Mehdi Dakhli Presents Intrecciata Venezia
On the occasion of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, designer and creative consultant Mehdi Dakhli curates Intrecciata Venezia, a contemplative look at Venice’s history as a center of cultural exchange, presented at Lo Studio.
Intrecciata Venezia is a group exhibition curated by designer and creative consultant Mehdi Dakhli. Hosted in collaboration with Nadja Romain of Lo Studio Gallery, in the Dorsoduro, the exhibition is part meditation, part exploration around Venice’s layered identity as a nexus of global exchange. Through a dialogue between Dakhli’s sculptural furniture and contemporary artworks from six international artists, Intrecciata Venezia reframes the city’s architectural and cultural legacies within a contemporary framework.
At the heart of the exhibition is Dakhli’s own work—a series of functional sculptures that engage both material and metaphor. Drawing from his Tunisian heritage and the Islamic influences embedded in Venetian architecture, Dakhli reimagines horseshoe arches, an emblematic Islamic architectural element found across Venice, in collaboration with Murano’s master glassmakers. His use of carved pearwood and patinated bronze evokes the city’s artisanal traditions of gondola making or instruments, while subtly nodding to broader histories; a cabinet inspired by the Brutalist Hotel du Lac in Tunisia speaks to architectural migration, while a daybed’s bronze legs trace lines back to ancient Egyptian and Byzantine design.
Venturing beyond the functional, Dakhli also presents a non-utilitarian piece composed of 76 cobalt Murano glass beads. Evocative of a rosary, it references the dark history of Venice’s trade in goods and slaves, where such beads played a transactional role. The use of cobalt—a pigment once traded through Venice from Persia—further underscores the exhibition’s meditation on how aesthetics and ethics have long been entwined.
The exhibition then weaves in works from six contemporary artists: Joël Andrianomearisoa, Seyni Awa Camara, Clément Gloaguen, Alexandre Gourçon, Abdoulaye Konaté, and Ibrahim Mahama. Konaté’s layered textiles in deep blues echo Dakhli’s beads and comment on colonial narratives embedded in fabrics, while Mahama’s wax print pieces trace similar themes through Ghanaian history. Gourçon’s naturally dyed textiles, created with artisans in Benin, reference the spice routes that once flowed through Venice, imbuing his work with sensory memory and ancestral resonance.
Seyni Awa Camara’s terracotta sculptures summon ancestral presences that might have brushed through Venice’s winding alleyways, and Joël Andrianomearisoa’s ghostlike textile works reflect the city’s own fragile, fading splendor. Clément Gloaguen’s abstract paintings, meanwhile, channel Venice’s dual essence—romantic fantasy and precarious physicality—through delicate balance and expressive brushwork.
For centuries Venice has been meeting point between East and West. Its architecture, art and narrow streets are evocative of the cultures that have passed through and left their mark, which is why the city remains today one of the most sought after to explore and discover. Intrecciata Venezia brings this rich history to life in a contemporary aesthetic, a 21st century vision of this past, on movement and imagination.
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