Three Encounters at Biennale Gherdëina 10

Lydia Ourahmane, Evelyn Taocheng Wang and Kelly Tissot reawaken the hushed hotels and the shuttered schoolrooms of Val Gardena with their art.

Text by Christabel Stewart

Hotel Ladinia has stood closed since 1998, absorbing nearly three decades of stillness – the upholstery turning stiff from disuse, the light fixtures dimming from dust. In Ortisei, Val Gardena in the Dolomites, the tenth edition of Biennale Gherdëina, titled (Future) Paradise Gardens and curated by Samuel Leuenberger, is home to some of this year’s most compelling work. The works are installed in relics of the region’s recent past: a shuttered hotel bar, a disused school. The biennial’s premise is that in 2026, a garden can no longer be imagined innocently. As a cultivated and enclosed paradise, it is shadowed by everything outside its walls, yet, in the curator’s words, “even in damaged landscapes something unexpected may still take root”. That tension is clearly legible in the vacated rooms.

Lydia Ourahmane’s intervention at Hotel Ladinia is markedly simple: she has provisionally reopened the hotel’s former bar. The work is the room itself, with inventive additions: visitors are asked to bring their own drinks, and to sit at chess tables the artist has built for the occasion. There is no bartender, no service, no transaction in the conventional sense – just furniture, and the faintly ceremonial act of occupying a space closed off to the public for 28 years.

Ourahmane, born in Algeria in 1992, is not interested in restoring Hotel Ladinia so much as briefly disobeying its closure. The chess tables stage games stalled in mid-play, so positions are held rather than resolved. A similar negotiation is at the core of Ourahmane’s work, where space is constituted both perceptually, through the movement of others, and conceptually, as a sociopolitical construct. The work requires little of its visitors; there are no supplementary devices for its reception, no headphones, and nothing is screened. The installation’s minimalism exposes how strange it is to be allowed somewhere, and permission is handed back for the length of a drink, or a game, inside a once public-facing room.

Sharing space with Ourahmane’s reopened bar, Evelyn Taocheng Wang shows four new paintings from her series Princess and the Frog. Through the recurring figure of the Frog Princess, who gazes upon unrecognisable backgrounds, various places are filtered through familiar images of global circulation. In Bolzano, Museion is staging the artist’s first solo exhibition in Italy, Sweet Landscape, a museum-scale counterpoint to the biennial’s scattered, informal geography, and part of a longstanding partnership between the two institutions.

Ourahmane’s work is about the ceremony of re-entry, Wang’s is about dislocation and Kelly Tissot’s is about residue. Tissot’s work is installed at Cesa Benste, a former school building and semi-abandoned apartment block in nearby Santa Cristina. The French artist, born in 1995, presents Girl (The Workshop I–XII), a site-specific presentation of photographs taken in local artisanal studios, looking closely at the accumulation of work: wooden toys, work tools and the material culture of the valley craftsmanship community’s daily life. She shows these images inside the abandoned rooms themselves, alongside the school’s leftover fixtures: sinks, mirrors and cupboards.

Tissot is conducting an inventory with tenderness, rather than the taxonomic coldness that the word implies. Photographing a work tool is an act of attention towards an object whose maker, user and purpose sit outside the frame. Placing that photograph inside a room built for a different kind of instruction creates an elegiac dialogue between image and abandoned room. There is no forced nostalgia in Tissot’s approach; the melancholy accumulates toy after tool, until the room itself starts to feel less like a container for the work than its final, largest print.

These three interventions suggest something astute within the biennial’s language of gardens as spaces of care and coexistence. Ourahmane, Wang and Tissot are staging a set of experiments into what happens when a building’s function is stripped away but its structure remains. A biennial that unfolds through a valley’s abandoned buildings stakes a claim that the ruins of a past activity and economy are not simply a backdrop but subjects in their own right. Ourahmane reactivates memory through collective presence. Wang looks at why belonging is never fixed. Tissot “explores the antagonisms and harmonies that emerge at the heart of a once-wild nature, now rendered synthetic”.

Biennale Gherdëina 10, (Future) Paradise Gardens, runs in Val Gardena, Italy, through 13 September 2026.