Security Guarantees is the title of the Pavilion of Ukraine at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.

The Ukrainian Pavilion addresses the unfulfilled security assurances provided to Ukraine under the Budapest Memorandum (1994) in exchange for relinquishing its nuclear arsenal. The project reflects on the fragility of peace and the resilience of the Ukrainian people.

At its centre is Zhanna Kadyrova’s The Origami Deer. Installed in 2019 in Yuvileynyi Park, Pokrovsk, on the site of a dismantled Soviet Su-7 aircraft, the sculpture was realized with executive and technical support from Denys Ruban. Rooted in the tradition of park sculpture, it reinterprets this legacy through a contemporary form.

This exhibition was curated by Ksenia Malykh and Leonid Marushchak, with architecture by Oleksandr Burlaka, and technical direction by Denys Ruban.

The visual identity was designed by Ostap Yashchuk with the typefaces KTF Roman (Kyiv Type Foundry) and Periodica (Mint Type). The website was designed and developed by Dmytro Prutkin and Oleksii Nasirov using Times New Roman.

July Type’s typefaces JT Peleton and JT Picolo are used for the catalog to the exhibition Repeat after Me II by Open Group, shown in the Polish Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale in 2024. See also the previous post about the audiovisual video installation.

The publication was designed by Janek Bersz of Full Metal Jacket and publsihed by Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki. It’s available in its bookshop in Warsaw and the official bookshops of La Biennale in Giardini and Arsenale. A pdf can be downloaded from the Polish Pavilion’s website. Made with support from the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office.

Pictures by Jacopo Salvi, Ewa Mielczarek, and Janek Bersz.

La stella dentro (“The star within”) is the official catalog of the 69th edition of the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice, the Biennale Musica 2025. This edition, under the artistic direction of Caterina Barbieri, is marked by an openness towards contemporary electronic and electroacoustic music, and understanding music as a possibility for expanding one’s perception.

Thus, the catalog, designed by Tomo Tomo, conceals a colourful, psychedelic star within its austere, sidereal cover, and the object itself changes and expands in the hands of those who leaf through it, expressing the dynamics of sensory expansion. Except for a sixteenth of ‘stellar’ images, the book is printed entirely in a silver spot color with a few elements in black and a large amount of white space. Cold, electronic, rarefied.

The typography, on the other hand, interprets the link with the refined tradition of classical music, with a font inspired by the work of Jean Jannon, Robert Granjon and Philippe Grandjean and other – it’s Store Norske Gangster, designed by Arve Båtevik. Used very often in italics and in very small sizes, it creates an interference with the electronic and intergalactic aesthetics of the catalogue and the ‘Biennale’.

The Shape of What Remains is an exhibition project presented by Aea: Culture Initiative at the Venice Design Biennial. The exhibition takes its title from American writer Lisa C. Taylor’s novel about the slow return to life after tragic loss. It consists of six compartments shaped by the lived experiences of émigré women – all of whom, for various reasons, had to leave their homes and are processing this loss through creative practice.

Silvia reconstructs an old house. Lisa collects antique objects once broken and repairs them. Professional painters Kimia and Alisa improvise music in a makeshift studio. Nanka cultivates a garden on uncertain ground. Olena discovers her grandmother’s tapestry, abandoned midway.
Sarah, in a foreign city, walks its hills, studying vanishing native flora.

Spectral by Production Type is in charge of the exhibition’s typography (including the exhibition booklet that the visitors have to bind by themselves, while the name of the art show is set in a slightly modified version of TXT Long Hand by Illustration Ink.

The exhibition booklet was left unbound so that visitors could pick the stories they wanted to take home and bind the booklet themselves in the exhibition space (all binding materials were provided).

Julien Creuzet represented France at the 60th Venice Biennale, held from April 20 to November 24, 2024. His catalog carries a title that stretches like a great wave: Attila cataracte ta source aux pieds des pitons verts finira dans la grande mer gouffre bleu.

The 368-page volume, designed by Alliage and WIP Office, centers on a constellation of collages and seventy text fragments from authors of the African diaspora. White is replaced with silver ink that catches light like reflections on water, while the black layer is removed so that darkness itself shines and the images vibrate in unexpected colors.

Set in AL Sigla Neretta and Neretta Corsiva, typefaces designed by Alex Lescieux as a revival of Umberto Fenocchio’s FTC Sigla, an Italian version of Times, the catalog emphasizes Creuzet’s shifting, diasporic poetics. Like its title, it moves and resonates, highlighting diasporic histories and decolonial stakes, where poetry, collage, and voice converge in a tide that resists erasure.

The first physical release of Collisions.cc takes the form of a limited 12″ vinyl with a foldable 24×36″ poster. The edition features an original orchestral composition by Beni Brachtel, created for Ersan Mondtag’s installation Monument eines unbekannten Menschen in the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024.

The design employs an early version of Hagel Regular, a contemporary serif typeface by scifipoetry, to set the textual elements of the sleeve and poster. The typeface’s sharp detailing and calm rhythm complement the layered themes of memory, architecture, and sound that shape the installation.

Nieuwe Instituut presents SIDELINED: A Space to Rethink Togetherness, the Dutch contribution to the 19th International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, developed in collaboration with curator Amanda Pinatih and social designer Gabriel Fontana. Hosted at the Rietveld Pavilion in the Giardini in Venice, the project reimagines the sports bar to question how architecture shapes social dynamics.

The museum describes the projects as follows:

How can architecture resist exclusionary social norms? How can we create spaces that nurture new ways of coexisting? SIDELINED explores these questions by presenting an alternative sports bar, continuing designer Gabriel Fontana’s investigation into social dynamics in through the lens of sport. By subverting traditional norms and suggesting deviations, the Dutch Pavilion strives to change the rules of the game.

Sport, as both a reflection and producer of societal conventions, shapes group identities and can often be divisive, polarising and exclusionary. Fontana challenges these structures by understanding sport as an architectural system—one that regulates spaces, bodies, and behaviour—opening the playing field to inclusivity, empathy, and solidarity.

In collaboration with designer Koos Breen, artist Jeannette Slütter, curator Amanda Pinatih, and including works by a range of artists, researchers, and others, SIDELINED shows how built spaces can be hostile or welcoming, encouraging new ways of thinking about bodies, spaces, and identities.

Responding to the Biennale’s theme of Intelligens, the pavilion stages encounters that disrupt the norms of sport and its architecture, inviting visitors to engage through play and observation. The font used for the pavilion is WT Skrappa by Jacob Wise.

Who Are We Cheering For? is the sports newspaper accompanying the exhibition.
The newspaper was developed by Gabriel Fontana and Amanda Pinatih, edited by Maia Kenney and produced with the help of Frank Verkade and Charly Blödel. It was designed by Doğa Gönüllü, using the typefaces Feraz by Giulia Boggio and Literata by Irene Vlachou, Veronika Burian, Vera Evstafieva and José Scaglione.

French graphic designer Léo Grunstein uses BVH Anto Plot to compose the catalog for the French Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Description of the project by the publisher Flammarion:

This book explores architecture’s ability to meet the challenges of climate change, conflict, and instability in the world. How can we continue to live on this planet while inventing new ways of life in the face of these challenges?
Living with the Existing, the Immediate, the Broken, Vulnerabilities, Nature, Combined Intelligences.

The catalog features contributions by Pascal Amphoux, Marie-Ange Brayer, Matthieu Duperrex, Michel Lussault, Gregory Quenet, Magali Reghezza-Zitt, Isabelle Thomas, Chris Younès and Anna Yudina.

Titled Dancing Before the Moon, the British Pavilion for the 2023 Venice Biennale shows how people from different cultures make sense of the world through ritualistic acts. The curatorial theme resonated with us on a visceral level. It evokes the rituals in our cultural heritage and the significance of these being given space inside the British Pavilion.

Dancing Before the Moon promotes the idea that everyday rituals (from growing food and cooking to playing games and dancing) are tools for diasporic communities to establish spaces and presents new ways of thinking about architecture and the built environment. The exhibition reflects on ancestral practices of the artist’s homelands.

Description of the project by the designers of TEMPLO:

Drawing on our shared cultural heritage as a studio, we created a ritualistic visual identity of diffused edges and portals, reflecting the rituals of the British diaspora. Diffused edged imagery and colours are a reference to Asian and African visual styles. The colour palette is also a nod to the pavilion title and celestial light. Shapes representing the artists’ commissions act as portals into the pavilion echoing the migration journey.

The visual identity invites all the audiences into the pavilion both in person and digitally through the overall brand of the pavilion, film, social media assets, merchandise, exhibition graphics and a nationwide advertising campaign.

The whole identity uses three typefaces: ALT Maria Clara in the original cut designed by Alli Cunanan, Ginto for the headlines and quotes, and Marfa for all the body copy and information.

Visuals for the Pavilion of the Republic of Slovenia at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Sculpture and a piece of architecture, with the strange nomadic structure serves both as a paradigmatic foreigner, oddly out of place in the historic cityscape of Venice. From MG+MSUM:

At the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Slovenia is presenting Garden Secret for You, a project by the conceptual artist Nika Špan, curated by Vladimir Vidmar. This is the first time that the Slovenian pavilion has taken the form of a project in public space, thus addressing two underlying preoccupations: the lack of a permanent national pavilion and the title theme of the Biennale exhibition – Foreigners Everywhere. Both a sculpture and a piece of architecture, the strange nomadic structure thus serves both as a country’s pavilion and as a paradigmatic foreigner, oddly out of place in the historic cityscape of Venice.

Visuals are designed with Spektra Tekst, by Dotless Type. Spektra Tekst is a youthful offspring of Type Salon’s Spektra. Designed in five weights for both Latin and Cyrillic scripts, Spektra Tekst offers versatility and adaptability to various design needs.

Niger et Albus is the official catalogue of the Venice Biennale Theatre 2024, designed by Tomo Tomo Studio. A book that goes from black to white, crossed by silver. Cross-cut by alchemical fascinations and the universe of combinatorial play. A voyage of discovery and deconstruction that interprets the pivotal theme of this fifty-second International Theatre Festival, a labyrinthine and fragmentary journey but also one of discovery and ascent, from black to white.

Composed entirely in Union, with widespread use of all caps to allow the typographic composition to draw a page grid as regular as possible, so as to integrate with the basic grid pattern made up of all the squares that from time to time appear or disappear on the page. Printed in three colors on normal, black, and transparent paper.

Edited by Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte. Editorial co-ordination by Flavia Fossa Margutti. Published by La Biennale di Venezia.

Desire Lines is a collateral pavilion of the Venice Art Biennale 2024. The project brings together three independent European cultural institutions: Proforma (UK), Begehungen (DE), and PASE (IT). Their goal is to build connections between artists from the European scene through residencies, exhibitions, performances, and other events. This edition features the work of artists such as Edgar Leciejewski, Margret Hoppe, Max Magaldi, Pierpaolo Ovarini, and Omari Taylor.

The visual identity is initially built around the concept of an apparent grid – both evolving and flexible – that serves as a foundational structure. It evokes the idea of a modifiable playground, a dynamic visual framework reflecting the diversity of creative approaches and perspectives of the invited artists. The logotype block unites the three entities, reinforcing the idea of connection and links, symbolized by a line that takes shape, illustrating the various possible paths. Each line becomes a guiding thread, a metaphor for the exchanges and connections woven between the different cultural actors and the spaces they occupy.

July Type’s typeface JT Picolo is used for both Latin and Cyrillic text throughout the exhibition Repeat after Me II by Open Group in the Polish Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale. The exhibition, curated by Marta Czyż, runs until 24 November 2024.

Repeat after Me II is an audiovisual video installation created by the Ukrainian collective Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga). Their work is a collective portrait of witnesses of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The videos presented were created in 2022 and 2024. All the protagonists are civilian refugees speaking of the war through the sounds of weapons they remember, then inviting the audience to repeat after them.

The graphic design of the show was handled by Full Metal Jacket Studio.

Pictures by Jacopo Salvi, Ewa Mielczarek and Janek Bersz

Altered views captures Voluspa Jarpa’s extensive artistic work exhibited at the Chilean Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale. Edited by the artist and curator Agustín Pérez Rubio. Published by Ediciones Puro Chile:

The publication portrays the investigation of the Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa around European decolonization between the 17th to the 20th centuries from a contemporary revision and viewpoint, referring to six historical cases about crucial subjects for debate, such as race, gender and power structures.

Designed by the leading editorial design studio VACA (Caracas, Venezuela) which is headed by award-winning designers Álvaro Sotillo and Gabriela Fontanillas.

Nearly all typography is set in Lira Sans and Adobe Jenson; Only the section sign (§) in the margins of the text blocks set in Lira Sans is set in neither of the two – instead it’s Neue Helvetica. According to the imprint, a style of the Math & Technical series is used, too, but is not shown in the images of this post.

Bilingual edition in Spanish and English.

Portrait of Camilo Catrillanca, a young Mapuche who was murdered by repressive apparatus of Chilean state.

Dry seal on book's back cover.

Book spine, covered with a dyed and printed cloth.

Project Projects (now Wkshps) used Aero as the unifying element in a series of posters announcing Jesper Just’s film installation, Intercourses:

The film is set in a suburb of the city of Hangzhou in China, which is built as a full scale architectural copy of parts of the French capital of Paris. In contrast to the many other recreations of cities around the world, people actually live in this area. Here, Chinese signs and lettuce fields clash with a reproduction of the Haussmann boulevards and a smaller version of the iconic Eiffel Tower.

In his work on Intercourses, Jesper Just has thus taken his inspiration from the principal aim of the Venice Biennale, which was to represent his country in another country. The replica city, the artificial pastiche of a city, is the essential artistic feature in this total installation, which via poetic and sensuous images thematises highly relevant subjects such as a sense of cultural belonging, globalization and alienation.

Just explains, “I’ve worked in the past with the idea of architecture performing, with a building or structure as a main performer, a main protagonist. And here there was the possibility of working with a whole city. I was thinking about ways to make the city the protagonist or mediator between these characters, making them connect via the architecture. I wanted to explore how you could take something as superficial as this architecture and then turn it into something connecting humans.”

Aero was also used on the project website.

Catalogue for the Pavillon Belge à la 18e biennale d'Architecture de Venise, that is the Belgian Pavilion at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, designed by Studio Le Roy Cleeremans (Esther Le Roy and Sarah Cleeremans):

An inspiring fictional account that takes the form of an investigation conducted in the 2050s, Demeurer en mycélium / Living in Mycelium calls into question our voracious, extractivist production system by giving us an opportunity to see, feel and experience an alternative constructive world made from and with living materials, namely fungi.

The publication was edited by Vinciane Despret, Christine Aventin, Juliette Salme and Bento, and published by Cellule architecture.

The main typeface is Better Times, which anchors its skeleton in URW’s Nimbus Roman no. 9, a variant of the canonical Times. It was started by Adèle Gallé in collaboration with and for Studio Le Roy Cleeremans and triggered by this particular project. As of December 2023, it is work in progress and not available yet.

Better Times is paired with Uncut Sans by Kasper Nordkvist. The symbols seen on the book spine and also on some of the interior pages are derived from Clémence Fontaine’s Isobare.

Fountain of Exhaustion. Acqua Alta is the title of Ukraine’s contribution to the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. From the website of artist Pavlo Makov:

The Pavilion exhibits the works of Pavlo Makov, whose artistic practices in the early 1990s focused on exploring the parallels between the human body and urban space and have since then largely shifted to elaborating the theme of “the world without us”. The artwork Fountain of Exhaustion is a serene and reflective project, which serves as a conscious extension of the original story of Fountain of Exhaustion (at once providing for the particularities of the exhibition location) and comes as a natural response to the theme Milk of Dreams.

Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, the Pavilion was curated by co-founders of The Naked Room, Lizaveta German and Maria Lanko, and chief editor of IST Publishing, Borys Filonenko. The visual identity was designed by Ukrainian studio 3Z, using Aeroport Mono by Brownfox and SangBleu Versailles by Swiss Typefaces.

IST Publishing on the catalog:

The 2022 Arsenale di Venezia exhibition is the first time Fountain of Exhaustion has ever been displayed as a fully-functional art object with a steady water supply, even though its original conception dates back to 1995 and was initially occasioned by a local context of Kharkiv, a large city in the east of Ukraine. The book features a comprehensive chronological account of the Fountain’s development in the years 1995–2022 as well as a careful selection of archive materials, illustrating the work’s evolution over the last 25 years.

It also provides additional textual commentary by various authors, exploring Makov’s artistic practices and the spatio-temporal connotations of Fountain of Exhaustion as an art object all the while reflecting on water, rivers, and channels, overflow and desolation, personally landscapes and the pressing global issues of the day.

Antarctic Resolution is a 1,000 page study of Antarctica’s architectural, historical, ecological and climatic peculiarities. The book is the basis of an installation of the same name at the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture which is shown in this video, explained by the book’s author/editor and the exhibiton’s curator, architect Giulia Foscari.

According to Lars Müller Publishers’ release notes:

Accounting for approximately 10 % of the land mass of Planet Earth, the Antarctic is a Global Commons we collectively neglect. Far from being a pristine natural landscape, the continent is a contested territory which conceals resources that might prove irresistible in a world with an ever-increasing population. The 26 quadrillion tons of ice accumulated on its bedrock, equivalent to around 70 % of the fresh water on our planet, represent the most significant repository of scientific data available. It provides crucial information for future environmental policies, and, at the same time, is the greatest possible menace to global coastal settlements when sea levels rise because of global warming.

On the 200th anniversary of the discovery of Antarctica, Antarctic Resolution offers a high-resolution image of this hyper-surveilled yet neglected continent. In contrast to the fragmented view offered by Big Data companies, the book is a holistic study of the continent’s unique geography, unparalleled scientific potential, contemporary geopolitical significance, experimental governance system, and extreme inhabitation model. A transnational network of multidisciplinary polar experts – represented in the form of authored texts, photographic essays, and data-based visual portfolios – reveals the intricate web of growing economic and strategic interests, tensions, and international rivalries, which are normally enveloped in darkness, as is the continent for six months of the year.

The book was designed by Giulia Foscari/UNLESS with Integral Lars Müller using Everett by Nolan Paparelli and Hariett by Jackson Cavanaugh.

Editorial assistant: Federica Zambeletti
Printing: Grafiche Antiga, Italy
20×26.4 cm, 1,000 pages
ISBN 978-3-03778-640-6

“Antarctic Resolution” exhibition view at the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2021.

Cover for If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, 2017

If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes is an exhibition catalog showing the work of Katja Novitskova. Commissioned by the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) for the Estonian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, it was copublished by Sternberg Press in May 2017. In 2018, a sequel titled If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, Stage 2 was published by the Art Museum of Estonia – Kumu Art Museum.

Both books were designed by Ott Metusala. For the titles and the headings, Metusala chose FF Blur. The titles are composed of different font sizes and with a significant texture game to blend with the textures of Novitskova’s work.

While the cover of the first catalog featured a leopoard, the second one depicts a bee. There are many animal representations in the books in connection with the artist’s vision at the heart of the ecological crisis. We can find wild and genetically modified life forms in the exhibition as on the cover.

From the exhibition notes about the second show:

Stage 2 works from the intersection of big data-driven industries and the expanding domain of seeing in the thick of ecological crisis. The display is an immersive environment inhabited by living machines, graphic charts embedded in synthetic materials, and two-dimensional sculptures of wild and genetically modified life forms. (...)

“If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes,” says the replicant Roy Batty to the maker of his eyes in the sci-fi film Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott. Katja Novitskova and the curator Kati Ilves borrowed the quote for the title of the exhibition in the Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017, produced by the Centre for Contemporary Arts Estonia.

Katja Novitskova (b. 1984) is an artist originally from Tallinn, but living and working mainly in Berlin and Amsterdam. Her work lies at the intersection of visual culture, digital technologies, and speculative fiction: she is interested in how the rapidly changing planet is increasingly dependent on various data streams that mediate, preserve, and alter the environment around us in visual form.

Cover for If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, Stage 2

Spread from If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, 2017

Table of contents and title page from If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, 2017

Spread from If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, 2017

Spread from If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, 2017

Back cover for If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, 2017

Nizioleti (Abyme, 2017) in use on the cover of the April 2022 issue of ArtReview, reporting from the Venice Biennale. The cover was designed by Pedro Cid Proença at ArtReview.

Nizioleti was originally designed – and named – after the street signs of Venice (“nizioleti”) for the identity of the 2012 Venice Biennale by John Morgan studio – who also redesigned ArtReview in 2013.

The magazine is set in Lexicon throughout. Its masthead is based on Haas Unica.