On Saturday, June 20, the 15th edition of Art Night opens museums, foundations, galleries, and palaces until late. Guests include Vinicio Capossela at Ca’ Foscari. Here is our guide.
Saturday, June 20, 2026, Venice ignites the white night of art. Art Night celebrates fifteen years with 223 free events across 142 venues, including museums, galleries, palaces, universities, and cultural spaces. Vinicio Capossela will be one of the protagonists of the events in the main courtyard of the University, with an audio-visual performance blending nature and technology.
Like a widespread and free map, Art Night accompanies us into the Venice of culture, with performances, video art, workshops, and meetings.
We have selected the places to visit during the night. Some because they can only be seen during the day, others because
like the Academy of Fine Arts, they reveal in a single night the incredible energy born from this forge of contemporary art. Meet at the Querini at midnight, just like in our school days, this time to celebrate Q-Day: The Fondazione Querini Stampalia celebrates 157 years with exhibitions, events, and a DJ set by Argo16.
Art Night Venice starts at 6 PM at Ca’ Foscari
At 10 PM, Vinicio Capossela presents Art Milkwood: Entertainment from the Darkness, an audiovisual performance blending art, images, sound, poetry, and memory. A singer-songwriter, poet, and writer among the most original voices in Italian music, Vinicio Capossela brings a performance freely inspired by Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood to the main courtyard of Ca’ Foscari University. Radio waves, Ondes Martenot, generative soundscapes, and the voice of Irene Sciacovelli create a journey from the primordial darkness of the Lascaux Caves to the digital light of pixels.
From 11:30 PM until 4 AM, Sleepless Video Art Night returns to the Auditorium Santa Margherita, an international video art marathon curated by Lena Herzog, CYLAND MediaArtLab, and Giulia Gelmi. The program also includes TRINITY by Lena Herzog, a world premiere in immersive format with Apple Vision Pro.
On the morning of Sunday, June 21, the program continues in the San Sebastiano garden with Le petit déjeuner ARCOBALENO, in collaboration with Malìparmi. At 10:30 AM, the meeting Venezianissima takes place, with Gilda Zaffagnini and Giovanni Pellizzato.
Our Program
1. Venice Academy of Fine Arts
Open Studios
From 6 PM to 11 PM
In the spaces of the Incurabili and the Giudecca venue, the Academy opens its environments as a living laboratory, offering the public the opportunity to see firsthand the research and unique energy of this forge of contemporary art.
The program weaves together exhibitions, workshops, screenings, artistic performances, music, and experiments coordinated by students and faculty. At the Incurabili, the Cloister hosts live music by Crow, Kinky Kittens, and Gli Incurabili, followed by a DJ set by GianCosta. In Room 7A, Scrolling and Theory presents screenings of web-based Net Art works, curated by Davide Anni.
In Room 3, artist and professor Giorgio Andreotta Calò organizes Osteria A3 Pugni with his students. The classroom becomes a convivial and performative space, with tables for playing briscola with personalized cards and an area dedicated to play with extravagant costumes.
The program also includes engraving exhibitions, handmade paper-making workshops, Sul filo delle immagini (On the Edge of Images), an illustration course exhibition in Room 22, works from the Comic Art courses, those from the Elements of Journalistic Communication course, and other projects.
At the Academy of Fine Arts venue on Giudecca, there will be drum workshops, Off Tempo, DJ and Audio-visual projects, New Technologies for Art, and DJ sets. Full program
2. Ligabue Foundation
Collecto
Palazzo Erizzo Ligabue, San Marco 3438
From 6:30 PM. By reservation.
In a truly inhabited palace, a journey through the civilizations of all continents, paleontology, archaeology, and contemporary art: from a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite to works by Arcangelo Sassolino, Nico Vascellari, and Giorgio Andreotta Calò; from Oceanic art and prehistoric Venuses to Leonardo and Tiepolo; from 20,000 years of human history to the works of the young artist-in-residence Marta Spagnoli.
3. The Human Safety Net
The Living Library
Procuratie Vecchie, Piazza San Marco 105
6 PM – 10 PM. Free admission while seats last.
The exhibitions A World of Potential and We Rise by Lifting Others by Marinella Senatore are open to the public until 10 PM. For the Living Library, in collaboration with the Venice Sustainability Foundation, the books are real people, ready to narrate their stories and share memories in the spirit of listening and inclusion.
The public does not visit an exhibition: they meet people, such as Alvine Djatsa Kingue, a Cameroonian designer who combines sustainable fashion, the tradition of wax printing, and intercultural dialogue, or Salma Hilmi, a Moroccan artist and graphic designer, who will involve the public in her participatory work Art That Heals.
Among the Living Books is Marco Marino, architect and curator of the exhibition Intelligent Venice. The oldest city of the future (Biennale Architettura 2025). His narrative spans centuries of inventions, adaptation strategies, and technologies through which Venice has learned to coexist with a fragile environment—a thread linking the city’s past to its future.
4. Fondazione Querini Stampalia
Q-Day, Solstice, and Music Festival
Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Castello 5252
From 6 PM to midnight and beyond
Exhibitions open, DJ sets from 10:00 PM, toast and cake cutting at midnight.
On Saturday, June 20, at the stroke of midnight, Q-Day begins: the Foundation’s birthday (157 years), the Summer Solstice, and the Music Festival. On Saturday, the venue opens for free from 6 PM to midnight with visits to current exhibitions, such as The Dreamer. From 10 PM, DJ set by Enea Pascal (Argo16). At midnight, a collective toast and cake cutting. On Sunday, the 21st, the Foundation remains open for the entire day.
5. Palazzo Grimani
Amoako Boafo, It Doesn’t Have To Always Make Sense
Castello 4858
From 5 PM to 11 PM. Last entry: 10:00 PM. Free admission, no reservation required.
The Museum of Palazzo Grimani presents the exhibition of one of the most discussed and essential voices on the contemporary international scene. The Ghanaian artist brings his dense and layered figurative painting to Venice, capable of short-circuiting the history of portraiture with the most urgent contemporaneity.
6. Palazzo Bragadin
Medea. Fragments of Memory
Barbaria delle Tole 6480, Castello
From 6 PM to 9 PM
Georgian artist Tamara Kvesitadze reinterprets the mythological figure of Medea. The world of Medea, the eternal stranger, is explored through a lecture by Georgian philologist and researcher Nino Lordkipanidze, in conversation with the artist. The original soundtrack is by Soundwalk Collective.
7. Munav – Naval History Museum
Matter of Time: Sound Visions at MUNAV
Riva S. Biasio, 2148
From 7 PM to 11 PM
Contemporary visuals, environmental projections, and sound research: the Syncretika collective creates an immersive intervention at the Naval History Museum that brings the iconic photographs of Alfred Eisenstaedt into dialogue with the Piranesian spaces of the Ships Pavilion. Book now!
8. Palazzo Diedo
Strange Rules
Cannaregio 2386
From 6:00 PM to 11:30 PM
Berggruen Arts & Culture offers free access to Strange Rules, the first exhibition in Italy dedicated to Protocol Art, and to Unfinished, a retrospective of conceptual artist Ceal Floyer.
Furthermore, from 8 PM, Palazzo Diedo will host the final chapter of the theatrical performance How It Is by Samuel Beckett, directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett and performed by Conor Lovett and Stephen Dillane for Gare St Lazare Ireland.
9. Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa
108th Young Artists Collective
Sala del Camino, Complesso dei Santi Cosma e Damiano, 621, Giudecca
From 6 PM to 8 PM
The historic appointment with artists under 30 who live or have chosen to reside in the Triveneto region has reached its 108th edition, representing all contemporary languages: painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance. For over a century, this collective exhibition has been one of the primary observatories of emerging Italian art.
10. Vinicio Capossela + Sleepless Video Art Night
Ca’ Foscari and Auditorium Santa Margherita
From 10 PM
With Art Milkwood: Entertainment from the Darkness in the courtyard of Ca’ Foscari, Vinicio Capossela constructs a nocturnal narrative between primordial nature and digital technology, real worlds and inner visions. Free admission, but we recommend arriving well in advance to ensure entry.
From 11:30 PM to 4 AM
The Sleepless Video Art Night festival returns to the Auditorium Santa Margherita. World premiere: TRINITY by Lena Herzog in Apple Vision Pro.
11. Le petit déjeuner Arcobaleno – Sunday, June 21
San Sebastiano Garden
From 9 AM
The morning after Art Night, a rainbow breakfast in collaboration with Malìparmi.
Participants bring everything needed to set up a breakfast on the grass, which is then evaluated by a jury. At 10:30 AM, Venezianissima: Gilda Zaffagnini in conversation with Giovanni Pelizzato.
Reservations: artnightvenezia@unive.it.
Official Website Art Night 2026
Art sets the night free
Saturday, June 20, 2026
Article by Laura Scarpa
