VIDEO:Canicula

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound, 2026. Production still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film

It begins as a prickling on the neck, a subtle, unsettling warmth that doesn’t just heat the skin but begins to cloud the mind, altering rhythm and perception. This is the territory staked out by “Canicula”, the third and final chapter of Fondazione In Between Art Film’s “Trilogy of Uncertainties”. The exhibition is a potent and timely culmination of a six-year project that has used metaphor—the fading light of “Penumbra” (2022), the disorientating drift of “Nebula” (2024)—to map the contours of our present disquiet.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Fondazione In Between Art Film

With “Canicula” the arc tilts from ambiguity and disorientation towards a condition more oppressive, more politically charged: the blinding, suffocating excess of the “canicola”, the dog days of summer*. Far from any pastoral heat, this is the sweltering, saturated feeling of a world teetering on the edge of permanent collapse. “We thought the metaphor of a state of asphyxiation or exhaustion, induced by an excess of heat, expressed well the moment we are living in,” curator Alessandro Rabottini explains. “It’s a historical moment of information saturation, information overload, and the arrogance of visibility at all costs”.

This oppressive climate, which Albert Camus so memorably weaponised as an almost physical agent of fate in *The Stranger*, is the stage for “Canicula’s”eight new site-specific video installations. The works commissioned for the show—from artists 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—are not illustrations of a theme but deep, phenomenological explorations of how extreme conditions deform sensation, ethics, and reality.

In what is perhaps the show’s most forensically political piece, Lawrence Abu Hamdan presents “450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound” (2026). Titled after a long-range acoustic device (LRAD), the work investigates the weaponisation of sound to disperse protests—a “sonic weapon” used to silence dissent. The piece becomes a meta-reflection on the violent struggle between voice and erasure; a ghost hunt for a fugitive tone that exists precisely in its ability to be denied.

Other works in the exhibition contend with the psychic and symbolic wreckage of contemporary conflict. Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk’s multichannel video “Affirmations” (2026) confronts the trauma of the war in Ukraine, bearing witness to a society grappling with the contradictions of survival and memory. The work amplifies the foundational concern of the entire “Trilogy of Uncertainties”: the urgent need for lateral, personal, artistic visions.

Janis Rafa in “Sacrificial Transgressions” (2026) takes aim at the political and economic mechanics that reduce living beings to carcasses, examining the tension between survival and sacrifice through the clinical infrastructure of industrial meat production. And in a more introspective, metaphysical register, P. Staff’s “Terminal Lucidity” (2026) explores the disturbing neurological phenomenon of the same name—an unexpected flash of mental clarity in a patient moments before death—as a metaphor for art’s own illusory powers.

The result is an exhibition less about the crises of our moment than about the subjectivities they forge. “Canicula” emerges not as a document but as a survival guide—eight personal navigational tools for charting our present, a space where you can feel the heat but are also offered the resources to breathe.

΅Works by: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Janis Rafa, P. Staff, Wang Tuo, Yuyan Wang e Maya Watanabe

*The term “dog days of summer” refers to the hottest, most humid period of the year, typically occurring in late July and August. While it’s often associated with feelings of lethargy and discomfort due to the heat, the term also carries historical and cultural significance.

Photo: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound, 2026. Production still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film

Info: Curators: Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, Fondazione In Between Art Film, Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Barbaria delle, Barbaria de le Tole, 6691, Venice, Italy, Duration: 6/5-22/11/2026, Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://inbetweenartfilm.com/

Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Affirmations, 2026. Still. Courtesy of the artists and Fondazione In Between Art Film
Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Affirmations, 2026. Still. Courtesy of the artists and Fondazione In Between Art Film

 

 

uyan Wang, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of Sludge) (working title), 2026. Still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film
Υuyan Wang, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of Sludge) (working title), 2026. Still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film

 

 

uyan Wang, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of Sludge) (working title), 2026. Still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film
Υuyan Wang, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of Sludge) (working title), 2026. Still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film

 

 

Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, 24 Landscapes + A Vision, 2026. Still. Courtesy of the artists and Fondazione In Between Art Film
Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, 24 Landscapes + A Vision, 2026. Still. Courtesy of the artists and Fondazione In Between Art Film

 

 

Maya Watanabe, Jarkov, 2025-26. Still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film
Maya Watanabe, Jarkov, 2025-26. Still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film

 

 

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound, 2026. Production still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound, 2026. Production still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film

 

 

P. Staff, Terminal Lucidity, 2026. Production still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film
P. Staff, Terminal Lucidity, 2026. Production still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film

 

 

Wang Tuo, The Experimental Paradigm of Ownership and Autonomy, 2026. Production still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film
Wang Tuo, The Experimental Paradigm of Ownership and Autonomy, 2026. Production still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film