Paolo Baratta, president of the Biennale di Venezia, on the occasion of the pre-launch press conference of the Venice Biennale 2017 Via Arte Viva curated by Christine Marcel, stated “The Biennale represents the desire for art and artists in our lives”. “Biennale Arte proves once more to be an act of generosity”, Baratta continues, “it offers the audience knowledge, engagement, and a view of the world’s complexity that goes past banal simplifications”.
The exhibition route of the 57. Biennale Arte, within the Central Pavilion at the Giardini and at the Arsenale, comprises nine trans-pavilions putting on display the works of a number of artists who investigate several facets of “living Art”.
The Central Pavilion at the Giardini during Biennale 2017 hosts two trans-pavilions: the Pavilion of Artists and Books and the Pavilion of Joys and Fears. Here is what to see.
Pavilion of Artists and Books
The visit starts with the artist’s studio of Dawn Kasper, an American artist who literally moved her creative atelier from New York to the heart of the Central Pavilion. Kapser entertains visitors on site with musical performances and by showing her artistic life in balance between otium and negotium, Latin for idleness and activity.
Olafur Eliasson’s studio reflects on migration: migrants are the protagonists of the installation. They have been invited to create inside the pavilion — turned into an open workshop — three-dimensional visionary projects with a complex design.
Albanian Edi Rama, former Minister of Culture and mayor of Tirana, shows his cadavre exquis on a wallpaper in reinforced nylon: Rama’s drawings are indecipherable fragmentary micro-representations of a world full of political references and personal memories.
The artist from United Arab Emirates Hassan Sharif realised Supermarket: an incredible archive containing objects, finds, leftovers, objet trouvés, artworks, and prototypes part of Sharif’s artistic production of the last thirty years. Also from Arab Emirates is Abdullah Al Saadi, who shares with us, through his diaries, his reflections, meditations, drawings, tales, and encounters during his trips. The Al Saadi’s Diaries, collected in vintage tin boxes, are the result of the artist’s habit of writing every day, started in 1986 and still in progress, which was inspired by the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Jianyi Geng works on books –his obsession- using them as canvas. With the watercolour technique they become at once colourful and very fragile artworks: for Geng books are the best life partners.
A homage to French artist Raymond Hains, who passed away in 2005, closes the Pavilion of Books and Artists. Hains expressed in his works a fierce criticism of art institutions, like the Biennale itself: the messenger of an idea of art free from predefined schemes and far form the rules of academies, Hains’s work stood out for its unconventional intellectual capacity and for the creation of provocative and ironic projects.
Pavilion of Joys and Fears
In the universe of emotions and contradictions of existence, Kiki Smith works on the female figure realising paintings in fire-polished glass and silver leaves representing female artists in full size. Smith’s women, characterised by a refined erotic charge, are inserted in interior architecture overwriting lines and inanimate rigid shapes on body fluxes and auras of feminine holiness.
Syrian artist Marwan builds a dialogue with the observer trough a series of evocative self-portraits, exterior expression of an inner torment, seizing all the human feelings, from laughter to pain.
Rachel Rose with the video installation Lake View, suggests a dream-like vision, realised with the cel animation and compositing technique, of a sub-urban world invaded by an arrogant anthropisation. The protagonist is a hybrid animal, half rabbit and half fox, which moves about in a series of scenes built by assembling textures taken from 19th century children’s books.
The object of the investigations by the Czech artist Luboš Plný is the human body: fascinated by the geography of the internal organs and the connections of the vascular system, Plný creates drawings that are abstract maps made up of optical overlaps and invasions of incongruous objects that fuse with the flesh.
The fear and uncertainty of the voyage of migrants is at the centre of the exploration by Canadian artist Hajra Waheed. In A Short Film 1-321, using321 slides onto which she glued clippings from 1930s and 1940s postcards, she tells the story of a disappearance that left no trace and leaves us with an open ending…
All photos: 57. International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, Viva Arte Viva, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
Opening photo: CENTRAL PAVILION AT THE GIARDINI, COURTESY OF LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
