PERSONAL STRUCTURES 2026
RUBEN MÜLLER, SHUMU
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PALAZZO MORA, ROOM 206
https://personalstructures.com/
Personal Structures is the biennial contemporary art exhibition organised and hosted by the European Cultural Centre Italy in Venice. The 8th edition will run from 9 May until 22 November 2026 in parallel with La Biennale.
For its eighth edition, Personal Structures takes Confluences as its theme: it is a powerful metaphor to describe how people, cultures, and experiences can come together, influence one another, and give rise to fresh perspectives. The exhibition is built on the idea that individual stories are never isolated, but part of a larger, ever-changing collective fabric. Through the works of artists, galleries, universities, and cultural institutions from across the world, Confluences becomes a space for dialogue, where diverse languages intersect and open the way to new possibilities of imagining both our present and our future.
Ruben Müller’s work examines the fundamental experiences that shape human existence in contemporary society. His practice engages universal yet deeply personal dimensions of lived experience, attending to the often-overlooked rhythms of everyday life—its fruits of labor, quiet exchanges, and gestures of care. Müller situates the ordinary as a perceptual field in which meaning quietly emerges; his paintings visualize the warmth and significance embedded in these everyday acts, revealing the subtle sensory structures that sustain everyday life.
By foregrounding the delicate networks of effort and attention that underlie daily routines, Müller’s work opens a space for reconsidering value, existence, and relationality, demonstrating how contemporary painting can probe the phenomenological conditions through which lived experience unfolds.
Shumu’s work explores the processes through which life takes form, reflecting on the rhythms shared by human and non-human beings alike. Rather than representing specific species, she seeks to evoke inner human sensations and emotions through non-human presences. In a work depicting a roe deer braving the wind, viewers encounter not the animal itself, but a shared moment of emotional resistance.
Her woodcuts do not rely solely on visual form, but engage with invisible touch, durational time, and the relational processes that sustain life. In her woodblock works, the physical act of carving leaves traces of breath upon the surface, while layers of ink absorbed into the wood accumulate over time. These gestures invite an emotional attunement to what flows and what remains—between creation and decay, between what is seen and what is felt.
