Following its opening on 24 June, the exhibition Electric Whispers — a solo show by Italian visual artist Rä di Martino — will run until 15 August. The event is organised by the Italian Cultural Institute of Beirut in collaboration with the Beirut Art Center. The exhibition highlights the artist’s most recent works, created during an artist residency in Beirut, alongside a selection of earlier pieces reflecting her interdisciplinary research across video, photography, cinema, and 3D animation.
At the heart of the exhibition is The Focus of Attention (Up!) (2025), a new, previously unseen work conceived and premiered in Beirut. The installation consists of two projected slides drawn from Di Martino’s archival research. The first — a black and white reinterpretation of a theatrical stage photograph — depicts a group of people looking upwards, caught in a moment suspended between wonder and anticipation. The second portrays a page from a 1950s science fiction novel, dominated by the presence of a large UFO. Together, these images construct a visual narrative of mental projection and suspended hope, evoking the uncertain imaginary of speculative futures. The other works on display, rooted in local experiences, allow the artist to explore the intersection of memory, technology and speculative imagery.
The exhibition also features a selection of major earlier works, shown internationally, including Kant Can’t (2024–2025), a 3D animation made using video game software, which presents a chaotic existential vertigo, and L’eccezione (2019), a meditation on the fragmentation of cinematic experience into a constellation of fragments consumed via digital media. Electric Whispers invites viewers to move beyond formal distinctions between media, and to reimagine technology as a space for aesthetic reinvention, critical reflection, and poetic exploration.
