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The Art Box portal editorial team had the pleasure of attending once again this year the opening days of Personal Structures 2026 in Venice, one of the most prominent parallel exhibitions accompanying the Venice Biennale. Organized by the European Cultural Centre, this year’s edition, titled Confluences, quickly became one of the central gathering points of the preview days, attracting a large international audience of curators, artists, critics, collectors, and cultural professionals.

Running from May 9 until November 22, 2026, the exhibition unfolds across Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora, and the Marinaressa Gardens, bringing together 175 artists, architects, designers, and multidisciplinary creatives from more than 40 countries. Entry remains completely free, continuing ECC Italy’s long-standing commitment to accessibility and cultural exchange.

Centered around the idea of intersecting practices and global interconnectedness, Confluences takes its title from the image of rivers meeting and creating new currents — a metaphor for the ways artistic practices, cultures, technologies, and personal experiences influence one another and generate new perspectives. Rather than presenting isolated artistic statements, the exhibition explores how individual narratives become part of a broader and constantly shifting cultural landscape.

Among the featured participants are internationally recognized figures such as ORLAN, Hirohiko Araki, Paresh Maity, and Sandra Cattaneo Adorno, alongside a special dialogue between the works of Kozo and Keith Haring. The exhibition continues to balance established international names with emerging and experimental practices, reflecting the complexity and heterogeneity of contemporary global culture.

In the Marinaressa Gardens, large-scale works such as Paresh Maity’s Equilibrium and Rashid Al Khalifa’s Inhabited Crate engage the landscape as an active spatial and perceptual agent.

At Palazzo Mora, ORLAN presents We Are Inconsolable (2025–2026), a series combining AI-generated imagery with painterly intervention, continuing her exploration of embodiment, authorship, and technological mediation. In the same venue, the visual languages of Keith Haring and Kozo intersect through Kozo’s contemporary reinterpretations of drawing informed by pop aesthetics.

At Palazzo Bembo, the exhibition expands into cross-media collaborations, including Shueisha’s presentation of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure by Hirohiko Araki. Projects such as B-OWND further connect art, craftsmanship, and hybrid practices, including spaces dedicated to public tea ceremonies.

The European Cultural Centre Italy continues its collaboration with the Palestine Museum US, presenting Gaza – No Words – See the Exhibit, curated by Faisal Saleh. The project brings together 100 hand-embroidered panels by Palestinian women, using tatreez as a narrative structure for testimonies of loss, resilience, and survival in Gaza since October 2023.

The exhibition framework is further expanded through two National Pavilions. The El Salvador Pavilion presents Cartographies of the Displaced by J. Oscar Molina, focusing on migration and diasporic experience, while the Seychelles Pavilion features Egbert Marday, whose work reflects an intimate dialogue between nature and cultural identity.

This year also introduces PS Design, a new section that brings design into closer dialogue with contemporary art and architecture, further emphasizing hybrid and cross-disciplinary approaches to artistic production.

Across its venues, Personal Structures – Confluences activates both historical interiors and public spaces through site-specific interventions, transforming Venice itself into an active environment shaped by movement, exchange, layered histories, and contemporary cultural narratives.

Over the years, Personal Structures has featured artists such as Yoko Ono, Joseph Kosuth, Marina Abramović, Martin Parr, Xu Bing, and Lee Ufan, alongside institutions including Princeton University, the Willem de Kooning Academy, the Ludwig Museum, and the Guangdong Museum of Art.

Ultimately, Confluences reflects a broader question within today’s cultural landscape: how can spaces of encounter and coexistence be created in a moment increasingly marked by acceleration and division?

Rather than offering definitive answers, the exhibition proposes a framework where multiple perspectives can interact, overlap, and remain in productive tension, opening new possibilities for imagining both the present and the future.