Introducing Maya Watanabe, who will participate in CANICULA, the third and final chapter of the “Trilogy of Uncertainties,” a series of exhibitions organised by Fondazione In Between Art Film at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, on the occasion of La Biennale di Venezia

Curated by @alessandro.rabottini and @leonardobigazzi, CANICULA will open to the public on May 6, 2026 with 8 newly video installations commissioned to 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

The work of Maya Watanabe (1983, Peru) engages with death and mortality, and their material and symbolic traces. Her moving-image installations combine documentary research with a strong spatial and experiential dimension. Shaped by direct encounters with bodies and sites marked by loss, her work considers how death is perceived, recorded, visually mediated and understood, while exploring what happens when moving images fail to reveal their subject fully, and instead expose the limits of visibility and cognition itself. Through her work, Watanabe addresses the fragile boundaries between life, death, matter, memory and disappearance

Her work has been presented at institutions such as the De Pont Museum, Tilburg; MAXXI, Rome; the Sharjah Art Foundation; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Kyoto Art Center; Fridericianum, Kassel; Matadero Madrid; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and MASP, São Paulo. She has participated in various art biennials and festivals, including Manifesta 15, Barcelona; the Videobrasil festival, São Paulo; the Havana Biennial; the Asian Art Biennial, Taichung; the Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition; and the Beijing Biennial. She has also worked as an audiovisual art director on stage productions in Peru, Spain, Austria, and Italy. She is currently a PhD researcher in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London

Image credit: Portrait of Maya Watanabe by Sebastián Díaz Morales. Courtesy of the artist

Visual identity: @lorenzomasonstudio

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Introducing Yuyan Wang, who will participate in CANICULA, the third and final chapter of the “Trilogy of Uncertainties,” a series of exhibitions organised by Fondazione In Between Art Film at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, on the occasion of La Biennale di Venezia

Curated by @alessandro.rabottini and @leonardobigazzi, CANICULA will open to the public on May 6, 2026 with 8 newly video installations commissioned to 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

The practice of Yuyan Wang (1989, China) investigates the afterlives of images and material uploaded to online video sharing platforms. In particular, it traces their industrial production, circulation, mutation and proliferation within digital ecosystems. Wang has worked with various pieces of found footage, showing everything from dark slime and factories making plastic plants to swarming crowds, LED assembly lines and ASMR content, which she recomposes (or ‘recycles,’ as she puts it) into intensely affective, rhythmic assemblages. Her approach to montage is both critical and compassionate, and sees her dismantling and reconfiguring established hierarchies of value, authorship and meaning. Wang’s video installations open up immersive sensory experiences while providing disquieting reflections on the oversaturated logic that drives our contemporary, algorithmically-anchored visual culture

Her work has been showcased at art events and institutions including the 2025 Gwangju Biennale; the 12th Berlin Biennale; Tate, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; UCCA – Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; the Wanås Konst, Knislinge; and 3bisf – Centre d’arts contemporains, Aix-en-Provence; and at festivals such as Berlinale; the International Film Festival Rotterdam; Doc Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; CPH:DOX; and the European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück. Her films have received numerous awards

Image credit: Portrait by aiqing. Courtesy of the artist

Visual identity: @lorenzomasonstudio

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Introducing Wang Tuo, who will participate in CANICULA, the third and final chapter of the “Trilogy of Uncertainties,” a series of exhibitions organised by Fondazione In Between Art Film at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, on the occasion of La Biennale di Venezia

Curated by @alessandro.rabottini and @leonardobigazzi, CANICULA will open to the public on May 6, 2026 with 8 newly video installations commissioned to 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

Through film, performance, painting and writing, Wang Tuo (1984, China) draws on historical facts, art history, cultural archives, literature and mythology to construct speculative narratives that collapse the distinctions between time and space, reality and fiction. His practice investigates the entanglements of modernity’s disruptions in the history of China and East Asia, and seeks ways in which suppressed and unresolved memories of the 20th century can be triggered. In other words, his work exposes the hidden logic of contemporary social power structures and the complex interplay between collective unconsciousness, historical trauma and state-sanctioned censorship

Wang has recently held solo and group exhibitions at K21, Düsseldorf; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; the Power Station of Art, Shanghai; OCAT, Shenzhen/Shanghai; the Incheon Art Platform; UCCA – Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; the Times Museum, Guangzhou; the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; the Salt Project, Beijing; the Taikang Space, Beijing; the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf; the Queens Museum, New York; the Kino der Kunst, Munich; the Zarya Center for Contemporary Art, Vladivostok; the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung

Image credit: Portrait of Wang Tuo by Lin Banye. Courtesy of the artist

Visual identity: @lorenzomasonstudio

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Introducing P. Staff, who will participate in CANICULA, the third and final chapter of the “Trilogy of Uncertainties,” a series of exhibitions organised by Fondazione In Between Art Film at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, on the occasion of La Biennale di Venezia

Curated by @alessandro.rabottini and @leonardobigazzi, CANICULA will open to the public on May 6, 2026 with 8 newly video installations commissioned to 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

P. Staff (1987, United Kingdom) interrogates the ways physical bodies and their social worlds are shaped and defined by state power, industrial complexes, history and the law. Their work expands across video installation, kinetic sculpture and text, often creating dreamy yet unsettling environments where intense colours, blinding lights and ominous sounds congeal to produce sensory overload and disorientation. Drawing on queer and trans studies, affect theory and necropolitics, the artist’s work centres the body—from that of a cancer survivor, to slaughtered livestock, and even that of the visitors—as a site of mediation and conflict, where the experience of the world is viscerally felt as much as it is negotiated, flagging up both visible and invisible forms of violence and aggression in everyday life

Their works have been presented internationally at institutions such as the Bonner Kunstverein; Serralves, Porto; the Whitney Biennial 2024, New York; the Kunsthalle Basel; MOCA, Los Angeles; the Biennale Arte 2022, Venice; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Chisenhale Gallery, London; and the New Museum, New York. They have received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the Tate Liverpool/Keith Haring Foundation Artist Research Fellowship, and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Visual Arts

Image credit: Portrait of P. Staff. Courtesy of the artist

Visual identity: @lorenzomasonstudio

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Introducing Janis Rafa, who will participate in CANICULA, the third and final chapter of the “Trilogy of Uncertainties,” a series of exhibitions organised by Fondazione In Between Art Film at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, on the occasion of La Biennale di Venezia

Curated by @alessandro.rabottini and @leonardobigazzi, CANICULA will open to the public on May 6, 2026 with 8 newly video installations commissioned to 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

Working across film, installation, sculpture, drawing and text, Janis Rafa (1984, Greece) creates immersive environments and experiences that examine the fraught relationship between the human and non-human body as much as between individuals and power or cultural structures. Her work engages with conditions of desire, love, abuse, resistance and vulnerability, intersecting with environmental and feminist politics and poetics. Themes of intimacy and violence, pleasure and control, care and intrusion coexist within landscapes at the margins of the urban, the mundane and the decaying. Stray and domesticated dogs, sport horses, hunted prey and industrially exploited bodies appear in her work as living presences and symbolic figures in familial environments that form a wordless reflection on power, trauma and perception in late-capitalist society

Her works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions at Fondazione Merz, Turin; Salt, Istanbul; EMST – Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; VOX – Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal; M HKA, Antwerp; the Turku Art Museum; the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; the Biennale Arte 2022, Venice; the Museu Tàpies, Barcelona; and MAXXI, Rome. Her work has been supported by the Mondriaan Fund, ART for the World, AFK, the Netherlands Film Fund, and the Greek Film Centre

Image credit: Portrait of Janis Rafa by Pinelopi Gerasimou. Courtesy of the artist

Visual identity: @lorenzomasonstudio

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Introducing Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, who will participate in CANICULA, the third and final chapter of the “Trilogy of Uncertainties,” a series of exhibitions organised by Fondazione In Between Art Film at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, on the occasion of La Biennale di Venezia

Curated by @alessandro.rabottini and @leonardobigazzi, CANICULA will open to the public on May 6, 2026 with 8 newly video installations commissioned to 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

Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk (1992, Ukraine/1993, Ukraine) work at the intersection of multi-channel video installation, performance and social practice, often turning everyday situations into sites for collective meaning and memory. Combining the genres of documentary and fiction, their collaborative practice has taken on a distinctive approach that foregrounds the mundane while Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine rumbles on in the background. Their work tends to take the form of subtle interventions and poetic reconfigurations of both Russia’s routine crimes and Ukraine’s rituals of resilience, finding ways to render visible at once the fragility of the present and the uncertainty of the future, as well as the absurdity of theatres of war and the value of collective resistance

Their works have been presented at major institutions including the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid; Kunstverein Hannover; the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts; the PinchukArtCentre/Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice; the Kunsthaus Hamburg; the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the Albertinum, Dresden; the Haus der Kunst, Munich; the Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and the Galeria Arsenał, Białystok. They have been awarded the VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize (2021) and the PinchukArtCentre Prize (2020). Khimei and Malashchuk are members of the art group Prykarpattian Theater collective

Image credit: Portrait of Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk by Ania Brudna. Courtesy of the artists

Visual identity: @lorenzomasonstudio

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Introducing Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, who will participate in CANICULA, the third and final chapter of the “Trilogy of Uncertainties,” a series of exhibitions organised by Fondazione In Between Art Film at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, on the occasion of La Biennale di Venezia

Curated by @alessandro.rabottini and @leonardobigazzi, CANICULA will open to the public on May 6, 2026 with 8 newly video installations commissioned to 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

Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti (1974, Italy/1972, Italy) are a pioneering filmmaking duo who have redefined the language of documentary since the 2000s. Delivering their rigorously political vision in poetic form, D’Anolfi and Parenti have explored different types of archival materials—from war documentaries at the Istituto Luce in Rome, to exotic plants at the botanical garden in Padua, via ruined statues at Milan Cathedral’s storage facilities—and have observed the people taking care of them. Often combining archival footage with their own material, D’Anolfi and Parenti examine the ways in which collective memory is created, preserved and interpreted, in an effort to reflect on the production of images and the mediation of history. Together, D’Anolfi and Parenti have directed nine feature-length documentaries and two short films, each expanding the scope of their practice and pushing documentary cinema into new, uncharted territories

Their works have been presented at international festivals and major museum institutions, including the Berlinale; the Biennale Cinema, Venice; the Locarno Film Festival; Hot Docs, Toronto; EIDF – EBS International Documentary Festival, Seoul; RIDM – Montreal International Documentary Festival; IDFA, Amsterdam; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fondazione Prada, Milan; and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève

Image credit: Portrait of Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti by Eleonora Montani. Courtesy of the artists

Visual identity: @lorenzomasonstudio

#caniculavenice ...

Introducing Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who will participate in CANICULA, the third and final chapter of the “Trilogy of Uncertainties,” a series of exhibitions organised by Fondazione In Between Art Film at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, on the occasion of La Biennale di Venezia

Curated by @alessandro.rabottini and @leonardobigazzi, CANICULA will open to the public on May 6, 2026 with 8 newly video installations commissioned to 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

@lawrenceabuhamdan (1985, Jordan) is a Lebanese-British independent investigator or “Private Ear,” with a PhD from Goldsmiths - University of London on the role of sound in legal investigations. In 2023, he founded @earshot.ngo, the world’s first not-for-profit organization dedicated to the study of audio for human rights and environmental advocacy.

His work has been presented in the form of forensic reports, lectures, live performances, films, publications, and exhibitions at institutions such as: Munch Museum, Oslo; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Biennale Arte 2019, Venice; Sharjah Biennial 14; and the 12th Berlin Biennale.

Abu Hamdan’s work has been widely recognized internationally with awards such as the Grand Prize at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur (2022), and the Audience Award at the Toronto Biennial (2020), among others. For the 2019 Turner Prize, Abu Hamdan formed a temporary collective with fellow nominated artists Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and Tai Shani in order to receive the award jointly.

Image credit: Portrait of Lawrence Abu Hamdan by Diana Pfammatter Photography. Courtesy of the artist

Visual identity: @lorenzomasonstudio

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