Monira Al Qadiri. Geologies of Time

Planeta Cultura presents, on Saturday, May 23, 2026, at Tenuta Planeta Ulmo (AG), the tenth edition of Viaggio in Sicilia, a traveling project that for over twenty years has invited Italian and international artists to engage with the island’s landscape, history, and layered cultural identities, positioning Sicily as a site of research, exploration, and contemporary production.

Monira Al Qadiri

This year’s edition is part of the Gibellina 2026 OFF program, a calendar of collateral events promoted within the framework of Gibellina Italian Capital of Contemporary Art, expanding the project’s resonance and strengthening the dialogue between culture, creation, and community that has always defined Planeta Cultura’s commitment. Within this context also falls the collaboration with Fondazione Merz, with which Planeta Cultura has, for years, pursued an ongoing path of research and exchange.

The protagonist of this edition is Monira Al Qadiri, a Kuwaiti artist born in Senegal, educated in Japan and now based in Berlin—among the most recognizable figures on the international contemporary art scene—who has developed a practice capable of weaving together the Middle East and global contexts, personal memory and collective imaginaries. Her work, presented in international institutions and biennials across Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, addresses themes such as geopolitics, extractive industries, cultural identity, and the imaginaries of oil, transforming materials and symbols into powerful narratives of the present. Having grown up in Kuwait during the Gulf War, the artist has built a practice in which biography, collective history, and landscape merge, offering a visually compelling reflection on the relationship between resources, power, and transformation.

Selected by Valentina Bruschi, Beatrice Merz, and Vito Planeta, the artist presents Geologie del tempo / Geologies of Time, a project curated by Valentina Bruschi and Vito Planeta, developed from a nomadic residency held in October 2025 during the grape harvest: a journey across the island conceived as an immersion into deep time, its geological and cultural memories, and the transformations that have shaped its identity.

Trapani, Parco Archeologico di Selinunte. Photo: Federica Jannuzzi

During the journey, Al Qadiri was accompanied by photographer Federica Iannuzzi, who documented the experience step by step, capturing through images a path shaped by discoveries, encounters, and revelations. For over a week, her gaze accompanied that of the artist across archaeological sites and emblematic landscapes—from Selinunte to Enna, from the Cretto di Burri in Gibellina to Mount Etna, from Noto to Palermo—in dialogue with places such as Palazzo dei Normanni, Palazzo Chiaromonte Steri, and the paleontological collections of the Museo Gemmellaro.

From this engagement with ruins, natural archives, and scientific narratives emerges the trajectory leading to the site-specific work presented at Ulmo, the result of an experience grounded in observation and direct relationship with the island—one that has profoundly shaped the artist’s research. The intervention is conceived as a permanent work, intended to become an enduring part of the Ulmo landscape.

Andrea Contin. Secondo giusta misura

From April 9 to 19, 2026, for the fourth edition of Collateral. Mostre al CUBO—a program curated by Elisabetta Longari for the foyer of PACTA dei Teatri, presenting installations connected to the themes of the performances on the bill—Andrea Contin presents Secondo giusta misura. The project, whose title echoes Heraclitus’ fragment in which fire is conceived as a living principle that ignites and extinguishes according to a just measure, is conceived in relation to the performance The Picture of Dorian Gray, based on the novel by Oscar Wilde.

Andrea Contin, Flame (chains), 2013, courtesy l'artista, foto Simone Falso

The project unfolds around Flame (chains), a 2013 video in which a figure, crossed by the circular motion of chains of fire, traces a sequence of luminous lines in the dark space—like a temporary, unstable form of writing. Alongside the full-body version, a second projection focuses on the face, where light engraves and transforms the features, revealing an inner tension rather than a defined physiognomy.

The installation is completed by a series of previously unseen drawings, which extend the field of the work without making its process explicit, like fragments of an image that continues to shift. In dialogue with The Picture of Dorian Gray, Secondo giusta misura stages a possible relationship between image and identity. If in the novel the transformation of the soul settles into the portrait, here it emerges in gesture and fire, in a form that appears and dissolves at the same instant.

The body does not represent, but becomes the site of a tension, traversed by an energy that manifests and disperses at once. Without assuming an illustrative function, the intervention inhabits the foyer as a visual and perceptual threshold—an image that accompanies the viewer toward the stage while simultaneously extending its echo.

Diario veneziano. The project by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov that places Venetians at its center unfolds between the Biennale and the city

A new chapter is added to Diario veneziano, the participatory project by Ilya Kabakov and Emilia Kabakov, curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Giulia Abate, which will be presented in Venice on the occasion of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia: the city’s intimate mapping will extend from the piano nobile of Ca’ Tron (9 May – 28 June 2026) to the Biennale Gardens, within the Padiglione Venezia, entering into dialogue with Note persistenti, the exhibition project curated by Giovanna Zabotti with Denis Isaia and Cesare Biasini Selvaggi.

In keeping with the curatorial theme In Minor Keys, the Pavilion takes shape as a sensitive score that invites visitors to attune themselves to the deepest frequencies of Venice: those that emerge from its submerged layers, from the material that sustains it, from intimate narratives, and from the collective dimension that runs through it.

Across the sequence of spaces that guide visitors through four symbolic dimensions of the city—submerged, domestic, mythological, and collective—the exhibition unfolds through an equal number of interdisciplinary artistic interventions in dialogue with one another. Alberto Scodro’s sculptures, which investigate the invisible processes of matter and evoke the dimension of the underwater world, resonate with Dardust’s immersive sound composition, developed with Paolo Fantin, H-Farm, and Cisco, as well as with the works included in the project Artefici del Nostro Tempo, dedicated to the emerging expressions of younger generations of artists. Within this polyphonic score, the domestic and relational dimension finds one of its most significant expressions in Venetian Diary by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, which constitutes the heart of the collective project conceived by the duo with the participation of Venetians, along a path that connects the Venice Pavilion and Ca’ Tron.

Three years after Ilya Kabakov’s passing, Venice welcomes one of the most emblematic projects by the couple, in art as in life: a monumental and participatory work that takes the form of a choral self-portrait of the city. Curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Giulia Abate, Venetian Diary takes shape at Ca’ Tron—the Iuav University seat overlooking the Grand Canal—where the piano nobile is transformed into a large narrative device, and continues at the Venice Pavilion, reassembling the unity of the project in dialogue with the exhibition path of Note persistenti.

Not an exhibition about Venice, but an exhibition with Venice: this is the premise guiding the entire project. Around 500 inhabitants of the metropolitan city, belonging to different generations, social backgrounds, and urban areas, have contributed by writing a diary page recounting their relationship with the city and by lending a personal object capable of representing it. Fragments of lives, memories, and desires thus come together in a constellation of stories that restores the social and emotional complexity of the lagoon.

As Emilia Kabakov states: “From the stories collected, it emerges just how full Venice is of people who work hard to sustain not only the city, but also a sense of community rarely found in the digital age. At a time when political, economic, and religious differences seem insurmountable, Venice is a beacon of hope: an example of what happens when neighbors support one another, sharing the responsibility of caring for their home for future generations.”

Portrait Emilia and Ilya Kabakov by Werner Hannapel

Displayed in a series of thematic showcases and accompanied by the stories entrusted by the participants, the collected objects—tools, keepsakes, minimal traces of everyday life and of the future—become true “resonance chambers” of lived experience, transforming the work into a device of collective listening. In keeping with the Kabakovs’ poetics and their idea of the “total installation,” the experience is not limited to viewing, but takes shape as an immersive space in which the individual dimension intertwines with the universal one.

As Cesare Biasini Selvaggi explains: “The objects we asked Venetians to lend us are not simple ready-mades, but ‘resonance chambers’ of lives. They are teddy bears, tools, fragments of small-scale biographies that, brought together, compose a map of feeling, where art ceases to be an object to look at and becomes a collective affective diary, reminding us that being protagonists means, first and foremost, being together.”