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Biennale Arte 2019

Collateral Events

58th International Art Exhibition

 

3x3x6
Hacking digital surveillance technologies and social media, Cheang uses the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni – a Venetian prison from the 16th century in operation until 1922 – to create a real-time interface that the visitor is invited to join. Involving historical reports based on ten cases of subjects incarcerated because of gender or sexual dissent (including Casanova, Sade, Foucault, but also contemporary cases), legal documents, fake news, myths, and fantasies, as well as the data retrieved from 3D surveillance cameras and the images uploaded by visitors, the exhibition constructs a dissident collective history of sexuality, where trans punk fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations provide visual and critical frameworks to think through the histories of subjection and resistance and to activate a critical proliferation of poetic and political actions for digital times.
Palazzo delle Prigioni, Castello, 4209, San Marco
11 May - 24 November
Promoter: Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan
www.tfam.museum

 

AFRICOBRA: Nation Time
AFRICOBRA: Nation Time presents the work of an African American artists’ collective founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1968. It is an exhibition of historic importance for the Black Arts Movement in the United States and for all international audiences who are curious to discover more about the ways in which the aesthetic of African American artists relates to politics, culture, and identity. Capturing the sentiment of their time with a visual language of vivid colours, rhythm, compositional arrangement, and shine, the artists in AFRICOBRA: Nation Time reflect how a marginalised group found a way to empower themselves in a society that consistently denied them their power.
Ca’ Faccanon, San Marco, 5016 (Poste Centrali)
11 May - 24 November
Promoter: bardoLA
www.bardoLA.org

 

Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy: Mare Nostrum
This exhibition is intended as a meditation on the fragility of our environment and the urgency of the impact of climate change on the Mediterranean Sea. It presents works by Lauren Bon, Julian Charrière, Newton Harrison, Wolfgang Laib, and Kiki Smith, among others, along with a public programming. The project undertakes the full activation of the “Brooklyn Rail”’s radical ‘social environment’ (a synthesis of Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetic). The “Rail”’s office is moved temporarily on site, producing its monthly issues as well as the River Rail, an offshoot of the “Brooklyn Rail” focusing on environmental issues. Similar to Jürgen Habermas’s proposed ‘public sphere’, this shared forum is intended to foster generative conversations on how the arts, politics, and culture are integral parts of the commonwealth of greater public that may lead to necessary steps towards collective action.
Complesso della Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Penitenti, Fondamenta di Cannaregio, 910
8 May - 24 November
Promoter: The Brooklyn Rail
www.brooklynrail.org

 

Baselitz – Academy
major exhibition of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, Georg Baselitz is the first living artist to exhibit at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. Curated by Kosme de Barañano, Baselitz – Academy examines Baselitz’s work in relation to the Italian artistic tradition and the legacy of the academy. Raised in the shadow of the Second World War and the division of Europe, Baselitz is celebrated as one of Germany’s pre-eminent artists, who has continued to debate the role of art throughout his career of more than sixty years.
Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia, Dorsoduro, 1050 (Campo della Carità)
8 May - extended until 6 October
Monday 8:15 am – 2 pm; Tuesday – Sunday 8:15 am – 7:15 pm; admission with ticket
Promoter: Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia
www.gallerieaccademia.it

 

Beverly Pepper – Art in the Open
Forty years after their creation, today the Todi Columns are considered the ambassadors of Beverly Pepper’s art in the world. Symbolically coming into port in Venice, now installed at Spazio Thetis at the Arsenale – the columns are the fulcrum of this exhibition, narrated by Gianfranco Gorgoni’s photographs and by the video Beverly Pepper’s Umbria, which contextualizes her many artworks present in the region, as well as her more recent sculptures. The Columns’ journey’s next step is announced in a large-scale model of the Beverly Pepper Sculpture Park in Todi, where exact replicas are installed together with twenty other original works of art, donated by the artist to the Umbrian city for public enjoyment.
Spazio Thetis, Arsenale Novissimo, Castello, 2737/f
11 May - 24 November
open 11 am - 5 pm
Promoter: Fondazione Progetti Beverly Pepper
www.fondazioneprogettibeverlypepper.com

 

Catalonia in Venice_to lose your head (idols)
… and the statues want to die. The stone, wrenched from stones, material that is then cut, moulded or cast, constrained into an imposed form, wants to return to its mineral reign. Statues are artificial bodies. Like strange beings that ignite passions, desires and fears. Statues dominate us. They expose what we do not always want to see. We plead with them or we decapitate them. Desperate before their disdain, or grateful for their unexpected revelation, we react, by thanking them – or by serving them their final coup de grâce. To Lose Your Head (idols) documents the complex life of statues, which some artists today recreate and reflect upon. Faced with these statues, our idols, the form is lost – we deform them – so that they no longer look at us, so that we no longer can see ourselves reflected in their eyes.
Cantieri Navali, Castello, 40 (Fondamenta Quintavalle)
11 May - 24 November
Promoter: Institut Ramon Llull
www.llull.cat
www.toloseyourhead.llull.cat

 

Förg in Venice
By making works using abstract formal languages familiar from earlier movements in parallel to architectural photographs of modernist buildings, German artist Günther Förg (1952-2013) engages with the legacy of aesthetic Modernism. This exhibition presents a selection of his gestural and geometric paintings from different periods and on a variety of material supports, as well as examples of his bronze sculptures. It shows how Förg’s work not only challenges the modernist conventions of his media by implicating their spatial contexts, but also raises broader conceptual questions about beauty and art’s relation to time. By placing his work in a space already so beautiful that it does not actually ‘need’ any refinement, the exhibition proposes that far beyond simply appealing to the senses with its seductive colours and materials, Förg’s work critically questions aesthetics’ underlying belief systems.
Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Dorsoduro, 874
11 May - 23 August
Promoter: Dallas Museum of Art
www.dma.org

 

Future Generation Art Prize 2019 @ Venice
The Future Generation Art Prize @ Venice presents the fifth edition of the first global art prize with twenty-one artists from almost all the continents and seventeen countries. The exhibition explores two recurring themes through a variety of media. The first considers an ‘archeology of the future’, exploring the past and the present through the eyes of tomorrow. Using cutting-edge technology, the works question the possibilities of interpreting knowledge in today’s world. Investigating ideas of the self, the second theme of the exhibition draws from individual sociocultural values and traditions, whilst also exploring more poetic considerations of the psychological journey. Here, artists similarly reflect on a discrepancy between those traditions and shifting realities in a globalised world.
Università IUAV di Venezia, Ca’ Tron, Santa Croce, 1957
11 May – 18 August
Promoter: PinchukArtCentre; Victor Pinchuk Foundation
www.pinchukartcentre.org
www.pinchukfund.org

 

FutuRoma
FutuRoma draws upon aspects of ‘Afrofuturism’ to explore Roma contemporary art’s role in defining, reflecting, and influencing Roma culture. FutuRoma offers new and spontaneous reinterpretations of Roma past, present, and futures via a fusion of the traditional and the futuristic in order to critique the current situation for Roma people and to re-examine historical events. Imagining Roma bodies in speculative futures offers a counter narrative to the reductive ways that Roma culture has been understood and constructed – thereby moving our cultural expression beyond the restrictive motifs of oppression toward a radical and progressive vision of Roma to come.
Dorsoduro, 417 (Fondamenta Zattere allo Spirito Santo)
11 May - 24 November
open 10:15 am - 5 pm
Promoter: European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC)
https://eriac.org

 

Heidi Lau: Apparition
Heidi Lau’s ceramic work often resembles the crumbling remains of historical relics and features imageries of Taoist and folk mythologies. Influenced by childhood memories of Macao, Lau centres the vernacular perspective in her approach on the subject, thus probing forgotten histories. This solo exhibition of Heidi Lau’s work alludes to the resurrection of Macao, once known as the City of the Name of God, in the current global, political, and economic landscape. As international capital erects surreal replicas of Venice’s waterways in Macao, Lau recreates in Venice an apparition of Macao that reflects vanishing beliefs in a society of spectacle, mourning the loss of personal and collective memory.
Arsenale, Castello, 2126/A (Campo della Tana)
11 May -  10 November
Promoter: The Macao Museum of Art
www.mam.gov.mo

 

Ichich – Ichihr – Ichwir / We All Have to Die
Curated by Francesco Bonami, this is the first major exhibition of Jörg Immendorff’s work in an Italian institution. While this exhibition is not a retrospective, it is the first to uniquely address Immendorff’s inquiry into the artist’s identity and his participation within his own paintings. Jörg Immendorff (1945-2007) was one of the most important artists to emerge from post-war Germany. His work has been exhibited internationally since the mid-1960s. Most recently, the major retrospective Jörg Immendorff: For All Beloved in the World opened at Haus der Kunst, Munich, and travels to Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, in 2019. Immendorff lived and worked in Düsseldorf and Hamburg until his death in 2007.
Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Castello, 5252 (Campo Santa Maria Formosa)
8 May - 24 November
admission with ticket
Promoter: Fondazione Querini Stampalia
www.querinistampalia.org

 

Living Rocks: A Fragment of the Universe
Asking the question: what was our planet three billion years ago?, the installation Living Rocks: A Fragment of the Universe is a South Australian collaboration between artists James Darling and Lesley Forwood, Jumpgate, composer Paul Stanhope, and the Australian String Quartet. In Living Rocks, water floods the Magazzini del Sale, the historic stone salt storehouses of Venice that have stood the test of many an inundation. Emerging from an extensive pool are thrombolites that have been crafted, not by unimaginable time and the force of nature, but by the artists themselves, who employ the distinctive roots of an arid land eucalypt to create living rocks. Living Rocks is curated by Lisa Slade.
Magazzino del Sale n. 5, Dorsoduro, 262 (Fondamenta Zattere ai Saloni)
8 May - 24 November
closed on Tuesdays
Promoter: Art Gallery of South Australia
www.artgallery.sa.gov.au

 

Philippe Parreno
This new installation has been designed by Philippe Parreno specifically for Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia in the framework of the Fondation Louis Vuitton “Hors-lesmurs” program. Time – a core component – sets a tempo for the exhibition with the use of a complex computer program activating three interdependent elements: a marquee, a mechanical mirrored shutter, and phosphorescent wallpaper. Paced on the ongoing development of microorganisms collected by the artist during past exhibitions, this choreography brings life to the space and creates a singular interaction between the viewer and the context. It annihilates the familiar markers of perception in favour of a stimulating process of inventing new ways of understanding, defying rational categories and the established order.
Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia, San Marco 1353 (Calle del Ridotto)
11 May - 24 November
open Monday – Saturday 10 am – 7:30 pm; Sunday 10:30 am – 7:30 pm
Promoter: Fondation Louis Vuitton
www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr

 

Pino Pascali. Dall'immagine alla forma
Fifty years after Pascali’s death, this exhibition offers a new interpretation of his works. The show – which reveals the importance of drawings, pictures, and projects in Pascali’s practice – was made possible thanks to the recent discovery of an important collection comprising 160 photos taken and printed between 1964 and 1965. These previously unreleased materials were acquired by the Pino Pascali Foundation together with the fund dedicated to Commercial Videos. This exhibition can be viewed as an uncommon interpretation of the ‘Pascali method’, which connects artworks with some of his commercial work and set designs. Moreover, the show highlights unknown aspects about Pascali’s life and art.
Palazzo Cavanis, Dorsoduro, 920 (Fondamenta Zattere ai Gesuati)
9 May - 24 November
open 11 am - 6 pm
Promoter: Fondazione Pino Pascali
www.museopinopascali.it

 

Processional, an Installation by Todd Williamson
Todd Williamson explores ideas of order and tradition to examine the deep uncertainty and uncontrollable political, social, and cultural movements of our time. Both the work and concept generated for this installation were directly influenced by the environment in which it is displayed. Through its long elegant proportions, the church of Santa Maria della Pietà encourages a meditative, sequential process of reflection. Drawing from the site’s richness, the artist has developed a series of works which encourage contemplation, challenge the perceived order of tradition, and ask: Who are our apostles today? Is the influence of today’s perceived ‘influencers’ truly inspirational or dangerously dogmatic?
Chiesa di Santa Maria della Pietà, Castello 3701 (Riva degli Schiavoni)
8 May - 24 November
Promoter: MAK Center for Art and Architecture
makcenter.org

 

Salon Suisse: s l o w
The Salon Suisse offers a series of performances, talks, and cultural events supplementing the exhibition at the Switzerland Pavilion. On the piano nobile of Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi where the Salon takes place, s l o w questions the rhythm of creation and its intrinsic slowness. In an art world governed by the scopic dimension, slowing down would make way for sensoriality and resistance to productivism. This year, the programme engages with slowness and art by considering topics such as acceleration, bedding, slothing, hypnosis, etc. It brings together a cross-section of participants from diverse backgrounds. Through a participatory programme based on an interdisciplinary approach, s l o w fosters resonance, proximity, and conviviality.
Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, Dorsoduro, 810 (Campo Sant' Agnese)
11 May; 19-20-21 September; 17-18-19 October; 21-22-23 November
Promoter: Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia
www.prohelvetia.ch
www.biennials.ch

 

Scotland + Venice presents Charlotte Prodger
The Scotland + Venice partnership presents SaF05, a new single channel video by 2018 Turner Prize-winning artist Charlotte Prodger. This new work continues the artist’s research into how lives are lived in sparsely-populated areas, and what happens to socially contingent signifiers of queer bodies within these spaces. Exhibited at Arsenale Docks, in the utilitarian workshop of a boatyard, SaF05 is exhibited alongside sculptural interventions. The exhibition is commissioned by Scotland + Venice, and curated by Linsey Young with Cove Park. Scotland + Venice is a partnership between Creative Scotland, the National Galleries of Scotland and British Council Scotland. SaF05, a single channel video, is produced in partnership with If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution.
Arsenale Docks, S. Pietro di Castello, 40
Screening times: 10.10, 11.00, 11.50, 12.40, 13.30, 14.20, 15.10, 16.00, 16.50. Guests are welcome at anytime however to see the work in its entirety please reference these screening times.
11 May - 24 November
Promoter: Scotland + Venice
https://scotlandandvenice.com/

 

Shirley Tse: Stakeholders, Hong Kong in Venice
Shirley Tse furthers her two-decade-long investigation of plasticity as a means to understand the world. Tse rethinks materials and processes and sheds light on the interconnections of individual subjectivities in a pluralistic society. Negotiated Differences, a sprawling, rhizome-like group of abstract forms and everyday objects in wood connected by plastic and copper joints, brings together craft, mechanical, and digital technologies into an integrated whole. Playcourt, an arrangement of sculptures on tripods resembling a badminton court, emphasises the negotiation between people and space that is a fundamental component of play. This negotiation is at the heart of Stakeholders – foregrounding the ideas of affection, empathy, and ethics, the exhibition proposes a space to reflect on how we can coexist amidst our differences and come to terms with the unforeseen actions that define our relationships with one another.
Arsenale,Castello, 2126 (Campo della Tana)
11 May - 24 November
Promoters: M+, West Kowloon Cultural District; Hong Kong Arts Development Council
www.westkowloon.hk/en/mplus
www.hkadc.org.hk
www.vbexhibitions.hk

 

The Death of James Lee Byars
The exhibition allows the public to reconnect with the eponymous installation James Lee Byars created exactly twenty-five years ago and in which the artist hauntingly reflects upon his own mortality. In addition, the exhibition explores the artistic legacy of James Lee Byars and how his investigations on death continue to impact artists today, by way of a new immersive installation by the Franco-Lebanese artist Zad Moultaka,which was specifically commissioned for the occasion.
Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione, Fondamenta Zattere ai Gesuati
11 May - 24 November
Promoter: Vanhaerents Art Collection
www.vanhaerentsartcollection.com

 

The Spark Is You: Parasol unit in Venice
Curated by Ziba Ardalan, The Spark Is You shows works by nine contemporary Iranian artists who work either in Iran or abroad. Inspired by the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, a book of lyrical poems written in homage to the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez, the exhibition reveals aspects of Iranian culture as reflected in works that clearly evince the value of looking beyond the familiar. Just as two centuries ago Goethe sought to bridge East and West, these Iranian artists from different generations highlight the dialogue between all cultures as a vital spark to mutual understanding.
Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia, San Marco, 2810 (Campo Santo Stefano)
9 May - 23 November
closed on Sundays
Promoter: Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art
parasol-unit.org

 

Wales in Venice: Sean Edwards
The solo exhibition by Welsh artist Sean Edwards at Santa Maria Ausiliatrice is a poetic inquiry into place, politics, and class, intertwined with personal histories. It is the artist’s most ambitious and emotionally resonant work to date. Known for his sculptural approach to the everyday, Edwards has created sculpture, film, prints, and Welsh quilts inspired by his experiences growing up on a council estate in Cardiff inthe 1980s. The show also includes a new radio commission: a script read daily by the artist’s mother from her home in Cardiff transmitted live to the venue. Her voice becomes part of the material of the work, altering the exhibition’s atmosphere with its presence and its absence.
Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Castello, 450 (Fondamenta San Gioachin)
11 May - 24 November
Promoter: Cymru yn Fenis / Wales in Venice
venice.arts.wales

 

 

Unless otherwise stated, opening times are 10 am - 6 pm, closed on Mondays (except 13 May, 2 September, 18 November).

Biennale Arte
Biennale Arte