Hanna Rochereau

Opens Monday, May 4

For her first solo exhibition in Italy, French artist Hanna Rochereau transforms Mare Karina into a compressed archive in which bodies, analogue data, and remnants of a fabricated past are quietly put under pressure. The exhibition reflects the renewed attention that both art and fashion are directing toward archives, not only as engines of creation and display, but as sites where hierarchies of value are constructed, contested, and re-coded.

Data Divas carries the bright, slightly claustrophobic glare of a back room where information is sorted, classified, flattened, but also the tenderness and absurdity of mannequins attempting to reclaim agency.

Visitors pass through the gallery’s glass doors and encounter a stark white wall with a single opening leading into a sealed inner room. The space reads simultaneously as showroom, storage, and back-end: a small-scale fashion archive that feels less like heritage and more like a machine. No natural light circulates here. The floor is covered with a corporate-style carpet, and the air is rendered a crisp, cold white by LEDs. Mannequin-like sculptures, painted and assembled from cotton torsos, glass vitrines, and repurposed wooden elements, are positioned among large wall paintings depicting endless walls of drawers, cabinets, and storage systems.

Distributed throughout the space, the mannequin assemblages echo as posed archivists or corporate “data experts,” embodying a present in which archives operate simultaneously as spaces of care, knowledge production, and soft branding, where research is continually translated into narratives, metrics, and visibility. They stand in for figures who are now increasingly central within brands and museums, navigating the double tension between serving corporate needs for data and storytelling while using that same access to quietly rewrite the hierarchies that structure the archive itself. The multimedia sculptural assemblages recall how caring for collections, constructing brand memory, and managing data have become tightly intertwined activities. Their figures are glamorous and yet perhaps exhausted, conduits of an incessant flow.

Rochereau’s paintings, acrylic on canvas in wooden frames, run along the walls. Each work maintains a muted palette of grey, black, coal, brown, and dark blue. Here, indexation, labelling, and serial repetition become visual motifs that echo the way creative and cultural processes are converted into data points and returned through recommendation systems. In this sense, the archive becomes a threshold where cultural value is produced, reorganised, and continually repurposed.

The installation draws on recent studies of corporate art and fashion archives as “living” infrastructures that mediate identity, branding, and innovation. The exhibition pushes this logic toward a point of estrangement, where tools of preservation become pressured stages and competing expectations collide. In this register, the archive appears both generative and strained: a place where care, authorship, value, and visibility are constantly renegotiated.

Inside this sealed room, the archive is not celebrated as a stable heritage asset, but imagined as a speculative, slightly feral zone. The painted walls protect and isolate at once, and the cabinets suggest infinite storage while never revealing their contents. What remains available is the choreography between viewers and objects: a slow, low-volume encounter with the infrastructures that normally sit behind the screen, behind the brand, behind the museum.

The “divas” and their stage, main characters of this new cultural ecosystem that increasingly pushes the back end to the front end, are suspended between visibility and erasure. In this process, the fiction of neutrality that often surrounds archives and databases is exposed: the gendered and racialised biases underpinning search tools, fashion imagery, and algorithmic forms of attention, and the ways in which archives can reinforce hierarchies even as they promise access and preservation.

It is here, in the opacity and agency of the archive, that the exhibition aligns with the broader curatorial framework of Biennale Arte 2026 In Minor Keys. Offering an intimate and sensorial counterpoint to louder narratives of innovation and spectacle, in this back-room register Data Divas feels intimate, coded, slightly mournful, slightly glamorous, and quietly rebellious.

Hanna Rochereau (b. 1995, Paris) is an artist living and working in Marseille. She received a Master’s degree in Fine Arts – European Art Ensemble from ECAL, Lausanne, in 2020.

Her practice moves between painting and installation, focusing on the spaces and gestures of commercial display and on the ways consumerism stages desire, temptation, and absence. She often works with shop-like architectures, ghostly display devices, and serial arrangements of objects, using the visual language of retail and advertising to question how everyday aspirations are shaped and commodified.

Alongside Data Divas at Mare Karina in Venice, further presentations of her work are scheduled for 2026, including two solo exhibitions at Paulina Caspari in Munich and at Emanuela Campoli in Milan, as well as a group exhibition at Nicoletti in London. In 2025, she presented a solo project as part of the Hauser & Wirth Invite(s) programme in Paris, further developing her research on shops, display, and the life cycles of commodities. She has been an artist in residence at Les Ateliers de la Ville de Marseille with the support of Triangle Astérides (2021–23), at La Becque, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland (September 2024), and at Villa Belleville, Paris (2025).