Biennale Arte 2015
EVENTI COLLATERALI
56. ESPOSIZIONE INTERNAZIONALE D'ARTE
001 Inverso Mundus. AES+F
The medieval engraving Inverso Mundus depicts a pig gutting the butcher, a child punishing its teacher, a man carrying a donkey on his back, men and women exchanging roles and costumes, and a beggar in rags majestically giving alms to a rich man. In this engraving there are demons, chimeras, fish flying through the sky, and death itself, either with a scythe, or behind the mask of Doctor Plague. In our interpretation of Inverso Mundus, absurd scenes of the medieval carnival appear as episodes of contemporary life. Characters act out scenes of absurd social utopias, changing their own masks. Metrosexual cleaners shower the city with debris. Women-inquisitors torture men on IKEA-style devices. Children and seniors are locked in a kickboxing match. Inverso Mundus is a world where chimeras are pets and the Apocalypse entertainment.
Magazzino del Sale n. 5, Dorsoduro, 262 - Fondamenta delle Zattere ai Saloni;
Palazzo Nani Mocenigo, Dorsoduro, 960 (Event closed)
May 7th – November 22nd
Organization: VITRARIA Glass + A Museum
Catalonia in Venice: Singularity
If today Raymond Williams were to decide on more entries for his celebrated text Keywords, he would surely include “singularity.” The term refers to the moment when artificial intelligences surpass human capacity and human control. In mathematics it describes a point at which a given mathematical object is not defined or “well-behaved,” for example, infinite or not differentiable. The filmmaker Albert Serra Juanola takes this notion as a point of departure in his new film. Serra’s cinema makes the statement that being aware of the world is not simply a result of the mind’s existence, but rather it is the mind in action. To link cinema with the singularity condition means to foster belief in the notion that thought, will, and imagination are not made of the same substance as the world, objects, and things, but of images, feelings, and ideas.
Cantieri Navali, Castello, 40 (Calle Quintavalle)
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: Institut Ramon Llull
Conversion. Recycle Group
This site-specific installation proposes that the globalization of information networks and the cult of new technologies are in some ways comparable to the historic conversion to Christianity. The Recycle Group frequently turns to history to illustrate topical issues and shocking aspects of contemporary lifestyle. Their sculptures and bas-reliefs in modern materials frequently take on the appearance of ancient monuments that display the ravages of time, like artifacts from some lost civilization. Although the forms and compositions of this project are influenced by traditional Christian iconography, they introduce contemporary motifs. Conversion proposes a parallel between the Christian enlightenment and the digital technological revolution where sacred knowledge formerly residing in the heavens is now located in the intangible space of “The Cloud.
Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, Castello (Campo Sant’Antonin)
May 6th - November 22nd
Organization: Moscow Museum of Modern Art
Country
An exhibition that is the result of Italian artist Giorgia Severi’s one-and-a-half-year stay in the Australian territories, in direct contact with the indigenous artist community. Her journey involved various stopovers in art spaces throughout the continent. Country is a melting pot of different cultures, its works an investigation into memory and tradition.
Deploying an array of media from handcrafts to sound art, we are invited to contemplate the volatile equilibrium between Humans and Nature.
Gervasuti Foundation Foundamentalis, Cannaregio, 4998 (Calle Lunga Santa Caterina)
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: Gervasuti Foundation
www.gervasutifoundation.com
www.project-australia.blogspot.com
Dansaekhwa
Dansaekhwa describes a Korean art form and movement that arose in the early 1970s and continued through the ’80s. Although Dansaekhwa can be understood as sharing similarities with Western monochrome art and minimalism, it is distinct from both in terms of its historical background, aesthetic practice, and underlying social criticism. Dansaekhwa articulates a painterly flexibility and affinity by removing the excess of color. Brushing, plucking, scratching at paint, and pushing oil paints through the back of the canvas is a physical act, appearing as an element and important performance of the production process, and making painting unpredictable. The background of Dansaekhwa is seminal elements considering constantly changing aesthetic values and the ongoing history of activism and political critique reflecting social phenomena.
Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, Dorsoduro, 874 (Accademia)
May 8th – August 15th
Organization: The Boghossian Foundation
Dispossession
Organized by the city of Wroclaw, the 2016 European Capital of Culture, the exhibition takes as its departure point the city’s post- War history of displacements. Stemming from this historical context, it explores contemporary dimensions of displacements, of loss of home and seeking a refuge in a new, often hostile, foreign place. Artists from Poland, Ukraine, and Germany are guided by the recognition of a universal and atemporal dimension of dispossession and its psychological and material manifestations. Dispossession, pertaining to both deprivation and exorcism, hints at a distinction between “our,” “one’s own,” and an unwelcomed “other.” It is in this loss and desire for belonging that we analyze a complex relationship between space and identity.
Palazzo Donà Brusa, Campo San Polo, 2177
May 7th - November 22nd
Organization: European Capital of Culture Wroclaw 2016
http://wroclaw2016.pl/biennale/
EM15 presents Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf
The Leisure Principle is the curatorial theme driving EM15’s premiere presentation at la Biennale and manifests through two newly commissioned artistic outputs: Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf, a fully playable, artist-designed miniature golf course which visitors are invited to play, and Sunscreen (www.sun-screen.uk), an online project which explores the blurred space that exists between work and leisure. The Leisure Principle considers the concept of tourism and trade as a metaphor to explore current global economic complexities through one of the defining principles of leisure—that of consumption and how this consumption shapes our identity. EM15 is a collective from the East Midlands, UK, and comprises Beacon Art Project, One Thoresby Street, QUAD, and New Art Exchange in association with Nottingham Trent University.
Arsenale Docks, Castello, 40A, 40B, 41C
May 6th - July 26th
Organization: EM15
Eredità e Sperimentazione
This event develops through the representation of a decorative process created by the English artist Joe Tilson involving an undecorated facade of the Art Nouveau building of the Grande Hotel Ausonia & Hungaria on the Venice Lido. There is a day vision with material and three-dimensional instruments and a night vision with video media instruments. Night vision: a multimedia representation with a projection of the proposed decoration for a facade of the hotel. Day vision: two didactic exhibitions with pieces built to scale. Outside, in the garden, there is a 12-square-meter structure with Murano glass tiles and structural support, the prototype of the coating that will be put in place on the wall. Next to the lobby of the hotel, in the historic Meeting Hall, there is an exhibition of historical documents, sketches, paintings by the artist, and plans.
Grand Hotel Hungaria & Ausonia, Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta, 28, Lido di Venezia
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: Istituto Nazionale di BioArchitettura - Sezione di Padova
www.bioarchitettura.it
www.ereditaesperimentazione.org
Frontiers Reimagined
The phenomenon of globalization, where cultures are colliding and melding as never before, offers rich and complex sources of inspiration for artists. Frontiers Reimagined examines the results of these cultural entanglements through the work of forty-four painters, sculptors, photographers, and installation artists who are exploring the notion of cultural boundaries. These emerging and established artists—who come from a vast geographical landscape stretching from the West to Asia to Africa—share a truly global perspective, both in their physical existence, living and working between cultures, and their artistic endeavors. Each demonstrates the intellectual and aesthetic richness that emerges when artists engage in intercultural dialogue.
Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Castello, 4858 (Ramo Grimani)
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: Tagore Foundation International; Soprintendenza speciale per il patrimonio storico, artistico ed etnoantropologico e per il polo museale della città di Venezia e dei comuni della Gronda lagunare
Glasstress Gotika
The exhibition presents contemporary art works made in glass, all with a Gothic theme, by over fifty invited artists from more than twenty countries who have created works with the glass maestros of Murano. These works are juxtaposed with medieval glass artifacts chosen from the permanent collection of The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, one of the oldest and most celebrated museums in the world. Glasstress Gotika explores how medieval ideas have imperceptibly crept into the modern consciousness despite all the technological advances of today’s society and how the Gothic concept informs contemporary art.
Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, San Marco, 2847 (Campo Santo Stefano)
May 9th — November 22nd
10 am - 6 pm open daily, special opening on Saturdays until 8:00 pm. Admission with fee
Fondazione Berengo, Campiello della Pescheria, 15, Murano
May 9th — November 22nd
Organization: The State Hermitage Museum
www.hermitagemuseum.org
www.glasstress.org
Graham Fagen: Scotland + Venice 2015
The ambition of Fagen’s work and the complexity of his vocabulary positions him as one of the most influential artists working in Scotland today. He draws on a fascination for poetry, specific musical forms, and theatrical artifice in order to focus on ideas of the national, social, and political. Working with writers, theater directors, musicians, and composers enables him to draw on expertise, knowledge, and specialisms outside of his own. In this new work, contributions from classical composer Sally Beamish, reggae singer and musician Ghetto Priest, and music producerAdrian Sherwood are clearly embedded, yet Fagen’s authorship is never distracted or eroded. Fagen’s installation draws the viewer on a journey, a choreographed route.
Palazzo Fontana, Cannaregio, 3829 (Strada Nova)
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: Scotland + Venice
Grisha Bruskin. An Archaeologist’s Collection
A journey to the future among the ruins of the Soviet Empire. A large installation of thirty- three sculptures that emerge from archaeological excavations inside an ancient church. They are the pseudoartifacts of a recent, perished civilization. For this project, Bruskin uses characters from his painting Fundamental’nyi leksikon (1985–1986), a collection of archetypes from the USSR. He reproduces the figures life-size, then destroys the sculptures, gathers the fragments, and casts them in bronze. He then buries them in Tuscany for three years alongside the already buried ruins of the Roman Empire. He finally digs them out, and now the statues emerge from the cloudy waters in which Venice lies. Various perished empires meet in the present.
Former Chiesa di Santa Caterina, Cannaregio, 4941-4942
May 7th – November 22nd
Organization: Centro Studi sulle Arti della Russia (CSAR), Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
Helen Sear, ... The Rest Is Smoke
The title of Helen Sear’s exhibition is taken from an inscription in Mantegna’s last painting of Saint Sebastian, now housed at the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice: “Nihil nisi divinum stabile est. Caetera fumus.” Ideas of mortality and temporality are explored through a suite of new works in which agricultural landscapes marked for production and consumption are seen to exist simultaneously as magical spaces, imprinting themselves on the body and mind of the viewer. Sear’s photographic and video works explore the image as sculptural form whereby the artist integrates different speeds of looking, contrasting physical scale, color, and vivid material presence. The works resonate strongly with each other and with the architectural site of the exhibition and its place in Venice.
Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Castello, 450 (Fondamenta San Gioacchin)
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: Cymru yn Fenis/Wales in Venice
Highway to Hell
This exhibition is a metaphorical journey through life, death, and beauty. The highly technological and spectacular installations that emerge from an undistinguished futurist Chinese society coexist with traditional architecture in a surreal game of light and darkness, of sculptural surprises and painterly statements. The exhibition develops as an encompassing spatial experience that pushes visitors to traverse six distinct surreal spaces that are both physical and metaphysical. Nothing in the installations exists for art’s sake alone—butterflies become manifestations of the forces of nature, while skulls and skeletons remind us of the fragility and insignificance of life.
Palazzo Michiel, Cannaregio, 4391/A (Strada Nova)
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: Hubei Museum of Art
Humanistic Nature and Society (Shan-Shui) – An Insight into the Future
The Shan–Shui—that is, mountain and water—spirit mirrors the ultimate harmony between man and nature that we have been seeking for thousands of years. It symbolizes the spiritual dwelling that is unique to eastern nations and that is brimming with poetic vision and ideals. The excessive development of globalization and drastically growing desires have brought China numerous new dilemmas that had not been experienced before. It is these dilemmas that incite us to go back to our origins in the hopes of solving the various problems we are now faced with and to envision a Shan–Shui society that could be established as an ideal model for the future.
Palazzo Ca’ Faccanon, San Marco, 5016 (Mercerie)
May 7th – August 4th
Organization: Shanghai Himalayas Museum
In the Eye of the Thunderstorm: Effervescent Practices from the Arab World & South Asia
In many Arabic-speaking countries, artists’ practices have to be regarded as a form of consciousness at the crossroads of history, traditions, hopes, expectations, and claims. The artists selected for this exhibition (Rashid Al Khalifa, who belongs to the generation of the masters, and the younger Obaidi, Alia Al Farsi, Sadik Alfraji, Shurook Amin, Simeen Farhat, Khaled Hafez, Haytham Nawar, Ahmed El Shaer, and Khaled Ramadan) reflect the variety of artistic research currently taking place in Bahrain and Egypt, Kuwait and Iraq. They tackle burning topics such as war, world powers, and women’s issues. They witness a time–space situation where changes happen too fast, sometimes jeopardizing local memory and cultural heritage. They inhabit the “eye” of the storm, that extraordinary calm zone, undamaged by the dizzying movement of the surrounding winds.
Dorsoduro, 417 (Zattere)
May 6th - November 15th
Organization: ArsCulture
Italia Docet | Laboratorium- Artists, Participants, Testimonials and Activated Spectators
The i-AM Foundation aims to promote an awareness of Renaissance art in the contemporary and to seek methods that provide new interpretations through the direct experience of artists from different cultures. The core of Italia Docet | Laboratorium program is the free circulation of the Participants’ ideas in relationship with a humanistic common base, which are osmotically juxtaposed with subjective viewpoints. The artwork selected as a base is Raffaello Sanzio’s cartoon of the School of Athens, a motherboard capable of creating multiple new narratives. The source materials are organized and collected by the artist Federico Guida according to principles of generosity and ecumenism. Thanks to the “e-Laboratorium” protocol, artists from sixty countries will show their projects via the web and in specific areas within the body of the work.
Palazzo Barbarigo Minotto, San Marco, 2504 (Fondamenta Duodo o Barbarigo)
May 7th – August 2nd; September 11th – October 11th
Organization: Italian Art Motherboard Foundation (i-AM Foundation)
www.laboratorium-venice2015.org
Jaume Plensa: Together
Jaume Plensa’s art gives emphasis to the potential of communication. His response to the Palladian Basilica is a conversation between hand (beneath the cupola) and head (in the nave). They set up a line of spiritual and intellectual discourse that is extended by the Codice Miniato manuscript shown behind the altar. This contribution from the Benedictine Community strengthens the sense of togetherness and extends communication. Merging difference is central to Plensa’s work and is accentuated by the drawings and alabaster portraits in the Manica Lunga, three hundred meters from the Basilica entrance. In both spaces, Plensa’s forms connect diverse peoples of different faiths and of no faith.
Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore and Officina dell’Arte Spirituale, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore
May 6th – November 22nd
Organization: Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore Benedicti Claustra Onlus
Jenny Holzer. War Paintings
Selected from a decade of Jenny Holzer’s work addressing US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay military prison, War Paintings takes its starting point from heavily redacted, declassified, and other sensitive US government documents. The works explore the nature of contemporary international conflict through the experiences of individuals, quietly challenging the usual notions of victory or defeat. The transformation of documents into oil on linen paintings invites the viewer both to read and to look. As Holzer explained in an interview with Stuart Jeffries of the Guardian, “I wanted to show time and care. I wanted it to be an indicator of sincerity and attention. I wanted it to be human.”
Museo Correr, San Marco, 52 (Piazza San Marco)
May 7th – November 22nd
Organization: The Written Art Foundation; Museo Correr, Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
Jump into the Unknown
The exhibition originates within the International Interdisciplinary Environmental Art Symposium Nine Dragon Heads, a project that works with specific sites and contexts. Jump into the Unknown is a research-based, artistic enterprise that does not look to create an immediate visual effect. The project synthesizes and facilitates joint and individual works, and threads of overlapping artistic inquiry produced over a long process of evolving collaborative association. The strength of Jump into the Unknown is not the production of a final work but the provisional, unfinished, incomplete, and ongoing search for meaning, similar to any philosophical attempt to find coherence within a complex situation.
Palazzo Loredan dell’Ambasciatore, Dorsoduro, 1261-1262
May 9th – June 18th
Organization: Nine Dragon Heads
Learn from Masters
Painting, both in China and the West, has created two brilliant yet independent histories and has resulted into two great yet vastly different epics of art. However, globalization accelerates to make communication and joint development much easier than ever before, leading different cultures to merge. The philosopher Francois Jullien suggests that l’écart (gap)—the difference between cultures— requires comparative independence to keep its uniqueness as potential resources for the future world. This exhibition compares different values and canons in Chinese and Western art, to culturally and historically research Chinese painting and its potential value for people in the future.
Palazzo Bembo, San Marco, 4793 (Riva del Carbon)
May 9th – November 22nd
Organization: Pan Tianshou Foundation
pantianshou.caa.edu.cn/foundation_en
My East is Your West
Drawn from the title of an ongoing work by Shilpa Gupta, My East is your West is born out of a desire to reposition the complex climate of historical relations between India and Pakistan, proposing a cultural cartography where we can meet beyond fixed limitations. Through a new series of site-specific installations, video, performance, and print-based works, Gupta and Rashid Rana explore notions of location and dislocation, territorial division, and the subjective drive of perception. This presentation provides a unique platform for artists from south Asia to enter into a dialogue through the arts, and is the first time in the history of the Biennale that India and Pakistan have been presented together on a single stage.
Palazzo Benzon, San Marco, 3927
May 6th – October 1st
Organization: The Gujral Foundation
Ornamentalism. The Purvitis Prize. The Latvian Contemporary Art
Ornament is a visual system based on the rhythmic repetition of conventional elements. Nevertheless, it cannot be reduced to a purely decorative function. After all, since prehistoric times, the role of ornament has been not so much to adorn as to form the world. For this reason, it is quite appropriate to turn to the metaphor of ornament at a time when art, not giving up its mission to explore and create worlds, feels with particular acuteness its own artificial nature. It is exactly a moment like this that Latvian art is currently going through. The eight artists in the exhibition are polar opposites in many ways, but they all share a common point of departure: the more aware art is of its own illusory nature, the more it transcends empirical reality and discovers the reality of the essence. Ornament is will-to-form through which the soul of life shines.
Arsenale Nord, Tesa 99
May 9th – November 22nd
Organization: The Secretariat of the Latvian Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2015
www.purvisabalva.lv/en/ornamentalism
Path and Adventure
This is a story about Mio Pang Fei, a painter born in Shanghai in the 1930s. Mio might be described as one of those rare minds that are quick to raise doubts who are then forever tormented, physically and mentally, while facing endless risks. In the harsh times under Maoist ideology, one’s interest in artistic creation could swiftly be one’s demise. His creativity flourished after he moved to Macao in 1982, and exceeded the height of the Cultural Revolution, when genuine artistic creation was forced to desist. Mio spent his time pondering on the future of Eastern painting and his own artistic life, which gradually morphed into Neo-Orientalism and then became the direction of his artistic practice.
Arsenale, Castello, 2126/A (Campo della Tana)
May 9th – November 22nd
Organization: The Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau; The Macao Museum of Art; The Cultural Affairs Bureau
Patricia Cronin: Shrine for Girls, Venice
Shrines, part of every major religion’s practice, provide a space for contemplation, petition, and rituals of remembrance. Here, Cronin has gathered hundreds of girls’ humble clothes from around the world to reference specific tragic events in India and Nigeria, as well as Europe and the United States, and arranged them on the three stone altars as relics of these young martyrs. Juxtaposing brightly colored saris like those worn by girls gang raped and murdered in India, muted palettes of hijabs worn by the students kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and ghost-like values of aprons from the Magdalene Laundries in Europe and US with the richness of the marble and wood-paneled church interior opens up a space for refuge and reflection in the face of human tragedy. Shrine for Girls, Venice proposes a new dialogue between gender, memory, and justice.
Chiesa di San Gallo, San Marco, 1103 (Campo San Gallo)
May 6th – November 22nd
Organization: Brooklyn Rail Curatorial Projects
curatorialprojects.brooklynrail.org
www.shrineforgirls.org
Roberto Sebastian Matta. Sculture
The exhibition focuses on the sculpture of Roberto Sebastian Matta (1911–2002), one of the foremost artists of international surrealism. The thirty-six works on display document the variety and complexity of his inspiration in the years of his peak maturity, when he spent long periods living and working in Italy. Matta’s crucial idea is that of reinventing and reviving in a modern key the idea of the totem—that is, an image with a highly symbolic content and precise solemnity. Matta therefore picks up on echoes ranging from the Andean cultures of his roots to the Orient, from the Etruscan world to what could be described as broadly Mediterranean.
Giardino di Palazzo Soranzo Cappello, Soprintendenza BAP per le Province di Venezia, Belluno, Padova e Treviso, Santa Croce, 770 (Fondamenta Rio Marin)
May 9th – October 15th
Organization: Fondazione Echaurren Salaris
www.fondazioneechaurrensalaris.it
Salon Suisse: S.O.S. Dada - The World Is A Mess
The Dadaists rose up against World War I at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 and experimented with a creative destruction of meaning. Their “yes” to the Enlightenment morphed into a “no” to the war, culminating in a “no” to Western civilization. Sound poems shattered language like a broken mirror and, in New York, Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was declared a work of art. Now, for almost a century, new generations of neo- and post-Dadaists have been transmitting their S.O.S. Dada into the world. But how has the liberated space of art, caught between taboo and terror, changed? Salon Suisse is sending out its own S.O.S. Dada to explore the Dionysian power of Dada with guests over four weekends.
Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, Dorsoduro, 810 (Campo Sant'Agnese)
May 9th; June 4th - 6th; September 10th - 12th; October 15th - 17th; November 19th – 21st
Organization: Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia
Sean Scully: Land Sea
Sean Scully: Land Sea focuses on the enduring relevance of geometric painting in contemporary art, and reaffirms Sean Scully’s position as one of the world’s foremost abstract artists. Featuring approximately thirty pieces, many monumental in scale and created specifically for this exhibition, this unique event provides a rare opportunity to view work from a number of recent experimental series. The imposing Doric paintings, painted predominantly on aluminum, explore the principles of ancient architecture using opposing chromatic fields while the Landline pieces are composed of wide, horizontal stripes of blue, grey, and green that appear to lean against one another, suggesting new ways of exploring the concept of landscape.
Palazzo Falier, San Marco, 2906
May 9th – November 22nd
Organization: Fondazione Volume!
Sepphoris - Alessandro Valeri
Sepphoris is an artwork that Alessandro Valeri has conceived and created to provide direct support for the orphanage at Tzipori, a village near Nazareth in the middle of the Galilee region in Israel, where a tiny community of nuns of the Order of the Daughters of Saint Anne takes care of children from all ethnic and religious groups. The images that form the aerial installation which spirals up through the hollow of the Molino Stucky building are the result of a real experience for Alessandro Valeri: these images do not represent, but are an instrument for the real transformation of a place and point to the realization of a happiness that, although perceived as something beyond current circumstances, nonetheless appears real and attainable.
Molino Stucky, interior atrium, Giudecca, 812
May 9th – November 22nd
Organization: Assessorato alla Cultura del Comune di Narni(TR); a Sidereal Space of Art; Satellite Berlin
Tesla Revisited
The exhibition combines two main themes— the theme of Tesla’s approach, research, inventions, and discoveries as creative work comparable to the work of an artist, and the theme of invention itself, which for Tesla implied the greatest exaltation of the human spirit, and is regarded by Michel Serres as the only authentic intellectual act. In the juxtaposition of Nikola Tesla’s own works with the artworks of the participating artists, the relationship between science and art is illuminated. The manner in which invention—as the only authentic intellectual act—manifests in Tesla’s works and in the works of the artists is a crucial aspect of the exhibition.
Palazzo Nani Mocenigo, Dorsoduro, 960
(Event closed)
Organization: VITRARIA Glass + A Museum
The Bridges of Graffiti
This exhibition comes thirty years after Arte di Frontiera. New York Graffiti, an exhibition curated by Francesca Alinovi that brought the main exponents of New York graffiti—including famous artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Futura2000—to Italy in 1984. In attempting to historicize the cultural influences and exchanges of artists and works that have crossed the ocean, The Bridges of Graffiti focuses on those graffiti artists who later developed—or who already used—a figurative style, and who evolved and reinvented themselves—Boris Tellengen, Doze Green, Eron, Futura2000, Mode2, SKKI ©, Jayone, Todd James, Zero-T, and Teach.
Arterminal c/o Terminal San Basilio, Dorsoduro (Fondamenta Zattere al Ponte Lungo)
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: Associazione Culturale Inossidabile
www.inossidabileac.com
thebridgesofgraffiti.com
The Dialogue of Fire. Ceramic and Glass Masters from Barcelona to Venice
The Dialogue of Fire displays contemporary ceramic and glass artworks fabricated at the Artigas Foundation in Gallifa (Catalonia) and on Murano (Italy). Fire is the element that connects the two materials, even though it transforms them in opposite ways—fire bakes the hand-shaped clay thus giving ceramic its peculiar hardness, whereas it melts together the silica that forms glass until it reaches a semifluid state that can be shaped. The sixteenth-century Palazzo Tiepolo Passi will house and exhibit not only ceramic plates by acclaimed masters such as Antoni Tapies and Eduardo Chillida, but also site-specific installations created by Silvano Rubino, Judi Harvest, Joan Gardy Artigas, and Isao Llorens Ishikawa.
Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, San Polo, 2774
May 6th - November 22nd
Organization: Fundaciò Artigas; ArsCulture
The Question of Beings
Yahon Chang has expressed his life through painting portraits inspired by his mediations, which convey his experiences with rejection, struggle, acceptance, and love in this world. These portraits of sentient beings, while offering a variety of subject matter, present cohesion through the singularity of their compositional style. Implying a spiritual connection to the tradition of Chinese shrines, they evoke a feeling of commemoration for those situated in the past, present, and future, while simultaneously encompassing their greatness and mediocrity, achievements and failures, etc. Chang investigates the theme of The Question of Beings at the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, where he has created an interactive exhibition featuring a series of new paintings and mixed media installations.
Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, Castello, 3701 (Riva degli Schiavoni)
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MoCA, Taipei)
The Revenge of the Common Place
The exhibition is constructed around some of the most fundamental misunderstandings between the Western tradition and the Far East. Whereas in the West the idea of authorship is highly protected, time has come to accept that many avant-garde artists transcended this idea a long time ago. The copy just became a new option, a possible field of creativity. What is not clear yet is whether we have already come to terms with all the possible consequences of this new situation and whether this has become all the more obvious since the Chinese artist, a new kid on the block, appeared. Taking Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes as a starting point, the exhibition leads the visitor into a new mental climate zone where the status of the art work as an object becomes completely uncertain, suggesting that we might have reached a “post-object era.”
Palazzo Nani Mocenigo, Dorsoduro, 960
May 9th – June 30th
Organization: Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University Brussels-VUB)
www.therevengeofthecommonplace.be
The Silver Lining. Contemporary Art from Liechtenstein and other Microstates
The Liechtenstein art association Kunstverein Schichtwechsel has invited young artists from four European microstates—Iceland, Luxembourg, Montenegro, and Liechtenstein—to engage in dialogue and work together. All artists will be on site for the ten-day Collateral Event. The starting point is Walter Benjamin’s On The Concept of History, where he describes the history of humanity as a “chain of events,” events which retrospectively take on the appearance of a single catastrophe. His somber view of the world is challenged by alternative views on events by young artists—events which have inspired them and positively shaped their lives and the lives of those around them. A particular focus is the influence of coming from or living in a microstate.
Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, Dorsoduro, 810 (Campo Sant'Agnese)
October 24th – November 1st
Organization: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein
The Sound of Creation. Sound Paintings by Beezy Bailey and Brian Eno
We listen to music not only with our ears; we look at images not only with our eyes. The Sound of Creation presents a selection of pictorial works and sounds, the result of a cooperation between Beezy Bailey and Brian Eno. The exhibition unfolds vertically, along the grand staircase of the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory. The visitor climbs from the courtyard of the building to the different levels of the staircase where the works are located—some with headphones for listening— joining the creative process of the artists through physical effort and upward movement. At the top of the staircase is a small room filled with sound where canvases alternate with windows offering a magnificent view of the surrounding city far below. It is the meaning of “seeing” and “listening” that the exhibition aims to reexamine and reevaluate.
Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, Palazzo Pisani, San Marco, 2810 (Campo Santo Stefano)
May 7th - November 22nd
Organization: ArsCulture
The Union of Fire and Water
Recapturing the grandiose spaces of the Palazzo Barbaro, which is open to public for the first time, the artists explore the nature of oscillating cultural unions through site-specific installations and newly commissioned works. Rashad Alakbarov’s sculptural interventions interact with the environment of the fourteenth-century Gothic interior. Almagul Menlibayeva’s video installation immerses the viewer in the history of Baku. By exploring the spatial and temporal idiosyncrasies between Baku and Venice, the show proposes a new solution, a city–state, where cultural references and seemingly remote identities are superimposed to produce a new outlook on the established boundaries between love and conflict, union and rapture, East and West, and Old World Power and the New World Order.
Palazzo Barbaro, San Marco, 2840 (Campo Santo Stefano)
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: YARAT Contemporary Art Organisation
Thirty Light Years - Staging Chinese Art
The exhibition presents a small part of the complex development of contemporary Chinese art as a total and should be seen as a guide to the further development of our contemporary cultural heritage. This exhibition presents abstract characteristics—a language developed from the long tradition of Chinese ink paintings. The exhibited works present the awareness of each artist, questioning and reflecting on him- or herself, where s/he came from, where s/he is, and where to go. The artists communicate with themselves, thus struggling, discussing, and creating works as a result. They are performers on their own stage. This play has become a Chinese reality as it was in other cultures and at other times before. This is today’s China—ideas, thoughts, and culture expressed through works of art. Trying to invite all of you to learn about, question again, and recreate a deeper understanding of contemporary China. A fast-paced play on a big stage.
Palazzo Rossini, San Marco, 4013 (Campo Manin)
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: GAC Global Art Center Foundation; The Guangdong Museum of Art
Tsang Kin-Wah: The Infinite Nothing, Hong Kong in Venice
This solo presentation is conceived as an artistic continuation of Tsang’s examination of concerns and interrogation of current affairs. This exhibition presents the most recent development of Tsang’s longstanding interest in Nietzsche and religion. The exhibition spaces have been radically reconfigured to frame a series of video projections about the fragility of the absolute, the instability of things, and the uncertainty of life. Consisting of a sequence of four galleries beginning with the courtyard, with its four separate video projections, the exhibition takes viewers on a journey that ends where it began, physicalizing the idea of “the eternal return.”
Arsenale, Castello, 2126 (Campo della Tana)
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: M+, West Kowloon Cultural District; Hong Kong Arts Development Council
Under the Surface, Newfoundland and Labrador at Venice
The exhibition posits landscape as a space that continually informs and influences our relationship to the province, what it means to live in such an environment, and how it determines our sense of individual and collective identity. Anne Troake’s OutSideIn ventures into the woods to reconsider our entangled primordial relationship with the natural world. Featuring renowned performers Carol Prieur and Bill Coleman, with sound design by Ross Murray and music by Murray and Jim O’Rourke, OutSideIn offers a stereoscopic vision that is both intimate and monumental. Jordan Bennett encompasses the installation of a fishing shack alongside multiple video/ audio projections. By offering a glimpse of moments of reflection and contemplation, it brings a particularly site-specific experience into an otherwise foreign environment.
Galleria Ca’ Rezzonico, Dorsoduro, 2793
May 9th - November 1st
Organization: Terra Nova Art Foundation
Ursula von Rydingsvard
New York-based artist Ursula von Rydingsvard has evolved a distinctive sculptural language with cedar wood at its heart, driven by a passion for form and surface. Each sculpture is modular, built using individual 4” × 4” or 2” × 4” industrially milled cedar beams. These uniform components provide the neutral beginning from which she develops metaphors exploring complex psychological themes. She does not make drawings or models, but intuitively marks every beam before cutting using circular saws. A meticulous process, each cut affects the next, creating vigorous, organic works from “thousands of little geometries.” In the Giardino della Marinaressa, six sculptures reflect the range of her work across cedar, bronze, and resin, and are sited to integrate with the distinctive tree canopy, surrounding architecture, and the sea beyond.
Giardino della Marinaressa, Castello (Riva dei Sette Martiri)
May 6th - November 22nd
Organization:Yorkshire Sculpture Park
We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles
This is an exhibition that presents a group of exceptional contemporary Los Angeles artists whose work makes LA one of the most exciting hubs of creativity in the world today. We Must Risk Delight is inspired by the poem “A Brief for the Defense” by the American poet Jack Gilbert. By slicing through the somber depictions of the world we live in with sharp, vibrant moments of joy, Gilbert presents an irrefutable case for our happiness as being our indispensible expression of freedom, not in spite of the cruelty that is part of our world, but because of it. Artists in We Must Risk Delight present a visual response to Gilbert’s call to humanity to celebrate delight.
Magazzino del Sale n. 3, Dorsoduro, 264 (Zattere)
May 7th - November 22nd
Organization: bardoLA
Wu Tien-chang: Never Say Goodbye
The exhibition not only attempts to evoke the collective national memory of Taiwan, but also deals with the feelings that all human beings share, conjuring up the memories and traumas that people cannot let go of. Wu uses mask-like artificial skin membrane and a magical visual expression as a metaphor for the ugliness in the world and somber reality. In the former prison that is the exhibition venue, the atmosphere of death and parting recalls the ghosts that seem to haunt it. Clinging to their memory of the world, they are unable to find redemption, and are left with nothing but inconsolable grief. In addition to giving formal pleasure, the extremely sensuous skin membrane employed by Wu Tien-chang is intended to freeze a delightful moment, echoing the nostalgia in his work and its sense of unwillingness to say goodbye to the past.
Palazzo delle Prigioni, Castello, 4209 (San Marco)
May 9th - November 22nd
Organization: Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan
Xanadu by Nikunja
The ongoing and evolving project Xanadu refers to the ancient summer palace of Kublai Khan in Shangdu, which was built in 1251 exactly according to the dream of the Chinese emperor. Like the ancient dream temples, Xanadugathers the energies and experiences of its visitors, specific to each place and time the work is shown. After extensive research, Nikunja created the works for Xanadu between 2011 and 2015 in Europe, Mauritius, and Reunion Island. When visitors enter the exhibition, they are spectators, but they also become part of the artwork as performers. On special dates, the artist will be present to create new works of art in interaction with the individual visitors. We invite all visitors to interact with Xanadu and to contribute to Nikunja’s dream.
Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, Calle della Pietà, 3701 - Riva Schiavoni
(Event closed)
Organization: Dream Amsterdam Foundation
www.nikunja.org/xanadu
http://dreamamsterdam.nl/nikunjaxanadu/