Luisa Casati understood something for which the twentieth century had not yet found a language: that identity is not only lived, but also staged. Long before artists claimed the body as a medium, long before performance art became a museum category, she turned her own appearance into a radical image. Not as an ornament at the margins of the avant-garde, but as a woman who pushed the codes of aristocracy, fashion, power and desire so far that they began to break. Born Luisa Amman in Milan in 1881, she came from a world of industrial wealth and aristocratic certainty. Her father had made his fortune in the textile industry; after the early death of her parents, Luisa became one of...
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born artist whose work moves between collage, sculpture, installation, film and performance. Across these forms, the female body is never treated as a passive image. In Mutu’s work, the body becomes a site of transformation: human, animal, vegetal, technological, wounded, powerful, ancient and future-facing at once. Her visual language is hybrid and layered. She draws from fashion magazines, medical illustration, art history, popular culture, African visual traditions and organic forms, recombining them into figures and worlds that feel both seductive and unsettling. These bodies expose how femininity, race, colonial history, violence and desire have been projected onto women’s bodies — but also how those bodies can be reassembled, reimagined and reclaimed. An important early work is...
When silence is not absence, but pressure Sung Tieu does not work with grand gestures, heroic slogans or loud protest. Her resistance lies in precision, in silence, in documents, in buildings, and in everything administrations would rather keep invisible. Her work shows how power does not only manifest itself in political systems or historical monuments, but also in everyday life: in labour contracts, migration policies, bureaucratic language, housing complexes, and the question of who is allowed to appear within a national narrative. Born in Hải Dương, Vietnam, in 1987 and based in Germany since childhood, Tieu moves between installation, sound, text, video, sculpture and research. Her practice is careful, restrained and unsettling. She does not announce resistance as spectacle, but...
— Short Version Ranti Bam, born in Lagos in 1982, is a British-Nigerian artist working with ceramics, sculpture, performance, film, and photography. At the centre of her practice is clay: not as a neutral material, but as a living substance that responds to touch, pressure, fire, and time. Bam is known for her Abstract Vessels and her ongoing Ifa series. Her vessels are not functional objects, but bodies, carriers, and inner spaces. Their surfaces can evoke skin, earth, leather, or scar tissue. They show vulnerability, not as weakness, but as a material condition that carries history. Her exhibition title How Do We Hold Our Stories? reflects a central question in her work: how are stories carried — not only through...
How the Biennale Works, Who Decides What Becomes Visible, and Why This Edition Is Politically Charged The Venice Biennale can feel like a closed system. Pavilions, curators, the Giardini, the Arsenale, collateral events, national representation, juries, prizes, protests: at first glance, it can seem like a structure designed mainly for people who already know the codes. But once you understand that structure, something far more interesting than a series of exhibitions becomes visible. The Biennale is a temporary model of the world. A place where art, power, history, diplomacy and representation come together. Not as abstract concepts, but through buildings, flags, bodies, materials, choices and absences. The Venice Biennale Arte 2026 is the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale...
