59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, titled The Milk of Dreams, will open to the public from April 23 to November 27, 2022.
The Pre-opening will take place on April 20, 21 and 22; the Awards Ceremony and Inauguration will be held on 23 April.
The Main Exhibition
The Main Exhibition The Milk of Dreams
The Exhibition will take place in the Central Pavilion (Giardini) and in the Arsenale, including
213 artists from 58 countries; 180 of these are participating for the first time in the International Exhibition.
1433 the works and objects on display, 80 new projects are conceived specifically for the Biennale Arte.
The Milk of Dreams
takes its title from a book by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) –
Cecilia Alemani
stated – in which the Surrealist artist describes a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination. It is a world where everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else. The Exhibition
The Milk of Dreams
takes Leonora Carrington’s otherworldly creatures, along with other figures of transformation, as companions on an imaginary journey through the metamorphoses of bodies and definitions of the human.
This Exhibition is grounded in many conversations with artists held in the last few years. The questions that kept emerging from these dialogues seem to capture this moment in history when the very survival of the species is threatened, but also to sum up many other inquiries that pervade the sciences, arts, and myths of our time.
How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates plant and animal, human and non-human? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and other life forms? And what would life look like without us?
Diego Marcon, The Parents’ Room (still), 2021.
Courtesy the Artist; Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee, Napoli
The Main Exhibition The Milk of Dreams selected artists II
These are some of the guiding questions for this edition of the Biennale Arte, which focuses on
three thematic areas
in particular:
the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; the connection between bodies and the Earth.
“As visitors move through the Exhibition in the Central Pavilion and the Corderie, they encounter
five smaller, historical sections
: miniature constellations of artworks, found objects, and documents, clustered together to explore certain key themes.
Conceived like time capsules, these shows within the show provide additional tools of investigation and introspection, weaving a web of references and echoes that link artworks of the past – including major museum loans and unconventional selections – to the pieces by contemporary artists in the surrounding space
.
This wide-ranging, transhistorical approach traces kinships and affinities between artistic methods and practices, even across generations
, to create new layers of meaning and bridge present and past. What emerges is a historical narrative that is not built around systems of direct inheritance or conflict, but around forms of symbiosis, solidarity, and sisterhood.
Lenora de Barros, POEMA (POEM), 1979_2014. Photo Fabiana de Barros.
Courtesy the Artist; Gallerie Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna; Bergamin & Gomide, São Paulo
The Main Exhibition The Milk of Dreams selected artists III
The Milk of Dreams
was conceived and organised in a period of enormous instability and uncertainty, since its development coincided with the outbreak and spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. La Biennale di Venezia was forced to postpone this edition by one year, an event that had only occurred during the two World Wars since 1895. So the very fact that this Exhibition can open is somewhat extraordinary: its inauguration is not exactly the symbol of a return to normal life, but rather the outcome of a collective effort that seems almost miraculous. During these endless months in front of the screen, I have pondered the question of what role the International Art Exhibition should play at this historical juncture, and the simplest, most sincere answer I could find is that the Biennale sums up all the things we have so sorely missed in the last two years: the freedom to meet people from all over the world, the possibility of travel, the joy of spending time together, the practice of difference, translation, incomprehension, and communion.
The Milk of Dreams
is not an Exhibition about the pandemic, but it inevitably registers the upheavals of our era. In times like this, as the history of La Biennale di Venezia clearly shows, art and artists can help us imagine new modes of coexistence and infinite new possibilities of transformation.
melanie bonajo is the artist who will represent the Netherlands at the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2022. In the Dutch pavilion bonajo will present a new video installation called 'When the body says Yes'. The exhibition will take place at the Dutch pavilion's one-off location for the upcoming edition: the Chiesetta della Misericordia of Art Events in the Cannaregio neighbourhood from April 23 to November 27, 2022.
melanie bonajo (lowercase, they / their) is a Dutch artist, filmmaker, certified sexological bodyworker and somatic sex coach. The new work, specially commissioned for the Biennale Arte 2022, is part of their ongoing research into the current status of intimacy in our increasingly alienating, commodity-driven world. For bonajo, touch can be a powerful remedy for the modern epidemic of loneliness. bonajo will be working with a curatorial team consisting of Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg, Geir Haraldseth and Soraya Pol. In collaboration with scenographer Théo Demans, bonajo is creating an immersive video installation that will draw visitors into a perspective-altering environment. The visitors’ sensory awakening will help them to reflect on the meaning of touch and intimacy in relation to their own bodies. bonajo says:
“With this project we want to reprioritise the body as a vehicle for connection and safety, cultivating touch and friendship as a form of activism. Feeling is a form of intelligence; thinking through touch.”
South Africa’s national exhibition for Biennale Arte 2022 reflects the theme ‘Into the Light’ which complements the overarching theme ‘The Milk of Dreams’.
In order to fully grasp the existential threats facing humanity, and consequently redefine how we interact with our ecosystems and other species, we must first understand and define ourselves, our vision and our goals.
This requires earnest introspection and self-discovery through delving into the alternate realm of fantasy and imagination, as key elements of our psyche are often buried in the subconscious. In the daily hubbub of normal life, this process of introspection is often deferred due to more pressing priorities.
The ‘new normal’ of the COVID-19 lockdowns and quarantines enforced isolation and solitude. While this was justifiably viewed as symptomatic of another threat facing humanity, ‘Into the Light’ proposes that adversity can bring opportunity. Being cloistered in our homes, unable to travel or engage personally with our peers, afforded us the time and undistracted privacy to redefine our self-identity and seek personal truth. This, in turn, allows us to frame our personal contribution to the collective imperative to place humanity on a healthier, safer and more sustainable path.
Stan Douglas Represents Canada at the 59th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia 2022
Recognized as one of Canada’s most acclaimed contemporary artists whose multidisciplinary practice includes films, photographs and—more recently—theatre productions, Stan Douglas has continually reimagined the mediums of photography and multi-channel film and video installations.
His practice is characterized by critical imagination, formal ingenuity and deep commitment to social enquiry, while his work often reflects on the dynamic potential embedded in pivotal historical moments, investigating the relationship between local histories and generational social forces, both global and local.
The exhibition for the Biennale Arte 2022 is inspired by the tenth anniversary of 2011, a year that saw significant social and political unrest around the globe, including the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East, the Occupy protests that began in New York, the widespread unrest in the UK in response to austerity measures, as well as a riot in the artist’s hometown of Vancouver following a hockey final.
Aballí’s proposal consists of two actions: a 1:1 scale architectural intervention of the pavilion and the publication of six guides. Both actions were conceived with the idea of correcting the apparent errors the artist found during his research on the physiognomy of the pavilion and the city of Venice. First, Aballí corrects the layout of the Spanish building by rotating the whole structure by ten degrees, thus aligning it with the neighboring pavilions in the Giardini. With the second action, he corrects the generally accepted idea of a tourist guide to this Italian city.
Correction arises from an apparent error that Ignasi Aballí noticed when he looked at the blueprints for the Spanish Pavilion with respect to its location in the Giardini of the Venice Biennale. They reveal that the building appears slightly displaced compared to the neighboring pavilions of the Netherlands and Belgium. Moreover, there is a disturbing proximity with the latter, where the walls of both pavilions seem to touch. Based on this, Aballí embraces the hypothesis that the current location of the Spanish Pavilion is an error and poses the question, what would happen if we moved the pavilion to align it with the rest of the adjacent buildings, and what changes would that modification imply?
As a consequence, Correction "rebuilds" the interior of the Spanish Pavilion by rotating it ten degrees to align it with the neighboring buildings. An intervention of the building’s architecture that upends the memory in spatial terms and modifies the exhibition space, its location in the Giardini and its relationship with the city itself. The visitor will find a reconsidered space in which the original walls, which have not been touched or manipulated, but convert…
With their exhibition Invitation of the Soft Machine and Her Angry Body Parts Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl playfully and humorously make various facets of contemporary body discourses resonate. Knebl and Scheirl transform the Austrian Pavilion in the Giardini into an open stage that invites the audience to explore the ‘spaces of desire’ staged by the Viennese artists.
In this temporary staging, the two unfold their artistic universe with paintings, sculptures and photographs, through textile works and writing, to a fashion collection and a magazine. The Soft Machine materialises in the form of a literal ‘exhibition being’ whose individual parts merge into an organic, living whole. The pavilion is transformed into an inviting, ‘heterotopian’ space where art, performance, design, fashion and architecture come together in exciting, ironically humorous, futuristic hybrid forms.
“A young boy runs and falls on the ground while his leg slides over the earth of the street and the tip of his foot touches an imaginary ball, he scores a goal! Action comparable to the likes of Messi! You can feel the joy on the dry and dusty streets. But even if the ball isn’t there, he is there…”
Since 1999, during his many travels, Francis Alÿs’ camera has filmed children playing in the public space. It started with the video Children’s Game #1: Caracoles, showing a young boy kicking a bottle up a steep street, only to let it roll back to him and then kicking it up again.
Playing is something natural, something that we discover and learn instinctively in our childhood. Like eating or sleeping, playing is an essential human need. It is necessary to take time, to spend time and to lose time in playing. Children’s play is to be understood as a creative relationship with the world in which they are living.
Observing, investigating and documenting human behaviour in urban life is a constant in Alÿs’ work. His films record, in an ethnographical way, both the power of cultural tradition and the free and autonomous attitudes of children, even in the most conflicted of situations. Over the last decade, children’s play has gained a central position in Alÿs’ practice, its recording becoming a way to understand the patterns by which people live. Although some of the games can be related to a specific geographic or cultural tradition, most of them are played all over the world. And thus, gives work its universal character.
For the exhibition in the Belgian Pavilion, Alÿs presents a selection of new short films shot since 2017 in Hong Kong, Democratic Republic of Congo, Belgium, Mexico, to name a few. Filming without interfering in the games, Alÿs reveals the hidden rules of playing, the ingenious interaction of the children with their environment, their deep complicity and their hopeful mood and joy. The installation in the Pavilion invites the visitor to walk through a labyrinth of screens as if they were in the middle of a global playground. The sound and image of the different films interact with each other, fragments forming together a whole, allegories translating the complexity of a sometimes harsh reality.
Walking with Water:
“In the upcoming Venice Biennial, one of the key topics is the relationship between technology and our bodies. Living through the pandemic and the isolation it caused, technology became our mode of connection but also of separation. It accelerated the difference between the privileged and those who are not. Those whose world views are mediated by the screen, and those whose eye remains a direct optical instrument. The artist reflects these worldviews in this exhibition.” From curatorial text Walking with Water drafted by Biljana Ciric
The entrance is through an ear. The exit through the other. Between them, a warm back emerges from a wall and an eye, on the floor, sparkles from time to time. A little further on, hands in the fire, a foot stomping on a jackfruit, a head of wind, a bitten, severed tongue…
Jonathas de Andrade’s installation Com o coração saindo pela boca (With the Heart Coming Out of the Mouth), Brazil’s presentation at the 59th International Venice Biennale, suggests that the path towards “representing” Brazil today inevitably passes through the body. A body literally and repeatedly fragmented, silenced, ignored, torn into pieces again and again, year upon year, decade after decade, century after century. Yet these isolated and objectified parts also transcend the body, as the other structural element of this exhibition comes into play: language. The living everyday language of countless idiomatic expressions which, in speaking of the personal and collective weaknesses, virtues, attitudes and failures of the Brazilian people, resort to these very body parts: feet, hands, tongue, head, ears, backs, stomach, legs, arms, teeth, chest, bottom, eyes, jaw and this heart that, for being so big, generous and despairing, at times won’t fit in the chest and ends up coming out of the mouth.
An index of more than 200 of those expressions is the backbone of the immersive installation, which comprises photographs, sculptures, and a video, all produced specifically for the Brazilian pavilion. While physically going into one ear and out the other can be playful and fun, both this and many other sayings can also be read as clear metaphors of the present times, often marked by greedy and humiliating indifference. In de Andrade’s work, as in those expressions, strange and clumsy gestures and sudden jolts and jerks abound, like wayward marionettes or characters from the Theater of the Absurd. In this attempt to get to grips with what Brazil and the world are saying to us and imposing on us, we must set off today along the path of the irrational, the gigantic, the diminutive, the pantagruelian, the unfathomable, the allegory, the symbol, the excessive and the ludic. The path of absurdity and play.
The path of the infantile, of the wisdom of the child who points a finger and says: “The king is naked.”
Jonathas de Andrade was part of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016), where he presented the video installation O Peixe (The Fish), also shown the following year in a solo exhibition at the New Museum (New York, United States), and in the 29th Bienal de São Paulo (2010). His participation in the Brazilian pavilion is curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti.
The French Pavilion presents Zineb Sedira’s multidisciplinary exhibition, an immersive installation consisting of film, sculpture, photography, sound and collage. In line with her practice to date, Sedira uses autobiographical narrative, fiction and documentary to shed light on past and present international solidarities related to historical liberation struggles. Her contribution serves as a cautionary tale about the failure of an emancipatory promise which, for many people, remains an unfulfilled, not to say an impossible dream.
In Dreams Have No Titles, the artist addresses a major turning point in the history of cultural, intellectual and avant-garde production of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond, in France, Italy and Algeria especially. She focuses on a repertoire of remarkable cinematographic co-productions and filmmaking, in particular activist ones, which had an impact on postcolonial movements.
During several visits tothe archives of the Algerian Cinémathèque, she continued to mine the country’s incredible film heritage, which hardly ever gets a mention in the history of the cinematographic avant-gardes. Post-independence cinema in France, Italy and Algeria adhered to the so-called “Third-World” values and aesthetics, which amounted to a true revolution on the big screen.Throughout her life, Zineb Sedira felt close to this militant and anti-colonial movement inspired by the Cuban model, showing a political couragethat she considers to be an important manifestation of solidarity at that time, and which she hopes to reactivate today.
In the course of her tremendous research at various international cinema archives, Sedira came acros…
Cameroon’s presence at the Venice Biennale brings a number of firsts. Not only is it the first time the African country will exhibit a national pavilion at the prestigious art exhibition, but it’s also the first time NFTs will be shown. The pavilion encompasses two shows, one being an NFT exhibition organized by Global Crypto Art DAO, a newly formed collective that raises funds to support artists new to the crypto space. The pavilion’s focus on emergent technologies “represents a possible way out and development for the young Cameroon generations, exploring the emerging world of NFTs in an international key,” says Sandro Orlandi Stagl, who curated the pavilion with Paul Emmanuel Loga Mahop.
Small island ecologies, climate change, queer rights, Gauguin’s gaze, intersectionality and decolonization; these are just some of the topics explored by award-winning interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara.
Eight years in the making, Paradise Camp is Yuki Kihara’s politically urgent and creatively astute project curated by Natalie King. Kihara works across photography, video, archival research and socially engaged methods to present Paradise Camp for the New Zealand pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (Biennale Arte 2022).
Shot and filmed on location in Upolu Island, Sāmoa, Paradise Camp features a local cast and crew of over 80 people. Kihara worked closely with the Fa’afafine community to produce a new body of work that eloquently and provocatively investigates a range of critical issues, including the intertwinements of colonisation, intersectionality and climate catastrophe, that impact her community.
Close Watch, a newly commissioned video installation by Pilvi Takala, premieres at the Pavilion of Finland at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Commissioned and produced by Frame Contemporary Art Finland, the exhibition is curated by Christina Li.
The multi-channel installation is based on Takala’s experience in the private security industry, where she worked covertly as a fully qualified security guard for Securitas. The piece is centred on workshops she developed in response to issues encountered on the job during her six-month employment at one of Finland’s largest shopping malls.
Working undercover, staging social situations and infiltrating communities, Takala’s artistic practice exposes often-unspoken rules and norms in society. Exploring security as both a concept and an industry, Close Watch considers how it defines our public space and the behaviour tolerated within it.
Adina Pintilie, You Are Another Me—A Cathedral of the Body (excerpt). Courtesy of the artist and Manekino Cultural Association. Director of photography: George Chiper—Lillemark.
Artist and filmmaker Adina Pintilie has been selected to represent Romania at the 59th International Venice Biennale 2022, with the project You Are Another Me—A Cathedral of the Body, closely developed with curators Cosmin Costinaș and Viktor Neumann. The project consists of a multi-channel film installation at the Romanian Pavilion, complemented by a VR extension, hosted by the New Gallery of the Romanian Institute for Culture and Humanistic Research, as well as a public program taking place over the course of the biennial.
Today, once again, the body has become a contested site for ideologies, a pretext for cultural and political anxiety. Amidst the global resurgence of right-wing ideologies, accelerated during the pandemic—which also saw a hijacking of the discourses on body autonomy—as well as the growing polarities between people and between belief systems, Pintilie imagines a space of togetherness beyond borders and binaries. While contributing to the current conversations towards reassessing the normative in gender, sexuality, bodily ability and diversity, Pintilie’s distinctive perspective is conveyed through her particular visual universe and aesthetics, as well as through a sophisticated and seductive rethinking of the role and power of the moving image. Emerging from her personal experiences, background, and research, and nurtured by long-term collaboration with her protagonists, the artist’s idiosyncratic methodology explores the central role of intimacy in the everyday, centering on embodied practices and deep psychological investigations inspired by Family Constellations, attachment theory, psychosomatics, trauma therapy, and bodywork practices. It proposes possibilities to see, to think, and to relate, destabili…
Vampires in Space, by Pedro Neves Marques, Official Portuguese Representation at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia and curated by João Mourão and Luís Silva, is a narrative installation that transforms, in part, the Gothic architecture of Palazzo Franchetti into an unexpected spaceship, within which the wistful existence, dramas and routines of five passengers unfold during a long, centuries-long journey to a faraway planet.
Through a new film, unpublished poetry and an immersive exhibition design, Pedro Neves Marques resorts to the figure and expectations of what we consider to be a “vampire” to address issues of gender identity, non-nuclear families, queer reproduction, and also the role of intimacy and mental health today. The vampire’s imagined longevity, reinforced here by the physical distance from planet Earth and the notion of humanity, allows for a retrospective exercise that could be called “scientific autofiction”, anchored in Neves Marques’s own non-binary trans experience, as well as a political review of an extensive history of control over bodies and desire. If vampires have always reflected period debates on gender, from the Victorian era to feminist liberation and the AIDS crisis, how do they answer today to advances in biotechnology or the emancipation of queer lives and ecologies?
After all, in space it is always night and, in their immortality, vampires are the perfect beings to deal with the incommensurability of spatial distances. The Official Portuguese Representation at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia presents a solo project by Pedro Neves Marques, one of the most relevan…
Shubigi Rao, in collaboration with curator Ute Meta Bauer, will represent Singapore at the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Commissioned by the National Arts Council Singapore, Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book is a lyrical manuscript that charts the breadth of human cultural endeavour through shared stories of humanity and communities of print. Pulp III marks the midpoint of Shubigi Rao’s evocative 10-year project, Pulp, which explores the history of book destruction and those who persist in its margins to protect the futures of knowledge.
Taking the form of a book, film and paper maze, the exhibition explores the precarity and persistence of endangered languages, the futures of knowledge, public and alternative libraries, and the cosmopolitanism of regional print communities that have blossomed and waned in historic centres of print, including Venice and Singapore.
As artist Shubigi Raoelaborates: “What are our testimonies, and what is it we affirm? Are our certainties just circles of rationalising, restless half-truths, vivid imaginings and cynical manipulations? Or can we ask where the smallest form can speak to larger testaments? Every mark we read or see was made to bear witness to brief life and briefer designs. Every text then is a testimony, not necessarily of truth, but illuminating of time, idea, of the facts and falsities of place and moment. So, the stories in the Pulp project point to different forms of courage, in action, speech, in documenting and in sharing. These stories also make visible the nuanced forms of resistance in print, and of lives lived surrounded by books, of breathing air heavy with the weight of unread but …
The Israel Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia features the internationally acclaimed artist Ilit Azoulay. Her work minutely scrutinizes how visual information is processed, by means of a unique photographic and interrogative method that disassembles and reassembles previously unexamined elements. Through a prism of knowledge production and the imagination, Azoulay changes how the world is perceived. Within the context of the Biennale Arte 2022, she addresses intersectional questions of cultural appropriation, shared histories, and the sovereignty of art.
Azoulay’s project, Queendom, comprises large-scale panoramic photomontages, a sound installation produced in collaboration with a light-language channeller, and architectural interventions. The Queendom is governed by art, and its story is one of female and cultural empowerment. It is compiled from data that arises from a comprehensive system crash, following a malfunction of existing power structures, and pours out of the digital realm into the physical realm of the Giardini della Biennale. Beneath an ultramarine canopy, the pavilion is transformed into the Queendom’s palace, shifting from of its decadeslong national and patriarchal programming into a trans-regional and re-gendered space. Azoulay also reconfgures its architectural orientation from West to East—away from a male-centered gaze to female empowerment, and from Eurocentric modernity to Middle Eastern contemporaneity.
"Andi taku e sana, Amung taku di sana /All of us present, This is our gathering" is a collaborative project that involves musical notation, sound and video, painting and design, and textile weaving. Through the exploration of sound material and field recordings of indigenous weaving practices across the Philippines, the exhibit aims to represent the translation of cultural data into visual communication, collectively promoting Philippine traditions and ensuring its endurance through universal exchange.
ORTA explores the possibilities of human creativity through the creation of Universal Projects, including theatre, visual arts and new media art, video and film, technology, social research and philosophy, as well as robotic, computer, electronic engineering and applied arts.
Kazakhstan will present its first national pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 23 April to 27 November 2022. For its inaugural presentation, Kazakhstan will be represented by transdisciplinary collective ORTA, founded in 2015 by director Rustem Begenov and actress Alexandra Morozova. Their project for the Kazakhstan Pavilion is based on the ideas of the avant-garde Almaty artist, inventor and writer Sergey Kalmykov (1891-1967), who died in complete obscurity, but who inspired generations of contemporary artists in the region.
Transdisciplinary collective ORTA was founded in 2015 by director Rustem Begenov and actress Alexandra Morozova. Since 2017, the group also includes artist Alexander Bakanov, photo and video designer Daria Dzhumelya and artist Sabina Kuangalieva. ORTA explores the possibilities of human creativity through the creation of Universal Projects, including theatre, visual arts and new media art, video and film, technology, social research and philosophy, as well as robotic, computer, electronic engineering and applied arts. Since 2017, their projects have been mainly focused on the New Genius Theory of the artist Sergey Kalmykov (1891-1967).
“Man is the only being who consciously refers to its existence,” and in the context of the philosophy of existence if we continue with Sartre’s thinking about human freedom in terms of personal choice, choosing opportunities and taking responsibility for events and the risk to human existence, the conclusion or contradiction of the meaninglessness or absurdity of human existence is drawn, which is often confirmed in many examples throughout the history of mankind.
The project Landscape Experience by Robert Jankuloski and Monika Moteska reflects on this topic as well as many other sub-layers. It is a multimedia project that includes video installations, objects and photos. The “aesthetics” of the abandoned (neglected) landscapes, placed in a new context, with new layers of transcription of the dispositions life-death, beautiful-ugly, healthy-poisonous are present in the previous research of the artists, and in the project Landscape Experience they venture even deeper. In addition to the “transformed landscape panopticons,” the project questions the body—man as a symbol of power, but also as a fragile and easily vincible force, as well as the dominance of capital, colonial policies, ideologies and technology that influence the distortion of balance of human life, wildlife and natural environment within the ecosystem. Hence, with this multinational trans-tactical project, the Jankuloski-Moteska tandem point out, through a critical-discursive approach, the dangers that lurk if serious systemic steps are not taken to overcome the greatest challenges of the Anthropocene, which are a tax on capitalism and government policies, the uncontrolled misuse of the natural resources of the planet Earth in the form of mindless wars (explicit or…
The There You Are project explores the Spazio Ravà interior for the possibility of transforming physical space into a symbolic one, reinterpreted in the context of the body and its interaction with its living environment. Following the geometry of the rooms and the architectural and interior features, Michail Michailov arranges the exhibition by building objects similar in shape and proportions to the existing furniture. They create a minimalist but also an absurd stage on which the exhibition narrative unfolds.
At the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia, Loukia Alavanou is representing Greece by inviting the public to travel through time and space. Her VR360 film and installation Oedipus in Search of Colonus links the cultural heritage of classical Greece – specifically the work of the playwright Sophocles – to the social realities of today by showing the desperate existence of Roma communities in the region of Nea Zoi, west of Athens. Working with a film team and using futuristic technologies, Alavanou cast Roma as actors in the third play of Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle. This film and an accompanying sound installation are presented in a dramatic yet intimate atmosphere within the Greek Pavilion, which becomes a self-reflective island in the middle of one of the world’s biggest international exhibitions. Art an impossible place. U-topia.
The centerpiece of Loukia Alavanou’s installation Oedipus in Search of Colonus is a 15 min film that transposes Sophocles’ almost 2500-year-old drama, Oedipus at Colonus, into the present and tells the story through a combination of docufiction, video clips, farce, and the latest VR technology. Infamous for his horrible deeds, at the end of his life Oedipus is banished from Thebes, and he comes to Colonus to die. For the first time in his tragic life, he goes against the will of the gods. In the face of their resistance, he chooses Colonus as his resting place, a sacred site consecrated by the gods.
In Alavanou’s version, which is filmed in a shantytown inhabited by Roma, an off-screen chorus tells the story. All the roles are played by Roma, amateur actors who lend the narrative a grotesque quality through their exaggerated acting. Their biggest problem is identical to that of the aged Oedipus. Like him, the Roma who today live to the west of Athens in an area not far from Colonus also struggle against their fate. Often lacking any form of citizenship, these nomads are prevented by the Greek authorities from being able to choose a burial site close to their last place of residence.
Oedipus in Search of Colonus is the first VR film shot in Greece that tells a cohesive story. It was filmed using a complicated 360-degree technology, which enables the viewer not only to see but actually experience through their head movements the entire scenarios of interior spaces and drone flights over the settlement. In addition, the sound design is directional, which, like the image, also responds to the movements of the viewer.
Inside the neoclassical architecture of the Greek pavilion, Loukia Alavanou is building hemispherical domes of various sizes, in which there is space for three to five posture chairs based on the designs of the Greek utopian architect Takis Zenetos, who died in 1970. The entire pavilion is kept in semi-darkness, creating a simultaneously theatrical and mysterious atmosphere, which is enhanced by a sound installation played on loudspeakers hidden from view. The sound work includes fragments of the film’s narrative as well as music by Roma. Exhibition staff lead visitors to the individual chairs for viewing the film.
"When [Sabine Weiss] photographs children, she becomes a child herself. There is absolutely no barrier between her, them, and the camera."
Hugh Weiss, artist and husband of Sabine Weiss
The Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice presents, from March 11 to October 23, 2022, the largest retrospective ever held – and the first in Italy - dedicated to the Franco-Swiss photographer Sabine Weiss, who passed away at the age of 97 at her home in Paris on 28 December 2021, one of the greatest representatives of French humanist photography along with Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Edouard Boubat, Brassaï, and Izis.
The exhibition is the first and most important tribute to her career, with over 200 photographs. Curated by Virginie Chardin, the retrospective is sponsored by the Fondazione di Venezia, realized by Marsilio Arte in collaboration with the Berggruen Institute, and produced by the Sabine Weiss studio in Paris and Laure Delloye-Augustins, with the support of the Jeu de Paume and the International Festival Les Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles.
The only woman photographer of the postwar era to have practiced this profession for such a long time and in every photographic genre - from reportage, artists' portraits, and fashion to ‘street’ photography, with particular attention to children's faces and her extensive travels around the world, Sabine Weiss, who was able to actively participate in the construction of this exhibition, had opened her personal archives in Paris to tell her extraordinary story and present her work for the first time in a comprehensive and structured way.
Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies" is curated by Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Caroline Bourgeois, curator at Pinault Collection. The exhibition is an homage to one of the major figures of the contemporary art international scene and focuses on three fundamental aspects of his oeuvre: the artist studio as a space where creation takes place, the body through performances and the exploration of sound. Bruce Nauman was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2009 for Best National Participation and his work has recently been presented in numerous and major monographic exhibitions around the world. The unique exhibition at Punta della Dogana brings together older works and the most recent ones, some of which are new or have never been exhibited in Europe before.
Applied Arts Pavilion at the Sale d’Armi, Arsenale, Venice, 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia
Sophia Al-Maria, Screenshot Project Native Informant, London
This is the sixth collaboration between La Biennale di Venezia and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London , who present a Special Project jointly organised by the two institutions at the Applied Arts Pavilion in the Sale d’Armi, Venice Arsenale: Tiger Strike Red by Sophia Al-Maria , an artist selected by the Curator of the Biennale Arte 2022 Cecilia Alemani.
Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria explores the echoes of colonialism and racism as they have bled into the contemporary relationship between humans via the inherent biases of our algorithms and machines. Al-Maria’s work raises questions around the alienation and dysfunction arising from a culture of “alternative facts” and whitewashed history, identifying remnants of colonialism in the fields of quantum computing, virtual space, and artificial intelligence.
Tiger Strike Red (2022) is a new single-channel video created for the Applied Arts Pavilion in response to the Biennale’s theme, The Milk of Dreams . It is the third in an ongoing series of Al-Maria’s video works that include Beast Type Song (2019) and Tender Point Ruin (2021). Taking inspiration from the collection of automata at the V&A, Al-Maria was drawn to the peculiar eroticism of the automaton known as “Tippoo’s Tiger.” Made for Tipu Sultan, an 18 th century ruler of Mysore in South India, the mechanical sculpture depicts a tiger mauling a British soldier. In Al-Maria’s eyes, this automaton both demonstrates a yearning for revenge on the colonial oppressor and, in the suggestive entwinement of ma…
Photo of performance for the video The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O by Angela Su, 2022
(Courtesy of the Artist, Photo Credits: Ka Lam, Video commissioned by M+)
M+, Hong Kong’s global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) are proud to announce the exhibition Angela Su: Arise, Hong Kong in Venice, Collateral Event at the 59th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. This is the fifth collaboration between M+ and the HKADC at one of the world’s most prestigious international art platforms.
Freya Chou, an independent curator based in Hong Kong, guest curated the exhibition with consulting curator Ying Kwok, senior curator at Tai Kwun in Hong Kong and guest curator of Hong Kong’s Collateral Event at Biennale Arte 2017.
In her presentation, Su conveys a speculative narrative through interlocking fictional perspectives. The act of levitation serves as an organising metaphor that reappears throughout Su’s drawings, moving image works, embroideries, and installations. The artist assumes the guise of a fictional alter-ego to explore the myriad cultural and political valence of rising in the air.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a new video work, The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O. This pseudo-documentary tells the story of Lauren O, a fictional character who believes she can levitate, and her involvement with Laden Raven, an activist group catalysed by the US anti-war movement of the 1960s. Su’s video comprises found footage and clips of a new performance by the artist. Weaving together fact and fiction, the work suggests an alternative space for action and disruption.'
Traces of Lauren O and Laden Raven are embedded in the constellation of artwork in the exhibition. The works on view invite the audience to take a journey in t…
Alberta Whittle has been commissioned to develop new work which will be put forward to represent Scotland as a collateral event at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The project is commissioned by the Scotland + Venice Partnership and is a multi-partner project initiated by Glasgow International and supported by Glasgow Life.
This will be the tenth presentation commissioned by the Scotland + Venice partnership continuing to build Scotland’s strength and reputation as an important international voice in visual art and architecture.
Recognised as one of the world’s most prestigious festivals of contemporary art, the 2022 edition of La Biennale di Venezia will take place from 23 April – 27 November 2022.
Working in film, sculpture, print, performance and installation, Whittle’s work is often made in response to current events and draws on her research into the African diaspora and the decolonisation of Western histories. Major themes include colonialism, xenophobia, climate change and the global pandemic.
Over 2021, Whittle will be sharing new work as part of Art Night London, British Art Show 9, Liverpool Biennial,
business as usual: hostile environment
at Glasgow Sculpture Studios for Glasgow International and
Right of Admission
at the University of Johannesburg.
Whittle’s work has been acquired for the UK National Collections, The Scottish National Gallery Collections, Glasgow Museums Collections and The Contemporary Art Research Collection at Edinburgh College of Art amongst other private collections.
…
Dineo Seshee Bopape’s work begins with a journey to the Solomon Islands, and from there she moves on to plantations on the Mississippi, to Jamaica, and then back home to South Africa. Travel becomes a language that allows timelines to converge and intersect in the space of waters, a revisit to ‘dogs that are not asleep’. Bopape’s approach merges magical inquiry, historical curiosity, traditional wisdom, a sense of/for illusions, imagination and hope in order to create an operation on the post-post-colonial agency in conversation with the Ocean (being).
The commission is a further step in her practice towards the marriage of the earth and the memory of the Ocean. The rocks Bopape uses in her practice are teaching us to understand that ancient, mythical times are not of the past, since the times of oppression and the colonial are still not of the past, destruction and exploitation of resources are still not of the past. The semiotics of the ‘ghost’ slave ship embedded in the Ocean are conceived as an opening through a complex juxtaposition of artistic materials and language, an opportunity to enchant (and de/re-thread) contemporaneous life, and aid towards its tender transformation. For Bopape, the unseen – as in the spirits and energies moving actions and connecting us with the environment around us – is central to her video and augmented reality works activating a multifarious presence.
A hybridized landscape where ancient myths and future fictions co-mingle and act upon the body to transform the realm of the possible is the subject of Liquid Light, the second film in a trilogy. The female astronaut of Albuquerque’s film transmits an otherworldly knowledge across the planes of the celestial and terrestrial. Hers is a subjectivity constituted in the space between the outer reaches of the imagination and the emotionally submerged land she discovers on Earth.
Mirroring the threshold state in which humanity finds itself today, Albuquerque’s heroine is likewise caught between light and darkness, unable to avoid a metamorphosis triggered by her initial failure to communicate the poetics of Cosmic harmony to Earth’s inhabitants. An amalgam of iconography, biography, and extreme landscapes that embody a deeply personal mythology, Albuquerque’s film is exhibited as a multi-screen installation, inviting the viewer into the heroine’s journey.
For the duration of the 59 th Biennale Arte di Venezia, 23 April to 27 November 2022, Parasol unit will present Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained, a group exhibition of works by eleven international contemporary visual artists at the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello in Venice.
The exhibition brings together diverse and thought-provoking works and includes some interdisciplinary collaboration between music and visual art. The artists,Darren Almond, Oliver Beer, Rana Begum with Hyetal, Julian Charrière, David Claerbout, Bharti Kher, Arghavan Khosravi, Teresa Margolles, Si On, Martin Puryear, and Rayyane Tabet, all work in different media to address a disparate range of topics. Yet, common to them all is a deep concern for our world and a preoccupation with a comparable phenomenon that in scientific terms is defined as entropy, that is the measure of disorder, randomness, and unpredictability within a system.
Photographs and books by Surrealist artist and writer Claude Cahun (France, 1894 - 1954) are on show for the first time at the Alberta Pane Gallery in Venice. This is an important project that aims to highlight the exceptional research of Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) who, together with her half-sister and life partner Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), anticipated discussions on themes of extreme relevance in contemporary society, such as gender and identity.
I Owe You - Claude Cahun / Marcel Moore is accompanied by a publication with texts by curators and researchers Silvia Mazzucchelli, Miriam Rejas Del Pino, Paola Ugolini and gallerist Alberta Pane. Each volume contains a limited edition Fine Art print, inspired by the work of Claude Cahun/Marcel Moore, created by the artist Marcos Lutyens. Lutyens, with whom the gallery has been working for several years, is also invited to conduct two participatory performances/inductions on the opening days of the exhibition: these are explorations into the meanders of the unconscious, which Marcos Lutyens transforms into an artistic experience that can reawaken memories of images, sensations and thoughts that were believed to have been forgotten.
“Burning Matter” retraces the multiple uses of fire in the history of artists’ bookmaking since the early 1960s, documenting how this dual element – recognized in the literature as both a destroyer and a symbol of knowledge – has been absorbed into the creative research of a number of artists working with printed matter: Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, Roy Adzak, Jonathan Monk, Bernard Aubertin, Barbara Kruger, The Guerrilla Art Action Group, John Latham, John Riddell, François Dufrêne, Daisuke Yokota and Tiane Doan na Champassak. “Burning Matter” is the first show in a series of artist’s book-related exhibitions co-curated by artist and collector Tiane Doan na Champassak and independent researcher Larisa Oancea.
When Prometheus crept into Hephaestus’s workshop to steal a spark of fire in the dead of night, he had already been warned by Zeus that every gift to humanity brings a punishment: “this is how the Fates weave destiny”. The polarity of fire has been a recurrent topic both in ancient and modern culture: its capacity to burn and transform, destroy and regenerate, enlighten and conceal has followed the history of humanity since its dawn. When it comes to books, the most obvious reference is undoubtedly Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”: here, fire represents equally the loss of freedom through destruction and the spread of knowledge in the face of censorship.
Ewa Kuryluk had the ambition to find her own style, and she succeeded working with fabric in the late 1970s. A versatile and interdisciplinary artist whose work can universally intrigue and impress, Ewa Kuryluk is the leading representative of Polish hyperrealist painting and a pioneer of site-specific installations. She is an award-winning writer and poet, as well as a well-known art historian. In her art, she refers to the ancient idea of “outlining the shadow”. In her art history she complements her own artistic intuitions with the studies of the „vera icon, the true image”. She is the author of Veronica & Her Cloth: History, Symbolism and Structure of a „True Image” (1991), an extensive scholarly study of this topic in the East and West.
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