Awaiting Venice Biennale 2026: David Hrankovic

In this conversation Mara Sartore meets David Hrankovic who discusses his path from finance to the art world and the creation of SMAC Venice (San Marco Art Centre) in Venice. SMAC Venice was founded with Anna Bursaux, David Gramazio and Elia Federici as a flexible Kunsthalle-style institution that hosts museum-quality exhibitions through international collaborations. Located in the Procuratie in Piazza San Marco, the centre aims to complement Venice’s existing institutions while strengthening the city’s cultural life beyond the Biennale.

David Hrankovic – I was living between London and Germany and used to work in finance. At some point, almost by coincidence, a Swiss artist, a family friend, Not Vital, asked me to help him structure his foundation. I helped him to create a business plan, sort out the finances, and acquire the beautiful Swiss castle Terrasp, where he housed his foundation. Later, he asked me to help with the production of certain artworks.
Then I was asked to produce something here in Venice, at le Stanze del Vetro: first the “Glass Tea House Mondrian” by Hiroshi Sugimoto, and then Pae White’s “Qwalala”. I got more and more work in Venice and realised that my passion really lies in the world of art, bringing expertise from management, finance and operations into this world. We then decided to spend more time here with my wife and son, who was basically born here, speaks Venetian dialect, and feels very much like a Venetian.

David Hrankovic – I think it’s a fantastic place. There’s a new energy, with more international people moving here. You constantly have an interesting flow of people to meet.
For children, it’s a wonderful and safe environment to grow up in. I think it’s a pity that there aren’t enough opportunities for young people. Our team, for example, is very young: almost everybody is under 40. But for many people that leave university, it’s hard to find jobs and affordable housing. These, to me, are areas in need of improvement.

David Hrankovic – In a way, SMAC Venice (which stands for San Marco Art Centre) was born out of our collective experience: mine here in Venice, running TBA21’s Ocean Space and producing exhibitions around the Biennale, and David Gramazio and Anna Bursaux’s experience organising major international touring exhibitions and helping museums develop their international strategy.
We felt that many artists and foundations want to exhibit in Venice, yet there’s very limited museum-quality space. Institutions such as Fondazione Musei Civici and Fondazione Querini Stampalia have their own wonderful programmes, while private foundations often reflect the vision of an individual or company. The idea was to create a neutral platform – a Kunsthalle without a permanent collection – that can host museum-quality shows with international partners, across art, architecture, fashion, and design.
We don’t aim to compete with anybody, but rather to fill gaps. For the Architecture Biennale, for example, we focused on major retrospectives of overlooked but significant architects, rather than competing with the Biennale or other foundations in Venice.

David Hrankovic – We came across this space because there had been a Louise Nevelson retrospective here. We saw it and thought: wouldn’t this be the perfect place? Restored by a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, with the museum-quality infrastructure and the ability to hang works directly on the walls, a rarity in Venice where most walls are heavily decorated.
Formulating a plan with Generali took several years, but we reached a fantastic long-term agreement allowing us to stay here for many years. Being in St. Mark’s Square is an enormous blessing. We have one of the most famous façades in the world, and artists love being here. We have over 60 windows overlooking the square and cutting-edge infrastructure while still being in a fully renovated 16th-century building.

David Hrankovic – I think what we do is very different from what the other institutions on the square offer, so I wouldn’t really say we compete with them – certainly not with the Basilica di San Marco. One clear advantage, though, is the footfall, which we definitely benefit from here.
Co-locating with other cultural attractions is also very interesting. In Dorsoduro, for example, museums try to brand themselves as the “Dorsoduro Museum Mile”. Similarly, San Marco Square is a destination in itself, and being so centrally located makes it easy for anyone who wants to see our shows to find us.

David Hrankovic – Well, we’re not from Venice, but all of us have worked here a lot. I’ve been in the cultural sector here for ten years, and David Gramazio has organised many exhibitions in Venice starting from 2013 and has worked closely with the Musei Civici di Venezia in recent years, so we are very familiar to the context. We have really excellent relationships with many museums, having worked with them on other projects before. I have to say that the reaction from other institutions, and Venetians generally, has been overwhelmingly positive.
I think people are excited and happy when you discuss what the future of Venice could be beyond mass tourism. The cultural sector, to me, is probably the most exciting one. Creating more spaces for art, making meaningful contributions to the sector, and offering job opportunities for young people – many of whom study art history here in Venice – is something that everyone welcomes with open arms.
I often hear these prejudices that Venetians are conservative and maybe sometimes even hostile. I have to say that I have been met with nothing but enthusiasm. It’s not always open arms, you sometimes have to push a little against the door, but eventually, when it opens, people are very welcoming and happy. They are extremely happy that people from the outside choose this wonderful city as their home and the place where they want to work and create something.

David Hrankovic – What do I think is missing in Venice right now? There is the historic centre of Venice and then there is the city of Mestre. I know much more about the context in the historic centre. I think residents there sometimes feel more like occupants of a touristic destination rather than actual constituents, and that their livelihoods are maybe not fully recognised.
That’s the feedback I hear from people. I also think and hope that politics take the cultural sector, and its contribution to the city, more seriously, with a more proactive policy to bring Venice to a world level, not just around the Biennale. The Biennale is amazing and plays a huge role with dance, music, theatre, etc., but Venice could be a world capital of culture all year round.
There are plenty of possibilities. My hope, working in the sector, is that there would be more opportunities and jobs, and perhaps more space for cultural creation, not just consumption.

David Hrankovic – We try to plan the SMAC calendar as far in advance as possible, and we already have several conversations in place for future years. The reality is that the project started on extremely short notice, so our first Architecture Biennale programme was mounted barely a year ahead.
This year we had a bit more time to prepare, and as we move forward, we’re already well advanced for future years. For this year’s programme, we are showing two major retrospectives.
One is of Lee Ufan, in collaboration with the Dia Art Foundation and curated by Jessica Morgan, the director of Dia. Lee Ufan is turning ninety in June, marking an important milestone both personally and in his artistic career. We’ll show works from across his entire career, including a few major installations that are rarely seen.
In parallel, we will have a major retrospective of Alighiero Boetti, covering his entire oeuvre, curated by Elena Geuna, a leading expert in the field, in collaboration with the Archivio Alighiero Boetti. It’s a very strong institutional partnership, and we’re particularly happy to feature an Italian artist in our first year of being open during the Art Biennale. I hope and believe it will be hugely popular.

David Hrankovic – In Koyo Kouoh’s selection, which I saw at the press conference, there are many artists I hugely admire, but the focus is clearly not on Europe. There’s only a handful of European artists. That said, I do think it is important for the Italian audience to see Italian artists somewhere in Venice.
What we’re doing at SMAC is very different. We’re showing two very established, well-known artists. That doesn’t mean we’ll always do that, but for our first year of being open, it was important to demonstrate the quality of our exhibition-making and present artists that people recognize and want to see.

David Hrankovic – Last year is a very good illustration of what we do at SMAC.
As I mentioned, we had two architectural retrospectives that lasted three months. One was Harry Seidler, a Jewish architect born in Vienna who escaped in 1938, studied under Walter Gropius, worked with Marcel Breuer, and briefly with Niemeyer, before moving to Australia and bringing modernism there. It was a beautiful story because Seidler’s career really represents the movement of ideas through the displacement of people in the 20th century. We organised this together with the Chau Chak Wing museum at the University of Sydney where the exhibition will also be shown this summer.

In parallel, we presented an exhibition of Jung Youngsun, a female Korean landscape architect now in her 80s, giving visibility to a practice that rarely receives large retrospectives. This was done in collaboration with the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul.
Then, in September, we opened a third show called “The Quantum Effect”, curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Jacquie Davies. Daniel Birnbaum, of course, had previously been a director of the Venice Biennale, so his return to Venice was very exciting. The exhibition explored the intersection of art and science, illustrating how ideas from quantum physics and quantum thinking appear in both popular culture and art.
The show was spectacular: we used all of our sixteen galleries in a row, with eight galleries illustrating a principle of quantum physics on the right side, and the entire show mirrored in eight galleries on the other side. It included major loans such as Jeff Koons “One ball total equilibrium tank” (1985), Tomás Saraceno “Webs of Life”, John McCracken, and a recreation of Isa Genzken’s “Room” from the 2009 German Pavilion. The exhibition was accompanied by films produced by Jacqui Davies, which used footage from cinema and popular culture, from Stanley Kubrick to “Star Trek”, to show how quantum ideas appear in media.

The show was produced in collaboration with OGR and will open in Torino in a different form this November.