Manuela Kokanovic
Born in 1991 in Zagreb, Croatia | Lives and works in Venice
Manuela Kokanovic graduated in Visual Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice under Prof. Carlo Di Raco. Since 2016, she has been a member of the Fondazione Malutta art collective. From 2018 to 2024, she worked at the self-managed space Zolforosso, where she curated numerous projects, including the foundation of the exhibition space Terzospazio and the platform comecome.info. From 2021 to 2025, she was general coordinator and participating artist of Luca Massimo Barbero's traveling exhibition project "Venice Time Case."
Through her pictorial research, Kokanovic analyzes the depictions and stories of peoples and places that are only apparently distant. Their cultures and traditions, as well as her own, their similarities and differences, and the now obsolete instruction manuals for life become approaches to knowledge and the elaboration of the present. Painting is her concrete terrain—in the solidity of the agitated matter, in the extended time of thought. Each field that spills disastrously into the other is a risk and an opportunity.

Giovanna Bonenti
Born in 1992 in Tione di Trento | Lives and works in Venice
Giovanna Bonenti obtained her Second Level Diploma in Visual Arts and Performing Arts, specializing in Painting, from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 2019. Recent exhibitions include: "Abstract Figures," Palazzo Assessorile, Cles; "One and Beyond—A Love Letter to Shadows," Galleria Alberta Pane, Venice; "Venice Time Case," traveling exhibition curated by Luca Massimo Barbero; "Prato stabile," Bagagliera former railway station, Borca di Cadore; "Una formica in cielo,"
Church of Nostra Signora del Cadore, Corte di Cadore; "Smussando angoli vivi," Castel Belasi, Campodenno; and "Negli studi," Palazzo Roccabruna, Trento.
Bonenti's research spans drawing, painting, collage, and ceramics. In her works on paper and especially in those made of ceramics, shapes and volumes promise visual resolutions that fail to fully emerge. Like the roots visible on the asphalt, invisible underground forces are the hidden causes of these works—a continuous gestation of forms waiting to emerge, to reach us through a "tactile" experience of vision.

Benyamin Zolfaghari
Born in 1986 in Tehran | Lives and works in Rome
Benyamin Zolfaghari attended courses at art academies in Tehran and Rome, graduating in sculpture and photography. Self-taught as a painter since 2016, he has participated in exhibitions including the art fair "The Others," Turin (2022); group exhibitions at the Temple University Rome campus, Spazio Mensa, Rome (2021); solo exhibition at the Curva Pura gallery, Rome (2021); and the two-person exhibition "Lessico familiare," Curva Pura (2025). He has exhibited in various Iranian galleries such as 0 Gallery, Etemad, and Aknoon. Articles about his work have appeared in Artribune, Exibart, and Segnonline.
Zolfaghari's paintings arise from his exploration of the concept of "accumulation": accumulation of color, memory, form, and time. The forms move on the border between abstraction and representation, in a space where the image does not refer completely to either landscape or architecture, but does not detach itself from them entirely either. Through repeated layering, erasure, and reconstruction, the painting gradually takes shape through a continuous dialogue with the canvas. The limited, earthy color palette—muted greens, browns, ochres, and warm tones—evokes erosion, immobility, and the passage of time. For Zolfaghari, painting is experienced more as a process than as a final image, recording the moment before meaning stabilizes and form reaches a definitive state.