IAB_05

The Vast Automaton

13/9/2025 – 31/10/2025 

This edition, entitled The Vast Automaton (Ogroman automat), is curated by an international curator duo, Bani Brusadin, based in Barcelona and Madrid (Spain), and Giulia Colletti, currently based in Turin (Italy). It will run from September 13 to October 31, 2025, across four locations in the Istrian region: Labin, Pula, Raša, and Vodnjan.

Concept

The Vast Automaton delves into the emergence of mega-structural landscapes, spanning energy infrastructure, mining regions, industrial automation and their far-reaching impact on both human and non-human life. Addressing the ongoing polycrisis rooted in 20th-century industrialization, The Vast Automaton opens space for alternative visions of the present. This edition investigates automation, extractivism, and critical technologies aiming to unveil unseen facets of contemporary industrialization.

Spanning four clusters (Labin, Raša, Pula, Vodnjan), the programme brings together site-specific works, installations, and films to examine shifting power relations and reimagine our entanglement with technological systems, emerging subjectivities, and the planet. Activating a number of previously overlooked sites, the programme features a diverse group of artists from Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Cyprus, Russia, Belarus, Australia, South Korea, China, Cuba, Egypt, Sierra Leone, the USA, whose practices resonate with the region’s industrial and environmental legacies.

The Biennial also includes a collateral exhibition from the FLUX project at Gallery Novo in Pula, featuring works by female artists who have explored blockchain-based practices through an open and accessible training program co-funded by the European Union.

Artists

Heba Y. Amin, Ema Maznik Antić & Maks Bricelj, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Živa Božičnik Rebec, Alice Bucknell, Mark Cinkevich & Anna Engelhardt, Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, Aleksandra Domanović, Andrej Beštak & Anja Leko, Lawrence Lek, Abu Bakarr Mansaray, Monira Al Qadiri, Gerard Ortin Castellví, Tanit Plana, Nestor Siré, Suzanne Treister, Marina Xenofontos, Ayoung Kim, among others.

Public Programmes

In advance of the opening, satellite programmes and screenings are planned in Slovenia and across Croatia. During the opening weekend (September 11–13) a press conference will be held in Labin followed by an inaugural ceremony at DKC Lamparna introducing the rationale of The Vast Automaton. This is accompanied by a preview of the Biennial for the press and art professionals. A series of guided tours across the four participating cities led by the curators and artists will also give the visitors in-depth insights into the works and the Biennial’s overarching threads of enquiries. A conference on new technologies and media art will take place during the Biennial as part of the FLUX project.

About the Biennial

The Industrial Art Biennial (IAB) is an international exhibition of contemporary art and new artistic practices. It was launched in 2014 by the art-activist collective Labin Art Express XXI (L.A.E. XXI), as a strong alternative to the context of globalization, which changes most local features due to the dominance of much more powerful cultural and political centres, which systematically impose certain conventions in contemporary art, changing local cultural landscapes.  IAB insists on the local and regional context, emphasising the industrial and cultural heritage of Istria, with the aim of strengthening the local/regional identity, and improving its importance, visibility and recognition in the European framework. For each edition curators invite artists to explore the broader concept of the “industrial” in contemporary art. IAB was designed to present and promote new socially-engaged art practices, dealing with the ambiguity of the connection between art and industry, as well as between art and the built and/or natural environment.

Curators

Giulia Colletti is a curator and art historian. Her research traces the emergence of mega-structural landscapes shaped by mining territories and computational systems. Informed by cosmotechnics in Southern/Southeastern Europe and East Asia, she examines the reverberations of technological epistemic regimes. Engaging with artists who probe extractive paradigms, the erosion of living matter, and speculative futures, her work explores how biosphere-technosphere entanglements reshape modes of world-making.

In 2025, she serves as a Research Fellow at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), and at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA). From 2019 to 2025, she was Curator of Programs and Digital at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea. Her essays, reviews, and compiled readers have also been featured in museum catalogues and published by Cura., Mousse, Flash Art, and e-flux, among others.

Bani Brusadin, an independent curator, educator and researcher, has worked on numerous projects in his career dealing with contemporary art, critical technologies, planetary-scale infrastructures, and utopias of a networked society.

Brusadin is currently lead curator at Medialab, a project of Matadero Contemporary Art Center in Madrid (Spain). In 2023 he was part of the curatorial team of the renown festival transmediale, one of the oldest  digital art initiatives in Europe, and he was one of the founders and curators of The Influencers festival in Barcelona, which has been dealing with unconventional artistic practices and radical projects since 2004.

Brusadin’s research deals with a critical approach to digital culture and technologies, and his curatorial practice emphasizes the importance of artistic projects that question the social and political aspects of technological changes. His work often explores how art can provide answers to the challenges of contemporary society, and the thematic focus on automation, technology and post-industrial processes fully corresponds to the topics that will be addressed at the 5th Biennial.

Cultural partners

The cultural institution POU Labin, the gallery UO “Apoteka” from Vodnjan, and the Archaeological Museum of Istria (AMI), The Historical and Maritime Museum of Istria (PPMI) and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria (MSUI) and Gallery Novo from Pula.

Supported by

•  The European Commission

• The project is supported by the Italian Council program (2024) promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. / Il progetto è realizzato grazie al sostegno del programma Italian Council (2024) promosso dalla Direzione
  Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura.

• With the support of the Institut Ramon Llull.

• IFA Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

• Ministry of Culture and Media Republic of Croatia

• Region of Istria

• City of Pula

• City of Labin

• Zaklada Kultura Nova.