candy chandeliers slowly dissolve through venetian palazzo in exploration of fragile joy
a candy-coated mirage by Simone Post fills venetian palazzo
Inside the historic interiors of Palazzo Contarini Polignac in Venice, Simone Post transforms nostalgia into something tactile, fragile, and almost impossible to hold onto. For Still Joy – From Ukraine into the World, presented by the PinchukArtCentre as an official collateral event of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, the artist presents She Knew She/It/They Would Melt, a site-specific installation that addresses themes of domestic memory, childhood fantasy, and emotional survival.
Occupying the ornate rooms of the Venetian palazzo, the installation reconstructs chandeliers, decorative objects, and intimate family portraits entirely out of candy. Lollipops become framed memories. Sweets hang like precious antiques. Familiar interiors soften into a dreamlike hallucination, somewhere between a faded recollection and a fictional refuge. Through this exaggerated sweetness, Post creates a temporary architecture of care, where vulnerability is fully materialized.
all images by Simone Post
sugar as a material of emotional world-making
Post’s installation feels less like escapism and more like an insistence on tenderness amid instability. Candy, in Post’s hands, becomes an unstable emotional material, carrying the carefree pleasure of childhood while simultaneously foregrounding impermanence, fragility, and eventual collapse. The chandeliers may glitter, but they are destined to melt. The installation acknowledges joy as something delicate that we must continuously protect, rebuild, and imagine into existence.
This tension resonates deeply within Still Joy – From Ukraine into the World, whose exhibition narrative unfolds through testimonies gathered by Ukrainian marine, veteran, and former prisoner of war Hlib Stryzhko. Across the show, artists explore joy as a radical human capacity that persists alongside them. Within this context, Dutch artist’s candy interiors operate like emotional counterweights to the surrounding realities of war, displacement, memory, and survival.
Simone Post suspends candy chandeliers throughout Palazzo Contarini Polignac | image © Photo OKNO Studio
softness against collapse
Post’s wider practice has long revolved around textiles, craft processes, and material experimentation. Raised around sewing machines while her mother taught sewing classes at home, the artist developed an intuitive relationship with tactility and handmade production from an early age. Though trained at the Design Academy Eindhoven, her work consistently moves beyond functional design into sculptural and conceptual territory.
Across tapestries, twisted window frames, pleated ceramics, and reupholstered furniture, Post constructs immersive environments where ordinary materials mutate into emotional landscapes. Her installations often appear playful at first glance, yet beneath their bright surfaces lies an ongoing meditation on memory, decay, transformation, and the instability of material life itself.
At the Venice Biennale, her candy structures embody that vulnerability itself can become a form of resistance. Post leans into intimacy, tactility, and fleeting pleasure, inviting visitors to dwell briefly inside a world where softness survives, even while visibly dissolving before their eyes.
glowing chandeliers appear both playful and delicately unstable | image © Photo OKNO Studio
joy that refuses permanence
She Knew She/It/They Would Melt ultimately asks whether joy must be permanent to remain meaningful. The answer seems to emerge through the work’s inevitable instability. Like memory itself, the installation cannot fully preserve what it holds. It can only offer temporary shelter, fleeting comfort, and small emotional openings.
In this sense, Post’s candy-coated installation, She Knew She/It/They Would Melt, becomes a quietly radical proposition, that softness, imagination, and emotional openness may still offer ways of navigating a fractured world without hardening into it.
hanging candy forms reinterpret traditional chandeliers through softness, tactility, and excess
historic interiors become immersed in suspended candy sculptures and glowing pastel lighting elements
a monumental candy chandelier hangs at the center of the installation overlooking the Venetian canal beyond
Simone Post uses marshmallow-like textures and twisted candy forms | image © Photo OKNO Studio
visitors move through the suspended candy chandeliers
assembled from stacked sweets and soft pastel tones | image © Photo OKNO Studio
marshmallow-toned frames and candy rope details
transforming mirrors into dreamlike sculptural objects
lollipop-framed mirrors and candy lanterns
a candy-covered mirror reflects the glowing chandeliers throughout the historic palazzo interior
a pastel-blue candy chandelier with framed confectionery artworks | image ©designboom
marshmallows, twisted sweets, and pastel candy textures assembled into sculptural lighting forms | image ©designboom
transforming sweets into oversized illuminated objects | image ©designboom
the candy chandelier reveals intricate concentric patterns
hanging light sculptures drip downward in strands of colorful candy beads and pastel sweets
the chandelier installations reinterpret ornate Venetian lighting through softness and fragility
project info:
name: She Knew She/It/They Would Melt
artist: Simone Post | @simone_post_
exhibition: Still Joy – From Ukraine into the World
presented by: PinchukArtCentre | @pinchukartcentre and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation
event: 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia
location: Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice, Italy
participating artists include: Kateryna Aliinyk, Piotr Armianovski, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Julian Charrière, Tacita Dean, Ryan Gander, Gabrielle Goliath, Nikita Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, Alevtina Kakhidze, Roman Khimei & Yarema Malashchuk, Pavlo Kovach, Bogdana Kosmina, Katya Lesiv, Kateryna Lysovenko, Simone Post, Ashfika Rahman, Daniel Turner, Álvaro Urbano, Lesia Vasyichenko, Oleksiy Sai & Yury Gruzinov
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