Blog | COMBAT ART REVIEW

“Tentativi di fioritura” by Michela Rondinone opens at Exchiesetta

On March 1, at Exchiesetta in Polignano, the installation by Michela Rondinone, Tentativi di fioritura, was inaugurated. The work is the fourth installation within the exhibition dedicated to the Pascali Prize and its winner, Roberto Cuoghi.

The solo exhibition by Roberto Cuoghi, winner of the 27th edition of the Pino Pascali Prize, continues until May 5, 2026 at the Pino Pascali Foundation.

For the occasion, Roberto Cuoghi, together with the Foundation, invited five young artists from the local area to occupy the space of Exchiesetta in Polignano a Mare with their works: Arianna Ladogana, Michela Rondinone, Antonio Milano, Donato Trovato, and Angelo Iodice. After the presentations by Arianna Ladogana, Angelo Iodice, and Donato Trovato, it is now Michela Rondinone who takes over the space with her installation Tentativi di fioritura.

Michela Rondinone’s research revolves around play as a serious act: a primordial gesture expressed through essential signs and direct forms. Through sculpture and installation, she constructs environments that activate imagination and participation, leaving room for error and transformation. In Polignano she presents eight large-scale flowers that transform the space into a suspended landscape. Their stems rise from the floor like forms just born—never in perfect balance, but suggesting a fragile growth that still holds the possibility of becoming.

Michela Rondinone (1999, Matera) lives and works in Bari. She graduated in Sculpture and New Technologies from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bari. Her practice explores play, primordial gesture, and essential signs, experimenting with different materials and media to create installations, sculptures, videos, and participatory workshops. She has taken part in artistic residencies in Romania and developed large-scale projects in dialogue with space and material. She collaborates with the Fondazione Dioguardi, leading creative workshops for children and young people, and has created video scenographies for theatre productions. Her practice integrates clay, plasticine, drawing, videomapping, and stop-motion animation, transforming places and materials into playful and poetic experiences that open new relationships between viewer, space, and artwork.

Eglė Budvytytė will represent Lithuania at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia with animism sings anarchy

At the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2026, Eglė Budvytytė will represent Lithuania, presenting the new multichannel film installation animism sings anarchy. The work will be presented at Fucina del Futuro, Castello 5063/B, 30122 Venice.

The exhibition preview for press and guests will take place on Wednesday, May 6 at 1:00 pm.

The project has been commissioned by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, under the guidance of Commissioner Lolita Jablonskienė, Director of the National Gallery of Art, a division of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art. The project is curated by Louise O’Kelly, an independent curator based in London and founding director of Block Universe, a major international performance art festival and commissioning body.

Eglė Budvytytė is an artist based between Vilnius and Amsterdam who works at the intersection of visual and performing arts. Her practice—spanning singing, video, and performance—explores the persuasive power of collectivity, vulnerability, and the porous relationships between bodies, audiences, and environments.

Shot on 16mm film, animism sings anarchy is a performative and poetic attempt to translate archaeological research and its materials into songs, emotions, movements, and altered states of consciousness. The film draws on the research of Lithuanian anthropologist and archaeologist Marija Gimbutas on matrilineal and animist Neolithic societies—an influential source for artists, scholars, and ecologists associated with second-wave feminism.

Filming has so far taken place in southeastern Italy, near Grotta Scaloria, the site of a Neolithic water cult where Gimbutas conducted excavations in the late 1970s. Continuing a practice that works through the body and in relation to place, Budvytytė structures the film’s scenes around museum interiors and a stretch of the Apulian coastline dotted with ancient caves and watery burial sites.

Shaped by these locations, the sequences unfold as ritual movements: a form of animist prayer that anchors choreography to the landscape and to the remnants of the past. Facsimiles of anthropomorphic deities—appearing as 3D-printed figurines and humble photocopies—provide a devotional locus for tender, trembling choreographies: gestures that evoke altered states of trance, ecstasy, and compassionate surrender.

Curator Louise O’Kelly stated: “I am honored to be working with Eglė on the creation of this important new work, one of her most ambitious and significant projects to date. Shot for the first time on 16mm, animism sings anarchy charges archaeological artefacts, polyphonic melodies, and trembling choreographies with anarchic potential. In the process of collaborating with her community of creatives, I feel that something special is emerging: a medicine that is urgently needed for our times.”

Commissioner Lolita Jablonskienė commented:“The Lithuanian National Museum of Art is pleased to announce that Eglė Budvytytė will present a new work at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Among the artist’s most ambitious works to date, the project draws on ideas and theories across different times and geographies, bringing to light forgotten or suppressed connections between the visible and the infinite.”

Lithuania has participated in the International Art and Architecture Exhibitions of the Venice Biennale since 1999. The Lithuanian Pavilion has received a Special Mention four times and, in 2019, was awarded the Golden Lion for Sun & Sea (Marina).

The project will be accompanied by a catalogue co-edited by Louise O’Kelly and Virginija Januškevičiūtė, designed by Goda Budvytytė, featuring essays by Amelia Groom and Louise O’Kelly, as well as an interview between Eglė Budvytytė and Virginija Januškevičiūtė. The publication is produced in collaboration with the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Vilnius; Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg; and BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOIT, Berlin.

The exhibition project and installation design have been conceived by Marija Olšauskaitė, an artist whose practice unfolds through different modes of collaboration.

Giuditta Branconi unveils Cannon Fodder at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia

For Cannon Fodder, Giuditta Branconi’s first solo exhibition in an institutional venue, the young artist has created a series of new paintings alongside a large-scale installation composed of painted canvases that visitors will be able to physically enter. The exhibition will be held at the Collezione Maramotti (Reggio Emilia) from 8 March to 26 July 2026.

The title of the exhibition (“cannon fodder”) refers to expendable bodies, to a material destined to be consumed by a larger system. In the shift from the military field to a visual and symbolic dimension, Branconi’s images become ammunition of denunciation aimed at a violent and oppressive present: compressed, charged, ready to detonate on the surface of the canvas in an explosion that is not only formal but also emotional and political—an excess that refuses composure.

Branconi’s painting, rich and overflowing, is often characterized by an overwhelming visual density and develops both on the front and the back of the thin fabrics she uses as a support, multiplying expressive possibilities and layers of interpretation.

By combining iconographic references from both high and popular culture—fragments of literature, comics, newspapers, songs, and instant messaging—the artist transforms the space of the painting into a teeming and oxymoronic field, a semiotic labyrinth where images, words, and seemingly incongruous symbols freely coexist, much like in a stream of consciousness.

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