Bracha L. Ettinger

Opens Monday, May 4

Booking required. Please visit: tinyurl.com/ywyhku47

This is arguably the smallest exhibition in Venice and, due to limited capacity, booking is essential and open to everyone. Every thirty minutes small groups will be guided from the hotel lobby entrance through the exhibition.

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During the opening week of the Venice Biennale, a room at the Hotel Metropole becomes the site of an exhibition by Bracha L. Ettinger.

The Room Is Shared transforms the room where Sigmund Freud partly wrote The Interpretation of Dreams between 1895 and 1899, into a space of painting, slow looking, psychoanalysis, resonance, and shared presence.

Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev comments, “In a time saturated by noise and speed, Bracha L. Ettinger’s painting asks us to slow down and to feel-with rather than look-at. The room becomes a shared psychic space where subjectivity is not isolated, but co-emerges through vulnerability, care, and attention. Here, art is not spectacle; it is an act of what she calls ‘borderlinking’.”

Seven paintings made between 2006 and 2025 are installed within the lived Venetian atmosphere of the historic hotel room. The exhibition unfolds over seven days — the same number as the seven paintings — creating a quiet correspondence between duration and image, time and attention. Veils of mauve, deep red-purple, and milky white release spectral faces and trembling forms that surface and recede as the viewer gazes. Several rare video works premiere in this exhibition and accompany the paintings, extending the artist’s language of layering into moving image, where cinematic time becomes another membrane through which memory and resonance unfold.

The exhibition also includes an installation of seashells and St. Mary’s Milk thistle. The thistle refers to the legend of a plant in the desert, said to have been grown thanks to drops of the Virgin Mary’s milk while nursing the Infant. Long associated with protection and medicinal plants, it becomes a quiet emblem of nourishment and healing. Placed among shells shaped by tide and time, the installation deepens the sense of the room as a resonant, womb-like space. The encounter becomes one of proximity, echoing the intimacy of a psychoanalytic chamber while offering a contemporary feminist rethinking of subjectivity.

The artist’s famous theory of the “Matrixial” proposes that subjectivity begins not through traumatic separation at birth, as Freud believed, but in shared prenatal relations. In Venice, this concept becomes spatial: viewers enter into what Bracha L. Ettinger calls a “borderspace” that is neither entirely theirs nor entirely the artist’s. For the artist, painting becomes an ethical gesture of “borderlinking” and “co-emergence” in a fractured world.

“Her work, deeply marked by the personal history of her parents, survivors of the Holocaust, emerges in the second half of the twentieth century, a period in which much modern European painting developed in response to individual and collective pain,” says Christov-Bakargiev. “Drawing on both her family heritage and the history of art, she explores notions of generational transmission, trauma, amnesia and collective memories. Bracha L. Ettinger’s theoretical publications in the fields of aesthetics and psychoanalysis have widely influenced feminist thinking about art since the 1980s, as well as the work of many artists today dealing in the world today with the personal impact of colonial violence. Her thinking on the intimate sonority of art resonates with Koyo Kouoh’s theme of this year’s Biennale.”

The Hotel Metropole — with its layered history as a girls’ orphanage from the fourteenth century, music school, hotel from the end of eighteenth century, and military hospital during the Second World War — acts as a matrixial partner in the exhibition. As owner Gloria Beggiato reflects, the Hotel Metropole “has long welcomed artists, writers, musicians and thinkers from around the world. Its walls hold their stories, and we are proud to continue this cultural tradition by hosting projects that bring art into direct dialogue with history.”

Situated away from the fray of the Biennale, The Room Is Shared offers a pause — a protected space for reflection during an otherwise accelerated week.

In relation to this exhibition, Bracha L. Ettinger poetically states:

"An angel is needed to attend to the pain and the beauty of the world in tragic moments, to reorient us toward a humanised future without ignoring the agony. I call her angel of carriance. Her matrice is now endlessly bleeding. In our matrixial sphere I hear your silence whispering, through the other, through the air, through the water, asking me to breathe with-in-for you. Depth to depth resonates. In metramorphic transformation along our shareable subreal transjective strings, co-breathing is co-birthing in com-passion."

Bracha L. Ettinger is a contemporary visual artist and writer. Born in Tel Aviv (1948) and currently active principally in Paris, she is a painter, psychoanalyst, philosopher, and a groundbreaking theorist whose Matrixial Theory has impacted the fields of ethics and aesthetics, cultural studies, art theory and art history, film and literary studies, ecology, and feminism, over the last four decades. Her solo exhibitions include: K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2025); Centre Pompidou (Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou), Paris (2024); Castello di Rivoli. Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin (2021-2023); Muzeum Śląskie, Katowice (2018); Museum of the City of St. Petersburg (2013); Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers (2011); Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2010); Freud Museum, London (2009); The Drawing Center, New York (2001); Bozar – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2000). Her group exhibitions include: Copyists, Centre Pompidou-Metz in collaboration with Musée du Louvre, Paris (2025); Dans le flou, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris (2025); Artists in a Time of War, Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli-Turin (2023); Colori – GAM, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin (2017). She has participated with solo shows in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018-2019) and the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015).

Her books, in which she developed the subjects of trans-generational and personal trauma, memory, ‘wit(h)nessing’, feminine and maternal Unconscious, 'Copoiesis,' 'fragilisation,' ‘carriance’ and 'transjectivity,' include: The Matrixial Gaze (1995), The Matrixial Borderspace (2006), and Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics (edited by Griselda Pollock, 2020). Two volumes of her writings are in preparation with Routledge Publishing House.

The monograph Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (2025) that will be launched in Venice during the exhibition curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, is a cooperation between Skira and the Centre Pompidou that has a long history of collaborations with the artist, notably in Elles (2010-2011), Face à l'Histoire (1996-1997), an early solo exhibition (1987), and a recent one (2024). The book includes essays by Christov-Bakargiev, Donatien Grau, a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, and texts by Laure Chauvelot and Marie Siguier, curators of Centre Pompidou and editors of the monograph, and other writers. Earlier monographs on the artist include: Art as Compassion, edited by C. de Zegher and G. Pollock (Ghent: MER, 2011); And My Heart Wound-Space (Istanbul: İKSV. Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2015). Bracha L. Ettinger is Chair and Professor of Art and Psychoanalysis at EGS. European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at GCAS Global Center for Advanced Studies, Dublin.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is Honorary Guest Professor FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern, Basel, Switzerland. She was the Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in 2009 and from 2016 to 2023. From 2009 to 2012 she was the Artistic director of Documenta (13), which took place in Kassel, Germany, as well as in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Canada. She was Chief curator of the Castello di Rivoli in Italy from 2002 to 2008, following her tenure as Senior curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in New York from 1999 to 2001.

Christov-Bakargiev has curated numerous exhibitions with works by the artist Bracha L. Ettinger. Among these: La Ville, le Jardin, la Mémoire, Villa Medici, Rome (1998-2000); the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015); Bracha L. Ettinger. Bracha’s Notebooks, Castello di Rivoli (2021-2023) and Artisti in guerra. Artists in a Time of War, Castello di Rivoli (2023).

She recently curated the 2024-25 exhibition Arte Povera at the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris, which explored the roots, development, and global legacy of the Italian movement. Christov-Bakargiev is the author of many books and essays including her recent analysis of Ettinger's work (Skira, Paris, 2025). She has lectured widely and has taught at the University of Leeds and Northwestern University. Since 2021 she has been a professor in Basel. Currently she is researching the topic of artistic freedom, corporeality, and transcendence in aesthetics in the digital era.