Monday, May 29, 2017

Venice – Around Town: Collateral Events – Shirin Neshat + Elisabetta Di Maggio + Giovanni Anselmo

  Photograph and copyright Manfredi Bellati


57 Venice Biennale - Around Town

Collateral Events  - Museo Correr

Shirin Neshat – The Home of My Eyes

At the Museo Correr, until November 26, Shirin Neshat’s, The Home of My Eyes exhibition, curated by Thomas Kellein with the scientific direction of Gabriella Belli. It is the visual portrait of a culture, which comprises of 55 portraits, as well as, and Neshat’s new video Roja - 2016 - which is based on the artist’s personal dreams and memories, exploring an Iranian woman’s nostalgia for connection.


 
“A portrait of a country that for so long has been a crossroads of many different ethnicities, religions, and languages.”
Shirin Neshat



Museo Correr

Shirin Neshat – The Home of My Eyes

Neshat’s photographic and filmic portraits investigate the psychological and emotional states of her subjects, a series portraying the diverse people of Azerbaijan. While the subjects range in age and ethnicity, Neshat unites them formally by staging them in similar clothing and poses, against a dark background. The specific hand gestures reference Christian religious paintings, most notably those of El Greco.

 
 The View
Piazza San Marco


 
Fondazione Querini Stampalia

Elisabetta Di Maggio - Almost Transparent Nature

At the Fondazione Querini Stapalia, until September 24, Elisabetta Di Maggio’s site-specific exhibition, Almost Transparent Nature, is curated by Chiara Bertola.  The artist’s work is spread throughout the museum and invades the space creating a relationship with past and present times, placing the viewer inside a visual alienation.
Above. Giovanni Bellini – Presentation of the Temple – Elisabetta Di MaggioUntitled – 2016 – white porcelain hand-cut with scapel.







“I have based my research on the concept of time inflected in all its forms, to the extent that I have made time itself the real substance of my work.
Elisabetta Di Maggio

Cabbage
2011 – Brassica Oleracea leaves
eighteenth–century root table.

 

Fondazione Querini Stampalia

Elisabetta Di Maggio – Ivy
2017 – Ivy branches
marble bust – Michele Fabris detto l’Ongaro



Elisabetta Di Maggio – Archive
2017 – installation
mixed materials and media


Fondazione Querini Stampalia

Elisabetta Di Maggio – Untitled
2001-2010 –tissue paper

 

Fondazione Querini Stampalia

Giovanni Anselmo - Senza titolo, invisibile, le stelle si avvicinano di una spanna in più, oltremare appare verso Sud-Est, e la luce focalizza...

Senza titolo, invisibile, le stelle si avvicinano di una spanna in più, oltremare appare verso Sud-Est, e la luce focalizza...  As is often the case with Giovanni Anselmo’s work, the long title is like a formula, almost a short story, which describes installations that could be considered landscapes to observe while “looking out of the window of our imagination”. At the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, until September 24, the installations are curated by Chiara Bertola.  Anselmo’s work is like a paradigm that is constantly being recreated and which orients itself differently every time it encounters a new space and dimension: in this case the Carlo Scarpa space, inspired by the precision and essential rigor that the place suggested itself to the artist. The exhibition unwinds through four elements-works: one work for each space, to give direction and create a tension towards the exterior. It is a route of trajectories and directions, weights and energies, which represent five moments in which a meaning is implied: the visitors become participants.

Giovanni Anselmo - Mentre Oltremare appare verso Sud-Est
1967-1979-2016



 



Giovanni Anselmo – Dove le stelle si avvicinano di una spanna in piu
2001-2016


Fondazione Querini Stampalia

Giovanni Anselmo – Invisibile
1970-1998-2007



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Friday, May 26, 2017

Venice – Around Town – Collateral Events – Judi Harvest - Propagation: Bees + Seeds

 
Palazzo Tiepolo Passi

Judi Harvest

Propagation: Bees + Seeds

American artist Judi Harvest displays glasswork, paintings and a video installation in Propagation Bees + Seedspart of Beauty and the Beast, exhibition in Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, until November 24, it is curated by Francesca Giubilei and Luca Berta. Harvest’s new works are a rumination on seeds, bee pollination and plants as metaphors for life and renewal. The exhibition is imbued with the spirit of the flowers and plants in the Honey Garden Harvest planted in Murano in 2013. 

Judi Harvest – Seed Jewel Boxes


“I focus on the fragility of life and the search for beauty. For the past 12 years my focus has been on the endangered honeybees and the endangered glassmakers of Murano, and the environment. Something urgent usually inspires me.”
Judi Harvest

Honeycomb I - Honeycomb II


 
 Judi Harvest
Propagation: Bees + Seeds

The work is also inspired by global seed banks, like the world’s largest, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. Harvest created over 150 different glass seeds, plants and flowers to highlight the beauty, purpose and sacred symbolism of seeds and vegetables. She showcases the beauty of a glass artichoke or pomegranate seed, but also the intricate artistry that glassmakers practice to create form and reimagine nature. 

 
Judi Harvest

Propagation: Bees + Seeds

Harvest’s work is a comment on how global demand for foods or spices is unrealistic, damaging to nature’s seasonal order, and ultimately a threat to the bees that pollinate the world’s crops. 

 
Judi Harvest

Propagation: Bees + Seeds
Archival Photos 
on metal
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Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Venice – Around Town – Collateral Events: Palazzo delle Zattere – V-A-C Foundation - Space Force Construction

 
Palazzo delle Zattere

V-A-C Foundation - Space Force Construction
V-A-C Foundation presents Space Force Construction, organized with the Art Institute of Chicago, for the launch of V-A-C’s new Venetian headquarters at Palazzo delle Zattere, is curated by Matthew Witkovsky and Katerina Chuchalina, with Anna Ilchenko, until August 25.  Space Force Construction is a conversation between contemporary artists and historic works. Over 100 works from the 1920s and ‘30s by key Soviet artists are brought into dialogue with new site-specific commissions and recent works by contemporary artists, including Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera noted for her strong political messages, Mikhail Tolmachev, a young artist from Moscow who explores the subject of memory through photographic archives, renowned American artist Barbara Kruger, German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans and Russian multi-media artist Kirill Savchenkov, amongst many others.
Vladimir Gel’freikh
Design for a monument to Vladimir Lenin in Leningrad
1925-1929
 
Cultural production
is one of the fundamental aims of V-A-C and nearly all of the contemporary artists in the exhibition have produced new site-specific works. Each new piece, we believe, offers the potential for new interpretation and new reflection on the current global condition. And when these reflections come to life in the shared space of a show like Space Force Construction, they inevitably start a new conversation. In trying to find new answers to the problems posed by our contemporaneity, we create spaces where people are free and motivated to engage with an art that makes them feel part of the discussion. With this show, as always, we hope to demonstrate that the social spirit of art is still alive and that the engines of its motor for change are running at full speed.”
Teresa Iarocci Mavica
Director of the V-A-C Foundation


Performance - Isasthenai
Cuban sculptor - Tania Bruguera


Barbara Kruger – Untitled (Surrounded)
2017


Performance - Stomach It

Taus Makhacheva

Uniformed servers offer guests dishes on the politics of food: edible paper, two carrots wrapped in a poem by Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, bread made from flour of dried leaves and hay…




Wolfgang Tillmans – The State We’re In, A
2015



Melvin Edwards – Ana’s Corner
Dedicated to the memory of Pateh Sabally
2017


  Sergey Sapozhnikov - Dance
 
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Monday, May 22, 2017

57 Venice Biennale: Arsenale – Viva Arte Viva – Christine Marcel

  Photo by Jacopo Salvi – courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
 
The 57 Venice Biennale
The Golden Lion  
Viva Arte Viva - Franz Erhard Walther

Arsenale: Golden Lion for the Best Artist of the 57th International Art Exhibition Viva Arte Viva, curated by Christine Marcel goes to to Franz Erhard Walther for his work, which brings together forms, color, fabrics, sculpture, performance and continues to activate the viewer in engaging ways; for the radical and complex nature of his oeuvre that has an impact on our time and suggests a way of living in transit.
The Jury was chaired by Manuel J. Borja-Villel (Spain): Francesca Alfano Miglietti (Italy), Amy Cheng (Taiwan), Ntone Edjabe (Cameroon), and Mark Godfrey (Great Britain).





“This moment of manipulation and action as a component of the work, or as the work itself – became my main theme. The decisive fundamental idea was to build up an oeuvre from action”
Franz Erhard Walther





57th International Art Exhibition Biennale
Viva Arte Viva
Curated  - Christine Macel


“...the title Viva Arte Viva immediately sets the tone of this Biennale: an exhibition which, even if it addresses complex political and social issues, has its own particular energy and dynamism. I chose it to inspire a lively interest in the public: Viva is a celebratory exclamation but also an expression of exuberance, and so it encourages a feeling of engagement with the exhibition.”
Christine Macel

President of La Biennale di Venezia, Paolo Baratta with the curator of Viva Arte Viva, Christine Marcel



 
Viva Arte Viva
The work of art and produced in solitude, but is a sediment of cultures accumulated in millennia of collective experiences”
Maria Lai

Se il cielo fosse in terra l’avrebbero rinchiuso pure - 1997
Il the sky were on the ground, they would have locked it up as well
1997


 

Viva Arte Viva
Maria Lai

Enciclopedia Pane – 2008
17 bread books

 
Viva Arte Viva
“Construction and construction materials appeal to me because
of their deep-rooted familiarity, the way that we are immersed in them and the possibilities of their re-shaping through use.”
Martin Cordiano

Common Places - 2017


Viva Arte Viva
“Space. The work of art no longer has an autonomous form / The work of art adopts the form of nature: swim, dynamics / The work of art has no place (gallery, museum ...) Outside of nature / Its place is nature.”
Nicolas Garcia Uriburu

Hidrocromia Intercontinental – series 1970

 


Viva Arte Viva
“Time and distance are shrinking with new technology [...] it is the end of geography.”
Julian Charriere

Future Fossil Spaces - 2017

 

Viva Arte Viva
“A little like a gardener ... has to work with things that are beyond my control.”
  Michel Blazy

Acqua Alta - 2017

 
Viva Arte Viva
“I have lots of objects. Every object has a story,
which makes me think I should write a story about every object.”
(from an interview by Haley Weiss on Interview Magazine)
Michelle Stuart

In the Beginning – Islas Encantadas – 1981-2015
Dream Collectors Carpinteria – 2002-2012


Michelle Stuart
James Island Logbook (for Herman Melville) - 1982

 

Viva Arte Viva
“I really believe that art exists in a context, so I don’t see (my sculptures) outside of the spaces where they exist.”
Leonor Antunes

…then we raised the terrain so that I could see out – 2017
installation



Viva Arte Viva
“I feel the form. More so from the inside than from thinking.
I do think about the construction to place the skin. To place the canvas which is the skin.”
Zilia Sanchez
Los Amazonas – The Amazons - 1968

 

 Viva Arte Viva
“Wanting to be an artist. Being an artist. For forty years I have used the vernacular mass-market object and the hand-made as the site for my work. I would like the work to slip between boundaries, from a recognized use
in the world to another experience of thought or pleasure.”
Nancy Shaver
Standardization, Variation and the Idiosyncratic – 2017 Installation 
 
Viva Arte Viva
“To a child toys are very important; they store many emotions in them.   Adults have a different way of perceiving things but I think that they are still able to think the same way.”
(from an interview by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand for Art Observed)

Liliana Porter
Man with an Axe – Venice 2017 – 2017
installation - detail


  Liliana Porter - Man with an Axe – Venice 2017 – 2017 - detail

Special Thanks
Biennale Arte Mag

 VeNews
 




 


 



 




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