Weaving together performance, photography, and collage, Roth’s performance during the 2026 Venice Biennale transformed the process of collage into embodied action — exploring the agency of self-fashioning and the dynamic between seeing and being seen. Set inside a Renaissance Venetian palazzo, the piece drew on the apocryphal figure of Irene di Spilimbergo, believed to have lived there. Born in 1538, di Spilimbergo was only 21 at the time of her tragic passing and was memorialized by contemporaries as an accomplished artist and reputed student of Titian — yet not a single work survives that can be attributed to her with certainty. She is, in the scholarly literature, a pittore senza opera: a painter without works, her legacy constituted entirely by the gazes of others.

Roth began with found paintings of di Spilimbergo printed on large vinyl sheets, which he adhered to life-sized glass panes set in a custom gilt frame. He then performed a series of interventions— cutting, adding, subtracting — until the vinyl was draped across his own body, fusing artist and image. Photographic and video documentation transmitted in real time to adjacent monitors, multiplied Roth’s likenesses in circulation.

In di Spilimbergo, Roth found a figure whose life is rendered visible entirely on others’ terms; by evoking her in his performance, Roth inverts this dynamic. In this way, his performance can be viewed as an act not of destruction, but of liberation.