Forever, Until the End: Giuseppe Di Liberto’s work on memory, disappearance, and the fragility of the present at the Ca’ Pesaro Project Room
In Venice, the end is never just an end. It is something that returns, resurfaces, settles on the stones, enters the memory of images, and coexists with the city’s beauty. From June 23 to September 6, 2026, the Project Room of the International Gallery of Modern Art presents Forever, Until the End, a site-specific installation by Palermo-born artist Giuseppe Di Liberto (born 1996), who trained in Venice and is now among the most interesting voices on the new Italian scene.
The exhibition, curated by Marta Cereda and Giulia Mariachiara Galiano, is part of the Polifonie italiane series—a Ca’ Pesaro project curated by Camilla Salvaneschi and Angela Vettese dedicated to artists trained at the Iuav University of Venice—held in the Project Room, a space dedicated to experimentation and dialogue with local educational institutions.
The title of the exhibition is an affectionate phrase that carries within it the awareness of loss. Di Liberto has long worked on death, absence, and mourning. His research can be read as an investigation into what remains: the forms through which communities retain memory, and through which human beings attempt to endure the unbearable.
Ex-votos, apocalyptic iconography, funeral rites, the sea as a place of both danger and salvation, and popular memory. In the exhibition Thus We Attempted to Wait for the End, presented in 2024 at the Galleria Poggiali in Milan, the apocalypse also appeared as a revelation, and the end as a condition—a suspended time where past and present mingle.
At Ca’ Pesaro, in the center of the Project Room, a large concrete structure comes to life through a cyclical process of appearance and disappearance of images drawn from Venetian archival memory. The material is heavy; the history of the city resurfaces without ever becoming fixed.
The work also introduces an olfactory component developed specifically for the project, an element consistent with the artist’s practice of often building immersive and sensory environments. The sense of smell acts differently than images: it arrives before thought, activates memories, produces associations, and places the visitor’s body inside the work.
In Venice, where the experience of space is always physical and atmospheric—composed of water, stone, and humidity—the city enters the work as an unstable archive, a place where memory is a continuous movement.
Forever, Until the End can also be read as an exhibition about the way we look at Venice. What remains of a city when its images are everywhere? What does memory mean when the past is continuously reproduced, consumed, and transformed into a visual surface? And how can art restore complexity to a city often described through overly simple formulas?
Giuseppe Di Liberto. Forever, Until the End
Ca’ Pesaro, International Gallery of Modern Art – Project Room
Santa Croce 2076, Venice
From June 23 to September 6, 2026
Curated by Marta Cereda and Giulia Mariachiara Galiano
As part of Polifonie italiane, curated by Camilla Salvaneschi and Angela Vettese
Information
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