After six months of renovating works, Palazzo Grassi will reopen to the public on September 5th with “HYPERVENEZIA”, an exhibition specifically dedicated to the city of Venice on the occasion of the 1600th anniversary of its foundation. It presents for the first time to the public the ambitious “Venice Urban Photo Project”, conceived and developed by Mario Peliti.


Curated by Matthieu Humery, curator of the Pinault Collection, the exhibition “HYPERVENEZIA” will be open at Palazzo Grassi from 5 September 2021 to 9 January 2022. This immersive show unfolds on the first floor of Palazzo Grassi in three installations: a linear path of almost 400 photographs that mark out an ideal trail through the sestieri – neighbourhoods – of Venice, a sight-specific map of the city made of approximately 900 geolocalised images that offer a panoramic view and a video installation of over 3.000 shots that scroll accompanied by a soundtrack composed specifically for the show by musician and composer Nicolas Godin, members of the electronic music duo Air.

In 2006, Mario Peliti starts to photograph and systematically map the city with the aim to form an archive of images that is the widest and most organic ever created and to offer a unique representation of the entire urban fabric of Venice, in its complexity and continuity. This photography archive currently amounts to 12.000 images, all in black and white, taken under the same lighting conditions, without any shadows and, most of all, in the absence of any human presence.


“HYPERVENEZIA” offers to the visitor a radical visual experience: the Venice we know disappears to give way to a parallel Venice, an empty and timeless one. From the Serenissima presented in its pure materiality emerges this unsettling strangeness that characterises any city that has been emptied of its inhabitants.