Venice: Biennale Arte - 2019 – Giardini – PART ONE - National Pavilions: Australia – Austria – Belgium – Brazil – Canada – France – Germany – Great Britain – Israel - Japan

Venice – International Art Biennale 2019

Giardini - PART ONE

National Pavilions

Australia – Austria – Belgium – Brazil – Canada – France – Germany – Great Britain – Israel - Japan

https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2019/national-participations

photograph – Bonnie Elliott – production still – Angelica Mesiti – Assembly 2019 – courtesy Australian Pavilion

Australia Pavilion

Assembly - Angelica Mesiti

Commissioner - Australia Council for the Arts
Curator - Juliana Engberg

Evolving as performed translations in the styles of polyphony, dissonance, and cacophony and culminating in a moment of harmony, Angelica Mesiti has created an imaginable world in which a ‘contingent’ gathering of ‘the people’ is allowed to disintegrate and resolve by perpetually reforming and revolutionising itself.  Mesiti situates her film in the architecture of power – the Senate chamber – and uses music and performance, moving from text to code, music to movement, from actions to occupations to represent the way a society assembles and builds upon itself. The exuberant energy she unleashes demonstrates the creativity and strength of community at a time when ‘Democracy’ is fragmenting and failing.

Assembly - 2019 - Angelica Mesiti

three-channel video installation in architectural amphitheater

production still

www.australiacouncil.gov.au/

  photograph – Bonnie Elliott – production still – Angelica Mesiti – Assembly 2019 – courtesy Australian Pavilion

Assembly - 2019 - Angelica Mesiti

three-channel video installation in architectural amphitheater

production still 

Angelica Mesiti

artist

photograph – Bonnie Elliott – production still – Angelica Mesiti – Assembly 2019 – courtesy Australian Pavilion

Assembly - 2019 - Angelica Mesiti

three-channel video installation in architectural amphitheater

production still 

 

Austria Pavilion

Discordo Ergo Sum - Renate Bertlmann

Commissioner - Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria
Curator - Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein

Discordo ergo sum - Renate Bertlmann has conceived a new two-part, site-specific installation that, in accordance with her overall approach, is characterised by high formal and conceptual precision. Based on the artist’s programmatic axiom, Amo Ergo Sum, the impressive textual piece opposite the pavilion and the sprawling installation of knife-roses spread out across the pavilion’s entire courtyard displays an artistic commentary that makes the existential ambivalence of the human experience tangible in both form and content. The pavilion itself serves as a contemplation zone that, in the sense of a cartographic perspective, places core aspects of Bertlmann’s art since the 1970s in a relationship with the new installation in Venice.

www.biennalearte.at/

www.bertlmann.com/

Austria Pavilion

Discordo Ergo Sum - Renate Bertlmann

 photograph and copyright manfredi bellati

Belgium Pavilion

Mondo Cane - Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys

Commissioner - Federation Wallonie-Bruxelles
Curator - Anne-Claire Schmitz

Mondo Cane by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys is a display of the human condition. The exhibition features a group of automated puppets set amongst a series of large drawings of pastoral scenes and steel grids that fence off the pavilion’s lateral recesses. Some of these puppets are craftsmen – a musician, a shoemaker, a knife grinder, a spinner – who faithfully exercise their respective skills. It is a utopian world, pure and clean. Around the edges is a parallel world filled with rogueing zombies, poets, psychotics, and dropouts. These two realities coexist in the same space, but appear unaware of one another. They do not touch and this segregation is evident. The pavilion acts as a true promenade, similar to a touristic or anthropological experience reminiscent of an older Europe.

www.belgiumpavilion.be/

www.mondocane.net/

 

 Brazil Pavilion

Swinguerra – Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca

Commissioner - Jose Olympio da Veiga Pereira, Fundacao Bienal de Sao Paulo.
Curator - Gabriel Perez-Barreiro

Swinguerra takes its title from swingueira, a popular dance movement in the north-east of Brazil, fused with the word guerra, meaning war. Wagner and de Burca’s work focuses on the powerful expressions of popular culture in contemporary Brazil, and their complex relationship with international and local traditions. Swinguerra provides a deep and empathic view of contemporary Brazilian culture at a time of significant political and social tension. In common with their former films, the artists work alongside their subjects in a horizontal and respectful relationship, sharing an understanding of the complexities of contemporary self-representation and awareness.

www.bienal.org.br/

Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca

Artists

Brazil Pavilion

Swinguerra – Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca

 

Canada Pavilion

Isuma – Zacharias Kunuk, Norman Cohn, Paul Apak, Pauloosie Qulitalik

Commissioner - National Gallery of Canada
Curators - Asinnajaq, Catherine Crowston, Josee Drouin-Brisebois, Barbara Fischer, Candice Hopkins 

Isuma - Our name, Isuma, means ‘to think’, a state of thoughtfulness or an idea.  Isuma video art illuminates Canada’s forced relocation of the Inuit people in the 1950s and the power of the media today to reclaim history and see the best in us. One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk premieres our newest feature, recreating a day in 1961 when Inuit life on the land changed forever.  Silakut Live From the Floe Edge is a series of live online webcasts from Nunavut to the world.  Lastly, Isuma Online presents an online collection of Isuma and indigenous-language films available in thirty countries.

www.gallery.ca/

www.isuma.tv/isuma/

Canada Pavilion

Isuma – Zacharias Kunuk, Norman Cohn, Paul Apak, Pauloosie Qulitalik

Photograph and copyright Giacomo Cosua - Laure Prouvost, Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre - French Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale - 2019

France Pavilion

Deep see blue surrounding you / Vois ce bleu profond te fonder

Laure Prouvost

Commissioner - Institut français with the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture
Curator - Martha Kirszenbaum

Laure Prouvost has imagined a liquid and tentacular pavilion structured around a reflection on who we are, where we come from, and where we are headed. It discloses an escapist journey towards an ideal elsewhere, and challenges the representation of a fluid and globalised world, in which diverse unveiled and shared realities intermingle. A fictional film was produced over the course of a road trip on horseback through France, with performances by characters of different ages and from different backgrounds, with specific acting skills. A sculptural in situ installation enriches and develops the film in the space and the context of Venice – a floating city built on water and by water, a city of facade and backstage – and the Biennale with its notion of representation both appear as sources of inspiration. Lachons les chevaux!

www.insititutfrancais.com/

Photograph and copyright Giacomo Cosua - Laure Prouvost, Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre - French Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale - 2019

 France Pavilion
Deep see blue surrounding you / Vois ce bleu profond te fonder
Laure Prouvost
Film still

 France Pavilion

Deep see blue surrounding you / Vois ce bleu profond te fonder

Laure Prouvost

Photograph and copyright Giacomo Cosua - Laure Prouvost, Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre - French Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale - 2019

 France Pavilion
Deep see blue surrounding you / Vois ce bleu profond te fonder
Laure Prouvost 

 

Germany Pavilion

Natascha Suder Happelmann

Commissioner - ifa (Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen) on behalf of the Federal Foreign Office, Germany 
Curator - Franciska Zolyom

Natascha Suuder Happelmann has used a collaborative process to develop a multimedia artwork, inviting artists from various disciplines to participate. Together, architectural elements, sound, sculptures, and installations create a space that makes the economic, political, and social conflicts of the present day physically tangible. The main concepts to be examined here are containment, isolation, and accumulation. The installation reveals the consequences of these concepts and raises the question of how they can be encountered. Beyond the pavilion, the work continues in the form of publications, concerts, radio broadcasts, and lectures, thus activating its questions in various contexts and self-organised political spaces.

www.deutscher-pavilion.org/

Franciska Zolyom

curator

Germany Pavilion

Natascha Suder Happelmann

 

 Seen in the German Pavilion

Eva and Adele

www.evaadele.com/

Great Britain Pavilion

Cathy Wilkes

Commissioner - Emma Dexter
Curator - Zoe Whitley

Cathy Wilkes’ exhibition for the Biennale Arte 2019 is bathed in natural Venetian daylight. The unadorned architecture of the British Pavilion provides the setting for an interconnected series of floor-bound sculptural installations, paintings and prints. In the first room, the artist has created a complex group of figures and objects surrounding a sepulchral form. Wilkes’ paintings evoke a snow-covered elsewhere, full of sadness, both dormant and obscure. Profoundly moving and solemnly engaging, Wilkes appeals for our courage to reject the notion that knowledge is always something we can possess.

https://venicebiennale.britishcouncil.org/

Great Britain Pavilion

Cathy Wilkes

 

Great Britain Pavilion

Cathy Wilkes

Israel Pavilion

Field Hospital X - Aya Ben Ron

Commissioner - Michael Gov, Arad Turgeman
Curator - Avi Lubin

Field Hospital X (FHX) is a mobile, international institution, established by Aya Ben Ron. It is an organisation that is committed to researching the way art can react and act in the face of social ills and corrupt values in society. FHX originated with the intention to create a safe space to screen No Body, a video by Ben Ron about abuse in the family, as well as to other stories that need to be heard. Learning from the structure and practice of hospitals, health maintenance organisations and healing resorts, FHX provides a space in which silenced voices can be heard and social injustices can be seen. It launches at the Israeli Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2019, and from there it will continue to travel to various sites around the world, to develop and expand.

www.fieldhospitalX.org/

Israel Pavilion

Field Hospital X - Aya Ben Ron

 artist Aya Ben Ron and Avi Lubin curator

Israel Pavilion

Field Hospital X - Aya Ben Ron

Japan Pavilion

Cosmo-Eggs – Motoyuki Shitamichi, Taro Yasuno, Toshiaki Ishikura, Fuminori Nousaku

Commissioner - The Japan Foundation
Curator - Hiroyuki Hattori 

This collaboration between an artist, a composer, an anthropologist, and an architect aims to create a platform from which to consider the ecology where humans and non-humans coexist, as well as questions of where and how we can survive within our world. Four instances of video footage filmed by Motoyuki Shitamichi that capture ‘tsunami boulders’ washed ashore from beneath the ocean are accompanied by Taro Yasuno’s composition, reminiscent of a bird song consisting of automated sounds performed on recorder flutes, and allegories developed by Toshiaki Ishikura in reference to various local beliefs and folklore related to the tsunami. Fuminori Nousaku was inspired by the architecture of the Japan Pavilion, linking together images, music, and texts to create a unified spatial experience.

www.jpf.go.jp/

 Part Two Follows

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