Benni Bosetto

Benni Bosetto: the artist

Among the most compelling Italian artists of her generation, Benni Bosetto (Merate, Italy, 1987; lives and works in Milan) moves across drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance to explore representations of identity, which in her practice emerge as fluid and often entangled with other species and organisms. Her practice revolves around perception, transformation, and the deconstruction of the body.

Narratives drawn from literary, anthropological, popular, and cinematic sources, as well as from psychoanalytic tradition and art history, distinguish Bosetto’s research: by examining gestures, habits, rituals, and states of semi-consciousness associated with meditation and dreams, Bosetto investigates the human experience and the subtleties of everyday life. Through reflections on notion of rest and sexuality, she transforms these concepts into fertile ground for imagination and new visions of reality.

Her long-standing fascination with the codes of staging and their transformative potential leads the artist to create porous environments that offer immersive experiences, where multiple temporalities and perspectives coexist.

On the occasion of her first major institutional exhibition, the artist will transform the Shed into a domestic environment, where rooms, walls, and surfaces come to life, giving to the space a distinctly human dimension.

The exhibition by Benni Bosetto at Pirelli HangarBicocca

A living organism, the exhibition draws inspiration from Daphne du Maurier’s novel “Rebecca”, in which the author portrays the house as an architectural female body. Transfigured from its original form, the space conceived by Bosetto becomes a place to inhabit—both intimate and political—capable of questioning the nature and function of the exhibition space itself.

Visitors will be welcomed into a dreamlike landscape, where drawings, sculptures, and objects invite profound reflections on the body, on intimacy exposed to the gaze of others, and on the concept of care and rest as forms of resistance. A chimeric place that calls for discovery and daydreaming: every element vibrates within a liminal, surreal dimension, subverting linear and productive notions of time.

The exhibition will feature new works created specifically for this project, alongside drawings, installations, and performances that explore memory and ritual, sensuality and sexuality, constraint and freedom—themes that resonate within both the individual and collective body.