From March 31 to June 7, 2026, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan presents THE ONLY TRUE ANARCHY IS THAT OF POWER, the first major European monographic exhibition dedicated to Marco Fusinato (b. 1964), an artist and musician among the most original voices on the international scene. The exhibition, curated by Diego Sileo and promoted by the City of Milan - Culture in collaboration with Silvana Editoriale, marks the artist’s return to Italy after representing Australia at the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2022. The exhibition is part of Milan Art Week (April 13-19, 2026), which in conjunction with miart will transform the city into a stage dedicated to contemporary art.
"The exhibition THE ONLY TRUE ANARCHY IS THAT OF POWER by Marco Fusinato represents a major event for the Milanese and international cultural scene," comments Culture Councillor Tommaso Sacchi. “With this project, the PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea confirms its vocation to be a space of research and experimentation, capable of welcoming the most radical and innovative expressions of contemporary art. Marco Fusinato, among the most original voices on the global art scene, invites the public to engage with an engaging and intense experience in which sound and image intertwine in a powerful dialogue. Included in the Milan Art Week 2026 program, the exhibition contributes to strengthening Milan’s international profile as a capital of culture and contemporary art. An intense and immersive project, capable of bringing sound and image into dialogue and offering the public a unique experience.”
The title of the exhibition takes its cue from a line in the film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pier Paolo Pasolini, anticipating the tone of a review that focuses attention on three ongoing projects, all centered on the theme of noise. Fusinato offers visitors a visual and aural universe characterized by great intensity. The artist will be present daily with live performances and will present a new LP commissioned by the PAC, whose cover resembles a painting preserved at GAM.
Fusinato’s works take many forms: installations, photographic reproductions, performances and recordings. His practice takes the form of a series of interconnected projects, sometimes repurposed in successive iterations. As a musician, he explores noise as sonic matter, using electric guitar and massive amplifiers to generate frequencies of strong physical impact. His research unfolds between conceptual opposites such as noise and silence, minimalism and maximalism, purity and contamination, creating dynamic situations in which energy and intensity are captured through allegorical appropriation and the materialization of gesture.
A central element of the exhibition is the DESASTRES project, divided into two parts. The performance-installation, which was first presented at the Venice Biennale 2022 for 200 consecutive days, is presented again in a new configuration. Fusinato improvises blocks of noise and dissonant feedback with electric guitar and amplifiers, while a stream of heterogeneous images, from a digital archive built by the artist or from photographs taken with his cell phone, alternates on a large-format screen. The sound always remains improvised, the images follow each other randomly without a predefined theme, leaving the audience to interpret the work independently. The effect produced aims to generate a kind of sensory hallucination, alternating between euphoria and disorientation. Parallel to the performance, the exhibition displays a series of silkscreen paintings derived from DESASTRES images, designed for prolonged meditative enjoyment. The works retain the .jpg tags of the original files, the same dimensions and are handmade.
Fusinato will inhabit the Ignazio Gardella-designed space on a daily basis: at the end of the day, he will perform live performances, the final moments of which will then be recorded, randomly cut and replayed in “ambiance” mode until the next performance. This mode creates a contrast to the brutality of the live performance, introducing a milder, more meditative immersive effect.
The exhibition continues with the project MASS BLACK IMPLOSION (2007-ongoing), a series of drawings that reinterpret avant-garde scores transformed into noise compositions. Fusinato selects scores by composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Anestis Logothetis, Carlos Cruz de Castro, Mauricio Kagel, and Cornelius Cardew’s 193 squares of Treatise, reproducing them on a 1:1 scale. Each original note is connected to an arbitrary point on the score, generating a simultaneous condensation and unique sonic impact at the boundary between visual score and physical experience of sound.
The exhibition also includes a selection of 12-inch vinyl LPs made by Fusinato from 2009 to the present. The covers combine art historical images and contemporary photographs extracted from the mass media, creating unsettling visual juxtapositions yet consistent with the sound recordings. Examples include Caravaggio ’s The Lute Player juxtaposed with imploding buildings(Ambianxe, 2010), Greuze’s The Guitarist conversing with a cargo ship at the mercy of the waves(Spectral Arrows: Melbourne, 2019), and Artemisia Gentileschi ’s Jael and Sisara paired with a screeching bat(Atmosphæram, 2022). Other authors featured include Johannes Vermeer, Eugène von Guérard and Gustave Courbet, always confronted with images from magazines, advertising campaigns and photojournalism.
Prominent among recent worksis The Horizon is a Razor, an LP commissioned by PAC and produced by Soundohm. Recorded in two studio sessions with aluminum guitar, distortion overload and 100-watt amplifiers, the record explores feedback and jarring metallic intensities, risking damage to the speakers. The cover captures Incendio di un porto di mare by Francesco Fidanza (GAM Milan), while the back cover shows a newspaper clipping with human beings and vultures, a key image of the exhibition. The exhibition is realized with the support of Tod’s, sponsor of PAC’s annual programming, and Arsenalia.
Marco Fusinato, a noise artist and musician, represented Australia at the 59th Venice Biennale with DESASTRES and has exhibited at numerous international festivals, including All the World’ s Futures (56th Venice Biennale, 2015), The Imminence of Poetics (30th São Paulo Biennale, 2012), SUPERPOSITION (21st Biennale of Sydney, 2018) and Soundings: A Contemporary Score at MoMA New York (2013). Recently, his work was commissioned for the inaugural exhibition of Thailand’s first contemporary art museum, Dib Bangkok (2026). Fusinato continues to perform in the underground experimental music scene as a soloist, taking hisSpectral Arrows series, defined as monumental sound sculpture, and other solo performances around the world to galleries, museums, theaters, and festivals.
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| Marco Fusinato at PAC: noise, image and performance in the first European monographic exhibition |
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