On the occasion of the Venice International Film Festival, the second edition of STATIC CINEMA returns to Venice, an exhibition project by ART-ICON exploring the space between photography, cinema, and contemporary visual arts.

At the heart of the exhibition is an image that comes to a standstill. A film still removed from its cinematic sequence, a photograph that seems to contain movement, an instant suspended between what has happened and what might happen next. It is precisely within this space between stillness and becoming that STATIC CINEMA develops its curatorial research.

The exhibition brings together an international selection of established and emerging artists, moving across different visual languages — from documentary photography and portraiture to staged photography, conceptual practices, and the cinematic image.

The second edition features Nick Zinner, Julia Fullerton-Batten, Graziano Arici, Bernis von zur Muehlen, Lindsay Elizabeth Warner, Natalie Curtis, Lars von Trier, Yung-Hsiang Chou, and David Allan Brandt, among others.

The presence of Lars von Trier is particularly significant. Film stills extracted from his movies are presented as autonomous images, removed from their original narrative sequence. Freed from the flow of the film, they become photographs to be observed and interpreted, shifting the viewer’s relationship with the image.

Alongside this, Lindsay Elizabeth Warner’s work moves between portraiture, intimacy, and contemporary imagery, while a historic work from the 1970s by Bernis von zur Muehlen, a significant figure in American photography, introduces a different temporal perspective. Distant generations and approaches are brought into dialogue, creating a reflection on how images evolve and on the ways in which we continue to look at them.

STATIC CINEMA therefore goes beyond a simple dialogue between photography and cinema, exploring what happens in between: when a photograph seems to tell a story, when a film still acquires a life of its own, and when documentary and fiction begin to overlap.

It is a space where every image can oscillate between testimony and narrative construction, reality and fiction, memory and the present.

Presented by ART-ICON, the curatorial platform founded and directed by Danila Tkachenko and Slavica Veselinović, STATIC CINEMA 2026 invites us to slow down our gaze at the very moment when Venice celebrates the movement of cinematic images. An invitation to pause before an image and ask what happens when cinema, for a moment, stops moving.