Exhibition

  • Saints at a Disco
    Gerard & Kelly
    Artists
    Bangkok Art Biennial, Bangkok
    Oct 29, 2026 to Feb 28, 2027
    Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo
    Mar 2027
  • GRANTEE
    Gerard & Kelly:
    Brennan Gerard &
    Ryan Kelly
    GRANT YEAR
    2026

Gerard & Kelly, “Woodpecker Discoteca, Cervia,” 2025. Research image documenting site visit for “Saints at a Disco.” Cervia, Italy. Courtesy the artists

At the center of this project is a single-channel film installation that opens a space to reflect on the complex relationships between architecture and memory, history and fiction, spirituality and sexuality. The film is shot at discotheques in Italy, where disco culture flourished in the 1970s and 1980s, including the Woodpecker Discoteca and Cocoricò along the Adriatic coast. Many of these clubs remain only as relics in today’s urban landscape, and in their silence and jettisoned state they resemble temples and chapels—sites of devotion to a past civilization. Designed with a modular logic, the project unfolds in shifting formats. At its core are three acts: the creation of a film; an exhibition juxtaposing devotional artworks with new works in performance, sculpture, and installation; and the design of an architectural pavilion—a disco/chapel—where sacred ritual and dance-floor ecstasy meet.

Gerard & Kelly are visual artists and filmmakers whose interdisciplinary practice spans performance, film, and installation, incorporating choreography, writing, printmaking, drawing, and sculpture. Known for conceptually rigorous and research-based projects that engage with architecture and site, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly began their collaboration in New York in the early 2000s. Recent solo exhibitions include Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris (2025); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023); and Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes (2022–23). They participated in the NGV Triennial, Melbourne (2023); the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017, 2023); and the Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014).