Andrea Galvani © The Void Migrates to the Surface, 2025. Multichannel video and sound installation. Music by Federico Albanese © Waldo Music Publishing / Bosworth Music GmbH, Berlin. Courtesy the artist and Fotografiska Shanghai, China

OPENING: 

September 12, 2025.

From September 12 until January 12, 2025.

WHERE: 

Fotografiska Shangai.

Curated by PEIPEI HAN and ZIYAN ZHANG

Andrea Galvani presents The Void Migrates to the Surface at Fotografiska Shanghai, the artist’s first institutional solo show in Asia. Constituted by a multichannel video and sound installation developed specifically for Fotografiska Shanghai, this groundbreaking exhibition offers an immersive experience, bringing visitors into a new dimension of time.

In his latest cinematic masterpiece, the artist extends the brief lives of twenty rare and endangered butterfly species — from just a few weeks to 73 years, the global average human life expectancy. Using advanced super-slow motion technology capable of capturing up to 1 million frames per second, Galvani dilates time with precision — stretching seconds into minutes and aligning the lifespan of butterflies with that of human beings.

Within this parallel universe of altered temporality, viewers are immersed in a radiant purple cosmos where they witness dazzling butterflies flying in slow motion. The Void Migrates to the Surface crystallizes a gradual, graceful choreography of flight — of fragility and resilience, delicacy and monumentality. As the butterflies move, visitors observe the subtle passage of time through their natural aging process — the fraying of wings, the fall of iridescent scales, and the shimmering traces they leave behind. Projected in Fotografiska’s Exhibition Hall A at architectural scale, Galvani’s mesmerizing installation invites viewers into a new cosmology. There, boundaries between life and void, ephemerality and eternity dissolve in a complex continuum.

Accompanying the visuals is a soundtrack specifically developed for the exhibition by celebrated composer and musician Federico Albanese. Luminous yet melancholic, intricate yet hopeful, the music interprets the images’ majestic power — melodically synchronizing the visual ascent and descent, stillness and motion that unravel across a different order of time.

The Void Migrates to the Surface creates more than just an immersive sensory spectacle — Galvani’s installation transports audiences into a world that coexists within and yet remains invisible to our everyday reality. Through his profound technological intervention on our perception of temporal flow, Galvani exposes anthropocentric limitations and encourages us to move beyond them. The Void Migrates to the Surface takes on a clear political, philosophical, and existential direction—life is an event that embodies time in a continuous natural flow, without perimeters.

Andrea Galvani © The Void Migrates to the Surface, 2025. Multichannel video and sound installation. Music by Federico Albanese © Waldo Music Publishing / Bosworth Music GmbH, Berlin. Courtesy the artist and Fotografiska Shanghai, China

Andrea Galvani’s The Void Migrates to the Surface opens to the public on Friday, 12 September 2025 and will be on view through 12 January 2026.

On Saturday September 13th, Andrea Galvani will be in conversation with Dr. Jiaying Chen, an award-winning curator and writer, at Fotografiska Shanghai from 3-4pm.

Fotografiska Shanghai is a hub for international photography and video art designed by the prestigious AIM Architecture in a beautifully-renoated historic bank warehouse located along the Suzhou Creek. Opened in October 2023, Fotografiska Shanghai is part of a constellation of institutions located in Stockholm, Oslo, Berlin, Tallinn and New York.