If you haven't been to this year's Venice Biennale and plan to go soon, download 'The Ideological Guide', a free app developed by the Dutch artist Jonas Staal. As reported in artinfo.com "the smartphone app offers information about each participating country’s 2013 pavilion, from its commissioner and curator to the sources of its funding, while also providing historical information about past pavilions, and charting that nation’s economic and political alliances with other participating countries. The app, according to its creators, shows that the Venice Biennale’s distribution of national pavilions around the city is in many ways a more accurate reflection of nations’ geopolitical position than any geographical map.

Allora. So. Let's begin with the Spanish Pavilion, not only as it's the country where Latitudes is based, but also as it's the first pavilion one encounters when entering the Biennale area, walking towards the Padiglione Centrale. Quinn Latimer
 in Art Agenda wrote: "In her discreetly powerful Spanish Pavilion, meanwhile, Lara Almarcegui also tread some familiar contemporary-art modes and ideas, though they were insistently material. And the pavilion was a natural: streaked with sunrays from the skylights above, the piles of stone, wood, glass, and dirt—the exact same amounts that were used in the building of the pavilion itself—were immediately comprehensible, inevitable, lucidly effective." [Press Release and more photos here, video interview here]


Continuing with Latimer
: 

"Surrounded by Massimiliano Gioni’s larger show, the somewhat airless “Encyclopedic Palace,” with its Documenta hangover of late, and serious crush on cleanly framed taxonomies, the national pavilions’ representatives of culture and country felt antique and obvious and a mess—but also a relief. Gioni’s turning of private cosmos and personal struggle into a stylized interior design aesthetic was definitively lacking in the disordered, disparate pavilions, where taste was usually the least concern. Yet lack of taste does not always equal distastefulness, which often arises instead from an excess of the stuff. If sometimes bad taste materializes as poeticized and/or politicized kitsch (see the pavilions of Canada, the US, Israel, and, at moments, the Netherlands), other pavilions broke through the visual chatter."

On the Netherlands' presentation, Adrian Searle of UK's The Guardian commented that Mark Manders' "Room with Broken Sentence" (...) "is a sensitively conceived and quietly dramatic tableau, like the interior of a mind as much as an actual space. The human presence emerges and disappears, conjoins with furniture or is sandwiched between stacks of timbers." 

Following on from our previous post on biennale tote bags, we'd like to add that the Dutch press package gets our bravo for the most beautiful, comprehensive and effectively-designed communication materials (and what a great pavilion catalogue too, with contributions by 37 international writers invited to reflect on individual works by Manders, published by Roma Publications). The press folder includes a full-coloured booklet with beautiful installation views of the pavilion; an 8-page booklet with an interview between the pavilion curator, Lorenzo Benedetti, and the artist alongside black and white photos of the works on show and a floorplan of the exhibition; two double-sided thick card A4 postcards of the artist's work; and a copy of Manders' "fake newspapers" which also covers the entrance to the pavilion. You can see images of the materials on the website of Amsterdam-based designer Roger Willems, or read more in the website of the pavilion. Gefeliciteerd!


Latimer laments the somehow shy presentation of Valentin Carron at the Swiss Pavilion which according to her "provoked nostalgia. Bruno Giacometti’s austere, 1952 modernist idyll is one of the finest pavilions in the Giardini. If two years ago Thomas Hirschhorn [see a few photos here onwards] obliterated Giacometti’s clean lines with his overwrought, über-hoarding installation, this year Valentin Carron erred on the side of caution, hewing too close and careful to those very same lines."


Despite Latimer's comments on the "disordered, disparate pavilions", Jörg Heiser was amazed to find a common thread: "Even in the national pavilions of the Giardini – which are not under any over-arching curatorial supervision, but in each case are commissioned according to very different agendas – there are numerous signs that artists are groping in the dark of the unconscious and the (supposedly) ‘primordial’: grottoes and caves all over the place, clay sculptures, enigmatic allegories, prehistoric flintstones, (pseudo-)fossil findings. Is this parallel between the curated show and the national pavilions merely coincidental or does it tell us – as it steers art away from sober abstraction, calculated boutique chic, and more straightforward forms of realist social comment – something about the current state of things, the position of art in society (and economy) at large?"

And speaking of clay figures and rocks, according to Carol Vogel Sarah Sze's 'Triple Point' spread beyond the US Pavilion, with a few merchants in Castello displaying simulations of her pieces adorning rooftops, balcones and shop windows. "Ms. Sze is asking questions of her audience: “What objects in your life have value, and how is value created?” she explained. “I wanted to show objects that we know and have seen in our bag or on the shelf of a store which have the residue of emotion... Ms. Sze, who is known for creating site-specific environments from everyday objects like toothpicks, sponges, light bulbs and plastic bottles, arrived here in a snow storm on March 28 and has been hoarding, foraging and installing ever since." [Full article here, you can also read another review here, watch a video interview with the artist or have a 360 degree virtual tour of the Pavilion].






"The images consisted mostly of depictions of large pieces of junk (the seat of a broken office chair, a tattered soccer ball) that were displaced and then photographed by the artist in Luanda. Visitors were invited to collect the different images, thus producing a supersized album of all the gathered prints. Despite the naïve dualism generated by the blatant contrast between the two worlds (the location of production and location of display), the project presented an almost magical and secretive discovery to its visitors that was much in harmony with Massimiliano Gioni's exhibition's focus on parallel and lesser-known art histories."



Do check out – and leave plenty of time for – the Cyprus-Lithuania in Palasport "Giobatta Gianquinto" nearby the Arsenale entrance. The sports centre building alone is worth a visit. You'll be surprised to see such a large venue in what is seemingly such a small island. As Dan Fox of frieze writes "The Pavilion of Lithuania and Cyprus, held in a building one would never expect to find in Venice. An almost Brutalist-looking edifice, tucked next to the Arsenale, housed a huge, modern school gymnasium, where curator Raimundas Malasauskas had organized a show of performances, sculpture, painting, and dance in an environment that was about as un-Venetian as one could get ... What on earth was going on? What was the work and what wasn’t? For once it was nice to simply enjoy the mystery." 

Back to Quinn Latimer: "Maria Hassabi performed her intricate movement-based work on the steep, cinematic steps of the gymnasium, while far below, an installation of temporary walls made up of recycled walls from previous pavilions (by Gabriel Lester) and works by various artists—Jason Dodge, Elena Narbutaitė, and Dexter Sinister, among twelve others—looked, from above, as small and distant as a diorama." [Watch a video with interviews and images of the exhibition]




Another one to not miss is Richard Mosse's 'The Enclave' in the Irish Pavilion. The photo below doesn't do justice if you want a better idea to watch this wonderful 7min. video 'The Impossible Image' produced by frieze (and Vimeo staff pick!) in which you can hear the artist talking about the process of making the works. 


Not to forget the Scottish Pavilion in the Palazzo Pisani which has one of the most solid shows in town, composed of three artists – Hayley Tompkins, Duncan Campbell and Corin Sworn. Filipa Ramos noted that "Hayley Tompkins’s floor installation of photographs and paintings puts together different scales of familiar, commonplace scenes and objects (from the depiction of a traffic jam to an electric plug or to the proliferation of plastic bottles) in such a way that they all become part of a set of recognizable, familiar presences."

Following previous years reports (2009, 2011 biennale posts and 2007 photo album 1 and 2) we'd like to share our photo-documentation alongside some articles and interviews related to this year's biennale that we have been reading before, during and after our Venice trip. 

Bit first a bit of recent history. Massimiliano Gioni (Busto Arsizio, 1973), currently Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions at the New Museum as well as Artistic Director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan, was appointed Director of the 55th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale at the end of January 2012. In October 2012 he announced the title and overall concept of "The Encyclopedic Palace" (Il Palazzo Enciclopedico) and in March 2013, he announced his artist list (over 150 artists from 38 countries, map of the venues here). A real tour de force.


Vincenzo Latronico introduces the linearity of the exhibition: "Gioni’s exhibition focuses on the encyclopedia as an idiosyncratic struggle—the impossible, yet nonetheless deeply human attempt at knowing the structures of the world. The part of the exhibition taking place in the Arsenale is linear and suggests a possible evolution of the way this structure has been imagined. It opens with the Palazzo Enciclopedico, a utopian architectural model for a museum of all human knowledge, patented in 1955 by Marino Auriti, a retired car mechanic. It closes with a sequence of chaotic and overcrowded video works (most notably Stan VanDerBeek’s immersive 1968 Movie Mural), offering a stark rendition of how such encyclopedias have been approximated by the Internet."
 
To this much-debated insider-outsider wrangle, Dan Fox of frieze adds: "perhaps Gioni did stack the number of artists expressing dense personal cosmologies rather high in places throughout the show – at points it was a little like going to a party where every guest wishes to corner you and talk intensely about their definition of the universe rather than ask you how you’re doing – but I was never short of something to discover, think about, learn from, agree with or push against."



Adrian Searle writes humourously about the exhibition's megalomaniac ambitions: "You expect Gioni to leap out of Auriti's tiered architectural cake of a building yelling: "Today we curate the biennale! Tomorrow, the world!"" He then continues, "throughout Gioni's exhibition, we are asked where meaning lies. So many artists here seem to be speaking private languages only they can understand: here is a Theosophist, there is a Shaker, and over there are some horrible occult tarot drawings by Aleister Crowley, the satanist once described as the most evil man in the world... What unites this vast rag-bag of sculptures, tantric blobs, errant modernists with esoteric beliefs, and outsiders who fill drawing after drawing with lurching interior worlds, is a sense that everyone here is trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. Much of the time, they just add to it."



Starting with the Central Pavilion (previously called the "Padiglione Italia"), Vincenzo Latronico
writes in Art Agenda that "one of the Giardini’s most delicate rooms, for instance, displayed French Surrealist Roger Caillois’s collection of over a hundred rare geodes—their flamboyantly colored geometrical patterns and crystalline structures arranged in progressions, suggesting both a museum of natural history and the visionary maps of an alien landscape."


Vincenzo Latronico also highlights another central piece: Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Plötzlich diese Übersicht (1981–), "a collection of over a hundred small clay sculptures offering a depiction of the world through an arbitrary selection of significant minor events. From Einstein’s parents staged at the moment after the conception of their son, to Jacques Lacan first seeing himself in a mirror at age two; from a group of potatoes (asking how they ever got to Europe) to Jagger and Jones going home satisfied after writing “I can’t get no satisfaction” it is an ironic and yet oddly sensitive encyclopedia of banal mysteries and everyday epiphanies. The display, however, is particularly significant. In 2008, when Gioni showed the piece in a Fischli and Weiss retrospective he curated in Milan, he arranged the sculptures’ individual plinths in a linear sequence of groups, suggesting both an intrinsic order and a path the viewer could follow to obtain a complete experience of the work. In the Biennale, however, these are scattered around the room, giving the labyrinthine feeling of a mass of knowledge that could never be fully apprehended."


Another absorbing piece in the Central Pavilion is Kohei Yoshiyuki series of black-and-white infrared film photographs “The Park” (1971–1979) in which the artist photographed unaware couples having sex in parks at night. An interesting piece of context is that the pictures where originally presented in a dark gallery, offering the possibility of recreating the gloom depicted and making viewers complicit in the act.



Writing about this years's Golden Lion awardees, Amy Sherlock points out that music features heavily in the encyclopedic video Grosse Fatigue (2013) by French artist Camille Henrot in which "computer windows showing photographs, video clips and morphing Wikipedia pages flicker and accumulate to a pulsing baseline whose steady tempo links a primitive, cardiac rhythm with the heady erotic charge of the dancefloor."



"Tino Seghal picked up a Golden Lion as best participant in the main pavilion for his piece in which performers sit on the floor, beatboxing, singing and humming in a shifting melody of voice and rhythm."



Also in the Central Pavilion, Italian Marisa Merz and Austrian Maria Lassnig, Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement of the 55th International Art Exhibition, share room 24. See video of the award cerimony. [More photos of Marisa Merz via Contemporary Art Daily.]

In the above-mentioned interview with Bonami, Gioni described that "a few artists in the show will use theatrical stagings or, simply, live actors. But I think of these less as performances than as living sculptures. Tino Sehgal is making a new piece, comprising a mise-en-scène with other works in the main pavilion. It’s on a smaller scale than his most recent works, but it is going to be quite intense. (...) John Bock is creating an installation that will include actors speaking in imaginary languages and what he calls a “house of maggots."

Sam Thorne: "The Arsenale – the stronger half of the exhibition, I think – is episodic, even insistently narrativizing in its form. It tracks a kind of evolutionary process. The beginning, for example, is pointedly about beginnings of different kinds – Stefan Bertalan’s drawings of the life cycle of a sunflower or the whole of R. Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis. Indeed, the refrain of a great new film by Camille Henrot is ‘In the beginning…’ These early stages are also filled with animals and evocations of the natural world: Eliot Porter’s exquisite 1950s photos of birds in flight, Christopher Williams’ forensic photos of Harvard’s collection of glass flowers (1989)."   




It would seem that Gwangju's "unauthorized, partial reconstruction and unannounced tribute" of Mike Kelley's 1993 'The Uncanny' exhibition is in Venice echoed with the invitation extended to Cindy Sherman, who curated an excellent show-within-a-show in the Arsenale (Room 10). Sam Thorne describes it as a space with "figures of all shapes and sizes: signature pieces by Charles Ray, Duane Hanson and George Condo, some slightly more surprising inclusions like John Outterbridge and Jimmie Durham, through to Haitian vodou flags and even Sherman’s personal collection of photo albums. It’s quite a coup."    

54th Biennale di Venezia
4 June–27 November 2011

Much has already been written about this year's biennale which officially opened last Saturday, 4 June (professional previews 1–3 June). We have selected some excerpts of reviews that have appeared so far to accompany our photo-tours. We'll begin with the main exhibition 'ILLUMInations / ILLUMInazioni' curated by Bice Curiger at the Padiglione Centrale in the Giardini and at the Arsenale.

On the inclusion of three Tintoretto paintings in the Padiglione Centrale, Giardini:
Adam Kleinman, “ILLUMInazioni – ILLUMInations”, Art-Agenda, 5 June 2011: At first reading, it seems that we might be in for a show on the artistic play of light and shadow. (…) Normally the suffix –tion alerts the reader that some process has affected the host word it is tagged to, i.e., illumination is the condition of being lit. But at the Biennale, curator Bice Curiger instead turns a homophonic pun by tying –nations to nations, as in states, in the exhibition literature. (...) "Why they [three Tintoretto's paintings 'The Last Supper' (1592–1594), 'The Stealing of the Body of St. Mark' (1562–1566), and 'The Creation of the Animals', (ca. 1550)] were there, exactly, is a bit hard to ascertain, especially since all three of these paintings have been on view to the public in Venice for some time now." (…) In addition, the ahistorical juxtaposition of trusting the work in the center of a contemporary exhibition could blur some notion of antiquarian historicism."
Adrian Searle, 'The Venice Biennale's balance of power', The Guardian, 6 June 2011: (…) Shuttling the canvases across Venice from the Accademia and the church of St Giorgio Maggiore to the Giardini was the perilous bit. But they don't belong here, and add nothing but a frisson of High Art, an intimation of the certainties of the past. In the climate-controlled half-light, they just look big, excessive and out of place.
On Maurizio Cattelan's 'Others' (2011) a re-creation of his 1997 piece 'Turisti' (also presented in the Biennale) with 200 stuffed pigeons and pigeon shit on the floor – also by Adrian Searle: Excess in one way or another marks this biennale more than most. Cattelan's pigeons are everywhere in the central pavilion. He had them here before, in 1997, but they have bred. It's a running gag. [this time 2,000 stuffed pigeons are placed in every room's roof except in Gabriel Kuri's space].

On the German, the Swiss and the Polish pavilions:
Adrian Searle, 'The Venice Biennale's balance of power', The Guardian, 6 June 2011.
(…) Schlingensief was still planning his work when he died, and the final show is an over-the-top mixture of theatre sets and artistic works, film and documentation from his project to build a school and opera house in Burkina Faso. The whole thing is a mock-cathedral of disquiet and rage, loud with recorded voices, fragments of filmed performances and archival footage, copies of Joseph Beuys drawings and diagrams – as well as x-ray images of Schlingensief's own ravaged lungs. I felt hectored. An extraordinary man though Schlingensief undoubtedly was – as much a social critic as an artist – at what point does the artist's work end and curatorial surmise begin?
Germany seemed excessive, but Thomas Hirschhorn filled the Swiss pavilion with a wonderland of gaffer-tape, cardboard and Bacofoil, bevvies of Barbie dolls and other uncountable props. It's great, in a rackety Doctor-Who-set way, but one might say that Hirschhorn is doing what he always does. (This was also Mike Nelson's problem, as I wrote last week.) – Great photos of the pavilion here by Contemporary Art Daily.
(…) More pointed and focused was Israeli-Dutch artist Yael Bartana trilogy of films '... And Europe Will Be Stunned', in the Polish pavilion. This felt right. Bartana's idea is a call for over three million Jews to return to Poland, and her film follows the setting up of a Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. The whole thing is both real and unreal, heartfelt and parodic. Perhaps such a movement may now become a reality. Bartana's final film ends with the funeral of the assassinated leader of the movement; there is an implicit critique of Israeli politics, and of xenophobia and nationalism everywhere.
Adam Kleinman, “ILLUMInazioni – ILLUMInations”, Art-Agenda, 5 June 2011: (…) Yet, these cross-pollinations become even more laughable and glib in the exhibition ephemera as the curator rambles, in one of many examples, that the Tintoretto works somehow have a relation to Urs Fischer’s 'Untitled' (2011), in which a giant modeled souvenir candle of Giambologna’s 'Rape of the Sabine Women' (1574–82), is melted away because they both share some connection to “art history”, or likewise, that James Turrell’s sci-fi light “echoes” Tintoretto’s palette.
Adam Kleinman, “ILLUMInazioni – ILLUMInations”, Art-Agenda, 5 June 2011: (…) Within the context of the show’s half-formed pairing of light, or let’s say, vision & power, Amalia Pica’s Venn Diagram (Under the spotlight) (2011), is the only work that truly brought notoriety to this coupling, while also touching on ideas of togetherness, socio-political history and the like. Here two lights, each with their own colored gels, shot two beams onto a wall in the Central Pavilion. (…) one beam produced a red circle of light on the wall, and the other a blue light completed by a slight overlap between the two. Underneath these blinkers was a handwritten wall caption on an irrational prohibition by the dictatorship of Argentina in the 1970s. This censorship banned Venn diagrams (…) due to the subversive implications of these models of heterogeneity. As such, these fundamental pedagogical devices were removed from primary school textbooks and overt public usage. (…) Blended in the center of the red and blue surveying alarms was a bright, clear spotlight, which pointed to a need to watch all political and nationalistic colorings.
On the overall focus, the four 'para-pavilions' and, again, the inclusion of Tintoretto:



Article by Georgina Adam and Jane Morris, 'First impressions of “Illuminazioni” exhibition at Venice Biennale. Elegant, intelligent and well paced, but its curator Bice Curiger takes few risks', 3 Jun 2011, The Art Newspaper (web only): (…) Curiger has organised a show that despite its conceptual underpinnings also focuses on the classic themes of form, composition and materials. (…) The critical reaction generally favoured Curiger’s other innovation: the creation of four “para-pavilions”, in which Franz West, Song Dong, Monika Sosnowska and Oscar Tuazon were invited to create individual spaces that could also house works by other artists. West is showing a “reproduction” of his kitchen in Vienna with works that usually hang there by his artist friends. The works are displayed on the outside of the structure. Inside is projected Dream Villa, a work by Dayanita Singh. (…) Ossian Ward, the art critic and art editor of London’s Time Out magazine, said: “The Arsenale is the stronger of the two venues, but overall 'Illuminazioni' fails to take any real risks. Besides, that is, the parachuting of three Tintorettos into its midst, which neither steal nor cement the show.”On the Italian Pavilion, “L'Arte non è Cosa Nostra” in the Arsenale curated by Italian polemicist, politician and art historian Vittorio Sgarbi:

Cristina Ruiz, 'Italian Pavilion: Vittorio Sgarbi’s sprawling, sexed-up show', The Art Newspaper, 3 June 2011: (…) When he announced his decision to include 200 artists selected by 200 intellectuals, the pundits said it couldn't be done. In fact, Scarbi has displayed the 200 he said he would, and then added another 60 for good measure. (…) The resulting display has the sprawling randomness of a flea market. There are works featuring sex, religion, violence, nudity, as well as a giant pomegranate and a polar bear.

Adrian Searle, 'The Venice Biennale's balance of power', The Guardian, 6 June 2011: (…) Sgarbi, a maverick critic and TV personality who hates most contemporary art, has invited leading Italian writers and intellectuals, Dario Fo and Giorgio Agamben among them, to select the works. Boorishly provocative, the resulting show is full of horrible, kitschy things, appallingly installed; with its cliched sentiments and rubbishy populism, it is like a tour of Silvio Berlusconi's brain.
Roberta Smith, 'Venice Biennale: The Enormity of the Beast', The New York Times, 2 June 2011: (…) A new and historic Biennale low is reached in the vast Italian Pavilion where Vittorio Sgarbi, an Italian art historian, television personality and former under-secretary of culture, has overseen a ludicrously dense installation of work by some 260 Italian artists, almost all of it unredeemable still-born schlock. Bristling with an unbelievably venomous hatred of art, the exhibition would be a national scandal, if Italy weren’t already plagued by so many.


Jerry Saltz, 'The Ugly American', Artnet.com: “This makes me embarrassed to be an American,” the mega-curator of an extremely well-known U.S. art museum groaned to me. (…) Artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla have placed a 60-ton army tank. It’s a real one, shipped from England at who knows what expense, turned upside-fucking-down, turret and gun barrel on the ground, steel treads to the sky. Atop this warlord wedding cake, they’ve installed a treadmill where a world-class runner works out for 15 minutes of every hour. It’s the health club from Hell, Afghanistan in Venice, and it makes a humongous racket that can be heard all around the Giardini. I looked back at the curator and said, “I think being embarrassed to be an American is partly what this is about.”

Adrian Searle, 'The Venice Biennale's balance of power', The Guardian, 6 June 2011: America, of course, has been flexing its muscles and telling the world to screw itself for years. I heard that Obama personally approved the US pavilion's show Gloria, by Jennifer Allora and Cuban-born Guillermo Calzadilla. Their work really depends on the Olympic athletes who run on their tank-track-powered running machine, and who perform amazing gymnastics on American Airlines first class seats. They leap, fling themselves about, defying both gravity and the imaginary confinement of air travel, slumped on the beds. Extraordinary rendition was never like this. Was this all about American power and choreographed, muscle-bound might? Allora and Calzadilla pirouette on the line between politics and entertainment. The runners go nowhere, and the upside-down tank looks impotent and vulnerable, though it makes a lot of noise – a roaring excess. (video on the US Pavilion, UK Pavilion, Swiss Pavilion, Tintoretto and Maurizio Cattelan at the Central Pavilion, Urs Fischer at the Arsenal)

Carol Vogel, 'Venice Biennale: Money Talks, Make That Sings', The New York Times, 3 June 2011: (…) There is only one A.T.M. machine in the whole of the Giardini, the gardens at the tip of the city that is home to the national pavilions. It’s in a space of its own at the back of the American pavilion. But this is no run-of-the-mill A.T.M. The brainchild of the artist duo Allora & Calzadilla, it is a pipe organ with an A.T.M. embedded in its belly that is computer-programmed to play a tune when a person puts in their pin number. (…) During the first three days of the Biennale’s V.I.P. preview earlier this week, more than 100,000 euros were withdrawn from the machine. That amount, Lisa Freiman, commissioner of the pavilion said, is three or four times the normal activity of an A.T.M. in Italy, according to BNL, the bank that operates it. When it gets low on cash, gun-toting guards can be seen coming to replenish it.

Roberta Smith, 'Venice Biennale: An Installation Art Contest', 1 June 2011: At that pavilion [Czech Republic], a little-known artist named Dominik Lang, barely 30 years old, has mounted a strangely affecting time-capsule-like installation featuring a great deal of generic postwar figurative sculpture by his father, Jiri Lang (1927-1996), who stopped making art years before his son was born. It serves as a sobering reminder of the obscurity that awaits most of the art produced at any given point in time, as well as the ability of art objects, being objects, to wait out different phases of neglect.


Rachel Withers, 'Mike Nelson at the Venice Biennale', The Guardian, 3 June 2011: Nelson's concept for Venice is to test out ideas of repetition and duplication on a giant scale. He tells me he's going to "build a biennial within another biennial" by reconstructing his 2003 Istanbul piece. But he's not stopping there. The Istanbul work was housed in a remarkable building: the Büyük Valide Han, a vast, once-palatial 17th-century travellers' inn that survived, in 2003 at least, as a crumbling warren of artisans' workshops. (…) His goal, he insists, is not to produce a replica of the Han but to realise a memory of it, in all its cobbled-together confusion and curious beauty. (…) "Making the pavilion disappear" means three months of intense work for the artist and his small team of technicians. In the present age of artistic fabrication and delegation, this hands-on approach is relatively uncommon.

On the Spanish Pavilion, 'The Inadequate / Lo inadecuado / L'Inadeguato' a project by Dora García:


Javier Hontoria, 'Dora García, inadecuadamente oportuna', 31/05/2011: Tras varias ediciones frustradas, el pabellón español de la Bienal de Venecia alberga a partir de hoy un proyecto de altura, acorde con las exigencias y expectativas de la cita que mayor visibilidad concentra en el calendario del arte contemporáneo internacional. (…) La artista vallisoletana presenta desde hoy en el pabellón español de los Giardini venecianos un proyecto titulado Lo Inadecuado. Es un concepto que implica, como le dijo a Paula Achiaga en una reciente entrevista “un sentimiento de malestar, de desajuste, de torpeza”. (…) El proyecto que ahora presenta en Venecia es también inadecuado en su forma. Esta no es una exposición al uso. Aunque tiene su emplazamiento en el interior del pabellón español de los Giardini, no está pensado para ser instalado en un lugar sino para que se extienda en el tiempo. (…) Diseminados en el interior del pabellón vemos diversos elementos que no constituyen obras de arte en sí mismas sino apoyos, atrezzo para situaciones que tienen su curso a lo largo de la Bienal. (…) Es un proyecto, digámoslo sin paliativos, de una enorme complejidad pero en el que la artista se reconoce plenamente. Toda su obra, toda su trayectoria, toda inquietud se concentran en estos meses de Bienal. La necesidad de empujar los límites de todo aquello a lo que se enfrenta es visible en cada situación. Lo inadecuado lo es a todos los niveles, formal, conceptual. (…) Durante la Bienal se sucederán las situaciones en forma de performance, charlas y encuentros en los que participan diferentes actores, fundamentalmente italianos, muchos de ellos profesionales del arte contemporáneo.

Ángela Molina, 'Dora García, entre un gato y un ratón', El País, 04 Junio 2011: "De repente entendí la no adecuación de la bienal y de su público como algo interesante. Decidí que mi intervención tendría que hacerse de espaldas al público, en un espacio de precariedad. No se tocan las paredes del pabellón, ni apareceré como autora del proyecto. Se trata de prescindir de la platea, pasar por allí sin mancharse. Tampoco es un proyecto colectivo, sino algo iniciado" (…) "El artista es algo incidental que cede su voz a los marginados. Trato de investigar la idea de exclusión, el autismo, lo que no se entiende o no tiene sentido."
Catalonia and the Balearic Islands also had a pavilion at the Magazzini del Sale, in Dorsoduro, with new works by Mabel Palacín:
Natàlia Farré, 'Mabel Palacín revisa el papel de la imagen en la era digital', El Periódico, 2 Junio: [180º] El propio título de la obra ya remite al séptimo arte, puesto que la regla de los 180º es aquella que asegura que la relación entre imagen y espectador es la correcta, es decir, que la cámara siempre esta en el mismo lado de un eje ficticio para no desconcertar al público. Y lo que hace Palacín es evidenciar que en un mundo en el que cada día se cuelgan 100 millones de fotos en Facebook y se visiona el equivalente a 150 siglos de vídeos en Youtube, el estatus de la imagen ha cambiado y las normas se han roto. «No hay diferencia entre emisario y receptor», apunta Torres. Y añade: «La imagen ha pasado a calificar la realidad». Pero aún hay más: fotografía y vídeo confluyen y se confunden. «Todo es lo mismo» – Better images here and a video tour of the exhibition.



On the 54th Venice Biennale awards announced 4 June, Artforum.com: "The Golden Lion for best national participation went to Germany, represented this year by the artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died last August. The Golden Lion for best artist went to Christian Marclay for his piece The Clock, 2010, on display at the Arsenale, while the Silver Lion for a promising young artist went to Haroon Mirza. The jury—comprising Hassan Khan (Egypt), Carol Yinghua Lu (China), Letizia Ragaglia (Italy), Christine Macel (France), and John Waters—also assigned two special mentions, one to the Lithuanian pavilion, which was represented by Darius Miksys, and one to Klara Lidén’s work Untitled (Trashcan), 2011, on display in the Arsenale. Additionally, according to Curiger’s proposal, the artists Sturtevant and Franz West were awarded Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement."In case you are thirsty for more, here other recommended sources to read/see: for the next two weeks Roberta Smith will discuss one of the 'pieces that stuck with her for good or for bad' on the The New York Time's under the title 'Everyone's a Critic' - you can contribute with your impressions writing 6 words; sweet storytelling NYTimes blog with illustrations by Christoph Niemann, or the ever useful and always growing Center for the Aesthetic Revolution blog by cultural agent, independent curator, exhibition organizer, amateur researcher, public editor, occasional writer, museum-art fairs-collections adviser, retired architect, and aesthetic dilettante Pablo León de la Barra.

And finally, before ending with full slideshows of the Biennale, an interesting article titled 'The Venice Effect' by Olav Velthuis (The Art Newspaper, 3 June 2011) to read on your way to Basel focusing on the dealers’ credo: “See it in Venice, buy it in Basel.”

Slideshow of the Giardini:


Slideshow of the Arsenale:

Slideshow of the Eventi Collaterali:


–

Some numbers on the 54th Venice Biennale:

• 83 artists
• 28 country pavilions in Giardini, used by the 30 official countries considered permanent participants.
• 89 participating countries this year(77 in the 2009 Biennale)
• 37 Collateral Events

2011 Venice Biennale director Bice Curiger, is an art historian, critic and curator. Her curatorial activity at Kunsthaus Zurich parallels her important work in the publishing sector. In 1984, she co-founded the prestigious art magazine “Parkett”, of which she is editor-in-chief. She has been publishing director of London Tate Gallery’s magazine “Tate etc” since 2004. She is the author of a number of publications on contemporary art, among which “The Collected Writings” (Lindinger+Schmid, Regensburg, 2002), “Looks and tenebrae” (Peter Blum Editions, New York and Zurich, 1983), and a monograph on Meret Oppenheim, “Spuren durchstandener Freiheit” (ABC Publisher, Zurich, 1982, English translation 1990, MIT Press, Boston).

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org

Last night, a fascinating conversation between Dora García and Isidoro Valcárcel Medina took place at ProjecteSD, Barcelona, coinciding with the opening of the exhibition Forever, which featured works by both artists as well as Joe Scanlan.
García led the dialogue which began around the concept of the over-excluded or the super-excluded artists in relation to Pierre Bal-Blanc's 2009 Secession exhibition and essay 'The Death of the Audience' (interview with the author here). Besides talking about this long-term interest of García around 'the marginal', the artists also discussed the role and sense of mission attributed to artists, censorship (and self-censorship), what it means to work ethically (or the ethics of work), the definition of quality and regret.

One of the highlights was this short exchange:

– Dora García: Do you identify with the idea of an artist without work?
– Isidoro Varcárcel Medina: Is that possible?
– DG: Well, there's a few examples in history...
– IVM: With or without a catalogue...?

Dora García (Valladolid, Spain, 1965) studied Fine Arts at the Universidad de Salamanca and was resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1989–1991). Recent projects and exhibitions include Kunsthalle Bern (2010), Index (Stockholm 2010) and Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, 2009). She participated amongst others at the Lyon Biennial 2009, the Sydney Biennial 2008, and Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007. Dora García will represent Spain at the upcoming Venice Biennial (2011) with her new project The Inadequate.

Isidoro Valcárcel Medina (Murcia, Spain, 1937) moved to Madrid at the age of nineteen to study Architecture and Fine Arts. From 1972 on, after taking part in the Encuentros de Pamplona on conceptual art, his work involved actions and works for public spaces. He is one of the leading Spanish Conceptualists, not only historically, but also as an artistic referent for a new generation of creators. Valcárcel Medina had a retrospective exhibition at the Tàpies Foundation in 2002, exhibitions at MACBA in 2006, and at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2009. In 2007 he received the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas and recently (2011) he was awarded in the first edition of the Premios Arte y Mecenazgo.

ProjecteSD
Passatge Mercader 8, Baixos 1
08008 Barcelona
T | F: + 34 93 488 1360
info@projectesd.com
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Tuesday to Saturday 11–19h

Following the demise of the photo sharing site Bubbleshare, we have transfered our blog albums with over 1,000 images to Flickr so that you can enjoy slideshows in a bigger format on our blog. Take a tour to this year Venice Biennial (see Arsenale, Giardini or the Collateral Events), the 2008 55th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh or through the Port of Rotterdam in our first site visit in May 2008. 33 further photo sets here.

Photo documentation of Latitudes' projects can still be found as usual on each of our projects pages under 'photo gallery' – see this and this or this galleries as examples.

We welcome your (sensible) comments!

Daniel Birnbaum's 'Making Worlds' felt less melancholic though still very much in keeping with his recently-curated '50 Moons of Saturn', the 2nd Turin Triennial (see post 10 November 2008). Both exhibitions shared several artists (Ulla von Brandenburg, Koo Jeong-A, Pietro Roccasalva, Spencer Finch, Ceal Floyer, Lara Favaretto, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Haegue Yang, Paul Chan, Tomás Saraceno, Wade Guyton, Keren Cytter and Rosa Barba), while Venice included several students (including Att Poomtangon) or professors (Simon Starling, Wolfgang Tillmans) from the Birnbaum-directed Staedelschule in Frankfurt, and the support of curator Jochen Volz in the artistic organisation (additional advice was provided by a team of 'correspondents': Savita Apte, Tom Eccles, Hu Fang and Maria Finders). In contrast with the 2007 biennial by Robert Storr it felt less painterly and more sculptural and with a notable lack of 'black boxes' with film and video work. 

Roma also commented on the challenges in presenting ongoing research and extensive archival materials in an attractive exhibition format – those who saw Pedro G. Romero's 'F.X. Archive: The Empty City' at the Fundació Tàpies in 2006 might remember a huge scaffolding structure filled with the buzz of printers, flashing TV monitors, wires and stacks of paper. Josep Bargalló (director of the Institut Ramon Llull) and Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira's speeches predictably praised the historical role of Catalunya as a center of debate, innovative cultural society and the pavilion's aim to make the take note of Catalan cultural production.

Why is it that in every such press conference the first question from the floor always related to the budget? In this case the exhibition's coffers total €500,000, plus a exceedingly generous €200,000 for the publication (in Catalan, Italian, Spanish and English) plus c. €5,000 for a website. The agreement with the city of Venice is that they could use the Magazzini del Sale #3 for no rental fee but, according to Bargalló, they would contribute towards the restauration of the spaces to the tune of €40,000, adding up to €745,000. On top of that are curatorial and artists fees, press & marketing, flights, accommodation, opening events, invitations, etc. A hearty budget.

More info: www.veneziacatalunya2009.cat

RELATED LINKS:
 
Click here to read the full list of participating artists in 'Fare Mondi/Making Worlds';
Here to read the 53rd Venice Biennale Press Release (dated 23 March 2009);
Here to read the full list of Eventi CollateraliHere to read about the Catalan project

[Images: Press conference and (right) Pavilion curator Valentín Roma. Photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org]

Haegue Yang's new exhibition at sala rekalde 'Symmetric Inequality' (18.12.08-19.04.09) "belongs to a group of installations the artist has been developing over the course of this year, focusing her interest on investigating new possibilities for parallel crossings between abstraction and narration. Together with Kunstverein (Hamburg), Cubitt (London), the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), Portikus (Frankfurt) and REDCAT (Los Angeles), sala rekalde now contributes to the closure of a serial project that has taken the medium of portraiture as the point of departure for its own articulation." (from e-flux 18.12.08).

Below an excerpt from the catalogue essay by Latitudes' Max Andrews "Towards Haegue Yang's 'Blind Rooms'", which will be included in the forthcoming publication (out Spring 2009) followed by a video of the installation:

"Yang has developed a finely-tuned articulation of space through deft assemblage that has encompassed mirrors, multifarious electric lamps, scent atomizers, infrared motion detectors, heat sources and Venetian blinds. Variously sensory and sensible (i.e. readily percieved), such devices are not necessarily socially meaningful in themselves, yet they allow an interactive atmospherics that suggest zones of indeterminate necessities – part domestic interiors, part private theatres – and “localized effects” akin to political action."
As the Arts Council Korea announced on the 23 December Eungie Joo, Director & Curator of Public Programs at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, recently appointed commissioner of the Korea Pavilion at the forthcoming Venice Biennale has invited Yang to represent Korea at the 53rd International Venice Biennale. Joo is the first non-Korean national commissioner for the Korean Pavilion.


Haegue Yang was featured in an interview by Doryun Chong in the Summer 2007 issue, which Latitudes guest edited, of UOVO/14 titled 'Ecology, Luxury and Degradation' (see inside the issue here).

HAEGUE YANG
'Symmetric Inequality'
18 December 2008 - 19 April 2009sala rekalde
Alameda de Recalde 30
48009 Bilbao, Spain
www.salarekalde.bizkaia.net