Venice Exhibition Canicula Brings War, Sound, and Climate Pressure Into Focus
A new exhibition opening in Venice this spring asks what it means to live inside a world of overload. Canicula, the third and final chapter in Fondazione In Between Art Film’s Trilogy of Uncertainties, opens at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto on 6 May 2026 and remains on view through 22 November. The project gathers eight newly commissioned site-specific films and returns to a set of concerns that now feel inseparable: conflict, distortion, environmental strain, and the pressure of too much information.
The trilogy has tracked the mood of recent years with unusual precision. Penumbra opened in 2022, only weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nebula followed in 2024, after the 7 October attacks in Israel and the subsequent assault on Gaza. Canicula, whose title refers to the hottest days of summer, shifts the focus from obscurity and fog to saturation itself — the sense of being flooded by images, noise, and competing claims on attention.
Leonardo Bigazzi, the curator of the nomadic foundation, says the exhibition feels especially apt for the present moment. Alessandro Rabottini, the foundation’s artistic director, describes it as “radically different” from the earlier chapters because it addresses “hyper stimulation of the senses and being plunged into an excess of things.” Beatrice Bulgari, who founded the organization in Rome in 2019, frames commissioning as a form of position-taking: a belief that artists can help audiences navigate uncertainty by reshaping how they see and feel.
Several of the works take on war directly. In Affirmations (2026), Ukrainian artists Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk present a multi-channel video installation built around fictional deathbed testimonies from elderly Russian soldiers reflecting on their roles in the war against Ukraine. The work does not offer resolution; instead, it lingers in the uneasy space between memory, guilt, and self-justification.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound (2026) turns to another form of violence. The Jordanian-born artist examines a sonic attack on a silent vigil in Belgrade in 2025. Working with his team, Abu Hamdan analyzed 19 videos, conducted 15 earwitness interviews, and reviewed 3,244 written testimonies. Their findings challenge the official account issued by Serbian and Russian authorities, which blamed fireworks and crowd disorder, and instead point to the use of an LRAD 450XL directional acoustic weapon.
Maya Watanabe’s Jarkov (2025-26) brings the exhibition into the Arctic, where warming temperatures have exposed remains from the Pleistocene Epoch. The film centers on Jarkov, a 20,000-year-old woolly mammoth discovered in 1997 and recovered from the tundra almost intact. In the context of an exhibition concerned with excess light, the work’s paradox is striking: access to the mammoth has only become possible because the planet has heated.
That tension gives Canicula its force. The exhibition does not attempt to mirror reality in a literal way. Instead, it treats war, sound, and climate as conditions that shape perception itself. In Venice, where the Biennale will soon draw the art world’s attention, the show offers a darker register of the present — one defined less by clarity than by pressure.
