Helen Broms Sandberg Reimagines Caravaggio's Seven Works of Mercy in Venice

At Spazio Bruchium Fermentum near the Arsenale in Venice, Helen Broms Sandberg presents 'Le Sette Opere di Misericordia', a seven-channel video installation inspired by Caravaggio's 1607 altarpiece at Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples. The works, created between 2018 and 2026, reinterpret the traditional acts of mercy—feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, caring for the sick, visiting the imprisoned, and burying the dead—as contemporary practices of care and relational ethics. The installation uses multiple screens not as sequential chapters but as thresholds to different experiential levels, generating meaning in the spaces between images. Broms Sandberg avoids both linear narrative and spectacular dispersion, creating an open system where viewers actively negotiate connections. The work engages with the Biennale context by addressing art's ethical and social commitment without rhetoric. It functions as a dynamic archive of human experiences, layering historical, cultural, and political memories. The artist connects her approach to Caravaggio's, where sacred past intrudes on the present, but here the present is interrogated by collective memory. The installation transforms vision into relation, proposing mercy as a concrete practice of mutual recognition.