#BiennaleArte2026 - Palazzo Marin - Shirin Neshat - Do U Dare!

"Do U Dare! explores one artist’s gaze upon another, 

and the connections that emerge 

between them."

 

Palazzo Marin 

Shirin Neshat - Do U Dare! 

At Palazzo Marin - until September 6 - Shirin Neshat - new film trilogy - Do You Dare! - curated by - Ilaria Bernardi and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi - explores themes of displacement, isolation, protest, artistic obsession, and the line between creation and self-destruction.

 Visual artist and filmmaker - Shirin Neshat

This film trilogy was inspired by the story of Nasim Aghdam, an Iranian Bahá’í woman who fled persecution as a child and grew up isolated in suburban California, suspended between American society and a fading connection to her Iranian heritage. Online, she created stylized videos of song and dance that expressed longing, rage, and protest while critiquing authoritarianism, consumerism, media spectacle, and the objectification of women. After gaining millions of views, YouTube shut down her channel. Devastated by what she perceived as censorship echoing her family's experiences in Iran, Aghdam entered YouTube’s headquarters in 2018, injuring several people before taking her own life.

Shot in three different socioeconomic landscapes in New York, the three films investigate the paradox between women’s inner and outer worlds, reality and illusion, and American society and the Iranian female perspective. 

Actor - Pegah Ferydoni - Curators - Ilaria Bernardi and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi

Visual artist and filmmaker - Shirin Neshat

Pegah Ferydoni 

 

 

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Archivio di Stato di Venezia - Dayanita Singh - Archivio

"ordering, containing, protecting"

 Archivio di Stato di Venezia  

Dayanita Singh - Archivio

For the first time in its history, the Archivio di Stato in Venice opens to the public as an exhibition venue with Archivio by Dayanita Singh - until July 31 - curated - Andrea Anastasio. Archivio pays tribute to the Italian archives Singh has photographed over the past decade and to her evolving archive of images made in Italy over the last 25 years. The exhibition brings together two interconnected bodies of work: her engagement with institutional archives and her long-running visual exploration of Italy’s architecture, interiors, artworks, friends, archivists, flowers, and more.

In Archivio, the act of photographing becomes a form of cataloguing – an ongoing attempt to understand how memory is shaped, structured, and preserved.

Singh revisits images she has made in Italian cities since the late 1990s, placing them in dialogue with her extensive studies of archives in India and elsewhere. Through this encounter, the exhibition proposes the archive not as a static storehouse but as a living organism, continuously rearranged through the artist’s editorial play, display structures, and resequencing of images.

Curator Andrea Anastasio situates Singh’s practice within the broader question of how we construct cultural memory. The installation reflects his interest in the poetic and philosophical resonance of archival labour – ordering, containing, protecting – while allowing Singh’s photographs to remain open and porous, shifting with each new context.

More than 350 photographs are organized by city and subject. Sixty images focus on Venice, including the Archivio di Stato and other lagoon locations, while the rest explore Rome, Florence, Turin, Bologna, Naples, Palermo, as well as Indian archives, and the homes of friends and acquaintances, past and recent exhibitions.

Dayanita Singh - Archivio

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#BiennaleArte2026 - Palazzo Franchetti - Eva and Franco Mattes - Rage Bait

 Palazzo Franchetti 

Eva and Franco Mattes - Rage Bait

At Palazzo Franchetti - Autotelic Foundation presents - Rage Bait - Until June 30 - curated - Nadim Samman and Luisa Haustein - an exhibition by the Italian artists Eva and Franco Mattes.  The exhibition title is derived from the internet slang term ‘rage bait’: content engineered to provoke a visceral emotional response before reason can intervene. Spanning installation, video, and generative AI, the show explores how rage bait is the logical — often inevitable — endpoint of platforms optimised for user engagement.

The artists subject a suite of 16th century rooms in the palazzo to architectural banalisation. A scenography of prefabricated components including raised flooring cages and cable trays - most commonly fitted in datacentres and crypto mining facilities - support two new bodies of work - Cursed cat (in the Dataset -2025) and Are You Still There? - 2025.

Eva and Franco Mattes are among today's foremost artists of networked culture. This exhibition continues their recent investigation into the gap between online culture's polished surface and its murky ethical depths.

Eva and Franco Mattes

Cursed Cat (in the Dataset) - 2025, involves a computer running a Large Language Model train exclusively on images of a single sculpture: a black, earless, stuffed cat, its expression frozen somewhere between triumph and rage - a physical incarnation of the well-known internet meme 'Cursed Cat', where it poses for a moving camera mounted on a robotic arm, that also captures the background. The ever-evolving AI model is a generative system that constantly spews out novel iterations of 'Cursed Cat' distributing them on the internet where they are absorbed into future AI training datasets. The artist intend "to corrupt or alter the imagination of AI" so that the 'Cursed Cat' becomes a ghost in the machine - liable to appear periodically no matter what user's prompt maybe.

Also exhibited other AI-generated 'cursed cats' are made physical in a series of sculptures: using material such as wood-carved from the Dolomites, glass forged in Murano - above - and plastic food replica from Japan.

Are You Still There? - 2025 - a series of AI-generated videos in which 'Italian Brainrot' characters restage real conversations from a suicide prevention hotline.

Rage Bait arrives at a moment when provocation is no longer fringe but is instead native to digital infrastructures. Under these conditions, the strange is the new normal — a feedback loop in which platforms, users, and algorithms train one another into ever more reactive configurations.

Le Cabanon

Rage Bait 

The second venue presenting Rage Bait was in a private swimming pool located next to Palladio's Redentore church on the Giudecca where Eva and Franco Mattes staged a monumental site-specific video installation titled - But I Love Human - 2025 . There the pool water rippled with the reflection of moving images generated by a massive LED screen suspended over the water.  The work staging created a contemporary reflection akin to that of the Greek myth Narcissus, who vainly fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. 

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#BiennaleArte2026 - Ama Venezia - Aura

AMA Venezia

Aura

The exhibition - Aura - until November 22 - brings works and presences into relation, where art emerges through intensity, perception, and shared experience. Drawn entirely from the AMA Collection, the exhibition explores the tensions between material and immaterial, the seen and the sensed.

Richard Serra - Sign Board Prop - 1969

A significant work by Ed Ruscha, created for AMA Venezia, forms a bridge between Venice, U.S.A. and Venezia, Italy, while a live work by Tino Sehgal foregrounds movement, presence, and direct encounter. Alongside works by Arthur Jafa, Charles Ray, Christopher Wool, Richard Serra, Laura Owens, Jenny Saville, and others, these works engage the architectural and perceptual conditions of the space in distinct ways.

Ed Ruscha - Venezia, Venice - 2026

Brandon Morris - Ghost Dress 12 - 2025

Christopher Wool - Untitled

Charles Ray - Everybody Takes Their Pants Off At least Once A Day - 2024

Aura invites visitors to slow down and look closely, allowing vision to become a physical, emotional, and mental experience.

Sang Woo Kim - Clarity 001 - 2020

Arthur Jafa - Townshend - 2025

Elisabeth Peyton - Larry - 2010

 AMA Venezia - Aura

Fondamenta de Ca' Vendramin 2395 - Venezia

Wednesday-Sunday

 

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#BiennaleArte2026 - Palazzo Cesari Marchesi - The Pool NYC - The Glass Aquarium - Party Photos

 Palazzo Cesari Marchesi - The Pool NYC

The Glass Aquarium - within - Marriage of the Sea - Il Ratto di Venezia

Party Photos

At Palazzo Cesari Marchesi - The Pool NYC - presented - during preview week of the Venice Biennale - The Glass Aquarium - until November 22 - an exhibition dedicated to the great masters of glass: Lino Tagliapietra - Tristano di Robilant - Maria Grazia Rosin - Dale Chihuly -  they are presented within the - Marriage of the Sea - Il Ratto di Venezia - a site-specific installation by Austin Young at Palazzo Cesari Marchesi which was originally conceived for Venice in 2024 and continues to transform the piano nobile of the palazzo into an immersive environment, forming the spatial and conceptual framework within which the exhibition is presented.

The Pool NYC - and - Artists

Austin Young - Maria Grazia Rosin - The Pool NYC's Luigi Franchin and 

Viola Romoli - Tristiano di Robilant 

The exhibition is set to be a celebration of artists working in glass. Tagliapietra and Chihuly, have worked together, creating unprecedented forms and techniques born from the genius of both minds. Tagliapietra, an undisputed master, blows glass into masterpieces without sketches or plans, guided purely by breath and mind. Two world-renowned masters, they continue to inspire younger generations.  From the next generation in the global glass scene, Maria Grazia Rosin and Tristano di Robilant are essential presences.

 Austin Young - Marriage of the Sea - Il Ratto di Venezia

Austin Young

Robert and Andrew Olliver-Jones

Isabella, Claudio and Ilaria Ciani Bassetti

Camilla Purdon and Erik Hannikainen

Tristano di Robilant creates harmonious, enigmatic sculptures suspended between solidity and weightlessness—light, transparent forms that embody his poetic vision. His process begins with a spontaneous drawing, an immediate gesture transformed into three-dimensional form in the furnace. Through siliceous shapes inspired by poetry and literature, Tristano, together with Maestro Zilio, turns ideas into drawings and brings them to life in a single breath.

Dale Chihuly, participates with - Seaforms - works inspired by marine forms, light and transparency—spirals of color that reveal layered, rhythmic, and flowing structures.

Dale Chihuly - Seaforms

Maria Novella and Aurora Papafava dei Carraresi 

Andrea di Robilant

Beppi, Dodo and Gigi Franchin

Bartolomeo Bellati

Giovanna Carrer and Olga Spanio di Spilimbergo

Maria Grazia Rosin, a master of rock-like, pulsating, mirrored forms inspired by octopuses, cuttlefish, and deep-sea creatures, remains deeply attentive to the environment that hosts her work, placing it with grace and sensitivity in complete harmony with the palace.

Lorenzo and Valentina Marangoni

Ilaria Ciani Bassetti

Dale Chihuly - Seaforms

Bikem de Montebello and friends

Lino Tagliapietra, based in Murano, participates with a work that is a hymn to color: shifting brushstrokes of yellow, like the moment you enter underwater and the marine world welcomes you with a light that seems switched on.

Olivier Lexa - Vase - Lino Tagliapietra

 

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