Trieste Contemporanea is pleased to announce the premiere of Monna Lisa, the film installation by German artist Helga Fanderl dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci’s famous portrait. The opening will take place on Saturday 15 November 2025 at 6.30 pm at Studio Tommaseo (Via del Monte 2/1, Trieste - Itay). The exhibition is co-produced by altriformati and Trieste Contemporanea and curated by Filippo Perfetti.
Monna Lisa is an artistic project that explores the complexity of the contemporary gaze and the perception of historical works of art in an era dominated by digital reproducibility. The Mona Lisa, a universal icon, becomes the subject of a reflection on the relationship between art, time and visual memory. Starting in 2000, Fanderl made a series of recordings inside the Louvre with her Super 8 film camera, observing the painting not only as a work of art, but also as a social phenomenon, amid the crowds of visitors and the incessant recording of images with all kinds of photographic and video equipment.
The installation at Studio Tommaseo uses five 16mm projectors, twice the size of the original Super 8 format, to create a cinematic gallery of moving images that presents Leonardo’s painting in multiple variations. The images projected in a loop onto the walls recreate the presence of the work through time and the movement of visitors, marking both its permanence and its change.
Fanderl’s work presents two types of gazes: that of the public, quick and often superficial, driven by curiosity and the desire to capture the image, and that of the artist, attentive, measured and delicate, capable of capturing gestures, details and nuances.
The visitor to Monna Lisa, on view in Trieste until December 12, finds themselves at the centre of a dialogue between image, time, and perception: between the enigmatic gaze of the Mona Lisa and the photochemical density of Fanderl’s Super 8 films, each viewer is invited to reflect on the fragility and richness of vision, on the phenomenon of mass viewing, and on the memory of images. The installation thus becomes an immersive experience, in which classical art and cinematic experimentation enter a conversation, creating a space for observation and contemplation, where time, history, and technology intertwine.
Helga Fanderl (Ingolstadt, 1947) lives and works in Berlin. She studied film with Peter Kubelka at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and with Robert Breer at the Cooper Union School of the Arts in New York. Since the mid-1980s she has made hundreds of Super 8 short films, presented in ephemeral montages that result in one-of-a-kind programs. Her work has been shown at numerous international festivals and is part of the collections of major museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2023, the volume Konstellationen Super 8 (Hatje Cantz) was published, which brings together the full breadth of her artistic work.
The project is in collaboration with altriformati, a group dedicated to experimental cinema and video art. It conceives curatorship as aesthetic refinement, definition of meaning, and a method of study. The group has collaborated with major institutions and festivals and has hosted or curated some of the most important artists in the international experimental film scene. The exhibition is curated by Filippo Perfetti, the group’s artistic director. He is pursuing a PhD in film at the University of Udine, focusing on theories of the image and montage. He is engaged in the curatorship of exhibitions and experimental film programs and is an editor for La Rivista di Engramma.