Contemporary Art | COMBAT ART REVIEW 3/4

Ana Silva – Eau. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Italy at GAMeC, Bergamo

Opening on February 25, 2026, GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo presents Eau, the first solo exhibition in an Italian institution by Angolan–Portuguese artist Ana Silva (Calulo, 1979).

The project unfolds within a framework that brings into dialogue two distinct yet interconnected moments in the museum’s programming, under the direction of Lorenzo Giusti: Thinking Like a Mountain, the biennial program developed between 2024 and 2025, which opened a shared space for reflection on sustainability and the collective dimension of artistic experience; and Pedagogy of Hope, which takes up this legacy and, in 2026, shifts the focus towards the educational dimension and the role of art as a practice of knowledge, relation, and transformation.

Inspired by the thinking of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who conceives education as a practice of freedom, the program is the result of an ongoing co-design process between Sara Tonelli and Rachele Bellini from the Education Department and the curatorial team, comprising Sara Fumagalli, Valentina Gervasoni, and Irene Guandalini.

Through a rich and articulated calendar of activities—from a permanent laboratory of pedagogical experimentation at Palazzo della Ragione to exhibition projects in Spazio Zero, from talks and workshops with international guests to the new season of Radio GAMeC—Pedagogy of Hope will actively engage diverse audiences throughout the year, strengthening the institution’s role as a space for dialogue, participation, and collective responsibility.

Conceived for GAMeC’s Spazio Zero, Ana Silva’s exhibition is developed in collaboration with a network of local female embroiderers, invited by the artist to intervene on her textile works, addressing one of the most urgent crises of our time: access to water.

In the production of her works, Silva initially entrusts the subjects she conceives and designs to Angolan male embroiderers—for in Angola, only men are permitted to use sewing machines—before completing the works herself, adding decorations, glitter, and sequins by hand. Through the language of embroidery—traditionally associated with care, memory, and resistance—the artist denounces water scarcity, and reveals a reality in which water is considered a privilege rather than a right. Each stitch silently bears witness to a fundamental need which is denied, highlighting the tension between the delicacy of the gesture and the seriousness of the reality.

Ana Silva’s artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of memory, materiality, and sociocultural critique, engaging with the effects of globalization, consumption, and transcontinental flows. Her work takes shape through a gesture that is both simple and radical: the recovery of textiles, practices, and forms of female knowledge long relegated to the private sphere, now adopted as part of the contemporary artistic language.

The industrial fabrics used by the artist bear the marks of history experienced firsthand: mass-produced in Africa or for Africa, and once central to everyday life, they now accumulate, having been replaced or forgotten, and ultimately become waste in a global system of accelerated production and consumption. Silva intervenes in this cycle by recovering and re-semanticizing these materials. Through the use of embroidery, she slows down the industrial rhythms and adds a manual, repetitive, and bodily sense of time.

The artist lives and works between Portugal, Brazil, and Angola, navigating a plurality of territories, experiences, and cultures that resonate throughout her work—particularly in her representation of female subjects. These figures appear fragile and incomplete, embedded within geometric patterns that evoke serial production, global markets, and colonial legacies that remain unsolved.

By operating on these patterns through embroidery, the artist introduces an interruption—a pause, a breath. The manual gesture reinscribes industrial fabric within a broader ecosystem where sustainability is understood not only as an environmental issue, but also as a cultural and social one. Sustaining means caring for, mending, extending the life of what seemed destined for the landfill. The freehand drawing, visible threads, and absence of a finished surface further reinforce her rejection of fixed identities or singular narratives: these figures are bodies in the making.

The exhibition also presents a body of Silva’s earlier works, tracing the evolution of her artistic research: the O Fardo / Vestir Memórias series. It consists of works made from plastic and raffia sacks used to transport clothing from Europe to Africa for second-hand markets, reconfiguring these objects as artistic supports and tools for critical reflection. Filled with garments yet also bound up in invisible histories and trajectories, these sacks are removed from their original function and transformed into narrative surfaces. Here too, the artist intervenes through embroidery and stitching, incorporating human figures, scenes of everyday life, and symbolic motifs that evoke social relations, childhood, care, and the transmission of memory.

The choice of support here is not neutral: materials originally associated with waste expose economic asymmetries, question circuits of consumption, and reveal the environmental and social consequences of the excess generated by systems of production and consumption in the Global North and then dumped onto the countries of the Global South. At the same time, the works propose a sensitive and poetic reappropriation of residue, transformed into a material of resistance, affirmation, and reconstruction.

The works presented in the exhibition engage with ecology as a relational field connecting bodies, materials, histories, and production systems. Silva ponders which stories may be told on the basis of what has been forgotten or discarded. Textile practice, social research, and environmental awareness thus intertwine within the exhibition space, offering a critical reinterpretation of everyday life.

Ana Silva. Eau

February 25 - September 6, 2026

GAMeC - Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo | Spazio Zero

Via San Tomaso, 53 - 24121 Bergamo

Qiu Xiaofei. The Theater of Whither and Thrive

For his debut exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, Qiu Xiaofei presents new paintings and works on paper inspired by his discovery of previously unknown family photographs — a cache of images uncovered after the death of the artist’s father.

With ‘The Theater of Wither and Thrive,’ Qiu considers the ceaseless evolution of the world and the ways in which that unpredictable process intersects with the subtle and elusive formation of personal memory. His work gives shape to these phenomena, drawing on Chinese cultural and philosophical traditions, as well as the influence of poets Robert Lowell and Emily Dickinson. Nostalgia, loss and wonder are distilled into compositions that suggest the vastness of the theater of life: presence and absence, prosperity and decline, grand histories and individual emotions gyre in the tidal dramas of human experience.

The family photographs Qiu found among his late father’s belongings form the psychological engine of this new body of work. The stories of love and loss captured in heretofore undeveloped rolls of silver-halide film, peeling and oxidized from the passage of time, set in motion the artist’s broader consideration of the cycle of life. The exhibition’s title, ‘The Theater of Wither and Thrive,’ captures the drama inherent in this cycle, and references Qiu’s familial connections to the stage: his grandparents were directors of the Yongfeng Society, the legendary Beijing theater troupe where his father was a painter and set designer. Many of the works on view at Hauser & Wirth—including the painting of a dense red forest that greets visitors entering the gallery and is the exhibition’s namesake—make use of a distorted ground and scale to evoke the flatness of the theater backdrops so familiar to Qiu’s childhood.

Natural and architectural elements of the artist’s hometown in China intertwine with visages of both relatives and otherworldly humanoid monsters, forming hallucinatory scenes across the paintings and works on paper. Flowers and fallen petals recur throughout the works, reminders that ecological renewal is a natural consequence of death, that loss gives rise to growth. In four large-scale paintings along the gallery’s back wall, Qiu explores that eternal terrestrial and emotional story through the passage of the four seasons, connecting cyclical transformations from the natural world with the human experience.

John Giorno: The Performative Word

Retracing more than sixty years of history and culture, MAMbo is dedicating the first major institutional retrospective to John Giorno, a poet and performer with a magnetic stage presence, who transformed the word into an experience and a form of art.

A poet and magnetic performer, John Giorno (New York, 1936 – New York, 2019) transformed the word into a form of art.

From 5 February to 3 May 2026, the MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, part of the Musei Civici Sector of the Municipality of Bologna, presents John Giorno: The Performative Word, curated by Lorenzo Balbi. This first major institutional retrospective, hosted in the Sala delle Ciminiere, celebrates one of the most radical and visionary figures in contemporary culture.

The exhibition is part of the institutional programme of ART CITY Bologna 2026, a calendar of exhibitions and events promoted by the Municipality of Bologna with the support of BolognaFiere on the occasion of Arte Fiera.

A key figure of the New York avant-garde, poet, artist, and activist, John Giorno broke down disciplinary boundaries, turning poetry into a living body and a gesture capable of inhabiting unexpected spaces. His friendships and collaborations with some of the most significant figures of the time — including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, William Burroughs, John Cage, and Patti Smith — and the founding in 1965 of Giorno Poetry Systems — the non-profit platform that revolutionised the dissemination of poetry by intertwining it with music, visual arts, political engagement, and community practices — testify to the profound impact Giorno had on the history of art.

The exhibition traces John Giorno’s multifaceted practice through a series of thematic sections, showing how the artist explored the poetic language in its material, relational, and performative dimensions, pushing the word beyond literature into the realms of visual art and telecommunications networks. A large part of his artistic production reuses excerpts from his poems, replicated across different media, employing carefully selected colours and an iconic typeface.

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Giorno Poetry Systems and with the support of Galleria Thomas Brambilla.

John Giorno: The Performative Word

February 5 - May 3, 2026

Opening: Wednesday February 4, 2026 at 6:00 PM

MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna | Sala delle Ciminiere

Via Don Giovanni Minzoni 14, Bologna

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