![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Faustin-climbing-1.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\t\u201cFor me, it\u2019s first a question of listening,\u201d he said. \u201cHow does this space speak to my body? And what kind of response does that trigger?\u201d The answer, in this case, was not to transform the Galeazze, but to meet it on its own terms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe performance, presented by the foundation Scuola Piccola Zattere and Studios Kabako, uses what is already there or close at hand: gravel sourced from the Veneto region, stacked in mounds and packed into industrial bags that double as seating; light that shifts naturally as evening falls; sound that travels across water and stone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe lagoon acts as an amplifier. Brass instruments will cut across the basin with notes ricocheting off the surrounding structures. Audiences will not sit facing a stage. They will move through the site, gathering first along a narrow path by the water before being drawn deeper into the complex, guided by performers who emerge from different points in the structure.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tCurator Eduardo Lazzari described the project as an attempt to \u201cembody the archive of the space,\u201d treating the Galeazze not as a backdrop but as an active presence, layered with histories that the performance can activate rather than overwrite. In that sense, The Galeazze Project<\/em> offers one answer to the problem Venice poses. Rather than forcing the city to accommodate the work, it allows the work to be shaped by the city\u2019s limits.<\/p>\n By Land or By Sea<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tBarry X Ball\u2019s exhibition, \u201cThe Shape of Time,\u201d will fill the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore with 23 sculptures, many of them shown publicly for the first time, arranged across the nave, sacristy, and choir stalls of the Palladian church. Some are monumental, including 10-foot-tall figures based on Bartholomew Flayed from the Duomo in Milan. Others are smaller, highly worked objects that have taken years to produce. One, a portrait of Pope John Paul II in silver and gold, has been in progress for more than a decade.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tGetting them to Venice has been its own project altogether.<\/p>\n \n\tThe sculptures left Ball\u2019s studio in Brooklyn\u2019s Greenpoint neighborhood in early February, packed into dozens of custom-built crates and loaded onto a container ship bound for Italy. The plan was straightforward: cross the Atlantic, dock near Trieste, and move the works by truck and boat into Venice with enough time to install before Easter. Instead, the ship stalled along the East Coast, making multiple stops in Norfolk, Virginia, before crossing the Atlantic and veering off course.<\/p>\n \n\tBall tracked its movement digitally in real time. As it approached Italy, it turned south, stopping first in Alexandria, Egypt, where his containers were offloaded and left on the ground, then continuing on to Haifa, Israel, before eventually making its way back toward the Adriatic. No one at the shipping company would explain the detour.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBy the time the works began moving again, the schedule had collapsed. The crates, which were meant to arrive weeks before installation, were still in transit with days to go before work needed to begin. Ball and his team built a cushion into the timeline, but even that proved insufficient. In the end, the shipment was roughly three weeks late, forcing a compressed installation schedule that would require round-the-clock work to meet the opening.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tEven under ideal conditions, staging a show in Venice demands a level of coordination that most exhibitions never approach. Works arrive not at a loading dock but through a chain of transfers, from cargo ship to port, from port to truck, from truck to smaller boats, and finally by hand into buildings that were never designed to receive them.<\/p>\n \n\tThe costs accumulate at every step. Ball, a veteran at the Biennale who is financing the exhibition himself with the help of a small group of patrons, wouldn\u2019t share the exact number he thinks he\u2019ll have spent but said he knows many exhibitions will wind up costing \u201ca couple million.\u201d That figure does not include the years of fabrication behind the works themselves, some of which carry seven-figure production costs.<\/p>\n \n\tRent alone can run between $30,000 and $50,000 per month for a major venue during the Biennale, a six-month commitment that begins long before the first visitor arrives. Security is another major expense. Ball is paying for guards in two shifts each day, a cost he puts in the hundreds of thousands over the run of the exhibition. Shipping, custom crates, local transport, installation crews, lighting, insurance, and public relations all add to the total.<\/p>\n \n\tMuch of that burden is usually absorbed by galleries or institutional backers. In this case, Ball has taken it on himself, effectively acting as his own producer, logistics manager, and financier.<\/p>\n \n\tThe result is a show that, when it opens, will appear composed and deliberate, its works placed in careful dialogue with the architecture of the basilica. The months of planning, the detours across the Mediterranean, and the final rush to install will by then have disappeared into the background.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou Have to Be Flexible\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tSome artists take a different approach. At the Icelandic Pavilion, \u00c1sta Fanney Sigur\u00f0ard\u00f3ttir built her show, \u201cPocket Universe,<\/em>\u201d around the idea that things might not go according to plan, so you might as well plan for that. The exhibition will feature film music, performance, and a handful of objects spread through a former shipyard space near the Arsenale. The team shipped what they could from Iceland, including speakers from an old \u201990s movie theater in Alvabakki, and massive rolls of an Icelandic wool called lopi<\/em> that will serve multiple purposes in the pavilion, from sound absorption to decoration. Then she and her team, including curators Margr\u00e9t \u00c1skelsd\u00f3ttir and Unnar \u00d6rn, filled in the gaps once they got to Venice, buying carpets and other materials from around Italy to avoid delays.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tSigur\u00f0ard\u00f3ttir doesn\u2019t fight any possible changes or mishaps\u2014she expects them. \u201cIf it doesn\u2019t arrive, I will fix it differently. You have to be flexible to move easily through life,\u201d she said. When a shipment goes missing or a material shows up wrong, the response isn\u2019t to stop and wait. It\u2019s to adjust the work. At one point, even a missing piece turned into part of the logic of the show, another detour folded into the process.<\/p>\n The Pressure Doesn\u2019t Stop Once the Doors Open<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tAt the Armenian Pavilion, the work won\u2019t show up finished.<\/p>\n \n\tZadik Zadikian\u2019s project, The Studio<\/em>, turns a 5,000-square-foot space inside the Arsenale into a working studio, where Zadikian and his assistants will spend the six months of the Biennale\u2019s run making and remaking sculptures in front of visitors. The idea goes back decades, to when Zadikian was working in Iran with art dealer Tony Shafrazi and became fixated on the way laborers stacked clay bricks, repeating the same gesture over and over until something larger took shape. That\u2019s still the core of the work: Zadikian builds stacks of brick-like sculptures, pulls them apart, and builds them again, over and over. In Venice, that simple idea turns into a logistical problem.<\/p>\n \n\tA studio needs materials, and those materials have to keep arriving. The pigments that give the sculptures their color are coming from Los Angeles in batches, with enough on hand to last a few months before the next shipment. Other supplies are being pieced together as they go. Some things come from Italian suppliers. Some are ordered when they\u2019re needed. It\u2019s a rolling system, not a fixed one.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tEven the sculptures are adjusted for the setting. What looks like solid plaster is actually built over foam, which keeps the weight down and makes it possible to keep moving and rebuilding the work inside the space without heavy machinery.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tOnce the Biennale opens, the studio runs on a schedule. They start in the morning, work through the day, and visitors walk in and watch it happen. You see the building, the breaking down, the starting again.<\/p>\n \n\tThat also means the pressure doesn\u2019t stop once the doors open.<\/p>\n \n\tMost shows absorb their problems before anyone arrives. This one has to keep going for six months. Materials have to show up. People have to keep working. If something slows down, it will be visible. Tina Chakarian, who has overseen Armenia\u2019s presence at the Biennale for years, said her team has tried to get ahead of that by locking in the essentials early and setting up a system that can be replenished as needed. But a few things can\u2019t be easily replaced. The pigments, in particular, are specific to Zadikian\u2019s process. If those don\u2019t arrive, the work might have to change.<\/p>\n \n\tIn this case, the exhibition ends up showing more than the finished sculptures. It shows the effort it takes to keep making them. Occasionally, however, the effort starts well before the artist\u2019s materials ever arrive.<\/p>\n \n\tCurator Christian Viveros-Faun\u00e9 is staging \u201cIv\u00e1n Tovar: Le Retour,\u201d a survey of paintings and sculptures by the late Dominican painter, inside the Ex Istituto Idrografico at the Museo Storico Navale, a former hydrographic institute on the waterfront in Castello, part of the old naval complex near the Arsenale. The space sits less than 100 feet from the canal and, like much of Venice, wasn\u2019t built with contemporary exhibitions in mind. It had no proper air conditioning, no humidity control, and limited electrical capacity\u2014basic requirements when you\u2019re showing paintings valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tSo before a single work could be installed, the team had to retrofit the building. That meant new electrical just to power climate control, and a rush to install air conditioning in a structure that\u2019s part of a historic naval site still under the jurisdiction of the Italian Navy. The lease only kicked in at the start of April, leaving a matter of weeks to make the space functional. \u201cWe\u2019ve had to essentially fit out the entire space,\u201d Viveros-Faun\u00e9 said. According to one source with experience building out spaces in the Arsenale, the electrical and air conditioning alone could cost up to $1 million.<\/p>\n Locals and Insiders\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tBehind many of these projects are people who rarely appear in the credits.<\/p>\n \n\tPia Capelli is one of them. Based in Venice, she has worked with galleries, museums, foundations, foreign culture ministries, both before and during several editions of the Biennale as a strategic adviser and in some cases project manager, pairing artists, galleries, and institutions with the right spaces and helping shape projects long before installation begins. \u201cIn a way, I\u2019m a matchmaker,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThat work often starts earlier than people realize. A year is the bare minimum for a major project. Many begin closer to two. By the time the current Biennale opens, the next one is already underway, with organizers walking clients through active exhibitions to secure venues for the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWhat catches people off guard is rarely the art. It\u2019s everything around it.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cLogistics,\u201d Capelli said, is the part most often underestimated. Getting a work into a building can depend on the width of a canal, the height of a bridge, or whether a boat carrying a crane can physically reach the site. Some vessels can\u2019t pass under Venice\u2019s bridges. Others can\u2019t navigate the smaller canals at all. If the route doesn\u2019t work, the artwork doesn\u2019t arrive.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tCosts follow the same pattern. Budgets can be mapped out early, but they tend to balloon as installation approaches, when problems become concrete and expensive to solve. Even disposal carries a price. Removing materials from a site often requires boats and labor, to the point where it can be cheaper to store or donate structures than to throw them away.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tMoney helps, but it isn\u2019t decisive. Venice doesn\u2019t function as a simple rental market. Churches, palaces, and institutional spaces all operate differently, and access often depends as much on relationships and experience as it does on budget. \u201cYou can be very wealthy and still not find a venue\u2014or the perfect project,\u201d Capelli said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tFor a city of fewer than 50,000 residents, the pressure is constant. Capelli pointed to the rising cost of living and the spread of short-term rentals, which have pushed many locals out of the historic center. The Biennale brings work and attention, but it also adds to the strain, layering a global event onto a place that is already stretched. So relationships matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBy the time the Biennale opens, most of that work has disappeared. Capelli is quick to point out that the work isn\u2019t only transactional. Venice is difficult, she said, but that difficulty is part of the draw. \u201cIt\u2019s a privilege working here. Your brain is entirely engaged, and you\u2019re compensated for any logistic nightmare by the beauty of the place where you\u2019re working.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/venice-biennale-2026-logistics-costs-installation-1234783673\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Faustin-flying-1.jpg?w=1024″] Last month, Faustin Linyekula stood at the edge of the lagoon beside the Arsenale, looking out over the water. He bent down and ran his hand along the moss that clings to the concrete docks, then began to sing. His voice carried across the basin, past the bell towers and into the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1916749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1916749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1916749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1916749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1916749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Barry-heads-in-venice.jpg?w=400\")
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Courtesy Tony Shafrazi \/ Gallery Without Walls<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n![\"VENICE,](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-1366122102_f76ba0.jpg?w=400\")
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