It’s 1971, and in the basement of Stanford University, 24 students prepare to strip away their identities to take part in what would become one of the most important social psychology experiments of the 20th century. A two-week simulation, led by Professor Philip Zimbardo, in which two groups of individuals were assigned the roles of guards and prisoners in an imaginary prison, aimed at investigating the roots of antisocial behavior in penitentiaries. However, after just six days, the research team was forced to halt the experiment due to the growing number of brutalities and abuses committed by the fictitious guards against the prisoners. The outcome of the simulation shocked the scientific community: until then, violence had been thought of as a peculiar characteristic of deviant individuals, but now it was confirmed as an inescapable condition of human nature—a collective “diabolical genome,” dormant but activated by specific circumstances, most notably the depersonalization that results from adhering to a particular group or social role.

This innate condition is the key subject of the work of Daniel Pešta, a Czech artist (born in 1959), who, with the exhibition Something Is Wrong, returns to Venice, transforming Spazio Tana / Tanarte into a disturbing observatory on the world’s evils. Having grown up under the grip of the Communist regime, since the early 1980s Pešta has explored the obsessive machinations of politics and the destructive force of manipulated masses, which find a sinister culmination through a wide range of expressive mediums on display. Inspired by the Stanford experiment, in the first room the artist recreates the atmosphere of a cell populated by orderly ranks of faceless men, victims and perpetrators, whose brutality is reflected in the surrounding works shrouded in atomic clouds and sketches of tormented bodies. Following this silent procession, one reaches the second room, an aseptic laboratory where streams of blood trace monstrous masses of flesh on the walls, recalling the devastating effects of power both suffered and exerted, but also the savagery of modern man, abandoned to his instincts and stripped of inhibitions.

In this eternal dualism between power and obedience, between the individual and mass society, between reality and alienation, Pešta charts only one path to redemption: at the center of the journey, rising from a blood-red block, stands the pale figure of Jesus Christ who, stripped of historical and religious overlays, becomes a universal symbol of the return to spirituality, the only antidote to the “gene of evil.”