Join Arch Hades and ArtReview editor Fi Churchman at the Scoletta Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia, Venice, on the morning of Friday 8 May
At the Scoletta Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia, a deconsecrated church on the Grand Canal, Arch Hades’s Return | Ritorno positions the idea of ‘return’ not as resolution, but as an ongoing process shaped by the weight of lived experience. Opening 7 May during Venice Biennale preview week and supported by the Erarta Foundation, the exhibition unfolds across three floors of the building, bringing together large-scale site-specific painting, immersive sculpture, installation and soundscape.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is Return (2025), a monumental 22-panel painting spanning thirteen metres, with sixty-three life-size figures installed across three walls on the building’s uppermost floor in a formation that echoes an altar triptych. The work draws from Gustav Klimt’s Faculty Paintings — Medicine, Philosophy and Jurisprudence (1900–1907) — in which bodies drift through allegorical space, caught between individual agency and collective fate. Hades works in a similar register: the figures are rendered with the precision of Greco-Roman sculpture, each in a distinct emotional state.
Elsewhere, Sphinx (2026), drawn in mirrored chrome, oscillates between the archaic and the speculative. Positioned in the backdrop of the deconsecrated church’s history, the installation amplifies a prevailing sense of time compressed and meaning unresolved.
Meanwhile, the Confessions series (2025–ongoing) marks a significant turn in Hades’s practice. Drawing on decades of private journaling started in early childhood, the works extract lines from handwritten diary pages and scales them onto surfaces resembling concrete or marble. For the first time, text sits at the centre of her visual work, transforming intimate confessions into monumental inscriptions.
About Arch Hades
Arch Hades first rose to international acclaim as a best-selling poet known for meditative explorations of loss, existentialism and the human condition. In 2021, her fourth volume Arcadia was sold at Christie’s New York as an abstract animation, soundtracked by RAC and illustrated by Andrés Reisinger, achieving a hammer price of $525,000 and becoming the most expensive poem ever sold. Her practice has since expanded into multidisciplinary visual work merging the lyricism of her verse with richly imagined visual forms. She is the author of six volumes of poetry. Previous solo exhibitions include We Are All Just Passing Through, 8 Berkeley Square, London (2025), and Arch Hades, Ladbroke Hall, London (2024). Recent performances include the inauguration of the Italian Pavilion for the opening of the Venice Architecture Biennale and re:VERSE, a poetry symposium at Ladbroke Hall, both in 2025.
Please join us on the occasion of Arch Hades’s exhibition Return | Ritorno at the Scoletta Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia, Venice, for a breakfast conversation between the artist and ArtReview editor Fi Churchman, from 9:30am (doors open from 9:15am) on Friday 8 May. Here, Hades will reflect on a dynamic practice that combines spoken word, text and image, where gesture and form coalesce into immersive artworks that are both intimate and expansive.
Where Scoletta Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia, Santa Croce 1980, 30135 Venice (Vaporetto: San Stae)
When Friday 8 May 2026, 9:30 – 10:30am (doors open from 9:15am)
In Conversation Arch Hades and ArtReview editor Fi Churchman
Return | Ritorno runs 7 May – 30 October 2026.
