Now in its twenty-second edition, the event renews its commitment to conveying the vitality of Italian contemporary art through a widespread programme involving the entire country. On Saturday 10 October, the 28 museums associated with AMACI, together with museums, foundations, galleries, independent spaces, cultural associations, academies, private collections and other bodies active in the sector, will open their doors free of charge, offering exhibitions, talks, workshops, guided tours, performances and special initiatives, both in person and online, aimed at an ever wider and more diverse public.
Giornata del Contemporaneo is now one of the most important occasions for bringing together institutions, sector professionals, the artistic community and the public, reflecting the richness and plurality of a cultural system capable of speaking different languages and inhabiting diverse places, all united by the shared aim of promoting knowledge of contemporary art and making it accessible to everyone.
This year, too, the event extends beyond national borders. From 5 to 10 October, Giornata del Contemporaneo | Italian Contemporary Art will take place — the international programme delivered in collaboration with the diplomatic-consular network of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (Embassies, Consulates and Italian Cultural Institutes), bringing exhibitions, talks and initiatives dedicated to Italian contemporary art to numerous venues abroad, strengthening the cultural dialogue and network of relationships built up in recent years.
The theme chosen for the 2026 edition is “Geographies of Contemporaneity“, a reflection on the present as a space traversed by continuous transformation, in which territories, communities and identities are not fixed realities but are defined through relationships, conflicts, exchanges and ongoing processes of redefinition. It is an invitation to read the contemporary world as a shifting geography, in which art can offer tools for critical interpretation and new ways of understanding.
The tradition, established in 2006, of entrusting the creation of the event’s guiding image to an artist also continues. Following Michelangelo Pistoletto (2006), Maurizio Cattelan (2007), Paola Pivi (2008), Luigi Ontani (2009), Stefano Arienti (2010), Giulio Paolini (2011), Francesco Vezzoli (2012), Marzia Migliora (2013), Adrian Paci (2014), Alfredo Pirri (2015), Emilio Isgrò (2016), Liliana Moro (2017), Marcello Maloberti (2018), Eva Marisaldi (2019), various artists (2020), Armin Linke (2021), Giorgio Andreotta Calò (2022), Binta Diaw (2023), Tomaso Binga (2024) and Atelier dell’Errore (2025), the Twenty-Second Giornata del Contemporaneo features Italian-Libyan multimedia artist Adelita Husni Bey (Milan, 1985) as its protagonist.
For the Twenty-Second Giornata del Contemporaneo, AMACI has chosen an image from the series Working for a World Free of Poverty (2014–2026) by Adelita Husni Bey, a project that draws on statistical data compiled by international bodies to critically reflect on the ways in which the economic, social and geopolitical dynamics of the present are constructed and represented. Through an essential yet highly evocative visual translation, the artist makes perceptible the mechanisms governing the distribution of resources, the production of data and the representations through which we interpret contemporary geographies.
In the selected image, the gesture of a man in a jacket and tie, unevenly dividing up coloured sweets, symbolically evokes the logics of classification, distribution and value attribution that underpin the construction of global economic narratives. The simplicity of the elements used makes the relationship between data, resources and inequality immediately perceptible, suggesting that the boundaries defining our time are not only geographical, but also economic and cultural.
The choice of this work engages directly with the theme “Geographies of Contemporaneity”, which invites us to consider the present as a space in continuous transformation, in which territories, communities and identities emerge as the outcomes of dynamic processes and complex relationships. Adelita Husni Bey’s practice, long oriented towards building participatory and collective devices capable of questioning the structures that organise social life, offers a particularly significant lens for this reflection, returning a vision of geography as a field of relationships, negotiation and shared responsibility.
As every year, the Giornata del Contemporaneo will unfold across a plurality of programmes: initiatives from museums in the AMACI network, events organised by MAECI’s overseas network, activities promoted by Luoghi del Contemporaneo mapped by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity, and the rich calendar of the hundreds of public and private bodies taking part in the event across Italy.
The initiative is supported by Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea, nell’ambito del Dipartimento per le Attività Culturali del Ministero della Cultura, in collaboration with Direzione Generale per la Crescita e la Promozione delle Esportazioni del Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale, and under the patronage of the Rappresentanza in Italia della Commissione europea, Camera dei deputati, Conferenza delle Regioni e delle Province autonome, ANCI – Associazione Nazionale Comuni Italiani, and ICOM Italia. The Twenty-Second Giornata del Contemporaneo benefits from a Media Partnership with Rai Cultura, Rai Italia and Rai Radio 3.
The twenty-second edition also marks the debut of the new registration form for the Giornata del Contemporaneo, designed by the studios Frakas and TILT with the aim of offering an updated experience — simple, intuitive and accessible to professionals and the public alike — for browsing and registering. The new amaci.org website makes it easy to explore the event’s programme and follow the 2026 Giornata del Contemporaneo events taking place across the whole country.
ADELITA HUSNI BEY
Adelita Husni Bey (Milan, 1985) is an artist and educator whose work is rooted in historical materialism and weaves together theatrical practices, radical pedagogies and legal anthropology. Through workshops, publications, broadcasts and exhibition projects, she conceives of art as a space for collective rehearsal and political experimentation, in which to imagine, stage and practise alternative forms of social organisation and the reproduction of life. Adopting non-competitive pedagogical models, her work brings together people from activism, architecture, law, spoken word poetry, acting, urban planning and physiotherapy, alongside children, students and teachers, in building shared processes of learning, action and representation.
In 2017, she took part in the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. Among the major international exhibitions and events she has participated in are Matter of Art – Prague Biennial (2024), To Carry, Sharjah Biennial (2024), Care Ecologies at State of Concept, Athens (2024), Quizá Mañana, 16th Cuenca Biennial (2023), New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2018), The Eighth Climate, 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), and Really Useful Knowledge at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014).
From 2020 to 2022, she was a Fellow of the Vera List Center, where she developed a project dedicated to the radical transformations of social relations generated by responses to pandemics, past and present. As part of the tenth edition of the Italian Council, the international programme promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, the project These Conditions, presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School in New York, was selected as a winner and entered the collections of the Castello di Rivoli.
The project Like a Flood, supported by the thirteenth edition of the Italian Council (2024), was presented by the Sharjah Art Foundation and is destined for the MUCIV – Museum of Civilisations, Rome. For the 2025 Sharjah Biennial, she also created, in collaboration with researcher Shehrazade Mahassini, a video installation exploring water extraction, infrastructure, techno-fetishistic imaginaries and the paradigm of “adaptability”. adelitahusnibey.info
