When the Italian architect Marino Zancanella visited Poznań in 2024, his meticulous observations of the city’s local Renaissance architecture — most notably the structural geometry, rhythmic arches, and humanistic proportions of the Town Hall designed by the classic master Giovanni Battista di Quadro — did not merely result in a localised aesthetic appreciation or a transient exchange of professional courtesy.
There is a shared question running through the practices of Nona Inescu and Oláh Gyárfás: what happens to things after they lose their original function? A stone after it stops being perceived as landscape, a plant after it stops being decoration, a textile after it is no longer a tool, a body after it becomes a trace.
In a Venice Biennale season shaped by national spectacle, institutional diplomacy, and cultural branding, South African artist Gabrielle Goliath has presented something far quieter and far more unsettling.