The Italian Pavilion
The Magic World
Giorgio Andreotta Calo - Roberto
Cuoghi - Adelita Husni-Bey
ll Mondo Magico - The magical world
- presents the work of three Italian artists: Giorgio Andreotta Calo - Roberto
Cuoghi - Adelita Husni-Bey, whose practices suggest a new faith in the
transformative power of the imagination, and an interest in magic. With
references to magic, fancy, and fable, these artists see art as a tool for
inhabiting the world in all its richness and multiplicity.
curator: Cecilia Alemani
“For these three
artists, magic is not an escape into the depths of irrationality so much as a
new way of experiencing the world.”
curator - Cecilia Alemani
The Italian Pavilion
The Magic World
Roberto Cuoghi - Imitation of Christ
- 2017
“Superstition is the
unconditional need for a meaning. It is a precise characteristic, no animal
other than man feels the need to celebrate supernatural forces.”
Roberto Cuoghi
The artist transforms the
basilica-like space of the Arsenale into a factory for churning out devotional
figures inspired by the Imitation of Christ, an ascetic medieval text that the
artist reinterprets from the standpoint of what he calls a “new technological
materialism.” Cuoghi introduces us to an experimental process of sculpting
matter, reflecting on the magical force of images, the power of repetition, and
the iconographic memory of art history.
The Italian Pavilion
The Magic World
Roberto Cuoghi - Imitation of Christ
– 2017
The installation – a workshop set up
for producing these sculptures from start to finish, from casting the organic
material in a single mold all the way to the phase of fixation – does not cease
to evolve with the opening of the show: it continues to unfold through
decomposition and composition, death and regeneration. The entire process has
been conceived so as never to yield the same outcome, creating a sense of
dissociation that seems to echo
the present moment.
The Italian Pavilion
The Magic World
Roberto Cuoghi - Imitation of Christ
– 2017
Maurizio Cattelan, Marta Papini,
Stefano Seletti and Ruth Beraha
The New Zealand Pavilion
Lisa Reihana: Emissaries
Lisa Reihana: Emissaries features
the artist’s vast panoramic video in Pursuit of Venus [infected], 2015—17,
alongside interrelated photo-based and sculptural works. In Pursuit of Venus is
a cinematic re-imagining of the French scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages De La Mer
Pacifique, 1804—1805, also known as ‘Captain Cook’s voyages’. Two hundred years
later – and almost 250 years after the original voyages that inspired them –
Reihana employs twenty-first century digital technologies to recast and
reconsider the wallpaper from a Pacific perspective. Enlivened with the sights
and sounds of performance, cultural ceremonies and encounters, the expansive
video panorama is populated by known and invented narratives of encounter
amongst the British navigators and astronomers and people drawn from across
Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.
curator: Rhana Devenport
Lisa Reihana
The New Zealand Pavilion
Lisa Reihana: Emissaries
Michele Lamy
Photo courtesy – The Pavilion of
Ireland
The Pavilion
of Ireland
Jesse Jones - Tremble Tremble
"Did I disturb ye
good people? I hopes I disturb ye, I hopes I disturb ye enough to want to see
this, your house, in ruins all around ye! Have you had enough yet? Or do you
still have time for chaos? Hah? More?"
Beginning with the title itself, a
slogan of the Italian feminist
movement (Tremble, tremble, the
witches are back!), Jesse Jones mixes cinema and performance to exalt the
return of the Witch as a feminist, destructive archetype that has the power to
change reality. The Pavilion becomes the place of a different jurisprudence,
where the multitude is kept together in a symbolic giant body to proclaim the
law of In Utera Gigantae.
Installation View
Jesse Jones - Tremble Tremble – 2017
Film – sculpture – moving curtain –
sound and light scenography
Commissioner/Curator: Tessa Giblin
The Pavilion
of Ireland
Jesse Jones - Tremble Tremble
Tamu Mcpherson
The Tunisian
Pavilion
The Absence of Paths
“I didn’t come here of
my own accord, and I can’t leave that way. Whoever brought me here, will have
to take me home.”
Rumi - 1207-73
The Absence of Paths is a human performance staged across Venice, which, for the duration of the Bienniale, represents an idyllic microcosm of the world: a place
where human beings may still flow freely from one nation to the next. This is
represented in a physical travel document called a Freesa, produced with the help of Veridos, a leader in producing secure identification papers for
countries and companies around the world.
Curator: Lina Lazaar
http://www.theabsenceofpaths.com
Curator - Lina Lazaar
The Tunisian
Pavilion
The Absence of Paths
Issuing a Freesa
Freesas are issued
at three locations both inside and outside the perimeter of the Biennale. This installation hopes to empower each and
every visitor towards shedding the divisive baggage and classifications imposed
upon people. The carefully developed collateral event, at the heart of the
pavilion, is the basis of a silent, individual protest.
Monica Bonvicini,
Mariuccia Casadio
and Raffaela Cortese
The Malta
Pavilion
Homo Melitensis - An
Incomplete Inventory in 19 Chapters
Adrian Abela, John Paul Azzopardi, Aaron Bezzina, Pia Borg, Gilbert
Calleja, Austin Camilleri, Roxman Gatt, David Pisani, Karine Rougier, Joe
Sacco, Teresa Sciberras, Darren Tanti and Maurice Tanti Burlo
Melitensis: An Incomplete Inventory in 19 Chapters combines the work of thirteen
artists and a diverse selection of artefacts. Through a non-hierarchical,
achronological installation, the exhibition investigates Maltese identity via maps, folkloric objects, historical
photographs, and contemporary artworks. Artefacts and paraphernalia intermingle
in a series of chapters that reveal stories of nationhood, memory, war,
diaspora, dreams, and island life, imagining an identity situated between truth
and non-truth. Taxonomically and alphabetically organized in custom-made,
spatial arrangements, Homo
Melitensis–Maltese man–witnesses the transition from nation-state to an
atomized, impenetrable existence, and is perplexed.
Curators: Raphael Vella and Bettina Hutschek
Curators - Raphael Vella and Bettina Hutschek
The Malta Pavilion
Homo Melitensis - An Incomplete
Inventory in 19 Chapters
Things People Put on Their Head
installation
Samina Seyed
The Anonymous Stateless immigrants
Pavilion
“We, the Anonymous
Stateless Immigrants (A.S.I.), are the initiators of peaceful and civil
disobediences, public interventions and performances, spatial occupations,
participation and orchestration of demonstrations and virtual sit-ins!”