The Biennale hasn’t opened yet, but we’ve already found its masterpiece

The Biennale Arte 2026 has yet to open, but there is already an exhibition in Venice worth the trip. Titled Canicula, it is on view at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto from May 6 to November 22, 2026. It is the third and final installment of Fondazione In Between Art Film’s “Trilogy of Uncertainties,” which began with Penumbra in 2022 and continued with Nebula in 2024. The title refers to the hottest days of summer. Here, however, the heatwave also becomes a way of reading the present: a time saturated with images and information, shaped by technology, inequality, propaganda, environmental crisis, and political instability. After the semi-darkness and fog of the previous two chapters, the trilogy now arrives at an excess of light and heat.

The eight new video installations are by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Janis Rafa, P. Staff, Wang Tuo, Yuyan Wang, and Maya Watanabe. All were conceived in relation to the spaces of the Ospedaletto, a place devoted for centuries to the care of body and soul, transformed for the exhibition into a journey through birth and death, memory and control, vision and hallucination. The project is led by Alessandro Rabottini, the Foundation’s artistic director, and Leonardo Bigazzi, its curator: two distinct roles on the organizational chart, but ones that, in practice, complement and overlap. Canicula, Rabottini explains, is a “narrative machine” built over two years of collaboration. The artists were invited to engage not only with the spaces, but also with the Ospedaletto’s “implicit and explicit narrative”: that of a historic hospital founded in the 18th century, and later expanded in the 1950s as a modern hospital. Over time, Rabottini says, “the voices find harmony with one another.”

For Bigazzi, this choral work is fully realized when the audience encounters the works. Video is a medium that requires time and space: physical conditions that allow viewers to enter the flow of moving images. Yet, he explains, it is “still one of the worst-installed mediums, even in major biennials”: long-form works are often presented without seating, without context, without the basic conditions for sustained viewing. In Venice, during the Biennale, the problem becomes even more pronounced, as the sheer number of exhibitions inevitably reduces attention. In Canicula, seating, light, soundproofing, and the relationship between screen and space are therefore integral to the exhibition experience.

The exhibition design is by 2050+, the Milan-based studio led by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, which describes scenography as “a critical practice,” not something merely “technical” or “in the background.” In the case of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s work, for example, the piece is installed on a grid that physically vibrates as the film reconstructs the use of acoustic cannons against the crowd during the silenced protests in Belgrade. The installation is located in the Ospedaletto’s Music Room, where sound was once used as a form of healing: a deliberate short circuit between sound as cure and sound as weapon. “The idea was that the film, in addition to being seen, should actually be felt,” explains Pestellini Laparelli, “bringing the viewer as close as possible to how, unfortunately, those cannons were felt by the crowd.” Similarly, in the work by Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, the exhibition design becomes part of how the piece is read. A completely corroded mirror, conceived as part of the scenography, dialogues with the sponged surfaces that block the view outside. These materials have been treated according to what the studio calls material fatigue, as if they had been exposed to an intense environmental force: the same force Pestellini Laparelli associates with the heatwave, chosen as an image of contemporary crises and translated into space through light. The result is a deliberately ambiguous journey. “You don’t know exactly whether you are inside the Ospedaletto or inside the scenography,” Pestellini Laparelli says. And at the end of the visit, a question remains, as simple as it is difficult: what does it take, today, to really see?