From February 6 to 9, 2026, on the occasion of Arte Fiera, within ART CITY Bologna and ART CITY White Night, Ababo Art Week returns with exhibitions, talks, events, installations and performances inside and outside Bologna’s historic center, as well as within Accademia delle Belle Arti di Bologna, which for the occasion will become a widespread exhibition space capable of displaying the richness of ideas and research of students from various departments.
ABABO Open Show 2025, ph Martina Platone, courtesy Accademia delle Belle Arti di Bologna
Starting from Arte Fiera, Bologna’s art fair, it will be possible to visit until Sunday February 8 the Accademia delle Belle Arti booth, at which the works of six students from the specialization biennials are present in: Visual Arts Painting (Michele Cotelli, Chiaraselvs), Sculpture (Serena Galimberti), Photography (Viola Manfrini), Decoration for architecture (Qianwen Chen) and Art graphics (Ilaria Venturini). The exhibition project, curated by Maura Pozzati, takes the name Direzione segno and reasons on the sign understood in its broadest valences. Starting from drawing, texture and writing one expands to reasoning on the trace, on the furrow and on the foundational gesture up to the configuration of the sign as true and proper conquest of space. Various are the exhibitions scattered throughout the city. The Product Design 3 course of Bologna’s Academy creates, through the scenographic installation curated by LABBRAINdesign, a staging through LED walls of a series of “observation points on water”. The installations, conceived to be positioned along water basins to favor unusual and interesting aesthetic experiences, are visible by visiting the exhibition OCCHIO! Sguardi sul territorio Evolution, at the Cortile d’Onore of Palazzo Zani, headquarters of Consorzio della Bonifica Renana.
ABABO OFF. Disseminare e condividere, Jiupeng Sun, “Crescere fa male”, plexiglas, gesso, pigmento, 2025, courtesy Accademia delle Belle Arti di Bologna
A performance, which will be possible to attend on Sunday February 8 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM will be Keep Out, curated by Annalisa Cattani, which analyzes the experience of near-death and of an out-of-body state of consciousness. The performance is realized in collaboration with the three-year Fashion design program of Bologna’s Academy which designed the clothes and with the contribution of dancer and choreographer Alessandra Carloni of Bologna Danza by Gymmoving. Outside Bologna, at the municipality of Valsamoggia, it is instead possible to visit a widespread exhibition among the city streets composed of thirty-two posters realized by the Photography biennial of the Academy within the project Le Case del Campo dei Fiori, dedicated to the district of Bazzano municipality known for its public housing, once heart of working-class and community life, with a strong local identity that survives still today. In the Foyer of Teatro Arena del Sole one can visit TEATRODISEGNATO/03: the exhibition of drawings realized by the Illustration for publishing course, inspired by the show Bestemmia by Teatro Valdoca (created in collaboration with Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT), while at Palazzo Malvezzi de’ Medici one can visit DISSEMINARE E CONDIVIDERE, an exhibition realized in collaboration with the Decoration for architecture course of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, which returns a symbolic and physical crossing of the external and internal spaces of the palazzo, headquarters of Città Metropolitana di Bologna, and urban extension of Museo della Civiltà Contadina in Bentivoglio.
Serena Galimberti, “Immortalità in coltura”, 2024-2025, courtesy Accademia delle Belle Arti di Bologna
Another great initiative is the exhibition of the winning works of the Art Up 2025 prize and the Zucchelli 2025 competition which, through the exhibition All of a sudden curated by Parsec, can be observed at Zu.Art giardino delle arti of Fondazione Zucchelli. Also at Zu.Art, for the occasion of Art City White Night, the white night of art realized by BolognaFiere within ART CITY Bologna 2025 (February 7), from 6:00 PM to 11:00 PM it will be possible to also experience the interactive video mapping installation Interaction Zucchelli, conceived in 2025 together with the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna and realized with the contribution of Regione Emilia-Romagna l.r. 2/2022, in addition to the two talks in the main hall at 11:00 AM and 4:30 PM which see Guido Molinari in dialogue with Anneke Eussen (on exhibition at Galleria Studio G7) and Marco Scotini with Délio Jasse (on exhibition at AF Gallery). The two initiatives are part of the ARTalk series of meetings organized by the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna to deepen the poetics of some of the protagonists of solo exhibitions scheduled on the occasion of ART CITY Bologna 2026 (already seen as protagonists Flavio de Marco in dialogue with Carmen Lorenzetti, Giuseppe Pietroniro in dialogue with Marinella Paderni and Matt Connors in dialogue with Stella Bottai).
ABABO Open Show, Art City White Night 2025, ph Martina Platone, courtesy Accademia delle Belle Arti di Bologna
As every edition, this year too the academy itself is an essential part of the ART CITY program, opening to the public with ABABO OPENSHOW, various exhibitions, events, installations and conferences will inhabit the academy. This, on the occasion of ART CITY, becomes a widespread exhibition space that presents itself as an explosion of exhibitions and installations produced and curated by the academy’s different departments returning a cross-section on the research and most interesting ideas observed by students. During Ababo White Night (Saturday February 7), from 9:00 PM to midnight in the main hall, it will be possible to attend Minimum Sonoritas @Magna, a sound intervention that will alternate in loop two different soundtracks: Onigiri Limon’, curated by Danilo Danisi, and Obliquità acustiche, curated by Marco Cesare Consumi in collaboration with student Martin Hintelbrand. Both acoustic tests were conceived as sound carpet for the exhibition “I 100 anni di Nino Migliori. I Manichini. Identità”, organized by do ut do. In Sala Clementina, starting from 9:00 PM until midnight, a group of young artists coordinated by Prof. Gabriele Lamberti will give life to Gabinetto Magico Auratico, a drawing practice founded on an approach to extemporaneous portrait interpreted according to categories inspired by inner energy, by the aura of all those people from the public who will lend themselves to being portrayed and who will receive as gift their own portrait.
ARTalk CITY 2025. Incontro con Urs Lüthi. Ph. Martina Platone, courtesy Accademia delle Belle Arti di Bologna
In the Study Hall, from 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM, one can attend Volumi sensibili, a project curated by Prof. Elisabetta Zanelli, in which sculptural garments, with daring volumes and unusual textures, expand in space, giving form to the Fashion Design Biennial’s research on dialogue between Art and Fashion. In this encounter between art and fashion, the garment becomes work, sculpture or space of narration and means to explore one’s identity. The same space hosts, from 9:00 PM to midnight, the immersive video projection Fusione, realized by the Digital Video course under the coordination of prof. Mikkel Garro. Fusion is here understood as an act of rebellion against an aesthetic and a logic founded on war, on deconstruction and on destruction: a critique of the processes of disintegration, division, scission and separation proper to rationalism. The projection will remain visible throughout the night, also from outside, at via Irnerio 45C. In addition to performative events, video projections and talks, very numerous are the various exhibitions inside the academy’s classrooms that display the most interesting research of the biennials and three-year programs of Painting, Sculpture, Art graphics, Scenography, Photography, Fashion Design, Decoration, Care design and Graphic interaction and videogame design. Set up along the academy’s corridors and inside the classrooms of various departments, will finally be present Un po tuttə, un po nessunə, a widespread work that, giving voice to students, will speak of the reality they live within the academy. Using the modality of a treasure hunt, the visitor will be able to search for students’ thoughts that become explicit through texts hung on walls and audio coming from various red cassettes scattered throughout the academy, exposing the voice of those who live and create art.
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Always connected to the art world, Samuel Tonelli attended the course in Art Education and Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and furthered his studies with the two-year master’s program in Education and Cultural Mediation of Artistic Heritage. After gaining experience mediating in various exhibitions and teaching art history at the art high school in Bologna, he developed a passion for art writing, which he sees as a powerful means of expression capable of opening up visions, broadening horizons and enriching the understanding of diverse perspectives on reality.
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