552nd International Art Exhibition Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind.
Art in the Present Tense

The Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, presided over by Davide Croff, is setting up the 52nd International Art Exhibition, entitled Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense and curated by Robert Storr, the first director from the United States in the history of the most famous art review in the world, opening to the public from 10th June to 21st November, 2007.

The central international exhibition, set up in the Arsenale Corderie, in some spaces of the Arsenale Artiglierie and in the Italian Pavilion at the Giardini, will present about a hundred artists from all over the world with works – including site-specific and new productions – created in co-operation with the Venice Biennale for this occasion. "While this show looks forward, it does not look back": with this definition, Storr has underlined the guidelines of a wide reconnaissance which has led him to invite living and active artists and, in the rare cases when they were not alive due to premature or unexpected deaths, to display works testifying a vitality that makes them more relevant than ever. "This exhibition – explains Robert Storr – is not based on an all-inclusive ideological or theoretical proposal.

It is rather founded on a fundamental approach to art aimed at presuming that analytical dichotomies between perceptual and conceptual, thought and feeling, pleasure and pain, intuition and criticality, too often obscure and deny the complex presence of all these aspects in our experience of the world, as well as the presence of all these dimensions in the resulting art. Each work will be there to speak for itself. In whole, correspondences among works – whether harmonious or discordant – will, in my opinion, stimulate the public's attention to the diversity of feelings, materials, topics and ways of involving visitors that distinguishes these art works, which, though created in different languages, are all conjugated in the present tense". The international landscape is flanked and enriched by the expositions of the 77 countries (a record number set by this edition) displaying works in the historical city centre as well as at the Giardini and Arsenale; since 2006 the latter premises have been the permanent seat of the new Italian Pavilion, an area of central future development for the Biennale exhibition spaces, making its debut this year with an exhibition curated – for the first time in the largest and most important international contemporary art review – by Ida Gianelli and representing one of the main novelties in the 52nd Venice Biennale Exhibition.

Robert Storr's artistic project has chosen to include, as an integral part of the main exhibition, a Turkish Pavilion as well as a show representing African contemporary art (the "Check List Luanda Pop" exhibition from the Sindika Dokolo African Collection of Contemporary Art, Luanda, Angola, curated by Fernando Alvim and Simon Njami) in the Arsenale Artiglierie. The African exhibition has been selected by a panel of experts invited by Robert Storr, constituted by Meskerem Assegued, Ekow Eshun, Lyle Ashton Harris, Kellie Jones and Bisi Silva.