Internazionale Donna
‘SupaStore x Biennale Internazionale Donna’, on view from March 27th – May 3rd 2026 is the debut of SupaStore.Art within the Biennale Internazionale Donna (BID) in Trieste, Italy.
A simple scenography has been devised to present the long tail of SupaStore. Echoing the project’s pre-digital roots and following its trajectory into dematerialised formats, the archive is presented at BID in printed matter and as web presence. Two bespoke asymmetric shelves present the content: on one shelf you will find the artists book: ‘SupaStore Inventory 1993-20’; an incomplete archive, comprising image and text that covers iterations since the genesis of the project, along with the long list of participating artists; on the other shelf, a tablet is displayed and here we soft launch ‘SupaStore.Art’, a bespoke web archive built by Slope, for this event, where iterations of the project from 2021-2026 can be discovered. Resolutely IRL for decades, SupaStore is excited to low-key segue into digital space at BID.
The new presentation brings a light touch aesthetic connection to previous SupaStore kiosks in strikingly asymmetric sculptural form that are devised to reignite a close looking at the art object, recalling the 19th century arcades, where musicological and retail aesthetics merged in aesthetic collisions, the subject of Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary reflections.
SupaStore kiosks have recently appeared at the Bikaner House Delhi during IAF (Feb 2026), and at the Tinguely Museum, Basel, in the context of the exhibition Fresh Window (Dec 2024-May 2025), as well as within the extensive touring exhibition ‘Multiplication’ (2001-2007) and at Tate Modern, London in its ‘Century City’ exhibition (2001).
The curatorial provocation, ‘Bohemia by the Sea’, provides a context for reflection on the nostalgic prompts that drive Sarah Staton’s SupaStore. From a childhood, exploring London’s grand department stores, interior public-private realms, where soft carpets and intriguing merchandising lulled consumers into temporary grandeur and flights of fancy, where purchasing a parrot was as viable as stocking up groceries in the Egyptian food hall, or taking a hair cut in the basement barber’s shop.
As everything merges into shopping, art negotiates its fate of proximity to the commodity, to conditions of objecthood and reproducibility; SupaStore reveals them to be irrepressible for both. Using languages of commerce with wit and irony, Staton celebrates artists’ ability to reinvent the ordinary. SupaStore invites audiences to rethink value, ownership, and display - an art that activates space, multiplies, and delights in its many guises.
SupaStore.Art has been developed in collaboration with Slope (a collective comprising Pietro Cattai, Dhruv Duggal, Pablo Durban and Kamce Vasilev).
