AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS: Works from the Enea Righi Collection Exhibition

Under the title AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS, Museion is exhibiting over 150 works by more than 80 artists from one of the most visionary and significant private collections of international contemporary art in Italy: the Enea Righi Collection. Thanks to a longstanding, trustful relationship, this collection has shaped Museion’s research into transdisciplinary, poetic, and socio-politically engaged artistic practices for over a decade.

It features a wide range of art works, architectural designs, and artists’ books by renowned international artists and collectives such as Massimo Bartolini, Alighiero Boetti, Anna Boghiguian, Trisha Donnelly, Theaster Gates, Nan Goldin, Marisa Merz, Sturtevant, Superstudio, Walid Raad, Franz Erhard Walther, Lawrence Weiner, Akram Zaatari, and many more. The exceptional nature of the exhibition is evident in the fact that it occupies the entire building and features the first showing of several recent acquisitions to the collection, including works by Sonia Boyce, Roni Horn, and Ser Serpas.

At the heart of the works in the Enea Righi Collection is the human being with all its hidden truths and emotions, its intimacy and relationships with others, its self-perception and its perception from the outside.

The title AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS is borrowed from the writing of Virginia Woolf, in which human life unfolds as a testament to its fluidity, brimming with potential and uncertainty. Her characters delicately hover between presence and impending absence, grappling with the memory of events and conflicts that prove elusive to full comprehension. The title therefore hints at the various thresholds between remembering and forgetting and the recurring acts of opening and closing doors on the continuous human journey of becoming. As such, the exhibition traces the intimate connections between life itself and the stories we tell, between what was and what remains physically perceptible. Above all, it highlights the collectors’ understanding of the transformative power of art by providing profound insights into life’s fluidity.

The works selected for AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS encourage viewers to ponder the transitional spaces of contemporary existence, where socio-political tensions intertwine with artistic expression. Throughout their artistic and sometimes activist work, artists such as Lisetta Carmi, Nan Goldin, and Zoe Leonard have emphasized the fluid nature of identity by regarding bodies as open systems in a permanent exchange with the environment. The works of Giulia Cenci, Jef Geys, Roman Ondak, Tarik Kiswanson and Bronwyn Katz are just a few examples of how doors, and windows recur in the exhibition as potent motifs that frame the human body as well as marking transitions and thresholds. Objects from daily life, urban architecture, and public décor – like Alex Ayed’s sculptures or Michael E. Smith or Massimo Bartolini’s installations – are relocated and reframed by the artists to compose new narratives and weave unexpected connections between geographies and memories.

Curated by Museion director Bart van der Heide, Frida Carazzato, Brita Köhler, and Leonie Radine, in collaboration with the collector Lorenzo Paini, the exhibition showcases a significant part of the Enea Righi Collection. Over the years, this collection has not only followed the artistic evolution of renowned conceptual positions, it has also embraced and supported a younger generation of artists. Another defining characteristic of the collection is its affinity for works of an institutional scale.

The architectural design, conceived by the Trento-based Campomarzio collective, encourages visitors to establish intimate relationships with the works and embark on a sensory-expanding journey on the threshold between inside and outside, the self and other, lived experience and its representation.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, published by the Enea Righi Collection and Museion and edited by Lorenzo Paini and Bart van der Heide.