Gisela McDaniel - Táifinakpo’. The first Solo exhibition in Italy at Poggiali Gallery

Galleria Poggiali presents Táifinakpo’, the first solo exhibition in Italy by American artist Gisela McDaniel, opened on April 9, 2026, at the gallery’s Milan space, concurrently with Subvert, Repair, Reclaim at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on view through August 2026. In parallel, in 2026 the artist will present her work in major international contexts, including the Colby Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Installation View. Courtesy Galleria Poggiali. Photo by Michele Sereni

An internationally recognized artist, Gisela McDaniel’s practice brings visibility to ancestral narratives while addressing pressing contemporary social issues. Rooted in her Native American heritage—specifically her Choctaw lineage—her work foregrounds intergenerational memory and amplifies voices that have historically been marginalized.

As Sophia Thowinsson writes in the exhibition catalogue: “On the occasion of Táifinakpo’, the artist invites us into a universe where identity is not fixed, but rather a living process in constant transformation and healing. The title is not incidental. Táifinakpo’’ literally translates as “without end,” but on a deeper level it suggests “without death.” Rather than a linear notion of time, it proposes persistence: that of ancestral memory and the active presence of those who came before us.”

Through the integration of audio interviews, assemblage, and oil painting, McDaniel intentionally incorporates the voices of her subjects, subverting traditional power dynamics between artist and sitter. Her subjects are primarily women and non-binary individuals who identify as  Micronesian, Indigenous to Turtle Island, Asian, Latinx, and/or multiracial. In doing so, her work challenges and responds to the systemic silencing imposed upon these communities across art, politics, and popular culture.

The portraits presented in the exhibition become presences in their own right: semi-precious stones embedded within the painted surfaces and the exhibition space reinforce themes of protection, resilience, and spiritual grounding.

Conceived as a single immersive installation created specifically for the spaces of Galleria Poggiali, Táifinakpo’’ brings together a total of thirteen works: three large-scale paintings and ten works on paper that expand and deepen the narrative. Taken together, the works invite viewers to enter the artist’s universe, moving between immersion and reflection.

Gisela McDaniel, What has always been within you, 2026, Oil on canvas, consensual artifacts from subject collaborator, found objects, 129 × 182 × 15 cm

Gisela McDaniel (born 1995 in Bellevue, Nebraska; lives and works in New York) is a Chamoru Indigenous artist whose multimedia practice encompasses oil painting, assemblage, and audio interviews. By intentionally incorporating the voices of her subjects, she challenges and redefines conventional power dynamics between artist and sitter.McDaniel has recently presented solo exhibitions at leading international institutions and spaces, including the Ogunquit Museum of American Art (2025), The Mistake Room (2021), and Pilar Corrias (2020; 2022). In 2026, in addition to her exhibition at Galleria Poggiali, the artist will present her work in major international contexts, including 20 Years of MOCAD: A Practice of Multiplicity at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and Imagining an Archipelago: Art from Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Their Diasporas at the Colby Museum of Art.

She has also participated in significant group exhibitions in museum and institutional contexts, including the Hawai‘i Triennial (2025), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2023), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2023), ICA Boston (2022), and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (2022).

Her work is held in numerous public collections, including the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Baltimore Museum of Art; Blenheim Art Foundation, Woodstock (UK); Christen Sveaas Art Collection, Oslo; Elie Khouri Art Foundation, Dubai; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill; Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Miami; Kadist, San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; New Orleans Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka; The Mer Collection, Madrid; The Perimeter, London; and the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), Ann Arbor.

Hans Op de Beeck – Danse Macabre. Solo Exhibition at Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio

Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio presents the solo exhibition of Hans Op de Beeck, titled Danse Macabre, curated by Angel Moya Garcia, from April 11 to October 25, 2026.

Hans Op de Beeck, Danse Macabre. Ph: Dominique Provost

Hans Op de Beeck works across a wide range of media and forms, developing over time a versatile body of work that includes installations, sculptures, video, texts, drawings, photography, and watercolor paintings. Over the past decade, he has also been active in theatre, opera, and contemporary dance as a playwright, director, scenographer, and costume designer. He is best known for his monumental, immersive, and sensory installations, composed of enigmatic, fictional scenes frozen in time, which evoke silent contemplation or moments of wonder. His work explores the complex relationship between human beings and the world around them, while also addressing universal questions related to the invisible framework of existence.

The exhibition at the Tenuta Dello Scompiglio unfolds through a site-specific installation and an animated film. The former, titled Danse Macabre, appears as a black-and-white image of a nocturnal park, composed of bare trees and bodies of water, traversed by a path leading toward a life-size monochrome grey carousel. This evocation of a fictional, colorless landscape functions as a cinematic and atmospheric “opening shot,” open to potential narratives, in which oil barrels become bonfires, treetops are stripped bare, and a winding path leads us toward an abandoned attraction immersed in complete darkness.

The conventional carousel, as we still know it today in many variations, is usually a baroque object, brightly colored, sparkling, and kitsch, nostalgically evoking past times when it faced little competition from today’s noisy and crowded attractions. In 1999, at the beginning of his career, Op de Beeck created the video Blender, in which a pompous, colorful carousel slowly began to rotate before dissolving into an indecipherable swirling motion, like cotton candy, only to come to a halt again. Since then, the carousel has become a recurring motif in his work, serving as a metaphor for the human condition. The artist considers the carousel a deeply human form of entertainment—somehow tragicomic—but also rather absurd, as we place our children on wooden horses and let them spin endlessly in circles.

In these objects or structures of leisure, no longer—or no longer fully—in use, a melancholic undertone emerges. The subdued or vanished joy lends these objects, originally conceived to be in motion, colorful, and crowded, a gloom akin to the emptiness left after a celebration. The monochrome grey color gives the carousel a completely crystallized and inert appearance, like a fossil fixed in time. By removing all color, the carousel is stripped of its final layer of vitality, further distancing it from the real object. This work is a sculptural interpretation, not an imitation. The matte grey suffocates the image, yet at the same time elevates it into something entirely other, like a residue covered in ash after a great fire, or an object abandoned after a war or nuclear catastrophe.

The title Danse Macabre refers to the immobile procession of carriages, horses, and objects alluding to death, which Op de Beeck has conceived as a kind of enlarged still life. Historically, the still life genre has functioned as a memento mori, a reminder of the transience and relativity of our lives. On the carousel, an entire family of skeletons appears to be enjoying themselves, alongside stacks of used plates, remnants of cakes, bottles and empty glasses, ashtrays, fruit, and similar elements that recall an abandoned battlefield. Nothing is as it seems in this seemingly fossilized carousel: the skeleton of a little girl holds a roaring seal on a leash; that of a dandy calmly smokes a cigarette in a carriage; and a small airplane evokes a World War I bomber.

A soundscape, composed by Sam Vloemans and performed by the Hermes Ensemble, resonates distantly throughout the space, guiding us toward the second part of the exhibition, where the animated film Vanishing Point is projected. The title refers to the point on the picture plane in a perspective view where pairs of parallel lines appear to converge. At the distance of the vanishing point, we are no longer able to perceive three-dimensional depth. Op de Beeck uses the term metaphorically, as a turning point that leads from measurability and readability toward the unknown, the indecipherable, the incomprehensible—or from the concrete to the abstract, from the intellectual to the spiritual. The film begins with the image of a child lying peacefully on its back, eyes closed. We are then transported into fictional landscapes, still lifes, and figures.

Together with the music, the watercolors come to life, creating a calm and immersive atmosphere that invites us to disappear into a moment of surrender.

“Vanishing” itself means “to disappear suddenly and completely,” or, in mathematical terms, “to become zero.” Op de Beeck is fascinated by those moments in which, as human beings, we become, for an instant, nothing or no one—when we let go of our linguistic, logical, and rational understanding of the world and slip into a state of self-loss and atemporality.

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.