“A Journey Through Five Dimensions. Robert Wilson at La Biennale di Venezia”

Almost a year after his passing, the Biennale Teatro 2026 pays tribute to Robert (Bob) Wilson, with an exhibition focusing on an artist whose work substantially transformed the language of contemporary experimental theatre. Over more than five decades, Wilson was invited to La Biennale di Venezia on numerous occasions, presenting work in many of the disciplines it covers, from Visual Arts to Music, Theatre, and Cinema. He was awarded the Golden Lion for sculpture at the 45th International Art Exhibition in 1993: Wilson’s contribution to redrawing the boundaries between these disciplines was unprecedented. More than a retrospective, this small but precious exhibition takes the form of a journey through Wilson’s work, capturing the complexity of a practice in which light, time, space and sound were conceived as independent elements that shaped the dramaturgy behind an image. Light does much more than illuminate in Wilson’s art: it structures a space and directs our gaze, while time and perception expand, lending a different quality to the way an audience sees and hears a performance. The exhibition draws on material from the Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts (ASAC) which once again reveals itself to be not merely a major repository for – but an active source of – knowledge and appreciation for contemporary practice. Within the exhibition’s layered landscape of images, notes, sketches and creative processes, Wilson’s work continues to interrogate the viewer’s gaze, in a realm suspended somewhere between abstraction and memory.