The Cube by Nadja Verena Marcin as part of Denniston Hill's CHIMERA
At the 61st Venice Biennial – In Minor Keys
Main Exhibition
May 9 – November 22, 2026
Giardini, Venice
Nadja Verena Marcin presents The Cube (2026) as part of CHIMERA, Denniston Hill’s contribution to the 61st Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys. Installed in the Giardini’s Central Pavilion, the work joins a larger network of artists reflecting on fragility, resonance, memory, and interdependence.
Built from aluminum, 3D resin print, human hair, and embedded screens, the life-sized skull-like sculpture is based on the artist’s own CT data and fitted with a real-hair wig. In its eye sockets, video fragments from Marcin’s earlier performance The Cube (2017) unfold as a layered exchange between body and artifact, past and present, individuality and collective experience.
The performance footage shows Marcin moving across the roof of a former farmhouse at Denniston Hill, reciting a poetic text about resistance, stability, and historically gendered expectations. The piece culminates in a leap into a firefighter’s rescue net held by participants below — a powerful gesture that turns individual action into shared responsibility
PROMISES
Art Between Perception and Algorithms
Promises - Art Between Perception and Algorithms brings together artworks that trace how technological, social and institutional promises shape our lives. Through echo chambers, detection systems and participatory setups, art appears here less as a solution and more as an indicator: a way to sense where expectations, control and imagination collide.
Machine Royale — Echo Chambers of Our Time, Kathrin Hunze
Video installation/object robot surrounded by a guinea pig fent with black shadowballs. 2025
Machine Royale — Echo Chambers of Our Time explores desire within emerging power structures across digital and physical spaces and their effects on society. Technologies like AI and digital currencies fuel a hunger for efficiency, inflating bubbles whose bursts reshape social and economic life. The work asks how we will navigate dataism while dulled by an incessant flood of communication and information.
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How this media artist got discovered by the algorithm
Clemens Schöll & Ortrun Bargholz
Visibility and invisibility are always in tension with each other, both in digital and physical space. Recordings of a video-based performance were examined using the automated object recognition of the YOLO system. The desire for anonymity exists alongside the desire for attention and to be discovered as an artist.
Single-channel video (3’5”, 1080×810) with sound, 2021/2024
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A Brighter Flash
Dani Ploeger, Digital Video, 2024
Standing on the street in front of V2_, I give a short lecture on the aesthetics of explosive devices. I am holding a pipe bomb in my hands. The camera slowly moves backwards while I speak. The bomb explodes. While the camera keeps moving away, the film set and the fire SFX mechanism are exposed.
Filmed at V2_Lab for the unstable media, Rotterdam, April 2024
Camera: Jochem Weststrate
Fire effects: Lieven Slabbinck / Divi-Divi
Dolly Grip: Jelle Zuidweg
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