Venice Biennale: Art in Cannaregio 01

Venice Art Biennale 2026 was inaugurated in May, but it was so hot during this summer that I kept on postponing my visit. Now, the temperatures have come down but I am troubled by knee pains.

In the end, I thought that I will go to see some of the collateral art events in Cannaregio, near the Venice Santa Lucia railway station, as it does not need too much walking.

Venice Art Biennale and most of the collateral events will be on till 20 November 2026. 

This is the first part of my visit-diary to collateral events of Venice Art Biennale in Cannaregio area of Venice. 

The image on the left shows the Church of Abbey of Compassion, my first stop on this Venice art-walk. (You can click on all the images for a bigger view) 

All the places that I visited during this visit had free entry. 

1. Art at the Church of Abbey of Compassion (Chiesa dell'Abbazia della Misericordia)

I started my walk with this ex-church (image above) that is used frequently for art exhibitions and events. The old church has a big hall with a beautiful ceiling painted in blue with stars.

There are two artists in this hall - Patty Toro Ribbeck from Santiago in Chilli and Keiko Bodereau Miyauchi from Tokyo, Japan.

Patty Toro Ribbeck 

Patty studied art in Florence. She explores the themes of identity, intimacy and sensuality, especially in terms of femminine sensibility through accessories made with ceramics. Originally trained as a designer, she teaches decorative ceramic painting and glass modelling.

 

Patty showed me a box with tiny ceramic works (image above) in different shapes that she had prepared for use with her work. She explained that the first step is to prepare these ceramic pieces, which she then colours and fixes them with a second oven-heating, and then uses them for making her art works.

 

For the exhibition in Venice, she has taken eye-glasses and converted each of them as an artwork by adding and fixing the tiny ceramic pieces in different shapes and colours to each frame (3 examples shown above - click for a bigger view). Thus, each of her artwork looked like a pair of eye-glasses expressing a specific femminine personality.

Keiko Bodereau Miyauchi 

Keiko is from Japan and she went to an art school in London, UK. Over the last years she is experimenting with performance-installations in which two persons enter a space created by a translucent black sheath and play with inter-relationships and intimacy created in that space. She experiments with locations and different shapes of the sheath, in which the spectators add an additional layer of relationship as they look at them from outside.

 

More recently, she has also experimented with these performance-installations by involving hundreds of persons covered under enormous black sheaths. In one such performance, she showed the picture in which the participants had raised their hands to hold the sheath in what seemed to be synchronised movement, without Keiko or anyone actually guiding this process.

You can see some of the Venetian experiences of these two artists, including some where they partecipate in each other's art on their Instagram pages - Patty & Keiko. 

2. Fallani Venezia Screen-Printing Workshop 

The Fallani Venezia workshop on Calle Lunga Santa Caterina, on my way to Fondamenta Nuova was not a part of Venice Biennale but as I was walking, I saw some beautiful prints inside and went inside to look at some of them.

It was an opportunity to talk to its owner Gianpaolo Fallani (in the picture with an artwork of Dario Fo) and learn about Serigraph Printing or the Silk-screen printing. It is a specialised way of making artistic prints. Gianpaolo explained to me that the first step is artist makes an artwork and brings to the workshop. A digital copy of that artwork is first made and a silk-screen (actually now they use a synthetic tissue instead of silk) is stretched and fixed on a wooden frame. Then a film with parts corresponding to each colour designed in black are put in front of the tissue-screen and exposed to strong light, so that the exposed parts become hard and the black parts remain soft, which is then washed. Thus, through this complicated process the silk/tissue screen is prepared with that artistic design which is then used make prints.

Gianpaolo explained that during the times of his father Fiorenzo Fallani many famous Italian artists such as Renato Guttuso, Salvatore Fiume, Emilio Vedova and Fabrizio Plessi, used to come to this workshop for their printing. Even today artists come there for their specialised printing. During my visit, he was busy working on an artwork made by an American artist. He also hosts artists for art-residencies so that they can find out the artistic possibilities of this screen-printing techniques. The webpage of the workshop has a large number of known names from the contemporary art world, including Gianpaolo Fallani himself.

In 2018, Gianpaolo Fallani received the Maestro d'Arte e Mestieri award (MAM - Master of Art and Crafts award) and his screen-printing laboratory is part of the "Diffused Museum of Paper and Prints" in Venice.

3. Fondamenta Nuove Theatre - David Cerny

My third stop was the Theatre, which is hosting an exhibition of the artworks of the Czech artist David Cerny.

Born in a family of artists in 1967, David studied art in Prague. He has won numerous awards including the most promising young Czech artist in 2000. In 2001, he launched a non-profit for contemporary art called Meetfactory and in 2017 he started Black n' Arch an architectural studio for innovative approaches to architecture and design. Apart from being an artist and architect, he is active in the areas of cinema and music.

He has different art works in the theatre, for me among them the most striking are three works -

(1) A sculpture of American President Donald Trump, sitting on a multi-coloured chair made of Lego-like pieces, his head bowed down, looking sad and thoughtful. He is shown wearing a half white and half dark suit, with one white shoe and the other dark, with his trademark magenta tie. 

(2) A wax sculpture of a dead man, lying on the floor among scattered pieces of glass, his eyes unseeing and open. Like Trump, he is also shown half real, with flesh and colours, and half white coloured mannequin.

 

(3) A film about the chimpanzee holding a human thigh bone and using it to playfully hit on other bones, including many skulls lying scattered in an area. It was as if a child was playing at the scene of a massacre.

All his different artworks are visually very striking and in a way disturbing. For example, looking at the man lying dead surrounded by broken glass, with his glazed eyes, looked so real that I was shocked.

In The End

This is the first part of the diary of my visit to art-events in Cannaregio area of Venice.

The second part will deal with some more smaller spaces, similar to the ones presented here, while the third part will be dedicated to the artworks in Palazzo Mora, the European Culture Centre.

The Venice Art Biennale is much more than this - apart from the numerous country pavilions which require an entry ticket, there are many other collateral events in other parts of Venice, which have free entry. My only problem is that I might need a knee-replacement to be able to look at all of them!

 

The last image of this post (above) has an overview of the hall hosting the David Cerny's installations. 

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