Nebula

Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Saodat Ismailova, Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado, Diego Marcon, Basir Mahmood, Ari Benjamin Meyers, Christian Nyampeta

Nebula is a group exhibition curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi that features 8 new site-specific video installations commissioned to Giorgio Andreotta Calò (1979, Italy), Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (1983, Cyprus/1983, USA), Saodat Ismailova (1981, Uzbekistan), Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado (1974, Brazil/1973, Brazil), Diego Marcon (1985, Italy), Basir Mahmood (1985, Pakistan/Netherlands), Ari Benjamin Meyers (1972, USA), and Christian Nyampeta, and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film.

Nebula, the Latin word for “cloud” or “fog,” is the second chapter of a series of exhibitions organized by the Fondazione in Venice that began with Penumbra in 2022 and explores states of vision and extra-visual perception. The Fondazione returns to the same venue, the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, this time transforming its spaces into a sensory architecture, incorporating the Church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti, the frescoed concert room and the old pharmacy, as well as unveiling a previously unseen wing of the modern retirement home.

Nebula further deepens the narrative and spatial interaction between the newly commissioned video installations and the architecture. The artists have been invited to conceive their works in close structural, visual, and sonic dialogue with the spaces. Developed over two years, the exhibition makes explicit the methodology of the Fondazione in commissioning and producing moving images works, one that nurtures long-lasting relationships of curatorial and production support to the artists.

The exhibition concept is inspired by the phenomenon of fog as a material and metaphorical space where visual orientation is reduced, and different sensorial tools are required to produce and situate our understanding of what surrounds us. Within this framework, the works in Nebula embrace forms of psychological, socio-political, technological, and historical fragmentation, suggesting possible ways of navigation through a present crossed by forces that, like fog, feel like both immaterial and insurmountable. The works in the exhibition, in this sense, look at the possible internal and individual responses in the face of events that condition the movements of existences. Finally, by placing the dissemination of sounds and images through the space at the heart of its scenography, Nebula also proposes a reflection on the pervasive production and distribution of images, information, hopes, and fears.

The interdisciplinary studio 2050+, founded by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, has once again been invited to interpret and spatialize the curatorial concept through the exhibition design. Their interventions will stage the visual, acoustic, tactile, and mental conditions of nebulousness with synesthetic splits and junctures between the works that at times emphasize, while at others break free from, the original architecture.

Nebula will be accompanied by a cross-disciplinary public program curated by Bianca Stoppani, editor at the Fondazione, and organized in collaboration with Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection Venezia at the Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi on October 17–18, 2024. The public program will involve the artists featured in the exhibition and expand the conversations around their practices, via panels, screenings and performative contributions.