In a moment when cultural discourse oscillates between visual oversaturation, digital acceleration and political anxiety, the Fondazione Dries Van Noten inaugurates its public programme with the manifesto-exhibition The Only True Protest Is Beauty, opening on 25 April 2026 at Palazzo Pisani Moretta in Venice.
Fondazione DVN Presentation Poster
Curated by Dries Van Noten, the exhibition offers a reflection on beauty as a form of cultural resistance, a critical instrument and a transformative experience. It does not operate as an exhibition in the conventional sense, but rather as a spatial manifesto on beauty, materiality and the profoundly human act of creation.
The title—borrowed from a verse by American activist and songwriter Phil Ochs, “In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty”—provides the conceptual key to the entire project. Yet the beauty invoked here is far from comforting or decorative. On the contrary, the exhibition explores an unstable, at times disquieting beauty, capable of generating tension and ambiguity. It is not the aesthetics of perfect harmony that define the curatorial approach, but those forms that disrupt perception and suspend certainty.
Atelier lachaert dhanis I Trompe l’oeil, 2026. Chandelier Alexander Kirkeby, 2025. Courtesy of the artists
Spanning more than 20 rooms and bringing together over 200 works, the exhibition deliberately avoids any linear curatorial structure. Instead of a didactic route, the curator constructs a sequence of encounters and visual frictions between fashion, photography, ceramics, glass, jewellery and experimental design. Whenever the composition risks becoming too seductive or too coherent, a dissonant element almost invariably intervenes to destabilise the balance.
Kaori Kurihara Pierrot fleuri, 2025. Courtesy of the artist
More than a mere backdrop, Palazzo Pisani Moretta becomes an active participant in the exhibition’s construction. Its Venetian Gothic architecture, Baroque interventions and dense ornamental interiors generate a constant tension with the contemporary works on display. The result evokes the logic of a contemporary Wunderkammer: an intuitive accumulation of artefacts, materials and images that resists rigid classification and privileges sensory experience and free association.
fondazionedriesvannoten.org
Photography by Matteo de Mayda
Words by Andreea Dicianu
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