DA A AD A. Nothing / Nic zwyczajnego | IUNO E ACCADEMIA DI BELLE ARTI DI ROMA

Opening
Wednesday 13 May, 2026 - h. 19.00
Istituto Polacco di Roma, via Vittoria Colonna 1, Roma

On Wednesday, May 13, 2026, the second edition of DA A AD A. Nothing Ordinary / Nic zwyczajnegoopens at the Polish Institute in Rome. The project, conceived by Alfredo Pirri and Sergio Sarra for the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, is developed in collaboration with the Polish Institute in Rome and curated by da Ilaria Gianni con Greta Martina e Giuliana Paolino for IUNO.

The exhibition takes the form of a collective project featuring nine artists from the Painting School of theFine Arts Academy in Rome, guided Alfredo Pirri and Sergio Sarra in dialogue with five artists and collectives from the Studio of Spatial Activities, coordinated by  Mirosław Bałka e Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka, at theAcademy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

Nothing Ordinary / Nic zwyczajnego takes its title from the first verse of a poem by Wisława Szymborska, serving here as a point of departure for reflecting not only on the passage between cultural contexts, but also on a space where meaning shifts and is redefined, shaping a way of thinking and looking at the world.

Nothing ordinary or Nothingness introduces a condition in which the everyday is overturned: what appears familiar shifts, loses stability, and opens itself to new possibilities of interpretation. As Szymborska writes, “Nothingness has truly turned itself inside out,” suggesting a suspension of habitual coordinates and an opening toward the unexpected.

It is precisely on this threshold that the works in the exhibition unfold. Spanning painting, sculpture, video, performance, and photography, they propose altered worlds, dreams translated into images, memories reworked in the present, and rewritten imaginaries.
In each work, in its own way, spaces and objects withdraw or reveal themselves; the macro takes the form of the micro, and the intimate becomes a shared extension. Presence and absence coexist; fiction and reality touch, but never fully align. The narrative thus oscillates between a personal dimension and a collective horizon, as memory and the familiar are set in motion—reconfiguring both domestic and external space, and opening onto subtle perceptual and discursive displacements.

Throughout the path traced by the artists, a tension toward the extraordinary surfaces—not as spectacle, but as necessity: a way of finding orientation in uncertainty, a form for questioning experience and stretching it beyond the limits of what is lived, desired, and feared.
In this sense, the works by the students of the two Academies remind us that nothing is ever simply ordinary, and that what appears given is always open—translatable, reconfigurable, shareable—ready to unfold into encounters and unexpected dimensions.

The artists were selected through an open call conducted by the IUNOcuratorial team, composed of Ilaria Gianni, Greta Martina, and Giuliana Paolino.

During the opening, performative actions will take place by: di:
Stefa Gosiewsk
Paco Sangrado

Download the critical text here .