The Pinault Collection presents Algebra, a major solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth on the upper floor of Punta della Dogana. The exhibition project stems from the extensive presence of Nazareth's works in the Pinault Collection and includes a core of unpublished works, bringing together over twenty years of artistic practice and transforming the exhibition space of the former customs house.

Curated by Fernanda Brenner, an independent curator, the exhibition takes its title, Algebra, from the Arabic al-jabr, the reassembling of broken bones, evoking the essence of algebra as the art of solving unknowns and reassembling what has been fractured. For Paulo Nazareth, this becomes a methodology to address the unresolved fractures of history through epic walks in the Americas, the Caribbean, and the African continent. His practice of walking reveals the structural violence—racial and colonial—that has shaped contemporary borders, proposing forms of knowledge rooted in relationships rather than extraction, in ancestral wisdom rather than colonial mapping.

A thick line of salt runs through each room, marking a threshold between what is visible and what remains submerged. For the most attentive visitors, this line slowly reveals the geometry of a ghost ship—a tumbeiro, the Portuguese term for the slave ships that crossed the Atlantic. Its architecture of suffering resurfaces in fragments within the rooms, a spectral presence underlying the entire exhibition. The salt functions both as a metaphor and as a material agent: it heals, corrodes, accumulates.

The exhibition does not present a chronological or thematic approach, but stations in a continuum, a distillation along the exhibition path of a ongoing art-life performance. Central among these is Notícias de América from the Pinault Collection, which condenses Nazareth's ten-month walk from Brazil to New York. Photographs, texts, and worn-out Havaianas trace moments where identities and boundaries collide, offering a direct testimony of migration as a lived experience and constructed fiction.

When invited to the Venice Biennale in 2013, Nazareth created a parallel event in Veneza, in the state of Minas Gerais: a small Brazilian town that shares its name with the Italian maritime capital. For this exhibition, he activates both sites simultaneously, creating a dialogue between hemispheres: the floating city built on trade meets its namesake without access to the sea in the Brazilian interior. Two geographies, one practice.