Venice: Palazzo
Grassi – Voices of Images exhibiton. Voice of Images, until January 13, is the first
Palazzo Grassi, François Pinault Foundation exhibition to be dedicated to the
moving image in the François Pinault Collection. Curated by Caroline Bourgeois,
the exhibition opened its on the occasion of the 69th Venice International Film
Festival, underlining the strength of the links uniting Venice and the cinema. The exhibition brings together around 30 works,
films, videos, installations, by 25 artists, in a display, which highlights the
great diversity of the media, projection devices and means of appreciating
space and time.
Above: Zoe
Leonard – Campo San Samuele 3231, 2012 – site-specific installation, lens,
darkened room. New York self-taught photographer Leonard’s transformation of
the exhibition space into a camera oscura is part of her reflection on the
perception of images. She calls upon an ancient viewing device that makes it
possible to reproduce a precise image of the world: in a darkened room, the
light penetrating from a small orifice reaches a flat surface and produces an
up-side-down, inversed image of the space outside and the black room. More than merely a device used by painters
throughout history, the camera oscura is here a means of questioning the border
between the image and reality and of evoking the sovereign status of the
spectator.
Director of
Palazzo Grassi,and Punta della Dogana Martin Bethenod and curator of the
exhibition Caroline Bourgeois.
Palazzo
Grassi: Voices of Images – Michel Francois. Michel Francois –
Bureau Augmente Poject Evolutif et Intinerant, 1997-2012, video installation . Belgium sculpture and artist Michel
Francois branches out into photography, video and even installations. Sculpture
allows Francois to take into account the space that is never abstract. He
inscribes his work in this reality that we share collectively, source of
frustration but also of wonder. His
Bureau Augmente testifies to this commitment.
Within an environment composed of heterogeneous elements, the artist
recreates an office, such as numerous companies have today, but in a highly
critical manner. Different elements highlight the feeling of alienation of
solitude that can invade those who must work each day within these impersonal
spaces governed by demanding output requirements.
Designer
Alberta Ferretti.
Palazzo
Grassi: Voices of Images – Peter Aerschmann. Peter Aerschmann –
Eyes, 2006, video installation. Swiss artist Aerschmann Eyes is articulated
around three characters: a woman wearing a burka and two hooded policemen. Although the faces of all three characters
are covered, only the veiled woman looks us straight into the eyes. Their reunion in a single scene allows
Aerschmann to direct the spectator’s gaze towards the motif of the
dissimulation of faces in the public sphere.
Palazzo
Grassi: Voices of Images – Bill Viola.
Bill
Viola - Hall of Whispers, 1995, video and sound installation. American video
artist Bill Viola’s Hall of Whispers shows ten projections in black and white
of ten faces of men and women, filmed rather closely. They are gagged, their eyes are closed, and
only a whisper reaches our ears. The
darkness that surrounds these faces and the spectator forces the viewer out of
his daily reality and plunges him in a state of uncertainty: who are these
people? To what kind of spell or
violence have they been submitted? What
secret are they trying to reveal? A
dialog is set in place, founded on unknown facts, on an ambient mystery.
Entrepreneur, Franco Zoppas.
Entrepreneur Marina Salomon.
Palazzo
Grassi: Voices of Images – William Pope.L. William Pope L. - Pierce,
2004-2008, video projection. Pope L. self-proclaimed himself as “Friendliest
black artist in America.” In the video Pierce, around banal images of everyday
life of an upper-class white family, PopeL. has inserted other images or even
drawings. Covering the eyes, mouths or
faces of the protagonists, the drawings function as ‘primitive’ masks, thus
evoking African culture. Literally
defaced these ‘whites’ become haunted, or inhabited, by this fantastical other
- the ‘black’ Afro-American.
Palazzo
Grassi: Voices of Images – Bruce Nauman. Bruce Nauman – For
Beginners (all The Combinations of the Thumb and the Finger), 2010, HD video
installation, color, stereo sound. Nauman’s work notably his videos, is crucial
not only to the history of contemporary art, but also for art history seen more
broadly. His work is oriented according
to two axes: on the one hand, the staging, often minimal, of the body; on the
other, an investigation, constantly renewed, of the philosophical and political
issues at stake in art. For Beginners, the artist’s hands follow a set of
verbal instructions, recited off-camera by the artist himself. Through this visual alphabet, Nauman returns
to his initial training during the earliest stages of life. The volume of the soundtrack and the scale of
the image immerse the spectator in a hypnotic visual grammar. Between the word and the body, we find here the
key elements of Nauman’s work.
Coffee entrepreneur Paola Goppion.
Photograph courtesy Palazzo
Grassi
Palazzo Grassi: Voices of
Images – Abdulnasser Gharem. Abdulnasser Gharem - Siraat (The Path), 2007, video
projection. Born in Saudi Arabia, Abdulnasser
Gharem is both and artist and a soldier. His works can be considered as
conceptual art in a politically engaged vein.
The film Siraat (The Path) illustrates his work method well. The bridge shown here collapsed in 1982 after
a violent storm, causing the death of several people who sought refuge under
its concrete arches. The artist asked
various people from the region to spray-paint the word al siraat (the way, the
path) on the ruins of the bridge during four days and three nights. Homage to those eclipsed from official
narratives of history, this film has the appearance of a clandestine project.
Prince Carlo Giovannelli, blogger Diane Pernet and artist soldier
Abdulnasser Gharem.
Shoe designer Roberta Rossi and art restorer Toto Bergamo Rossi.
Palazzo
Grassi: Voices of Images – Adel Abdessemed. Adel Abdessemed –
Jouer de Flute, 1996, video projection, color, sound. Abdessemed left Algeria
threatened by Islamist violence and settled in France. There he produced works
situated tensely between denunciation and narrative The political dimension of the images
produced by him operates hand in hand with their capacity to ‘tell
stories’. Jouer de Flute was created at
the end of his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. It announces the characteristics of the
artist’s future productions, in which a work is the translation of an
action. Here he has convinced this
Muslim character to disrobe in order to play an instrument that he had
abandoned since his Berber childhood. To
this constraint, imposed by the artist, is added the exhaustion and
breathlessness resulting from the duration of the shot. Opposing all hedonism, this literal
stripping-down presents itself simultaneously as a gesture of major cultural
transgression and extreme fragility.
Urban anthropologist Catherine Facerias exhibiton curator Caroline Bourgeois and curator Elisabeth Lebovici.
Video Artist Anita Sieff and artist
Elisabetta di Maggio.
Palazzo
Grassi: Voices of Images – Peter Fischli, David Weiss.
Peter Fischli, David Weiss – Hunde, 2003, DVD, color. Peter Fischli and David
Weiss are one of the most famous duos in contemporary art. Trained in Switzerland they are known for
their installations combining sculpture, photography and video. Their practice offers an iconic, unhinged counterpoint
to today’s world and its absurdities, its codes, its banalities. This systematic deconstruction has led them
to analyze very precisely certain social or esthetic ‘tics’ that contaminate
our daily lives. As in La Fontaine’s
use of the fable, the animal world allows them to avoid head-on criticism. The artists often appear in disguise, wearing
the costumes of animals in search of knowledge and capable exchange, of
commenting on the state of the world. In
the video presented here, the camera never leaves the gaze of two dogs behind a
fence, on the lookout for any minor movement: moving, ironic evocations of a
human condition, prisoner of its desires and disappointments.
Technogym entrepreneur Nerio Alessandri.
Desire Abete Colapietro and PR Laura Morino Teso.
photographs courtesy Palazzo Grassi
Palazzo Grassi: Voices of Images – Shirin Neshat. Shirin Neshat – Faezeh, 2008, 35mm film
transferred to Blue Ray. Shirin Neshat moved to the United States to study
art. She didn’t go back to her country,
Iran until 1990, when she was particularly struck by the effects of the Islamic
revolution on the situation of women. Faezeh is an adaptation of the novel
Women Without Men written by her compatriot Shahrnush Parsipur. This novel is composed of the stories of
several women with widely different destinies, whose lives intersect during the
summer of 1953, at the time of the coup d’etat that reestablished the authority
of the Shah. In Faezeh a young woman, tormented by painful memories, wanders
through a phantasmagoric landscape where she witnesses her own rape. The feeling of alienation is reinforced by
the whispered Farsi phrases, only snippets of which are translated for the
viewer.
Lawyers John and Annie Fiorilla.
PR Paola Manfredi.
Director of Palazzo
Grassi and Punta della Dogana Martin Bethenod and author and specialist in art and the art market Judith Benhamou-Huet.
photograph courtesy Palazzo Grassi
Palazzo Grassi: Voices of Images – Yang Fudong. Yang Fudong – Liu Lan,
2003, 35 mm film, black and white.
Chinese Yang Fudong first tried his hand at painting before turning to
cinematography, which he uses in an eminently “authorial” manner: his films,
made in 35mm, rely on very though-out, sophisticated images. His works comments on the abrupt changes
undergone in China and the balance between tradition and modernity. A central question links his films, such as
in Liu Lan: that of anachronism. In Liu Lan, two young people meet along the
water’s edge. The girl is wearing traditional
garb, while the boy seems to come from town.
The treatment of the intrigue, soundtrack and more generally, the
structure itself aligns this film with the fable, the tale and even romantic
fluff. The reeds, the fog, the
embroidery, the rowboat: each of these details evoke Chines painting. The male character seems to have strayed from
the set of a European New Wave film.
Wavering between lyricism and disappointment, by playing on contrasts,
Yang Fudong produces a form of atrophy: it is difficult to determine the space,
or even the temporality, in which we find ourselves.