About the Exhibition

Undercurrents regards Venice in its unfixity. The exhibition reflects on Venice as a transient site where we can recognize the frictions of Venetian life and how they intersect with our own. By placing personal interpretations of problems in the modern world in present day Venice, artists conceptualize climate, migratory, and cultural change. Through representations of change and transformation, the artists reflect Venice as a dynamic landscape. In Venice–a city with a storied history and present circumstance of exceptional glamour, tourism, and spectacle–this dynamism is often hidden by forces of performative pageantry, historical preservation, and global capital. Undercurrents pulls the curtain back to identify what Venice can teach us about our lives and the modern world.

The artists in this exhibition approach the city from a few directions. Venice’s water, inscribed by empire and mercantile exchange, shaped by industry, and the circulation of goods and culture, emerges as connective tissue. It sustains life, carries memory, and threatens collapse. Through diverse media, the participating artists reimagine waterways as immersive and precarious sites of memory, migration, and ecological crisis. Inspired by the city’s status as a living archive, the presented artists investigate the entropic nature of time by constructing visual forms of the transitory and abstract. These two themes merge in their impermanence: the flow of water and the passage of time. Together, the artworks presented interact with Venice as a site of contemporary life while interlaying meaning from the artist’s disparate cultures and experiences


SPONSORS & COLLABORATORS