Mare Karina is pleased to present a duo exhibition featuring new works by Federico Tansella (2003, San Benedetto del Tronto, Marche) and Giacomo Mercuriali (1990, Cesena, Emilia-Romagna), curated by Caterina Avataneo. Opening on the occasion of Venice Galleries Weekend on Thursday, March 20, the exhibition will run until April 19.
Tansella and Mercuriali’s emerging artistic practices reveal a sensitivity to both new and enduring digitally-native subcultures. As post-humanist practitioners working with and researching new media, their works emerge from an intuitive engagement with the Internet. Through unassuming formats as diverse as Instagram posts, banners, Amazon-sourced commodities, and prints, the artists channel motifs cursor-picked from both contemporary anti-elitist currents (social media trends, video games, manga) and the Western tradition. Their work engages with the Internet’s capacity to continuously reshape forms and narratives, reconfiguring them within a speculative framework attuned to a world-scale, underground digital unconscious.
For this exhibition at Mare Karina, Tansella and Mercuriali will present new works engaging with and seeking contamination from both online and IRL cultures—especially those, like Japan’s, that have long been shaped by technological expansion.

Federico Tansella is an artist and sound designer currently based in Venice, where he studies Multimedia Art at the Academy of Fine Arts. His practice navigates contemporary sociological phenomena, addressing emergent pathologies, new forms of violence, and speculative futures through an expanded field of sound, video, installation, and performance.
Despite his young age, Tansella has already built a prolific body of work. Under the alias Meynsense, he pursues his experimental music venture, performing live in multiple venues across Italy and developing a distinct research that delves into the intersections of sound, technology, and perception. Alongside this, he works internationally on commissions and collaborations as a sound designer and composer, contributing to a wide range of creative endeavours. His original sound compositions have been featured in projects based in Venice, Milan, Paris, and Tokyo, with collaborations including Missoni, Marine Serre, SANDRO, and MM6.
His ability to distill the logic of contemporary digital trends into sonic and visual environments positions his work at the threshold of online chaos and its most fragile, often violent, human consequences.

Giacomo Mercuriali is an artist and theorist whose work bridges philosophy, anthropology, and new media. He holds an MA in Art History and Criticism from the University of Milan and pursued a PhD in Philosophy. His academic trajectory includes research at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where he investigated visual anthropology and the semiotics of power.
Parallel to his scholarly work, Mercuriali has cultivated an experimental artistic language through social media. In 2020, he launched the Instagram account @young_agamben as an anonymous extension of his philosophical and political inquiries—an online space where memes, AI-generated visuals, and reels operate as tools for critical discourse. Over time, the account has evolved into a reference point for an international network of artists, philosophers, architects, designers, photographers, musicians, and curators.
Mercuriali's ability to harness the aesthetics of social media as a medium in itself has redefined the contours of theory and practice, positioning contemporary visual culture as a site of intervention and speculation.

For this exhibition, Mare Karina is excited to invite Turin-based independent curator Caterina Avataneo.
Before moving back to Italy, Avataneo was working and studying in London where she completed an MA in Curating from London Metropolitan University and Whitechapel Gallery (2017). Between 2018-2021 she worked as Assistant Curator on assigned projects at Serpentine Gallery (London), and in 2019 she was Assistant Curator of Sun & Sea (Marina), the Lithuanian Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennale - winner of the Golden Lion. She has been the curator of the VII Edition of the Club GAMeC Prize (Bergamo) in 2022, and curatorial consultant for the New Entries section for emerging galleries at Artissima (Turin) in 2022 and 2023.
Currently, Avataneo runs a series of duo-collaborative shows which have been exhibited internationally since 2019, and for five years she has been curating the residency fellowship programme at Cripta747 (Turin). Since 2022 she also co-curates the Digital Fellowship programme for Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters – the first long-term, contemporary art programme established by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. She is working with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Josh Willdigg to develop new commissions with 11 artists and 11 footballers for an exhibition opening in summer 2025 at Factory International (Manchester) as part of Manchester International Festival. She writes a series of "in conversation with" for PW-Magazine and she is editorial coordinator for CURA., where she also writes.


For further information please contact:


Marta Barina
Founding Director of Mare Karina
+39 329 258 0978
marta@marekarina.com


Mare Karina
3200 Campo de le Gate,
Venice 30122 (VE) Italy
Opening hours: Tue–Sat 10:00-13:00, 14:00-18:00
info@marekarina.com
www.marekarina.com
@mare_karina