Carnival Biennale Mask

Carnival Biennale Mask

A curatorial project between the masks we wear and the truths we seek.

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Season: November – May, spanning the period between Biennale editions and the wider season of the Venetian Carnival

Carnival Biennale Mask is a curatorial project unfolding during the period between official Biennale editions, from November to May, and within the wider season of the Venetian Carnival, when Venice enters a quieter yet symbolically charged rhythm.

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Removed from the intensity of the main exhibition season, the city offers a different temporal and emotional register — one marked by stillness, fog, ritual, and heightened sensitivity to atmosphere.

Rooted in the symbolism of the carnival mask, the project invites artists to engage not simply with concealment or performance, but with transformation. Here, the mask is approached as a complex cultural and psychological form: a threshold between appearance and revelation, a symbol of multiple identities, and a means of confronting the unstable boundary between what is shown and what remains hidden.

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Launched in 2024/2025, Carnival Biennale Mask has been conceived as a curatorial framework for artistic practices that move between inward reflection and outward theatricality. The project draws on the cultural language of carnival while shifting its emphasis from spectacle to inquiry, creating a context in which art may become ritual, experiment, and critical self-examination.

Within this framework, the gallery becomes a site of transformation. Roles may be reversed, authorship may be destabilised, and conventional structures of presentation may be questioned. What emerges is not a fixed formula, but an evolving curatorial space shaped by symbolism, ambiguity, and artistic risk.

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The project is defined by several central concerns: the mask as a symbolic and conceptual device; transformation as both personal and cultural process; the tension between visibility and concealment; and the possibility of curatorial forms that allow for anonymity, collaboration, reversal, and experimentation.

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The first edition brought together solo and group exhibitions, anonymous works, performative gestures, and curatorial reversals. Each subsequent edition is intended to evolve organically, responding to the specific artists, works, and questions that enter its framework.

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Carnival Biennale Mask is conceived as a space of passage and revelation — a curatorial project in which the mask does not serve to hide, but to make visible what might otherwise remain unspoken.