Valentina Furian (b. 1989, Venice, Italy ; lives and works in Berlin, Germany)

Capriccio (2026)

Valentina Furian is a visual artist whose practice, rooted in moving images and time-based installations, explores the evolving relationship between human beings and the natural world. Her work investigates the boundary between reality and fiction, employing a cinematographic approach that merges documentary experimentation with narrative fiction. At the core of her research is an exploration of interspecific relationships, where human and non-human entities intersect, revealing the wild within the everyday.

Capriccio (2026) is a sculptural constellation of moving images inspired by monumental fountains. Monitors display human faces, animals, plants, and fragments of classical sculpture, forming a dynamic ecology of relationships. The work extends Valentina Furian’s ongoing investigation into interspecies relationships, domestication, and the coexistence of human and more-than-human forms. Presented at the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, it engages with the site’s historical and symbolic layers while questioning representation, perception, and the unstable boundaries between nature and culture, body and image, presence and absence.

Furian’s recent solo exhibitions include Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene (2025) and XNL Foundation, Piacenza (2024). Selected group exhibitions include the Quadriennale di Roma, Rome (2025); BIENALSUR, Rome/Milan (2025); Triennale Milano, Milan (2025); Lo Schermo dell’Arte, Florence (2025); Biennale Gherdëina, Dolomites (2024); Gallerie d’Italia, Turin (2024); Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi / Pinault Foundation, Venice (2024); MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, Bologna (2023–24); MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome (2023); Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai (2021); and MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, Bologna (2018). In 2024 she won the New York Prize. Her works are in collections including Castello di Rivoli Museum, MAMbo Bologna, GAMeC Bergamo, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa and Triennale Milano. She is represented by UNA gallery Piacenza | Milano.

Established in Piacenza in 2018, UNA promotes artists born in the 1980s and 1990s. The gallery supports practices that investigate key issues shaping the contemporary world, including the relationship between humans and nature, gender and contemporary feminism, cultural diaspora, new technologies and AI, image production and circulation, and emerging figurative trends. Working across photography, video, painting, sculpture, and other media, UNA’s artists share an interest in installation as a central mode of presentation. In 2025 UNA opened a new space in Milan. While the headquarters remain in Piacenza, the Milan space is conceived as a place of collaboration and convergence for emerging artistic practices.