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Museums, curatorship, and territory: the interview with Lorenzo Balbi

IT

2026 will be the last year of Lorenzo Balbi’s second term as director of MAMbo ‒ Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna. In this interview, we focused on the main stages of his tenure, from institutional experimentation to the socio-political urgencies that are currently affecting the art system.

The artistic and cultural offering is a fundamental component of Bologna’s distinctive character, both nationally and internationally. For nine years, Lorenzo Balbi (Turin, 1982) has been Head of the Modern and Contemporary Art Area of the Civic Museums Sector of the Municipality of Bologna, which includes MAMbo, Museo Morandi, Casa Morandi, Villa delle Rose, Museo per la Memoria di Ustica, and Residenza per artisti Sandra Natali. We retraced some of the decisive stages of his career with him, reflecting on the responsibilities of the contemporary museum and the challenges facing those working in the cultural field today.

Lorenzo Balbi, director of MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. Photo by Ornella De Carlo

THE INTERVIEW WITH LORENZO BALBI

Since 2017, you have been Head of the Modern and Contemporary Art Area of the Bologna Civic Museums Sector and artistic director of MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. Since 2018, you have also been the artistic director of ART CITY BOLOGNA, and in 2020 you taught at the AMaC (Arts, Museology, and Curatorship) master’s program at DAMS. Since 2021, you have been teaching Tools and Skills for Artistic Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts. Bologna seems to be not only the location of your work, but also an active partner in your projects. What does this city represent for you?
For me, Bologna is much more than a place of work: it is a living interlocutor, a context that stimulates and guides every design choice. I think that the role of the artistic director of a public museum goes far beyond the management of an exhibition space. It means being part of a community, intercepting its demands, catalyzing energies, becoming a sensitive antenna for the territory. Bologna, with its cultural history, its institutions, and its civic dimension, has allowed me to understand the museum as a porous organism, capable of continuously dialoguing with the city and seeking to restore its complexity and vitality.

In an interview with ProfessioneARTE, regarding the role of the contemporary museum director, you said that today it is important to be an aggregator of multiple demands. In your experience, which collaboration — with an artist, a community, or an archive — has been particularly significant?
Of all the experiences I have been fortunate enough to develop, that of the Nuovo Forno del Pane has been the most radical. During the pandemic, we redefined the museum as a center of production and a place for community, offering artists a space to work, meet, and rebuild a critical mass together. The legacy of that project continued with the Outdoor edition, in which the museum became the activator of a network of artistic production centers spread throughout the territory. It was concrete proof that a public museum can transform its identity and role in response to the real needs of the historical moment.

Nuovo Forno del Pane Outdoor edition 2024, self-training activities in the WWF Oasis of Montovolo. Photo by Valentina Cafarotti and Federico Landi of Migliorare con l’età (Improving with Age). Courtesy of MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, part of the Civic Museums Sector of the Municipality of Bologna

MEMORIES, ARCHIVES, AND CRITICAL PRACTICES IN THE PRESENT

The Project Room is an exhibition space within MAMbo which, under your direction, has taken on a specific function, welcoming research, local memory, archives, emerging artists, and little-known historical figures. What role does it play in relation to the museum’s general programming?
Of all the experiences curated at MAMbo over the past nine years, the Project Room is the one I am most proud of. I wanted to dedicate a space — taken from the permanent collection — to historical and archival research on Bologna and Emilia-Romagna. The goal was to offer the public, almost 60% of whom are international visitors, a glimpse into the stories, places, events, and people that have shaped the collective consciousness of the region. At first, it wasn’t clear to everyone what we wanted to do: I received many proposals for solo exhibitions from local artists. But the consistency and continuity of the programming made the direction clear. Today, many people identify with that space, finding fragments of their own experiences there, while those who weren’t there can come into contact with a tradition that gives meaning to our contemporary museum choices.

Among the programmatic points of your second term at MAMbo, you mentioned decolonization. What do you think is the best way to act radically in this regard?
I believe that a museum can act in a decolonial sense not by hiding objects, but by activating them to generate new meanings. The exhibition The Floating Collection, which I co-curated with Caterina Molteni, was born precisely from this principle. We invited international artists to build a “floating” collection based on their direct experience with the city’s collections. This approach does not rewrite history, but rather places it in tension with the present, creating plural and shared narratives.

FUTURE CHALLENGES ACCORDING TO LORENZO BALBI

Your work can be described as a device that intertwines works and context, institutions and communities, artists and cities, capable of capturing needs and directions. If you had to point out a socio-political urgency that museums must address in the coming years, what would it be?
In recent years, we have been confronted with fundamental issues: gender, provenance, religion, decolonization, sustainability, post-digital, artificial intelligence. I believe that the new urgency concerns access to the artistic professions. Today, becoming an artist or curator is still possible, especially for those from economically privileged backgrounds. This is no longer sustainable. Museums, together with the art system, must take responsibility for addressing this imbalance by creating tools, pathways, and opportunities that allow disadvantaged talents to emerge and grow.

Under your direction, ART CITY — a contemporary art event that takes place in various venues in Bologna in conjunction with ArteFiera — has gained increasing visibility. Looking to the future, which area of the city would you like to transform into the next major space for artistic activation?
Since I took over as artistic director, ART CITY has gone through several phases: from special events with major international artists — from Tino Sehgal to Gregor Schneider, from Zakharov to Castellucci — to a project that is increasingly rooted in the territory and capable of recounting it through contemporary art. After working on Morandi’s sites and the city’s ten historic gates, in 2026 we will open to the public some exceptional sites linked to the University of Bologna, the oldest in the Western world, founded in 1088, and we are already imagining a very ambitious project for 2027. The goal remains the same: to transform a different part of the city each time into a large field of artistic activation, bringing out identities, memories, and possibilities that we may not have looked at enough yet.

ART CITY Bologna 2025, Special Program Le Porte della Città. Courtesy of MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, part of the Civic Museums Sector of the Municipality of Bologna

Throughout your career, you have demonstrated a search for balance between production and ethical responsibility. How do you reconcile the urgency of supporting contemporary production with the need to avoid cultural overproduction?
During the pandemic, we wondered whether the exhibition and fair models had come to an end. The facts have shown the opposite: not only have they returned, but cultural consumption has intensified. I believe that museums must take responsibility for reflecting on this acceleration: avoiding ephemeral productions, choosing to work over longer periods, prioritizing depth over quantity, reducing waste and temporary installations.
Museums must return to being bastions of complexity: places that cultivate meaning, not just events.

After years of institutional assignments, do you ever miss the position of independent curator, which allows you to act without the constraints of a public museum?
I worked as a curator — always within institutions — for many years, and today I am happy with the role I play. I don’t see it as a departure from curating, but as an extension of it: my role is to provide scientific and strategic direction to the institution, while the daily research on artists and projects is the responsibility of the internal and external curators with whom I collaborate. They are the ones who can devote themselves continuously to investigating the present.
I deeply enjoy this work, it stimulates me every day, and I feel I still have a lot to say. I also believe that I could bring this experience to different institutional, geographical, and cultural contexts, continuing to measure myself against new challenges. I don’t miss anything from the past: it is the present, with its responsibilities, that really motivates me.

Alice Longo

Lorenzo Balbi

MAMbo

Lorenzo Balbi, director of MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. Photo by Ornella De Carlo
Nuovo Forno del Pane, opening, MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, 2020. Courtesy of MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, part of the Civic Museums Sector of the Municipality of Bologna
ART CITY Bologna 2024, Special project Elegia Luminosa, Virgilio Sieni, Teatro Comunale di Bologna. Courtesy of MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, part of the Civic Museums Sector of the Municipality of Bologna
John Giorno, YOU GOT TO BURN TO SHINE, 1989. Acrylic on vinyl, 48×48 inches. Courtesy of Giorno Poetry Systems
Nuovo Forno del Pane Outdoor edition 2024, self-training activities in the WWF Oasis of Montovolo. Photo by Valentina Cafarotti and Federico Landi of Migliorare con l’età (Improving with Age). Courtesy of MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, part of the Civic Museums Sector of the Municipality of Bologna
View of the exhibition Facile ironia. Irony in Italian art between the 20th and 21st centuries, MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. Photo by Carlo Favero. Courtesy of MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, part of the Civic Museums Sector of the Municipality of Bologna
ART CITY Bologna 2025, Special Program Le Porte della Città. Courtesy of MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, part of the Civic Museums Sector of the Municipality of Bologna

The text has been translated in English using AI
by

Alice Longo

December 11 · 25
Ordet in Milan hosts Jack O’Brien’s unfinished objects

IT

Jack O’Brien’s first solo show in Italy – held at Ordet in Milan – led visitors through industrialized landscapes, ruins, and architectural traces of a bygone Renaissance, in the wake of suspended potentialities and the physicality of materials.

On 20 November 2025, Ordet in Milan hosted the closing of A Formality, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Jack O’Brien (London, 1993), whose practice is grounded in an extensive overwriting of meanings. Various materials – often sourced from consumer culture – are assembled and stripped of context to generate new narratives. Heat-shrink film, epoxy resins, fabrics, cable ties, and plastics come together in the large-scale installations with which O’Brien experiments. These works amplify the monumentality of his gestures of assembly, carried out both during and after the making process. Ordet became the stage for a story shaped by a desire to experiment.

Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi

A FORMALITY: THE CURATORSHIP

The curatorial project presents itself as an unfinished tool, made of gears and rollers that evoke a factory in the making, suspended in time. As you enter, a sharp smell reminiscent of glues and machine plastics fills the air. Both alluring and slightly unsettling, the scent sparks curiosity. Two intersecting black conveyor belts stretch diagonally across the space, creating a narrative punctuated by white objects – like small statues resting on plinths. Yet the mechanism is broken; nothing moves, and the process comes to a halt. The white – of the walls and of the sculptures – recalls a past sense of sacredness, emphasized by draped fabrics soaked in plaster and cement. The object is static, yet always in flux. Black, in contrast, brings us back to a performative present, to a consumerist society driven by productivity and perpetual motion. The transformation of the industrial object turns the exhibition experience into a moment of contemplation and reflection, far from the relentless efficiency of today. What the artist creates is not a finished object; it is an embodiment of possibilities, a gesture toward times that feel ancient, without slipping into didacticism. Reaching the second floor, one encounters a composition of pipes and drapery recalling columns with soft, fluid forms. The curatorial choice to exhibit the sculptures as though they were part of an assembly line reinforces the artist’s poetics. The reconfiguration of the object becomes increasingly urgent. The exhibition implicitly brings these aspects to the surface, making us participants in an infinite mechanism of which we become part, almost without noticing.

Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi

ORDET AND LENZ PRESS

Founded in 2019 by Edoardo Bonaspetti and Stefano Cernuschi, Ordet is not only an exhibition space but also an experimental laboratory and cultural hub. Following its relocation in February 2025, exhibitions now unfold within a 250-square-meter open space. The former garage, renovated by Ballabio & Bava, is now ready to host new approaches to display and installation. Its white-cube features make it an ideal terrain for exploring previously uncharted artistic possibilities. Located on Via Filippino Lippi 4, Ordet is connected to the first bookshop of the publishing house Lenz Press – founded by Bonaspetti – which offers catalogues, monographs, theory books, and artists’ publications on contemporary art, photography, architecture, and design. This creates a synergy between two entities that, since 2019, have pursued a constantly evolving project driven by experimentation and contemporaneity.

Maddalena Domenghini

Ordet in Milan

Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, Metalepsis (2025). Courtesy of the artist, Ginny on Frederick, and Matthew Brown Gallery. Photo: Benjamin Deakin
Jack O’Brien, Inversion (2025). Courtesy of the artist, Ginny on Frederick, and Matthew Brown Gallery. Photo: Benjamin Deakin
Jack O’Brien, Objection (2025). Courtesy of the artist, Ginny on Frederick, and Matthew Brown Gallery. Photo: Benjamin Deakin
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
Jack O’Brien, A Formality, installation view, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi
by

Maddalena Domenghini

November 27 · 25
The forms of water: art, research, and activism at S.a.L.E Docks in Venice

IT

Until 23 November 2025, the spaces of S.a.L.E Docks in Venice host “Contested Waters”, the exhibition curated by ɪ-ʏ ʜꜱɪᴇʜ. With the organizational collaboration of the Hong-Gah Museum and the support of organizations such as the Taiwan National Culture and Arts Foundation, RSI Group, Lion Pencil CO, and NICHE – Center for Environmental Human Sciences at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the exhibition explores water and its role – real and metaphorical –in contemporary ecological and social issues.

Contested Waters brings together five works in the exhibition running until 23 November 2025 at S.a.L.E Docks in Venice. Installations and videos introduce the water as a physical but also political place, in its sense of a narrative device. This perspective creates bridges between areas that are distant in terms of aesthetics, culture and nature, finding a common denominator in water – and, more broadly, in the concept of liquid. On display, scientific, geopolitical, and metaphorical aspects blur their boundaries through the works of artists who describe their reality and imagination.

Contested Waters, exhibition view, S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice 2025. Photo by Rebecca Canavesi

THE WORKS ON DISPLAY AT S.A.L.E. DOCKS IN VENICE

No body makes its own bodies (2024), the sculpture created by Chen Chen Yu and placed at the centre of the exhibition space, explores the body as a viscous composition of ideologies. The artist’s multimedia practice encompasses an interest in the fluidity of identity, offering reflections on gender and the material expressions of typically contemporary sensations, such as anxiety and desire. The flow and the body are also key elements in the installation presented at S.a.L.E. Docks, where a shapeless mass, located in the centre of a cage, melts into murky waters. The fading of the body, its construction and its disappearance convey the image of the fragility of today’s individual: glued to ideology, they appear as a mass ready to melt away.
Ranjit Kandalgaonkar’s decade-long research, on the other hand, finds in water a fertile ground for connections and invisible interests in the shipbuilding industry. In [shipbreak_dossier] (2009-2025), the artist collects and maps hidden and opaque dynamics, revealing the phases of shipbuilding and demolition. The latter phase is often characterised by obscure and neglected data that conceal large-scale speculation.

Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, [shipbreak_dossier] (2009–2025), installation view, S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice 2025. Photo by Rebecca Canavesi

Jui-Lan YAO’s work connects scientific research and participatory practices. The installation The Replicate Blue.eu (2023-2025), on display in the exhibition and commissioned by the Hong-Gah Museum, highlights the artist’s investigations in the intertidal zones – between high and low tide levels – of Kinmen Island, opposite the Taiwan Strait. Jui-Lan YAO weaves together an ecological reflection on the exploitation of biotechnology, with particular reference to limulids: defined as “living fossils”, they are often used in medical material sterilisation tests.
No single drop of water diminishes in the world (2024-2025) by Szu-Ni Wen and Chia-Hsuan Sun considers water as a necessary resource, triggering a reflection on the quantity of resources present on Earth. In fact, to quote the curatorial text referring to the work, “the water we drink today is the same water that dinosaurs drank”.
Finally, behind a curtain that divides the large continuous space of Magazzini del Sale, Tzuan Wu’s The Sirens (2022-2025) presents a different kind of water, less scientific and more mythological. The inhuman, the liminal, the blurring of boundaries between a child underwater and a mermaid become fluid. The work, with its apocalyptic aftertaste, marks the end of the exhibition, in a deeper space, far from the entrance. It is no coincidence that the exhibition ends with a metaphorical and superimposable “end of the world”, given the themes dealt with in the other works.

Tzuan Wu, The Sirens (2022–2025), installation view, S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice 2025. Photo by Rebecca Canavesi

ACTIVISM AND CURATORSHIP

Contested Waters traces a path towards the unknown, a journey that begins with careful and attentive scientific research, passes through the ideological contradictions of contemporary society, and arrives at fiction. The exhibition speaks of water through a multiplicity and stratification of meaning, suggesting investigations in various forms: economic, ecological, political, metaphorical. The reflections are characterised by water as a content and media factor, but also by a spirit of struggle and participation, necessary in a space such as S.a.L.E. Docks.
The different languages on display allow visitors to develop knowledge and awareness of various specific and sectoral case studies, in which art and science coexist. The combination of these parts gives shape to an investigation that is not limited to aesthetics in order to generate awareness, but brings to the surface data that is often obscured by larger logics. Contested Waters evokes stories of waters that are not neutral: the discourse then becomes political, concrete and participatory, in line with the principles that animate S.a.L.E. Docks, an independent venue for contemporary arts founded in 2007 by a group of activists following the occupation of one of the Magazzini del Sale.

Rebecca Canavesi

Contested Waters

Chen Chen YU, No body makes its own bodies (2025), installation view, S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice 2025. Photo by Rebecca Canavesi
Chen Chen YU, No body makes its own bodies (2025), installation view, S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice 2025. Photo by Rebecca Canavesi
Jui-Lan YAO, The Replicate Blue.eu (2023–2025), installation view, S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice 2025. Photo by Rebecca Canavesi
Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, [shipbreak_dossier] (2009–2025), installation view, S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice 2025. Photo by Rebecca Canavesi
Contested Waters, exhibition view, S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice 2025. Photo by Rebecca Canavesi
Contested Waters, exhibition view, S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice 2025. Photo by Rebecca Canavesi
Tzuan Wu, The Sirens (2022–2025), installation view, S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice 2025. Photo by Rebecca Canavesi
Tzuan Wu, The Sirens (2022–2025), installation view, S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice 2025. Photo by Rebecca Canavesi
Tzuan Wu, The Sirens (2022–2025), installation view, S.a.L.E. Docks, Venice 2025. Photo by Rebecca Canavesi

The text has been translated in English using AI
by

Rebecca Canavesi

November 20 · 25
Between time and matter: a conversation with Giorgio Andreotta Calò

IT

Central figure of the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale in 2017, Giorgio Andreotta Calò talks about his creative process, his relationship with matter, and the often-complex dialogue between the artist’s intuition and the mediation of the curator.

The encounter with the work of Giorgio Andreotta Calò (Venice, 1979) was, for me, rare. With an educational background in the field of materials engineering, my gaze is used to deciphering the world through stress graphs and physical laws. And yet, in front of his works, that technical language was transfigured into visual poetry. His bronze Clessidre, born from Venetian briccole corroded by the tide, evoke in me the image of tensile test specimens brought to breaking point in the laboratory. But whereas I see a fracture point, a mechanical limit, Giorgio Andreotta Calò sees an imprint of time, a form that preserves the memory of the lagoon. This double reading, this bridge between scientific rigour and artistic imagination, is the engine of our conversation.
Giorgio Andreotta Calò is one of the central figures on the Italian contemporary art scene, whose research moves between sculpture, performance and installation. His artistic practice is deeply rooted in the places he has crossed and inhabited, from Venice, his native city and inexhaustible source of inspiration, to Berlin and Amsterdam, where he completed his professional education.
The recurring themes in his poetics are the passage of time, seen as a dynamic process of transformation, and stratification, expressed through an almost archaeological investigation of places and materials. Through works such as the Clessidre, the Carotaggi or performative actions such as Il Ritorno, Giorgio Andreotta Calò establishes a deep dialogue with matter, architecture and memory, inviting the viewer to reconsider their own relationship with space and time.

Scultura lingua morta, exhibition view, Ca’ Pesaro – Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Venezia, 2024–2025. Photo by Kirsten Suzanna de Graaf

THE INTERVIEW WITH GIORGIO ANDREOTTA CALÒ
Your artistic practice often starts from materials, such as the wood of the briccole, which undergo a process of transformation over time. With the work Clessidra, however, you choose to translate this process into bronze. What does it mean for you to stop a natural process in such a definitive sculptural form?
My intervention, in reality, fits into a much longer process of transformation that is already underway. The starting material is a tree, which is cut, worked and finally planted in the water of the lagoon. There, it undergoes a further transformation: the movement of the tides corrodes it, imprinting on it a visible trace of the ecosystem. I arrive at the moment when these poles, thinned out, break and drift away. I began to collect these fragments, fascinated by their forms. The sculpture is born from the mirror-like combination of two of these elements, generating the shape of an hourglass. This recalls the idea of reflection, but also the etymological meaning of the word: from the Greek kléptein (to steal) and hýdōr (water), “to steal the water”. The decision to translate all this into bronze is a precise intention: to give a fixed, crystallised and resistant form to an element that would otherwise be destined to wear away. It is a way of defining a precise moment, of freezing in a form a process that would otherwise vanish.

You are experimenting with new technologies such as 3D scanning. How do you see this process evolving and the relationship between the natural and the mechanical element in your future work?
We are now using 3D scanning and printing, which allows us a further passage. We scan the original piece of wood and then 3D-print it by inverting the algorithm, thus creating a “opposable” form, mirroring the starting one, like our hands. This fully realises the idea of reflection. It is a process we would like to carry forward, because it marks a meeting point between the natural element and the mechanical one, a hybridisation that is occurring more and more today. From here, we could think of using different materials, perhaps with reflective properties, which would open the work to a new dimension, transforming it into a threshold towards space and the surrounding environment.

The exhibition at Litografia Bulla in Rome is an example of “four-hands” collaboration. How did it come about and why did it work?
There the format of the gallery, “windows on the landscape”, already provided a very strong curatorial framework. They identified the street-facing window as a display, a diaphragm between the internal space and the public one. I was asked to work within this framework. My interest was to modify that transparent diaphragm, shifting the colouring of the glass towards aqua green to create an immersive, almost underwater environment. This colour reinforced the narrative of the work, linked to the part of the wood corroded by the water. The dialogue was very close-knit: they knew the space well and made proposals, but they also allowed themselves to be surprised. We had worked together on the prints, so we all knew the material very well.

THE WORK OF ARTISTS AND CURATORS ACCORDING TO GIORGIO ANDREOTTA CALÒ

Works such as Pinna Nobilis can be transformed or rethought in each exhibition. What are the main challenges for the artist and the curator in the face of works in mutation, and how is the poetry of these processes preserved in the exhibition set-up?
Works have a margin of modification when they are placed in a space. At Ca’ Pesaro, the Pinne Nobilis were rethought in relation to the exhibition room. It was decided to insert them into the door jambs, attached to vertical pipes that recalled the set-up of the 2017 Biennale. On that occasion they were also turned upside down. This is possible because they are small-sized sculptures, more manageable. Works such as the Clessidre, instead, have their own fixity and less margin of modification. The real rethinking of the work takes place during the realisation phase, when one works on the wax. Once it is cast, the margin of change shifts to how the object is set up in the space, which requires a dialogue with the curator.

In an exhibition such as CITTÀDIMILANO, you transformed Pirelli HangarBicocca using the device of the camera obscura. How can such a complex concept, which requires time and adaptation of the gaze, be made accessible to a non-specialist audience?
I try to work on a stratification of meanings. A work must be able to open up to different readings, from the most immediate and formal to the deepest one, depending on the sensitivity and predisposition of the viewer. As far as accessibility is concerned, it must be understood in various ways. At times, a certain difficulty can push the viewer towards a more active investigation. At other times, choices must be made. For the Italian Pavilion at the Biennale, I had a discussion with the curator Cecilia Alemanni because the staircase we had designed was not accessible to people with disabilities. I was asked for a ramp, but I had to weigh up the aesthetic and functional needs of the work and those of accessibility. In the end I insisted, while knowing that I was excluding a portion of the public, because modifying the project would have weakened the final impact of the work. I do not believe that one must always sacrifice the strength of a work in order to make it universally accessible.

Produttivo, set-up, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milano, 27 January 2019. Photo by Giorgio Andreotta Calò

The pathway-work Il Ritorno unites performance, time and territory. How can such a complex experience be transposed into traditional exhibition modes without losing its performative dimension?
In this work we wanted to work on absence, or rather on an idea of waiting, of advent. The public was asked for an act of faith, that is, to imagine that in that precise moment in which they were inside the place of the advent, the place towards which the action of the return was tending (the Sculpture Garden designed by Carlo Scarpa), this return was actually taking place elsewhere, between Amsterdam and Venice precisely. It was a matter of working on the evocative power of a radical gesture, which excludes the physical presence of an object in the exhibition space but at the same time opens onto a possible imaginative dimension.

How crucial is the curatorial or critical text for the understanding of the work, and what distinguishes an effective text from a superfluous one?
I have always given great importance to the story that lies behind a work. Our archive grants ample space to this narrative part, because my works lend themselves to a complex narrative. Today, however, I see that there is little time to really focus on a work, and many texts are simply “copy and paste” of information taken online. Building a text that truly serves a purpose requires either a great sensitivity, which few have, or great dedication and study. It is a complex job.

CRITIQUE AND FUTURE

To criticise a work, is it necessary to place it in its present context, or is sensitivity alone enough?
The work must resonate in its present. But it is also true that there are works that transcend temporality. I am more interested in this aspect: when a work manages to exit a contingent dimension and opens up to a broader, absolute reflection, almost outside of time, reaching a degree of absoluteness that makes it always current.

Looking to the future, how do you both imagine and hope the relationship between artists and curators will develop?
Too often I encounter an approach that I would define as “extractive” or “parasitic”. And this does not concern only curators: at times, artists themselves lack fundamental practical skills. There is a widespread incapacity to read a space, to manage the complexity of an exhibition set-up, to know even just how to “hammer in a nail”. This incompetence leads to delegating or to settling, weakening the final result. A curator, for me, is someone who engages with the work at all levels, from the logistical bases to conceptual research. I believe we will witness a natural selection: the current situation will put many fragilities to the test and will reward those who work with seriousness and dedication, those who are willing to start from the basics and build a real path of knowledge.

What qualities should a curator possess today to create real added value?
A curator is a person who has dealt with the full complexity of making an exhibition. A person who has also understood what it truly means to set one up: from how you move a crate to how you install a work, up to communication and economic strategies. It takes humility in recognising that there is a long path to follow before being able to curate an exhibition. You have to start from the basics.

Press releases and projects such as Produttivo connect your work to debates on raw materials and socio-ecological changes. What is the role of the artist in this debate? Does an artist need to be an activist?
I am not interested in creating works by default in order to follow the wave of a specific debate. Those works risk dying once the debate is over. I prefer to work on complexity, creating works that aspire to a more absolute value, almost outside of time, but which precisely for this reason lend themselves to different perspectives of investigation. A work such as the Sulcis Carotaggi can be read as a reflection on sculptural form, but also as a comment on the extractive economy or on the psychological perception of space. A complex work remains communicative over time and can be questioned by different urgencies, including the ecological one, without being confined by it.

Beyond new production methodologies, what exhibition strategies and formats do you imagine could help regaining time, complexity and quality?
New and different strategies must be activated. Each of my projects is born as a response to a situation or a limitation, which in some way generates a possibility and therefore an innovation. My studio, for example, is an absurd place in which to think of making sculpture; it is almost impossible in itself; and yet, this limitation pushes one to think of different strategies, to rethink the way of producing, perhaps returning to a certain way of making art. It is fundamental to return to a less agitated and compulsive dimension of making. Production must be reduced and more time dedicated to individual works, if only to regain that complexity in giving form to works that is progressively being lost. The general quality is decreasing notably. A lot is produced, exhibitions are made continuously, many of which are absolutely useless: they are more like parties that leave nothing behind. I believe that more and more a natural selection will be made between those who have embarked on this path thinking it was a shortcut and those who instead have taken it very seriously. We must try to make the complexity that lies behind a work understood, invest in its history, in everything that sustains it.

Linda Rubino

Studio Giorgio Andreotta Calò

Giorgio Andreotta Calò. Photo by Studio Giorgio Andreotta Calò
Ritorno, 2011, ILLUMInazioni, 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Christopher Schroeer-Heiermann
CITTÀDIMILANO, set-up, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milano, 2019. Photo by Giorgio Andreotta Calò
Produttivo, set-up, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milano, 27 January 2019. Photo by Giorgio Andreotta Calò
Scultura lingua morta, exhibition view, Ca’ Pesaro – Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Venezia, 2024–2025. Photo by Kirsten Suzanna de Graaf
Scultura lingua morta, exhibition view, Ca’ Pesaro – Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Venezia, 2024–2025. Photo by Kirsten Suzanna de Graaf
Senza titolo (La fine del mondo), Pinna Nobilis, 2017, lower level, Italian Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Kirsten Suzanna de Graaf
CITTÀDIMILANO, set-up, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milano, 2019. Photo by Giorgio Andreotta Calò
Giorgio Andreotta Calò, chapter sixteen of Passaggi, Litografia Bulla, Roma. Photo by Luis Do Rosario

The text has been translated in English using AI
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Linda Rubino

November 20 · 25
Maps are for the lost. An interview with the design specialist Annalisa Rosso

IT

The Milan-based curator and consultant talks about her unconventional path, the quiet intelligence of listening, and why she trusts her instincts over everything else.

Eighteen years ago, Annalisa Rosso, born in Pavia in 1978, moved to Milan for what was meant to be a three-month project, a collaboration on Italy’s first digital design platform for Corriere della Sera. She never left. Today she occupies a distinctive space in contemporary design, one that defies easy categorisation and thrives in the gaps between disciplines. She’s the Editorial Director and Cultural Events Advisor at Salone del Mobile.Milano, and Director of the Euroluce International Lighting Forum. To top it all of, she is also the co-founder of Mr.Lawrence, a design and brand strategy consultancy firm she started with her husband, Francesco Mainardi.
With a background in literature and theory rather than formal design training, Rosso worked across theatre, contemporary art, literature, and photography, including a formative collaboration with architecture photographer Ernesta Caviola. She arrived in Milan by what she calls chance, and her approach has always been shaped by an insatiable curiosity and a commitment to creating a smorgasbord of ideas through carefully crafted interactions between people.

The Orbit’s Orbit by Matilde Cassani at Westbund Art & Design

ANNALISA ROSSO’S APPROACH TO HER WORK

When asked what unites her roles as journalist, editor, curator, cultural director, and consultant, Rosso pauses. “I thought a lot about that. What is my specific character? What is the tool I bring from one sector to another? And it’s curiosity”.
But it is a particular kind of curiosity. “I like people. I like to understand how ideas move from one mind to another. The connection, the encounter, the clash between different people can give birth to something new”. She orchestrates these interactions with the precision of a chef de cuisine, mixing ingredients, stirring creative crossovers that lead to unexpected outcomes.
This philosophy runs through all her work, whether she is writing, editing, curating exhibitions such as the Library of Light by Es Devlin during Milan Design Week 2025, or running her strategic consultancy with her husband. In every role, she positions herself not at the centre, but as a facilitator.
“Even when I’m creating, I approach it with curiosity. I want to know more about the artist, the thinker, the other person”, she explains. “Everyone is interesting. I try not to place myself at the centre because it’s not about me; it’s about ideas. When I meet people who have something to share, I tell them: ‘You should meet this person, you should talk to this one’. Something usually happens. I’m happiest when I create connections, when I build bridges between people or situations that can bring something new”. An architect, indeed.

Library of Light by Es Devlin at Pinacoteca di Brera for Salone del Mobile.Milano. Photo by Monica Spezia

ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN AND COMMUNICATION ACCORDING TO ANNALISA ROSSO

In a saturated media landscape, how does she cut through the noise? “This is instinct”, she says. “I’m always looking for something that hasn’t already been said, designed, or thought”.
While her generation sometimes chants that novelty is dead, she disagrees. “We are living in an extraordinary moment. We are facing incredible things, there’s potential, but its terrifying and transformative all at once. And people, especially the new generation navigating this reality, are finding new paths, new ideas, new solutions every day”. For her, the claim that everything has been done is not just tired, it is absurd. “In fact,” she smiles, “nothing has been done”.
Her method of discovery is refreshingly analog. She talks to people. All kinds of people. Simple, yet tricky to do properly. She recalls advice from Paola Antonelli: “You have to look for what you are seeking in uncommon places. If you search only in the proper books, exhibitions, schools, it is hard to find anything truly new. It is too easy to get lost there”.
The hunt for newness starts where the art world stops, in bars, supermarkets, and whatever corner of the world someone is playing a song you have never heard before.
In a field often charted by careful planning and linear ambition, Rosso’s path moves more like a current than a map. She has learned to recognise when a project belongs to the past, even the recent past, and to pursue new urgencies instead.
“For me, it is so important to live in my own time. Times change fast. Sometimes I realise I have been working on something that felt relevant just yesterday, and suddenly there is a new urgency, a new way of doing things”.
That instinct to shift course has shaped her practice, though it was not always easy. “I was super scared in the beginning, and for a long time after. But you learn not to be scared because you always carry something with you: your values, your ideas, your past experiences. If you have something to say, you will keep going, no matter what”.
Her turning point came when her network became her community. “I have an amazing network of family and friends who are part of my daily work. The contributors, the collaborators, they became friends. Now working feels as natural as living”.
Her advice to those starting out is simple: do not rush to define yourself. “The most interesting space right now is the in-between, the intersections of design, architecture, film, communication, economy. That is where things feel alive. Reality itself is liquid”.

CURATORSHIP AND DESIGN CONSULTANCY

Perhaps most striking is her insistence that she is not a creative person, a claim that surprises anyone familiar with her curatorial or editorial work. For her, the distinction is precise and long-held.
“A creative person is someone, an artist, a writer, whoever, who has the urgency to create something new, to follow a vision. They need to do it. For an artist or designer, expression is a necessity. I love creative people so much that I am not one myself”.
Her drive is relational and reflective, not expressive. She is less interested in producing and more in contextualising, and facilitating. She shapes meaning rather than originates it.
She traces this awareness back to childhood. “I remember being a kid, and it was already clear. Some of my friends were creative, and I adored them. At school there was theatre ‒ I loved the kids performing, but I was not with them. I was around the corner, doing the scenography, taking notes, contributing but in an alternative way”.
Her thinking is different, she says. “Someone once told me I think in reverse. I always have the result in mind. Creative people think differently; they focus on what they are doing at the moment”.
This reversal is central to her curatorial approach. When she and Es Devlin collaborated on the Library of Light, they began with one structure but changed it completely through conversation. “We said no and changed everything. I try to stay open, to change my mind, to change position”.
The installation itself embraced openness, designed with empty spaces where visitors could add their own books and ideas. “There were kids playing because it was fun, and that is okay. Why not? I do not like to take everything for granted, or to be too serious. This is about daily life, so it belongs to the people”.
Flowing forward, her shift into design consultancy happened organically. Her husband had experience with brands, she brought her own mix of skills, and together they realised: “Our knowledge is technical, industrial, strategic, about research, content, new names, new markets. Put it together and you can offer brands a whole new vision”.
Their approach is unconventional. “First things first, we want to know everything about the people, the brand, sometimes what we find is totally unexpected”. Often the problem clients think they have is not the problem at all. “Sometimes they come asking for a product strategy, and we realise it is not about the product. It is the circumpherence, about market, positioning, perception”.
Timelines are tight. Two or three years maximum. “We do not do forever contracts. It is now. We have to show what is possible in two or three years, not ten”.

Annalisa Rosso. Photo by Maria Vittoria Backhaus

ANNALISA ROSSO, AI AND THE FUTURE

On AI, Rosso is curious rather than scared. “I am not against it, in the end AI is just a tool”. She nods to computer art from the 1970s but knows this is different. “We are facing a new revolution, it is tricky, but I am curious. I want to see what is next”.
AI is part of a larger turn towards imperfection. “It is a new tool, dangerous maybe, but for creativity it is just a tool. I will never ditch an amazing book for a decent text written with ChatGPT”. Her work is human, relational, and personal. AI can help sort archives or gather information, but it cannot replace what she does best: connecting people and ideas, thinking in her own way.
Still, she remains open. “Sometimes you stumble on a use for it that surprises you”.
What is next? Rosso stays open. “The best is yet to come. I am ready for new proposals, new adventures, new countries”. Lately she has been drawn to the East and Far East, travelling whenever she can. “I am discovering new things, at least for me, and I love talking to people who can open my mind”.
She is exploring collaborations in India, helping build bridges between Italian and Indian design. Building bridges, after all, is what she does best.
In a world that prizes certainty and self-promotion, Rosso works differently. Her model is curiosity, connection, and the courage to keep changing your mind. “Allow yourself to take unexpected paths. If it feels right, in the worst case you will learn something new, or you will learn what you do not want to do”.
For someone who does not call herself creative, she has built something undeniable: a practice that lives in the spaces between, one conversation at a time.

Noor Sharma

Annalisa Rosso

Salone del Mobile.Milano. Photo by Salone del Mobile.Milano
The Orbit’s Orbit by Matilde Cassani at Westbund Art & Design
Annalisa Rosso. Photo by Maria Vittoria Backhaus
Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi for Incalmi. Photo by Eller Studio
Salone del Mobile.Milano. Photo by Delfino Sisto Legnani
Annalisa Rosso and Francesco Mainardi. Photo by Alessandro Dipierro
Library of Light by Es Devlin at Pinacoteca di Brera for Salone del Mobile.Milano. Photo by Monica Spezia
Salone del Mobile cultural program “Drafting Futures. Conversations about Next Perspectives” with Oscar-winning filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino and Antonio Monda. Photo by Giulia Copercini
by

Noor Badal Sharma

November 13 · 25
Fata Morgana: occult, esotericism, and art on display in Milan

IT

Until 30 November 2025, the Nicola Trussardi Foundation presents “Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible” in the spaces of Palazzo Morando | Costume, Moda, Immagine in Milan. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini in the current museum dedicated to the city’s historical memory and customs, the exhibition tells the story of illusions and a collective imagination linked to the occult.

Palazzo Morando is a Baroque building in the heart of Milan’s fashion district and home, between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, to Countess Lydia Caprara Morando Attendolo Bolognini, patron and creator of a library dedicated to all things liminal. Her interests revolved around alchemy, spiritualism and esotericism, themes on which she constituted her collection, now preserved in the Civic Historical Archives and Trivulziana Library in Milan.
Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisibile is conceived in this context. Following the research of the personality who inhabited the palace, the exhibition develops through the many facets of those additional creative expressions that reveal the plurality of contemporary art. The exhibition curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini is a journey into occultism, an exhibition of more than two hundred works presented according to a thematic division consisting of eight sections.
The title takes its name from the Fata Morgana of the Arthurian cycle, and it is inspired by the homonymous poem by the surrealist artist André Breton, composed during his exile in Marseille in 1940. The exhibition echoes the text which narrates mystical drifts, of a confused elsewhere of the visible and the invisible. Like the poem, the exhibition presents a confusion of boundaries, of expressions evocative of something else that becomes art only in the contemporary.

Fata Morgana: memorie dall’invisibile [Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible], 2025. Installation view of the exhibition conceived and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi for Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini. Courtesy of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Photo by Marco De Scalzi

THE SECTIONS OF THE FATA MORGANA EXHIBITION IN MILAN

The exhibition brings together diverse media and figures, including artists – canonically recognized as such – and mediumistic personalities, as well as female artists often obscured by a “linear” art history. In fact, among the lenders of the works on display are archives, libraries, museums of anthropology and ethnography and galleries, alongside private collections. Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible offers a true atlas of the invisible, as well as, inevitably, the occult. “The works on display” – explain the curators – “tell how the history of art is crossed by invisible forces and a constant tension towards elsewhere”, underlining the blurred boundaries of artistic expression which, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, no longer had limits of definition.
The atlas of the invisible traces the developments of a practice, that of the occult, from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Alongside the first disembodied representations in Georgiana Houghton’s watercolours, there is a section – Mediums and Mystics – which describes the links between the occult and the female figure. Here, photographs of the early twentieth-century sessions of the medium Linda Gazzera, characterized by the presence of ethereal entities, dialogue with Chiara Fumai’s 2015 video The Book of Evil Spirits. Then a section dedicated to Automatic Message, then Surrealism with Man Ray, Antonin Artaud but also Lee Miller and Unica Zürn. The female presence, already very significant in the first rooms, becomes preponderant in the subsequent ones, where nature and body take over. Body that is otherworldly, but also strongly carnal, in the works of Judy Chicago and Carol Rama. The path becomes more abstract in liturgies and rituals, towards an increasingly prophetic discourse in the last rooms on the ground floor. Here then is the most important core of works in the entire exhibition, with the visions of Hilma af Klint and Emma Jung, among others.

Fata Morgana: memorie dall’invisibile [Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible], 2025. Installation view of the exhibition conceived and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi for Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini. Courtesy of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Photo by Marco De Scalzi

Fata Morgana’s narrative oscillates between the concrete and the abstract, driven by encyclopaedic research that identifies occultism in every contemplable form. In this way, the exhibition opens a new perspective, further even than the contemporary one itself, where every expression is valued and every point of view is valid.
Central themes are esotericism and automatism in all their forms – even in the descriptions of the artists exhibited, generated with AI. The invisible is revealed in the most recent contemporary but also in the most distant one of the early twentieth century. Digital is invisible just as the voices of some female authors have been invisible, obscured by the predominant male presences – as in the case of Emma Jung.

FATA MORGANA’S CURATORSHIP

The large, visibly invisible atlas told at Palazzo Morando allows the viewer to travel through time and space in an exhibition curated in the spirit of a major artistic event. In Fata Morgana, the Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani for the 2022 Venice Biennale, resonates: echoing are not only the themes, but also the research approach, with a view to feminist re-evaluation and the rediscovery of dreams and marginal artistic practices. This research hat finds its roots even earlier, again at the Venice Biennale, in the Palazzo Enciclopedico curated in 2013 by Massimiliano Gioni, who chose Carl Gustav Jung’s Red Book as its fulcrum.
Today, the seventy-eight protagonists of Fata Morgana connect the dots on a map drawn up by the curators, who do not seek to provide answers but rather to leave questions open, providing the tools for visitors to reflect on their own. What are the boundaries of art? What and who is truly marginal in society?

Rebecca Canavesi

The exhibition Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible in Milan

Hilma af Klint, Primordial Chaos, The WU/Rose Series, Group 1, 1906-1907. Oil on canvas, 53 x 37 cm. HaK017. By courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation. Photo: The Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
Chiara Fumai, The Book of Evil Spirits, 2015. Single channel video, color, sound. Duration: 26 min 24 sec, video still. Courtesy Archivio Chiara Fumai
Milly Canavero, Untitled, 1985. Exhibition copy. Marker pen on paper, 46.5 x 65 cm. Elmar R. Gruber Collection of Mediumistic Art
Fata Morgana: memorie dall’invisibile [Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible], 2025. Installation view of the exhibition conceived and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi for Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini. Courtesy of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Photo by Marco De Scalzi
Fata Morgana: memorie dall’invisibile [Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible], 2025. Installation view of the exhibition conceived and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi for Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini. Courtesy of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Photo by Marco De Scalzi
Fata Morgana: memorie dall’invisibile [Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible], 2025. Installation view of the exhibition conceived and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi for Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini. Courtesy of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Photo by Marco De Scalzi
Diego Marcon La Gola, 2024 [Still], digital video transferred from 35mm film. CGI animation, color, sound. Duration: 22 min 22 sec © Diego Marcon. Courtesy the Artist; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York; Kunstverein Hamburg; Kunsthalle Wien; and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for BIM ’24
Fata Morgana: memorie dall’invisibile [Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible], 2025. Installation view of the exhibition conceived and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi for Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini. Courtesy of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Photo by Marco De Scalzi
Fata Morgana: memorie dall’invisibile [Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible], 2025. Installation view of the exhibition conceived and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi for Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini. Courtesy of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Photo by Marco De Scalzi
Pierre Klossowski, Le Jeune Ogier dans les bras du Frère Lahire II, 1972. Pencil and crayon on paper, 110 x 75 cm. Collezione Bilinelli, Milano

The text has been translated in English using AI
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Rebecca Canavesi

November 13 · 25
Inside the quantum effect: the new exhibition at SMAC in Venice

IT

The rooms of SMAC San Marco Art Center host “The Quantum Effect”, the exhibition that combines science, art and science fiction in an immersive journey curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies.

In the heart of San Marco’s Square, the new SMAC San Marco Art Centre ‒ opened in early 2025 ‒ hosts a project that redefines the boundaries between art, science and film. The Quantum Effect, conceived and co-curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies, presents itself as an authentic quantum experience: an expository experiment in which the concepts of entanglement, supersymmetry and multiple realities are translated into spatial form.
Created in collaboration with OGR Torino, the exhibition explores the paradoxes of quantum physics ‒ parallel universes, time travel, teleportation, dark matter ‒ to build an immersive environment where works, images and spectators behave like particles in constant correlation. The interior of SMAC becomes an optical machine with over eighty meters of corridors and sixteen rooms arranged symmetrically on the sides of a central axis. The focus is Isa Genzken’s work Oil VII (2007) – a kind of gravitational knot. From here the exhibition splits, creating two mirror sequences perceived as parallel worlds. The spectator thus finds themself experiencing a form of perceptive supersymmetry, in which each work has its own double potential, an alternative vision of itself.

The Quantum Effect, installation view, SMAC San Marco Art Centre, Venice, 2025. Photo Enrico Fiorese

THE QUANTUM EFFECT: EXHIBITION DISPLAY AND CURATORSHIP

The exhibition is inspired by Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, a novel in which eight tableaux vivant follow one another in a glass house. Similarly, The Quantum Effect builds a narrative architecture of self-contained exhibition “stations”, each suspended between science and imagination. The exhibition functions as a fragmented tale, within which the viewer traverses spaces that seem simultaneously real and virtual.
Birnbaum and Davies, drawing on their experience in cinema and visual arts, transform curating into directing. The works of artists such as Jeff Koons, Mark Leckey, Isa Genzken, Tomás Saraceno, Sturtevant and Dara Birnbaum are intertwined with installations and audiovisual collages signed by the curators themselves, who take on the role of author-performers. The distinction between those who exhibit and those who organize dissolves. The effect is that of a quantum montage: each room is a variation on the theme, a micro-reality connected to the others by invisible laws. Curatorship becomes a performative act, capable of merging aesthetic research and theoretical reflection. Nothing is fixed, nothing is linear. Everything happens “in superposition”: the works look at each other, duplicate and are rewritten.

The Quantum Effect, installation view with curators Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies in front of Sturtevant’s Duchamp descendant l’escalier, 1992, SMAC San Marco Art Centre, Venice, 2025. Photo Enrico Fiorese

THE QUANTUM EFFECT AT SMAC IN VENICE

The Quantum Effect is not a simple exhibition of contemporary art, but an experience that undermines the very notion of reality. The visitor is invited to choose their own trajectory, to move between possible worlds as in a mental experiment. Thus, SMAC establishes itself as a new Venetian center dedicated to interdisciplinary research, where art does not illustrate science but stages it, makes it a sensitive experience. The result is a quantum museum: unstable, mirror-like and at the same time perfectly consistent with its ambition to explore the boundaries of contemporary imagination.

Valeria Eneide

The Quantum Effect exhibition at SMAC San Marco Art Centre

The Quantum Effect, installation view with curators Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies next to Tomás Saraceno’s Hybrid semi-social musical instrument NGC 2976: built by Cyrtophora citricola – three weeks (tidally locked) + Cyrtophora moluccensis – four weeks (turned 180 degrees on z axis rehearsing towards ISS), 2014, SMAC San Marco Art Centre, Venice, 2025. Photo Enrico Fiorese
Jacqui Davies, Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy, 2025. Video still
Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978–79. Colour, stereo, 6 minutes. Courtesy of Dara Birnbaum and LUX, London
The Quantum Effect, installation view with curators Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies in front of Sturtevant’s Duchamp descendant l’escalier, 1992, SMAC San Marco Art Centre, Venice, 2025. Photo Enrico Fiorese
The Quantum Effect, installation view, SMAC San Marco Art Centre, Venice, 2025. Photo Enrico Fiorese
Mark Leckey, To the old world (thank you for the use of your body), 2021–22. Courtesy of the artist and Cabinet London
by

Valeria Eneide

November 6 · 25
On the collective function of artistic practices. Interview with Charlotte Laubard

IT

In this conversation, Charlotte Laubard explores her interest in self-taught art and her critique of the myth of the artist as genius, proposing a vision of art as a collective and socially situated practice. Laubard highlights the transformative potential of art and recognizes curating as playing a fundamental role in co-creation and facilitation.

Born in 1974, Charlotte Laubard was director (2006-2023) of the CAPC ‒ Musée d’art contemporain in Bordeaux and is currently professor of Art History and Theory at HEAD in Geneva, where she also served as director of the Department of Visual Arts (2017-2023).
She has worked in New York, Turin, and Kiev in international institutions dedicated to contemporary artistic creation and has curated numerous exhibitions, including the Swiss Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale with artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and the group exhibition L’énigme autodidacte at the MAMC+ in Saint-Etienne in 2021-2022.
She is an art historian and independent curator, as well as co-founder of the Société suisse des Nouveaux commanditaires. This interview was an opportunity to explore some of the research topics that characterize her academic and curatorial career.

SELF-TAUGHT ART AND CURATING

In your work, you have explored the issue of autodidactism in art, questioning the institutional processes at stake for its legitimacy. Many great pioneers of curating ‒ from Harald Szeemann to Pontus Hultén ‒ did not have a formal academic background, because curating as a discipline did not yet exist. Today, however, the figure of the curator is becoming institutionalized, with the risk of standardization. In this context, what space remains for a self-taught and innovative dimension of curating?
The risk for any curator today is to think in keywords ‒ to approach the complexity of reality through a categorical reading that is reductive. The major flaw in much of today’s artistic and curatorial practice can be summed up in a single word, in my view: the aboutness. To avoid this pitfall, I often encourage my art students to approach reality through a detail that escapes attention, that resists understanding, and that unfolds a whole series of questions ‒ sometimes of an abyssal nature.

Your research focuses on the digital dimension not only as a technological innovation but as a structural factor of cultural change. In this scenario, do you think there is a risk that self-taught artists, instead of inventing alternative paths, will increasingly rely on models and archives generated by AI and self-learning algorithms?
There is one thing I know from having studied self-taught practices, as well as the practices of unlearning that were so prevalent in modern and contemporary art ‒ and from spending time with art students: anything that can facilitate learning and expression is worth embracing. History shows this time and again: whenever a technology has been designed to be used with almost no technical knowledge, it enables a broader public to seize it and express themselves. Of course, this also generates a great deal of normativity. Those who manage to stand out tend to use such tools in deviant, non-conforming ways ‒ whether consciously or not ‒ which often proves far more conducive to creative accidents and unexpected discoveries.

The Self-taught Enigma, curated by Charlotte Laubard, exhibition view, MAMC+, Saint-Étienne, France, 2021

ART AGENCY AND COLLECTIVE PRACTISES

You invite us to move away from the idea of the isolated artist-genius, to recover a collective practice in the production of art, and a role for art that is not only contemplative but operational. How could this perspective redefine not only the criteria for artistic legitimacy, but also the very function of the institutions that preserve and display artworks?
In the past ‒ and still today ‒ too much importance has been placed on the artist’s intentions. This burden confers both enormous responsibility and a certain fragility: the artist must constantly meet the imperative to say something original, endlessly reinvented, while also managing the anxiety that arises when their work fails to connect, when their intentions are not understood. Yet the reality is that everyone who experiences an artwork projects their own intentions onto it ‒ intentions that may diverge considerably. The very existence of the work, and the social legitimacy it gradually acquires, depend on this process of co-construction and co-creation. We would have much to gain by letting go of the myth of genius and our attachment to authorship, in order to focus instead on the effects and experiences that artworks produce.

In the letter to visitors written on the occasion of Moving Backwards, the Swiss Pavilion you curated at the 2019 Venice Biennale, you invited people to move beyond the modernist and Western reading of art as formal or conceptual advancement, in order to restore its active role in society. What kind of agency can we recognise in art today, in a fragmented and globalised society?
Art not only heightens sensitivity, strengthens critical judgment, and broadens the field of consciousness ‒ it can also protect, heal, grant access to invisible entities, influence the course of existence, resolve situations, affirm shared values, commemorate, bring people together, and celebrate… It seems to me that by embracing all these roles of art, we can restore social legitimacy to creative practices and make the art world genuinely more inclusive. This means, quite concretely, that aesthetic contemplation is only one among many possible ways of relating to creation.

Moving Backwards: Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, curated by Charlotte Laubard, exhibition view, Swiss Pavilion, Biennale di Venezia, 2019. Photo Annick Wetter

ART AND CO-CREATION

You are the co-founder and mediator of the Société suisse des Nouveaux commanditaires, an initiative that allows anyone ‒ regardless of age, origin or profession ‒ to collaborate with an artist or mediator to commission a work. From your experience, what are the issues that most mobilise citizens today?
The Nouveaux commanditaires (“New Patrons”) initiative enables groups of citizens to commission an artist to respond to a collective issue ‒ for instance, to strengthen social bonds, give visibility to a cause, revalue a place, or share a memory. The Nouveaux commanditaires make artistic creation a tool of democratic action, accessible to all, producing works that emerge in response to real needs and social concerns meaningful to the communities in which they take root. What continues to amaze me most about this approach is how the commissioners gradually become open to the most contemporary and radical forms of art, even though they often begin with rather clichéd or simplistic notions of what art is. The explanation is, in fact, quite simple: the work responds to their need. It offers them an “imaginary leap” that often helps resolve or transcend ‒ on a symbolic level ‒ situations that may be complex.

You have often insisted that creation is collective by nature, and that the work lives in its relationship with its audiences. In this sense, curating is no longer just mediation, but becomes co-creation. How do you imagine a curatorial practice capable of giving shape to these collective energies without being reduced to simple social facilitation?
I think it’s perfectly fine to be a facilitator. With the Nouveaux commanditaires, my role is to help people and artists work together, in mutual respect for each other’s skills. My ambition in this context is to produce works that are legitimate both socially and artistically. Ultimately, it’s about transforming the roles of all the actors in the art world: the artist, the curator, and those who experience art. In short, it’s about changing the very way the history of art is conceived and written. Quite an ambition ‒ one that surely restores a sense of dignity to the role of facilitator, doesn’t it?

Nouveaux commanditaires, work by the Frères Chapuisat, commission mediated by Charlotte Laubard, Nyon, Switzerland, 2021. Photo Michel Giesbrecht

If curating has a political task, not just an aesthetic one, what do you think is its most urgent function today: to create common sense, to encourage dissent or to imagine new forms of coexistence?
Common sense and dissent are both at stake in our current era, one deeply marked by populism. At a time when antagonism is so pervasive, I believe we should think of art and curating as practices of agonism ‒ to borrow a concept from philosopher Chantal Mouffe. The most effective artistic practices are those capable of welcoming diverse perceptions and interpretations. Their polysemy ‒ their resistance to unilateral meaning ‒ is their true strength.

Alice Longo

Charlotte Laubard

Charlotte Laubard. Photo Keystone / Gaetan Bally
The Self-taught Enigma, catalog of the exhibition curated by Charlotte Laubard, MAMC+, Saint-Étienne, France, 2021
The Self-taught Enigma, curated by Charlotte Laubard, exhibition view, MAMC+, Saint-Étienne, France, 2021
Moving Backwards: Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, curated by Charlotte Laubard, exhibition view, Swiss Pavilion, Biennale di Venezia, 2019. Photo Annick Wetter
Nouveaux commanditaires, work by the Frères Chapuisat, commission mediated by Charlotte Laubard, Nyon, Switzerland, 2021. Photo Michel Giesbrecht
Nouveaux commanditaires (New Patrons), artwork by Lili Reynaud-Dewar, commission mediated by Charlotte Laubard, Fribourg, Switzerland, 2022. Photo Guillaume Python
Nouveaux commanditaires (New Patrons), artwork by Invernomuto, commission mediated by Charlotte Laubard, Geneva, Switzerland, 2024
Nouveaux commanditaires (New Patrons), artwork by Invernomuto, commission mediated by Charlotte Laubard, Geneva, Switzerland, 2024
Charlotte Laubard. Photo Keystone / Gaetan Bally

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Alice Longo

November 6 · 25
Decoloniality and culture: the story of the Owneh project from Palestine

IT

The proliferation of decolonial rhetoric in the Western art market risks emptying the political meaning of actions aimed at decolonisation. In this scenario, the Palestinian initiative Owneh proposes a different approach: it does not thematise decoloniality, but exercises it through infrastructural practices of solidarity and self-determination.

In recent decades, the language of contemporary art has been enriched by the term “decolonial” to indicate a critical reflection on all institutions, including cultural ones, that have reinforced colonial rhetoric. Exhibitions, reinterpretations of museum collections, open calls, residencies, talks and biennials make decolonisation the main theme of their content, but visitors and readers must be able to distinguish between simple rhetoric and actions aimed at radically changing hierarchies and the system.

Photo courtesy The Owneh Initiative and Cultural Center Khalil Sakakini

FROM LANGUAGE TO STRUCTURE: THE PARADOX OF DECOLONIALITY

First of all, it is useful to make a distinction between postcolonial and decolonial. Postcolonial studies emerged after the end of colonialism and analyse its impact and political, economic, cultural and identity-related legacy on colonised countries. The decolonial approach aims to be not only critical and reflective, but above all active: it aims to create autonomous, self-determining narratives of those peoples historically subjugated by the West.
The great paradox is that many Western art institutions adopt this term in a discursive rather than structural way: while language is updated with terms such as “inclusivity”, “deconstruction” and “care”, important critical issues remain. Above all, there remains a dependence on Western funding – banks, government agencies, multinational corporations – and a vertical curatorial system: the West continues to retain decision-making power over what to represent, perpetuating dynamics of representation of the “other” and thus maintaining control of the narrative.
In this way, even works created in radical contexts are absorbed by the system as aesthetics of discomfort, transforming dissent into symbolic and commercial value. Thus, even when a work retains a political message, it is incorporated by institutions that claim to be progressive, converting it into cultural capital and continuing to operate with extractive, colonial logic. Inequality not only remains, but is masked by virtuous language, disguised as inclusion and ultimately aestheticised in the name of “ethical profit”.
Decolonial aesthetics cannot be spectacle: it should be a practice of care. It would be truly decolonial to leave free will – on how and whether to show themselves – to the people who have been victims of colonialism and imperialism. This applies to artists as much as it does to curators. It would be necessary not to thematise decoloniality, but to transform the structure of cultural production.

OWNEH: CURATORSHIP AS INFRASTRUCTURE

The Owneh project embodies precisely this logic. It is an initiative of thirty Palestinian civil society organisations, formed in the wake of 7 October 2023 and the subsequent accelerated genocide perpetrated in Gaza. The principles that led to the establishment of this initiative concern the rejection of global funding systems based on historical exploitation that have prolonged the occupation in Palestine; the rejection of politically conditioned funding that imposes geographical restrictions and operational limitations; and a commitment to strengthening Palestinian resources, volunteerism and solidarity.

Photo courtesy The Owneh Initiative and Popular Arts Center

The mission is not only economic, it is curatorial in the broadest and most radical sense of the term. By creating a Solidarity Fund, a Resources Basket and an AID Watch platform to monitor donation mechanisms, Owneh practices a reappropriation of the tools of cultural production and distribution. In fact, over 60% of the current signatories to the initiative are artistic and cultural organisations, many of which operate in the visual, performance or community art fields. The primary goal is not to produce or exhibit works, but to curate a context, restoring the political, collective and infrastructural dimension to the curatorial gesture.
To date, the Owneh Initiative, through its Solidarity Prints for Palestine campaign, has raised approximately $20,000 for the Solidarity Fund, created to support Palestinian organisations active in art and culture that refuse conditional donations, and to set up psycho-social workshops that use the arts to help adults and children affected by the trauma of genocide.
In an art system based on power and profit, Owneh stands out as a warning and an alternative, truly decolonial infrastructural and curatorial model. It invites us, as visitors and cultural operators, to think about how much our practices, even artistic ones, are truly free from market logic, conditional funding, and predatory representation.
Decoloniality is not proclaimed, it is practised, in the slow work of redistributing power, resources and possibilities.

Alice Longo

The Owneh Initiative

Photo courtesy The Owneh Initiative and Baladi Center for Culture & Arts
Photo courtesy The Owneh Initiative and Al-Harah Theatre and Baladi Centre for Culture and Arts
Photo courtesy The Owneh Initiative and Popular Arts Center
Photo courtesy The Owneh Initiative and Cultural Center Khalil Sakakini
Monther Jawabreh, I Shall Carve the Sun’s Words, exhibition view, 5 April 2025, Ramallah. Courtesy © A.M. Qattan Foundation
I Shall Carve the Sun’s Words, exhibition view, 5 April 2025, Ramallah. Courtesy © A.M. Qattan Foundation
Ruba AlFarawna, I Shall Carve the Sun’s Words, exhibition view, 5 April 2025, Ramallah. Courtesy © A.M. Qattan Foundation
Izz Al-Jabari, I Shall Carve the Sun’s Words, exhibition view, 5 April 2025, Ramallah. Courtesy © A.M. Qattan Foundation
Ruba AlFarawna, I Shall Carve the Sun’s Words, exhibition view, 5 April 2025, Ramallah. Courtesy © A.M. Qattan Foundation
Ruba AlFarawna, I Shall Carve the Sun’s Words, exhibition view, 5 April 2025, Ramallah. Courtesy © A.M. Qattan Foundation
I Shall Carve the Sun’s Words, exhibition view, 5 April 2025, Ramallah. Courtesy © A.M. Qattan Foundation
I Shall Carve the Sun’s Words, exhibition view, 5 April 2025, Ramallah. Courtesy © A.M. Qattan Foundation
I Shall Carve the Sun’s Words, exhibition view, 5 April 2025, Ramallah. Courtesy © A.M. Qattan Foundation
I Shall Carve the Sun’s Words, exhibition view, 5 April 2025, Ramallah. Courtesy © A.M. Qattan Foundation

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Alice Longo

October 30 · 25
This Will Not End Well: an intimate journey into the life of Nan Goldin in Milan

IT

Pirelli HangarBicocca brings together the largest collection of slideshows ever presented in the first retrospective dedicated to Nan Goldin not only as a photographer, but as a multimedia artist. Until 15 February 2026, eight works in the form of slideshows and a new sound installation occupy the space of the Navate thanks to architectural designs created to make the visitor experience even more engaging.

Curated by Roberta Tenconi with Lucia Aspesi, featuring architectural structures designed by Hala Wardé, This Will Not End Well, exhibited at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, intimately portrays, through slideshows composed of frames, Nan Goldin’s joie de vivre and her relationships. The exhibition, organised by major European museums, is part of a tour, curated by Fredrik Liew, former guest of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which will continue on to the Grand Palais in Paris.
In Milan, the exhibition stands out for the addition of two new slideshows, You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024) and Stendhal Syndrome (2024), along with the sound installation Bleeding, specially created by Soundwalk Collective. This piece collects ambient recordings from previous This Will Not End Well exhibitions, breaking them into fragments and recombining them into a loop that accompanies visitors throughout their experience.

NAN GOLDIN’S EXHIBITION IN MILAN

The exhibition is meticulously detailed, with architectural designs shaping intimate spaces that allow visitors to view each slideshow privately. The environment created by Wardé, quoting the architect from the exhibition catalog, is “a village made of visible structures that express themselves like living bodies […] like instruments in an orchestra playing in unison”. Each structure is specifically designed according to the subject of the slideshow it houses, and each architectural composition is tailored for the museum in which it is installed. This reflects a collaborative curatorial approach rooted in a dialogue between space, the artist, architecture, and the exhibition itself.

Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well, exhibition view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio

THE WORKS ON DISPLAY AT THE PIRELLI HANGARBICOCCA

This Will Not End Well is a retrospective whose selection perfectly encapsulates the artist’s work. Nan Goldin from early on has documented her personal universe of relationships through photography while shining a light on urgent contemporary issues. The exhibition presents a comprehensive picture that captures moments of not only artistic but vital evolution. Through thousands of frames, the exhibition evokes tenderness and the purity of a perspective that stirs nostalgia.
The exhibition starts with the slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-2022), Goldin’s most famous piece, which gathers moments of life and portraits of her closest loved ones. The work is constantly evolving, updated, and re-edited, never appearing the same as in previous exhibitions. Memory Lost (2019-2021) offers a moving narrative about abstinence: Nan Goldin appears deeply attached to everything and manages to make the viewer feel that attachment as well. Sirens (2019-2020) documents the pleasure brought on by drugs through a montage of images taken from various sources, paying homage to top model Donyale Luna, who died in 1979 from a heroin overdose.

Nan Goldin, Sirens, 2019–2020, installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio

In Fire Leap (2010-2022), Goldin captures godchildren and children of friends, punctuating the narrative with songs sung by children. The Other Side (1992-2021) gives visibility to those often unseen, referencing the queer club of the same name in Boston during the 1970s, while Stendhal Syndrome (2024) juxtaposes Renaissance artworks with the artist’s intimate relationships. In the latest structure designed by Wardé, You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024) metaphorically describes living on Earth through animal subjects. Finally, in the “Cube” space of the Pirelli HangarBicocca, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004-2022) unfolds, mixing three stories told across three screens in an impressive installation inspired by the original commission for the Chapel of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris in 2004.

NAN GOLDIN’S ARTISTIC LANGUAGE

This Will Not End Well speaks with the language of sincere activism ‒ of someone who has fought their whole life for what they believe in. It is the final word of those who hold on to hope that things can end well, the voice of those who still believe when all seems lost. In the exhibition, Goldin openly addresses Palestine and P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an activist group founded by the artist in 2017 in response to the opioid crisis, mentioned in the acknowledgments at the end of Memory Lost.
The artist tells her story, her relationships, and everything around her. The subject of her images is the human being totally human, even when invisible or forgotten. The exhibition nurtures empathy, encouraging love and tenderness even in suffering. This Will Not End Well is a long, intimate video memory: even if things don’t end well, Nan Goldin reminds us that photography is still alive.

Rebecca Canavesi

Nan Goldin’s exhibition at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan

Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well, exhibition view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio
Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well, exhibition view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio
Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well, exhibition view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio
Nan Goldin, Memory Lost, 2019–202?, installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio
Nan Goldin, Sirens, 2019–2020, installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio
Nan Goldin, You Never Did Anything Wrong, 2024, installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio
Nan Goldin, Stendhal Syndrome, 2024, installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio
Nan Goldin, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, 2004–2022, installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Kramlich Collection and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio
Nan Goldin, The Other Side, 1992–2021, installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio
Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1981–2022, installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio
Soundwalk Collective, Bleeding, 2025, installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. Commissioned and produced by Pirelli HangarBicocca. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artists and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio

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Rebecca Canavesi

October 30 · 25
Castello di Rivoli launches a new format: Inserzioni

IT

Following celebrations for its 40th anniversary, the Castello di Rivoli is introducing a new curatorial format titled “Inserzioni”. Three contemporary artists engage in a dialogue with the museum’s permanent collection, generating new and unexpected interpretations. The project runs through February 2026.

The Castello di Rivoli presents Inserzioni ‒ a new curatorial format in which contemporary artists are invited to create site-specific works conceived for the museum. Curated by director Francesco Manacorda, the project aims to foster an evolving dialogue, allowing artists to exhibit their works for six months within the rooms typically dedicated to the permanent collection. The first featured artists are Guglielmo Castelli (Turin, 1987), Lydia Ourahmane (Saïda, Algeria, 1992), and Oscar Murillo (Valle del Cauca, Colombia, 1986).

Oscar Murillo, A see of history (Una visione della storia), 2025, installation view, Inserzioni, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, 2025. Photo Tim Bowditch. Courtesy the artist © Oscar Murillo

INSERZIONI AT CASTELLO DI RIVOLI

Since 1984, the Castello di Rivoli has played a vital role in the contemporary art scene. The museum is an unfinished container that embraces a layering of meanings and artistic languages shaped by innovation and experimentation. As Monica Trigona noted in La Stampa, Manacorda highlights the institution’s ongoing commitment to innovation and its openness to new voices ‒ particularly those from geographic areas historically underrepresented in the art discourse by the museum. The result is a narrative no longer defined by traditional hierarchies, but by a collective storytelling approach ‒ one that reveals how art, past, and future can intertwine in a harmonious and dynamic interplay. Inserzioni is also a tribute to the Castello’s very first exhibition, Ouverture (1984), curated by then-director Rudi Fuchs. For that inaugural show, each participating artist was invited to create a site-specific work in direct dialogue with the museum’s architecture, envisioning the permanent collection as an “ideal gathering” of works. This spirit of innovation and collaboration continues to define both exhibitions, affirming the Castello di Rivoli’s role as a vital center for creative research. By giving voice to contemporary artists ‒ alongside renowned figures such as Richard Long, Hito Steyerl, and Nicola De Maria ‒, the museum reaffirms its relevance and centrality in today’s cultural landscape. With this new format, the museum is not simply a container for art; it becomes a true incubator of ideas and a prototype for active experimentation.

THE WORKS ON VIEW AT CASTELLO DI RIVOLI

In the frescoed Room of the Continents, there is the corpus of works created by Guglielmo Castelli. The walls are adorned with new paintings that evoke dark, dreamlike worlds. At the center of the room, two large tables display small cases containing delicate paper sculptures, rooted in the world of scenography ‒ a familiar artistic language to Castelli. These figures, charged with tension, lead the viewer in a space that hovers between the real and the imaginary, the finished and the unfinished. In the adjacent room, the artist’s sketchbooks are on view for the first time, revealing thoughts and ideas from his imagined worlds.
Per voce (2025) is the title of Lydia Ourahmane’s contribution, created in collaboration with her sister Sarah, a musician and composer. At first glance, the work appears imperceptible: only upon approaching the walls does a long Braille score become visible. The composition adapts to the space, its rhythm shaped by the architectural voids ‒ windows and openings ‒ that punctuate three walls. Three blind singers perform by reading the Braille notation, bringing the piece to life through a fusion of body, space, and sound.

Lydia Ourahmane, Per voce (For voice), 2025, installation view, Inserzioni, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, 2025. Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

The final work is A see of history (2025) by Oscar Murillo ‒ an immersive, site-specific installation located in Room 18. The large room is almost entirely filled with forty-eight massive canvases from his Disrupted Frequencies series, all laid face-down, prompting visitors to actively engage with the installation. Using wheeled beds and headlamps, viewers can explore this ocean of signs and blue brushstrokes. The canvases ‒ previously engraved with marks made by students from different countries ‒ are assembled into a vast, flowing sea that gathers years of shared memories. The message is both poetic and powerful: the emergence of a global culture that transcends borders.
The museum’s permanent collection is thus enriched by these new commissions, which actively rewrite its narrative ‒ rooted in the past, focused on the future.

Maddalena Domenghini

The exhibition Inserzioni at the Castello di Rivoli

Oscar Murillo, A see of history (Una visione della storia), 2025, installation view, Inserzioni, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, 2025. Photo Tim Bowditch. Courtesy the artist © Oscar Murillo
Oscar Murillo, A see of history (Una visione della storia), 2025, installation view, Inserzioni, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, 2025. Photo Tim Bowditch. Courtesy the artist © Oscar Murillo
Oscar Murillo, A see of history (Una visione della storia), 2025, installation view, Inserzioni, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, 2025. Photo Tim Bowditch. Courtesy the artist © Oscar Murillo
Guglielmo Castelli, installation view, Inserzioni, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, 2025. Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Guglielmo Castelli, installation view, Inserzioni, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, 2025. Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Guglielmo Castelli, installation view, Inserzioni, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, 2025. Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Lydia Ourahmane, Per voce (For voice), 2025, installation view, Inserzioni, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, 2025. Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. Photo Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

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Maddalena Domenghini

October 23 · 25
Yeast Photo Festival 2025: an example of widespread curatorship in Salento

IT

Involving palaces, oil mills and farms, the festival transforms the Salento area into a curatorial device that encourages people to reflect on the relationship between food, image and sustainability. Open until 9 November, the event explores the paradox between abundance and scarcity through fourteen photographic projects in the exhibition “(N)ever Enough”.

On 25 September 2025, the fourth edition of the Yeast Photo Festival, entitled (N)ever Enough, was inaugurated. This international contemporary photography exhibition explores the relationship between food, territory and image. This year’s theme is the current paradox between consumerist abundance and scarcity of resources: while one part of the world allows itself the luxury of wasting food, another survives or suffers from hunger. Fourteen projects make up a visual atlas in which food is the starting point for investigating injustice, identity, technology and power. The solo exhibition by the great British photographer Martin Parr stands out, with over sixty images that irreverently describe the hypocrisies of consumer society.
The artistic direction is by Edda Fahrenhorst with Flavio&Frank and Veronica Nicolardi, while the guest curators are Jan von Holleben, curator of Martin Parr’s children’s exhibition Wow!, and Maria Ghetti and Nora Schianchi, winners of the festival’s first Open Call for Curators.

Yeast Photo Festival, Martin Parr, Snack It!, exhibition view, Spiaggia della Purità, Gallipoli, 2025. Photo Florian W. Mueller

YEAST PHOTO FESTIVAL: THE CHALLENGE OF WIDESPREAD CURATORSHIP

Founded in 2022 in the Salento village of Matino, the festival confirms and expands its widespread format, with a total of nine locations scattered throughout the area: Palazzo dei Marchesi del Tufo, Casa del Professore, Aranceto and Frantoio Ipogeo in Matino; Palazzo Scarciglia in Lecce; Masseria Le Stanzìe in Supersano; KORA Centro del Contemporaneo in Palazzo Baronale de Gualtieriis in Castrignano De’ Greci. These historic venues have been joined by Spiaggia della Purità, in the centre of Gallipoli, and the Pietro Cavoti Civic Museum in Galatina, a city that symbolises the historical, cultural and culinary heritage of Salento.
If curating a photographic exhibition is challenging due to the fragile nature of the medium, the saturation of images in visual culture and the conceptual ambiguity between testimony and interpretation, the difficulties increase precisely because of the widespread model of the festival: having multiple venues, some dozens of kilometres apart, risks fragmenting the meaning and creating disorientation among visitors. Furthermore, the chosen venues, both rural and historical, are not neutral containers; on the contrary, they have an aesthetic personality that must be taken into account.

Yeast Photo Festival, Blake Little, Preservation, exhibition view, Frantoio ipogeo, Matino, 2025. Photo Alice Longo

In Italy, several national and international thematic photography festivals have chosen not to limit the exhibition to a single venue, but to spread it out. Examples include Foto/Industria, the biennial photography exhibition on industry and work promoted by the MAST Foundation in Bologna; Cortona On The Move in the province of Arezzo; PhEST in Monopoli, which explores the relationship between the Mediterranean Sea, identity and contemporary imagery; SI Fest in Savignano sul Rubicone and the Ragusa Foto Festival. In all these cases, despite the plurality of exhibition venues, the experience is limited to a single city or village, usually within walking distance in a small area.

THE ROLE OF EXHIBITION SPACES FOR YEAST PHOTO FESTIVAL

Yeast Photo Festival, on the other hand, adopts a widespread curatorial approach on a large scale: the venues are not concentrated in a single urban centre. Here, mobility becomes part of the project: the territory itself is the medium, and the physical distance between the venues is conceptually part of the experience. Visitors are forced to move around, to take the time to observe, to recognise connections, to create their own path. The Salento region itself is emblematic of the paradox between abundance and scarcity: it can be said to embody the tension of the theme (N)ever Enough. The visual richness of the landscape contrasts with the material fragility of the territory, which is suffering from desertification caused by Xylella, overtourism and depopulation. Culturally, too, Salento is suspended between tourist overexposure and a structural lack of institutions and resources for cultural production.
Even the venues chosen – oil mills, orange groves, palaces and museums – are material witnesses to the theme. On the one hand, agricultural spaces represent production, labour and the present: they are environments of transformation, places where matter changes state. Historic buildings, on the other hand, embody memory and symbolic power. Buildings “preserve”, oil mills “transform”: two fundamental functions also in curating, archiving and metabolising.

Yeast Photo Festival, Sara Scanderebech, Green Resistance, exhibition view, Casa del Professore, Matino, 2025. Photo Alice Longo

The works do not merely occupy these spaces, but interact with them through analogy or contrast. In the underground oil mill in Matino, for example, photographer Blake Little presents Preservation: a project in which the transience of the human body is juxtaposed with the eternity of honey. Naked bodies covered in this substance lose their individual character and resemble living sculptures. In contrast, the exhibition Snack It! by Martin Parr at Palazzo dei Marchesi del Tufo works by contrast, where images become icons, but pop icons of our time: fast food hamburgers, packets of crisps and famous fizzy drinks.
Yeast Photo Festival is making a name for itself on the photography festival scene thanks to its curatorial specificity and because it is inspired by values that are being rediscovered in society and contemporary art: on the one hand, the need to slow down and reclaim time; on the other, the overcoming of the sterility of the white cube in favour of a situated curatorship that serves not only to enhance the works on display, but also to reactivate the territory and the places that host them.

Alice Longo

Yeast Photo Festival

Yeast Photo Festival, Martin Parr, Snack It!, exhibition view, Palazzo dei Marchesi del Tufo, Matino, 2025. Photo Alice Longo
Yeast Photo Festival, Martin Parr, Snack It!, exhibition view, Palazzo dei Marchesi del Tufo, Matino, 2025. Photo Alice Longo
Yeast Photo Festival, Blake Little, Preservation, exhibition view, Frantoio ipogeo, Matino, 2025. Photo Alice Longo
Yeast Photo Festival, Umberto Diecinove, I N S C T S, exhibition view, Aranceto, Matino, 2025. Photo Alice Longo
Yeast Photo Festival, Martin Parr, Snack It!, exhibition view, Palazzo dei Marchesi del Tufo, Matino, 2025. Photo Alice Longo
Yeast Photo Festival, Sara Scanderebech, Green Resistance, exhibition view, Casa del Professore, Matino, 2025. Photo Alice Longo
Yeast Photo Festival, Klaus Pichler, One Third, exhibition view, KORA Center, Castrignano de’ Greci, 2025. Photo Florian W. Mueller
Yeast Photo Festival, Martin Parr, Snack It!, exhibition view, Spiaggia della Purità, Gallipoli, 2025. Photo Florian W. Mueller
Yeast Photo Festival, Martin Parr, Snack It!, exhibition view, Spiaggia della Purità, Gallipoli, 2025. Photo Florian W. Mueller
Yeast Photo Festival, Flavio&Frank, Buone Mani, exhibition view, Museo Civico Pietro Cavoti, Galatina, 2025. Photo Alice Longo

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by

Alice Longo

October 23 · 25
Artists and social media: an exhibition in Pakistan

IT

The exhibition “feed (/) me”, open until 19^th September 2025 at HAAM Gallery, Lahore showcased works in various mediums and styles by thirteen contemporary Pakistani artists who were inspired by the content of their public Instagram accounts. Artists had exhibited works in various mediums ranging from oil/acrylic paintings to video and digital art. Ultimately “feed (/) me” raised cogent questions about how an algorithm-driven virtual world has shifted the discourse on art from “what art is” to “how art works”.

On August 29^th 2025, the exhibition feed (/) me curated by Ghazala Raees opened at HAAM Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan. The title of the exhibition is pivotal to understanding the crux of the exhibition and its significance. The use of a noun and pronoun together in the title alludes to a peculiar tension that now defines the relationship of the artist with the self in a commodity driven world that exists in virtual space. In this process the newsfeed of the artist takes on a life of its own, consuming, “feeding” and fueling the ambitions and desires of both viewer and artist alike. Artworks featured in the exhibition can be interpreted as a layered exploration of the digital space be it as muse, catalyst, voyeur, addiction or archive.

THE EXHIBITION AT HAAM GALLERY

The structure and layout of the exhibition consisted of a side-by-side layout where two spaces/large rooms adjacent to each other allowed visitors to segue between both spaces. Most artworks had been displayed on the walls. Some were grouped and displayed in accordance with audience engagement so that the first room connected to the entrance allowed visitors to engage directly with certain artworks.
Some artists chose a more painterly approach such as Ayaz Jokhio, who had reproduced an enlarged oil painting of his phone that featured his Instagram profile. Perhaps it was commenting on a new epoch, one where the phrase “global village” had segued into a new phase; the artist was now visible, connected and available all the time. More than commodification, the painting could be interpreted as a sort of metonym for an addiction to social media because it had ironically been titled Still life. Other artists such as Sohail Zuberi had blown up and transformed their newsfeed into a lenticular print. The work resembled a sort of indexical display of daily life in an urban city captured as a collage of posts, shifting and wavering as one moved across the gallery space. The work teetered between various realities and compelled one to question the artist’s vantage point: the newsfeed as a performative embodiment of an artist’s social reality or merely a voyeuristic archive of the inhabitants of a city? Hoor Imad Sherpao had created an entire feature film using AI that featured herself in various avatars engaging in battle and posing with famous personalities. Many of these works attempted to question the validity of content even on their own newsfeed; a pressing concern in a world where fake news, misinformation and messy AI slop purported to democratize creativity.

Sohail Zuberi, #culturlbloodbank_karachi, feed (/) me, exhibition view, HAAM Gallery, Lahore 2025. Courtesy HAAM Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan

THE ARTISTS INCLUDED IN THE EXHIBITION AT HAAM GALLERY

Other works commented on this idea through documentation of the process of making digital imagery. Would the value and authorship of digital artworks be further compromised if the process of airbrushing and photo manipulation were to be uploaded on a newsfeed? Nakshab Rehman’s works consisted of three small LCD monitor screens placed in a triangular layout on a single plinth. The use of the plinth can be analyzed art-historically; there was a time when it was specifically designed to give importance to the prized object on display so as to add grandeur, elevating its value and significance. Rather than a precious bust in marble or wood, instead Rehman opted to question this conventional primacy of skill and craft by replacing it with sleek screens that were relaying the laborious process of the making of his digital paintings. Rehman’s sly pun that celebrated the capitulation of technology over the use of conventional mediums such as oil on canvas or marble also extended to his subject matter. The three LCD screens not only captured how Rehman was making his paintings by manipulating and reimagining existing images but it also prompted questions about where he was sourcing his images from for the creation of his works.
One of the screens showed a singular banana emerging from a mountain range evoking a skewed notion of the Sublime, a second screen featured a roll of toilet paper being lovingly airbrushed into a photograph of a lush green landscape while the third featured a pair of flip-flops nimbed in the heavenly light of Transfiguration: Rehman’s irreverence and parody of the past questioned what is consumed and what kind of gatekeeping now determines the myth of artistic genius in an age of commodification. Rehman’s digital paintings mocked the redundancy of a past that felt almost atavistic with its reliance on history: banal and even mass-produced objects were reimagined with an aesthetic dollop of humour and digital kitsch.

Nakshab Rehman, Toilet Pata, feed (/) me, exhibition view, HAAM Gallery, Lahore 2025. Courtesy HAAM Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan

ARTISTS AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Safwan Sabzwari’s Please Like Me series attempted to dismantle the iconic design interface and logic of Instagram and social media platforms itself. Social media platforms and influencer culture in particular sustains itself by feeding off of the fear of cancel culture; the monetization of one’s life comes with the anxiety of counting “Likes” to determine one’s worth. It is entwined with an unhealthy addiction to obsessively abiding by the algorithmic preferences of followers in a digital age where the approval of anonymous strangers, more than anything determines one’s self-esteem.
After all, every time we see a “Like” on our post on social media it is accompanied by a release of dopamine that enhances our joy and increases our desire to please. Sabzwari’s interactive sculptural piece channeled this desire into parody and the playfulness of child-art to comment on this culture of instant gratification. His artwork consisted of six rectangular bricks of equal size mounted on a wall. Each brick held a contraption that bore a striking resemblance to butterstamp telephones from the late 1870s evoking memories of redundant technologies and lost forms of interaction/ communication. This redundancy was exemplified by childish doodles or graffiti-like artworks on each surface accompanied by the use of a hand-held device that could easily double as a butterstamp telephone “receiver”. Interestingly the receiver functioned as a stamping cylinder and was attached by a chain. Visitors were provided with instructions that accompanied the display labels: they were asked to stamp their “Likes” for specific images in the form of hearts so that the artist could encourage viewers to reflect on the futility and childishness of our desires on social media platforms.
feed (/) me was an unconventional show that attempted to push the boundaries of what constitutes as artistic production in today’s age. Its relevance resonated with younger artists, students and visitors who reflected on the blurred boundaries between the real and virtual world. Each artwork carried this kernel of truth: some fragment of the zeitgeist of their age had been encapsulated in the works.

Zohreen Murtaza

HAAM Gallery

Sohail Zuberi, #culturlbloodbank_karachi, feed (/) me, exhibition view, HAAM Gallery, Lahore 2025. Courtesy HAAM Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
Safwan Sabzwari, Please Like Me series, feed (/) me, exhibition view, HAAM Gallery, Lahore 2025. Courtesy HAAM Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
Nakshab Rehman, Toilet Pata, feed (/) me, exhibition view, HAAM Gallery, Lahore 2025. Courtesy HAAM Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
Safwan Sabzwari, Please Like Me series, feed (/) me, exhibition view, HAAM Gallery, Lahore 2025. Courtesy HAAM Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
Safwan Sabzwari, Please Like Me series, feed (/) me, exhibition view, HAAM Gallery, Lahore 2025. Courtesy HAAM Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
Nakshab Rehman, A-kela Banana, feed (/) me, exhibition view, HAAM Gallery, Lahore 2025. Courtesy HAAM Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
by

Zohreen Murtaza

October 16 · 25
Ida Križaj Leko, curator of the Croatian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025

IT

“Intelligence of Errors” – the project of the Croatian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 ‒ bold embrace of “error” as a creative and critical tool. The following conversation with its co-creator, architect and curator Ida Križaj Leko explores how error can be mobilized in collective work, curatorial practice, and architectural imagination.

Born in Croatia, Ida Križaj Leko works at the intersection of architecture and curatorial research. Her practice often navigates the overlaps between spatial design, critical imagination, and collective authorship. In Intelligence of Errors, she and her collaborators developed a research-driven, modular pavilion that investigates the presence of “spatial errors” in the Croatian context since 1991, proposing error not as failure but as a generative tool for rethinking spatial and social conditions.

THE INTERVIEW WITH IDA KRIŽAJ LEKO

The Croatian Pavilion was developed by a trans-disciplinary, non-hierarchical collective. What did working in this way open up ‒ or complicate ‒ in terms of curatorial thinking, authorship, and shared responsibility?
The team, alongside myself, consists of Ana Boljar, Jana Čulek, Marino Krstačić-Furić, Iva Peručić, Ana Tomić, and Marko-Luka Zubčić. Through working with each of them ‒sometimes more directly, sometimes less ‒ I had already touched on the theme of error or disruption. So this project didn’t start from zero; in fact, it was the perfect opportunity to bring all our work together in one place, fueled by collective energy.
At the same time, it was a long and difficult process ‒ personally, my first experience of this kind. The curatorial concept defined both the period we were addressing (since Croatia’s independence in 1991), and “spatial error” as a manifestation in space ‒ as subject ‒ and gave us the task of mobilizing error as a positive act, of putting it to use. We called the first phase of work “brainstorm”, a month-long process of offloading every idea related to spatial errors in Croatia, both individually and as a group, then shaping them, kneading them like dough. That was the most beautiful part of the collective effort.
During that phase, we agreed that the work would remain collective, with no division between researchers and designers, and everyone taking on every role. Of course, that also created challenges: decision-making, individual fixations, and an enormous ambition to show the full complexity within a limited space of just seventy square meters. Since the project had a strict timeframe, we had to weigh the depth of engagement with each segment carefully, without reducing things to the banal. And this is only the first translation of the project, which is evolving into a serious, multi-year investigation.
Fieldwork has taken the form of photographing the sheer number of errors, while the imaginariums act as a metaphorical method of “harvesting” errors through interactive, designed objects, each with clearly inscribed symbolism. In a project where we insisted ‒ down to the very last screw ‒ on shared decision-making and iterative questioning of everything, what emerged was a coherent pavilion with a bold concept, shaped by explicit symbols and impressions. The Repository of Errors, both digital and analog, is already being populated, and the project is now building itself further into long-term research and a network of errors.
One other crucial factor heightened the group’s dynamic. Working with errors inevitably meant confronting one’s own errors ‒ something we’re not always ready for at every stage of the process. I’d say it was a kind of psychodrama, but with a happy ending.

Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić

THE CROATIAN PAVILION AT THE VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE 2025

The pavilion’s design emerged from a research-driven curatorial process, learning from the educational exercise “Error Harvest”. Can you walk us through how this initial framework shaped the development of the project ‒ from research to design response to built form?
Another requirement set by this installation proved challenging: the design had to be modular, easily (dis)assembled, and portable. For that reason, the pavilion was conceived as a traveling pop-up pavilion, built from materials that can withstand different weather conditions and spatial contexts, with assembly that is not logistically demanding. The folding stainless-steel substructure, bolted together, is easily transportable, while the modular “raincoat” of tarpaulin connects with zippers and Velcro, adjusted with straps and cords following the logic of tent-like constructions.
The Repository consists of 48 paper rolls printed with spatial errors drawn from the local context, gathered partly through new fieldwork with photography, the study of digital aerial images, the reading of statistical and spatial data, and the analysis of laws and by-laws. The selection of case studies in the Repository relied heavily on existing scientific, artistic, and architectural projects from within our team.
The impossible ping-pong table, a human-powered fan, and a fragment of a roof installation from the 2021 Venice Biennale were designed as interactive objects that illustrate our method of utilizing error to generate new and better worlds ‒ what we call “Error Harvest”. They are independent from the pavilion itself, and in some future iteration we could just as easily imagine creating other imaginariums in their place.
Deciding on the imaginariums for the Venice Biennale was, in fact, the hardest part of the process: how to represent the method in a way that would be understandable, or how to create an object that wasn’t simply a designed solution driven by problem-solving.

Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić

You’ve framed error as both a subject and a method. Could you also see “play” as part of this methodology? Can play be a form of critique in your work?
Play was always present in the process, although it came with tension. By insisting on collective authorship, we also insisted on questioning and re-questioning each decision. This opened up room for playfulness in method and form ‒ whether in designing the impossible ping-pong table or harvesting errors through interactive objects. At the same time, play was never a distraction; it was a way to critique systems of order by showing how instability or improvisation can generate knowledge. In that sense, play allowed us to say things that a traditional exhibition format would have constrained.

Croatian architecture has often navigated between systems of control and spaces of freedom. Does your pavilion comment on this historical balancing act ‒ and if so, how?
Yes, absolutely. By focusing on “spatial errors” since 1991, we were inevitably tracing the contradictions of a society still negotiating between regulation and freedom, order and improvisation. Many of the errors we documented are not merely mistakes, but traces of survival, adaptation, or even resistance. The pavilion, with its modular and provisional character, reflects this balancing act ‒ it is structured yet flexible, ordered yet open to disruption.

CURATORSHIP AND ARCHITECTURE

Your past work often engages with spatial storytelling and critical imagination. How does this project continue or challenge the trajectory you’ve been on as an architect and curator?
I see this project as a continuation but also as a turning point. In previous work, I often moved between architectural practice and speculative projects. Here, those two aspects merge more fully into a collective language. What challenged me most was learning to let go ‒ to allow the collective to shape the outcome, and to let error guide the process rather than resist it.

If a child walked into your pavilion, what do you hope they’d instinctively do? And if a philosopher walked in, what would you want them to question?
I would hope a child would immediately start playing ‒ pulling zippers, testing the impossible ping-pong table, feeling the textures. The pavilion is meant to invite interaction, to spark curiosity and mischief. For a philosopher, I would want them to ask deeper questions: What is the value of error in society? How can mistakes be productive rather than destructive? Can a system be designed to embrace rather than erase imperfection?

Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić

Ida, you work across the roles of architect and curator ‒ often at the same time. How did this dual lens shape your approach to the pavilion, and were there moments where these two ways of working came into tension or productive friction?
I can honestly say I’m not much of a curator. At my core I’m an architect, and in many situations my hand is quicker than my head. I tried hard to be as little of an architect as possible, while still offering the best of my design knowledge. Above all, I was more part of the team rather than someone standing apart from it. And now, with a bit of distance, that’s how I see our collective installation.

Gopika Kohli

https://idakrizaj.com/

https://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2025/croatia

https://intelligenceoferrors.com/

https://www.instagram.com/croatianpavilion2025/

Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić
Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić
Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić
Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić
Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić
Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić
Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić
Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić
Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić
Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić
Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić
Pavilion of Croatia at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Photo Doris Fatur and Hrvoje Franjić
by

Gopika Kohli

October 2 · 25
What it means to be an artist today. Interview with Kyle Meyer

IT

We met Kyle Meyer during a studio visit organized by the School for Curatorial Studies in Venice, where he introduced us to his distinctive practice. Some time ago, he decided to move to Venice, selling his studio in the United States and leaving behind the bustle of New York, to begin a new chapter in both his personal and professional life. In this interview, we talked about the motivations behind his move to Venice, his future plans and ideas here, the role of textiles, as well as his perspective on curatorship of his works.

Kyle Meyer (Ohio, 1985) is an American artist whose work sits at the intersection of photography and textiles. In his practice, he questions the potential of photography, born from mechanical and computerized processes, and examines how it still can create human connections by integrating handicraft such as weaving, dyeing, and layering. Meyer learnt weaving while living and working at a basket weaving factory in Swaziland, where he came after his college graduation. The merger of photography and textiles brings both textured and haptic quality into his work, touching such topics like identity, gender, memory, loss, and seclusion. His practice is especially shaped by his identity as a gay man as well as his relationship to LGBTQ+ communities.
His series Interwoven is being shown until 2 November 2025 in the exhibition Rupture and Repair in Morris Museum, New Jersey. His other big projects include Impermanent Skin, 95 Bedford and Bleeding Out.

Kyle Meyer, © Kyle Meyer

THE INTERVIEW WITH KYLE MEYER

Now that you’re back in the US for a while, what initially drew you to move to Italy, and why Venice in particular?
First, I moved to Milan at the end of October 2024, and I was there for about a month and a half. I really couldn’t connect with the city at all. It was like a smaller New York, but I didn’t feel the drive to make anything there; I wasn’t inspired at all. Then I went to the Venice Biennale, and it was the first time I did it by myself, so I wasn’t on anyone’s agenda. I really allowed myself to be present for the first time in a very long time and connect to the city. I remember I went to San Giorgio Maggiore and visited Berlinde De Bruyckere’s show there. I was thinking a lot about these works, my creations, and the space. And I really put myself into thinking about what I would be making here and then just said, “Wow maybe I should just move here”. I left that space so inspired by the work that I was almost in tears. I was about to turn 40 and had left the United States – it was time to take control of what I want to do, and not what other people want me to do.

So it was a turning point for you.
Yes. My career was super successful, but it used to be, “you gotta make, you gotta make”. For the majority of my life, I’ve thought about what other people think and not about myself. I’m also always thinking about the art and how the art is placed in a context, so I am allowing the art to kind of dictate my life. I understood I had to really take control over it. Many things just started going in my head at that point. I went back to Milan, and when I came back to Venice a couple of weeks later, everything had changed. The people were gone and it felt very secluded. You could really get lost in that mentality, which I am drawn to. For several weeks I kept coming and went to all the churches and independent spaces like Spazio Punch and SPARC*, which is a big artist and communal space in Venice. People and artists were coming together and showing their work, and I understood this was what I was looking for – a place where I can get completely lost and meet so many beautiful people making incredible things and discussing ideas. And so, at that point in December, I said “I will move here”. It was the first time where I was starting my life over.

At that time, did you feel tired of New York?
New York is a tough place. You have to continuously be making. You have to make money. And the art world is really fucked up in the sense that one day you’re in and the next day you could be out. It’s a constant race, and there’s never ever a chance to fully enjoy what you’re doing. Interwoven took a lot of energy and had taken over my life. I was experimenting and doing other projects, but was not able to fully engage with them and engage in what I wanted to. I got really burnt out and tired. I needed to start making other work. I was dyeing and thinking about how I could use photographic materiality in a different way, and about textiles and color. And the most important thing is: in New York, the idea of being present is quite difficult. Everything is happening at once. I feel very grounded in Venice because it’s not so much chaos. There is chaos within Venice, but it’s not an inundation of chaos all the time. You can disappear.

Kyle Meyer, Binded relations, 2024, 200 x 265 cm, Hand dyed cotton fabric. Courtesy of the artist

THE ARTISTIC PRACTICE OF KYLE MEYER

During the studio visit, you mentioned that you no longer work with a gallery. How has your practice changed since parting ways?
I feel free in the work that I’m making because all the work is being made for me. It’s not for the commercial setting or shows. I have been looking at work and putting the puzzle together, but it was kind of all over the place. Since I got to Venice, I’ve had the time to step back and think deeply about what the work is ‒ or was at that time ‒ which is really beautiful. And if I had a gallery, I wouldn’t have been able to do that. I’m in a really deep reflection period, and the work will probably change wildly when I get back to Venice now.

Are there any ideas or projects you want to realize particularly here in Venice?
I’m really interested in the lagoon. A lot of my work is all about imprintation and dyeing of spaces, objects, and humans, which takes a lot of time and is always very precarious. It is also getting that very decisive moment in kind of a chaotic situation, where I have a person to lay down for 30 minutes, which is quite difficult. The lagoon has so much ‒ hundreds and hundreds of years of people coming and going. We’re in a time now where Venice is overrun with people, but the marks that these people have left over the centuries are becoming even more relevant with every step that they take. Just brushing up against the walls takes away and rots away the city. So, it’s getting those imprintations of the city. I also think about the water systems a lot, so I’ll start using the canal water in some way. I am interested in how that water is going to interact with the things that I’m doing, and with the objects that I’m going to be using that will explain consumerism and capitalism within Venice.
I also want to go out into the lagoon and find abandoned boats and things that are discarded there. It’s such a protected place, yet it has things that are left behind or things that are brought from the ocean. So there are definitely ideas at this point. Some of them will just be ideas, but other things will come to fruition.

How are you dealing with the city?
When I am making something, I fully immerse myself in a place. Even in Swaziland: I lived there for a long time, trying to understand the issues that people have. I was sitting, listening and understanding people, or at least I was getting an understanding from an outsider’s perspective. So that’s the same with Venice. I’m coming in as an outsider and I need to understand exactly what the place is doing to me and what it’s doing to other people. Then I can really start making work that I’m excited about. I want the work that I’m making to be very genuine and very thought out. The questions that I’m searching for feel deeply rooted in and intensely connected to the place.

Process of dyeing. Courtesy of the artist Kyle Meyer

THE TECHNIQUES USED BY KYLE MEYER

When you were living in Eswatini, you learned weaving while still working primarily with photography. This is how your Interwoven series was born, combining imprinting, weaving, and photography. How would you describe your practice today – is there a particular medium or process that now dominates your work?
I would say right now my practice is the process of dyeing and weaving. There’s also a very labor-intensive component to my work. Digital photography is ubiquitous now. Everyone with a phone can just take a picture. So what is the authenticity of a photo when it’s all done by a computer? There’s no trace of the hand. Back then I asked myself: “How can I be making photos digitally, but have this component of the handmade?” That’s kind of how I learnt weaving. I was sitting down and listening to people’s stories. It connects you to those people, to the place, to the community. It weaves you together. So I started weaving photos together. Then people were asking me if I thought about making my own textiles. I had dyed a little bit in Eswatini and I thought: “How can I bring this dye into my practice where I’m making my own textiles?” I was experimenting a lot by dyeing the paper with the snow and getting the imprints of leaves and sticks and the environment. Afterwards, I started to use my own body and to dye textiles with it in long-durational performances. Then I did a townhouse (95 Bedford) which was my first real exploration with dyeing a big space. I fully immersed myself in it. I was sleeping there and learning so much about how dyes interact. Sometimes I was throwing pigment and sometimes I was dripping it. Then there was a performance. People were coming in all the time: photographing me, listening to what I was thinking about, and sometimes giving their tips. It was six months of dialogue and I loved it. That is how I understood dyeing is my life.
Later, I was experimenting with how dyes were mixed, but at some point I felt lost. My friend once came over and asked me: “If you could be doing anything, what would it be?” And I understood that I would love to do a human body. I’ve done the structures and objects, but not the human component, which is so critical to my practice because everybody is different. The next day he came over and that was the first time that I did a design of the human body. I think I dyed 40 people or something like that.
Some time ago I did a dyeing on paper. I had never done a work on paper. It had always been a cotton fabric. I had a big roll of paper and thought why not try it. I have to say: this took me to another place in terms of how the work should be made. That was kind of the “Aha moment”. That will be something that, once I get to Venice, requires more exploring and making. It means moving from just dyeing to actually painting these larger pieces from objects and people.

Are those people mostly your friends?
A majority, I would say, are very close friends of mine. But then there’s also people that were complete strangers. It’s a lot of relinquishing control to me, because you’re giving me your body.

How do you usually proceed? Do you begin with a conversation first and then move into the work?
I am never forcing anyone. I’ve never asked anyone if I can dye them. People always ask me to do it. We sit down and have quite a lengthy conversation. It takes around an hour and a half to two and a half hours, depending on how much information is there and where the dialogue is going. But during that, they’re choosing between 12 and 16 colors out of 100. Those colors are tied to specific moments in their lives: joy, a person, or a moment of self-defeat. I just listen to them, but once I have an idea of that specific moment that is kind of critical to them, I ask them to give me a specific color. All people choose in different ways. Then they lay down onto the fabric. I try to get them as comfortable as possible, but also help them feel very powerful in the moment. I ask them what they want to release. Then I’m dyeing the portrait. I kind of go into a trance when I’m doing it.

How do you feel when people share so many personal things with you?
It’s really beautiful. It can be very intense for some people. Some of them break down, but then other people are so elated. It is quite a powerful experience.

There a lot of exhibitions focusing on textiles right now, for example in Textile Manifeste Zurich or Woven Histories in MoMA in New York. The personal connection that appears through the thread and materiality, and the memories the textiles carry seem to be particularly important. Do you feel that textiles, as a medium, are having a unique impact on the world right now, or even “triggering” it somehow? What is special about this practice that other mediums do not have or cannot do?
It’s finally being recognized as not just craft. If you even look at the Bauhaus, at Annie Albers, she wasn’t allowed to go into painting because she was a woman, so she only could weave. But those weavings are the most powerful out of all of the Bauhaus. So now finally there is this emergence, but a lot of those textile people are women. It is really a woman’s work and a majority of weavers are women. So I think that within the art world, there’s now something that is giving women their place, and it’s not the white cis man getting the place anymore. But it also might just be in fashion right now. But within that spotlight, there’s also so much bad textile work as well.

Can you explain what you mean by “bad”?
It’s when you take textiles and make it a mass-produced item. Again, textile making is a very labor-intensive practice. When I see a textile work that is really good, everything clicks, like with Sheila Hicks or Erin Riley, whose works are really incredible. They’re doing it all by hand. That’s really powerful, beautiful work, where you can see the labor and how the material is being used. They’re not just doing it because it’s in fashion, or because they like the way that it looks. For me, in textile work, you have to have a reason when you use fabric. It is not just because of the aesthetics of it.

Kyle Meyer, 95 Bedford, Spring 2022, Pigment on fabric. Courtesy of the artist

KYLE MEYER’S PERSPECTIVE ON CURATORSHIP

There are so many aspects that you mentioned: It is a personal medium and requires a lot of labor, so it is a physical and intellectual process at the same time. So, talking about exhibitions and displaying the works, what’s your experience with curators and what do you think is important to consider while exhibiting textiles? Is there something special in comparison to other mediums?
Textile is very powerful, but also textile draws you in. It takes you away from the other things. It’s usually very colorful and very plush. People want to touch it. In displaying textiles, all of mine have very specific ways they need to be hung. For example, all of the Interwoven work is framed. I don’t like showing it unframed, but at the Morris Museum show right now, they have four works that are unframed.

Why is it important for you to frame them?
I don’t want people touching them. It’s about preservation, but also the framing puts it in a completely different context. It really makes it like a jewel in this box. If you’re walking by an unframed work, just that presence of the human is going to manipulate it in some way, and I don’t want that. Those works are very precious because they’re precious people. They need to be put into a jewel case to give them that space and also recognition at some point.
Though where the body works, they should just be pinned to the wall, because it is the physical skin of them. They’re not permanent – they will fade over time. They will change like skin or like a person. So, they don’t need to be in a box. Every little mark is a mark of history. I want the interaction with the environment to change them. In 10 years, one is completely falling apart and things have gotten ripped. That’s okay, because that’s the life of the work. So it really depends on my work, the context of the show, the context of the space. But yes, the curator has their own vision, and you kind of have to go with that. Sometimes you agree and sometimes you disagree, but as an artist, you should always be able to compromise at some point. Every moment that I can get to show my work and get to talk about my work and make people think a little bit differently: that’s the most beautiful. “How can I change a little perspective in some way?” It’s even changing me. I make something and I’m like: “Whoa, I was not expecting that”. I’m just very grateful.

Iuliia Kulikova

https://www.thekylemeyer.com

Kyle Meyer, © Kyle Meyer
Process of dyeing. Courtesy of the artist Kyle Meyer
Kyle Meyer, Outhouse Stream, 2019, 244 x 292 cm, Archival pigment print woven with hand dyed cotton fabric. Courtesy of the artist
Kyle Meyer, 95 Bedford, Spring 2022, Pigment on fabric. Courtesy of the artist
Kyle Meyer, 95 Bedford, Spring 2022, Pigment on fabric. Courtesy of the artist
Kyle Meyer, Unidentified 131a, part of Interwoven series, 2021, 91.5 x 137 cm, Archival pigment print woven with waxprint fabric. Courtesy of the artist
Process of dyeing. Courtesy of the artist Kyle Meyer
Kyle Meyer, Sheppherd of Buried Cloth, 2021-2024, 180 x 260 cm, Handy dyed cotton fabric. Courtesy of the artist
Kyle Meyer, Binded relations, 2024, 200 x 265 cm, Hand dyed cotton fabric. Courtesy of the artist
Kyle Meyer, Fire Island Fool, 2024, 115 x 165 cm, Hand dyed cotton fabric. Courtesy of the artist
by

Iuliia Kulikova

September 22 · 25