sustainable ice skating rink occupies palazzo diedo’s frescoed banquet hall in venice

Olaf Nicolai installs A synthetic rink inside a baroque hall

Olaf Nicolai introduces Eisfeld II: Enjoy / Survive to Palazzo Diedo in Venice, transforming the frescoed banqueting hall into a 100-square-meter skating rink. On view until February 22nd, 2026, the installation is presented by Berggruen Arts & Culture and coincides with the year of the Winter Olympics. Nicolai’s project brings an unlikely form of movement into an enclosed, historic interior.

Eisfeld II uses sustainable technology that simulates ice, allowing the rink to exist within the fragile setting of Palazzo Diedo’s first-floor hall. Visitors are invited onto the surface, where skating becomes both a physical activity and a perceptual shift. A soundtrack accompanies the installation, heightening a sense of estrangement as sound, motion, and architectural ornament collide. The contrast between the Baroque frescoes and the engineered skating field foregrounds the tension between historical permanence and temporary, bodily experience.

Eisfeld II: Enjoy / Survive: a conceptual axis within palazzo diedo

Originally presented in 2001 at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, Eisfeld returns here in a reinterpreted form. The Venice iteration adapts the work to a new architectural and cultural context, integrating contemporary technologies while retaining its core inquiry. Nicolai uses this return as a way to reopen questions about how institutions frame participation, leisure, and spectacle, especially when the artwork demands active involvement rather than passive viewing.

At either end of the rink, Nicolai places two lightboxes titled ENJOY/SURVIVE (I & II). Their stark pairing introduces a conceptual axis that runs through the installation. Skating, often associated with play and pleasure, is reframed as a precarious act that requires control and endurance. The lightboxes turn the rink into a space of reflection, where enjoyment is inseparable from the conditions that make it possible.

project info:

name: Eisfeld II: Enjoy / Survive

artist: Olaf Nicolai

venue: Palazzo Diedo

location: Venice, Italy

dates: December 13th, 2025 – February 22nd, 2026

presented by: Berggruen Arts & Culture | @berggruendiedo