July 16, 2026 - September 16, 2026
Nabatele
Nabatele is a large-scale open-air installation by London-based architect and artist Anna Kamyshan. Set upon a massive rock floating over the Venetian lagoon, a synagogue appears in the sky, exposed to atmospheric forces. Rather than holding land, it inhabits airspace, remaining responsive to its environment. The work recalls René Magritte’s “The Castle of the Pyrenees,” a stone levitating above the sea crowned by a castle which is often read as hope without ground.
Responding to contemporary global uncertainty marked by conflict and displacement, Nabatele frames refuge as provisional rather than secure. Its suspended condition, unrooted yet stable, is sustained by a steady inner glow reminiscent of the Ner Tamid, the synagogue’s eternal light, reflecting the artist’s layered identity as Ukrainian with Jewish and Russian heritage.
The Yiddish diminutive -ele softens nabat – a word spanning Slavic and Semitic languages – shifting it from warning to quiet presence. Referencing lost wooden synagogues of Eastern European shtetls and the non-territorial idea of Yiddishland, the work evokes continuity through memory and transmission rather than land. In dialogue with Venice’s Ghetto history, Nabatele exists neither as monument nor memorial, but as a gentle presence that holds unresolved belonging without claiming permanence.
– Yevgeniy Fiks and Maria Veits (Curators)
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Photo: Polina Ahababova
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Photo: Tommaso Boccadifuoco x Labirinto Studio
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Photo: Iwan Baan
Anna Kamyshan is a Ukrainian, London-based multidisciplinary artist and architect of Jewish heritage, working with complex, spiritual, past- and future-inspired, playful, and dreamlike visions, ideas, illusions, and spaces. Her practice has been presented at the Venice Biennale, the Milan Triennial, and the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv, among other international platforms.
Anna co-created the conceptual vision for the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center and its 100- year plan—the Landscape Horizontal Museum concept for the site in Kyiv—working under the artistic direction of Ilya Khrzhanovsky. The project focuses on the idea of living memory and healing through nature and the celebration of life, and includes the Mirror Field, the Babyn Yar Synagogue by Manuel Herz, the Crystal Wall installation by Marina Abramović, the Kurgan of Memory Museum by SUB, and numerous other works.
Among her projects are Glimpse into the Past, an installation in Kyiv opened by the President of Ukraine in 2021, and her poetic vision of the Moscow River, which received the Wax Bee Prize at the 2019 Milan Triennale with the Moscow River Age exhibition and resonated at the 2020 Venice Biennale with the Moscow River Friends publication by Voices. In 2022, Anna co-founded Mriia, an initiative imagining the long-term future of Ukraine beyond the nation-state concept. She was a research fellow at the Charles Jencks Foundation and the School of Advanced Study at UCL.
Maria Veits is a London-based curator and researcher whose work interrogates how state power, legal structures, and cultural institutions produce social reality. Working across collaborative and site-responsive formats, she develops transnational frameworks that challenge national narratives and institutional authority. She is a co-founder of TOK, a nomadic female collective established in 2010 that reimagines civic, industrial, and cultural infrastructures through feminist and participatory strategies.
Yevgeniy Fiks is a Moscow-born, New York–based artist and organizer whose practice reactivates suppressed histories of Yiddish culture, diasporic memory, and Jewish political thought. Across multiple media, his work confronts nationalism, cultural erasure, and the afterlives of Soviet and post-Soviet ideologies.
Together, they have developed an independent, non-national Yiddishland Pavilion, a curatorial and artistic platform shaped by Yiddish experiences of diaspora, migration, and doikeyt (hereness), advancing Yiddishland as a political and cultural proposition.
ARTIST
Anna Kamyshan
CURATORS
Yevgeniy Fiks & Maria Veits
ORGANIZING INSTITUTION / PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Alyssa Stokvis-Hauer and Zev Moses, MJM
Luca Berta and Vincenzo Casali, Venice Art Factory
ENGINEERING DESIGN
Christopher Hornzee-Jones, Aerotrope
MODELLING 3-D ARTIST
Daniel Maga
INFRASTRUCTURE CONTRACTOR & ENGINEERING
Nicola Ferrari, Servizi Tecnici
CALCULATIONS AND ENGINEERING ANALYSIS
Tensys
MANUFACTURING
Àrea Cúbica
TAO-group Trans Atmospheric Operations
