Traces of Time. Forms of Memory. A Group Exhibition in Venice

Contemporary Art Exhibition in Venice Exploring Memory and Time

With Beppe Borella, memory takes the form of a return to childhood—the earliest stage of human life. His marble sculptures, created from a material deeply rooted in history and centuries-old tradition, evoke the world of play, transporting viewers back to a universal dimension of innocence and openness to the world. The contrast between the lightness of the subjects and the monumentality of the material creates a temporal paradox in which past and present merge into an image suspended between nostalgia and contemporaneity.

Daniele Accossato‘s works, by contrast, transport us to the origins of Western civilization through a direct dialogue with the history of art. References to classical icons—pagan deities and archetypal figures—are reinterpreted and brought into the present through interventions that transform and destabilize them. The beauty of Venus is suffocated beneath bubble wrap, while Cupid’s wings are bound to prevent his escape from the shipping crate in which he is confined. Here, time becomes a critical tool exposing the commodification of the artwork, turning mythical figures—bearers of timeless human values—into hostages of the art market, governed by economic rules and calculations far removed from the human experience.

In a complementary way, Dario Tironi works with what both humanity and time have already consumed: discarded materials, abandoned toys and technological waste. These seemingly worthless fragments are reassembled into almost post-human figures or permanently encapsulated in resin like fossils preserved in amber. In this case, the past is not an idealized memory but tangible matter that constructs the future: what we discard ultimately becomes what we are, and vice versa. Tironi’s humanoids do not depict a dystopian future; rather, they bring us back to the present through the objects created in the past that now constitute our memory, reminding us where we come from and who we are.

From the external world of the objects we endlessly produce and consume, the exhibition moves inward through the work of Manuel Felisi, whose research explores an intimate and emotional dimension. His works adopt a painterly language that captures memory through colour as an emotional experience, leaving traces of personal history embedded in images and materials. Colourful fabrics, floral wallpapers and pure pigments interact within layered collages of memories and sensations, evoking an untouched natural world that survives only as a fleeting spiritual image destined to disappear, yet here preserved on canvas.

Completing these journeys through memory and time are Valeria Vaccaro, a sculptor who seeks to suspend time, and Max Farina, a photographer who instead embraces and visually reveals its constant flow and transformation.
Vaccaro’s sculptures transform ephemeral materials destined to deteriorate and disappear—such as the burnt wood of used matches—into marble. Through this process, the destructive action of time is reversed: what is fragile becomes eternal, and what is temporary is transformed into permanence. The ordinary object, designed to vanish once its purpose has been fulfilled and evoking the notion of planned obsolescence, rebels against the tyranny of time, becoming instead something intended to endure forever within our collective memory.

Farina adopts the opposite approach. He works with photography—a medium traditionally associated with stillness—yet redefines it as a dynamic, evolving visual language. His research begins with the city of Venice, presenting an endless attempt to exhaust the gaze directed toward one of the world’s most photographed places: the iconic Grand Canal as seen from the Rialto Bridge. His Cronoramas preserve and reconstruct the memory of every individual who has crossed this space, assembling countless temporal fragments into a compelling visual composition. What emerges is a constellation of moments reconstructed into a single image documenting the continuous transformation of the city and the life that inhabits it. Here, time is no longer invisible: it becomes structure, rhythm and surface, shaped by the collective memory of billions of individual experiences.

Through these diverse artistic practices, the exhibition creates a journey in which time is not merely a subject but an active material. Individual and collective memory, past and future, permanence and transformation intertwine to form a layered and multifaceted narrative. On the occasion of the Biennale, Traces of Time. Forms of Memory offers a space for reflection where art becomes a means of understanding not only who we have been, but also who we are becoming.