Manuela Kokanović: The Stream at Vino Vero Venice

The contemporary art project ‘Vetrina’ inaugurated its second cycle of presentations in February 2024. After exploring the broad theme of nature through the site-specific works of the first nine invited artists, the focus has now shifted to the theme of activism, exclusively involving women artists who are enterprising and provocative in different ways and who have always, in their works, provided space for a proactive reflection on the contemporary world. The 2025 exhibition programme was inaugurated with “Night Eyes” by Mariana Hahn and “Tarocchi” by Isabella Staino.

For Vetrina#15, Vino Vero has invited Manuela Kokanović, a Croatian artist born in 1991 in Zagreb, who lives and works in Venice. Through her artistic practice, she engages with and processes the present, analysing representations and stories of seemingly distant places and people. While painting is her primary medium, her research extends to the experimental use of different materials such as isomalt, food colouring, metal and ceramics.

For the occasion, the artist will present “The Stream” (2025), a large-scale site-specific installation accompanied by a critical text by Beatrice Timillero and created on the basis of an interdisciplinary reflection. Bringing together anthropological, geographical, and visual studies, the artist will explore the concept of flow as a movement inherent in time and global collective consciousness. The work will be presented as a flamboyant mapping of the creative process itself, considered a privileged flow in that it is dimensionless.

As Beatrice Timillero notes in her curatorial text:

“Taking inspiration from ancient maps, drawn by hand even before geography was an objective discipline, the artist deconstructs physical elements such as rivers, coastlines and mountain ranges, reasoning on two-dimensional and fundamentally unrealistic lines of colour. The stylization of this series of tangible elements, considered reliable a priori in the cartographic context, allows the artist to think about themes such as conquest and belonging, inviting viewers to reflect on the number of truths that can be formally developed on an abstract level.”