Artissima 2025

Yael Bartana was born in Kfar Yehezkel, Israel, in 1970. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin.

Yael Bartana is an observer of the contemporary and a pre-enactor. She employs art as a scalpel inside the mechanisms of power structures and navigates the fine and crackled line between the sociological and the imagination. Over the past twenty years, she has dealt with some of the dark dreams of the collective unconscious and reactivated the collective imagination, dissected group identities and (an-)aesthetic means of persuasion. In her films, installations, photographs, staged performances and public monuments Yael Bartana investigates subjects like national identity, trauma, and displacement, often through ceremonies, memorials, public rituals and collective gatherings.
Her work has been exhibited worldwide, and is represented in the collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

In 2023 she was awarded of the Rome Prize at German Academy in Rome Villa Massimo.
In 2024, she participated to the 60th Venice Biennale representing Germany.

Francesco Arena was born in Mesagne, Brindisi, Italy in 1978. He lives and works in Cassano delle Murge, Bari, Italy.

If one tried to summarize a large part of Francesco Arena’s work into a formula, it would be as follows: numbers that take on form. From a linguistic point of view his work can be read as a development, a personal “derivation”, of sculptural processes that arise from the geometric shapes typical of Minimal art and from the more archetypal ones of Arte Povera. But from a thematic point of view his pieces are often the translation of formulae and numbers linked to private and personal facts.

Gabrielle Goliath (b.1983) lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her art practice, Gabrielle Goliath attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices of possibility perform the world differently. Each of her works convenes a coming-to – a tenuous community – collapsing the presumed remove and privileged subject position of representation (as white, male, heteronormative) and calling for meetings in and across difference, on terms of complicity, relation and love.

Goliath’s immersive, often evolving installations have been exhibited throughout South Africa and internationally. She has received numerous awards, including the Future Generation Art Prize - Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017).

Goliath has taken part to the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia with the project Personal Accounts, which will be on show in Goliath's upcoming solo show at MoMA PS1.

Marcello Maloberti was born in 1966 in Codogno (Lodi), Italy. He lives and works in Milan.

Maloberti’s artistic research draws inspiration from trivial events and urban contexts, paying attention to shapeless and precarious states of life. His observations, however, go beyond the ordinary evidence of everyday life experience thanks to an often estranged and visionary neorealistic approach. His performances and multimedia installations take place in both private and public spaces having a strong interactive impact for the audience. The artist puts together an extremely condensed, theatrical narrative and suspenseful atmospheres for the viewer to watch and feel. The performers’ bodies belong to each other, they are part of a dialogue as they set up a participatory event. Maloberti also emphasizes the relationship between art and life researching new approaches to photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture and drawing, as to form a contemporary gesamtkunstwerk.
Maloberti has a current show at Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan and Albisola and has just closed a major retrospective at PAC, Milan in 2025.

Joan Jonas was born in 1936 in New York, where she lives and works.

Jonas is one of the most significant artists in the history of video and performance. Beginning in the 1960s, she placed female subjectivity at the center of her work, employing a complex linguistic repertoire including gestures, storytelling and images in movement.

A tireless experimenter, Jonas explores the possibilities inherent to the interdisciplinary nature of art, a characteristic that has made her a point of reference for a young generation of artists. Over time, she has established an intense relationship of exchange in collaborations with visual artists such as Peter Campus and Richard Serra, the performer Ragani Haas and musicians Alvin Curran and Jason Moran. The continuous renewal and transpositions of the media Jonas experiments with sources from fairy tales to essays, from myths to local folklore and relate newly to contemporary life, both poetically and politically.

In 2015 Jonas represented the United States at the 56th Venice Biennale. She has taken part in Documenta V, VI, VII, VIII, XI, XIII in Kassel, Germany. In 2018 the artist received the prestigious Kyoto Prize and in 2009 she obtained the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s first Lifetime Achievement Award.

Roni Horn was born in 1955 New York. She lives and works in New York City.

Horn’s artistic production, which spans for about fifty years now, explores the changing nature of art through sculpture, works on paper, photography and books. Roni’s drawings focus on the materiality
of the objects depicted, using also the written word at the basis of his drawings and other works. Horn creates complex relationships between the observer and her works, for example by placing a single piece on opposite walls, in communicating rooms or across a series of different spaces and buildings. Horn subverts the notion of “identical experience” by insisting that self-perception is determined by place in the “here-and-there” and by a time in the “now-and-then”. Her works also combine the critical relationship between mankind and nature; a relationship similar to a mirror, in which we try to shape nature according to our image. Over the past fourty years, Roni Horn’s work has been intimately linked to particular photographs, the geology, climate and culture of Iceland.