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.”

In the Canova Rooms of the Museo Correr, a reflection on the poetics of time and matter unfolds, through the works of Canova and the installations of Julian Charrière

The Dialoghi Canoviani series continues at the Museo Correr, an exhibition project that brings contemporary artistic research into dialogue with the legacy of Antonio Canova. This second edition presents a comparison between the French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière (Morges, 1987; lives and works in Berlin) and the great master of Neoclassicism, through a path that unfolds across the Canova Rooms: Spiral Economy: Charrière and Canova

Julian Charrière, Spiral Economy, 2025. © The Artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2026 - Photo by Jens Ziehe

Curated by Chiara Squarcina and Pier Paolo Pancotto, with the collaboration of Claudia Cargnel, the exhibition—on view from April 30 to November 22, 2026—develops as a dialogue between epochs, revealing the poetry of matter. Julian Charrière’s works engage with Canova’s idealized forms, placing marble at the center as a living presence: both body and ghost, a vessel of beauty and a witness to deep time.

Central to the project is the concept of productive tension: on the one hand, the neoclassical ambition to immortalize forms in stone; on the other, the sense of precariousness and processuality that characterizes contemporary creative process. The exhibition showcases this dualism: permanence alongside erosion, the ideal alongside the inevitable, certainty alongside fluidity, the aesthetics of being alongside that of becoming.

Charrière’s proposal is presented in the form of a single, large-scale multisensory installation, closely articulated with the museum’s exceptional collection of Canova artworks, at the center of a contemporary art project for the first time. Visitors are thus immersed in a state of total perceptual recalibration where the ethical and intellectual ideals expressed by Canova are reformulated through Charrière’s gaze, reaffirming their enduring semantic relevance, both iconographically and iconologically. This exercise unfolds through an exhibition itinerary arranged in a sequence that alternates Canova’s creations with those of Charrière, many of which were conceived for the occasion: Venus Italica, 1804-12/Albedo, 2025; Icarus, 1777-79/Controlled Burn, 2022; Orpheus and Eurydice, 1773-76/Stone Speakers, 2024; Spiral Economy, 2025; Self-Portrait, 1812/Imperfect Lovers, 2025.

Through the adoption of various media—installation, photography, performance, sculpture, video—Julian Charrière reflects on the conflictual relationship that exists in the contemporary age between humanity and nature, technology and ecology, industry and science. Both drawing on the methodology as well as deconstructing the idea of a modern explorer or archaeologist, he conducts field work and analyzes the history of the environment to understand its future. To this end, he often travels to remote places on the planet, working in sometimes extreme conditions, not with the aim of contemplating beauty but rather of highlighting the vulnerability and criticality of those contexts.

Julian Charrière, Spiral Economy, 2025, Installation view: Midnight Zone, Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland. © The Artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2026 - Photo by Jens Ziehe

The project for the neoclassical rooms and the Canova collection at the Museo Correr is based on an original, in some ways surprising, dialogue he established over time with Antonio Canova. This dialogue was inspired primarily by the artist’s ability to engage with the highest systems—particularly the dimensions of myth and utopia—through a universal plastic gesture, suspended in time and space. The Possagno master’s approach to creative action reflects his own, finding a harmony with his own aptitude for engaging with timeless themes of general interest.

Charrière's intervention (already invited to the 2017 Visual Arts Biennale and the 2012 and 2021 Architecture Biennale) aims to initiate a subtle yet profound reinterpretation of the Canova rooms through the adoption of a distinct syntactic and operational articulation—sculpture, video, photography, light, and sound. Thus, an unexpected encounter is born between Canova’s classical idealism, embodied primarily in marble, and Charrière’s analysis of the phenomenon of entropy and biological mutation, expressed through multimedia.