contessanally: Venice: Punta della Dogana – Luoghi e Segni

Punta della Dogana

Luoghi e Segni

At Punta della Dogana, until December 15, the exhibition Luogo e Segni is conceived by Mouna Mekouar, independent curator, and Martin Bethenod, Director of Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana.

Liz Deschennes – FPS (60)

www.palazzograssi.it

photograph Pino Dell’Aquila - courtesy Palazzo Grassi - copyright Archivio Carol Rama – Torino

The exhibition is named after an artwork by Carol Rama, above, displayed in the exhibition, which presents over 100 works by 36 artists, among whom 17 are presented for the first time in a Pinault Collection exhibition in Venice. It is an itinerary through some inner geography where nature, creation and poetry intertwine, and draws particular inspiration from the writings of the poet and artist Etel Adnan, with whom many artists on display share a very strong connection. The artists show their peculiar relationships with their own urban, social, political, historical, intellectual contexts.

Carol Rama – Luoghi e Segni – 1975

plaster - photographic film and marker on canvas

“Another form of paradoxical reflection, one which does not refer so much to the image of places in the present as to that of their memory, of their absence. The work Ann Veronica Janssens (…) or that of Cerith Wyn Evans, are housed in a room looking onto the island of Giudecca. Which is where Ann Veronica Janssens showed for the first time in Venice, in a building directly opposite, on the other side of the canal. And it is the same island on which Cerith Wyn Evans had installed his memorable beam of light for the Biennale in 2003.”
Martin Bethenod

Cerith Wyn Evans – We are in Yucatan and Every Unpredicted Thing – 2012- 2014
Ann Veronica Janssens – Untitled – White Glitter – 2016

“Another theme, closely related to the former, is that of the special affinity that binds the artists, between them and to Etel Adnan in particular, be it of mutual esteem and inspiration or a more intimate bond, friendship or love. Roni Horn and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Simone Fattal and Etel Adnan, Liz Deschenes and Berenice Abbott, Tacita Dean and Julie Mehretu, Philippe Parreno and Etel Adnan but also works resulting from the collaboration between Anri Sala and Ari Benjamin Meyers, or Charbel-joseph H. Boutros and Stéphanie Saadé... All these ‘conversations’ map the implicit geography of a cohesive way of thinking between individualities coming from different horizons but all inhabited by poetry.”
Martin Bethenod

Berenice Abbott – New York – 1935

“The inclusion of works like Roni Horn’s Well and Truly and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Blood) is, in my view, a way of fleshing out a proposal that, while at the heart of the history of Punta della Dogana, seeks to extend/explore it further. It creates a web of connection between past and present, highlighting phenomena of superimposition, or even fusion, that are at work in the fabric of any exhibition as well as in the history of any collection.”
Mouna Mekouar

Roni Horn - Well and Truly – 2009-2010