Dialectics of Chaos, Echelons of Time

Panorama presents “Dialectics of Chaos, Echelons of Time”, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Andrea Knezović.
Part of the Horizons series, the show is curated by Venice-based independent curator Giulia Menegale, invited by Panorama following a period of local research and public activations. This forms part of Panorama’s ongoing exploration of new perspectives on Venice, engaging a wide range of practitioners and researchers from different backgrounds. Through its programming, the space seeks to unpack the complex layers that shape this singular environment, moving beyond conventional narratives to spark critical and meaningful dialogue.

The exhibition – generously supported by the Mondriaan Fund – was preceded by a poster campaign displayed in public spaces across Venice, bearing the words:

“Is resistance simply refusing to arrive on time?”
“Are you out of sync or refusing alignment?”

Precariousness, insecurity and exhaustion are conditions that Knezović explores as signs of capitalism’s ability to accumulate wealth at the expense of the emotional and cognitive dimensions of human beings. Panorama invites the artist to reflect on how specific forms of urban extractivism manifest themselves in urban lifestyles, imagining a poetic parallel between the city and the human psychophysiological body. Along this line of inquiry, “Dialectic of Chaos, Echelons of Time” amplifies and facilitates a context-specific, societal and cultural negotiation of the perception of time, thus offering transformative insights into the dynamics of collective care, social cohesion and cultural sustainability.

This exhibition-research project began at the end of May with a series of urban interventions across the city—posters quietly embedded in the public landscape, posing questions about our relationship with time, both personal and collective. In Venice, a city where walking is the only way to move across the island, footsteps mark the hours like the hands of a clock. It is within this context that the posters emerged—not as loud declarations, but as fleeting presences, vanishing surfaces among the city’s many textures that so often escape our distracted and transient gaze.

While these visual prompts inhabited public spaces under municipal care, the curator and artist initiated a parallel thread of inquiry behind closed doors. Conversations unfolded with scholars, art workers, and grassroots civic associations—each exchange rooting this emotional and psychological exploration of time in the specific socio-cultural rhythms of the Venetian lagoon.

Shaped by these dialogues and the artist’s own experiences living and working in a so-called “creative city” like Amsterdam, a new body of work takes form. At the exhibition’s opening, a large-scale diagram and a pair of drawings will be presented and “activated” through the public programme—they are visual maps that function as cognitive tools. At times ironic, at other times conceptually rigorous, Knezović’s diagram draws on ideas from psychology, queer studies, and adjacent disciplines. Alongside it, the drawings emerge from a performative and contemplative gesture, an attempt to attune oneself to a rhythm that extends beyond the individual. Together, these elements offer frameworks for self-reflection, inviting viewers to pause and consider the temporal structures—visible and invisible—that shape our lives. A customised chessboard accompanies the diagram and the drawings; it introduces into the gallery space a playful engagement with one’s own sense of time. Through this act of play, the work evokes a gesture of reappropriation—an attempt to reclaim time, along with the wide spectrum of emotions and affections that shape its perception, giving rise to unexpected expansions and suspensions.