Nebula

Fondazione In Between Art Film announces Nebula, a group exhibition opening to the public on April 17, 2024 at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto in Venice on the occasion of the 60th International Venice Biennale.

Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi—respectively artistic director and curator at the Fondazione—Nebula features eight new site-specific video installations commissioned to Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (1983, Cyprus/1983, U.S.A.), Giorgio Andreotta Calò (1979, Italy), 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, U.S.A.), and Christian Nyampeta. All eight works are commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film, the institution conceived by Beatrice Bulgari to promote the culture of moving images and support international artists, museums and theorists that explore the dialogue between disciplines and time-based media.

Nebula, the Latin word for “cloud” or “fog,” is the second chapter of a series of exhibitions organised by the Fondazione in Venice that began with Penumbra in 2022 and that explores the current state of moving images in the field of contemporary art. The Fondazione returns to the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, whose spaces are transformed into a sensory architecture that includes the church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti, the frescoed concert room and the old pharmacy, as well as a wing of the modern retirement home, unveiled to the public for the first time. Developed over the course of 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 elements that, like fog, feel both pervasive and insurmountable. The works touch upon a range of themes: the vastness of the landscape as the site of either loss or salvation; the architecture of memory, and the labyrinth of consciousness; music and voice as conduits of reclamation. They explore further forms of fragmentation: the tension between being and disappearing, and between living together and estrangement; the reverberation of History within individual lives; and the impact of economic and political forces on the environment and on people’s lives.

Arranged as an orchestration of images and sounds in the space, Nebula is a meditation upon the unstable borderline between seeing and understanding, between what we perceive and what we believe. The artists in Nebula have been invited to create their works in close structural, visual, and sonic dialogue with the spaces, with the intention to further deepen the narrative and spatial interaction between moving images and the architecture.

The interdisciplinary studio 2050+, founded by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, has designed scenographic and architectural interventions that reflect on the different visual, acoustic, tactile, and mental conditions of nebulosity, attempting to translate them into passages that absorb or amplify sound and light. Reacting to the artists’ works, the architectural strategy enhances or obfuscates different senses for each installation, creating a porous and tactile space in which stories, images and voices extend beyond the confining dimensions of the rooms.

Nebula will be accompanied by a cross-disciplinary public programme 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 programme will involve the artists featured in the exhibition and expand the conversations around their practices, via panels, screenings and performative contributions.