“Canicula”

The Latin word “canicula” refers to the “dog days” of summer: an airless stretch of asphyxiating heat and overbearing light. It aptly describes a present marked by metastasizing fascism, genocide, and war, sustained by technologies that erode human agency and subjecthood. If the moving image belongs to that same spectacular superstructure, this exhibition suggests that film and video might also bear witness to individual experience—and to those textures and minutiae of daily life that offer reprieve, resistance, or hope—while, at its best, opening up new worlds.

Fondazione In Between Art Film’s “Trilogy of Uncertainties” is a biennial cycle of moving-image exhibitions timed to coincide with the Venice Biennale and staged in the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, a decommissioned sixteenth-century hospital and former church. Following on from “Penumbra” and “Nebula,” the third and final installment extends the foundation’s sustained inquiry into the atmospheric conditions of vision: shadow, fog, and now blinding light. Each edition commissions eight moving-image works, displayed in separate rooms that coalesce around these distinct optical metaphors. The works in “Canicula” ask what can be glimpsed through the glare of gathering catastrophe.

Two astounding works, by Yuyan Wang and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, confront this dark future through sharply contrasting registers. Wang’s Boring Billion (all works 2026) assembles the detritus of online videos into a vision of our robot futures that is uncanny, and surprisingly wry, precisely because these machines appear not as alien Others but as the awkward inheritors of human gestures. As an eerie remix of DeBarge’s 1982 song “All This Love” plays, Wang cuts between clips of humanoids sheathed in fleshy silicone: they learn to blink, flex their fingers, climb stairs. Rather than affirming human mastery over natural forms, the mimetic impulse here reveals the conditions of human obsolescence. The robots emerge from infancy—flailing steel—until they finally leap across forests, fields, and open terrains without us, their parental figures.

Where Boring Billion portends the strangely animated aftermath of human apocalypse, Abu Hamdan’s work finds a fragile but enduring manual for resistance in collective voices and bodies. His forensic 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound looks to the future of sonic violence. Drawing on videos, audio recordings, witness interviews, and thousands of written statements from participants in a 2025 silent protest in Belgrade, the work investigates what the artist identifies as the first use of the LRAD 450XL long-range speaker as a sonic weapon, believed to have triggered a stampede at the protest. Displayed across fifteen screens mounted on poles like placards, silent intertitles pair drone footage of the protest with “earwitness” testimonies. Strikingly, the aerial imagery avoids reproducing the aesthetics of surveillance and instead abstracts the mass of bodies holding up their phone torches into a field of stars, rendering collective movement as a kind of nebula. 

Other films take a more materialist turn on questions of the future, specifically through the relationship between moving-image technologies and preservation. Maya Watanabe’s Jarkov captures, in spectacular close-up, a mummified mammoth within an underground cave-archive, while Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti’s film traces the double-edged history of visual technologies across spaces of preservation (archives, hospitals) and destruction, including war and hunting. Both seem to circle an unanswered question: Preservation, but for whom?

Although Wang and Abu Hamdan’s films are thoughtful and sensitive, when taken as a whole these future-facing works can feel too immense in scale, stretching time toward the near future or deep past through archeological, forensic, and archival modes removed from the messiness of human life. At times, the exhibition might have afforded greater attention to the entanglement between the specificity of lived reality, and the sense of alienation through which these futures are already being experienced.

Some works return these questions to the scale of the body, but abstract it through metaphor. Janis Rafa’s Baby I’m Yours, Forever, the first work you encounter as you enter the exhibition, approaches industrialized death through the symbol of the abattoir. Human bodies are consistently compared to butchered animals in an all-too-direct comparison. The work stages opulent sacrificial rituals (which appear even more ornate in the Ospedaletto’s church atrium) invoking a devotional register that clashes with the abattoir’s supposedly mundane and routine violence. The work’s slick emphasis on surfaces only superficially engages with the horror it seeks to indict.

If Rafa’s film attempts to return these questions to the body but veers into abstraction, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk’s Wishful Thinking makes futurity uncomfortably human. Here, the frail, aging, penitent body of the perpetrator is exposed as an inadequate vehicle for political restitution. Ukrainian actors perform as elderly Russian soldiers in fictional scenes set decades into the future; some appear as end-of-life patients awaiting care within a hospital, reflecting on their crimes during the present war to an unseen interviewer. Although it resembles Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary The Act of Killing, the fabulation of such accounts renders the testimonies weightless and performative in a way that undermines the historical legitimacy of confessional testimony. Yet this discomfort gives the work its force, exposing how individual acts of witnessing and repentance are not enough in themselves to prevent history from repeating.

Anxiety about the future is palpable throughout this exhibition. But that could benefit from consideration not only of what makes conditions “hospitable to life,” as Koyo Kouoh put it in her curatorial statement for this year’s Biennale, but the very evidence of life in the present.1 Its most urgent moments arrive through modes of relation: from the tension that arises between testimony’s political force in Abu Hamdan’s work and its compromised failures in Khimei and Malashchuk’s, or to the strange affect and recognition we feel towards Wang’s machines.