Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, Canicula brings the “Trilogy of Uncertainties” to a close: the journey launched in 2022 with the exhibition Penumbra and continued in 2024 with Nebula marks the completion of a now clearly recognisable trajectory, one that has transformed the Foundation’s Venetian presence into one of the most coherent and ambitious projects in the field of moving images. This is no coincidence: founded by Beatrice Bulgari in 2019, the Foundation was established precisely to support artists, institutions, and research centres working at the intersection of cinema, video, performance, and installation. In recent years, it has consolidated a distinctive identity, capable of weaving together production, curatorship, and critical thought. This time, the title already says it all. Canicula evokes the hottest days of summer, the moment when light no longer illuminates but dazzles, and heat ceases to be a season and becomes pressure. This is where the project takes shape: from a sensation of excess, saturation, and visual fatigue.
The exhibition brings together eight new site-specific video installations, commissioned and produced by the Foundation, by international artists including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, Janis Rafa, P. Staff, Wang Tuo, Yuyan Wang, and Maya Watanabe. Yet more than the list of works, what matters is the framework that emerges: a project that interrogates the present through the language of images, placing at its centre themes such as the distortion of information, sensory overload, the fragility of memory, and the increasingly unstable relationship between reality and perception. This is also why Canicula arrives in Venice with a particular specific weight. In a Biennale that already promises to reflect on minor keys, complexity, and the less clamorous frequencies of the contemporary, Canicula seems to choose another path: that of intensity, immersion, and friction. It also strengthens an already well-tested format, one that does not end with the opening but extends into an interdisciplinary symposium scheduled for 26 and 27 October and a catalogue published by Marsilio Arte in the autumn. These are concrete signs of a project that seeks to move beyond the social calendar of the Biennale and leave a critical trace in the international artistic debate.
This is where Canicula seems to play its most interesting hand. Not in the simple promise of a major event, but in its ability to give form to a shared feeling: that of an overheated, saturated, feverish present, in which even looking becomes an uncertain act. During the months of the Biennale, Venice will, as always, be full of images, languages, and visions competing with one another. But some exhibitions, more than others, manage to catch the air of the times. Canicula has every ambition to be one of them: not only an exhibition to visit, but an experience to absorb, a jolt to carry with you, one of those that remain in the memory when the season ends and the lights, at last, dim.
Featured image: Janis Rafa, Sacrificial Transgressions, 2026
Courtesy dell’artista e Fondazione In Between Art Film
