NEXT UP
FEBRUARY 2025
Event Selection II
by Beatrice Rainone
NEXT UP is the column curated by Beatrice Rainone, dedicated to a critical selection of the most significant initiatives that address the new themes and languages with which contemporary art confronts digital culture.
Realia
13.03 – 01.06.2025
MEET Digital Culture Center, Milano
Sabrina Ratté transforms digital into living matter. Not a representation, but an environment in mutation: extinct plants resurface in a virtual archive (Floralia), electronic waste merges with nature (Inflorescences), AI becomes a visual oracle (Cyberdelia). Inspired by Donna Haraway, Ratté goes beyond dystopia to open up to the Symbiocene: a world where technology and biology recreate themselves, and the monstrous becomes wonder.
ICARUS
27.03 – 27.07.2025
Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan
Yukinori Yanagi’s imposing installations rewrite industrial space, transforming it into a borderland of power, migration and identity. The artist goes further: flags eroded by ants, containers and barrels that tell of sovereignty and control. An art that dissolves the symbolic in the mutable, like Icarus, approaches the sun – too close, perhaps. But that is precisely the point: to burn away certainties and see what remains.
Almost Real. From Trace to Simulation
16.04 – 02.06.2025
OGR, Turin
Yukinori Yanagi’s imposing installations rewrite industrial space, transforming it into a borderland of power, migration and identity. The artist goes further: flags eroded by ants, containers and barrels that tell of sovereignty and control. An art that dissolves the symbolic in the mutable, like Icarus, approaches the sun – too close, perhaps. But the point is precisely this: to burn away certainty and see what remains.Is reality a simulation? Three artists – Butler, Al-Badri, Lek – traverse AI, video games and imagined archaeologies to unmask the illusion of the real. The exhibition, curated by Piazza and Vitale, asks not what we see, but who decides what is real. Technology, image, power. Beneath the surface, everything wavers.
Beatrice Rainone
Graduated in Art History at the University of Florence with a thesis on the concept of reproducibility in crypto-art, she currently works in various cultural institutions in Tuscany, including Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Fondazione Pistoia Musei, Museo del Tessuto.
