The Scoletta Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia, a deconstructed church from the early seventeenth century, makes a fitting location for Arch Hades Return | Ritorno, an exhibition grappling with the meaning of life and the inevitability of death, an ambitious premise which Hades meets with a surprisingly succinct thesis on responsibility and self-actualisation.
Greeting visitors at the door of the church is Sphinx (2026), a site-specific sculpture which serves as an introduction to the central themes of the exhibition. According to Greek myth, the Sphinx terrorised the people of Thebes, devouring any poor soul who couldn’t answer her riddles. Much like its mythological predecessor, Hades’ Sphinx demands answers to its own questions. “Am I the sum of my experiences?” it asks. “Am I the chances that I take?”
Rather than terrorising the people of Thebes, the questions written on Sphinx appear to reflect the questions that have plagued the artist herself, but despite the intimacy of the piece there is a universality there too, one which echoes the appeal of her poetry, finding community in vulnerability. Hades, however, isn’t one for ambiguity. Inscribed on the inside of the statue is her resolution to rumination: “You are the sum of your choices.”
Hades’ philosophical awakening happened at a young age. The artist recalls discovering that Mary was supposedly impregnated at the age of fourteen and feeling immediately that she couldn’t follow a God who would impregnate a child. From there she looked for something new to believe in. Hades turned to philosophy, finding her own prophets in Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, eventually discovering existentialism. Hades describes existentialism as “consistent atheism”; it’s a philosophy that rejects the notion that human beings are born with an innate purpose and instead proposes that meaning is something we create through the choices that we make over the course of our lives.
In Return | Ritorno Hades translates this philosophy into a visual medium. Nowhere is this more evident than in Return (2025). The 22-panel piece takes up the entire top floor of the Scoletta Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia and shows the breadth of human experience through a crowd of Greco-Roman forms in various states of agony, ecstasy, solitude and contemplation. Whilst each figure appears to be having their own experience, they are joined by the pull of the darkness behind them. Strikes on the canvas convey the inevitability of their return to nothingness. The sentiment runs a striking parallel with God’s message to Adam in Genesis: “To dust you will return.”
Typically this notion is used in Christianity to encourage a focus on the afterlife, but Hades asks us to abandon that premise altogether and to instead create our own meaning in the fleeting time we have left.
Evidence of Hades’ own pursuit of meaning-making is scattered throughout the exhibition, which also includes Isle (2025), Hades’ tribute to the island of San Michele, locally known as “the island of the dead.” The island sits between the main islands of Venice and Murano and is a cemetery for Venice’s dead. The sculpture represents Hades’ desire to bury those that she loves in her poetry.
In a particularly contemporary viewing experience, visitors are invited to observe the sculpture beneath a speaker through which Hades reads the text inscribed on the back of the sculpture: “I worship you, a saint, who’d never count my sins. With every answered prayer, my faith in us accrues.”
This tension between religion and existentialism continues in her series of poems on the ground floor which appear on what appears to be crumpled paper (but are actually sculpture). The series is called Confessions Series, a title which takes on a new life in the context of a deconstructed seventeenth-century Catholic church. The interactive nature of the exhibition only enhances this feeling of call and response. Murmuring Bark (2025) invites visitors to walk among trees which speak verse aloud.
Hades plays with all of the trappings of religion—altar pieces, confessionals and voices which come from no identifiable source. But Return | Ritorno exemplifies Hades’ firm belief that there is no god—only a sublimity that we can, and must, provide ourselves.
