Art City Bologna: neo-colonial impulses, crimes in a desecrated church and irony against a reactionary society

I’m always on the lookout for a flimsy excuse to go to Bologna. And ART CITY Bologna just provided me with a golden one. This year, the long weekend of installations and (what looked like) hundreds of exhibitions all over the city was accompanied by a Special Program of artworks that celebrated Le Porte della Città, the ten mediaeval Gates of Bologna which used to defend the access to the city centre. The whole circular path of artworks was eight kilometres long, so I skipped some of the gates. I did, however, make a beeline for Dread Scott’s A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday at Porta San Felice.

Francesco Cavaliere, OTTO, doppia curva lingua!, 2025. At Porta Saragozza. Photo: Valentina Cafarotti

Fatma Bucak, Tremendous gap between you and me, 2025. At Porta Castiglione. Photo: Valentina Cafarotti

There are more images of the works installed at the mediaeval gates below. I’ll jump right to some of the exhibitions that I found most interesting while i was in town.

Rashid Masharawi, From Ground Zero, 2024

Rashid Masharawi, From Ground Zero (trailer), 2024

Younes Ben Slimane, We knew how beautiful they were, these islands, 2022

Sasha Kurmaz, State of Emergency, 2018

Sasha Kurmaz, State of Emergency (trailer), 2018

The Museo civico del Risorgimento (the Museum of the Unification of Italy) had a fantastic exhibition looking at “the nature of sovereignty, the persistence of neo-colonial impulses and the fragile equilibrium of power in an increasingly divided global landscape.” The curators probably conceived Fragmented Nations (on dropping bomb*shells) before Trump’s return as the abominable president of the U.S. His first weeks in power have only exacerbated the breakdown of multilateral cooperation and made our present and future more chaotic and daunting. Which made this show even more significant. And hard to swallow.

There were 7 video works in the show. The one i want to highlight is Shadi Habib Allah‘s ghost stories.

Shadi Habib Allah, 30KG Shine, 2017

Set in Jerusalem, 30kg Shine weaves together three stories that unfold under the cover of darkness and explore conditions of ownership in contested places.

The starting point of the film is an old rumour about a ghost that was roaming the streets of Jerusalem’s old city around 1936. Frightened of this disturbing presence in their streets, people stayed indoors. 80 years later, in that same neighbourhood, an elderly woman is moving like a thief (or a ghost) in her house at night. She uses candlelight to go from one room to another and tries to secure possessions that belonged to her family. The hostile Israeli neighbours who took over the houses around hers cut electricity on the meter outside her home and she is too scared to go out and turn it back on.

The work also features footage of an underground network of tunnels that will house 22,000 displaced corpses. The ultra-fancy catacomb is an answer to the holy city’s chronic shortage of burial space, both for Jerusalem residents and for non-residents willing to pay significant sums to be buried in a Holy City plot. The project also has a symbolic and political dimension: these bodies claim presence and ownership of the place where they will lie. If the bodies of one’s ancestors rest here, there can be no ambiguity concerning to whom this place belongs.

Many of the Palestinian workers who were digging these tunnels (before the October 7 attack) were from the West Bank. They were allowed to enter the city for the sole purpose of building the underground cemetery. Their invisible, underground presence was tolerated only as a labour force, and solely for the sake of the Israeli dead. They had to work and sleep on the construction site (a breach of human rights in the workplace that is far from being exceptional in Israel) for 3 weeks or even longer before being able to visit their homes and families.

Meanwhile, Palestinian bodies are denied the right of a final resting place.

Part horror story, part drama, part documentary, the video tells uncomfortable truths about Palestine and Israel, a territory where politics is linked with fear, where notions of property, ownership and belonging are constantly contested and where the burial of the dead is made an argument for an eternal claim to the land.

Per Barclay, The Massacre of the Innocents – Guido Reni, 2025. Exhibition view at Chiesa di San Barbaziano

I would probably never have paid attention to Guido Reni’s 1611 painting Massacre of the Innocents before Art City Bologna. I tend to avoid the rooms dedicated to Baroque in art museums. But this wasn’t a museum; this was a desecrated church. And the painting was hanging upside down over a pool of reflective dark liquid.

The painting shows soldiers with daggers as they are about to harm or kill mothers and children. Per Barclay printed a photograph of the original work and hung it upside down over a pool of black linseed oil that mirrors the scene. The viscous liquid symbolises petroleum, a source of wealth and great damage to countries and ecosystems. The painting has painful contemporary echoes. It is difficult not to think of all the children killed by men with weapons in Ukraine, Palestine, the DRC and elsewhere right now.

The setting of the now desecrated San Barbaziano church was spectacular. After years of neglect, the church has undergone restoration works. It’s now raw, unadorned and luminous.

Exhibition view of Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo. Photo: Carlo Favero

Chiara Fumai, Annie Jones, Harry Houdini, Dope Head, Eusapia Palladino, Zalumma Agra, Dogaressa Querini Read Valerie Solanas, 2013. Photo: Mathilda Olmi

Franco Mazzucchelli, Intervento Ambientale, 2025. In front of MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Valentina Cafarotti

I also stopped at the MAMbo, Bologna’s museum of modern art, to visit Easy Irony: Irony in Italian art between the 20th and 21st century. I liked the premise: “Artists of different generations have recognized the destabilizing and imaginative power of the ironic procedure, especially in the Italian scene, where its proliferation seems particularly justified. The weight of its artistic tradition, a reactionary society strongly influenced by the Church and the Fascist past, the success of the Commedia all’italiana and the more recent cinepanettoni films, the rise of Berlusconism and with it an aggressive consumer society: these are just some of the «institutions» to be undermined and challenged.” A smart way to remind Italians that they’ve fought against oppression, vulgarity and capitalism for decades. Irony is not enough if you want to resist the current ultra-conservative government, but it might prevent people from falling into despair.

I’ll just highlight two works from the exhibition. P(VIPs)po by Roberto Cuoghi and Paola Pivi‘s iconic polar bear.

Roberto Cuoghi, P(VIPs)po, 2020

The painting shows what remains of a Donald Trump puppet after the artist’s dog had played with it. With its/his hair in disarray, socks with dollar signs, a kiss on the buttocks and a product label prominently displayed, the doll is tawdry. However, the cotton wool bursting from torn limbs and the hyper-realistic features add a tragic dimension to the strange scene.

Exhibition view of Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo. Photo: Carlo Favero

A life-size polar bear made of polyurethane foam crouches with its snout on the floor. Perhaps it is exhausted after its journey from the Arctic Circle. Or depressed by the perspective of losing its natural habitat. Because of global warming, his white fur coat has turned into soft yellow feathers more compatible with Mediterranean temperatures.

Refaat Alareer, Even if I burn, Here I belong. From the poem O’Live Tree, part of the festival Reclaim Poetry

CHEAP‘s poetry posters were not part of ART CITY Bologna but they were stunning. Like pretty much everything CHEAP does. The public art project brings poetry to passersby daily and collective experience, underlining the contemporary, political, radical, social and transfeminist dimensions of the literary art form.

More images from the streets of Bologna:

I know nothing about this one. I suspect it must be part of a CHEAP initiative