Venice 2013 - Arsenale: 55th International Art Biennale; National Pavilions – Argentina

 Photograph courtesy Nicola Costantino

Venice 2013 - Arsenale: 55^th International Art Biennale; National Pavilions – Argentina. At the Argentina Pavilion, Nicola Costantino embodies Eva Peron, the exhibition, Eva-Argentina. A Contemporary  Metaphor, is commissioned by Magdalena Faillace and Curated by Fernando Farina. For the first time, the myth of one of the most emblematic women of the XX century is addressed in the language of contemporary arts. Rapsodia Inconclusa (Unfinished Rhapsody) introduces the problem of a representation that has, either in one way or another, always been too partial and too constrained. Two video-installations Eva the Dreams, above, and Eva the Mirror, an object-machine, Eva the Strength and an almost abstract Eva the Rain: all four works try, from different angles, to portray Eva at the same time in between what is personal and what is political, real and fictitious, private and public.

 Photograph courtesy Nicola Costantino

 

Argentinian Pavilion. Eva the Rain, ends this unfinished rhapsody. The atmosphere of the installation is that of an autopsy or embalming room. A stainless steel table is covered by a mountain of ice tears which, when melting, become falling drops that increase the monotonous background sound of rain, standing for the people’s never-ending sorrow.

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Venice 2013 - Arsenale: 55th International Art Biennale; National Pavilions – China.

 

Venice 2013 - Arsenale: 55^th International Art Biennale; National Pavilions – China.  With the title Transfiguration the Chinese Pavilion is curated by Wang Chunchen. Shu Yong is one of seven artists representing China at the Biennale. Shu Yong’s installation work, Guge Bricks is laid out on the lawn of the Virgin Gardens.  Each tile contains a cultural term or phrase that the artist collects.  They are written both in Chinese and English that show living concepts, popular culture, and social changes of today’s society. 

 

Chinese Pavilion. Artist Shu Yong uses the Guge Bricks, above, bilingual texts as a strong social-presence to convey his concern about social and cultural ecology. 

Chinese Pavilion. He Yungchang’s Seawater of Venice installation also placed in the Virgin Garden, are bottles filled with seawater and labeled with the artist’s signature and numbers.  They are displayed on nine Chinese tables, in which the audience can use their own containers such as water bottles to fill with seawater from the seawater tanks placed on the other side of the tables.  The audience can exchange the seawater bottles with the bottles left by the artist and label their containers with their signature with the stickers prepared by the artist. Just as seawater is for all humans, the seawater bottles here are also public and can be shared.  For six months it will be an audience involved art piece, in which people can share the seawater of Venice, as long as, they follow the agreed rules, in order to represent equality and harmoniousness in the modern world.

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Venice 2013 - Arsenale: 55th International Art Biennale; National Pavilions – Turkey

Venice 2013 - Arsenale: 55^th International Art Biennale; National Pavilions – Turkey.  In the Turkish pavilion, Ali Kazma’s multi-channel video installation Resistance explores the interventions and strategies that both release the body from its own restrictions and restrict it in order to control it. As an extensive survey on the contemporary discourses, techniques and management tactics developed for the human body. 

Turkish Pavilion. Resistance is an attempt to unravel the interventions imposed and practiced on the body today. Ali Kazma explores the ways in which the body is shaped today through scientific, cultural and social tools, and how as a performance site it is repeatedly reproduced.

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Venice: Ca Corner della Regina – Fondazione Prada: When Attitude Becomes Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 exhibition

 

 Venice: Ca Corner della Regina – Fondazione Prada: When Attitude Becomes Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 exhibition. At The Fondazione Prada, until November 3, the exhibition When Attitude Becomes Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, curated by Germano Celant in dialogue with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas.   A novel remaking, the project reconstructs “Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form”, an exhibition conceived and organized by Harald Szeemann at the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969, which went down in history for the curator’s radical approach to exhibition practice, conceived as a linguistic medium.  All the art has been collected and the very halls that characterized the Kunsthalle’s exhibition area have been recreated, all using documentation, site-specific interventions, photographs, video, and original briefs.

 

 Curator Germano Celant

 

 

Fondazione Prada: When Attitude Becomes Form: Bern 1969/Venice. 2013. Carl Andre – 36 Copper Square, 1968.

Fondazione Prada: When Attitude Becomes Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013. Walter de Maria – Art by Telephone, 1967, Reenacted.

Artists, Stephen Kaltenbach and William T. Wiley

Fondazione Prada: When Attitude Becomes Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013. Rafael Ferrer – Chain Link Fence Piece, 1968-69, Displacement.

Fondazione Prada: When Attitude Becomes Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013.  Getting the Daniel Buren – Affichages Sauvages, 1969, reenacted, ready.  Fondazione Prada’s Astrid Welter and  the artist Daniel Buren.

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Venice Art Biennale 2013: National Pavilions Around Town – Republic Of Angola - Golden Lion for Best Pavilion.

  Photograph by Italo Rondinella 

Venice Art Biennale 2013:  National Pavilions Around Town – Republic Of Angola - Golden Lion for Best Pavilion. The Golden Lion for the Best National Participation went to Luanda, Encyclopedic City, the first pavilion of Angola whose venue is the spectacular Palazzo Cini. The International Jury assigned the prestigious award  “for the curators and artist who together reflect on the irreconcilability and complexity of site”.  The Pavilion hosts the photographic works by the Angolan artist Edson Chagas with an installation and a graphic project curated by Paula Nascimento and Stefano Rabolli Pansera (Beyond Entropy Ltd) in collaboration with Thankboys.

Above: artist Edson Chagas, co-curator Paula Nascimento, Bice Curiger and co-curator Stefano Rabolli Pansera.

 Photograph courtesy Beyond Entropy

Palazzo Cini: Republic of Angola Pavilion. Luanda, Encyclopedic City is exhibition curated by Paula Nascimento and Stefano Rabolli Pansera. The show is composed by twenty-three photographic big format posters by Edson Chagas setting up an installation open to the interaction with the audience. The exhibition is compared with the collection of Ancient Art owned by Vittorio Cini hosted in Galleria di Palazzo Cini. 

Palazzo Cini: Republic of Angola Pavilion. Botticelli e Aiuti’s Guidizio di Paride is used as backdrops for the piles of photo posters by Edson Chargas. Central to Edson Chagas’ work is a reflection on the ways in which images are used to give form to the way the city is experienced. Edson Chagas’s Found Not Taken series, which has been partially selected for the Angola Pavilion by the curators, concentrates on the systematic cataloguing of abandoned objects that are repositioned within an urban context to create new relationships between the objects and their context, form and its codification. 

 

The installation is made up of piles of photo posters, that sit on the palazzo floor ready to be taken home by the visitor.

 

Palazzo Cini: Republic of Angola Pavilion. What relationship is created between spaces and their images? What role are imagination and creativity allowed to play in this urban taxonomy are all questions that Chagas asks? In the ambiguity of a vision which uncovers and nonetheless reconstructs, what is delineated is an urban cartography mixing documentary-like precision and poetic reconstruction: a new way of observing the encyclopedic wealth of spaces around us and, perhaps, a new way of inhabiting these spaces.

Above: Maestro Francesco, San Paolo in Trono e Santi.

Photograph courtesy Beyond Entropy 

 

Palazzo Cini: Republic of Angola Pavilion. The public is invited to meditate on the theme of the Encyclopedic Palace through the exhibit and the graphic project which gives the possibility to create one’s own urban encyclopedia and catalogue starting from the unusual red hardcover placed at the beginning of the exhibition itinerary and take home the posters of the installation.

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Venice Art Biennale 2013: National Pavilions Around Town – New Zealand

 

Venice Art Biennale 2013:  National Pavilions Around Town – New Zealand. Celebrated New Zealand sculptor, photographer and installation artist Bill Culbert is exhibiting his work at the New Zealand Pavilion situated inside the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, right on the lagoons busy Riva degli Schiavoni.  Entitled Front Door Out Back, the installations are be anchored firmly in the domestic world, with common objects such as tables, chairs, wardrobes and plastic containers featuring prominently in many works. But these objects are altered and energized, lifted out of the ordinary, by Culbert’s signature medium – light. Fluorescent light tubes in abundance draw viewers through the spaces, flowing around, over and often right through Culbert’s pieces of furniture and coloured plastic vessels – objects that Culbert refers to as both "stoppages and transporters".

Above. Bill Culbert, Daylight Flotsam Venice, 2013.

 

Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà – New Zealand Pavilion. Bill Culbert, Bebop, 2013. The most ambitious of these works is a 20-metre-long overhead light sculpture, which will send gleaming steel chairs and tables tumbling through space in a torrent of fluorescent tubes.

Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà – New Zealand Pavilion.   Bill Culbert’s Front Door Out Back installation. Bill Culbert, Straight, 2013.

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Venice Art Biennale 2013: National Pavilions Around Town – Mexico

Venice Art Biennale 2013:  National Pavilions Around Town – Mexico. The old church of San Lorenzo, venue of the Mexican Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, is a building that still speaks of its past greatness. It is important that the project to be developed there actively relates to a place of intrinsic aesthetic appeal. Consequently, the curatorial proposal consists in creating a sonorous dialogue with the space. Cordiox, by Ariel Guzik, is a complex machine that describes its environment through sound, spreading a tonal, subtle and expansive crystalline cadence, thus creating a unique listening experience.

 

Old church of San Lorenzo – Mexican Pavilion. With this four meters high machine, the artist has achieved an important synthesis of elements and functional simplicity. His design is backed by decades of research and study; hence it is not a mere representation, but the result of a perfection achieved in the laboratory, with the backing of thorough experimentation. The machine's core is made of a very fine quartz cylinder, unique in the world (45 cm in diameter and 180 cm high) manufactured especially for this piece by an expert German company. It has long and tense chords, very much like a musical instrument. All sorts of vibrations, empathic and environmental energies are susceptible to be captured by its subtle mechanism, which transforms invisible entropy into harmonious order. Furthermore, because of its sound-descriptive nature, without speakers or amplifiers, Cordiox has the capability to envelop the complete inner area of San Lorenzo with sound. Therefore the audience will sonorously experience a site that cannot be traversed physically due to the church's deterioration.

 

Old church of San Lorenzo  – Mexican Pavilion.  This antique church has a surprising musical background. Among other important facts, it is said that, due to its excellent acoustics, Antonio Vivaldi liked to rehearse for his concerts there. In 1984, for the 41st edition of the Venice Biennale, this site hosted a great public event: the opera Prometeo, by Luigi Nono, one of the most important avant-garde composers of the twentieth century. This concert was his final realization of what he conceived as the theater of consciousness: "An invisible theater where the sound production and its projection in space are fundamental for the creation of dramaturgy". For this concert, the famous architect Renzo Piano produced a complex intervention that was later taken apart in San Lorenzo and reinstalled wherever the opera Prometeo was later presented.

 

Old church of San Lorenzo – Mexican Pavilion. Cordiox, by Ariel Guzik.

Old church of San Lorenzo.

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