There is a phrase from Saint John Chrysostom, uttered in 362 AD, that speaks of the proximity of the faithful to the bodies of martyrs, of what it means to stand close to something sacred, of how that closeness transforms those who inhabit it. It is from there that More Than Any Body begins, the exhibition that Panorama – an independent exhibition space located in the San Marco district – dedicates to Chiara Cecconello and Nadezda Golysheva until April 19, 2026. The title is not a decorative borrowing; rather, it is a conceptual threshold through which the two artists, with very different languages, enter into dialogue with the Church of San Zulian, which overlooks the same campiello as the space, and with the questions that church carries with it. The shared starting point is thus a place that is both physical and symbolic: a building that continues to function, to be traversed every day by residents and tourists, to host liturgical practices. Not a ruin to contemplate, but a living space, with its objects, its rhythms, its painted or sculpted figures. Cecconello and Golysheva do not cite it or document it: they use it as material, interlocutor, and field of tension.
Chiara Cecconello, Nadezda Golysheva, “Più di ogni corpo”, installation view, courtesy Panorama Venezia
Nadezda Golysheva starts from an almost hidden detail: the figure of Saint Paul from Thebes, the hermit depicted on the surface of the urn in the high altar of the church. Saint Paul is a liminal figure: according to Christian tradition, he withdrew to the Egyptian desert at the age of sixteen and remained there for nearly a century, alone, far from any form of social life. An absolute, unrepeatable choice, difficult even to imagine in its radicality. The installation, Eremo, does not celebrate that asceticism nor make it heroic. Rather, it transposes it into a domestic grammar: a bed, a mat. Objects of rest and recollection, of night and prayer, which Golysheva uses to put into tension two polarities that are hard to reconcile. On one side, the absolute gesture of spiritual withdrawal; on the other, contemporary forms of isolation, the ones we know well, fragmented, voluntary or endured. The difference between one who withdraws from the world by radical choice and one who shuts themselves in at home out of exhaustion, discomfort, or necessity is not merely quantitative: it is ontological. Yet something resonates between the two conditions, and the installation works precisely in that space of ambiguous resonance. Panorama’s display windows, opacified to become part of the work, withdraw from view and return an intimate yet simultaneously inaccessible atmosphere. Something is perceived from the outside, but nothing is truly seen. This choice also functions as a metaphor for the hermitic experience itself: withdrawal is not invisibility; it is a form of other presence, which allows itself to be intuited without surrendering.
Chiara Cecconello, Nadezda Golysheva, “Più di ogni corpo”, installation view, courtesy Panorama Venezia
Golysheva often works with natural materials and traditional techniques, and her research, gravitating around the memory of places and the relations between bodies and spaces, finds here one of its most precise articulations. The work has neither the heaviness of a monument nor the lightness of a performative gesture: it inhabits an intermediate, suspended zone, which is probably the one most faithful to the experience it seeks to evoke. Chiara Cecconello presents at Panorama prima rimessa in voce, the first chapter of RIMESSA, a project created in collaboration with Ida Malfatti. The stated starting point is a childhood game, an experimental approach to sacred liturgy born from an irreverent, curious, pre-theoretical posture. Liturgy not as a codified system to respect, but as a sound structure to dismantle and reassemble. The sound installation occupies Panorama’s internal spaces and expands into the external campiello with a precise temporal rhythm: every day at 10:00, 12:00, and 19:30. The times are not random; they mark the day according to an almost canonical logic, like the hours of the divine office, and impose on the work a rhythm that is also a secular liturgy, repeated and anticipated. Voices and sounds are reprocessed through the repetition of phonemes and the grafting of quotations drawn from the trial records of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc is a figure who carries stratifications that are hard to unravel: visions, war, martyrdom, trial, posthumous rehabilitation. But what interests Cecconello is neither the hagiographic narrative nor the historical one; it is the voice, or rather the problem of the voice: who speaks, who is believed, how the speaking body is interrogated, transcribed, betrayed by the transcription. The trial records are a text in which the voice is already mediated, already interpreted by the writer, already reduced to a report. Working with them means interrogating the distance between sound and its written residue.
Chiara Cecconello, Nadezda Golysheva, “Più di ogni corpo”, installation view, courtesy Panorama Venezia
Cecconello’s practice, formed between IUAV and the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen, has moved for years in this territory: the one where the audible and the inaudible swap places, where the voice is not only a vehicle of meaning but matter, body, presence. The polyphonic environments she constructs do not illustrate concepts: they inhabit them, make them perceptible through a physicality proper to sound. What holds the two works together is not a stylistic affinity. Cecconello’s and Golysheva’s languages are distinct, and the exhibition does not seek to uniform them. The thread is more subtle and more resilient: it concerns the way bodies relate to sacred space, to distance, to presence. The hermit who withdraws is a body that chooses distance as a form of approach. Joan of Arc is a body whose voice was gathered, transcribed, judged, burned. Chrysostom’s panegyric speaks of the faithful crowding around relics, bodies close to bodies, in the hope that proximity transmits something.
Chiara Cecconello, Nadezda Golysheva, “Più di ogni corpo”, installation view, courtesy Panorama Venezia
More Than Any Body does not offer answers to these tensions, nor does it propose a synthesis. Instead, it functions as a space of listening where questions can reside without being resolved. This is perhaps the most precise sense of the title: not an affirmation of the body’s supremacy, but an interrogation of what exceeds it, of what remains when the body is no longer there or has voluntarily withdrawn, or has been reduced to a transcribed voice.
Info:
Chiara Cecconello e Nadezda Golysheva. Più di ogni corpo
11.02-19.04.2026
Panorama Venezia
Campiello San Zulian 602, Venezia
panoramavenezia.com
Elena Barison is a contemporary art historian specializing in the relationships between art, ecology and gender studies. She explored the verbal-visual practices of the neo-avant-garde with a thesis on Tomaso Binga, whose archive she now curates in Rome. She collaborates with Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice and with various independent organizations and magazines.
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