Nebula public program: “Thick Atmospheres”

Fondazione In Between Art Film is pleased to announce the public program that will accompany Nebula, its second institutional group show in Venice which is currently on view at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto and organized on the occasion of the Venice Biennale 2024.

Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi—respectively artistic director and curator at the Fondazione—Nebula features eight new site-specific video installations commissioned to Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Saodat Ismailova, Basir Mahmood, Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado, Diego Marcon, Ari Benjamin Meyers, and Christian Nyampeta. All eight works are commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film, the institution conceived by Beatrice Bulgari to promote the culture of moving images and support international artists, museums and theorists that explore the dialogue between disciplines and time-based media.

Nebula will be accompanied by “Thick Atmospheres”, a discursive program curated by Bianca Stoppani, editor at the Fondazione, and organized on October 17–18, 2024, in collaboration with Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection Venezia.

Embracing an entangled perspective on media and environments, Thick Atmospheres will navigate a path through the poetic concerns evoked by the eight video installations featured in Nebula and delve deeper into the ideas that informed both the exhibition’s curatorial posture and the architectural interventions devised by 2050+ at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto. The participants include:

2050+/Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Maria Alicata, Mara Ambrožič Verderber, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Karimah Ashadu, Lucia Aspesi, Cristina Baldacci, Erika Balsom, Leonardo Bigazzi, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Nav Haq, Sharon Hecker, Fatima Hellberg, Eleni Ikoniadou, Chrissie Iles, Saodat Ismailova, Amal Khalaf, Helena Kritis, Basir Mahmood, Diego Marcon, Lorenzo Mason Studio, Ari Benjamin Meyers, Matteo Pasquinelli, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Alessandro Rabottini, Mark Rappolt, Giulia Rispoli, Francesco Spampinato, Mike Sperlinger, Carla Subrizi, Paola Ugolini, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Valentine Umansky, and Isobel Whitelegg, among others.

Exploring both the objects and the conditions of perception, “Thick Atmospheres” will look at atmospheres as vectors dense with image and weather events: gaseous substances surrounding us, physical spaces where projected images become tangible, and metaphorical agents that imbricate humans and more-than-humans. Atmospheres are here defined as “thick” because they bring together the planetary and the existential, just as they do the elemental, the medial, and the relational.

The conversations, panels, and screenings of “Thick Atmospheres” will probe wider questions concerning the act of seeing and the sensory experiencing of moving images, from their display contexts to the relationship between architecture and projected light and sound, the spatial distribution of screens, and the mobile aspect of spectatorship. At the same time, it will focus on the pervasiveness of images and media content, and the corporeal relationship they condition and create, as well as complex, planetary-scale phenomena within the continuous aftermath of the Capitalocene, the sense of being lost, and the chance to find meaning again within the realities in which we are immersed.

In addition, “Thick Atmospheres” invites artist Karimah Ashadu, whose film Machine Boys was produced in 2024 by the Fondazione for her participation at the Venice Biennale 2024 and was awarded with the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist in the International Exhibition curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Finally, it presents the work in progress that Paola Ugolini, curator at the Fondazione, is undertaking with co-editors Maria Alicata and Carla Subrizi for an upcoming publication dedicated to women artists working with moving images in Italy between the 1960–1970.

On this occasion, Fondazione In Between Art Film has partnered with Mousse: a special live coverage of the conversations and panels over the two days of “Thick Atmospheres” will be authored by Chiara Moioli, Senior Editor at Mousse, and broadcasted via Mousse’s Instagram account, offering critical and editorial insights that will be echoed across various formats following the event.

Fondazione In Between Art Film has also activated a number of educational partnerships with Italian universities, including the Department of the Arts, Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna, the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, and the School for Curatorial Studies Venice, with the aim of offering formative experiences tailored to students from art history, film, photography, and scenography schools.

The program builds upon and extends the work of Vanishing Points—the public program curated by Bianca Stoppani and Paola Ugolini—that accompanied the first exhibition organized by Fondazione In Between Art Film at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, called Penumbra—which in 2022 looked at the relationship between seeing and knowing as fabricated by linear perspective.

Please visit inbetweenartfilm.com or follow @fondazioneinbetweenartfilm on Instagram for the details of “Thick Atmospheres”.

The program is free and open to all.

For international media enquiries, please contact: 
Sam Talbot: Matthew Brown, matthew@sam-talbot.com / T+44 (0) 7989 446557

For Italian media enquiries, please contact:
Lara Facco P&C: Lara Facco, lara@larafacco.com / T +39 349 2529989
Claudia Santrolli, claudia@larafacco.com / T +39 339 7041657

The cultural programme of Fondazione In Between Art Film is focused on the role of contemporary moving images and the support of international artists, institutions, and research centres exploring the dialogue between different disciplines. The Fondazione investigates the boundaries of time-based media—film, video, performance and installation—through commissioning and producing new works, organizing exhibitions and public programs, collaborating with international institutions, and producing editorial projects. The Fondazione continues and expands the work of the production company In Between Art Film, which from 2012–2019 supported video and filmic productions by international artists and directors.