In Venice, CYFEST 17 brings historical avant-garde movements into dialogue with media art and addresses climate change, environmental transformation and new forms of perception through installations, video, sound and kinetic systems.
Type: Thematic/curatorial exhibition.
Artists: Anna Frants, AES+F, Andy Barrt, Sergey Kishchenko, Mariateresa Sartori, Jaanika Peerna.
Genres: Mixed media, installation, performance art, digital art.
Dates: 8 May–31 August 2026.
Venue: CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo.
Address: Giudecca 211 B, 30122 Venice, Italy.
Opening hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11:00–18:00; Sunday 11:00–17:00; Monday closed.
Further information: www.cristinagatti.it.
Contact: press@cristinagatti.it; +39 338 6950929.
Author: Cristina Gatti Press & P.R.
VENICE — The international media art exhibition CYFEST 17 — Natura Naturans: Human Beings, Nature, Landscape brings historical avant-garde movements, contemporary technologies and environmental transformations into dialogue in Venice. It asks what happens when nature is no longer represented, but becomes a process to observe, activate and even programme. At CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo, on the island of Giudecca, the project brings together international artists and works from the Frants Family Collection until 31 August 2026, creating a route in which painting, movement, light, sound, algorithms and technological systems become tools for examining the relationship between human beings and the environment.
Curated by CYLAND MediaArtLab in collaboration with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Center for Studies on the Arts of Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus (CSAR), the exhibition takes its title from the philosophical concept of Natura Naturans, which identifies nature as a generative force in continual transformation. Nature is thus not something motionless to contemplate, but a dynamic system in which matter, energy, time and perception constantly interact.
This is precisely the starting point for a dialogue between apparently distant eras. On one side are the experiments of the twentieth-century avant-garde and Russian and Soviet art, represented by the Frants Family Collection; on the other, contemporary artists using automation, kinetic devices, video, artificial intelligence, algorithmic systems and interactive technologies. The result is a route that shows how some of the questions posed by the avant-garde — about movement, light, matter and perception — continue to re-emerge today through new tools.
Among the works on display, Anna Frants’s automated kinetic drawings transform light and movement into a generative process; Jaanika Peerna addresses the fragility of glaciers and climate change through an installation of great poetic intensity; Tuula Närhinen, meanwhile, imagines bird species capable of adapting to an environment contaminated by plastic, using fiction as a tool for reflecting on transformations of ecosystems.
The wind becomes an invisible author in the work of Mariateresa Sartori, where an anemometer produces drawings situated between natural phenomenon, chance and human intervention. Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov take up the legacy of the avant-garde through a large kinetic installation, while the international collective AES+F investigates body, identity and perception in the digital age through images oscillating between the fairy-tale and the unsettling.
The exhibition also includes works by Andy Barrt, Alexandra Dementieva, Alexey Grachev, Sergey Kishchenko, Sergei Komarov & Lidiia Griaznova, Alexei Kostroma, Valery Koshlyakov, Linda Loh, Natalia Lyakh, Dmitriy Shishov, Eric Vernhes and Mathieu Zurstrassen, expanding the dialogue across different generations and geographies of contemporary media art.
CYFEST 17 is not confined to the exhibition space, however. During its time in Venice, the festival has developed a programme of discussions, performances and screenings in collaboration with Ca’ Foscari, bringing reflection on art, technology and ecology into the university’s spaces as well. Among the Art Night Venezia events, the 50th edition of LASER Talk CYLAND, devoted to so-called “hybrid ecologies”, brought together artists, curators and scholars to discuss new forms of ecology emerging from the interaction of natural systems, technology and cultural processes. The programme also included Andy Barrt’s sculptural performance The Snow Flower of the North, made with Anton Ershov and Gabriele Grassi, and the third edition of Sleepless Video Art Night, an overnight marathon of international video art addressing environmental crises, migration, collective memory and possible futures.
Founded in 2007, CYFEST is now an international itinerant platform bringing together artists, curators, engineers, programmers and researchers around the possibilities offered by the encounter between art, science and technology. Its 17th edition, which began in Thessaloniki at the end of 2025, now continues in Venice, where Natura Naturans offers a particularly timely reflection: at a moment when climate change is transforming the landscape and our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by technology, art can become a space for observing these processes and, perhaps, imagining alternatives.
English translation of the original Italian announcement.