Choosing what to see in Venice these days is a truly difficult task. While the 80th Venice International Film Festival will end on September 9th, and the 60th Art Biennale is underway until November 24th, throughout the month there are events for Homo Faber, the festival that celebrates the art of craftsmanship from September 1st to 30th, and from September 14th to 22nd, the 8th edition of The Venice Glass Week, an international event dedicated to promoting the art of glass, will take place.
Getting lost in the streets of the city is already an artistic experience in itself, but between openings of new spaces, inaugurations of locations in stately buildings, exhibitions, and events, here is a selection of the most surprising initiatives.
This year Homo Faber is titled “The Journey of Life”: hundreds of handmade works are on display at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Additionally, with Homo Faber in Città, over 70 ateliers in Venice and the islands of Giudecca, Murano, and Burano open their doors to visitors free of charge (the list is on homofaber.com/it/in-citta).
Among the splendid stately buildings, Palazzo Diedo (Cannareggio, Ca’ D’Oro vaporetto stop), the new space dedicated to contemporary art that opened in April, the largest in Venice in the last decade, hosts the Janus exhibition, and two special projects presented in collaboration with The Kitchen in New York and with the Polaroid Foundation, including a solo show by Rhea Dillon (born in 1996) in which the London-based artist and writer examines the ways in which Blackness is conceptualized in aesthetic and theoretical practice.
The Gothic Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, built in 1473 (Fondamenta Van Axel o de le Erbe, Cannareggio), is worth a visit. It is the current home of the Bottega Veneta flagship store and the exhibition of Pakistani artist Shahzia Sikander with her transnational gaze, Collective Behavior. Set up on the second noble floor of the building, it occupies eight reception rooms for a total area of 500 square meters (until October 20th). A monumental sculpture located on the ground floor, in the main courtyard of the building, completes the exhibition.
In Dorsoduro, a few steps from the Gallerie dell’Accademia, at Palazzo Contarini Polignac, the artist and designer Coralla Maiuri opens a temporary store where, until the end of the year, alongside the classics from the Tableware collection, the new products for 2024 will be on sale, including the Murrine collection, which is inspired by Venetian glass.
In Campo San Polo, inside the fourteenth-century building Palazzo Donà Brusa, the new Tommaso Calabro gallery presents Matta, an exhibition dedicated to Roberto Matta (Santiago, Chile, 1911 – Civitavecchia, Italy, 2002), one of the most visionary artists of the twentieth century, defined by Marcel Duchamp as “the deepest painter of his generation.”
In Mestre, M9 hosts Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction, an Italian premiere, until January 12th, 2025. After the worldwide success of the Anthropocene exhibition, the photographer continues his investigation into the impact of human action on the planet.
On the Giudecca, the Palazzina Fortuny, home to a textile factory founded by the Spanish artist and inventor Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo in 1921, the last one still active on the island, hosts the glass collection of Chahan Minassian, a renowned interior designer and gallerist, starting September 14th. In the Hall of Mirrors on the second floor of the Palazzina, there will also be an exhibition by Marcantonio Brandolini d’Adda, an artist and designer whose sculptural practice focuses on glassmaking.
On the island of Murano, at the historic Orsoni Venezia 1888 furnace, a few steps from the Jewish ghetto, is the Biblioteca del Colore (Color Library): about 5,000 colored glass plates, cataloged in more than 3,500 shades, a true mecca for mosaicists, designers and artists.
The fourth edition of the Biennale del Merletto (Lace Biennale), an international festival of events, meetings, and conferences to narrate, transmit, experience, and celebrate the art of the Venetian island and its heritage, will be held at the Museo del Merletto (Lace Museum) in Burano until January 8th, 2025. The exhibition Fragile Stories by artists Mandy Bonnell and Déirdre Kelly pays homage to this extraordinary art with delicate contemporary works on precious papers and geographical maps.
Finally, on the initiative of MuVe, Fondazione Musei Civici Venezia, the city offers four aperitifs in special places, the cafeterias inside the museums, which can be accessed without paying the entrance fee: the one in Museo Correr overlooking St. Mark’s Square and the two with stands on the Grand Canal, Ca’ Rezzonico, which also has a public garden, and Ca’ Pesaro. Until October.
