“I progetti che inauguriamo oggi raccontano molto bene la visione del MAXXI,” said Maria Emanuela Bruni, museum president.
The MAXXI museum in Rome opened three new exhibitions on November 13, 2026, featuring works by Shirin Neshat, Gordon Matta-Clark, and photographer Nanda Lanfranco, insideart.eu reported on November 12, 2026. Museum leadership presented the slate to press ahead of the public opening, showcasing different artistic approaches to architecture, labor, and history.
Bruni opened the press conference alongside curators Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, Francesco Stocchi, and Lara Conte. The exhibitions explore contemporary American society, 1970s urban intervention, and twentieth-century artistic archives.
The exhibition Shirin Neshat. Do U Dare! examines the 2018 shooting at YouTube’s California headquarters by Nasim Najafi Aghdam, an Iranian immigrant who injured three people before dying by suicide. Pietromarchi explained that Neshat uses the event to question individual freedom, female identity, and corporate power.
“Nel mio lavoro emozioni e politica si incontrano,” Neshat told insideart.eu. “È una critica alla società americana, ma dalla prospettiva di una donna immigrata.”
The display runs until January 10, 2027. It includes three video works—Wall Street, Brooklyn, and Suburb—alongside photographs from 2025 and 2026 depicting porcelain-doll figures accompanied by verses from Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad.
Curators Francesco Stocchi and Jessamyn Fiore organized Gordon Matta-Clark. Not the Work… The Worker, which runs until February 28, 2027. The retrospective examines the American artist’s structural cuts to buildings and his use of architecture to question social conventions.
“È bello tornare a casa,” Stocchi told insideart.eu, noting the artist’s ties to the New York cultural scene of the 1970s.
The exhibition features Open House (1972), marking its first loan to an Italian institution. The work transforms a dumpster into an architectural space open to public interaction, challenging the boundary between private and collective environments.
Lara Conte curated Ordinare il mondo. L’Archivio di Nanda Lanfranco in the Carlo Scarpa foyer, on view through February 28, 2027. The project draws from an archive entrusted to the museum in 2024.
Lanfranco’s photography captures Italian and international art scenes from the late twentieth century, documenting figures such as Marina Abramović, Ulay, and Laurie Anderson. Her images record ephemeral performances and community interactions from the Arte Povera era and beyond.