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.
Post-Human Hallucination, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Courtesy VM12
Post-Human Hallucination 13.05 – 30.05.2025
VM12, MILAN
Pietro Catarinella feeds artificial intelligence with his oil paintings and harvests its altered visions: glitched icons, post-human archetypes, a version 2.0 of the sacred. No time-wasting prompts herethis is a synthetic unconscious endowed with a strange, profound, and unsettling spirituality just like our times. Access via Eventbrite even hallucinations require an RSVP.
Charles Darwin and Steve Irwin Owned The same Tortoise 16.05 – 06.06.2025
Palazzo Bronzo, Genoa
Five artists, five divergent directions. No overbearing themes, but a shared subtext, a background noise: that of the collective unconscious mediated, translated, and brutalised by the culture industry. And then theres her: Harriet, the tortoise. Talisman, relic, influencer before influencers existed. Shes seen more than we have, lived through more eras than a Pynchon novel. Darwin collected her, Irwin cherished her, the internet turned her into a meme. An exhibition like an evolving species: incoherent, unpredictable, perfectly adapted.
Padiglione Giappone, Biennale Architettura, Venezia
Beautiful Venice, but… Jun Aoki revives ma, the ancient Japanese concept of in-between space: a zone of living tension, where subject and object, natural and artificial, human and other observe and blur into one another. An unstable ground, and all the more fertile for it. Forget AI that creates: here we celebrate the empty space that thinks, doubts, errs. A graceful blow to the cult of control the answer lies not in the data, but in the voids between the lines.
Beatrice Rainone
Born in 1999, she is a museum educator and mediator. She 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.
