05/02/2026
One of my proudest moments in my nine years with Cardi is our current presentation here at ArtBasel Qatar. Jannis Kounellis’ “Senza titolo” is a historic large-scale installation originally conceived in 2003 for the cloister of the Monastery of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice. This site-specific work, which has previously only been exhibited in institutional settings, consists of a series of modular weighing scales suspended in vertical sequence, creating a cascade of delicately balanced “mobile” sculptures upon which fragile compositions of found Venetian glass cups and pitchers rest.
The measuring scale is one of the central recurring elements in Kounellis’ oeuvre, first appearing in a 1969 installation at Lucio Amelio’s Modern Art Agency in Naples, when the artist balanced small mounds of ground coffee onto individual iron elements to produce a sensory experience that powerfully evoked mercantile history and the Mediterranean’s ancient trade routes. For his 2003 intervention on the Venetian island of San Lazzaro, Kounellis expanded on this motif, harnessing the city’s archipelagic condition and its historical role as a crucial point of commercial, cultural and religious exchange. By placing found arrangements of polychrome Venetian glasses, pitchers and other domestic objects on the scales, Kounellis materializes this historical process as a series of fragments in dialogue with one another, ready to be reconstituted by the viewer. “The scales clearly allude to ocean voyages”, Gloria Moure writes in the original catalogue essay, “through their reference to the weighing of colonial products or industrial raw materials, and this could easily be extended to the peripatetic nature of cognitive formalizations, whether it is we who move in the world, or the world that moves towards us” (“Formalization as Resistance” in Jannis Kounellis, Electa, Milan, 2003).
