contessanally: Venice: The 58th International Venice Art Biennale – PART TWO - May You Live in Interesting Times

The 58^th International Venice Art Biennale

May You Live in Interesting Times

ARSENALE

The 58th International Venice Art Exhibition, titled May You Live In Interesting Times, until November 24, is curated by Ralph Rugoff and its title is a phrase of English invention that has long been mistakenly cited as an ancient Chinese curse that invokes periods of uncertainty, crisis and turmoil; "interesting times", exactly as the ones we live in today. All the 79 artists exhibit different works at the Giardini and the Arsenale, in order to highlight their artistic practice rather than a single work. It is also trying to highlight the fact that just as art has many levels, each artist’s practice has many different dimensions and aspects to it. The artists are trying to defy whatever categories and whatever conceptual boxes we might want to put them into.

Zanele Muholi – MaID III – Philadelphia – 2018

Wallpaper

https://www.labiennale.org/en

“Illegal combinations with rejected objects.”

Jimmie Durham is the recipient of this year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement Award. His work also includes elements of writing and performance, and his practice most often takes the form of sculptures in which diverse everyday items and natural materials are assembled into vivid forms, the process of production can be seen as an embodiment of the subversive attitude that suffuses his works. Here each sculpture, fashioned from combinations of furniture parts, slick industrial materials or used clothes, approximates the scale of the titular animal, yet the resulting forms are not portraits of the beings, but rather poetic entanglements that challenge the traditional Enlightenment notion of the separation between humans and nature.

Jimmie Durham – Musk Ox – 2017