From August 28 to October 25, 2026, Todi (Perugia) hosts the exhibition project by Alicja Kwade (Katowice, Poland, 1979), articulated between Piazza del Popolo and the Sala delle Pietre. The initiative is part of the collaborative program between the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation and the Municipality of Todi and continues a series of interventions dedicated to contemporary art that over the years have involved, among others, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Fabrizio Plessi, Mark di Suvero and Ian Davenport. The exhibition project is curated by Marco Tonelli, scientific curator of the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation.
At the center of the project is ParaPosition, an installation placed in Piazza del Popolo and visible until Oct. 25, 2026. The work consists of interwoven steel frames that support monumental stone boulders, presented in a condition of apparent suspension. The structure produces a visual effect of controlled instability, in which the mass of stone materials seems to evade gravity. A bronze chair is placed at the base of the installation, an isolated element that introduces a direct reference to human presence and helps define a relationship between monumental scale and individual dimension. The intervention insists on the relationship between perception, weight and balance, recurring elements in the artist’s research.
Simultaneously, in the Hall of Stones, the exhibition project remains open until Oct. 4, 2026, and presents a selection of works that address the relationship between time, space, and systems of measurement. Among the works is a new sculpture-clock, featuring an industrial analog device that introduces a nonlinear and paradoxical reading of temporal functioning. Also featured is 88 seconds, an installation composed of stainless steel rings arranged according to different inclinations, suggesting the progressive movement of a single rotating element until it stops on the ground.
The intervention is part of the foundation’s activities dedicated to the enhancement of contemporary art in the city’s public space and historic environments. The 2026 edition is also in the context of the 40th edition of the Todi Festival, for which Alicja Kwade created the official poster.
The collaboration between the foundation and the festival is also renewed on this occasion, consolidating a relationship already active in previous years. Kwade, who is active internationally, has created large-scale installations in museum and urban settings, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2019 and Place Vendôme in Paris in 2022. His works can be found in institutional collections such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mudam - Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg, and mumok - Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna. The Todi project also includes the publication of a catalog, which includes an unpublished interview between Marco Tonelli and the artist.
“To Beverly Pepper,” says Antonino Ruggiano, Mayor of Todi, “Todi owes the extraordinary intuition, more than half a century ago, to bring Todi’s architecture and landscape closer to contemporary art. To the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation, another munificent intuition of the artist, the city is indebted for having been able to perpetuate and ennoble his work with initiatives of great value and appeal. Not an easy job that continues in this 2026 with the choice of Alicja Kwade as the new protagonist of an installation on the stage of the monumental Piazza del Popolo, one of the most beautiful medieval settings inItaly, with which international artists such as Arnaldo Pomodoro, Fabrizio Plessi, Mark di Suvero and Beverly Pepper herself have related in recent times, whose ’signs’ are still present in the city to tell a story of present and future.”
“With Alicja Kwade,” says Elisa Veschini, President of the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation, “we open ourselves to a new confrontation with the international art scene by inviting to Todi, for the first time since Beverly Pepper, a female artist to measure herself against the unique setting of Piazza del Popolo. This exhibition also renews our link with the Todi Festival, for which the artist signs the official manifesto, continuing a tradition that for decades has intertwined contemporary art and theater. It is precisely through projects such as this one that, together with the Municipality of Todi, we continue to build an ambitious and international cultural perspective: that of a city collected in size, but capable of promoting artistic and cultural experiences proper to the great capitals of contemporaneity, where public space becomes shared experience and vision.”
“In a game the references and illusions,” recalls Marco Tonelli, curator of the exhibition and scientific curator of the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation, “time in Alicja Kwade becomes a material just like stones suspended on metal rods and structures or large stainless steel rings unfolding in space. These are concrete metaphors for weight and gravity, elements that curve space/time and determine the movement of bodies in the fourth dimension: it is the basis of matter and time, of its circularity, of its always returning on itself and keeping the universe in balance. It is the matter of which our thinking is made. Obviously an apparent equilibrium because it is destined to be exhausted according to the principle of entropy, of thermal death, of absolute stasis. But in this waiting, Kwade’s time seems to flow backward, to stop, to hold back, to unfold in space, to take precisely ”time.“ Everything is illusion, but everything is true, and every beginning is itself the end.”
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| In Todi, Alicja Kwade brings ParaPosition: suspended stones and the perception of gravity |
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