Isabel Nolan Brings Copernicus and Tony Soprano to Venice
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- Isabel Nolan is representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition installed in the Irish pavilion
- Nolan's work appropriates religious imagery and repurposes it for secular celebrations of scientists and humanists
- The roster of celebrated figures spans the historical — Copernicus — to the fictional, including TV mobster Tony Soprano
- The show also honours an Italian punctuation master credited as the inventor of the semicolon, alongside other 'heroic obsessions'
- The curatorial conceit flattens the sacred and the profane by treating scientists, punctuation pioneers, and a fictional gangster with equal reverence
Why it matters: By elevating a fictional mob boss and a semicolon inventor to the same visual register as Copernicus, Nolan's pavilion reframes who counts as a cultural hero worth sacred-style tribute — a provocative curatorial choice for a national pavilion at one of the art world's most-watched stages.
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