We Thought We Were Alone, Palazzo Rota Ivancich, Venice (IT), 9 May – 22 NOV 2026

28 nov 2025
2 minuten om te lezen

Bijgewerkt op: 30 mrt

Koen Vanmechelen presents his first solo sculptural exhibition in Venice, We Thought We Were Alone, at Palazzo Rota Ivancich during the 61st Venice Biennale. The exhibition features more than 40 new sculptures and installations created specifically for this historic palazzo.

Moving beyond human-centred perspectives, the exhibition explores the dynamic relationship between living organisms and the inorganic environment. Across three floors of Palazzo Rota Ivancich, visitors encounter the central themes of Vanmechelen's practice: crossbreeding, hybridity, and identity, shaped by his vision of a Cosmopolitan Renaissance.

The palazzo itself becomes part of the work. Its centuries of repair and reinvention echo the exhibition's central inquiry: how do we exist in relation? Moving through its layered spaces, visitors experience the building as a 'cocoon', a space where forms loosen, reconfigure, and return changed.

Materials—bronze, marble, glass, photography, and video—create a dialogue between past and future, individual and collective, matter and form. Classical sculptures are reinterpreted alongside animal forms. Biology and culture, the local and the global, solitude and solidarity intersect.

"For centuries we thought we were alone. We imagined ourselves at the centre of all things—the measure of progress, the author of peace, the keeper of paradise and the pinnacle of evolution. As the exhibition unfolds, the animals reveal themselves, not as metaphors or relics, but as messengers of a different truth. In their gaze, we confront the price of our domestication—how we tamed the world and, in doing so, lost our own wildness. This is not nostalgia for a lost Eden, but a confrontation with the limits of human exceptionalism. Nature does not need our pity, only our willingness to coexist. The minor key of survival is not conquest, but reciprocity and hybridity."

Koen Vanmechelen, artist

More than 40 installations and artworks

The exhibition marks an evolution in Vanmechelen's practice. The works begin with reinterpretations of classical sculptures—Medusa, The Three Graces—but move beyond these references to focus on how artworks are shaped through relationships and collaboration. Rather than existing as isolated objects, the works take form through networks of human, animal, and ecological connections. Community plays a central role in how meaning is created.

Wild Gene Festival:

A dedicated room presents the Wild Gene Festival, a collaboration with Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour. Originally staged in August 2025 at LABIOMISTA, the festival became a co-performance: live music by Youssou N'Dour and Le Super Étoile de Dakar intertwined with Vanmechelen painting a monumental nine-metre canvas in real time. At the Palazzo, installations and videos highlight the community that brought the festival to life, creating a shared space of music, ritual, and collective creativity.

"Vanmechelen doesn't illustrate the idea of interconnected life; instead he engineers conditions in which it becomes visibly unveiled. By staging hybrids, thresholds and fragile systems across the palazzo, he turns a familiar premise into a physical experience: a continuous negotiation between form and transformation."

James Putnam, curator