Venice, 6th June 2009

The International Jury of the 53rd International Art Exhibition, comprised of Jack Bankowsky (USA), Homi K. Bhabha (India), Sarat Maharaj (South Africa), Angela Vettese (Italy, president), and Julia Voss (Germany) has decided to confer the official awards for the 53rd International Art Exhibition as follows:

to the United States of America

(Pavilion in the Giardini)

Commissioners: Carlos Basualdo, Michael R. Taylor

 

(Germany, Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini)

(Sweden, Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini)

 

The Jury has also decided to assign four Special Mentions :

 

Special Mention to Lygia Pape

 (Brazil, 1927 – 2004; Corderie in the Arsenale)

 

Special Mention to Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset

Curators of Denmark and Nordic Countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden)

 (Pavilions in the Giardini)

 

Special Mention tothe artist Ming Wong

exhibiting in the Singapore Pavilion

 (Pavilion in the city centre)

 

Special Mention to Roberto Cuoghi

(Italy, Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini, giardino Scarpa)

 

 

The Awards and Opening Ceremony of the 53rd International Art Exhibition took place on 6th June 2009 at 5 p.m. in the Giardini. The Board of the Venice Biennale has this year awarded two Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement to:

 

Yoko Ono a key figure in post-war art. A pioneer in performance and conceptual art, she is one of the most influential artists of our time. Long before becoming an icon in popular culture and in peace activism, she developed artistic strategies that have left a lasting mark both in her native Japan and in the West.

John Baldessari one of today's most important visual artists. Often named the most important art teacher of our times, he has above all developed a visual language entirely his own. Since the 1960s, he has worked in many disciplines and has produced an outstanding body of work that has inspired several generations of artists.

 

Golden Lion for Best National Participation to United States of America

The Golden Lion for the best pavilion is awarded to the United States of America in recognition of the sustained energy and precision of Bruce Nauman’s art. From iconic embodiments of human pain and fragility to pithy jabs at our frailties, his oeuvre reveals the magic of meaning as it emerges through relentless repetition of language and form. Topological Gardens makes new connections between the Giardini and the city’s universities.

 

Golden Lion for the Best Artist in the Fare Mondi // Making Worlds exhibition to Tobias Rehberger

Tobias Rehberger is awarded the Golden Lion as best artist for taking us beyond the white cube, where past modes of exhibition are reinvented and the work of art turns into a cafeteria. In this shift social communication becomes aesthetic practice.

 

Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist in the Fare Mondi // Making Worlds exhibition toNathalie Djurberg

Nathalie Djurberg is awarded the Silver Lion for her unsettling fairy tales, fantasies and “black pedagogy” that are brought together in a range of media.

 

A special mention goes to the work of Lygia Pape (1927 – 2004), a Brazilian artist; the weave of golden threads reveals itself to be the result of experiences initiated within the framework of Brazilian constructivism. The work changes from geometric structure to place of new experience in terms of vision, emotions and attitude to performance.

 

A special mention goes to the two-person team of Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset for reimagining the national pavilion as a collaborative universe. Bringing together the work of 24 international artists in the adjoining Danish and Nordic Countries Pavilions, “The Collectors” comprises a delirious network of narratives that interrogate the relationship between our desires and the material worlds we design around them.

 

A special mention goes to Ming Wong (Singapore Pavilion) for examining the history of Singapore’s multiethnic cultural identities via the demise of the country’s once flourishing film industry. Ming Wong’s video-works use innovative forms and techniques to reflect on the sense of shame and exclusion that accompanies the imposition of racial and sexual stereotypes.

 

Roberto Cuoghi, who has specifically chosen to place his work in a garden of Oriental extraction designed by Carlo Scarpa, stages the practice of translation through sounds and atmospheres. The artist’s specific performance deliberately betrays the translation, calling into question a modernist double obsession: for the copy of the other world and for the so-called genuine one.