The Venice Biennale: Canicula. Oppressive temperatures and societal suffocation – We Make Money Not Art
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I’ve always associated videos at the Venice Biennale with boundless frustration. So many videos, so little time to watch them; even less patience for prolonged stays in airless, humid overcrowded dark rooms. Yet, when asked about what not to miss during the Biennale, my number one recommendation is Canicula, an exhibition with 8 new video installations commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film. This show plays with light, soundproofing and the extraordinary architecture of a 16th-century church complex to give a different physical, auditory and spatial dimension to each artwork. This, however, would mean little to me if the videos themselves were not exceptionally good.
Yuyan Wang, Boring Billion, 2026 in “Canicula”_Fondazione In Between Art Film at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice. Photo Marco Cappelletti Studio
Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, 24 Landscapes + A Vision, 2026
The translation for "canícula" in English is heatwave or, more evocatively, "dog days of summer". Oppressive temperatures can severely impact mental health. They disrupt sleep, impair brain function and can make people feel more irritable or aggressive. Heatwaves test our limits. Rising temperatures and their consequences from wildfires to drought will increasingly affect everyone, even climate change deniers. Canicula considers extreme heat metaphorically, evoking states of suffocation, pressure and strain that feel so disorientating that they could push societies to the brink of collapse. The exhibition is about excess of heat but also excess of light, information, noise, violence, technology, images, complexity and the overlapping crises of our time.
Set inside a historic church complex incorporating both hospital and chapel spaces, the eight new site-specific video installations create spaces for reflection, for considering complexity without simplifying it.
Janis Rafa, Baby I’m Yours, Forever, 2026. Fondazione In Between Art Film at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, 2026. Photo © Marco Cappelletti and Giuseppe Miotto / Marco Cappelletti Studio
Janis Rafa, Baby I’m Yours, Forever, 2026
Janis Rafa, Baby I’m Yours, Forever, 2026
Janis Rafa, Baby I’m Yours, Forever, 2026. Fondazione In Between Art Film at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, 2026. Photo © Marco Cappelletti and Giuseppe Miotto / Marco Cappelletti Studio
The first video you encounter is as spectacular as its mode of display. Janis Rafa’s Baby I’m Yours, Forever materialises on a large freestanding screen that cuts across the nave of the church, bathing the space with alternatively red, blue or purple halos of light.
Ironically for an exhibition titled after the hottest days of the Summer, the film is set inside an industrial meat refrigeration facility. Rafa’s work explores the material, economic and symbolic mechanisms of the commodification of both non-human and human bodies, offering a meditation on the tension between nourishment and cruelty. In a single-take, the film takes you through the system of machinery, corridors and rooms dedicated to dismembering, cutting, packaging, storing and transporting corpses.
In a sequence of allegorical scenes, the brutality of the meat industry is alluded to, rather than displayed in all its horror. In one chamber, the muscular torsos of young call up carcasses. In another, a body contorted on a dance pole conjures images of a slab of meat on a hook. On a staircase nearby, floods of milk cascade down the steps suggesting overconsumption and wastefulness. It is nighttime and no one is at work. Even the bodies of the animals seem to be absent, save for a couple of barking dogs and the magnificent head of a bull offered on a platter like John the Baptist.
These bodily fragmentsmirror the psychological dissociation and distancing required to accept the monstrous scale of animal suffering that the meat and dairy industry relies on. The video is a subtle but powerful plea to open our eyes to the ruthless, sanitised and invisibilised exploitation of other sentient beings.
Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Wishful Thinking, 2026
Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Wishful Thinking, 2026. “Canicula,” Fondazione In Between Art Film at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, 2026. Photo © Marco Cappelletti and Giuseppe Miotto / Marco Cappelletti Studio
Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Wishful Thinking, 2026. “Canicula,” Fondazione In Between Art Film at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, 2026. Photo © Marco Cappelletti and Giuseppe Miotto / Marco Cappelletti Studio
Wishful Thinking imagines an unspecified future when Russia’s assault on Ukraine is over and four Russian soldiers reminisce about their role in the war. Installed in rooms that look like hospital wards, the three Russian men and the woman interviewed are old and frail. They variously regret, justify, refute or...