Kelsey Lu: Penumbra

The work, presented by Berggruen Arts & Culture and Monteverde Productions, continues the live performance staged at the palazzo on May 7, 2026, transforming its traces — soil, sound, and charcoal — into a lasting installation developed in dialogue with photographer Yumna Al-Arashi.

PENUMBRA is conceived across three realms:

Earth: black sand, gravity, imprint, friction, decay, ancestry

Dream: improvisation, fractured memory, subconscious movement, lucidity

Heaven/Collapse: music as devotional prayer, rupture, contemplation, surrender

Imagery from Lu's collaboration with Al-Arashi shaped the visual language of the May 7 performance, exploring the sacredness of land, the violence of erasure, and the tenderness of survival. The charcoal drawings on view are made from soil crushed and spread across the floor during the May performance, echoing Venice's own hidden strata — earth, water, marble, light — and Lu's earlier experiments making clay from soil gathered in North Carolina.

Across the installation, the body appears as vessel, archive, and site of power, moving through the witness, the devotee, the warrior, the lover, the ghost. PENUMBRA holds these states together, where identity remains fluid and wholeness is only ever hinted at.