Bienal de Arte de Venecia 2017, Exposición en Giardini, Italia

La 57a exposición internacional de arte, titulada Viva Arte Viva, comisariada por Christine Macel y organizada por Paolo Baratta, se llevó a cabo del 13 de mayo al 26 de noviembre de 2017. La Bienal se presenta como un lugar dedicado al diálogo abierto entre artistas, y entre artistas y el público. El tema de este año dedicado a celebrar y casi agradecer la existencia misma del arte y los artistas, cuyos mundos amplían nuestra perspectiva y el espacio de nuestra existencia.

La exposición se llevó a cabo en los pabellones históricos del Giardini, en el Arsenale y en el centro de la ciudad de Venecia, con la participación de 86 países y regiones. 23 Collateral Events, promovidos por instituciones sin ánimo de lucro nacionales e internacionales, presentarán sus exposiciones e iniciativas en Venecia durante la 57ª Exposición.

La Exposición Viva Arte Viva ofrece un recorrido que se desarrolla a lo largo de nueve capítulos o familias de artistas, comenzando con dos reinos introductorios en el Pabellón Central en el Giardini, seguidos de siete reinos más que se encuentran en el Arsenale y el Giardino delle Vergini. . Hay 120 artistas invitados de 51 países; 103 de ellos participan por primera vez.

En un mundo lleno de conflictos y conmociones, el arte da testimonio de la parte más preciosa de lo que nos hace humanos. El arte es el terreno último para la reflexión, la expresión individual, la libertad y para las cuestiones fundamentales. El arte es el último bastión, un jardín para cultivar más allá de las tendencias y los intereses personales. Se erige como una alternativa inequívoca al individualismo y la indiferencia.

Viva Arte Viva
Viva Arte Viva es una Exposición inspirada en el humanismo. Este tipo de humanismo no se centra en un ideal artístico a seguir ni se caracteriza por la celebración de la humanidad como seres que pueden dominar su entorno. En todo caso, este humanismo, a través del arte, celebra la capacidad de la humanidad para evitar ser dominada por los poderes que gobiernan los asuntos mundiales. En este tipo de humanismo, el acto artístico es contemporáneamente un acto de resistencia, de liberación y de generosidad.

Viva Arte Viva es una exclamación, un grito apasionado por el arte y el estado del artista. El papel, la voz y la responsabilidad del artista son más cruciales que nunca en el marco de los debates contemporáneos. Es en y a través de estas iniciativas individuales que toma forma el mundo del mañana, que aunque seguramente incierto, a menudo es mejor intuido por artistas que por otros.

Cada uno de los nueve capítulos o familias de artistas de la Exposición representa un Pabellón en sí mismo, o más bien un Trans-Pabellón ya que es transnacional por naturaleza pero refleja la organización histórica de la Bienal en pabellones, cuyo número no ha dejado de crecer desde entonces. finales de la década de 1990.

Viva Arte Viva también busca transmitir una energía positiva y prospectiva, que mientras se enfoca en los artistas jóvenes, redescubre a aquellos que fallecieron demasiado pronto o que aún son en gran parte desconocidos a pesar de la importancia de su trabajo.

Desde el «Pabellón de artistas y libros» hasta el «Pabellón del tiempo y el infinito», estos nueve episodios cuentan una historia que a menudo es discursiva y en ocasiones paradójica, con desvíos que reflejan las complejidades del mundo, una multiplicidad de enfoques y una amplia variedad. de prácticas. La Exposición pretende ser una experiencia, un movimiento extrovertido del yo al otro, hacia un espacio común más allá de las dimensiones definidas, y hacia la idea de un potencial neohumanismo.

A partir del Pabellón de Artistas y Libros, la Exposición revela su premisa, una dialéctica que involucra a toda la sociedad contemporánea, más allá del propio artista, y aborda la organización de la sociedad y sus valores. El arte y los artistas están en el corazón de la Exposición, que comienza examinando sus prácticas, la forma en que crean arte, a medio camino entre la ociosidad y la acción, el otium y la negociación.

La exposición en Giardini
La Exposición se desarrolla desde el Pabellón Central (Giardini) hasta el Arsenale e incluye a 86 participantes de todo el mundo. El sitio tradicional de las exposiciones de arte de La Biennale desde la primera edición en 1895. El Giardini ahora alberga 29 pabellones de países extranjeros, algunos de ellos diseñados por arquitectos famosos como el pabellón de Austria de Josef Hoffmann, el pabellón holandés de Gerrit Thomas Rietveld o el pabellón finlandés, un prefabricado con un plan trapezoidal diseñado por Alvar Aalto.

Como parte de la reorganización de la exposición de los lugares de La Biennale, en 2009 el histórico Pabellón Central de Giardini se convirtió en una estructura multifuncional y versátil de 3500 metros cuadrados, el centro de actividad permanente y punto de referencia para los otros pabellones de jardines. Alberga espacios interiores diseñados por artistas de renombre internacional como Massimo Bartolini (Área Educativa «Sala F»), Rirkrit Tiravanija (Librería) y Tobias Rehberger (Cafetería).

La transformación del Pabellón Central en los Jardines Multifuncionales se completó en 2011 con la reorganización de los espacios expositivos y el vestíbulo de entrada. A partir de entonces, el Pabellón Central podrá disfrutar de óptimas condiciones espaciales y microclimáticas para cada uno de los diferentes y numerosos destinos, incluyendo actividades educativas, talleres y proyectos especiales. Tras una parte importante del proyecto de recuperación, el Salón Central dotado de todos los servicios para la recepción del público, se convierte así en un punto de apoyo del Pabellón en forma de atrio monumental desde el que se accede a todas las nuevas áreas funcionales.

The Central Pavilion at the Giardini during Biennale 2017 hosts two trans-pavilions: the Pavilion of Artists and Books and the Pavilion of Joys and Fears.

Pavilion of Artists and Books
The Pavilion of Artists and Books opens with a section centered on the artists’ practice and how they «make art».

Dawn Kasper
Dawn Kasper, an American artist who literally moved her creative atelier from New York to the heart of the Central Pavilion. Kapser entertains visitors on site with musical performances and by showing her artistic life in balance between otium and negotium, Latin for idleness and activity.

Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson’s studio reflects on migration: migrants are the protagonists of the installation. They have been invited to create inside the pavilion — turned into an open workshop — three-dimensional visionary projects with a complex design.

Edi Rama
Albanian Edi Rama, former Minister of Culture and mayor of Tirana, shows his cadavre exquis on a wallpaper in reinforced nylon: Rama’s drawings are indecipherable fragmentary micro-representations of a world full of political references and personal memories.

Hassan Sharif
Hassan Sharif from United Arab Emirates, realised Supermarket: an incredible archive containing objects, finds, leftovers, objet trouvés, artworks, and prototypes part of Sharif’s artistic production of the last thirty years.

Abdullah Al Saadi
Abdullah Al Saadi, also from Arab Emirates, who shares with us, through his diaries, his reflections, meditations, drawings, tales, and encounters during his trips. The Al Saadi’s Diaries, collected in vintage tin boxes, are the result of the artist’s habit of writing every day, started in 1986 and still in progress, which was inspired by the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Jianyi Geng
Jianyi Geng works on books –his obsession- using them as canvas. With the watercolour technique they become at once colourful and very fragile artworks: for Geng books are the best life partners.

Raymond Hains
The Pavilion of Artists and Books ends with a space homage to French artist Raymond Hains. Hains expressed in his works a fierce criticism of art institutions, like the Biennale itself: the messenger of an idea of art free from predefined schemes and far form the rules of academies, Hains’s work stood out for its unconventional intellectual capacity and for the creation of provocative and ironic projects.

Pavilion of Joys and Fears
The Pavilion of Joys and Fears provides a journey into the relationship between the artist and his own existence.

Kiki Smith
In the universe of emotions and contradictions of existence, Kiki Smith works on the female figure realising paintings in fire-polished glass and silver leaves representing female artists in full size. Smith’s women, characterised by a refined erotic charge, are inserted in interior architecture overwriting lines and inanimate rigid shapes on body fluxes and auras of feminine holiness.

Marwan
Syrian artist Marwan builds a dialogue with the observer trough a series of evocative self-portraits, exterior expression of an inner torment, seizing all the human feelings, from laughter to pain.

Rachel Rose
Rachel Rose with the video installation Lake View, suggests a dream-like vision, realised with the cel animation and compositing technique, of a sub-urban world invaded by an arrogant anthropisation. The protagonist is a hybrid animal, half rabbit and half fox, which moves about in a series of scenes built by assembling textures taken from 19th century children’s books.

Luboš Plný
The object of the investigations by the Czech artist Luboš Plný is the human body: fascinated by the geography of the internal organs and the connections of the vascular system, Plný creates drawings that are abstract maps made up of optical overlaps and invasions of incongruous objects that fuse with the flesh.

Hajra Waheed
The fear and uncertainty of the voyage of migrants is at the centre of the exploration by Canadian artist Hajra Waheed. In A Short Film 1-321, using321 slides onto which she glued clippings from 1930s and 1940s postcards, she tells the story of a disappearance that left no trace and leaves us with an open ending

Highlights of National Pavilions in Giardini
29 National Pavilions located Central Pavilion showing part of the exhibition VIVA ARTE VIVA.

Swiss Pavilion
Central to this year’s exhibition at the Swiss Pavilion is an absence – that of the great Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. It’s a little-known fact that during his lifetime he refused to represent his native country by exhibiting at the Swiss Pavilion, that had been build by his brother Bruno in 1952. Living in Paris, Giacometti considered himself an international or transnational artist and rejected being monopolised by one nation. This late modernist, post-national utopian vision formed the starting point of this year’s exhibition Women of Venice.

Carole Bove takes Giacometti’s constellations of figures and late figurative work (Femmes de Venise) as a starting point for a new sculptural group taking over the pavilion’s courtyard and sculpture hall. The Swiss-American Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler present Flora, a new film installation focussing on Giacometti’s love affair with the American artist Flora Mayo, with whom he studied in Paris in the 1920s. The film allows a key figure from Giacometti’s early life.

German pavilion
The German pavilion was probably the most anticipated one of this year’s Biennale. Anne Imhof, this year’s representative for Germany, shot to popular acclaim after winning the Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2015 and presenting her three part opera Angst in Basel, Berlin and Montréal the following year.

In a sculptural setting designed specifically for the space and the occasion, including threatening Dobermans behind a fence, an elevated glass floor, a safety harness-equipped mezzanine and glass partitions as temporary walls. Anne Imhof and her team present Faust, both a five-hour production and a seven month scenario comprised of performative dynamics, sculptural installations, painterly touches, and rigorously choreographed visual axes and movements that encompass the entire pavilion.

Finland Pavilion
Artists Erkka Nissinen and Nathaniel Mellors, an installation with video and animatronic sculptures exploring themes such as nationalism, xenophobia, bureaucracy and intolerance by way of absurdist satire.

The work re-imagines Finnish society through the eyes of two messianic outside figures, Geb & Atum, who are being represented by talking animatronic puppets. They are engaged in a dialogue touching on subjects such as Finnish creation mythology, contemporary Finnish society and their vision for the future of Finland. The story presents Geb & Atum as terraforming higher beings who re-visit the Finland they created millions od years earlier, and who try to make sense of the culture that has developed in the meantime.

Belgian Pavilion
Dirk Braeckman’s photographs bring a stillness to today’s constant flow of images. Using analogue techniques, he has developed a visual language that focuses on viewing and reflects on the status of the image. Braeckman explores the boundaries of his medium, and challenges artistic conventions. The camera’s flash reflects off the surface of the subject, the texture of walls, curtains, carpets and posters. His images show anonymous subjects from his immediate surroundings, evoking an open story. The artist shows empty rooms in which time seems to stand still, elements of interchangeable interiors or human figures that stand only for presence, all separate from any specific identity, place, time or emotion.

Venice Biennale 2017
The 57th Venice Biennale was an international contemporary art exhibition held between May and November 2017. The Venice Biennale takes place biennially in Venice, Italy. Artistic director Christine Macel, the chief curator at the Centre Pompidou, curated its central exhibition, «Viva Arte Viva», as a series of interconnected pavilions designed to reflect art’s capacity for expanding humanism.

The curator also organized a project, «Unpacking My Library», based on a Walter Benjamin essay, to list artists’ favorite books. Macel was the first French director since 1995 and the fourth woman to direct the Biennale. A trend of presenting overlooked, rediscovered, or «emerging dead artists» was a theme of the 57th Biennale.

The Venice Biennale is an international art biennial exhibition held in Venice, Italy. Often described as «the Olympics of the art world», participation in the Biennale is a prestigious event for contemporary artists. The festival has become a constellation of shows: a central exhibition curated by that year’s artistic director, national pavilions hosted by individual nations, and independent exhibitions throughout Venice. The Biennale parent organization also hosts regular festivals in other arts: architecture, dance, film, music, and theater.

Outside of the central, international exhibition, individual nations produce their own shows, known as pavilions, as their national representation. Nations that own their pavilion buildings, such as the 30 housed on the Giardini, are responsible for their own upkeep and construction costs as well. Nations without dedicated buildings create pavilions in the Venice Arsenale and palazzos throughout the city.

La Biennale di Venezia was founded in 1895. Paolo Baratta has been its President since 2008, and before that from 1998 to 2001. La Biennale, who stands at the forefront of research and promotion of new contemporary art trends, organizes exhibitions, festivals and researches in all its specific sectors: Arts (1895), Architecture (1980), Cinema (1932), Dance (1999), Music (1930), and Theatre (1934). Its activities are documented at the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC) that recently has been completely renovated.

In all sectors there have been more research and production opportunities addressed to the younger generation of artists, directly in contact with renowned teachers; this has become more systematic and continuous through the international project Biennale College, now running in the Dance, Theatre, Music, and Cinema sections.