Riccardo Benassi
An artist originally from Cremona, he lives and works in Berlin, Bergamo, and online. He uses text and sound to challenge the limits of technology from an existentialist perspective, employing a poetic language in environmental installations, video essays, performances, and spatial interventions created for public and private commissions. Over the years, his practice has stood out for its multidisciplinary approach, reflecting on the impact of technology on our daily relationship with space and people, and on how it has radically altered living structures and the organization of reality—from architecture to politics—as well as the production and consumption of culture. Benassi was part of the subcultures of the 1990s and was a key figure in the underground music scene. Equally active in the visual arts, he has utilized new media with a particular focus on the expressive development of the millennial generation, becoming a point of reference for them in both theory and practical application. In recent years, textual language has increasingly become part of his work. His work has been exhibited at MAXXI in Rome (2025, 2026); Museion in Bolzano (2024); Museo della Permanente in Milan (2024); Palazzo Grassi / Punta della Dogana, Venice (2023); the ICA Foundation in Milan (solo exhibition, 2023); MAXXI in L’Aquila (2022); GAM in Turin (2022); ar/ge kunst in Bolzano (2022); MACRO in Rome (2022); Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Geneva (2021); MoCA, Taipei, Taiwan (2021); ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe (solo exhibition, 2020); Live Arts Week/ART CITY, Bologna (2020); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (solo exhibition, 2019); Impakt festival, Utrecht (2019); Galleria ZERO... in Milan (2019); Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (solo exhibition, 2016). Notable among the artist’s special projects curated and produced by Xing are *The Last Factories Left in the Distance Sing Repetitive Gospel Songs…* (2026), commissioned for FESTA, and *Morestalgia* (2020), supported by the Italian Council. Benassi was a finalist for the MAXXI Bvlgari Prize 2024. Since 2013, Riccardo Benassi has been a professor of Sound Design at the Bergamo Polytechnic of Arts and, since 2019, a professor of Visual Arts at NABA in Milan. He has published *Letters from the Passenger Seat When No One Is Behind the Wheel* (Mousse Publishing, 2010), *Briefly, Ballare* (Danilo Montanari, 2012), *Attimi Fondamentali* (Mousse Publishing, 2012), *Sicilia Bambaataa* (NERO Publishing, 2015), *Techno Casa* (Errant Bodies, 2015), *Morestalgia* (NERO Publishing, 2020), and *Daily Dense Dance Desiderio* (Distanz Publishing, 2023).
About Chiara Nuzzi
Chiara Nuzzi has been a Curator and Editorial Manager at ICA Milan since 2018. Since 2023, she has also served as Curator of the Bonollo Foundation Collection in Thiene (Italy).
Her main areas of interest include transdisciplinary, transcultural, and collaborative artistic practices, in which the politics of representation, acts of imagination, and decolonial and ecological thought play a central role. Having always been interested in the work of artists who address the crucial issues of our time, she has developed an approach that combines artistic, experiential, and theoretical practice, with the aim of imagining and activating alternative and transformative ways to build community with and through art, starting from an engagement with the present and its fragilities.
Her previous projects include collaborations with institutions such as the Istituto Svizzero (Milan/Rome), ar/ge Kunst (Bolzano), MART – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Le Narcissio (Nice, France), and the Independent Art Fair (Brussels).
Recently, Nuzzi has curated solo exhibitions by Cemile Sahin (ICA Milan, 2025), Paul Chan (Fondazione Bonollo, 2025), Augustas Serapinas (ICA Milan, 2025), Erika Verzutti (ICA Milan, 2024), Camille Henrot & Estelle Hoy (ICA Milan, 2023), and Simone Forti (ICA Milan, 2019).
In 2026, he curated the 78th edition of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Prize for Sculpture and the exhibition *Dancing at the Edge of the Worlds*, featuring the artists Yu Ji, Dan Lie, Cong Tung Truong, Bronwyn Katz, and Luana Vitra. In 2023, she curated the Project Room program at the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation in Milan, dedicated to the sculptural work and research of Lito Kattou and Paul Maheke.
His most recent publications include: *Dancing at the Edge of the Worlds* (Lenz Press, 2026); *Simone Fattal. A Breeze Over the Mediterranean* (Mousse Publishing, 2025); *Camille Henrot & Estelle Hoy. Jus d’Orange* (NERO editions, 2023); *Rebecca Moccia. Ministry of Loneliness* (Humboldt Books, 2023).
