How Venice and New Media Art Are Making the White Cube Increasingly Obsolete
Every two years, the Venice Biennale stages a series of curatorial exercises in direct dialogue with the city’s heritage, reminding us how much more powerful and successful site- and context-specific projects are than anything mounted in a white cube—not just in their capacity to grab attention but also in their capacity to generate sensorial and imaginative engagement. In biennials, art is not simply a selection of objects staged in a supposedly neutral space, where the curator or the artist articulates a thesis or narrative. Instead, it becomes a form of dynamic storytelling, in which the history and architecture of the place, the context in which it is situated, the spatial flow and sensory characteristics and the objects themselves contribute their own specific qualities to the establishment of a final meaning.
The white cube is a utopian idealization… a neutral container that is never neutral, since the system of power and the institutional or market authority it embodies attributes a different message and symbolic power to an object that could be perceived differently in another context. Michael Asher alluded to the failure of the white cube with his legendary intervention at Pomona College in 1970, when he altered the gallery architecturally and acoustically, removing the boundaries of that controlled space to open it to the imperfections of exterior light, air and street noise.
In his recent book The Failure of the White Cube, art critic and curator Paco Barragán argues that this modern formalist pandemic has spread across the world over the past century, from MoMA to the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, from the Louvre Abu Dhabi to M+ and the Dib Bangkok International Contemporary Art Museum, “all adhering bravely and uncritically to the formalist Western bourgeois white cube ideology.”
From his deep historical analysis, we learn how the terminology first originated in the early days of modern German museology around the turn of the 20th Century, when scholars traditionally referred “to die Weiße Wand or white wall, never to the white cube!” It was Brian O’Doherty’s catchphrase that caused a furor after it first appeared in 1976 in the pages of Artforum, in the essays later collected as Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space.
The cleaned-up format developed progressively, from the Vienna Secession in Austria to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Bauhaus in Germany, before establishing itself as the dominant standard when Alfred H. Barr Jr. adopted it for the new MoMA. All those projects shared the illusion of representing “the embodiment of the supposed democratic museum,” as Barragán puts it, in a world where access to art has long remained primarily elitist.
Today’s 21st-century white-cube display is still essentially Barr’s model, Barragán argues: white-painted walls without a plinth, or with only a small white wooden plinth; artworks sparsely hung at eye level; sculptures placed on white pedestals; artworks isolated to enhance an exclusively formalist reading; symmetrical displays and works aligned from the middle; artworks lit from above; the presence of technical or explanatory labels; no windows, to bar the outside world; wooden floors; and an absence of benches.
Engaging in this fearless critical deconstruction of the white cube, Barragán exposes how its physical container reduces and reframes non-formalist art as a neutral, sanitized and unproblematic entity.
If the white cube remained largely unchanged and unchallenged until the 1990s, more recently a combination of shifting audience behavior and psychology, as well as the very nature of new-media art, which is becoming more popular and naturally expansive, has been constantly pushing against this “neutral” box, revealing its limitations. As Claire Bishop argued, if painting or sculpture is conventionally encountered from a stable position, installation art presupposes a spectator who enters the work spatially and psychologically, moves through it and experiences it over time. With any installation, vision is no longer isolated from sound, touch, spatial orientation and bodily awareness. The final meaning of the work, and its role in the space, unfolds not only through what is seen but through the conditions under which it becomes visible.
If Rosalind Krauss in the 1970s began to speak of sculpture as an “expanded field” rather than a monument, this can now be extended to the moving image: no longer contained by the cinematic screen or defined solely by filmic or visual duration, many of today’s most powerful works operate between cinema, sculpture, architecture, performance, sound and installation. An exemplary case of how the latest forms of artistic practice require us to think more in terms of choreography and script than traditional exhibition display is offered in Venice by “Canicula,” the latest chapter in a trilogy of site-specific, video-based exhibitions produced and organized by Fondazione In Between Art Film, supported by the Bulgari family, at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto in Venice.
Mounted in the former Venetian hospital complex, the exhibition presents eight new site-specific video installations commissioned from an international group of artists who are redefining the possibilities of moving-image narratives, including major names such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Janis Rafa, P. Staff, Wang Tuo, Yuyan Wang and Maya Watanabe. Taking its title from the Latin canicula, meaning “dog days,” now used to describe the hottest period of summer, the entire show is a complex orchestration, a contemporary opera unfolding across the architecture, where the works, as much as the use of light, their physical supports and the overall design of the atmosphere and experience, determine the final impression and reading.
The exhibition is conceived as a dramaturgy, notes Leonardo Bigazzi, who co-curated it with Alessandro Rabottini and brings years of experience with video art, having founded and directed Lo schermo dell’arte. The experience begins as soon as one enters the church: taking time is fundamental to how the entire exhibition can be read, and the character of the place, historically associated with contemplation, encourages visitors to lower their voices and slow down.
All eight works were commissioned specifically for “Canicula” and developed through roughly two years of dialogue with the artists, and the curators specifically selected practices that could engage not only with the exhibition’s themes but also with the architecture of the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto. “These artists were invited because we can imagine how their practice might connect with the site thematically and conceptually, but also architecturally,” Bigazzi explains, emphasizing how curatorial intentionality should extend from the choice of artists and works to the space, the experience and the relationships among all those elements.
From the very first exhibition in the foundation’s “Trilogy of Uncertainties,” this emotional and poetic journey from darkness into light, the idea has been to create conditions in which images are not decontextualized from the historical setting in which they are shown, Bigazzi clarifies. At the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, this includes not only the monumental context of the church but also the smaller, more anonymous rooms, which still retain a strong character because of the functions they served when the complex operated as a hospital and later as a care home until the end of the 1990s.
“Creating a public dimension has to do with the practical conditions you establish: whether people can sit down when a film has a certain duration, for example. These things may sound banal, but they are not,” Bigazzi reflects. “We often go to biennials where a curator has placed a work on a monitor against a white wall in conditions where not even the artist’s brother would watch the whole thing.” In building a show, he argues, a curator needs instead to bring together works that may speak through related languages, sequences, subjects or structures.
In this exhibition, the works are installed with the intention of respecting each practice while considering how their individual grammars can construct an overall dramaturgy. That dramaturgy needs moments in which the visitor moves from a narrative dimension they must follow to more environmental or emotional experiences, according to Bigazzi. This variation creates different forms of time and prevents the route from becoming monotonous, playing instead with sequences of atmospheric conditions that accompany specific emotional and psychological reactions.
“In a moving-image exhibition, you need differences, not only linguistic differences but narrative ones. A work with a very insistent rhythm might be followed by one that asks you to slow down. The transitions create immersion and sustain the exhibition’s tension,” Bigazzi explains. “The work is always at the center of the construction, but everything built around it matters too, including the way you arrive at it,” he adds, noting how even the passages between rooms allow visitors both to anticipate the following work and gradually release the experience of the preceding one.
Following “Penumbra” in 2022 and “Nebula” in 2024, “Canicula” completes a trilogy that has moved from half-light to fog and, finally, to an excess of light and heat. Those characteristics have translated into the exhibition design and overall curation: whereas “Nebula” gave each transition a distinct material quality related to the following work, “Canicula” uses emptiness and exposure. Surfaces here appear in their raw historical memory, dried, corroded or fatigued by extreme conditions, while a few rooms function as places of shelter and others almost as bunkers.
Sound accompanies the entire experience, though what one hears is not necessarily the sound of the video immediately in front of them. “We thought carefully about which sounds could overlap progressively, which overlaps were productive and which areas needed silence,” Rabottini explains. “It takes three or four days of work simply to find those balances. It is not only a question of whether sounds can overlap, but of what happens when they do.”
The exhibition design was conceived in a collaborative process between the curators, the artists and the architecture studio 2050+. The latter entered the process early and studied each artist’s practice as the commissions developed. Even the display decisions respond to the cinematic world of the works, recreating, where appropriate, a more vintage, mechanical or technological material dimension of film while still situating it within an expanded spatial experience.
One of the final rooms was structurally altered to make it feel even more claustrophobic and fit the different human-sized screens where Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk’s Wishful Thinking (2026) is displayed, a five-channel video installation unfolding across four staged tableaux, in which elderly Russian veterans are imagined recounting, one day, their involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.
One of the most spectacular dialogues with the site, however, is the one created by Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 45th Parallel: The Story of a Fugitive Sound, staged in the former music room, where the hospital’s patients once listened to chamber music. The multi-part installation investigates reports that a sonic weapon was used against demonstrators in Serbia during a 15-minute silent vigil for 15 people killed in the collapse of a railway station canopy. Witnesses described an invisible sonic force, paralyzing sound waves as a train approached, or a powerful jet striking the body, since phones could not record the sound. Abu Hamdan worked from testimony and acoustic reconstruction. The spectacular presentation translates the forensic narrative of this tragic event into a galaxy of screens, floating like a forest of protest placards at different heights in front of the viewer as they enter the scene, creating a more abstract spectacle in which images of violence and drama blur and blend with the mythological storytelling of the frescoes adorning the room.
Throughout the show, the curators sought to create conditions in which the experience would be choreographed by them while still preserving a degree of freedom and fluidity in the journey and its interpretation. Visitors may remain for an entire 70-minute work, watch part of it and return, or move through the sequence according to their own attention, Rabottini admits.
“When we organized the first exhibition six years ago, this was something we genuinely asked ourselves: how do we create a situation in which the Biennale preview audience does not simply say, ‘Okay, I’ve seen it, now I’m leaving’? How do we make people understand that they can return?” Rabottini acknowledged that, during those preview days, people were usually intent on seeing as much as possible and covering as much ground as possible, yet visitors returned to the exhibition. “Admission is free, and during the preview, we saw professionals return.” The goal was to give moving images a highly spatialized form, Rabottini adds. “That happens when you integrate the history of the building and its architectural specificity, so that visitors no longer feel they are watching a series of films but encountering a succession of spatial experiences.”
A similar intentionality in the way curatorial approach meets spatial storytelling shapes LAS Art Foundation’s latest presentation in Venice. The magnificent fresco-covered hall of the Ateneo Veneto’s Aula Magna has been transformed into a red-lit environment that extends upward toward Jacopo Palma il Giovane’s 17th-century Cycle of Purgatory, reactivating the painted narrative as it intersects with Natasha Tontey’s queer mythmaking and unfolds across different dimensions of the space. The screens are positioned at different heights and angles, some looming overhead or cutting diagonally through the room, while the scaffolding allows visitors to move closer to and, at times, even within the projected imagery, enhancing the sense of immersion. The glossy black reflective floor then doubles and fragments the moving images through reflection, drawing the audience’s silhouettes into the installation and producing the destabilizing sensation Tontey describes as feeling “less grounded, less fixed.”
Co-commissioned with Helsinki-based Amos Rex, the video The Phantom Combatants brings together Indigenous rituals, playful B-movie aesthetics and experimental storytelling in an expansive, multisensory installation that unfolds across the façade and grand interiors of the historic venue. The semi-transparent silicone curtains further intensify the work’s visceral and theatrical atmosphere. Meanwhile, the Baroque decoration is folded into the entire orchestration, creating a captivating and evocative link between the purgatory theme and questions of political and identitary limbo, unresolved struggle and possible spiritual transformation and redemption. The result is a series of aesthetic and historical short circuits—sudden, jarring collisions between different periods and systems of representation that disrupt chronological continuity and trap the viewer within them. Despite the work’s duration, the presentation clearly moves beyond the conventions of a traditional video-art screening and even beyond conventional exhibition-making, becoming an immersive experience closer to expanded cinema, staged successfully in direct dialogue with the site’s architecture and historical memory.
Pioneereeing video and new-media art collector Julia Stoschek wanted to develop a form of storytelling in dialogue with space when she presented, for the first time, an extensive exhibition of her collection in Los Angeles last year. The site, the exhibition journey, the selection of supports and devices, the lighting and the projections all similarly contributed to creating this “audiovisual poem,” as curator Udo Kittelmann described it. Most of the pieces in “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” came from her art collection, which spans 900 works from the second half of the 20th century onward, encompassing video, film, single- and multichannel moving-image installations, multimedia environments and virtual reality.
“Every exhibition is a challenge, but when you create a project like this—entirely based on media art and across the distance between Berlin, Düsseldorf and Los Angeles—you are transforming something originally conceived far away and reactivating it in a new context,” Kittelmann explained to Observer at the time. “We wanted a space where the artworks would receive the attention they truly need. There are around 45 artists, with approximately 45 media and time-based works—video, installation and more.”
The venue, the Variety Arts Theater, a long-dormant Venetian-style landmark that originally opened in 1924 and once hosted vaudeville and live theater, functioned not simply as a backdrop but as an echo chamber for all the magic of video storytelling and its timeless fascination, linking the history of cinema to the latest developments in digital and video art. “Charlie Chaplin was in the audience when the Variety Arts Theater opened. I couldn’t imagine a better setting for this audiovisual poem. I’m so happy to be able to do the show here, in this building, with this history.” Ultimately, Stoschek’s exhibition successfully reflected, in its content, space and curation, how the technologies of cinema, video and other emerging time-based media have expanded the human capacity for storytelling and imagination, often serving as instruments for envisioning alternatives or resisting the pressures of the present moment, while never avoiding their contextualization within the specific conditions of perception and reception.
As new expansive and multisensory forms of art have emerged over recent decades—from installation and video to augmented reality and multidimensional poems—they are arguably exposing even more clearly the limitations of traditional museology, forcing us to rethink the white cube while demonstrating how every condition—technical, spatial, psychological and atmospheric—contributes to the reading and reception of an artwork.
Achille Bonito Oliva’s 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, “Punti Cardinali dell’Arte” (“Cardinal Points of Art”), was arguably the first to embrace fully and radically a notion of openness, not only by expanding across different media and disciplines, but also by moving beyond the Giardini’s assigned exhibition spaces and national pavilions to unfold across sites throughout the city. In doing so, it forced visitors to become nomads, encountering art as it manifested itself from place to place, anticipating in many ways the dispersed format that has since become central to biennials around the world.
For the first time, Bonito Oliva inaugurated an articulated, context-specific palimpsest: an exhibition that evolved and expanded “as a hypertext of constantly connecting nodes,” as Massimiliano Gioni describes it in his recently published book High Waves: An Oral History of the Venice Biennale, an eye-opening account of the Biennale’s making through direct interviews with its curators, beginning with Bonito Oliva and continuing through the present edition—the only one, sadly, without a direct interview, following Koyo Kouoh’s death. Bonito Oliva recalls working “without walls or borders, across different media, nations and disciplines,” anticipating the fluidity demanded by today’s global culture while insisting that an exhibition should be specific to both its context and its purpose. “My Biennale was also part of a cultural energy at the time that allowed a critic to be an interpreter of a much broader moment, or even a protagonist,” he acknowledges. The Biennale was not simply an exhibition, but a statement, one he conceived as fully responsive to the physical, sociological, political and cultural context in which it took place.
Toward the end of his unfiltered but thoughtful plea on the failure of the white cube, Barragán similarly brings attention back to a basic principle of any curatorial practice, when shaped with intention and reasoning: what we display and how we display it, its placement, dramatically affect its reception and interpretation.
Even more than Bonito Oliva, it was Harald Szeemann who truly inaugurated this “curatorial nouvelle vague,” in which the exhibition became a form of expression and the curator became a narrator, or, even better, a choreographer and screenwriter articulating a narrative, a vision or a thesis in space. If this is the notion of curating today, it means that all the elements within this staging, both spatial and conceptual and sometimes even political in their articulation, carry weight in the final creation and circulation of meaning.
In the book, Barragán lays out a helpful guide to what he calls the correct “Curatorial Communication Process.” Everything should start, he pointedly says, from “conceptualization,” answering the same key questions behind any story or assignment: the what, why, who and how of an exhibition. Barragán calls it an exercise in “reverse curatorial thinking” or “site-specific curating,” meaning that curation and exhibition display should enable us to match concept and content to context and space through each specific choice, from the artwork selection to the more practical and aesthetic decisions about how to manage the space.
Barragán also draws a parallel to theater, pointing to “Freytag’s Pyramid,” with its five-act structure, as something curators should use: exposition, or the introduction of the exhibition; rising action; climax; falling action; and denouement, or resolution. The rising action, climax and falling action form the exhibition’s central progression. Or, if we extrapolate the same structure to film: beginning, middle and end. “Watching an art exhibition is like watching a theatre piece or a movie: you expose a story, it develops, and you wrap it up,” he argues. This structure becomes decisive when determining specific elements such as the use of color, ambient lighting, hanging and the overall scenography.
It is worth noting here, in continuing the theater parallel, Erika Fischer-Lichte’s notion of the “autopoietic feedback loop,” which suggests that any event is never entirely produced in advance by the artist or director (or, in this case, the curator). It instead emerges through the bodily co-presence and reciprocal influence of performers and spectators. In our case, the works, viewers and context become entangled in a continuous feedback loop through which meaning is formed.
Physical elements such as color, asymmetrical hanging, different uses of lighting, architectural structures and scenographic devices can all radically alter the way we experience an artwork, rather than simply repeating the signature white-wall display.
While we are seeing color used more and more strategically, particularly in blockbuster exhibitions targeting broader audiences, it remains rare in galleries or contemporary art spaces unless dictated by an artist’s environment or installation. Lighting is one of the most effective tools for provoking different states of mind and feelings in viewers. “The different uses of light create distinct atmospheric spaces that allow the spectator to transition in a fluid way from one exhibition section to another while experiencing dissimilar psychological moods,” Barragán writes.
Even asymmetrical hanging, considered a complete heresy within any traditional museography or the Alfred H. Barr Jr. dictum, according to Barragán, can nevertheless create more active engagement among viewers as they move through the space, interrupting the monotony of the usual exhibition setting. For frequent art consumers in particular, that conventional sequence of evenly spaced works can, by now, begin to feel almost like scrolling through Instagram, unless this experience within frames is made more dynamic.
A curator, at the same time, cannot ignore how each space embodies, through its history and organization, a system of values. That is why it is probably better to think of location, beyond the illusion of the white cube, always as a “site,” intended, as Miwon Kwon suggests in her writing, as a subject, community, social problem or network of relations all at once.
The fact that art can enter unusual, uncharted territories and subvert their ordinary function and perception ultimately represents one of the greatest possibilities available to curators today for building exhibitions that are more site-specific, context-specific and purpose-specific, while reaching a broader public. Such exhibitions can interrupt and expand the ordinary urban experience, reactivating a new sense of enchantment and an imaginative response that is probably one of the only ways art can still have a meaningful social, cultural and visual impact today, within a dissociated, disconnected and fragmented society.
We might understand this as an alternative to the isolation of the white cube through Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia: a concrete “other space” capable of juxtaposing otherwise incompatible places, functions and systems of meaning within a single physical site. Unconventional exhibition spaces can bring together—and unsettle—different temporalities, modes of representation and types of audiences, producing a coexistence of histories and functions whose dialectical tensions generate meanings that a neutral backdrop might otherwise flatten.
Moving beyond the white cube and into the less prescribed territories of urban and public engagement, an expansion that many contemporary forms and media seem naturally to demand, might also help release art from its objectification as a mere product, as well as from its elitist institutionalization as a mystical object to be venerated. In this way, art could be encountered as something to be felt and freely interpreted in relation to the context in which it is situated, a context that ultimately shapes both the work’s meaning and the audience able to engage with it.
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