#BiennaleArte2026 - Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation - Lydia Ourahmane - 5 Works

Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation 

Lydia Ourahmane - 5 Works

The Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation presents a new solo exhibition by - Conceptual artist - Lydia Ourahmane - 5 Works - until - November 22 - curated - Polly Staple.  Created during the artist's 2026 residency in Venice, the exhibition is shaped by collaborations with local craftspeople, technicians and community organisations. Bringing together sculpture, installation, sound and found materials—including antique sculpture moulds, church lighting and decommissioned bed linen—5 Works explores themes of displacement, exchange and collective memory.  A highlight is a new landing pier - above - commissioned for the island of Poveglia, installed at the Foundation before being transferred to the island after the exhibition closes, it reflects Ourahmane's interest in works that extend beyond the gallery and continue to serve a public purpose.

(45.3820696, 12.3294242) - 2026

Offerta Luce €1 - 2026

Using materials such as antique plaster moulds, church lighting, decommissioned hotel bed linen, and handmade bead curtains, Ourahmane draws attention to the histories and forms of labour embedded within them. Rather than presenting sculpture as a self-contained object, the works reveal the networks of care, maintenance, and exchange that make them possible.

1.3 tons of decommissioned bed linen from 200 Venetian hotels - 2026

Many of the works emerge from partnerships with Venetian institutions and community groups, grounding the exhibition in the city's social and cultural fabric.   Through these site-specific collaborations, Ourahmane examines how art can intersect with everyday life, revealing the social, political and material forces that shape places and communities.

Manuela, Margherita, Marianna, Monia, Patrizia - 2026

Angel - 2026

5 Works operates as a series of encounters that unfold across the rooms of the Foundation’s building. The dormant void, contained energy, and its potential are concepts that Ourahmane uses as a dynamic within her work but also as a motif within the staging of the exhibition. In seemingly empty rooms the lights turn on and off or the aroma of cooking greets you.

Rock Soup - 2026

Ourahmane’s practice is focused on the real politics of daily life as much as exploring how art itself is valued and produced, distributed and displayed. We are living in a new world order in which waste collapses into sublime abstraction for many but remains a brutal reality for others. This requires a shift in perspective. What then is the form for our present moment? At what point does art insert itself into reality? In 5 Works, matter is always negotiating its terms.

324 Photos 

- Giudecca, Dorsoduro, Poveglia, Cannaregio, Napoli, Mirano, Murano - 2026

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#BiennaleArte2026 - Palazzo Franchetti - Turandot: To the Daughters of the East

"...works that reflect on memory, migration, mythology, identity 

and the enduring complexities of history"

 Palazzo Franchetti 

Turandot: To the Daughters of the East

At Palazzo Franchetti - The Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art - presented - an official collateral event - La Biennale di Venezia -  TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East - until October 31 - curated - Dr Ziba Ardalan, the exhibition brings together eleven remarkable women artists—Lida Abdul, Afruz Amighi, Huma Bhabha, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Saodat Ismailova, Madina Joldybek, Daria Kim, Nazira Karimi, Farideh Lashai, Tala Madani and Mona Hatoum.

 Mona Hatoum - Hot Spot

Saodat Ismailova - What Was My Name? - 2020

Spanning video, installation, sculpture, painting, textiles and spoken word, the exhibition brings together works that reflect on memory, migration, mythology, identity and the enduring complexities of history. 

Nazira Karimi - Return Policy - 2019

Curator - Dr. Ziba Ardalan

Huma  Bhabha - Road to Balkh - 2015

Inspired by the legendary figure of Turandot, whose origins lie in Persian literature, the exhibition reframes her as an emblem of resilience, wisdom and creative agency - and - together, these artists in the exhibition - present - compelling perspectives that honour the richness and plurality of women's voices across Central Asia and the wider East.

Farideh Lashai - Gone Down the Hole - 2010

Madina Joldybek

Director - Fondazione Giacomo Puccini - Luigi Viani

 

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#BiennaleArte 2026 - SMAC Venice - San Marco Art Centre - Lee Ufan

 SMAC - San Marco Art Centre 

Lee Ufan

Dia Art Foundation presents a major solo presentation of work by Lee Ufan - until November 22 -  at -  SMAC Venice - curated - Jessica Morgan - developed in close partnership with the artist and supported by - Pace gallery, the exhibition traces the evolution of seven decades of Lee Ufan's iconic visual language with works ranging from new and historical paintings to large-scale installations and a new site-specific commission. Developed in close partnership with the artist, the exhibition traces his iconic visual language with works ranging from new and historical paintings to large-scale installations and a new site-specific commission.

 

Relatum - Formerly Iron Field - 1969/2026

Lee, one of the foremost figures of the Japanese Mono-ha - School of Things - as well as a key contributor to the Korean Dansaekhwa - Monochromatic Paintings -  movements, has long explored the possibilities of embodying and representing space and time through painterly gestures on canvas.  The metaphysical observations of the relationship between entities are similarly explored in his site-specific paintings that are made directly on the floor and walls of a given space. Here, the architecture is part of the dialogue between the painted and the unpainted, the mark and the surrounding space.

Response - Excavated I - 2022

From Line - 1980 - comprises a downward stroke that captures a singular moment, exemplifying Lee's concern with the passage of time. With these reductive, repetitive gestures, the artist meditates on the act of painting and enduring examination of the representation of space - emphasizing absence and presence - as well as the cyclical nature of existence articulated through the systematic act of the brushstroke's release of paint.

From Line - 1980

Dialogue - 2008

With Winds - 1990

The Correspondance series is a return to an emphasis on the foregrounding empty space made evident by the surrounding elements. In their sparseness, the artist's strokes make clear the relation between unpainted and painted space, between absence and presence.

Correspondance - 1994

Two locally sourced, rounded stones - intentionally selected for their specific forms - flank a mirrored path that rests atop a layer of pebbles that fill the space.  The room-sized installation invites the viewer to traverse a shifting terrain, moving from the unstable surface of the pebbles to the smooth, reflective path in an experience that oscillates between the natural and the industrial.

Relatum - The Mirror Road - 2021-2022

The  exhibition is staged across eight of SMAC Venice’s galleries at the Procuratie in Piazza San Marco, holistically, it is designed to reflect both Lee’s long-standing dialogue with architectural space and his continued commitment to creating environments that prompt reflection and heightened awareness.

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#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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