In this video we have a look at the exhibition “Venetian Diary” by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and the Venetians at Ca’ Tron in Venice, Italy, and speak with the curator of the show, Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, and Emilia Kabakov. Three years after Ilya Kabakov’s death, Venice is presenting this major participatory project by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Conceived as a collective self-portrait of the city, the work gathers diary entries and personal objects from approximately 550 residents of the Venice metropolitan area, representing diverse generations, professions, and backgrounds.Displayed from 9 May to 28 June 2026 at Ca’ Tron, a sixteenth-century palazzo on the Grand Canal, and at the Venetian Pavilion in the Giardini, the exhibition features the contributions in thematic vitrines. Participants, identified only by first name, include shopkeepers, artisans, gondoliers, students, retirees, and cultural professionals. The project, curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Giulia Abate and organized by BAM under the patronage of the Municipality of Venice, transforms individual memories and everyday objects into an immersive installation.A complementary section at the Venetian Pavilion focuses on creatives, in dialogue with the exhibition Persistent Notes and the 61st Venice Biennale. The project continues the Kabakovs’ nearly fifty-year engagement with Venice.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Venetian Diary / Ca’ Tron, Venice (Italy), May 5, 2026.
Press text (excerpt):
Three years after the passing of Ilya Kabakov, Venice pays homage to one of the most significant artistic duos on the international stage with Venetian Diary, a monumental and participatory project conceived by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. The result of their shared vision, the work places at its center the stories, memories, and objects of Venetians, offering an intense collective self-portrait of the city while reaffirming the poetic and conceptual force that has established the duo as seminal figures in contemporary art.
Presented in conjunction with the 61st Venice Biennale, the project, curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Giulia Abate, unfolds as a dialogue between the city and the Biennale across two sites: the main floor of Ca’ Tron, a sixteenth-century palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal, and the Venetian Pavilion at the Giardini, as part of the exhibition Persistent Notes, curated by Giovanna Zabotti with Denis Isaia and Cesare Biasini Selvaggi.
From May 9 to June 28, 2026, the exhibition—organized by BAM under the patronage of the Municipality of Venice—transforms Ca’ Tron into a vast narrative and relational apparatus. This is not a show about Venice, but a show with Venice.
The protagonists are approximately 550 inhabitants of the metropolitan area of Venice, spanning generations, social backgrounds, and urban contexts. Each participant was invited to write a diary entry recounting their relationship with the city and to contribute a personal object symbolically representing that bond. Fragments of lives—memories, desires, nostalgia, and aspirations—are displayed in museum-style vitrines, forming a layered and unexpected human mosaic, suspended between past and future and organized into thematic sections. Participants include shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, artisans, retirees, homemakers, athletes, students, gondoliers, creatives, cultural professionals, maritime workers, restaurateurs, members of historic families, journalists, public servants, and representatives of different religious communities.
The project places at its center those Venetians who never appear on the red carpet yet sustain the city through their daily work and presence. The selection reflects the social complexity of Venice: children, the elderly, newcomers, and long-established families responded to a public open call, transforming the Kabakovs’ invitation into a collective and democratic gesture. The artists and curators chose to identify each contribution by first name only, underscoring the equal importance of every story—and, by extension, of every individual—without hierarchy.
Displayed in a series of thematic vitrines and accompanied by participants’ narratives, the collected objects—tools, mementos, and traces of everyday life—become true “resonance chambers” of existence.
In continuity with the Kabakovs’ poetics and their celebrated total installations, the work takes the form of an immersive environment in which the individual dimension intertwines with the collective. The city is not a stage but living matter; Venetians are not extras but protagonists. The gesture is both simple and radical: to place the individual at the center, recognizing them as custodians of a heritage that is not only historical, cultural, and artistic, but fundamentally human.
A complementary component of the project is presented within the Venetian Pavilion, in dialogue with Persistent Notes and in resonance with the curatorial vision of the 2026 Art Biennale. Here, the section entrusted to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov focuses on a specific group: creatives. Their objects—charged with memory and symbolic of personal and artistic trajectories—become gestures of recognition toward those who contribute to the ongoing redefinition of cultural identity in a city that hosts one of the most significant art events in the world.
The project marks the latest and most intense chapter in a nearly fifty-year relationship between the Kabakovs and Venice.
