Friday, May 19, 2017

57 Venice Biennale: Arsenale – The pavilions: Italy – New Zealand - Ireland - Tunisia - Malta - Immigrants




The Italian Pavilion

The Magic World

Giorgio Andreotta Calo - Roberto Cuoghi - Adelita Husni-Bey

ll Mondo Magico - The magical world - presents the work of three Italian artists: Giorgio Andreotta Calo - Roberto Cuoghi - Adelita Husni-Bey, whose practices suggest a new faith in the transformative power of the imagination, and an interest in magic. With references to magic, fancy, and fable, these artists see art as a tool for inhabiting the world in all its richness and multiplicity.

curator: Cecilia Alemani


 
“For these three artists, magic is not an escape into the depths of irrationality so much as a new way of experiencing the world.”
curator - Cecilia Alemani

 
The Italian Pavilion

The Magic World

Roberto Cuoghi - Imitation of Christ - 2017

“Superstition is the unconditional need for a meaning. It is a precise characteristic, no animal other than man feels the need to celebrate supernatural forces.”
Roberto Cuoghi

The artist transforms the basilica-like space of the Arsenale into a factory for churning out devotional figures inspired by the Imitation of Christ, an ascetic medieval text that the artist reinterprets from the standpoint of what he calls a “new technological materialism.” Cuoghi introduces us to an experimental process of sculpting matter, reflecting on the magical force of images, the power of repetition, and the iconographic memory of art history.

 

The Italian Pavilion

The Magic World

Roberto Cuoghi - Imitation of Christ – 2017

The installation – a workshop set up for producing these sculptures from start to finish, from casting the organic material in a single mold all the way to the phase of fixation – does not cease to evolve with the opening of the show: it continues to unfold through decomposition and composition, death and regeneration. The entire process has been conceived so as never to yield the same outcome, creating a sense of dissociation that seems to echo 
the present moment.



The Italian Pavilion

The Magic World

Roberto Cuoghi - Imitation of Christ – 2017



Maurizio Cattelan, Marta Papini, Stefano Seletti and Ruth Beraha


The New Zealand Pavilion

Lisa Reihana: Emissaries


Lisa Reihana: Emissaries features the artist’s vast panoramic video in Pursuit of Venus [infected], 2015—17, alongside interrelated photo-based and sculptural works. In Pursuit of Venus is a cinematic re-imagining of the French scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages De La Mer Pacifique, 1804—1805, also known as ‘Captain Cook’s voyages’. Two hundred years later – and almost 250 years after the original voyages that inspired them – Reihana employs twenty-first century digital technologies to recast and reconsider the wallpaper from a Pacific perspective. Enlivened with the sights and sounds of performance, cultural ceremonies and encounters, the expansive video panorama is populated by known and invented narratives of encounter amongst the British navigators and astronomers and people drawn from across Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.

curator: Rhana Devenport


Lisa Reihana


 
The New Zealand Pavilion
Lisa Reihana: Emissaries





Michele Lamy

Photo courtesy – The Pavilion of Ireland


 
The Pavilion of Ireland
Jesse Jones  - Tremble Tremble

"Did I disturb ye good people? I hopes I disturb ye, I hopes I disturb ye enough to want to see this, your house, in ruins all around ye! Have you had enough yet? Or do you still have time for chaos? Hah? More?"

Beginning with the title itself, a slogan of the Italian feminist movement (Tremble, tremble, the witches are back!), Jesse Jones mixes cinema and performance to exalt the return of the Witch as a feminist, destructive archetype that has the power to change reality. The Pavilion becomes the place of a different jurisprudence, where the multitude is kept together in a symbolic giant body to proclaim the law of In Utera Gigantae.
Installation View
Jesse Jones  - Tremble Tremble – 2017
Film – sculpture – moving curtain – sound and light scenography


Commissioner/Curator: Tessa Giblin

 

The Pavilion of Ireland
Jesse Jones  - Tremble Tremble 

 
Tamu Mcpherson

 
The Tunisian Pavilion
The Absence of Paths

“I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way. Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.”
Rumi - 1207-73

The Absence of Paths is a human performance staged across Venice, which, for the duration of the Bienniale, represents an idyllic microcosm of the world: a place where human beings may still flow freely from one nation to the next. This is represented in a physical travel document called a Freesa, produced with the help of Veridos, a leader in producing secure identification papers for countries and companies around the world.

Curator: Lina Lazaar
http://www.theabsenceofpaths.com
 
Curator - Lina Lazaar


  The Tunisian Pavilion
The Absence of Paths
Issuing a Freesa

Freesas are issued at three locations both inside and outside the perimeter of the Biennale.  This installation hopes to empower each and every visitor towards shedding the divisive baggage and classifications imposed upon people. The carefully developed collateral event, at the heart of the pavilion, is the basis of a silent, individual protest.


  Monica Bonvicini, Mariuccia Casadio and Raffaela Cortese

 
The Malta Pavilion
Homo Melitensis - An Incomplete Inventory in 19 Chapters

Adrian Abela, John Paul Azzopardi, Aaron Bezzina, Pia Borg, Gilbert Calleja, Austin Camilleri, Roxman Gatt, David Pisani, Karine Rougier, Joe Sacco, Teresa Sciberras, Darren Tanti and Maurice Tanti Burlo

Melitensis: An Incomplete Inventory in 19 Chapters combines the work of thirteen artists and a diverse selection of artefacts. Through a non-hierarchical, achronological installation, the exhibition investigates Maltese identity via maps, folkloric objects, historical photographs, and contemporary artworks. Artefacts and paraphernalia intermingle in a series of chapters that reveal stories of nationhood, memory, war, diaspora, dreams, and island life, imagining an identity situated between truth and non-truth. Taxonomically and alphabetically organized in custom-made, spatial arrangements, Homo Melitensis–Maltese man–witnesses the transition from nation-state to an atomized, impenetrable existence, and is perplexed.

Curators: Raphael Vella and Bettina Hutschek


Curators - Raphael Vella and Bettina Hutschek

 
The Malta Pavilion

Homo Melitensis - An Incomplete Inventory in 19 Chapters
Things People Put on Their Head
installation



Samina Seyed


 
 The Anonymous Stateless immigrants Pavilion

“We, the Anonymous Stateless Immigrants (A.S.I.), are the initiators of peaceful and civil disobediences, public interventions and performances, spatial occupations, participation and orchestration of demonstrations and virtual sit-ins!”


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