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Ph by Susan Perrotin

Rituals
Spazio Millepiani, Rome | July 4 – 31, 2025

The Rituals exhibition emerged from an open call for works exploring ritual practices in their broadest sense: from sacred and religious ceremonies to social traditions, from intimate, biographical, and familial expressions to psychological and introspective acts.

On display are photographs, videos, and digital artworks that interpret rituals through visual languages capable of evoking ancient ceremonies as well as everyday gestures—traditions handed down over time or reimagined through a contemporary lens. These images depict elements from specific ritual contexts: visual fragments that connect to a living past, to customs that preserve folk knowledge tied to nature and its elements—the beneficial use of certain plants, the honoring of specific traditions, the invocation of unseen forces.

Many of these are collective rituals that reinforce communal bonds and shared values, often rooted in places dense with memory—ancient burial sites, sacred forests, votive dwellings. Powerful symbolic motifs recur, such as the labyrinth, which holds various meanings across cultures, yet always suggests a journey, a trial, a threshold to cross.

The works in this exhibition do more than represent rituals—they evoke them, reinterpret them, and question them. Some pieces strive to restore symbolic balance among the elements—earth, water, fire, and air—building connections between the visible and the invisible, between life and death, between the sacred and the profane. In Rituals, spirituality, religion, and magic are not easily separated. The artists navigate these fine lines with different approaches: some work with subtle, silent gestures, while others choose to challenge or transform symbols of the past, recontextualizing them in the present and making them their own.

The exhibition prompts reflection on a series of open questions: When does a personal act—like prayer or meditation—become collective? When does a shared habit become a ceremony? What are the spaces and objects of ritual? And how do these elements still offer meaning, identity, or protection today?

Rituals is a journey into the heart of the gestures that connect us—to one another, to the earth, and to the invisible. It travels through eras, cultures, and symbols in search of what remains, what guides us.

In a time when spiritual reference points are fragmenting and reshaping, art itself becomes ritual: a gesture full of intent, a language that can preserve, evoke, and transform.

Each work in the exhibition is an open threshold—an invitation to pause, to recognize, and to remember.

Text by Silvia Colombo

Works by Alena Ahmadullina; Susan Perrotin; NC Hernández