Palazzo Nani Bernardo, Dorsoduro

ARTSA

Until 27 May 2026

The Open Wound is a group exhibition of ten contemporary artists, transforming the historical building of the Palazzo Nani Bernando into an encounter between past and present. Bringing together the works of Von Wolfe, Boris Acket, Savannah Harris, KV Duong, Geoffroy Pithon, Ludovic Nkoth, Isabella Amram, Dennis Miranda Zamorano, Giuseppe Francalanza, and Naleye Junior, the exhibition engages the artworks with mirrored salons and ceremonial spaces to create a unique multilayered environment. 

This is one of two exhibitions I co-curated this year with Selcan Atilgan. A shared vision, a shared dream - and this year, it actually happened. The setting is Palazzo Nani Bernardo - accessed from the Grand Canal, its rooms spanning the piano terra, a garden, and the piano nobile above. The cultural platform ARTSA transformed these ceremonial spaces into something more alive: contemporary works placed in direct conversation with frescoed ceilings, mirrored salons, and walls that have been holding history for centuries. Venice is not merely a backdrop here. The city - built on water, shaped by impermanence - becomes an active participant in what the exhibition is asking.

Ten artists. Ten completely different practices. What brought them together was precisely their refusal to speak in the same register. One traces the boundary between algorithmic process and oil paint; another moves between club culture and contemplative nature. Elsewhere: latex stretched across door-shaped frames, carrying colonial history and queer desire in the same trembling surface; portraits built up in impasto until they hold the full weight of diaspora; light followed into darkness until hidden topography appears. There is a spirituality running through all of it - not the institutional kind, but the spirituality of attention, of the natural world, of genuine connection. The wound the exhibition names is not a wound you observe from a distance. It is the one you recognise in yourself.

Von Wolfe

Boris Acket

Savannah Harris

KV Duong

Geoffroy Pithon

Ludovic Nkoth

Isabella Amram

Dennis Miranda Zamorano

Giuseppe Francalanza

Naleye Junior

Co-curated with Selcan Atilgan

Presented by ARTSA

Palazzo Loredan, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti

6 May – 22 November 2026

Sanya Kantarovsky's exhibition at Palazzo Loredan encompasses site-specific works which converse his otherwordly paintings with historical architecture. Hypnotically transportive, Kantarovsky's work engages with mythical and religious imagery to create pieces which feel both familiar and alien.

Kantarovsky fills Palazzo Loredan with paintings, ceramics, and a sculpture made with a Murano glass studio - each one circling the same territory his practice has always inhabited: spirituality, alienation, the painted figure caught somewhere between vulnerability and myth. The exhibition text invokes Freud on taboo - that which is at once sacred and dangerous, unclean and consecrated, of unknown origin. It is a useful frame. These are works about the things we cannot quite touch, and the compulsive rituals we build around that impossibility.

The centaur appears as a recurring figure: half one thing, half another, the seam always visible, coherence strained at every joint. 'Basic Failure' names a specific kind of recognition - it's me, a star in this dark pool - followed, a second later, by nothing again. What Kantarovsky does well is hold shame and beauty in the same gesture. The paint itself becomes the taboo object: touched and retouched, restricted, completed in private time. Standing close to these works, you feel the painter circling something they cannot resolve - which is, of course, the only honest way to paint the things that matter.

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Sanya Kantarovsky

Presented by Galerie Gisela Capitain

@galeriecapitain

Modern Art

VeneKlasen Gallery

@veneklasengallery

Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, San Polo

6 May – 1 November 2026

Matthew Wong: Interiors brings together almost forty rarely seen works made from 2015 through to Wong's death in 2019. As the title indicates, 'Interiors' features paintings which depict private spaces, with these indoor scenes conveying a sense of psychological depth and introspection.

Matthew Wong died in 2019. He was thirty-five. The speed at which his reputation has grown since then is something the art world is still processing - and this exhibition, organised by the Matthew Wong Foundation alongside the opening of their new archive and study centre, feels less like a retrospective than a reckoning. Curator John Cheim, who mentored Wong early in his career, has gathered around thirty-five rarely seen and never-before-exhibited paintings and works on paper, all focused on a single theme: the interior. Physical rooms, yes - but also psychological ones.

Wong synthesised Matisse's colour, Munch's unease, Van Gogh's pressure, and made something that looks like none of them. Dense, non-naturalistic rooms that vibrate at a frequency slightly off from ordinary life. These are spaces that contain more than furniture. You feel the weight of someone having been inside them for a very long time. Palazzo Tiepolo Passi is the right kind of setting for this — layered, a little worn, its own history present in the walls. A scholarly catalogue with a text by Nancy Spector will accompany the show.

Curated by John Cheim

Matthew Wong Foundation

@matthewwongfoundation

Massimo de Carlo Gallery

@massimodecarlogallery

Ca' Corner della Regina

9 May – 23 November 2026

Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince is a compelling creative conversation between two American voices in over fifty works. Their shared approach of appropriating and manipulating images manifests in a dynamic presentation across the palazzo, with Jafa and Prince exposing the gritty underbelly of American popular culture.

I overheard someone call this the actual US pavilion. I don't need to explain why that landed. I completely agree. Curated by Nancy Spector, this is the kind of exhibition that only makes sense once you are inside it - and then makes complete sense. Jafa and Prince have never been shown together before, yet the conversation between them turns out to be one that has been happening for years. Both are image scavengers. Both work from the bottomless reservoir of American popular culture: movies, pulp fiction, album covers, social media, celebrity, news. Both owe something to Duchamp's piracy. And both, from very different positions, are making unflinching work about what America actually is. Jafa maps his practice from his identity as a Black man and a mission to transform what Black cinema and art can hold. Prince hovers between a critique of white masculinity and a deep fascination with its underbelly.

The distance between those two positions is exactly the tension the exhibition lives in. The title is already doing the work: a British fairground ride, a Beatles song, a Charles Manson prophecy, a 1992 LA show that excluded Black artists. All of it at once, unresolved. More than fifty works across the ground and first floor of the palazzo, including new pieces by each artist and a collaboratively made zine of images exchanged during the making of the show. Ca'Corner della Regina is one of the better venues in Venice for something this charged - grand enough to hold it, worn enough not to sanitise it.

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Arthur Jafa

Richard Prince

Curated by Nancy Spector

Foundazione Prada