contessanally: #BiennaleArte2022 - Giardini - National Pavilions - Highlights - U.S.A. - Australia - Korea - Poland

La Biennale di Venezia - Biennale Arte 2022 - National Pavilions - Giardini

U.S.A. Pavilion - Giardini

Commissioner - Jill Medvedow
Curator - Eva Respini

Exhibitor - Simone Leigh

Sovereignity

Characterised by an interest in performativity and affect, Simone Leigh’s expansive body of work in sculpture, video, and performance parses the construction of Black femme subjectivity. Leigh’s large-scale sculptural works join forms derived from vernacular architecture and the female body, rendering them via materials and processes associated with the artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora, redefining notions of space, time, and existence. The exhibition Sovereignty commingles disparate histories and narratives, including those related to ritual performances of the Baga peoples in Guinea, early Black American material culture from the Edgefield District in South Carolina, and the landmark 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. With a series of new bronzes and ceramics, Leigh intervenes imaginatively to fill gaps in the historical record by proposing new hybridities.

Simone Leigh - Sovereignity

Simone Leigh - Anonymous - 2022

Simone Leigh

Simone Leigh - Jug - 2022

Simone Leigh - Sharifa - 2022

Simone Leigh - Cupboard - 2022

U.S.A. Pavilion - Giardini

Australia Pavilion - Giardini

Commissioner - Australia Council for the Arts
Curator - Alexie Glass-Kantor
Exhibitor - Marco Fusinato

Desastre

Desastres is an experimental noise project that synchronises sound with image. The work takes the form of a durational solo performance as installation. Marco Fusinato will be performing during the opening hours of the Biennale – a total of two hundred days. Fusinato performs live in the Pavilion using an electric guitar as a signal generator into mass amplification to improvise slabs of noise, saturated feedback, and discordant intensities that trigger a deluge of images onto a freestanding floor-to-ceiling LED wall. The images are sourced via a stream of words that have been put into an open search across multiple online platforms. The mass indexing is a mess – a morass of disparate and disconnected randomly generated images.

Marco Fusinato - Desastres

Marco Fusinato

Marco Fusinato - Desastres - Australia Pavilion - Giardini

Republic of Korea Pavilion - Giardini

Commissioner - Arts Council Korea
Curator - Youngchul Lee
Exhibitor - Yunchul Kim

Gyre

In the infinite cycles of creation and extinction, it gyrates and descends; this theme permeates everything from energy to matter, life, and the universe – the cycles are ubiquitous and ever-present. The exhibition Gyre explores the world as a labyrinth, where there are both motion in stillness and stillness in motion, embracing nonhuman objects and material reality. Based on the artist – Yunchul Kim’s transdisciplinary research into literature, mythology, philosophy, and science, he creates a universe within the Korean Pavilion, where his pataphysical installations continuously metamorphoses and are affected by cosmic events, atmosphere, light, and nature.

Yunchul Kim

Yunchul Kim - Gyre

Yunchul Kim - Gyre - Republic of Korea - Giardini

Serbia Pavilion - Giardini

Commissioner - Marijana Kolaric
Curator - Biljana Ciric
Exhibitor - Vladimir Nikolic

Walking on Water

You enter a space that is a fiction. An abstraction of time and space. It is pure modernist painting through which the artist returns reality into the picture. You enter a relationship mediated by technology that the artist inverts. The presentation underlines relations to technology and nature – in this case water as part of our body, but also water as our connection point rather the as a separation. In these waters the artist swims as he waits for the perfect image to emerge. The exhibition presents Vladimir Nikolic’s exploration over the last three years, intertwining the personal and intimate with political anxieties of uncertain futures if we don’t learn to be a different kind of human.

artist Vladimir Nikolic and curator Biljana Ciric

Vladimir Nikolic - Walking on Water - Serebia Pavilion - Giardini

Poland Pavilion - Giardini

Commissioners - Janusz Janowski - from 2022 - Hanna Wroblewska - until 2021
Curators - Wojciech Szymanski - Joanna Warsza
Exhibitor - Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

Re-enchanting the World

The project by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is inspired by the Renaissance Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara; it expands the European iconosphere and art history with representations of Roma culture, which is often overlooked. The interior of the Polish pavilion consists of an installation: twelve panels covered with depictions of the twelve months of the year in large-format textiles, which draw from the Renaissance astrological frescos from Palazzo Schifanoia. The symbols of the palace, including zodiac signs, the decan system, the time cycles, and the migration of images across time and continents, stand as visual and ideological points of reference, which the artist inscribes in a Polish–Roma identity and the vernacular historical experience, building the affirmative iconography of the largest European minority.