary to visit in the next six months. The Venice Biennale is becoming or has become an apparatus that is no longer what it was and does not know what it should be. It must first acknowledge its death or collapse before it can live again. The international art exhibition section, meant to stage manifold voices, show us contemporary artistic expressions, and facilitate critique, dialogue, and discourse on current world events, has significantly lost its role and charm due to various factors. Although this development is not recent, it is now clear to all. Likewise, the biased politics around the national pavilions are infuriating. Because of the excessive spectacle, I feel we are losing touch with the poetical and transcendental aspects of art within this context.

What changes do you think would be necessary?
The Biennale should no longer enjoy its privilege and high status if it cannot openly and unconditionally condemn countries involved in war and conflict, allowing them to be in the same space where it invites artists to address the injustice of the past and present. When the Biennale claims to be a neutral ground for truce in the name of art, culture, and artistic freedom, whose voices, oppressions, and emergencies are being amplified or silenced? We need to rethink and further decentralise how we gather and where we gather. Especially for all those who were initially marginalised and had to fight their way into this place. Is this what we fought to be part of, a problematic site of ‘art extravaganza’? We must ask ourselves what this Biennale really stand for today and how that aligns with one’s views as a human and as an art professional? Also, we need to reconsider the pinnacle, or the most significant moment of the artistic and curatorial profession and redistribute the power that is still concentrated in a place and a gathering like this. So far, the resignation of the award jury has been one of the best things to come out of this year’s program, along with the art against genocide protests by ANGA. The internal fault lines of this entity can no longer be managed; we should all demand and negotiate something new. Madame Koyo’s response to COVID-19’s social distancing problems and the global protests in 2020 birthed the Radical Solidarity summit. For me, this is an example of the kind of gathering we need today and should continue to aim for in the foreseeable future. We are fully in a state of crisis.

Giada Libero

Bukola Oyebode

Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, Take Care (2023) in Rhizomatic Portals: Ways of Knowing, Collateral Exhibition of the 18th International Triennial of Textile. Photo: HaWa / Courtesy of the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź
Simone Goslinga, Panic. Exhilaration (2024), installation and performance in Deconstruction/Reconstruction, 18th International Triennial of Textile. Photo: HaWa / Courtesy of the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź
Amina Agueznay, Talisman of Henna, Variation #2 (2024) and Ngozi Ajah Schommers, Tales in Shrubs, Weeds and Gathering (2025) in Rhizomatic Portals: Ways of Knowing, Collateral Exhibition of the 18th International Triennial of Textile. Photo: HaWa / Courtesy of the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź
Peju Layiwola, Stamping History II (2023) and Nubuke/Women Weavers from Ghana Upper West, Asaasaa (2023) in Rhizomatic Portals: Ways of Knowing, Collateral Exhibition of the 18th International Triennial of Textile. Photo: HaWa / Courtesy of the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź
Installation view of Generational Trauma (2022), Pain of the Defeated (2024) and Patriotic Subjectivity (2024) by Gvantsa Jishkariani in Deconstruction/Reconstruction, 18th International Triennial of Textile. Photo: HaWa / Courtesy of the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź
L-R: The Past in the Present (2018) / Ngozi Ajah Schommers: Tracings of Time and Place (2023) / Collector’s Series: Artists & Cities (2022) / Kids from the River by Okhiogbe Omonblanks Omonhinmin (2025) / Photo credit: Wain Wu
Sound recording and listening workshop during The Listening Academy in Lagos 2025. Photo courtesy of TSA Ideas Lab
Dunja Herzog, Instruments For The One Who Dances With Jiggling Brass (2018 – 2025) and Listening Devices (2025) in “Wind Chimes, Gongs and Bells. For whom is this call?”, Satellite Exhibition of The Listening Biennial 2025. Photo courtesy of TSA Ideas Lab
Bukola Oyebode. Photo credit: Wain Wu
by

Giada Libero

May 28 · 26
The exhibition dedicated to Protocol Art in Venice

IT

Displayed at Palazzo Diedo, the exhibition “Strange Rules” – curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon and Hans Ulrich Obrist, in collaboration with Adriana Rispoli – explores the underlying yet crucial rules that set the production, distribution and perception of culture in the digital age, introducing the concept of Protocol Art.

Algorithms, artificial intelligence models, protocols, IT platforms and technological infrastructures have become indispensable elements and invisible architectures of contemporary culture. Building on this very timely premise, the exhibition Strange Rules, on display in Venice at Palazzo Diedo until 22 November 2026, does not merely aim to describe the ways and forms in which these tools are employed in the process of creating a work of art, but rather seeks to present these processes as artistic material.
Developing this theoretical premise, Strange Rules takes the form of an ambitious exhibition project, aimed at introducing the concept of Protocol Art, in an attempt to outline the possibilities offered by the spillover of these “protocols” of the digital age into the field of art and by their hybridisation.

THE STRANGE RULES EXHIBITION IN VENICE

The exhibition itinerary is emblematically opened by the environmental installation Attention Guild (2026) by Mat Dryhust and Holly Herndon, in collaboration with SUB, in which, for the duration of the exhibition, a software is constantly translated into musical language, immediately preparing the viewer to engage with the protocols and codes of the contemporary digital and technological world. Continuing along the same lines, an initial selection of works and installations explores the multiple fields of application of the protocols at the heart of the exhibition, ranging from biology and ecology to pop culture and the procedural generation of images.

Mat Dryhurst & Holly Herndon in collaboration with SUB, Attention Guild (2026). Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: Joan Porcel

The works on display on the first floor further explore the ideas and themes of Protocol Art through a series of videos, paintings, site-specific installations and the remarkable permanent commission The Diambulist Humself (2026) by Philippe Parreno, a complex mobile sculpture whose behaviour is not pre-programmed, but determined by sensors that, by reading the internal and external environment, translate physical data into movement and light, not unlike a living organism inserted into the Venetian context. Finally, on the second floor, a video room presents works that explore other aspects of the relationship between technology, life and art. Overall, the exhibition is not structured as a rigidly constructed itinerary designed to promote a single interpretation of the concept of Protocol Art, but rather as a testing ground where the manifold possibilities of these “protocols” unfold in parallel, and where the formal or conceptual differences between the artworks do not detract from the exhibition’s sense of unity, which stems from the essentially coherent atmosphere that pervades it.

THE CONCEPT OF PROTOCOL ART

The central theme of the exhibition is, in fact, the very concept of Protocol Art, of which the works on display are possible manifestations. Although the shift in focus from the art object as such to the productive and cultural processes surrounding it is a line of thought that has already been historically developed, the innovative scope of the idea of Protocol Art lies in the exquisitely contemporary nature of the works, which can exist only because of the possibilities offered by current technological development and, in particular, thanks to the use of forms of artificial intelligence whose application is accepted as an established practice and reality. Protocol Art thus presents itself as an organic and coherent development in the relationship between art, technology and digital culture in the contemporary world, highlighting the processes that could increasingly shape the cultural discourse.

Mat Dryhurst & Holly Herndon with, Double-Headed Planaria by Michael Levin. Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: David Levene

PROTOCOL ART AND CURATION

If, in 1993, a young Hans Ulrich Obrist launched the do it project by gathering instructions from some of the greatest artists of the time on how to create works of art – aware that these would not easily become such – more than thirty years on, Strange Rules showcases those processes which, thanks to technological development, can finally allow simple instructions to become works of art. In this context, the curator assumes a fundamental mediating role between the diverse fields affected by Protocol Art, identifying its aesthetic potential and exploring its various manifestations. At the same time, the role of the curator proves central to the critical interpretation of the transformations in contemporary culture and to the attempt to assess the multiple perspectives opened up by technological evolution, seeking to bring to light the “strange rules” that characterise it.

Elia Castello

The exhibition Strange Rules at Palazzo Diedo in Venice

Trevor Paglen, Voyager (2026). Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: Joan Porcel
Fabien Giraud, The Final Epoch 1 (2025-2026). Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: David Levene
Mat Dryhurst & Holly Herndon with, Double-Headed Planaria by Michael Levin. Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: David Levene
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Waterfalls (2026). Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: David Levene
Primavera de Filippi, Plantoid (2014). Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: David Levene
Philippe Parreno, The Diambulist Humself (2026). Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: David Levene
Ken Stanley, Picbreeder (2008-2020). Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: Stefano Matteo
Mat Dryhurst & Holly Herndon in collaboration with SUB, Attention Guild (2026). Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: Joan Porcel
Simon Denny with Venkatesh Rao, Monsters Between Worlds (2026). Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: Joan Porcel
Michael Levin, Double-Headed Planaria. Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: Stefano Matteo
Philippe Parreno, The Diambulist Humself (2026). Installation view of Strange Rules, Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo credit: Joan Porcel

The text has been translated in English using AI
by

Elia Castello

May 28 · 26
Curatorship according to Julia Marchand: an escape from visual and spatial conventions

IT

The Venice-based curator reflects on curating as a practice of montage, active memory, and the construction of new forms of exhibition-making, moving between institutions and independent spaces.

French curator, researcher, and broadcaster, Julia Marchand moved to Venice in 2025. After working at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles from 2015 to 2023, she left the institution to pursue an independent path already initiated in 2016 with Extramentale ‒ an “underground” curatorial platform through which, for ten years, she supported a generation of emerging artists while investigating marginality and adolescence as a cultural condition. Using spatial montage as a narrative device, her exhibitions construct visual constellations that escape conventional narratives based on historical and identity-based linearity. In this conversation, Marchand also reflects on the role of the curator today, the contemporary reversal of the “carnivalesque” as a political device, the concept of “active memory,” and the need to imagine new forms of exhibition-making.

Julia Marchand. Opening of Adolescence, 2026, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Curated by Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło, Joanna Kordjak and Julia Marchand. Photo Hawa

In a lecture you gave at School for Curatorial Studies Venice, you said that one of the most important exhibitions of your career you worked as Associate Curator was Laura Owens & Vincent van Gogh, in 2021, curated by you, Bice Curiger and Mark Godfrey at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. What did you learn from that experience, and how significant was it for your professional development?
There is a common trope in curating with the duo-show that aims to measure the influence of an established or historical artist upon a younger one. Museum curators tend to look down at this model which seems to have empty itself of its narrative: Matisse & someone; Leonor Fini & someone, Paul Cézanne & someone else, and above all, Van Gogh. I do myself despise this model even though I did curate once a duo-show. With regards to your question: Laura Owens exhibition not only managed to dismantle any expectations one could associate with such exhibitions but also avoided its pitfalls. Her take was much broader than the sole influence of Van Gogh in her work since she inscribed her investigation into an economical axis: the economy of the image, its widespread circulation, and what it generates in terms of understanding of art, therefore in the exhibition itself. In short, we know Van Gogh before knowing him. We know the painting from the postcards before encountering the paintings. Laura Owens used other materials, other sources of images in the exhibition: the work of an unknown “craft” English artist from the XIXcentury (Winifred How). By doing so, we conceptually (and visually) re-equilibrate the understanding of Van Gogh’s oeuvre: through the lens of Laura Owens, looking at Winifred How, and relooking again at Van Gogh. It was about rebalancing the weight of our gaze between two opposite poles: on one side, the visually overfamiliar and culturally overexposed Van Gogh; on the other, the entirely unknown patterns of Winifred How. There is a wonderful essay by Mark Godfrey in the exhibition catalogue if you wish to explore further. To reply to your question, it taught me how to work with the legacy of historical artists in a more diffused and conceptual way. How to make a curatorial gesture that makes the coming together of artists more organic and clandestine approach. Duo-show or multilayered narrative are not only about outlining influences (it is even a bit dull to do so) but to expand the sensitive and conceptual scope in which you inscribed them. The Georgian pavilion I did shortly after is a direct response to this.

THE CURATORIAL PRACTICE ACCORDING TO JULIA MARCHAND

In Das Passagen-Werk, Walter Benjamin writes: “The method of this work: literary montage. I have nothing to say, only to show.” He described his method as one that disrupts historical and chronological linearity, recomposing it into visual, thematic, and conceptual constellations that evoke rather than explain. Do you see any resonance between this approach and your own curatorial practice? If so, could you give us some examples in exhibitions you have recently curated?
Totally. I would even say this is the accurate definition of how I curate! No wonder, then, that I did an exhibition with German filmmaker and poet Alexander Kluge, former (real) collaborator of Theodor Adorno and (desired) collaborator of Walter Benjamin as Kluge’s friendships with thinkers and writers expand the community of the living ones. I think Benjamin’s writings advocate an active remembrance without forcing it: a way of not forgetting, of sensing and remembering the presence of our past (and present) as something that emerges naturally, almost like a romantic encounter. Montage is not about juxtaposing elements; it is about how you juxtapose them to create the meaning of your own and slipping through the conventional narrative (and chronology). Montage is not only visual: it is a political act (used by artists and filmmaker such as Jean Luc Godard and Kluge). I am a woman and I am much younger than those folks so my take should be different, right? But I have been always skeptical about the oblivion in which we are plunged or about the pigeonholing of artists (I am not only talking about identity politics). By response to the oblivion: I curate exhibitions as a form of montage. The most striking ones are clearly my two last exhibitions I did on Iliazd (1894-1975), the Georgian editor and poet who lived in Tbilisi and Paris. In both of those exhibitions (Georgian Pavillion, 60th International Art Exhibition of Venice Biennale; Toutité at Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare, Bolzano) Iliazd materials are set in relations to the works of emerging artists. But none of those shows fall under the category of the duo show above mentioned. They are spatial montages acting upon a form that situates itself outside of curatorial hegemonic gestures. It is about trusting the materials and its reception by artists, then the visitors; it is about breaking the main narratives and to substitute it with a “feeling” which allows various entries point within the show. With regards the latter it was particularly striking with the Georgian Pavillion since the point of departure was a book on naked eye astronomy (Maximiliana ou l’Excercice Illégal de l’Astronomie, published in 1964). This sensual astronomy becomes the gesture of the exhibition as much as the idea of constellation as a prospective quest. The constellation put forth by Walter Benjamin was at stake too, but it was a silent pact I had with myself.

Laura Owens and Vincent van Gogh, 2021. Exhibition view, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. Courtesy: © Laura Owens, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, Sadie Coles HQ, London and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Photo Annik Wetter

In your curatorial research, the “carnivalesque” appears as a recurring theme. In a conversation with Morgan Labar (the Everythingism podcast, January 20, 2025), you describe it as a space of suspension and the subversion of social and political hierarchies. It was also central to the symposium you organized at the Centre Pompidou in 2020. It is even a key reference in the Venice Biennale In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh. How do you think the “carnivalesque” can operate today in contemporary art not only as an imaginary or aesthetic, but as a curatorial device?
The symposium was made right before Covid. How ironic was that. I don’t think carnivalesque is the progressive and subversive figure anymore. I am going to be a bit naughty here but I would be more aligned with the ideas of Claire Tancons she delivered during my symposium about the carnivalesque as belonging to the conservatism scope. Look at Donald Trump: he is the new figure of the bouffon. Let’s look at Javier M from Argentina. Those forces have migrated over centuries and now are part of the institutions. Those the world in itself has been “carnivalesqued”. With regards to the Venice Biennale, I think the most carnivalesque “curatorial” gesture is the Trump-supported American artist Alma Allen signing a big contract with the French major gallery Perrotin.

Do you believe in large-scale thematic or collective exhibitions? Can they still make sense in the contemporary art system, where there seem to be more biennials and triennials than artists? In this context, how do you imagine the role of the curator evolving in the coming years?
I don’t believe in them anymore but they still operate as a big carrot for many curators, including myself. The role of the curators has changed drastically the last few years. There are two sides of the coin: one could see we witness the “desertion” of our sector while one could testify of a “expansion” it is: how many of us have turned towards gardening, farming, laws, social work? I have been myself tired of making exhibitions that only circulate within our milieu. Today, the course of the world is deepening social inequalities, and this is massively reflected in the structure of the art world itself: on one side, the curators of major foundations who also circulate through the biennials, and on the other, those who continue to drift away from the artistic milieu. It is naive to think that the curatorial gesture is still made for art itself: it serves boards, patrons, and countless other parameters. And yet, it is within private foundations that we can witness some of the most radical artistic gestures. In Venice, for example, I am thinking of the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation.

Which themes do you think are urgent today, but still difficult to present within a museum or institutional framework?
Let me respond to this question by taking actions! But I can say one thing: I have a big problem with participatory art and workshops.

Adolescence, 2026. Exhibition visual identity, © Kaja Kusztra. Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Curated by Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło, Joanna Kordjak and Julia Marchand. Photo Aneta Grzeszykowska, “File 04”, 2025. The work was created with the support of the Fondazione D’ARC, Rome

THE PROJECTS BY JULIA MARCHAND

Three years ago, you left the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, where you had worked as a curator from 2015 to 2023, giving up the stability offered by a major institution. You now live in Venice and work as an independent curator ‒ a choice many colleagues would call “risky”. What motivated you to make such a radical change?
My internal flame was off. You can’t be a curator without this little fire inside!

I have always found your ability to “inhabit the threshold” fascinating: you have worked in major institutions while simultaneously maintaining a more “underground” curatorial practice, out of the spotlight, particularly through your platform Extramentale (2016-2026) and your podcast Everythingism, through which you have supported and given visibility to many young and emerging artists. Does this stem from a personal necessity, a political choice, or both?
A vision, perhaps? A way to build it by embracing more the fragilities of the established one and the emerging voices. I am not surrounding to the language of fixed forms, I am truly doubtful about everything and I believe there is an artistic rigor at every levels. This is a matter of artistic ambition, not a politics or individual needs.

Speaking of Extramentale: this year you decided to conclude this curatorial project ‒ encompassing exhibitions, happenings, talks, and research ‒ which for ten years has explored contemporary art “through the prism of adolescence”. What prompted you to start this research? Perhaps, do you inhabit thresholds in the same way as adolescence?
Extramentale was born in 2016, so clearly it is reflecting what happened in the wake of the 2008 crisis and the 2010 sensibility: the birth and disillusion brought by the digital totality, the necessity to inhabit the periphery, the phenomenon of an adolescence as a cultural condition, the necessity of building a community that felt the same way. Also, no one really addressed it “back in the days” apart from the exhibition at CAPC of Bordeaux co-curated by Stephanie Moisdon. Extramentale was born in 2016, when I turned 30, it is ending in 2026, right before my 40^th birthday. It is time (culturally and individually) to enter into a form of adulthood.

In 2026 Extramentale becomes a book (I Am The F****** Subject: Art and Adolescence, Lenz Press, March 2026) and enters an institution with an exhibition on adolescence at the National Gallery Zacheta in Warsaw (April 2026), which you co-curated with Joanna Kordjak and Katarzyna Kołodziej Podsiadło. What differences, limitations, and opportunities are you encountering in institutionalising exhibitions about adolescence? Is there a risk of stigmatisation that Extramentale has always avoided?
It is clearly a risk, but I feel this exhibition is very different from what I tried to not achieve with the book. Also, my co-curators and I have very different understanding of the subject and very different starting points: in that sense it is a very fruitful contrast. They involved teenagers in the curatorial endeavor whereas I stood “against” this idea for the reason you outlined above. But the outcome became very interesting like various modes of engaging visitors in an experience related to adolescence. As far as I am concerned, I considered adolescence as a condition, an experience, not an age group to involve in the making of an art piece (it can, of course, include them but in a more diffused, unexpected way).

As a perfectionist ‒ someone who literally rewrites the same text fifty times, as you told me once ‒ how do you relate to “error”? Has your relationship with it changed over the course of your career, or is it still evolving?
Ahahhaha it gives me back pain and I am still a perfectionist even at 40!! I am very hard to please, so I won’t give up on that with my work even it is involved suffering and not allowing errors. Perhaps I should be a bit more perfectionist with the men I chose, and less with the texts I write ;)

Vittoria Morpurgo

https://www.julia-marchand.com

Julia Marchand. Opening of Adolescence, 2026, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Curated by Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło, Joanna Kordjak and Julia Marchand. Photo Hawa
Laura Owens and Vincent van Gogh, 2021. Exhibition view, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. Courtesy: © Laura Owens, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, Sadie Coles HQ, London and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Photo Annik Wetter
Laura Owens and Vincent van Gogh, 2021. Exhibition view, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. Courtesy: © Laura Owens, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, Sadie Coles HQ, London and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Photo Annik Wetter
James Ensor & Alexander Kluge: Dark Centurie, 2018, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, curated by Julia Marchand. Visual identity © Fabien Chaminade
Adolescence, 2026. Exhibition visual identity, © Kaja Kusztra. Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Curated by Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło, Joanna Kordjak and Julia Marchand. Photo Aneta Grzeszykowska, “File 04”, 2025. The work was created with the support of the Fondazione D’ARC, Rome
Adolescence, 2026. Exhibition view, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Curated by Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło, Joanna Kordjak and Julia Marchand. Photo Hawa
Adolescence, 2026. Exhibition view, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Curated by Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło, Joanna Kordjak and Julia Marchand. Photo Hawa
Adolescence, 2026. Installation view by Chiki, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Curated by Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło, Joanna Kordjak and Julia Marchand. Photo Hawa
I Am The F****** Subject: Art and Adolescence. Edited by Julia Marchand, in collaboration with Vittoria Morpurgo. Lenz Press and Extramentale, 2026. Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio. English, softcover, 11×18,5, 160 pages. Image courtesy and copyright: Lenz Press and Lorenzo Mason Studio
I Am The F****** Subject: Art and Adolescence. Edited by Julia Marchand, in collaboration with Vittoria Morpurgo. Lenz Press and Extramentale, 2026. Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio. English, softcover, 11×18,5, 160 pages. Internal spreads. Courtesy and copyright: Lenz Press and Lorenzo Mason Studio
I Am The F****** Subject: Art and Adolescence. Edited by Julia Marchand, in collaboration with Vittoria Morpurgo. Lenz Press and Extramentale, 2026. Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio. English, softcover, 11×18,5, 160 pages. Internal spreads. Courtesy and copyright: Lenz Press and Lorenzo Mason Studio
by

Vittoria Morpurgo

May 22 · 26
From the Venice Biennale to the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Interview with curator Bana Kattan

IT

On the occasion of the opening of the Biennale Arte 2026, Bana Kattan spoke to us about “Washwasha”, the project she curated for the United Arab Emirates Pavilion. Starting from the sonic geographies that shape the exhibition, the conversation explores the reflections that informed its development, situated within the framework of “In Minor Keys” ‒ the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Koyo Kouoh ‒ as a space for listening and critical reflection. The discussion then extends to the foundations of her curatorial practice, which focuses on horizontal forms of collaboration and on connecting practices, subjectivities, and transnational cultural contexts.

Originally from Bethlehem, Palestine, and born in Abu Dhabi, Bana Kattan is a curator and researcher active between the United Arab Emirates and the United States. Appointed Curator and Associate Head of Exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project, she has curated numerous exhibitions at international institutions, including the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Framing her work as an active field of research aimed at constructing perspectives that diverge from dominant narratives, she investigates the connections between multiple forms of belonging and the historical, social, and political dimensions that have shaped their identities, creating a continuous network of relations between local contexts and global dynamics. Addressed to what is referred to as the “global majority,” she develops exhibition projects that bring different generations of artists and their practices into dialogue, while maintaining a constant focus on creating spaces for collective exchange.

Bana Kattan. Photo by Dahlia Dandashi. Image Courtesy of National Pavilion UAE ‒ La Biennale di Venezia, 2026

For the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia ‒ In Minor Keys, you curated the UAE Pavilion with the exhibition Washwasha. The title ‒ the Arabic word for “whispering” ‒ evokes subtle sounds and soft voices, resonating closely with the Biennale’s theme, which invites visitors to re-attune to emotional, intimate, and communal frequencies of life. This direction seems deeply aligned with your curatorial research, which engages with non-hegemonic forms of narration and plural, often marginalised or displaced subjectivities. In what ways did your approach engage with the Biennale’s overarching theme, and what path did you follow to translate it into the Pavilion’s project?
So I actually started working on this show before the theme was announced, and I can’t tell you how lucky I felt that the Biennale’s theme was so well connected to the show. There is a quote that Koyo said in the first press release about tuning into the minor keys and looking for the fragments and I wrote that quote down; I didn’t want to miss it. I wrote it down on a post-it, put it next to my computer, and I kept looking at it as I was thinking about the show. A really important connection, to me, has been thinking about gathering spaces and especially sonic gathering spaces, that resulted in Naiman, the bathhouse by Jawad Al Malhi representing a place of shared memories and collected oral histories. I reflected a lot on the importance of the places where we gather and where people talk, and this can also be seen in the work of Lamya Gargash who did the Majlis series.

Sound plays a central role in Washwasha. Prioritising the sonic over the visual carries an invitation to listening and proximity, creating intangible connections and communal exchanges. Is this direction a curatorial choice that interprets In Minor Keys, or is it the expression of a more intrinsic identity of the United Arab Emirates?
I think it’s both: I really wanted to show a part of the UAE arts scene, so not all of the artists are Emirati but they all are connected to and an important part of the UAE arts scene. Also within the UAE, as within every country, it is not possible to be one thing. It’s much more interesting than just being one thing. And I think this is well shown through the multiplicity of voices that are coming out of this exhibition. So yes, I think the sonic element actually works on many levels and at the same time it is something that really connects the UAE into one shared place.

THE NATIONAL PAVILION UAE CURATED BY BANA KATTAN

In your work, research plays a fundamental role in reconstructing and highlighting relational constellations, weaving together diasporic and transnational identities. From this perspective, how do you engage with the rigidity of a national pavilion in a framework that historically implies an idea of identity and culture tied to rigid territorial boundaries?
Your questions are so nice, thank you! You clearly care and understood the show. I think sound is a nice way to think about it because you can’t contain sound into a border, it just goes. This is not a sound show, but it starts with sound: the whole point is in this sonic element and in its connection to intangible culture. Then, once you start thinking in that way, movement and migration become a central part of the exhibition.

You have described the exhibition at the National Pavilion UAE as an “artist-led exhibition,” and your work reflects a clear intention to build relationships that move away from vertical structures. In pursuing a model of horizontal and collaborative curating, how do you orient your work to create an ecosystem of collective growth and ongoing research?
To me, just thinking about being artist-centric and artist-led is the right way of thinking about the curatorial experience in general. I have found that the best exhibitions that I have done, and that my colleagues have done, have placed this at the center. Another important aspect is to create an exhibition theme that is open enough. Washwasha’s theme allowed each of the six artists to take different routes: some of them spoke about oral histories, others spoke about language, and still others about anxiety ‒ considering the washwasha in someone’s mind or the washwasha of technology. In my opinion, what allows that to happen is to give support and autonomy to the artist.

Building on your professional experience at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, you have actively engaged with the local context while fostering dialogue between different generations of artists. In your view, does the rapid institutionalisation currently taking place in the United Arab Emirates pose any risks for the local art scene?
I think that the UAE arts scene is very ready, it’s been ready for some time and there are already wonderful art institutions. I think in Abu Dhabi alone I can list five amazing institutions that have been doing great work. There’s even a museum, the Al Ain Museum, which is part of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, that opened in 1971, before the formation of the UAE. So, we have a long history of museums and I think we definitely have room for more!

I was also thinking about the increasing western interest on the region…
Yeah, exactly. There is an exhibition that I co-curated while I was at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery with Maya Allison ‒ director and the chief curator of the NYUAD Art Gallery ‒ that was called But We Cannot See Them and it involved a group of UAE artists that were active from 1988–2008. The title was based on a poem by Nujoom Al Ghanem, one of the artists in the show, and we titled it in that way because we were a little bit bored of people in the West saying that we don’t have contemporary art or contemporary artists. I think this is a conversation that we can do through our work, beyond just talking about it, but actually doing it.

Mays Albaik, Kūni Kai Akūna Kama Aqūl! (Be, so that I may be as I say!), 2026. Mouth-blown glass, LED light. Courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ismail Noor

THE CURATORIAL PRACTICE ACCORDING TO BANA KATTAN

Staying on the theme of the relationship between institutions and cultural identity, and in connection with your appointment as Curator and Associate Head of Exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project, how are you positioning your practice within a museum with a Western framework in order to give resonance to regional art?
One of the main geographical mandates of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is West Asia and that will be the primary focus of the museum. I’m really excited to be part of a museum with such a wonderful collection ‒ they have been collecting since 2005 ‒ and I am so happy to contribute to bringing that West Asia focus within the Guggenheim constellation.

In your career, you have curated exhibitions in very different contexts: at the NYU Art Gallery in Abu Dhabi, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and now at the Venice Biennale. Has this diversity influenced your curatorial choices both practically and conceptually, as well as in terms of different forms of public engagement?
I think that one of the most important things for me as a curator is to make sure that no matter where I’m doing an exhibition, the content should still be interesting in its original context. For example, in the context of the UAE National Pavilion, we selected an exhibition title and concept that begin from an Arabic word. Yet as an onomatopoeic term, Washwasha contains in its pronunciation the sound made when whispering, and can thus be understood by non-Arabic speakers. In this case, and in all of my exhibitions, it is important to me that the project engage first and foremost the audience coming from the context in which it originates, while at the same time remaining capable of speaking to everyone.

Curating ‒ as your work demonstrates ‒ is not merely an aesthetic practice, but also carries a profound ethical, social, and political dimension. In a time of extreme tension and fragmentation, how should the role and responsibility of the curator be redefined?
Thank you for this question, this is a really nice interview. We all see the world we are living in, and also we can see that the Venice Biennale this year is so different from any other year. In the spirit of Washwasha I just ask people to slow down and listen to communities, listen to the voices that have not been heard but should be heard. This is part of the curatorial premise.

Alessia Leoni
https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/united-arab-emirates
https://nationalpavilionuae.org/art/2026/art-exhibition-2026/

Bana Kattan. Photo by Dahlia Dandashi. Image Courtesy of National Pavilion UAE ‒ La Biennale di Venezia, 2026
Alaa Edris, Wiswas, 2026. Iroko wood, 3D-printed animatronic eyes, sound. Courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ismail Noor
Alaa Edris, Wiswas, 2026. Iroko wood, 3D-printed animatronic eyes, sound. Courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ismail Noor
Farah Al Qasimi, The Curse, 2026. Video installation, sound, vinyl, inkjet prints, 18 mins. Courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ismail Noor
Farah Al Qasimi, The Curse, 2026. Video installation, sound, vinyl, inkjet prints, 18 mins. Courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ismail Noor
Farah Al Qasimi, The Curse, 2026. Video installation, sound, vinyl, inkjet prints, 18 mins. Courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ismail Noor
Jawad Al Malhi, Naiman, 2008/2026. Mixed media installation, sound. Courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ismail Noor
Jawad Al Malhi, Naiman, 2008/2026. Mixed media installation, sound. Courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ismail Noor
Lamya Gargash, Majlis (series), 2009. C-prints. Courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ismail Noor
Mays Albaik, Kūni Kai Akūna Kama Aqūl! (Be, so that I may be as I say!), 2026. Mouth-blown glass, LED light. Courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ismail Noor
Taus Makhacheva, And What Did You Say?, 2026. Performance, installation, sound. Courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ismail Noor
Taus Makhacheva, Dear R., R., K., S., M., A., C., S., K.,I., G., L., A., A., L., P., G., E., J., D.,M., C., B., O., F., F., R., D., M., E.,L., I., F., L., A., M., T., K., K., L., P.,F., V., A., L., L., 2018/2026. 3Dprinted speakers, sound. Courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ismail Noor
by

Alessia Leoni

May 21 · 26
The opacity of painting. Lorna Simpson in Venice

IT

Until 22 November 2026, Lorna Simpson’s solo exhibition “Third Person” at Punta della Dogana in Venice immerses visitors into a layered and elusive visual universe, where identity proves to be fluid, irreducible to a single definition. Through paintings, collages and installations, the artist explores the processes of image construction, inviting the viewer to question their own gaze and to accept the intrinsic opacity of reality.

Silent rays of light traverse the spaces of Punta della Dogana – the Pinault Collection’s Venetian venue – passing through the precarious totemic sculptures of glass and magazines and striking the surface of the paintings, altering their perception. The works by Lorna Simpson (Brooklyn, 1960) do not present themselves directly to the visitor’s eye, but appear veiled, filtered, blurred. The fluidity of the paint breaks upon the canvases, further eroding their texture, reconfiguring with its own viscosity the layers of meaning in the images depicted by the artist.
The Venice exhibition, curated by Emma Lavigne in collaboration with Simpson, is the largest solo exhibition dedicated to the artist in Europe, featuring over fifty works, including paintings, collages, installations and videos. Organised in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where an earlier version entitled Source Notes, curated by Loren Rosati, was presented in 2025, the exhibition in Venice reconfigures the curatorial project by bringing together works from the Pinault Collection, international museums, private collections and the artist’s studio, as well as new works created specifically for the spaces at Punta della Dogana.

(floor) Lorna Simpson, Black Totem, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. (wall, from left to right) Lorna Simpson, Then & Now, 2016, Tate: Presented by Tate Americas Foundation, purchased using endowment income 2017, accessioned 2021 (T15605); Three Figures, 2014, Forman Family Collection; Black Nebula, 2016, Collection of the artist; Polka Dot & Bullet Holes #2, 2016, The Holly Peterson Collection, New York Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

LORNA SIMPSON IN VENICE

In the introductory section, the connection with the lagoon city is evident in the presence of the artist’s very first paintings, which were shown for the first time in 2015 at the Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor. The black ink drips, indelible traces of the genealogy of racial violence, pierce the screen-printed surfaces, heralding the never fully decipherable opacity of the works on display. In Three Figures (2014), the composition is fragmented; the characters appear as fading shadows, destined to lose their balance and slip out of the painting. The paint splashes blur the original photograph – a vintage image of the 1963 racial riots in Birmingham – transforming it into a universal icon of resistance to erasure and an indestructible monument to the civil struggle against violence.
Moving forward along the exhibition route, the twilight chiaroscuro of the urban scenes gives way to the polar landscapes of the paintings in the most recent Ice series, where glacial expanses – suspended between documentation and imagination – evoke a liminal, almost posthuman state. In these rarefied settings, bathed in a metaphysical blue light, solitary female figures emerge, breaking the unperturbed silence of the ice and opening up dreamlike glimpses of new possible forms of existence and relationship.

Lorna Simpson, Tried by Fire (detail), 2017, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

The large canvases find a sensory resonance in the 2026 installation Vibrating Cycles, where black obsidian Tibetan bells, placed upon archaic structures of porphyry slabs stacked one upon another, invite the visitor to participate in a collective ritual: the act of sound becomes a meditative practice, a social act of healing that expands the iconic universe of the paintings into a shared multisensory narrative.
Ice reappears as a sculptural element in the installations scattered throughout the subsequent rooms: stacks of magazines, sometimes as tall as totems, rising from the floor and topped by blocks of glass that shield the covers, suggesting a filtered imagery, frozen forever in a dimension not fully accessible to the eye. The Ebony and Jet magazines embedded in the sculptures represent the collective memory of the African-American community, whose visual testimonies appear altered, in a precarious balance, perhaps destined to melt and disappear forever like the ice that covers them.
Magazines form part of the visual archive used by the artist in her work, particularly in her collages. These explore the processes by which images are constructed and the ways in which they convey meaning. The choice of black and white is imbued with semantic value, as the collages juxtapose, in a jarring and provocative manner, the faces of African-American women with imagery alien to them, belonging to the male, white, Western and colonising sphere. In these works, women become objects of desire, transform into animal prey, wear cumbersome European armour, dematerialise in fire, or risk sinking and disappearing forever as they unstably balance on drifting icebergs. Through these images, the artist gives voice to the precariousness of the female condition and to the impossibility for Black culture to effectively appropriate Western visual language, which cannot therefore be repurposed but must inevitably be reassembled and reinvented.

LORNA SIMPSON’S PAINTING

Painting – as is evident from the curatorial decision to give it a central role in the exhibition – proves to be the most suitable medium for conveying the complex and elusive nature of black women’s identity. The anonymous female portraits displayed in Tadao Ando’s Cube appear as ghostly presences destined to dissolve, ambiguous representations suggesting an unstable balance between individuality, authorship and perception. The viewer’s gaze – the “third person” evoked by the exhibition’s title – is the true protagonist of the exhibition: an external, subjective and shifting viewpoint, once again undefined. Simpson’s painting seems to translate into images the philosophical concept of “opacity” suggested by Édouard Glissant in Poetics of Relation: human identity has a fundamental right, namely not to be transparent or crystallised, but rather fluid, indefinable, irreducible. The women painted by the artist elude the gaze; they are not entirely legible, thereby challenging the Western desire for clarity and control.
Finally, the last room serves as a concise and universal epilogue. The 2024 work did time elapse depicts a suspended meteorite, a third element of space, which, on its journey through the universe, might remain on the periphery of human affairs or, conversely, disrupt them and leave an indelible mark. In Simpson’s work, the fate of humankind is constantly threatened by the mechanisms of erasure. Yet it is precisely this suspended temporality and the metamorphic nature of existence that allow for its eternal survival in the collective memory.

Alessandro Cerchier

Lorna Simpson’s exhibition at Punta della Dogana in Venice

(floor) Lorna Simpson, Vibrating cycles, 2026, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth (wall) Lorna Simpson, Night Fall, 2023, Private Collection Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
(floor) Lorna Simpson, Vibrating cycles, 2026, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth (wall, from left to right) Lorna Simpson, Night Fall, 2023, Private Collection; Thin Bands, 2019, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Time, 2021, Private Collection; Howling, 2020, Gina and Stuart Peterson Collection. Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
(from left to right) Lorna Simpson, 5 Properties, 2018, Private Collection; Head on Ice #4, 2016, The George Economou Collection, Athens; Head on Ice #3, 2016, courtesy of The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of the Director’s Council and Museum purchase, 2017 (2017.6) Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
Lorna Simpson, Tried by Fire (detail), 2017, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
(from left to right) Lorna Simpson, For or by the eyes, 2023, Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland; Third Person, 2023, Private Collection Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
(floor) Lorna Simpson, Black Totem, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. (wall, from left to right) Lorna Simpson, Then & Now, 2016, Tate: Presented by Tate Americas Foundation, purchased using endowment income 2017, accessioned 2021 (T15605); Three Figures, 2014, Forman Family Collection; Black Nebula, 2016, Collection of the artist; Polka Dot & Bullet Holes #2, 2016, The Holly Peterson Collection, New York Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
(from left to right) Lorna Simpson, Specific Notation, 2019, courtesy of Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; did time elapse, 2024, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Cheryl and Blair Effron, Lila Acheson Wallace, The Holly Peterson Foundation, and Modern Circle Gifts, 2025 (2025.14); All Night, 2021, Forman Family Collection Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
(from left to right) Lorna Simpson, All Night, 2021, Forman Family Collection; Observer, 2021, Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman; Painting, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
Lorna Simpson, Painting, 2025, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
(from left to right) Lorna Simpson, Painting, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Zenith, 2021, courtesy of Christen Sveaas Art Collection; L.A., 2025, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Cliffs, 2025, Pinault Collection Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
Lorna Simpson, All Night, 2021, Forman Family Collection. Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
Lorna Simpson, Cliffs, 2025, Pinault Collection. Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
Lorna Simpson, Tried by Fire (detail), 2017, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
Lorna Simpson, Tried by Fire (detail), 2017, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

The text has been translated in English using AI
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Alessandro Cerchier

May 14 · 26
Dayanita Singh’s meta-archive at the Archivio di Stato in Venice

IT

Until 31 July 2026, the Archivio di Stato in Venice will be open to the public, hosting a photographic exhibition by Dayanita Singh. A living, ever-evolving archive, it brings together photographs taken by the artist in archives – and elsewhere – over the last ten years.

The exhibition Archivio presents a parallel archive – a meta-archive – created by Dayanita Singh (New Delhi, 1961) over the last decade. It comprises a body of photographs taken in Bologna, Como, Florence, Venice, Rome, Naples and Palermo, featuring portraits of the respective cities’ archives, viewed from both the outside and the inside. A selection of three hundred and fifty photographs included in the project is therefore on display at the Archivio di Stato in Venice. The images, mounted on fifteen mobile wooden stands, blend seamlessly and interact perfectly with the shelving and the space. Each display stand is thematic and dedicated to an Italian city – except for Patrons, which features portraits and family photographs, and the cushions from Blue Measures. Thanks to the wooden structures, the photographs engage in a formal, exhibition-based and conceptual dialogue with the host archive.

Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic

DAYANITA SINGH’S EXHIBITION IN VENICE

After the Archivio di Stato in Venice, the exhibition will move to the Museo Nazionale Etrusco at Villa Giulia in Rome, then to the MAO ‒ Museum of Oriental Art in Turin and finally to the Italian Cultural Institute in New Delhi, taking on a new site-specific identity at each venue and explicitly expressing the desire to offer an interpretation of the concept of the archive, understood as an organism made up of shared and shareable memories. In this sense, the words of curator Andrea Anastasio, referring to the artist and quoted in the exhibition programme, are emblematic: “Crucial to this long engagement has been the role of friendship. Access – to private homes, hidden libraries, family collections, storerooms and spaces otherwise inaccessible – was granted to her not through institutional commission alone, but also through relationships cultivated over decades. Friends have opened their doors; they have entrusted her with their stories, their interiors, their silences. In doing so, they became, in a profound sense, her patrons.”
The artist’s photographs lend the viewer eyes and a perspective they could never otherwise have, silently discovering and observing otherwise inaccessible spaces that are thus opened and made accessible. The exhibition brings to the fore the role of photography as a medium for the collective dissemination of something which, though hidden, holds value for everyone. Thus, on the one hand photography, and on the other the archive become intimate expressions of the human inclination to collect and preserve images and memories.

Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic

THE ARCHIVE ACCORDING TO DAYANITA SINGH

What emerges from Archivio is the intimacy of a collective gesture; it is the contemplation of hidden treasures; it is the importance placed on detail which, if not immortalised, risks falling into anonymity.
Amidst a whirlwind of images that haunt the contemporary world, Singh chooses the tranquillity of a decade-long quest: a collection of photographs that grows richer with time and is constantly changing. Archivio manifests this growth through the specific recomposition and selection for each venue hosting the exhibition, thus giving concrete form to Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (a real place that functions as an “other” space). In the same venue – this time the Archivio di Stato in Venice – the façade of a Turin palace, the mise en abyme of a family album, and a labyrinth of reflections from a Venetian archive coexist. In this way, the physical archive becomes a space for collection but also a catalyst, in a discourse that connects the past, the present and all the places depicted. The images are linked by a single overarching theme: Dayanita Singh’s gaze, which offers the visitor the chance to see what they would most likely never have looked at otherwise.

Rebecca Canavesi

Dayanita Singh

Archivio di Stato di Venezia

Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic
Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic
Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic
Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic
Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic
Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic
Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic
Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic
Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic
Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic
Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic
Dayanita Singh. Archivio, installation view, Archivio di Stato, Venezia 2026. Photo Gabriele Boghlic

The text has been translated in English using AI
by

Rebecca Canavesi

May 7 · 26
Exhibitions, misunderstandings and curatorship: an interview with Luca Lo Pinto

IT

First a curator at the Kunsthalle Wien, then artistic director of MACRO – The Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome – until early 2025, Luca Lo Pinto has always combined publishing with curating, adopting a free and open approach that embraces misinterpretation.

Luca Lo Pinto’s (Rome, 1981) curatorial practice stands out for its unconventional nature. His approach consists of distancing himself as much as possible from the self-referentiality of the art world, creating encounters and hybrid cultural spaces. This identity emerged during his tenure as curator at the Kunsthalle Wien ‒ where he developed exhibitions characterized by a non-hierarchical and highly process-oriented approach ‒ and was further solidified during his artistic direction of MACRO ‒ The Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, where he promoted the idea of the museum as a magazine and an organism in constant transformation.
Lo Pinto is also part of the publishing world: he is co-founder of the magazine and publishing house NERO, and his catalogs often reflect the non-conformist and conceptual aspect of his practice. One example is Editorial, an exhibition in words, which does not contain photographs of the exhibition but rather the words of writers invited to visit it and write about it.
In his conception of curatorship, misunderstanding is not an error to be corrected but a condition with which to work. Similarly, the idea of curatorial authority does not coincide with control, but with a form of presence that never completely overlaps with the artists and that, precisely for this reason, must continually redefine its own position. Thus, the exhibition, too, is never a stable entity.

Luca Lo Pinto. Photo by Bianca Hirata

THE INTERVIEW WITH LUCA LO PINTO

You often talk about the importance of individual freedom. As a curator, where do you draw the line between your own freedom and that of the artists you work with?
I have always viewed curating exhibitions as an act of authorship, and when a curatorial project has a strong authorial dimension, it is often interpreted as a gesture of vanity, as an attempt to overshadow the artist or the works. From my perspective, this is not the case at all: the starting point is always the artist and their work. I try to understand them deeply, almost to get inside their head, and then step back to truly imagine an exhibition together.
I’m interested in being a sort of accomplice in the creative process, so that my presence isn’t merely an accessory. Otherwise, my work would risk being reduced to that of a facilitator ‒ almost useless. There are, of course, contexts in which the curator assumes a more productive role: I’m thinking about spaces like the Secession in Vienna, where the model is that of a solo exhibition in which the artist retains almost total control. This, too, is part of curatorial work: helping an artist transform a vision into reality. However, this dimension alone is not enough for me. The opportunity to engage in direct dialogue with artists, to share the same historical moment, is an aspect that has always fascinated me in working with contemporary art, compared, for example, to ancient art. This dialogue is something unique, which I strive to make the most of. Even in solo exhibitions, my goal is for the project we create together to be different from what the artist would have created without me. Every artist is different, every collaboration has its own dynamics, but for me, the relationship between curator and artist is above all about a working methodology, a way of constantly asking questions. I have never agreed to carry out a project simply “for the sake of doing it”: I have always tried to push every work as far as possible.

You say you’ve learned from artists not to be afraid of being misunderstood. Have any of your exhibitions ever been misunderstood?
Many. Spending time with artists from different generations has taught me that misunderstanding can be a productive part of dialogue. I’m thinking, for example, about the time I spent with artists like Emilio Prini or Luigi Ontani, who showed me a less rigid way of relating to art, and taught me to poke fun at the art world’s systems and not to be so attached to the constructed image of the intellectual. Or Mike Kelley, who in his writings fiercely criticized Rosalind Krauss: a gesture that struck me deeply, because at the time it didn’t seem possible to do so.
Some artists want their message to be understood exactly as they formulate it, while others want misunderstanding to be part of the dialogue. In this sense, even opacity can be productive: not necessarily something negative, but a space for interpretation. When an exhibition doesn’t propose an explicit theme or a linear narrative, it inevitably invites different interpretations. It’s a bit like experimental cinema: by eliminating certain narrative elements, the viewer is called upon to engage more deeply with the experience. It’s a more demanding process, but also a more open one. We often prefer familiar paths, like always choosing the same dessert because we already know what flavor to expect. But when an unexpected element is introduced, a possibility for discovery opens up.

Can you give us an example?
The communication work done at MACRO, which we might call “pop,” has been interpreted by some as a sign of a kind of negative frivolity. This was also the case with the catalog for MACRO’s latest exhibition, Post Scriptum. A museum forgotten by memory, the use of language drawn from fashion publishing could be misinterpreted as a form of adherence to commercial imagery. In reality, it is not a matter of appropriation, but of working with languages and their structures. It is always the combination of elements that produces meaning.

You told me that you don’t read art magazines and that this was one of the reasons you founded NERO in 2004. While art magazines were once one of the main sources of information about the art world, where do people now learn about and discuss contemporary art?
I have no idea. This isn’t a stance against art magazines: I used to flip through them just as I would fashion or music magazines. However, I often find that the way they talk about art lacks a personal touch. There must be a vision, an almost obsessive dimension, a style of writing where you sense a real urgency, even if imperfect, but authentic. For this reason, I’m more interested in editing than in writing art criticism in the traditional sense. Editing is a form of indirect writing, which allows you to construct a discourse through the relationship between different contents.
Today, the ways we access information are much more diverse. The idea of getting information exclusively through art magazines seems almost limiting: it’s more about reading everything. Some editorial projects I liked, such as Index or Purple, focused heavily on the format, or prioritized the interview as a space for reflection. When we founded NERO, there was no particular magazine that served as inspiration. Today I’m more interested in a platform like Contemporary Art Daily, which functions as a visual archive-in-progress documenting exhibitions with images that are not always easily accessible: a very simple but effective idea.

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CURATORSHIP ACCORDING TO LUCA LO PINTO

I believe that exhibitions are not necessarily the main locus for art. Where do you seek out or find art?
The search often unfolds through a chain of connections: a series of encounters, suggestions, and conversations. When I travel, I try to see as much as possible; I listen to people I trust, and I let my curiosity guide me. Many discoveries arise from dialogue: a conversation with an artist can lead you to a book, a place, an unexpected figure. I am surrounded by very different people, and I am interested in building an open network of references, avoiding overly self-referential circuits. Sometimes a suggestion can lead you not to a museum, but to a church or a marginal place, and it is precisely there that an intuition for a project can emerge. I am often drawn to details that escape a more casual glance, to figures left on the margins, to irregular stories. Over time, one realizes that some of history’s “losers” probably deserved a different standing, and this opens up new ways of interpreting events.

Speaking of history’s defeated, the program of the Museum for Preventive Imagination ‒ whose name paid homage to the Office for Preventive Imagination project created in Rome in 1973 by artists Carlo Maurizio Benveduti, Tullio Catalano, and Franco Falasca ‒ features the project Aritmici, which has given space to “irregular figures and atypical stories from a more or less recent past.” This drive toward the rediscovery of subjectivities that are marginal or overlooked by history often recurs in your curatorial practice. I’ve noticed a very high number of women in these projects. How can curatorship help preserve the memory of certain artists, and female artists in particular?
This is not a matter of policy or quotas. I am interested in avoiding a rhetorical approach to issues of identity. When these topics are treated superficially or merely as a matter of political posturing, the result risks being hypocritical. This does not mean denying the urgency of these issues, but rather asking how to address them consistently. When bringing figures into an institution who have also worked outside the art system, the responsibility is even greater. “Taking care” means avoiding rhetoric and working concretely on the conditions through which these stories can be understood.
Consistency between what is said and what is done is fundamental. It is not enough to select a name or follow a trend: every project must fit within a broader vision. Otherwise, the risk is simply that of chasing whatever appears relevant at a given moment. Regarding issues of representation ‒ I am thinking in particular of women and artists of color ‒ if we look at the data, the disparity is evident: one need only examine the statistics published by collectives such as the Guerrilla Girls. However, today we must also pay attention to how these issues are addressed. In many cases ‒ especially in the American context, which often drives these processes ‒ there is an attempt to rapidly make up for centuries of historical delay. The reality, however, is more complex. The same applies to the debate over monuments: I believe neither in their simple preservation nor in their destruction. There is a third way, which consists of questioning them, problematizing them, and creating new ways of interpreting them.
Reducing everything to a polarizing logic – black or white – is dangerous, because it is precisely this kind of simplification that fuels far-right populist politics. Complexity must be preserved, not simplified.

You became director of MACRO in 2020, at the start of the pandemic. How did these circumstances affect your work and your understanding of the audience?
Actually, less than one might think. The challenges were already there: it was as if the ground had been pulled out from under my feet, even though I was already somewhat accustomed to working without certainties. Of course, beyond the health emergency, the main regret was not being able to open the first exhibition right away.
At the same time, that situation opened up new possibilities. I’ve never had a rigid approach to curating: I don’t think reality should have to adapt to a pre-established project. During COVID, for example, while we were working on the first group exhibition, it was impossible to predict whether the works would arrive on time. So, I decided to embrace this uncertainty: if a work arrived later, we would integrate it subsequently. It wasn’t about constructing an “evolving exhibition” as a theoretical choice, but about letting reality itself determine the project’s rhythm. It’s an attitude that implies a certain openness to risk, but also the possibility of discovering unexpected paths.
Paradoxically, some ideas emerged precisely because of that situation: without the pandemic, I wouldn’t have organized the Lawrence Weiner exhibition in the sky or published a catalog like Editorial, an exhibition in words – devoid of images.

Your installation choices are anything but conventional. You just mentioned the Lawrence Weiner exhibition where the works were dragged through the sky by an airplane; I’m also thinking of the Hanuman Books 1986–1993 exhibition, where the publishing house’s archive was laid out on the floor, inviting visitors to walk over it. What criteria do you use to determine the placement of an artwork, and how does the mode of display influence the very definition and perception of the work?
I believe that the arrangement of works in space can profoundly alter their meaning, or at the very least suggest new interpretations. It is one of the most interesting aspects of curating exhibitions. When I speak of “exhibitional writing,” I’m using a metaphor; the ideal would be to construct an exhibition that stands on its own, without the need for any explanatory apparatus. Like when you walk down the street and encounter images, objects, people: you don’t have a caption, but you still construct an experience and a meaning. Some exhibitions work exactly like this, asking the viewer to engage. I’m thinking of Corrado Levi’s exhibition, Il Cangiante, at the PAC in Milan, where works of American Pop Art were arranged in a serial fashion, all at the same distance, suggesting a reflection on repetition and the logic of the product. Or Ed Ruscha’s intervention at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where he altered the height and exhibition context of historical works, radically transforming their perception.
Sometimes a single detail – the height of a painting, its position on the floor, the possibility of walking over an archive – is enough to generate a significant change. These choices arise from a blend of imagination and research, but also from spontaneous intuitions: there is no linear or programmable process.

Hanuman Books 1986 – 1993. Exhibition view, MACRO, Roma 2022. Courtesy Collezione Mughini Photo Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio

MUSEUMS, INSTITUTIONS, AND THE FUTURE

There are a lot of discussions today about the attention deficit crisis and the use of artificial intelligence, even in exhibition settings. What future do you see for wall text?
Artificial intelligence is a recent but unavoidable tool. You can’t stop reality. Thinking of excluding it from educational or cultural processes is unrealistic. The point, once again, is how to use it: limiting oneself to generating automatic summaries is a trivial, tired solution, devoid of real interest.
Every choice depends on the context. If I’m curating an exhibition in a highly specialized setting, I can afford a certain level of complexity. But in a public museum, accessible to everyone, the challenge is different: how to create a language that is meaningful to a scholar, a casual visitor, and a teenager accustomed to watching TikToks.
The goal is to find a form that is neither simplified nor artificial, but something else. And, precisely because it is “something else,” this form can lead to misunderstandings. It’s a situation I know well: even with NERO, it was often unclear whether it was an art magazine, a fashion magazine, or something else. For us, this ambiguity was a virtue, because it signaled the success of a hybrid project. Of course, this stance comes at a cost: being difficult to classify also makes securing financial support more complex. But that’s part of the game. If we want to talk about freedom – a word perhaps overused today – we must accept that it comes at a price. “Te la devi accollare”, as they say in Rome.

Your leadership style has been one of taking nothing for granted. In your interview with Il Giornale dell’Arte, you said that “Everyone sensed that this was a museum truly designed to welcome them, one that spoke their own language – a significant achievement, given that museums typically speak the language of history rather than that of artists, a language with different rules, different tones, and a different grammar.” You also opened the doors of your institution to everyone, putting up a sign outside that read “free admission.” Should museums be free? Or rather, can they be?
I don’t know if they should be free. I don’t think there are any rules. We need to think about the context we’re in. In a country like Italy, with shocking cultural decline and rampant precariousness, being able to share the work of avant-garde artists with a wider audience ‒ since the avant-garde usually has a smaller audience ‒ is important. Reaching out to the public doesn’t necessarily mean it will be reciprocated, but I think the choice to reach out anyway has a dimension that is also political. But I don’t think that, by its very nature, a museum should always be free. I think that right now it’s more important than ever to be even more generous than usual.

For your latest exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien, Time Is Thirsty, you created an immersive exhibition space: you asked Sissel Tolaas to recreate the scent of Vienna in 1992, and loud music played continuously throughout the exhibition – which you said you made them promise never to turn down. How important is the sensory dimension in your curatorial approach?
The immersive and sensory aspect, in and of itself, doesn’t particularly interest me; on the contrary, I often perceive it as a form of entertainment, especially when, in large institutions, complexity is reduced to something almost circus-like. I’m more interested in a sensual dimension, in the broadest sense of the term: a total, almost synaesthetic engagement that activates multiple senses simultaneously and isn’t limited to a single mode of perception.
In this sense, the use of elements such as smell, sound, or light can become significant, especially when one wishes to transport those entering a neutral exhibition space – the classic white cube – into another dimension. It is not, however, a matter of creating spectacular effects, but rather of constructing a complex perceptual condition.

In the past, you wanted to be an architect, and – for example, in the case of MACRO – your practice was greatly influenced by the museum’s architectural structure: its alien form partly inspired your idea of an “octopus museum.” If, in a parallel reality where you actually are an architect, you had to design your own museum, what would the ideal structure be?
I’d like a modular museum that can be modified. One that can open, close, move, rise, and change its flooring – parquet one day, marble the next. A bit like a child would imagine it.

You don’t like themed exhibitions, because in that context the artist risks becoming merely “a means” to support a curatorial idea. You have, in fact, organized many solo exhibitions; but in your group exhibitions, how have you avoided reducing artists to this role?
I don’t organize themed exhibitions. The latest exhibition at MACRO, for example, sought rather to reflect and condense the threads that had run through the entire program. The first, on the other hand, had an almost manifesto-like character: it involved artists working with very different languages, including practices that go beyond the traditional artistic object.
In Vienna, I conceived an exhibition in which there was no actual object, but time itself became the primary medium; in projects with house museums, on the other hand, it is the space that constitutes the subject. During a residency at the Frac in France, I worked on the collection while avoiding a traditional exhibition: I reflected on the idea of the artwork as an image, creating a postcard for each work, which was then paired with a book selected from the library. This resulted in a collection of 788 “meta-artworks,” a structure deliberately left implicit, partly left to chance.
Still on the theme of the image, for an exhibition in Vienna as part of Curated By – which took Beatriz Colomina’s The Century of the Bed as its reference – I arranged the works in the space, photographed it with the idea of exhibiting only a 1:1-scale photo, thereby transforming the exhibition into an image. In all these cases, even when the curatorial project is underpinned by a strong concept, the artists are never reduced to mere tools: they are involved in the process and participate actively, recognizing the solidity and coherence of the proposals. It may happen that someone refuses, but I have always sought to make it clear that behind every project there is substantial research and a genuine commitment to its realization.

Time Is Thirsty, installation view, Kunsthalle Wien 2019. Photo: Jorit Aust: Willem de Rooij, Body Warmer, Size S; Jacket, Size S; Jacket, Size L; Tracksuit, Size XL; Tracksuit, Size XL; 3-Part Track Suit (Jacket, T-Shirt, Pants), 2015, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

ITALY VS ABROAD: A COMPARISON

You have directed two institutions that are very different in terms of history, structure, and context: the Kunsthalle Wien and MACRO – The Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. How did their different institutional statuses ‒ the Kunsthalle without a permanent collection and MACRO as a municipal museum with a collection ‒ concretely influence your curatorial and programmatic decisions? And to what extent, on the other hand, did the systemic differences between the Austrian and Italian contexts (cultural policies, funding, relationship with the public, decision-making autonomy) influence your way of working?
From the perspective of autonomy, I had great freedom in both cases. At the Kunsthalle Wien, although I was not the director, I worked with a director, Nicolaus Schafhausen, who gave me absolute freedom.
The systemic differences, however, are enormous and represent almost two opposite extremes. Austria is a small but very wealthy country, and Vienna, as its capital, offers an extraordinary cultural concentration considering its physical scale. There are institutions of the highest caliber – just think of the musical tradition, from the Opera to the Musikverein, or the major museums – but also a solid educational system, with very strong academies. Above all, there is a genuine cultural welfare system: work in the arts is recognised, supported, and structured. This, however, also produces a side effect. In such a stable system, there is a risk of a certain overproduction: exhibitions, books, and projects that exist because the system allows them, but not always out of real necessity.
In Italy, the situation is the opposite. One grows up in a state of structural precariousness, without guarantees. On the one hand, this is problematic; on the other, it generates a different kind of tension, a more radical drive. Personally, I have always believed – perhaps still in a somewhat romantic way – that the artist should not be an “employee of the system,” but a figure capable of thinking outside the box, of embodying a form of freedom and risk.

And what about how the institutions operate?
Here, too, the differences are clear. In Italy, the system is much more fragile, both economically and politically. In Rome, for example, budgets are extremely limited, and political influence can directly affect cultural decisions: a change in administration can also mean a change in direction. This does not happen as easily in Austria.

How then does the relationship with the public change?
Paradoxically, in a context like Vienna’s, where the cultural offerings are so extensive and integrated into daily life, one sometimes senses a decline in curiosity. When something is always available, it risks becoming taken for granted. This is also reflected in the way institutions engage with the public. In Vienna, there is a strong focus on educational programs: they are structured, in-depth, and truly integrated into the school system. The educational departments function very well and play a fundamental role.
At the same time, however, I wondered about the overall effectiveness of this effort: how much of it is actually absorbed? It’s not enough to produce content; you also need to understand how it is received.
Working within an institution allows for precisely this: not only carrying out projects, but also observing over time how they function, how they evolve, and how they can be recalibrated. It is an opportunity that is not available in more temporary contexts, such as a single exhibition.

In your recent interview with Cristiano Seganfreddo for Flash Art, you spoke about your faith in art. What does it mean, given the global situation we find ourselves in, to have faith in art?
The idea that I might encounter works or people capable of surprising me, and of leading me to discover things I didn’t know, or making me see things I already knew in a new way. And that’s what still excites me. It happens rarely, but when it does, it has such power that it still makes working with art rewarding for me.

Yasmine El Hafidi

Luca Lo Pinto

Luca Lo Pinto. Photo by Bianca Hirata
Luca Lo Pinto (ed.), Editorial: an Exhibition in Words, Humboldt Books, Milan 2021 (cover)
Hanuman Books 1986 – 1993. Exhibition view, MACRO, Roma 2022. Courtesy Collezione Mughini. Photo Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
IN REAL LIFE, exhibition view. Christine König Galerie, Vienna 2014
Lawrence Weiner, Spaccato – Split, TRACCE / TRACES. Photo Claudia de Nicolò, Bianca Trevisani
Veduta della mostra Museo per l’Immaginazione Preventiva – EDITORIALE, MACRO, Roma 2020. Photo Roberto Apa
NERO 34
Time Is Thirsty, installation view, Kunsthalle Wien 2019. Photo: Jorit Aust: Willem de Rooij, Body Warmer, Size S; Jacket, Size S; Jacket, Size L; Tracksuit, Size XL; Tracksuit, Size XL; 3-Part Track Suit (Jacket, T-Shirt, Pants), 2015, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

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Yasmine El Hafidi

April 23 · 26
Universal stories: the exhibitions by Michael Armitage and Amar Kanwar in Venice

IT

Palazzo Grassi, the Venetian venue of the Pinault Collection, is hosting, until 10 January 2027, the works by Michael Armitage and Amar Kanwar exploring conflict, human memory and sensitive socio-cultural and political issues. A narrative centred on the violent implications of power, expressed through a universal perspective that becomes a collective voice.

Michael Armitage was born in Nairobi in 1984, whilst Amar Kanwar was born in New Delhi twenty years earlier. These two artists, working in different media – the former in painting and the latter in video – depict their contemporary reality with profound expressive sensitivity. Both narratives blend recollections, memories and episodes from human history, bringing together the individual and collective dimensions.

MICHAEL ARMITAGE AT PALAZZO GRASSI

Michael Armitage. The Promise of Change, curated by Jean-Marie Gallais, in collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist on the catalogue, Caroline Bourgeois and Michelle Mlati, features forty-five paintings, each of which depicts a daily reality experienced by many and (probably) unknown to those who have never encountered it. Armitage paints on large lubugo canvases made from tree bark, following an artistic practice widespread in Uganda. Lubugo cloth is characterised by holes and tears, an ambivalence between fragility and resilience that echoes in the themes addressed by Armitage. The holes, described by Obrist as “scars on a body” in the interview published in the exhibition catalogue, become, in the artist’s own words, “my attempts at sewing or the stitches I put into the cloth. […] I want to make work that has a relationship to a cultural history. […] It’s just a way of making that part of the work so I can talk about other things”.

Michael Armitage, Dandora (Xala, Musicians), 2022, Pinault Collection. Installation view Marco Cappelletti Studio

The cultural history of Africa, particularly East Africa, is central to Michael Armitage’s artistic output, both in terms of imagery and content. His works are inspired by fragments of current events: in Curfew (Likoni March 27 2020) from 2022, it is the violent police crackdown on passengers waiting for a ferry; in Nyali Beach Boys from 2016, it is the scourge of sex tourism; in Mkokoteni from 2019, meaning “cart” in Swahili, it is a means of transporting goods widely used in Kenya. Violence, both in expression and content, is the central theme of Armitage’s work, taking shape in almost abstract colours, with clear references to the paintings of Goya and the Fauves. The tragic events of the present range from clashes during political demonstrations to public summary executions, to the hardships faced by migrants, the use of glue as a narcotic, and even gang rape. Armitage draws on a story he knows, one he has lived through, and which echoes in his memory, to speak to the world about issues that are universal and which, universally, must be addressed. This story, “unknown” to the West, is shared by the artist, but also rewritten and decolonised through references to the filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. Thus, issues emerge that cannot fail to concern anyone who has the courage to acknowledge them and not look the other way. Anyone, because in #mydressmychoice (2015) the violence suffered by the protagonist was there for all to see – not only by those who caused it, but also by those who shared it online. The exhibition is heart-wrenching because it succeeds in sharing the pain and fostering a sense of community. However successful and powerful it may be, it would require a trigger warning at the outset.
The exhibition is spread over two floors and is organised into thematic sections. The selection of forty-five works provides a comprehensive overview of Armitage’s oeuvre. It is worth spending some time in the room dedicated to preparatory drawings and in the one featuring a series of in-depth studies on lubugo cloth. Here, the videos focus on the material, whilst the bibliographical references are connected to the exhibition. A valuable selection of texts, including the exhibition catalogue edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, proves to be an effective tool for understanding the artist’s perspective.

THE AMAR KANWAR EXHIBITION

On the second floor of Palazzo Grassi are the two multimedia installations The Torn First Pages (2004–08) and The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023), the centrepieces of the exhibition Amar Kanwar. Co-travellers, curated by Jean-Marie Gallais. The Torn First Pages, a nineteen-channel video, is displayed on metal frames running along three rooms and is accompanied by a book – a symbol of the visual storytelling. The video installation combines printed materials and archive footage – footage of demonstrations filmed by activists – with the aim of paying homage to the story of Ko Than Htay. The title of the work derives precisely from the bookseller’s act of protest, in which he tore out the first page of every book he sold: the page which, as required by law, listed the regime’s political objectives. The video installation bears witness to Kanwar’s commitment to supporting the democratic movements active in Myanmar, documenting the complexity of the struggle and the atrocities of the dictatorship.

Amar Kanwar, The Peacock’s Graveyard, 2023, Pinault Collection. Installation view Amar Kanwar. Co-travellers, 2026 Photo Marco Cappelletti Studio © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

In a separate room, in a more intimate setting, The Peacock’s Graveyard explores the theme of memory through a reflection on death: the result is a timeless narrative comprising five stories written by the artist. A contemporary fairy tale rendered in the video through a juxtaposition of texts and metaphorical images, accompanied by the sound of a raga (an Indian melody), which heightens the narrative’s poetic power, inducing a trance-like sensation. Kanwar’s are “timeless fairy tales”, to quote François Pinault’s words in the catalogue regarding the work The Peacock’s Graveyard, which has recently joined his collection.

A COLLECTIVE ISSUE

The two exhibitions at Palazzo Grassi shed light on themes that have been obscured or ignored by Western history, told through the works of Michael Armitage and Amar Kanwar who, though distant in style and geography, raise common questions about violence, abuse and contemporary tragedies. The common thread is certainly violence in its various forms, but also, and above all, an awareness of how necessary it is to listen and respond collectively. The sense of a shared community – as human beings – arises from an awareness of the present and is evoked by Armitage’s works, as well as by the images in The Torn First Pages and the universally valid morals of The Peacock’s Graveyard.
To echo the thoughts of Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power (1960): “All the distances that men have created around themselves are dictated by the fear of being touched”. If the experience of the crowd is a profound human experience that allows us to experience a moment of primordial equality, then the only way to be equal is to be touched by the same problems, to be confronted with the same violence.

Rebecca Canavesi

Pinault Collection

(from left to right) Michael Armitage, Nyayo, 2017, Private Collection; Strange Fruit, 2016, Private Collection. Installation view Marco Cappelletti Studio
(from left to right) Michael Armitage, Strange Fruit, 2016, Private Collection; Baikoko at the mouth of the Mwachema River, 2016, Private Collection. Installation view Marco Cappelletti Studio
Michael Armitage, Dandora (Xala, Musicians), 2022, Pinault Collection. Installation view Marco Cappelletti Studio
(from left to right) Michael Armitage, Conjestina, 2017, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; Curfew, (Likoni March 27 2020), 2022, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Gift of Ronnie Heyman in honor of Ann Temkin. Acc. no.: 768.2022; Necklacing, 2016, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Bequest of Gioconda King, by exchange, 2018 (2018.937). Installation view Marco Cappelletti Studio
Amar Kanwar, The Torn First Pages, 2004-2008, Collection of the artist. Installation view Amar Kanwar. Co-travellers, 2026. Photo Marco Cappelletti Studio © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
Amar Kanwar, The Peacock’s Graveyard, 2023, Pinault Collection. Installation view Amar Kanwar. Co-travellers, 2026. Photo Marco Cappelletti Studio © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
Amar Kanwar, The Torn First Pages, 2004-2008, Collection of the artist. Installation view Amar Kanwar. Co-travellers, 2026. Photo Marco Cappelletti Studio © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection
Amar Kanwar, The Torn First Pages, 2004-2008, Collection of the artist. Installation view Amar Kanwar. Co-travellers, 2026. Photo Marco Cappelletti Studio © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

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Rebecca Canavesi

April 16 · 26
Embroidery as social protest: Ana Silva’s exhibition in Bergamo

IT

Angolan-Portuguese artist Ana Silva presents her work for the first time within an Italian institution. The exhibition “Eau”, on view through 6 September 2026, at Spazio Zero of GAMeC in Bergamo and curated by Lorenzo Giusti, addresses urgent socio-cultural issues of the present, critiquing the unchecked consumption of an essential resource such as water and the broader effects of globalization.

The pressing issue of access to water lies at the heart of the solo exhibition by Ana Silva (Calulo, 1979) at GAMeC in Bergamo. Installed in Spazio Zero, the show brings together two new series of textile works: Agua (2024-25) ‒ conceived specifically for the show ‒ and Guardiãs (2024-25), which engage in dialogue with the earlier series O Fardo / Vestir Memórias (2023). Through the language of embroidery, the artist denounces the scarcity of a resource essential to survival, particularly in contexts where it is not a right but a privilege. In this light, Silva depicts landscapes that trace the geography of her own biography ‒ from Angola, her country of birth, to Portugal and Brazil.

Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo

ANA SILVA’S EXHIBITION IN BERGAMO

The most recent series feature environments ranging from semi-desert areas to lush ecosystems, such as the savanna during the rainy season. These settings are interwoven with female figures ‒ symbols of generosity and renewal ‒ and children, guardians of intergenerational memory and the environment. It is often the latter who carry heavy containers of drinking water in the poorest communities of the African continent.
A significant theme, which Silva addresses with remarkable subtlety. Her works are made from a light, semi-transparent material crinoline, that allows her to work on a large scale, revealing the various stages of production and the process behind each piece. The subjects are initially rendered using machine embroidery ‒ a practice traditionally associated with men in Angola ‒ and are then reworked through Silva’s manual intervention, introducing decorative details.
On the occasion of the exhibition ‒ part of the cultural program Pedagogy of Hope, promoted by GAMeC in 2026 ‒ Ana Silva initiated a collaboration with a network of local embroiderers, invited to intervene in her works, transforming embroidery into a relational artistic practice. The program’s title refers to the pedagogical writings of Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire and is inspired by the concept of “education as shared learning and a tool for emancipation and social transformation”, highlighting the role of educational action within the museum context. Upon entering the first room, visitors encounter a combination of works from which figures in shifting colors emerge, appearing suspended and layered in space. In dialogue with the bright, white setting ‒ a perfect white cube ‒ that frames them and enhances their presence, the works create an ethereal imagery, as though merging with the surrounding environment.

Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo

THE WORKS CREATED BY ANA SILVA
In the series O Fardo / Vestir Memórias, the artist instead employs industrial materials: plastic sacks commonly used in markets to transport second-hand clothing from the Global North to the Global South. Approximately 80% of these garments cannot be reused, ending up burned or, in the worst cases, discarded at sea. In this way, Silva reclaims the waste of a consumerist system, reconfiguring an ecosystem that speaks to sustainability and socio-economic relations. The sacks thus become new surfaces on which to embroider human figures ‒primarily women and children encountered in African markets ‒ telling a broader story. Unlike the more recent series, these works originate directly from the act of embroidery and do not develop through successive layering. Although this technique prevents the clear identification of the depicted subjects, it becomes a means to subvert the logic of globalized systems: embroidery is an ancient practice, slow and requiring dedication, standing in opposition to the speed of fast fashion. Manual labor, therefore, is not only tied to environmental concerns but also to cultural and social ones.
The works displayed in the second room are likewise suspended in a white, neutral spatial frame that enhances their vivid colors and decorative patterns. This effective display strategy fosters a silent dialogue between the viewer and Silva’s works, prompting a deeper reflection on the urgencies of our time.
The exhibition ultimately offers a compelling response to the need for inclusive and participatory cultural narratives and practices of social critique.

Elena Mutti

Ana Silva’s exhibition at GAMeC in Bergamo

Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Ana Silva ‒ Eau. Installation view. GAMeC, Bergamo, 2026. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy GAMeC ‒ Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo

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Elena Mutti

April 16 · 26
Art creates many worlds. An interview with curator Michela Alessandrini

IT

Michela Alessandrini, curator at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, spoke to us about her professional background and the key aspects of her practice, whilst also offering some reflections on the distinctive features of contemporary curating.

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris is a leading institution in the contemporary art scene, and Michela Alessandrini (Tivoli, 1987), curator responsible for international projects, took us through the stages of her career that have equipped her to meet the challenges of today’s art world within an institution characterised by an experimental approach.

Michela Alessandrini in the exhibition Andrea Branzi by Toyo Ito at Triennale Milano, 2026. Photo (still from video) @ Edera studio

THE INTERVIEW WITH MICHELA ALESSANDRINI

One striking feature of your past experiences is their diversity, which was already evident in your formation: you studied in different countries, including Italy and France, and later worked in Hungary, Belgium, Morocco, Switzerland, Spain, the Netherlands and Qatar. How do you think this international dimension may have influenced your experience and your curatorial approach?
Although I grew up in a semi-rural setting, away from the contemporary art scene, I belong to a generation of curators who were strongly encouraged to travel and have international experiences. Those were the days of Obrist’s Don’t Stop and night-bus journeys to see exhibitions; fortunately, we later realised we needed to slow down, at least a little. During those years of frequent travel, with no precise strategy in mind, I was lucky enough to work at institutions such as Mathaf (Arab Museum of Modern Art) in Doha, where I served as a research consultant on its extensive collection of Arab art; the ERG (École de Recherche Graphique) in Brussels; residencies in Geneva, Rennes and Rabat; experimental hubs such as FUTURA in Prague or Labor Gallery in Budapest; and museums like the MACBA in Barcelona and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, where I was able to develop my research, always in between academia and cultural institutions dedicated to contemporary art in all its forms. Today I can apply these experiences – which vary greatly in terms of the type of institution and cultural contexts in which they operated – to my curatorial practice at the Fondation Cartier, where I am specifically involved in international projects.

The wide geographical scope of your experience is matched by a very solid academic foundation – first your degree, then curatorial training and a PhD – as well as publishing, writing, residencies and exhibitions. How do these very different aspects come together in your professional life? Do they blend well, or is there a risk that they sometimes remain separate?
One of the central aspects of curating is precisely the creation of connections, and for this reason, I feel that learning to navigate between layered experiences, different formats and various disciplinary fields is fundamental. Art is many things and exists in many places; it creates many worlds. Overall, I would say that my formative years were an indispensable learning experience that has taught me to adapt to very different realities, from small and experimental to large and international ones, striving to evolve not only as a curator but also, hopefully, as a human being. For example, at the École du Magasin in Grenoble, I learnt from my fellow curators (there was no “top-down” teaching) that, in order to work in a group, one must accept compromise and trust the other’s vision, letting go of parts of oneself. Research, then, has been an extremely significant aspect that continues to accompany me to this day: I could never abandon it, and I am fortunate to be able to use both exhibitions and writing to create spaces dedicated to it. Curating is an umbrella discipline that allows me to switch on and off parts of myself and their related manifestations, depending on the creative (or destructive) phase I am going through.

View from Siamo Foresta, Triennale Milano, 2023. Credits Andrea Rossetti / Héctor Chico

THE PROJECTS BY MICHELA ALESSANDRINI

One of your early projects, carried out for the magazine Droste Effect, was The Portrait Room, a collection of “portraits” of curators and personalities from the art world. To what extent did comparing your work with that of other curators help you define your own approach?
If I had to identify a common thread linking all my projects right from the start, I would say that I have always been interested in starting with the subject, with people’s stories and lives. The idea of a human-scale history of art strikes me, an history that begins with individual experiences to speak of collective dynamics. Ginzburg’s cheese and worms… My writing practice is closely tied to the anecdotal, the self-fictional, the interstitial: even today, when I conduct interviews, I try to bring out those little things shared by everyone, as they seem to me to be the true guarantee of a common sense of humanity. It was particularly significant to see how the interview format was used by Tiziana Casapietra in Radicate and by Chiara Bertola in Curare l’arte (Mondadori Electa, 2008). Chiara interviewed other curators to understand their practice and their approach to art, a project still ongoing and one that has brought us together to the point of developing a sequel to the book, which will be titled Un cammino lungo: le cure dell’arte (in progress). I believe that engaging with others – not just curators but also artists, philosophers, architects, designers, etc. – is necessary to clarify the role of our practice in the world. When I set out on the path to becoming a curator, there were few courses focused on this practice, and asking questions was the only way to learn. Today, however, everyone wants to be a curator (as Lea Vergine says in a video interview, that I screenshotted and set as my desktop background. I let myself be guided by the smoke from her cigarette, thinking of Romana Loda or Cérès Franco and all those historic curators I’ve been lucky enough to meet, directly or indirectly, and who have taught me more than any school or journey I’ve done).

Another key theme in your work as an art historian and curator is the archive – and particularly the curatorial archive – understood not merely as documentation produced by the curator in the course of their work, but as a genuine working method and a living space. What use, then, can the archive have for a curator during their professional practice or that of their colleagues?
I don’t have a definitive answer, and I believe that the Curatorial Archives in Curatorial Practices project (which I have been curating since 2015) serves precisely to offer some answers, albeit provisional. One of the features that appeals to me most, in the archives I have visited and those I imagine, is that they allow us to “see something else”, taking into account aspects held within those folds of reality by what we call memory: a concept that needs to be completely re-examined, not least thanks to a more generous and contemporary definition of the archive, which, it seems to me, we are beginning to arrive at. Engaging with the archive allows one to gain a deeper understanding of an artwork, rethinking its role and re-examining its univocity and hegemonic role in relation to the archival record, for example through a curated display. The same can be done with institutions, by investigating why certain exhibitions were organised, why certain works were chosen or others acquired. For Harald Szeemann, for example, the archive was a tool for divination and self-representation; for Charles Esche, it is a collective device that speaks of a shared behaviour within the museum and the society that creates and sustains it. I like to sit somewhere between the two (to name just two, even though the CACP interviews are now more than thirty). I believe that the personal dimension is highly significant, because it is only by starting from the subjective experience and giving it its due weight that we can reach the collective, or universal, dimension, if you like. What is human unites us.

Do you have your own archive?
My relationship with the archive is mediated by my memory, which operates, so to speak, through convective movements, grasping things and then letting them go. The archive is necessary because it allows me to revisit what I would otherwise have lost or forgotten (I forget a great deal, and I believe that forgetting is, in some way, cathartic if approached with innocence and grace). In short, I would say that I trust in the organic nature of my memory’s flow, aided by the archive, even if, for now, it is scattered, fragmented and disordered, just like me. Perhaps the most recurring theme in the curators’ responses regarding their archives is that these archives resemble them, embodying their vision of time, space and of the existence between these two dimensions.

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2 place du Palais-Royal, Paris. Photo © Luc Boegly

MICHELA ALESSANDINI’S WORK WITH THE FONDATION CARTIER IN PARIS

After such a diverse range of experiences, how did you settle into and relate to an institution with such a rich tradition behind it as the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris?
When I was asked to curate exhibitions for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, I was ready and eager to get started, to put my research aside for a moment, since I had just defended my PhD thesis in the summer of 2020. Between one lockdown and the next, I began curating the exhibitions developed by the foundation as part of its partnership with Triennale Milano, where we have just opened the tenth exhibition, Andrea Branzi by Toyo Ito, which I co-curated with Nina Bassoli. My background was well suited to the interdisciplinary and international nature that characterises the work of the Fondation Cartier – which, over the years, has made very deliberate choices to represent art in its many forms, as well as moments, geographical and cultural spheres that were “in between” and marginal at the time – and that now enjoys considerable attention.

Your curatorial work for the Fondation Cartier, as you said, was also part of a fruitful partnership with the Triennale Milano that has been ongoing since 2019. In particular, the exhibition Mondo Reale (23rd International Exhibition Triennale Milano, 2022) was based on the idea of rediscovering the wonders of our planet; subsequently, with the exhibition Siamo Foresta (2023), you focused on a vision of the forest understood as an ecological state of mind, in a dialogue between works by indigenous and non-indigenous artists; ranging from an exhibition of the collection as seen through the eyes of the Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca (Les Citoyens, 2020), a retrospective on the work of Alessandro Mendini (2024), and the most recent one, which you mentioned, on Andrea Branzi. To these we can also add the exhibition Féminin Plurielles (2022), which you organised as an independent curator – invited by the Musée Cérès Franco – centred on plurality as a fundamental condition for the interpretation of the “feminine”, trying to deconstruct the univocal and canonical definition that is claimed to exist. From your point of view, what might be an effective way for a curator to engage with such complex contemporary themes, without resorting to repetitive approaches that fail to do justice to the reflection and poetics of the artists involved?
In Siamo Foresta, the central theme was the relationship between nature and culture, and the forest as a space for the creation of new ecological practices and philosophies, whilst Mondo Reale sought to reflect on what we look at and how we look at it. Formafantasma’s exhibition design was pivotal, and the collaboration was truly fruitful. The distinctly contemporary nature of these themes is undoubtedly due to the Fondation Cartier’s experimental approach and sensitivity to the contemporary world. As a curator, I believe it is necessary to constantly question one’s own practice, seeking to avoid the hyper-focus that could lead to dangerous forms of exploitation and exhaustion of a theme without resulting in a re-evaluation of the behavior – institutional, curatorial and experiential – associated with it. The curator bears responsibility not only for what is shown, but for why it is. The slow and careful work that these key issues of contemporary culture – memory, the dialogue between the real and the virtual, gender issues and ecology – deserve seems to me to be a methodology to be mindful of, an ethic to which we must return.

In October 2025, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain moved from its historic premises on Boulevard Raspail to its new space in Place du Palais-Royal, opposite the Louvre. The new venue, in an 1855 building, have been redesigned by Jean Nouvel with a focus on flexibility, adaptability and transparency. As a curator, how do you intend to approach this new space, and the opportunities and challenges it will present compared to the previous one?
Once located in Montparnasse, a neighbourhood of great historical significance for the arts, the Fondation Cartier now occupies a space – and, by extension, a cultural ecosystem – with a strong institutional identity, given its proximity to the Louvre, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs or the Bourse de Commerce. The principle of dynamic architecture is based on the ideas of porosity, flexibility and the continuous reinvention of space, inviting artists to experiment, in line with the Fondation Cartier’s approach. For a curator, this poses a fascinating challenge: we are accustomed to perceiving, thinking and projecting “in relation” to the space (of the museum), to temporality (the ephemeral nature of the exhibition), to the public, to the artist, to the work, and to the period in which the exhibition takes place. I feel it is urgent to ask ourselves what an exhibition is and what purpose it serves today. For me, the space of the new Fondation Cartier offers this chance by highlighting the proximity of the exhibition medium to that of a performance or a theatrical piece. Its location between Rue de Rivoli and Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré exposes us to the constant flow of people walking past the windows, who, in turn, see the exhibition shift within the ordinary flow of their daily lives. Everything passes, but this encounter is a breach in the bubble we call reality and, at the same time, a reminder of the possibility we have to constantly reshape that very bubble. We must always remember that the exhibition is just one point on the complex line of an artwork’s life; therefore, it is and must be undefined and non-definitive, otherwise it loses its power and, indeed, its raison d’être. The ephemeral nature of the exhibition compels me to accept my own finitude and the sequence of states I must pass through.

Given the vast range of experiences you’ve had – both as a scholar and as a curator – is there any particular theme or curatorial approach you haven’t yet had the chance to explore and would like to try?
Every curator has countless exhibitions in mind that they haven’t had the chance to realise, but I believe it is essential for me to continue focusing on counterexamples. A few weeks ago, I was in Miami, preparing an exhibition on the artist Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, which will open in autumn 2026 at the Institute of Contemporary Art. On that occasion, I was able to see one of the sacred trees on which Ana Mendieta imprinted one of her Siluetas (1981), specifically in Little Havana, where rituals linked to Santeria are still performed (leaving behind offerings that are very much present, both visually and olfactorily). I think there are two very interesting things about that place: the presence-absence of Ana Mendieta (which reminds me of the coats designed by Branzi, like uninhabited sculptures); and its nature as a counterpoint, an anti-monument to the official monument commemorating the Bay of Pigs Invasion. It seems to me that, in these times of withdrawal, clinging to something sacred yet mundane, to the invisible, is absolutely necessary. In the future, I would like to work starting from reflections of this kind, in whatever form it will be possible, from exhibitions to critical discourse to dialogue with other artists and colleagues; and especially writing, because writing is like weaving, and I never want to stop (words too are invisible rituals, always broken). Perhaps we, as curators, should focus less on the projects themselves and more on how they might flourish in others, without exploiting, and thus weakening, their essence by manipulating it. From mediation to therapy, we often try to bend art to a function it can only fulfil spontaneously: at best, I can accompany it so that it reaches the heart of those willing to receive it. I already know that it saves you, because it’s happened to me and keeps happening, cyclically. Reproducing this miracle so that it can reach many people is a strategy that institutions could aim for, embracing the crisis that inevitably runs through them and compels them to regenerate, if possible, with commitment and grace.

Elia Castello

Michela Alessandrini

View from Siamo Foresta, Triennale Milano, 2023. Credits Andrea Rossetti / Héctor Chico
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2 place du Palais-Royal, Paris. Photo © Luc Boegly
View from Andrea Branzi By Toyo Ito. Continuous Present, Triennale Milano, 2026. Photo Andrea Rossetti
View from Mondo Reale, Triennale Milano, 2022. Credits Andrea Rossetti
View from Féminin Plurielles, Musée Cérès Franco, 2022. Photo © Alain Machelidon
Michela Alessandrini in the exhibition Andrea Branzi by Toyo Ito at Triennale Milano, 2026. Photo (still from video) @ Edera studio
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Elia Castello

April 9 · 26
When museums meet contemporary art: MUSE – the Science Museum in Trento

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A new episode of our series dedicated to museums embracing art, particularly contemporary art. This time, we talk about MUSE – the Science Museum in Trento: an offshoot of the century-old Trento Civic Museum of Natural History, it has, in recent years, taken on a key role in the contemporary art scene, thanks to its research programmes, open calls and exhibitions.

“The function of a natural history museum is first to increase and then to disseminate scientific knowledge”. This quote from James Smithson, founder of the Smithsonian Institution, features on MUSE’s platforms and encapsulates the museum’s approach adopted by the Trentino-based institution. MUSE – the Science Museum in Trento presents itself as a centre for research through selected guests, collaborations, projects and open calls. This research is communicated to the public in a clear, interdisciplinary and accessible manner. The museum network now comprises six affiliated venues, exemplifying a dense web of collaborations woven across the region. Within these spaces, each with its own distinct character, the results of research are conveyed through exhibition programmes. This is how the Science Museum places rigorous scientific practice at the service of cultural enrichment, with a view to generating knowledge whilst remaining open to the surrounding realities. The promotion of culture championed by MUSE, particularly through initiatives focused on contemporary art, is effective because it is multifaceted and far-reaching. Through interdisciplinary and targeted projects, the Science Museum has built a genuine art ecosystem comprising open calls, residencies, publications and exhibitions.

MUSE. Courtesy MUSE Archive. Photo Roberto Nova

THE COLLECTION AND RESEARCH AT THE MUSE IN TRENTO

The Anthropocene programme was launched in 2020 and is structured as a research initiative addressing urgent ecological issues, developed through transdisciplinary approaches. The aim is to stimulate debate by adopting a scientific perspective blended with artistic elements. Anthropocene draws on the creative output of We Are The Flood. A fluid platform, as its curator Stefano Cagol describes it, conceived by the Trento Science Museum, which, by fostering a dialogue between art and science, presents itself as a New Bauhaus, where archival and curatorial dimensions coexist.
The project proves effective in both method and content: as well as raising awareness of the present, thanks to the open call it ensures the participation of emerging artists and the subsequent staging of exhibitions within the museum, triggering exchanges and experimentation both within the museum and beyond its walls.
The collection, established as part of the project and the Plan for Contemporary Art (PAC) 2022-2023, is the first in Italy to focus on the theme of the Anthropocene. Launched with an initial core of fourteen works, the collection has expanded over the years to embrace transdisciplinary practices and languages to explore today’s ecological issues.

Laura Pugno, Over Time, 2021. Documentation, video footage, Passo dei Salati. Photo Laura Pugno

Laura Pugno’s work fits well within the extensive network of collaborations promoted by MUSE. Over Time is one of the winning projects of the Italian Council 2020, now part of the Anthropocene collection but initially conceived for the Post-Water exhibition, hosted by the Museo Nazionale della Montagna in Turin. The artist, interested in landscape as a cultural product, had presented a reflection on the form and memory of snow at the Turin museum, exhibiting, in 2018, a few snow casts in Jesmonite. Andrea Lerda, curator of the Sustainability programme at the Museo Nazionale della Montagna, describes the work that has entered the MUSE collection as follows:
“The Overtime project set out to explore our historical and ancestral relationship with the imagery of winter and snow, and how this might change because of global warming. It examined how the decline in snowfall might lead to a loss of connection with this deeply romantic world. Thus, with the involvement of the scientific community, Overtime was born. Laura conceived this three-channel video installation, one channel of which was filmed at the Oasi Zegna (Biella), another at the Angelo Mosso Institute (located on the Passo dei Salati, in the Monte Rosa massif, Vercelli) and the third at the synthetic snow production facility near Cremona. This dystopian imagery has been distilled into these narratives, and the video was presented with a soundtrack composed by sound artist Magda Drozd, who accompanied the artist throughout the recording process, sampling the sounds of snow”.
The transdisciplinary and open-ended approach underpinning Anthropocene is confirmed by its residency programmes, such as the one launched in 2022 with the participation of Mary Mattingly, and by its editorial focus, with the publications of We Are The Flood – including the latest from postmediabooks.

Palazzo delle Albere and MUSE. Courtesy MUSE Archive

THE VENUES OF MUSE

The various exhibition spaces and partner venues across the region, each dedicated to specific exhibitions and projects, reinforce the system established by MUSE. The museum’s collection is displayed within the glass-fronted building designed by Renzo Piano with a strong focus on environmental sustainability, evident in the materials used and the building’s relationship with its surroundings. The MUSE building engages in dialogue and interacts with the Palazzo delle Albere, another exhibition venue within the museum circuit dedicated to historical exhibitions.
Until 13 September 2026, the Renaissance palace provides the setting for The Power of Machines. Humanity, Environment, Technology in 16th-Century Trentino, the exhibition that reaffirms, once again, the close bond between the museum and the local area.
Among the various venues with which MUSE maintains a partnership, Castel Belasi is particularly noteworthy: the contemporary art centre directed since 2023 by Stefano Cagol, housed within a medieval castle in the municipality of Campodenno (Trento). Castel Belasi showcases not only diverse media and artistic languages, but also established and emerging artists who contribute to the evolution of a coherent and comprehensive system.
Fragile. A Selection of Glasstress, curated by Sandrine Welte and Adriano Berengo, the result of a collaboration with Berengo Studio in Murano, presented an exploration of the ambivalence of glass – its interplay of strength and fragility – through the work of artists such as Erwin Wurm, Ai Weiwei, Mimmo Paladino and Thomas Schütte, whilst From the Anthropocene to the Biocene brought together in the project room nine artists under 35 from the masterclass organised by the museum. In this way, works by internationally renowned artists and emerging research within the museum converge in the same spaces, layering the MUSE’s levels of interest in contemporary art and integrating into the exhibition programme of Castel Belasi.
Considering the projects analysed and the fruitful relationships forged by the museum, it is possible to confirm the validity of the initial slogan: MUSE occupies a space at the intersection of knowledge production and participatory dialogue with society, raising awareness of current urgent issues and disseminating knowledge rooted in both the scientific and artistic spheres.

Rebecca Canavesi

MUSE ‒ The Science Museum in Trento

Anthropocene Collection. Courtesy MUSE Archive. Photo Michele Purin
Erwin Wurm, Iced Pickle Tree (detail). Fragile. A selection of Glasstress. Photo J.B. Musick
Laura Pugno, Over Time, 2021. Documentation, video footage, Passo dei Salati. Photo Laura Pugno
Fragile. A selection of Glasstress, exhibition view. Courtesy MUSE Archive. Photo Michele Purin
MUSE. Courtesy MUSE Archive. Photo Roberto Nova
Palazzo delle Albere. Courtesy MUSE Archive. Photo Michele Purin
Mary Mattingly, Lacrima, 2023. Courtesy MUSE Archive
Palazzo delle Albere and MUSE. Courtesy MUSE Archive

The text has been translated in English using AI
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Rebecca Canavesi

April 9 · 26
Community and curatorship. The interview with Mohamed Almusibli, director of Kunsthalle Basel

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Mohamed Almusibli has been appointed director of Kunsthalle Basel at the age of 33. He previously worked as a consultant for Amsterdam’s Hartwig Art Foundation and is also the co-founder and curator of the independent artist-run space Cherish in Geneva. Throughout his career, he has consistently emphasized the importance of independent cultural spaces and community-building.

In March 2024 Mohamed Almusibli was appointed director of Kunsthalle Basel, one of the most influential institutions in Switzerland, becoming one of the youngest directors in the museum’s history. Known for his community-based approach and his background as an artist-as-curator, he is considered one of the most promising figures in contemporary curatorial practice. In this interview, we discussed how he brings these principles into the framework of a major institution, how he envisions Kunsthalle Basel as a welcoming space for both artists and audiences, and how he navigates the dynamics of the Basel art scene and its connections with international art fairs.

Mohamed Almusibli. Photo Mathilde Agius

THE INTERVIEW WITH MOHAMED ALMUSIBLI

You are known for your artist-based approach and for working outside institutional frameworks ‒ as an artist yourself and as a co-founder of Cherish in Geneva. What elements of these practices have you been able to bring into a large institution like Kunsthalle Basel, and what had to be reconsidered? What challenges did you encounter in this transition?
At Cherish, we literally lived in the space where we made exhibitions. That changes everything about how you think about art and hospitality. The works weren’t chosen to fit an institution; the institution shaped itself around the works and the people. That principle, putting the artist genuinely at the centre, is something I’ve carried directly into Kunsthalle Basel.
What had to shift was my relationship with pace and structure. Eight exhibitions per year is a real challenge; at Cherish, we had the luxury of time and improvisation. Here, decisions have consequences for my team, our audience, our artists, and our supporters. I’ve had to learn to be rigorous without losing spontaneity. It’s a transition I’m still navigating, and I’ve come to see that ongoing process not as a weakness, but as part of what keeps the work honest.

What role do networking and community-building play in your curatorial practice? At Cherish, you and your colleagues aimed to create a space that was comfortable not only for artistic production but also for living inside this space. Do these values still guide your work within an institutional context today?
Absolutely, though they take a different shape. My goal has always been to establish the institution as a host, as a place where people and artworks feel comfortable. That was true at Cherish, and it’s just as true here.
What I’ve come to understand is that community-building at an institution requires more intentionality. At Cherish, it happened organically because we were living there. At Kunsthalle Basel, I had to be more proactive, building real relationships with the local scene, art students, the audience, and the artists. My first exhibition, Regionale 25, which I curated from the start, was very exciting because it gave me the chance to meet local artists and visit their studios. It was the ideal way to immerse myself in Basel’s art scene.

Many major museums and institutions operate under constant financial and institutional pressure and are often expected to produce blockbuster exhibitions. How do you balance your alternative, artist-centered approach with the budgetary and structural demands of a large institution in practice?
What is special about Kunsthalle Basel is that it puts artists at its centre, and I believe that when you do that well, audiences feel it.
We don’t have a collection. We can’t rely on a Monet to fill the room on a slow Tuesday. Every exhibition has to earn its own attention. That’s actually a freedom; it means I’m never programming around what we own, only around what I believe matters right now. My response to financial pressure is not to dilute the programme, but to be precise about it. I’ve had to become comfortable with fundraising; what matters is that the programme shapes the budget, not the other way around.

Kunsthalle Basel, 2025. Photo Nicolas Gysin – Kunsthalle Basel

MOHAMED ALMUSIBLI’S CURATORIAL APPROACH

Basel, much like Venice, is strongly shaped by one major annual event ‒ Art Basel ‒despite a vibrant cultural life throughout the year. How does this rhythm affect your work as a curator and the programming of Kunsthalle Basel? Do you align exhibitions with the Art Basel calendar, or do you deliberately position the institution independently from it?
Both, honestly, but not in equal measure. Art Basel brings an extraordinary concentration of people who care deeply about art to this city, and it would be foolish to pretend that doesn’t create an opportunity. I must say that I first underestimated how vibrant Basel is! I expected something quiet and cosy, but since arriving, there has always been something happening. Art Basel is part of that energy, not separate from it.
That said, Kunsthalle Basel’s programme follows its own logic year-round. We are not a satellite event. If something in our programme aligns with Art Basel week, it’s because it’s the right moment for that work, not because we timed it to the fair calendar. The rest of the year, we have a loyal, critical, engaged audience in Basel, and they deserve a programme that treats them as the main event, not the warm-up act. For me, every exhibition is an Art Basel show :)

Together with Cherish, you have also participated as a curator in art fairs such as artgenève, Art Monte-Carlo, and Paris Internationale. How do you relate to the commercial side of the art world today? Do you see it as a necessary skill, a separate field of experience, or primarily as a platform for direct dialogue with collectors?
I don’t think you can be a credible curator today without understanding the market, not because you should serve it, but because you need to know how it operates in order to navigate around it when necessary. My experiences at artgenève or Paris Internationale taught me that an art fair is not a monolithic commercial space. There are real conversations happening, real risks being taken by some galleries, and real discoveries to be made.
What I bring into those contexts is the same curatorial stance I have everywhere else. The artists I’ve worked with, like Ser Serpas, whose work I’ve loved watching evolve since we first did a show together in 2019 at Truth and Consequences in Geneva. I choose Ser because I believe in what she’s doing, not because of her market position. And I think collectors respect that.

Kunsthalle Basel, 2025. Photo Nicolas Gysin – Kunsthalle Basel

MOHAMED ALMUSIBLI’S PERSPECTIVE ON THE KUNSTHALLE BASEL

Historically, Kunsthalle Basel has served as a platform for emerging artists. How do you continue this tradition today? Through which activities and projects?
Kunsthalle Basel has an over 150-year tradition of identifying and showcasing artists before they achieve widespread recognition. Working with artists at pivotal moments in their careers is a privilege and a responsibility. I cannot promise that every artist shown will become a star, but if you’re willing to accept the risk, you’re in the right place. That’s the commitment.
In practice, it means staying close to emerging practices; through studio visits, through the schools, through my network around the globe. Marie Matusz is a great example: a young French sculptor working with transparency and materiality in really compelling ways, who had a show at Cherish and whose back wall project at Kunsthalle Basel I was very much looking forward to. That kind of continuity, following an artist across different contexts and scales, is how I try to nurture practices rather than just present them.

Recently the figure of the artist-as-curator have become more widespread. Your experience represents perfectly this phenomenon. Would you say that your work as curator, as well as a director, is an extension of your artistic views?
Yes, fundamentally. I consider myself a good observer, and I think that quality stems from my experiences as an artist and from spending a lot of time around other artists. You learn to look slowly, to notice what’s not being said, to understand what a work needs rather than what you want from it. That attention is what I bring into every exhibition.
But I’m also honest about the limits of the idea. Being an artist doesn’t automatically make you a better curator – it makes you a different kind of curator. What it does give you is a genuine understanding of vulnerability: what it means to put work into the world, what’s at stake in an exhibition for the person who made it. That changes how I work with artists, how I listen to them, and ultimately what ends up in the room.

Looking ahead, what do you see as your main priorities, and perhaps risks, over the next five years, not only as a director, but specifically as a curator?
My priority is straightforward: to make Kunsthalle Basel genuinely necessary. Not institutionally necessary, it already is that, but culturally necessary. A place that people feel they need to visit because something is happening there that isn’t happening anywhere else. Kunsthalle Basel has always placed the artist at its centre and stood as a beacon in the art world. I want to deepen that, not just maintain it.
The risk I think about most is normalisation, the slow drift towards safety that happens in every institution over time. You start making decisions based on what has worked before, on what supporters are comfortable with, and on avoiding controversy. The warm reception I received upon arrival was surprising and encouraging, but comfort can also be a trap. I’d rather make a programme that occasionally unsettles people than one that reliably pleases them.

Luiza Gareeva

Mohamed Almusibli

Kunsthalle Basel

Mohamed Almusibli. Photo Mathilde Agius
Kunsthalle Basel, 2025. Photo Nicolas Gysin – Kunsthalle Basel
Kunsthalle Basel, 2025. Photo Nicolas Gysin – Kunsthalle Basel
Kunsthalle Basel, 2016 Photo Yohan Zerdoun – Kunsthalle Basel
BibliothekArchiv Lesesaal, 2023, Photo Anja Furrer – Kunsthalle Basel
Kunsthalle Basel, 2021, Photo Moritz Schermbach – Kunsthalle Basel
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Luiza Gareeva

April 9 · 26