ABOUT
Sardegna Biennale is an international contemporary art event set to take place across the island of Sardinia in 2026.
Organised by Associazione Culturale Brebus, the biennale aims to serve as a cultural catalyst that merges cutting-edge socially-engaged artistic practices with the rural identity of Sardinia, particularly focusing on areas often excluded from major cultural circuits. Uniquely situated in the Sardinian countryside, the biennale will transform villages, farms, and urban outskirts into experimental art sites where local histories intersect with global dialogues.
Through immersive, inclusive, and interdisciplinary programming, the biennale wishes to promote intercultural exchange, contemporary artistic innovation, and regional regeneration. We strive to become a key contributor to Sardinia’s cultural identity and economic sustainability through cultural tourism, educational initiatives, and civic engagement, reinforcing the island’s role as a cultural hub while supporting wider decentralised development.
Manifesto
Sardegna Biennale is not a spectacle of contemporary art imposed upon an island. It is a process that begins in the folds of daily life — among stone walls and sea winds, at the edge of fields and the heart of small towns — and grows outward through relationships, exchanges and acts of imagination.
This is a biennale that operates in a post-spectacle condition and resists the extractive tendencies of cultural production. It does not treat Sardinia as a picturesque backdrop, a raw material to be shaped by outsiders, or a stage for reputations made elsewhere. Instead, it invites the territory to speak and invites artists to listen.
Sardegna Biennale is built on a principle of radical localisation and slow internationalism. It is rooted in place, yet globally relevant. It opens space for contemporary artistic experimentation to emerge from dialogue with communities, landscapes and layered histories that are too often excluded from the maps of contemporary culture.
A Biennale of Situated Socially-Engaged Practice
Unlike most biennales — which concentrate in capitals, museum districts or art world hotspots — Sardegna Biennale operates in the middle of the Mediterranean: in the rural, the marginal and the off-centre. It embraces fragility, complexity and contradiction as fertile ground for artistic production. It does not seek to represent Sardinia but to work with it — materially, emotionally and intellectually.The works presented are not shipped in, but developed through site-specific processes of listening and cohabitation. Artists live, research and create among communities. They collaborate with shepherds, craftspeople, elders, young people, cooks, fishermen, scientists, workers, musicians and storytellers. Their projects are shaped by the rhythms of the land, the silence of thresholds, the pressures of the present.
This is a biennale of entanglement rather than extraction — one that embraces the messiness of shared creation, where process matters as much as outcome.
A Territory as Method
Sardegna Biennale considers territory not only as geography but as a method. It is a lens for understanding systems of power, memory, migration, labour, belonging and resistance. It is also a tool for reimagining relationships between humans and non-humans, centre and margin, past and future.The biennale takes seriously the knowledge held in rural practices, oral traditions and forms of life not shaped by speed, efficiency or visibility. It explores how the “periphery” can offer alternative ways of thinking, seeing and being — not as escape or nostalgia, but as possibility.
In this framework, the role of the artist is not to interpret, represent or decorate, but to ask, to unlearn, to respond. The artist becomes a guest, a co-inhabitant, a companion in a process that is never fully theirs to control.
Art as Shared Transformation
Sardegna Biennale operates through porous forms, opening spaces for collective authorship and epistemic pluralism. It welcomes experimental cinema, political fables, ephemeral gestures and collective rituals. It does not separate art from life, nor beauty from struggle.
Its themes are urgent and interconnected: ecological precarity, extractivist legacies, feminist memory, queer joy, rural identity, colonial hauntings, economic tension, cultural erasure and renewal. But rather than illustrating these topics, the biennale inhabits them. It holds space for discomfort, for slowness, for not knowing yet.
At the core of the project is the belief that art can build new forms of solidarity — across languages, across generations, across experiences of belonging and exclusion. The biennale is a site of encounter. It values ambiguity and contradiction. It thrives on generosity.
A Post-Biennial Institution
Sardegna Biennale is not a brand or an event. It is a growing, decentralised cultural platform anchored in post-extractive logic. It is committed to sustainability — economic, social and ecological. It works with local economies, rather than around them. It supports long-term partnerships with institutions, families and informal networks. It builds capacity through education, employment, mentoring and visibility. It proposes a scaled, situated and reflexive structure for contemporary art: capable of producing cultural value within marginalised geographies, while contributing to broader discourses in curatorial, artistic and socio-political practice.
Above all, it trusts that culture belongs to everyone — and that contemporary creation can be most powerful when it emerges from places overlooked by the centre. Sardegna Biennale is a structural critique of where culture is produced, by whom, and for what purpose. It reclaims the periphery not as a deficit, but as a site of conceptual and political innovation — one capable of articulating new imaginaries for art, society and institutional form.
Team
Dušan Josip Smodej
Mohammad Salemy
Carmen Lorenzetti
Bernardo Zanotta
Michela Seren
Francesco Moneta
Ruggero Giancaspro
Silvia Schiru
Roberto Loddo
Artistic director
Curator - Educational program
Curator - Discursive program
Curator - Film program
Assistant curator
Fundrasing
Production
Hospitality
PR
History
Sardegna Biennale was born on the grounds of Contemporary Festival, a festival of experimental music and art founded in Sardinia in 2013. Since its earliest editions, it has stood out on the national scene for its original format, which breaks down traditional barriers between artistic languages. Music, visual arts, public readings, and debates come together in a multidisciplinary program that offers a richer, more integrated vision of contemporary reality.
The festival was created with the aim of showcasing the most innovative expressions of Sardinian creativity, building a bridge between the island and the wider world, revitalizing the territory as a space of inspiration for artists and audiences, and fostering collaborations between local and international cultural organizations.
Today, Contemporary serves a key reference point for cultural experimentation in the Mediterranean, thanks to its ability to absorb global influences and transform them into original, authentic, and independent forms.
The festival was created with the aim of showcasing the most innovative expressions of Sardinian creativity, building a bridge between the island and the wider world, revitalizing the territory as a space of inspiration for artists and audiences, and fostering collaborations between local and international cultural organizations.
Today, Contemporary serves a key reference point for cultural experimentation in the Mediterranean, thanks to its ability to absorb global influences and transform them into original, authentic, and independent forms.
—2013
Terminale Tre; Fabrizio Casti & Enrico di Felice; Concrete Mirror; Artura; Roberto Zanata, Marco Ferrazza & Gianni Atzeni; Alessandro Olla & Paolo Sanna; Sandro Mungianu; AnarKick; Dalila Kayros; Roberto Follesa; Tellas, Federico Carta; Claudia Matta; Paolo Marchi; Fabio Petretto; Giovanni Melosu & Davide Cau
—2014
Dario Coletti, Enzo De Leonibus, Roberto Follesa, Veronica Paretta, Elio Martusciello, Scott Arford, Massimo Gasole, Federico Branca, Marco Marinoni, Gabriele Paolazzi, Diego Capoccitti, Giacomo Casti, Paolo Sanna, Igor Nicola Pusceddu, Giacomo Salis, Marco Caredda, Michele Pusceddu, Mauro Laconi, Antonio Farris, Fabrizio Casti e Alessandro Olla
—2015
Chiara Seghene & Carlotta Del Giudice, William Basinski & James Elaine, Stefano Manconi & Emanuele Balia, Federico Branca, Marco Ferrazza & Michele Pusceddu, Travis McCoy Fuller & Danilo Casti, Zimbra, Performance partecipata “Extra_LD”, Myriam Laplante, William Basinski & James Elaine, The Color Of Escaping Dogs, Roberto Zanata, Giacomo Salis, Gianni Atzeni & Mario Massa, Autcast Crew
—2016
Alessandro Cau, Marco Caredda Valter, Marco Cabras, Duo ReNoir, Franco Casu, Scott Arford, Trishira + Efedra, Marco Antagonista & Gianni Atzeni, Valter Alberton & Matteo Musio, Silvia Corda, Adriano Orrù, Mauro Medda, Giacomo Salis & Stefan Schmidt - ensemble, Federico Fenu, Silvia Corda & Giacomo Salis & Stefan Schmidt, Luciano Cireddu, Triac, Jakob, Marco Ferrazza, Mariana Millapan, Daniele Pasini, Raffaele Pilia & Michele Pusceddu, Massimo Olla & Mauro Medda, Parallel Coast, Evangelia Basdekis (Performance), Pierluigi Calignano (installation), Giovanni Casu (installation), Martina Corongiu, Gregor Eldarb (video), Aurelien Mauplot, Margherita Morgantin, Andrea Panarelli, Monika Zarzeczna, Italo Zuffi
—2017
Marco Cabras + Bettosun (DJ Set), Claudio PRC (DJ Set), Silvia Corda, Federico Fenu, Elio Martusciello, Claudio Mascolo, Mauro Medda, Antonio Pinna, Adriano Orrù, Michael Thieke, Mario Consiglio, Anna Heydel, Patrick Jambon, Valeria Muledda & Marco Useli_STUDIOVUOTO, Daniela e Francesca Manca, Carlo Spiga, Ivana Spinelli, Marc Philip Van Kempen
—2019
Petr Davydtchenko, Federico Branca, December Hung Himself, Hand Franko B, Matteo Girometti & Bettosun, Alessandro Coni, Giuseppe Tibald e Gisella Trincas, Ramplingg, Menion, Mokoto Sakamoto, Ludovica Frauu, Andrea Young, Adele Madau, Marco Salaris, Arthur Piquer, Curios & Sascha
—2021
Mohsen Moghanjooghi Baghernejad, Elena Bellantoni, Jacopo Benassi, Alterazioni Video, Gianmaria Victor De Lisio, Chiara Druda, Paulina Herrera, Sabrina Melis, Tina Squillace, Sándor Vály, Marcello Cualbu, Julien Chelles, Léa Lalanne, Coline Lasbasts, Sandra Mistou-Chesa e Chris Van Eeden
—2023
Tekla Vály, Satya Forte, Marlon Sartore, Brazil, Dj Hundefriedhof, Miriam Montani, Sándor Vály and Attila Kaloczkai, Gabriele Mitelli & Julien Desprez, Franz Scala, Camilla Deidda, Gian Maria Marcaccini, Corrado Altieri , Patrizia Oliva, Panayiotis Andreou, Fabrizio Segaricci, Davide Collu, Francis Sosta, Manuele Frau, Nicholas Pucciarelli, Sergio Racanati, Oгни (Ogni), Davide Mariani, Stefano Manconi e Giacomo Salis, ADC 303, Man In A Shed, Anchorman Giorgio Manca, Andrea Young, Santa Valentina, Andrea Tramonte, Nona Et Decima
Partners
Fondazione Sardegna
Geomuseo MonteArci
The New Centre for Research and Practice
The Round Table
Comune di Donori
Comune di Masullas
Cantina Sa Defenza
Agriturismo Campidarte