Art

VIDEO DESCRIPTION: Working out of his Berlin studio, artist Tomás Saraceno creates interactive installations, immersive architectural interventions, and participatory community projects that research how to best steward the planet and cohabitate with all its forms of life.

Tomás Saraceno was born in 1973 in Tucuman, Argentina, and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Learn more about the artist: https://art21.org/tomassaraceno/

A new immersive art exhibition transforming projected light into walk-through sculpture is now open at Oklahoma Contemporary, inviting visitors to experience large-scale installations that blur the lines between cinema, sculpture and drawing.

Anthony McCall: Solid Light, presented in collaboration with Tate, features the artist’s pioneering “solid light” works, which use projected beams and atmospheric haze to create slowly shifting geometric forms that appear almost tangible. Rather than observing from a distance, visitors are encouraged to move through the installations, becoming active participants and shaping how the works are perceived.

A highlight of the exhibition is Line Describing a Cone (1973), a landmark piece that redefined experimental film by shifting focus away from the traditional screen and toward the projector’s beam of light. As the work unfolds, a cone of light gradually forms in space, emphasizing time, movement and the viewer’s physical presence.

The exhibition also includes rare archival materials, photographs and early performance films such as Landscape for Fire (1972), alongside later digital works including Doubling Back (2003) and Split-Second Mirror (2018). Together, these pieces trace McCall’s decades-long exploration of how simple elements like light, motion and spatial perception can create complex, immersive environments.

McCall’s work has influenced generations of artists working at the intersection of film, installation and immersive art, continuing to challenge traditional boundaries between artist, artwork and audience.

Sherrie Levine The New York artist Sherrie Levine is famous for appropriating artworks by others as her own, much as Marcel Duchamp appropriated a commercial urinal as his sculpture. But when she riffed on “Fountain,” she told me, she altered her source a fair bit. She’d found an ancient urinal in a shop — “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful,’ so I bought it, not knowing what I was going to do with it” — then had it cast in bronze and polished. She likes the “preciousness” this process added to Duchamp’s original, which can come off as simply abject. Also important: Her golden metal looks openly expensive, while Duchamp’s porcelain can pretend to be modest, although a 1964 replica sold at Sotheby’s in 1999 for $1.7 million. That’s what a Fort Knox gold bar goes for today — something Duchamp might have loved.

Alex Schweder Where Duchamp turned a real working urinal into a hands-off sculpture, the New York artist Alex Schweder collaborated with Kohler, the bathroom company, to turn toilets into sculptures meant to be plumbed for use.

“Duchamp took a functional work and created shock by putting it an art context, but I’m arriving at a similar affect by putting an artwork in daily spaces,” Schweder told me.

Duchamp’s nonfunctioning “Fountain” seemed to avoid any obvious aesthetics, while Schweder said that “Peescapes” adds aesthetics, giving waste a roundabout detour as it heads for the drain. Another innovation of Schweder’s: Since “Fountain” is so unavoidably wrapped up in maleness, he thought to design a new version that women could use.

Maurizio Cattelan In 2016, the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan had a real toilet cast from more than 200 pounds of 18-carat gold, then installed it in a bathroom at the Guggenheim Museum in New York for any art lover to use. “He took an object out of the world and placed it into art. I took it back into the world and gave it a price,” Cattelan told me. “Duchamp asked what art is. I asked what it’s worth.”

A piece that screamed value was tempting: In 2019, while on loan to Blenheim Palace in England, it was stolen. The thieves were caught, but the piece, estimated to be worth about $4 million, never reappeared: It looks as though it got sold for (golden) scrap. And Cattelan went on to duct-taped bananas.

Ai Weiwei The photograph “Letgo,” by the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, was inspired by a moment when the Lego company, in Denmark, refused to supply Ai with three million plastic bricks he’d planned to use in an immersive environment featuring portraits of human-rights activists. Ai used knockoff building blocks from China instead (he’s often made work about Chinese industry), but decided to commemorate Lego’s refusal in a Duchamp-inspired image that sent plastic bricks down the drain. “Like Duchamp, I treat everything as a readymade,” Ai told me. “His readymades might be a urinal or a coat hook; mine are the realities of contemporary politics and culture.”

Ai said that, in the course of his career, Duchamp has been the “most significant influence and a decisive factor; no one else has played a comparable role.” Many other artists might say the same.

‘Spiral Jetty’ (1970) by Robert Smithson “Spiral Jetty” is what Kevin Beasley, 40, a New York-based artist who’s heavily influenced by land art, calls “the poster child” for the movement. Located on the northeast shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the work is a coil made from roughly 6,000 tons of earth and basalt rock that stretches 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide. Its creator, Robert Smithson, who died in a plane crash in 1973, was one of a handful of American artists who began creating large-scale outdoor works, mainly in the Southwest, in the 1960s and ’70s. For Beasley, “Spiral Jetty” epitomizes the unpredictability of land art. A couple of years after its debut, it was submerged in the lake, and it largely remained so until 2002, when, as the lake receded because of drought, the sculpture re-emerged. Since then, it has become, essentially, a beached artwork. Land art thrives in “the impossibility of control,” Beasley says. “It’s like seeing an animal in the wild.”

‘The Lightning Field’ (1977) by Walter De Maria Sometimes, light is an even more important element for land art than dirt, says Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who’s worked with many of the artists associated with the movement. For “The Lightning Field,” Walter De Maria arranged 400 stainless steel poles in a one-mile-by-one-kilometer grid on a remote expanse in New Mexico. Only six people — who must stay overnight at a cabin adjacent to the property — are allowed to visit at any time. While the poles are designed to attract lightning, it’s rare for it to actually strike them. “The more ordinary, extraordinary events are sunrise and sunset,” Govan says. “It’s like God flipped a switch.”

‘City’ (1970-2022) by Michael Heizer By the time “City” opened in 2022, it had been under construction for 50 years and achieved near-mythological status. Critics likened aspects of Michael Heizer’s nearly mile-and-a-half-long, half-mile-wide complex of concrete and dirt mounds, plazas and geometric constructions to Teotihuacán and Luxor. (Heizer’s father, Robert, was an archaeologist who worked in Mexico and Egypt.) While many artists are concerned with scale, “Michael Heizer taught me that it’s about distance and size,” Govan says. There’s nothing metaphorical about walking a mile and a half in the harsh desert sun.

‘Silueta Series’ (1973-80) by Ana Mendieta If many land artists worked big, the Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta proved the power of working at the scale of the human body. For her “Silueta Series,” created across the Americas and Europe, she lay down in nature and left behind imprints, mounds or outlines of her form on the land. Rather than transforming the landscape with dump trucks and construction crews, Mendieta made “Siluetas” “about connecting with the earth in a foundational way,” Beasley says. “A lot of land art doesn’t do that.”

‘Marsh Ruins’ (1981) by Beverly Buchanan Near the Georgia coast, Beverly Buchanan created a sculpture that most people walk by without noticing. “Marsh Ruins” consists of three concrete mounds covered with tabby, a mixture of oyster shells, sand and water. She placed the work near Igbo Landing, where, in 1803, an estimated 75 people died by suicide rather than submit to enslavement. “It’s emotionally and spiritually extremely charged, but it’s a monument that refuses to announce itself,” says the French sculptor Marguerite Humeau, 39, who makes art in and about nature. The project, she adds, invites questions that aren’t always explored in conventional land art, such as “Who is given a voice through monuments and who isn’t?”

Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Museum of Assemblage Art (1989-2004) Artists are often drawn to land art because their visions can’t be contained by “the antiseptic, climate-controlled, never-changing white box of the gallery,” says Govan. The artist Noah Purifoy made his name in the mid-1960s with sculptures he created from materials burned in the Watts Rebellion. As he got older, “he couldn’t make the scale of work he wanted in the studio or museum,” Govan says. Priced out of Los Angeles, he found a creative home in the Mojave Desert, where he spent his final 15 years building an open-air museum filled with fun-house sculptures made of repurposed materials like toilet seats, chain-link fencing and tires.

‘Revival Field’ (1991-93) by Mel Chin “Revival Field” showed how land art could help heal the planet. In 1991, the artist Mel Chin teamed up with Rufus Chaney, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to build an experiment-cum-artwork at a Superfund site in St. Paul, Minn., where they created a garden of plants with high tolerance to heavy metals, along with a few that could absorb those metals from the soil in a process known as hyperaccumulation. It worked. “Revival Field,” says Beasley, “gets to the core of what art can do.”

‘Field Recordings’ (1999) by Raven Chacon By the onset of the 21st century, a growing backlash to the land art movement, much of which had been made by white artists on Indigenous lands, led some to challenge its monumentality by creating work that doesn’t change the landscape at all. In 1999, the Diné artist Raven Chacon visited quiet, remote sites across the American Southwest, recorded the sounds there and later amplified them. “There is often this idea that in the desert, there is nothing,” Humeau says. Chacon’s recordings — which sound like fuzzy audio feedback with the occasional clang or chirping bird — remind us that “actually, there’s so much,” even though “it might not be [apparent] at first.”

VIDEO DESCRIPTION: "This documentary short follows the artist (José de Jesús Rodríguez) in a moment of creative transition as he adapts the techniques of mosaic to his multilayered compositions, embracing more openness, gesture, and ambiguity in this emerging body of work."

FULL ARTICLE: The earth’s cool breath is the first thing that hits me. Scented with clove and cinnamon, it catches my senses by surprise in the dim, while a vast soil sculpture emerges around me as if from a dream, just as the artist intended. I’m contained within its mammoth, terraced walls of reddish soil and struck by the silence, the peace felt in being held by nothing but earth. Another visitor lies on the ground nearby, contemplating the circular, 12-metre-high structure towering above us. I resist the temptation to stroke it, instead smelling and observing the work, feeling a mixture of curiosity, fear and solace.

I’m in Mexico City, inside The Womb Space, a cavernous earthwork by Delcy Morelos. Now in its ninth and final month, the show has been a word-of-mouth sensation, drawing more than 60,000 visitors. Its draw lies in an often nostalgic appeal to the senses – a woman in her 70s enters and whispers: “It smells like my ranch! Like playing in the dirt as a child.” Remarkably, it turns out the sculpture’s soil was actually sourced from the region the woman is from. Together, we take in the earthwork’s cascading plant matter, its humidity and the uncanny aliveness emanating from within. It’s almost like standing inside a mountain: you feel humbled and somehow more primal, the response more visceral than cerebral.

'The Womb Space' offers a similar experience to Morelos’ latest earthwork, 'Origo', meaning Origin – a multisensory installation about to open to the public in the Sculpture Court of the Barbican in London. Both immersive artworks are part of her 14-year inquiry into our relationship with the material that, she says, “sustains all life but is most humble”: soil. Exhibited globally – including maze-like creation Earthly Paradise at the 2022 Venice Biennale – her earthworks are majestic, providing an encounter between ourselves and what she calls “our origin self – like that first dark, humid place we all come from”.

'Origo' is a 24-metre-wide outdoor, ovular pavilion with cave-like passages for visitors to explore. There is also a patio at its centre for rest, in which meditative activities will take place, such as tai chi. “I’ve thought about what a Londoner might need,” she says. “What I can bring from what I am, where I come from.” With organic materials and an egg-like form, Morelos’ work will be in active dialogue with the Barbican’s angular, concrete edifice which, she reminds me, is also derived from the earth.

We meet in Casa Pestalozzi del Valle, a cafe in the leafy, middle-class neighbourhood of Colonia del Valle in Mexico City. Petite and bright-eyed, wearing a handwoven indigo poncho, she calls her soil art “a mission, a vocation even”, saying it has given her more vigour than ever. “I want to create experiences,” she says, “where people discover answers to questions they didn’t know they had.”

We discuss lots of things: the loss of the sacred and our fear of death – the event that marks our return to the land that has so nourished us. “I work with earth so you realise you’re made of earth, too,” Morelos says. “There’s no separation. If you hurt her, you hurt me, you hurt yourself.”

This way of thinking stems from the Andean cosmovision her work is rooted in: a worldview in which mountains, seas and the like are perceived as sentient beings rather than resources to be exploited. Morelos says that for her Amazonian teacher, Isaías Román, “the universe is a tejido, a woven fabric – everything matters”. She sums it up excitedly: “It’s absurd to think that a river is not alive – when she sustains the lives of everything that feeds from her!”

Morelos, 58, grew up in a small town in Colombia called Tierralta. She remembers polishing the house’s earthen floor by hand with her grandmother each day to reduce dust. After attending art school, Morelos produced mainly works in blood-red, a way of addressing the prolific violence she’d seen around her as paramilitary groups fought over coca-rich territory. These conflicts eventually led her attention to the earth itself – something that should be “cared for, not possessed”.

The artist’s subsequent installations are a mix of land art, arte povera, minimalism and both pre-Hispanic and modern architecture. Morelos wants them to dismantle the belief that soil is just dirt underfoot, matter to be mined for gold and oil. Writing of her work, Oaxacan activist Yásnaya Aguilar notes that the Adam and Eve creation myth positions humans at the pinnacle of existence, having “dominion ... over every living thing”, according to the Bible. This eclipsed European pagan belief systems, Morelos says, and helped justify our extractivist culture. Aguilar goes on to describe how even “the idea of earth as property came with colonisation”, a concept that differs hugely from indigenous notions of collective territory.

Responding to this, Morelos’ elevation of earth is radical, suggesting that soil is an equal to be met eye to eye. “Horizontal relationships are much more interesting,” she says. “Because there’s an element of care, of listening. A Colombian phrase used when someone isn’t listening is ‘pon me cuidado’, meaning ‘put your care on me’. When you listen to someone, you’re looking after them.”

So that’s what she does. “I listen to the space, the materials it’s made of, the memory of what was there. That’s where the care starts.” She sees this care as something that’s mutual, extending between us and everything else, from lakes to stones to ants. “Care is what means our species exists.”

'Origo' will be free to enter, something that pleases Morelos. “It means people can visit multiple times, seeing it evolve through weather and time.” It has taken an extraordinary amount of manpower – 30 tonnes of soil passed through Morelos and her team’s hands – but 'Origo' will be taken down come August. “There’s a fetish, almost, that artworks should be preserved for ever,” she says. “But I like the idea of impermanence.” She draws a comparison to the English countryside passing through seasons: new buds appear, flowers bloom, leaves fall. “This work will only exist in the memories of those who lived the experience.”

Finally, our conversation turns to the role of mystery and magic in her work. “How do I say it?” she says, faltering, then bursting into laughter. “Magic has always been here. If there wasn’t magic in the world, I wouldn’t want to be alive.” I get a sense of this in The Womb Space, detecting some unknowable force as I look into the shadowed earth, feeling that my gaze is somehow being returned. One woman clutches her daughter’s hand before the looming soil mass, red-eyed.

“It makes me feel like the earth and I aren’t strangers,” she says quietly. This, Morelos has said, is her hope. “I want to create a space where you can be with her. Here, the earth will hold you. I want 'Origo' to move people, to help them realise we don’t need so much to live. The earth is so abundant.”

FULL ARTICLE: Like the rising sea levels that have periodically threatened to submerge this city, the 2026 Venice Biennale has experienced waves of uncertainty that have only grown in strength as the public opening of the world’s most prestigious international art exhibition nears on Saturday morning.

Its curator, Koyo Kouoh, died last year at age 57, within days after receiving a terminal diagnosis of liver cancer, leaving her team with a still-unfolding view of the exhibition she intended to build. And the 61st Biennale, featuring artists representing nearly 100 countries, is no longer a real competition; last week, the five-member prize jury resigned after backlash from its decision to exclude artists from countries whose leaders were being investigated by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, and after the artist representing Israel threatened legal action. (Instead, there will be popularity awards voted on by visitors).

The Venice Biennale Foundation, which oversees the exhibition, is also facing scrutiny from the Italian government and European Union because of its decision to allow Russia to participate in this year’s edition.

Here are five questions you might have about the Venice Biennale — and why this year’s edition has encountered so much controversy.

Who curated this year’s Venice Biennale? In December 2024, the Venice Biennale Foundation announced that Kouoh would oversee the central exhibition for the 61st edition of the Biennale. She was born in Cameroon, spent her teenage years in Switzerland, and was the first African woman selected to organize the prestigious show.

In her original curatorial statement, which is titled “In Minor Keys,” she aid the show would not be “a litany of commentary on world events,” though it would not shy from politics.

“In refusing the spectacle of horror, the time has come to listen to the minor keys, to tune in sotto voce to the whispers, to the lower frequencies; to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is safeguarded,” Kouoh wrote.

After her sudden death in May 2025, the Biennale asked Kouoh’s collaborators to complete her vision. The team includes the curators Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo of Britain, Marie Hélène Pereira of Senegal and Rasha Salti, who is based in Berlin and Beirut. Her former assistant, Rory Tsapayi is also a core adviser, as is the journalist Siddhartha Mitter, a New York Times contributor, who is editor in chief of the catalog.

Kouoh was respected in the international art scene as a torchbearer for artists of color from Africa and elsewhere. Until her death, she lead Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, one the continent’s largest contemporary art institutions, and staged influential exhibitions like “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,” which traveled internationally.

How faithful will the exhibition be to her vision? Kouoh only had a few months to plan the centerpiece exhibition before her death, leaving an outline of the show for her colleagues to fill. The team behind the current exhibition declined interview requests; however, Salti previously told reporters that she and her colleagues had spent an “intense” week with Kouoh in Dakar, Senegal just before her death. It was there that they agreed on plans for the show, she said, including the artist list.

Several previous curators of the Biennale said that in their experience, it would not have been enough time to finalize the artist’s plans; they also pointed to the sizable fund-raising requirements of doing such a massive show in Venice, which usually falls on the curator.

“I was still in the research phase,” said Cecilia Alemani, the Italian curator who oversaw the 2022 Venice Biennale, adding that she hadn’t started contacting artists at that point.

Without a figurehead, the Biennale relied on Kouoh’s colleagues to finish the job.

Audiences will be looking for Kouoh’s fingerprints on the exhibition, asking if the final result feels more like a tribute or a true embodiment of her ideals.

How is Russia participating in this year’s Biennale? Russia has not made a significant contribution to the Venice Biennale since 2019. The country’s pavilion was closed in 2022 after its invasion of Ukraine earlier that year, when two of its own artists pulled out in protest. And during the last edition, in 2024, the Russian government rented its pavilion to Bolivia.

Although there was no formal ban on Russia’s participation this year, few people expected to see a new exhibition from the country because of the ongoing war. Yet in March, when the Biennale announced this year’s national pavilions, which run alongside the central exhibition and are curated independently, Russia was on the list. It is presenting a group show of at least 38 artists and musicians, called “The Tree Is Rooted in the Sky” that will only open for the press preview, which runs Tuesday through Friday. The organizers said in a statement that the show “rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art.”

Ksenia Malykh, a curator for the Ukraine pavilion, told The New York Times that Russia’s return to Venice was the latest example of its use of art “as a weapon in the information war.”

Kirill Savchenkov, one of the Russian artists who withdrew from Venice in 2022, said in an email that his country reopening its pavilion was “unhinged” and “some sort of active measure to cause political division in Europe.”

In March, the European Union’s legislative body, the European Commission, said it would suspend more than $2.3 million in funding to the Venice Biennale if it didn’t reverse course, writing in a later statement that it was a decision “made in the name of protecting European values.” When the prize jury stepped down last week after saying it would not consider any countries whose leaders are facing charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court, it was indirectly pointing to Russia and Israel.

The Italian government has also expressed its opposition to the Biennale’s decision to host Russia, even sending inspectors to investigate if its participation was compatible with existing sanctions. While the Italian government provided funding to the event and appointed its president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said that the Biennale is an autonomous organization that must make its own choices.

Many artists and curators involved in the Biennale have made their dissent known, and protests against Russia’s participation are expected.

Did the jury have other motivations for resigning? The debate surrounding Russia’s participation in the Venice Biennale comes with long-running concerns by some artists and curators about the participation of other countries involved in global conflicts, including Israel and the United States.

At the last edition of the Venice Biennale, protesters marched by the pavilions of both countries and chanted “Viva, viva, Palestina!” But the Israel pavilion was already closed by then: Ruth Patir, the artist representing the country, had refused to open her exhibition, posting a sign on the window that the pavilion would remain shut until “a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.”

This year, Israeli organizers expect to open their pavilion with an installation by the artist Belu-Simion Fainaru, who told The Times that he was happy the jury stepped down. “Their decision discriminated against me on a racial basis,” he said.

The jury’s resignation came as several activist groups have raised concerns about how countries use the soft power of cultural diplomacy to rebrand themselves in the public eye. Protesters with the group Art Not Genocide Alliance have focused attention on the plight of the Palestinians and have called for the exclusion of Israel from the Biennale. Dozens of artists and curators signed an open letter from the group, including many involved in other national pavilions and the main show.

Organizers are also expecting that activists will stage demonstrations about Russias invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip and the American-Israel war with Iran.

What are the United States’ plans for the Biennale? The United States had a rocky start to its selection process for Venice. State Department officials abandoned using an independent review panel, and several delays left officials scrambling to find an artist willing to represent the country.

The United States Pavilion in Venice. At least two artists turned down offers to represent the country at this year’s Biennale.

Toward the end of last year, officials thought they had found a winning proposal by the artist Robert Lazzarini and the curator John Ravenal. But when the project’s fiscal sponsor dropped out, an appointee at the agency helped clear the way for a friend to take the lead.

That is how Jenni Parido became commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion, despite having no museum experience. For almost a decade, Parido had owned a pet food store in Tampa, Fl. with her husband. She also was involved in animal charities like Big Dog Ranch Rescue, which stages events at Mar-a-Lago and includes members of President Trump’s inner circle among its supporters. She founded the nonprofit American Arts Conservancy last year, which took over the artist selection process for the pavilion.

Parido has relied on the expertise of the curator Jeffrey Uslip, whose last major role at a museum ended about a decade ago when he stepped down from the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Uslip had difficulty finding an artist to represent the United States. At least two rejected his offer. Then he found Alma Allen. He was an unusual pick: The artist lives in Mexico and creates large, abstract sculptures that have rarely been featured in American museums. Most artists who have represented the United States in previous Biennales have a longer institutional record.

Alma Allen at his home in Mexico City. The Utah-born sculptor, who works in Mexico, is representing the United States at this year’s Biennale. He is known for biomorphic, hand-carved works in wood, stone and bronze. Last month, a White House spokesman, Davis Ingle, said the administration was confident in its plans. “The Department of State is proud to showcase American excellence at the Venice Biennale through the artistic vision of Alma Allen,” he said. “The Trump administration delivered the selection of a talented self-taught American sculptor who personifies the greatness of the American dream.”

Neither the curator nor the commissioner ever visited Allen’s studio, which is unusual for the organizers of a major exhibition. The artist said that he had creative control over the sculptures included in the show, adding that the State Department has not censored his work.

Acknowledging the strange circumstances around his selection, Allen has said that his career was made on taking risks and that he hoped that people would view his work at the Venice Biennale with an open mind.

“As an artist you want people to view the work in an open way,” Allen said. “In this context, that’s a fantastic way. The people will try to decipher the meaning.”

ARTICLE: Chiseled from wood, Aleph Geddis’ spindly, playful, vaguely alien wooden sculptures evoke an enigmatic tension between identity and glyph. His organic, hand-worked objects teeter between abstraction and figuration like retrofuturistic icons. The artist lives between Japan, Bali, and Orcas Island in Washington. “This split has been incredibly generative, allowing me to carry my practice with me and respond to very different environments and energies,” he tells Colossal.

Scale is a constant source of fascination. Geddis has recently been working on a series he calls Littles, which are “inspired by the way children disappear into dreamy, imaginative worlds while playing with toys,” he says. “They feel personal and secretive, almost like talismans.”

On the larger side, Geddis is lately considering how pieces may transform into site-specific responses to environments. He’s also currently working on a large-scale project for the Burning Man festival amid Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, which people will be able to walk through. “I love the idea of these forms existing in the clean, open environment of the playa, where they can be experienced at a completely different scale and in relation to the vast desert landscape.”

Participants simply stand on a box for a minute and have their photograph taken.

Fabio Orazzo should have been on his way home to Naples for the weekend. Instead, curiosity kept him in Rome, where he teaches art and history, long enough to jump on a bus to visit a little-known church in the north-east of the Italian capital.

He came to Sant’Agnese fuori le mura (St Agnes Outside the Walls), built above fourth-century catacombs, to see a marble bust depicting Christ the Saviour. A fixture in the church since 1590, it has been thrust into the spotlight by the bold claim that it could have been sculpted by Michelangelo.

“I read about it in the news and decided I must come to see it,” Orazzo said while examining the sculpture on the altar of a side chapel. “I’ve read all the cynical comments and comparisons to Cristo della Minerva, the Michelangelo statue in another Rome church. They say this bust isn’t the artist’s style. But perhaps they were made in different periods of his life and so in my humble opinion, this is a Michelangelo too.”

Orazzo was among a steady stream of visitors to the church since Valentina Salerno, an independent researcher, claimed during a press conference last week that newly discovered documents linked the bust to Michelangelo. The announcement caused a stir in the art world, especially since a sketch attributed to the Renaissance master – but dismissed by some as a copy – sold for £16.9m at a Christie’s auction in London on 5 February.

Fabio Orazzo, an art and history teacher, takes a picture of the Christ the Saviour sculpture in north-east Rome. Photograph: Victor Sokolowicz/The Guardian Salerno, a fiction author and actor, is the first to admit she “is not an art historian”. Neither did she finish university. But, she said, her three years at law school were “very useful” because they equipped her with the skill and tenacity to “read these notary acts, wills and inventories with a legal eye”.

For more than a decade, she has sifted through records in Italian and Vatican state archives in pursuit of details about the final days of Michelangelo’s life in Rome, where he lived for roughly 30 years until his death in 1564.

“I found it impossible to believe that nobody had studied the last days of his life in a deep way,” said Salerno, who published her findings on academia.edu, a non-peer reviewed website used by academics. “There are so many mysteries.”

Salerno said her most revealing discovery was of documents about a secret room, locked with multiple keys, in which the artist had ordered his close associates to stash some of his drawings and sculptures – apparently including the Christ the Saviour bust. This challenges the long-held theory that Michelangelo had burned his works before he died.

Valentina Salerno has challenged art experts to prove she is wrong in attributing the sculpture to Michelangelo. Photograph: Victor Sokolowicz/The Guardian Salerno claims Michelangelo’s goal was to hide his treasures from relatives he detested in Florence and for them to be passed on for future study.

The documents showed that the room was later emptied and its contents transferred to religious institutions and other sites. As a result, Salerno believes there could be about 20 unknown Michelangelo works.

She thinks the bust bears a resemblance to Tommaso dei Cavalieri, a young nobleman Michelangelo was infatuated with.

Adding credence to her claims is documentation following Michelangelo’s death that attributes the bust to him. The sculpture attracted much discussion in the 18th and 19th centuries. The British painter JMW Turner sketched it during a trip to Rome in 1819 and the German sculptor Emil Wolff made a copy now kept at the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. The French writer Stendhal also wrote that he believed the bust was by Michelangelo.

However, the attribution was debunked by a scholar in 1984 – incorrectly, according to Salerno. Since then, the bust has been categorised by Italy’s culture ministry as being by an unknown sculptor.

Salerno’s research has the backing of the St Agnes church. Franco Bergamin, the abbot of the Catholic order that runs the premises, said during the press conference: “We have lived here since 1412, and the monumental complex of St Agnes always holds surprises – this is one of them.”

However, the Italian culture ministry did not respond to an invitation to the press conference and nor did Mauro Gambetti, a cardinal who appointed Salerno to a scientific committee last year aimed at creating a Vatican exhibition to mark the 550th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth. Committee members approached by the Guardian, including Hugo Chapman of the British Museum, declined to comment.

The church of St Agnes Outside the Walls, which has taken extra security measures to protect the disputed bust. Photograph: Victor Sokolowicz/The Guardian Francesco Caglioti, a professor of medieval art history known for his in-depth studies of the Renaissance and Michelangelo, said Salerno’s research was “very useful” and “should be developed” but he categorically ruled out the bust being by Michelangelo.

“I have encouraged Valentina as she is looking into a part of Michelangelo’s legacy which has never systematically been studied,” he said. “But, as I told her, I did not expect her to make such an attribution. This bust is not a Michelangelo. It does not have his style, but above all, it does not have his quality. Perhaps it was sculpted under his watch, but it is not by him.”

Salerno has invited experts to “provide documents that dismantle my theory” and to scientifically appraise the attribution. “I don’t have the technical capabilities to say 100% that it is or isn’t a Michelangelo,” she said. “It could be plastic for all I know. I’m being attacked as some kind of charlatan but all the documents point in this direction.”

As the bust’s authenticity is debated, Italy’s art police are taking no chances. Security around the sculpture has been tightened and a laminated sign reads: “Alarm armed”.

Gori Magnani travelled to the church with her husband from a town near Rome specifically to see the bust. “I find it fascinating,” she said. “Maybe it is a Michelangelo. Either way, this research should be supported and scientific experts should establish whether it is true or not.”