LUCAS SAMARAS

LUCAS SAMARAS REPRESENTS GREECE AT THE 53RD VENICE BIENNALE

Curated by Matthew Higgs, Lucas Samaras will present the multi-installation “PARAXENA” in the Greek Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale at the 53rd International Art Exhibition in Venice.

Matthew Higgs explains:

“PARAXENA” brings together three recent series of photographic and video works produced between 2005 and 2009, juxtaposed with a discrete group of sculptural works from the mid 1960s. ‘PARAXENA’ sets up a conversation across four decades of Lucas Samaras’ practice, establishing a historical context for the recent departures in his work.
Upon entering the pavilion the viewer will be confronted by an image of themselves, reflected in the mirrored sculpture ‘Doorway’ (1966-2007): a scenario that initiates a narrative that runs throughout ‘PARAXENA’, where the act of being observed and the activity of observing are central concerns.
Samaras will debut new photographic works from the ‘Nexus’ series alongside images from the recent ‘Chairs’ series (2008) and the ‘iMovie’ video works (2005.) The ‘Chairs’ and ‘Nexus’ series originate in digital images taken during the artist’s walks through New York City. Seen together the images suggest a kind-of hallucinatory urbanism. The ‘iMovie’ films take this sense of ‘strangeness’ into the artist’s domestic space, recording Samaras’ everyday habits and routines. These recent works will be shown alongside the video installation ‘Ecdysiast and Viewers’ (2006), in which Samaras filmed the reactions of twenty four friends and colleagues (including artists Chuck Close and Jasper Johns) whilst they watched a video self-portrait in which Samaras lays himself bare for the camera. The frank self-portrayal in ‘Ecdysiast’ is echoed in a group of sculptures from the ‘Jewels’ series of the mid 1960s: fragile jewel-encrusted aluminum foil sculptures which represent three extremities of the artist’s body: the head, the groin, and the feet, creating a form of ‘incomplete’ self-portraiture”.

For more information on “PARAXENA” and the Greek Pavilion in Venice, as well as high resolution visuals and installation pictures please, refer to www.paraxenavenice.gr

Αρχική Σελίδα

Romanian Pavilion

The Seductiveness of the Interval
Romanian Pavilion – 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Artists: Ştefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu, Ciprian Mureşan
Commissioner: Monica Morariu
Curator: Alina Şerban
Exhibition design: studioBASAR -Alex Axinte & Cristi Borcan

In the period 7 June – 22 November 2009, the 53rd Venice Art Biennale will unfold, under the generic heading Making Worlds. The Seductiveness of the Interval, the project that will represent Romania this year at the Venice Art Biennale, was selected following the competition organised by the Ministry of Culture, Religions and National Heritage in late January.

Andrea Faciu - EXUBERANTIA suspended, 2009
Mixed –media installation (irrigation system, plants, audio system)
Variable dimensions
Drawings and preparatory sketches
Sound installation in collaboration with Guillaume Blondeau
Courtesy of the artist

The winning team, made up of artists Ştefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu, Ciprian Mureşan, curator Alina Şerban, and architects Alex Axinte and Cristi Borcan (studio BASAR), offers a reflection on the exhibition as a semantically mobile autonomous spatial and temporal structure, which suspends quotidian experience in order to enclose spectators within a temporal and spatial interval with which they become eventually complicit.
Directing a constrictive exhibition route, marked by stage-set and mise-en-scène elements, artists Ştefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu and Ciprian Mureşan pursue an unfolding of the viewing experience that reaches a crescendo, establishing a new relationship between objects and space, between the viewer’s time and the exhibition time. The artists’ projects (subjectively) juxtapose events, real-life situations, and stories, whose narrative and discursive structure recalls the world of theatre, film and literature.
Delimiting a reality that is theatrical and temporal par excellence, The Seductiveness of the Interval sets out to draw the subject into a new reality, not just as an observer, inviting him to identify a network of motivations, causal links between multiple landscapes, sequences and transitions presented within the exhibition, in order ultimately to ensure the coherence of the whole.

Romanian Pavilion 53rd International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia

Luiz Braga e Delson Uchôa

Luiz Braga e Delson Uchôa são os artistas convidados para participar da mostra

A Fundação Bienal de São Paulo tem o prazer de anunciar Ivo Mesquita, curador chefe da 28ª Bienal de São Paulo, como curador da representação brasileira na 53ª Bienal de Veneza.
Desde 1993, a Fundação Bienal de São Paulo é responsável pela organização e curadoria do pavilhão brasileiro na Bienal de Veneza, que, instituído em 1964, foi um dos últimos a ser construídos no espaço dos Giardini.

www.luizbraga.fot.br
www.delsonuchoa.com
www.bienalsaopaulo.org.br

Krzysztof Wodiczko - Guests

Krzysztof Wodiczko. Guests
53rd International Art Exhibition in Venice Polish Pavilion
Pavilion Commissioner Agnieszka Morawińska
Curator of the Exhibition Bożena Czubak
Assistant Commisioner Małgorzata Osińska

The protagonists of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s projection in the Polish Pavilion at the 53rd International Art Exhibition in Venice are immigrants, people who, not being ‘at home’, remain ‘eternal guests’. ‘Strangers’, ‘others’ are key notions in Wodiczko’s artistic practice, be it in the projections, the V ehicles, or the technologically advanced Instruments that enable those who, deprived of rights, remain mute, invisible and nameless to communicate, gain a voice, make a presence in public space.
The projection, created specially for the Biennale, transforms the space of the Polish Pavilion into a place where the viewers watch scenes taking place seemingly outside, behind an illusion of windows, their projection on the pavilion’s windowless walls. The individual projections, the images of windows projected onto the pavilion’s architecture, open its interior to virtual, but at the same time real, scenes showing immigrants washing windows, taking a rest, talking, waiting for work, exchanging remarks about their tough existential situation, unemployment, problems getting their stay legalised. The slight blurriness of the images reduces the legibility of the scenes taking place behind milky glass. Wodiczko plays with the visibility of immigrants, people who are ‘within arm’s reach’ and, at the same time, ‘on the other side’, referring us to their ambivalent status, their social invisibility. Both sides experience an inability to overcome the gap separating them. The Biennale visitors are ‘guests’ here too, of which they are reminded by the images of immigrants trying, from time to time, to peek inside.
The project, dealing with the multicultural problematique of alterity, concerns one of the most burning issues of the contemporary world, globally as well as in the EU, where a discourse of acceptance and legalisation is accompanied by often restrictive immigration policies. The author worked with immigrants based in Poland and Italy, but coming from different countries of the world such as Chechnya, Ukraine, Vietnam, Romania, Sri Lanka, Libya, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Morocco.
In his Venice project, Wodiczko combines the unique experience of his earlier indoor projections, staged in galleries or museums, which opened the otherwise isolated art world to the outside world, with a performative nature of his outdoor projections which allowed participants to animate public buildings with images of their faces or hands and the sounds of their voices.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, Guests | 53rd International Exhibition of Art in Venice

Krzysztof Wodiczko - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Optica Project

"Una conciencia implica la formación de una cultura. Y ésta se da mediante un proceso. Si lo deseamos, el videoarte puede consolidarse como una de las manifestaciones artísticas más importantes de nuestros días. Tan sólo es necesaria la voluntad de unos cientos de personas en todo el mundo.

El próximo 22 de junio celebraremos el "Día Internacional del Videoarte". Se trata de una iniciativa de Optica Festival. Desde aquí, te invitamos a participar de forma individual o en grupo, allí donde te encuentres."

Optica Project [The Visual Way of Life]

EGYPTIAN PAVILION

EGYPTIAN PAVILION
Adel El Siwi / Ahmed Askalany

Through this work, two different generations attempt to dialogue both with the creativity of their old culture, and with the experiences accumulated in and from it, which never stop to set forth and appear alive through daily but surprising images.

The discovery that comes out is that the biggest achievements can be measured on the availability of tearing a moment of possible joy, out of the logic and the means of development of it, and out of the destiny of a tiring daily struggle.
The painting from Adel El Siwi insists on the story, which is expressed by the solemn verticality of the art piece, but crossed by small anecdotes that suggest possible adventures, paths of pilgrimage towards non sacred territories. The exceptionally monumental art piece, with its heroic aspect hosts its antagonist provoking and mining it from the inside, although not destroying it. At its side the circle, which underlines the geometries of the work of art, is accentuating the presence of the painting by itself concentrated on its invisible centre and symbolically distant from the real context.
Ahmed Askalany’s sculpture present itself as an empty appearance, which isn’t heavy because of its mass but recalls only its fragility. The sculpture is produced with simple techniques, similar to a little girl’s hair weaving, with natural coloured palm leaves, and because of that it is captivating the essential gestures and shapes of a humanity cleared from its aggressiveness and its dark side. Askalany works on the subtle ridge that divides the handwork from the handcraft tradition, passed thought times, and the contemporary language to get to a synthesis which is far both from folklore and exoticism that from a declaration of identity.


Adel El Siwi was born in Beheira in Egypt in 1952. After a MA in psychiatry he decided to abandon medicine to dedicate fully to painting. He spends ten years living in Italy, and returns to Egypt where he is currently lives and works.
He participated to several international exhibitions like “Memories and Modernity” at the 1997’s Venice Biennale; “Italia-Arabia” at the Chelsea Art Museum, N.Y:; “Transafrican Art” at the Orlando Museum of Modern Art, “World into Art” at the British Museum in London, and at the Cairo Biennale in 2008.
Ahmed Askalany was born in Qena, Egypt in 1979. He began is artistic carrier as autodidact after his arrival in Cairo, where he develops a personal style based on poor materials. He exposes regularly in Egypt and abroad.

Pavilion of Serbia at the 53rd International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia

Zoran Todorović: WARMTH
and
Katarina Zdjelar: BUT IF YOU TAKE MY VOICE, WHAT WILL BE LEFT TO ME?

Commissioner and Curator: Branislav Dimitrijević, Assistant Commissioner: Jagoda Stamenković, Advisory Board: Branislav Dimitrijević, Zoran Erić, Milica Petronijević, Milica Tomić, Stevan Vuković,
Project co-ordinators: Maja Gavrić, Vesna Milić, Architectural Advisor: Milica Topalović, Catalogues editors: Anke Bangma (“But if you take my voice what will be left to me?”), Stevan Vuković (“Warmth”) Graphic Design: Gérard Konings, Borut Vild, Production and organization: Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia

Pavilion of Serbia at the 53rd International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia is open to become a space of dialogue between two art projects, thus far unrelated yet now jointly presented. Although they are artists of different generations, attitudes and philosophies, Zoran Todorović (Belgrade, 1965) and Katarina Zdjelar (Belgrade, 1979), share a common point in arguing that an artist is a free mediator within the space of social interaction, and that artistic subjectivity emerges only if situated in the frictions of a world constructed from social matter. They share determination to locate what is identified as contemporary art in the web consisting of social structures and individual resistances, yet they are taking this shared determination in different directions.

For his project Warmth, Todorović initiated systematic stockpiling of up to 2 tons of human hair. Hair was collected for months in hairdressing salons, but also in military barracks where hair-cutting is a norm of discipline, control or “social care”. The conditions in which this process is carried out in a closed system are thoroughly documented, and this bio-waste is reused as the material for curious looking blankets which are amassed and made available for exhibition, utilization, inspection or hypothetically a DNA test in which each participating/inscribed body could perhaps be identified.
Todorović always deals with modes of enacting bio-political control and explores the ways in which institutional spaces of control and punishment are inscribed in the body. He has been utilizing products/leftovers of the body as “raw-materials” for distressing counteractions. As in many of his previous Pavilion of Serbia at the 53rd International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia projects, Todorović explored his own scepticism towards ideas of social progress, emancipation and seemingly benevolent regulations, by questioning the norms of representation and participation; ethical and aesthetical standards.

On the other side, Katarina Zdjelar explores contrary processes of self-realization with all their paradoxes, promises and failures. As a foreign artist based in the Netherlands, she finds a way to situate experience of dislocation by investigating forms of regulated systems of communication and learning, rather than focus on the loss churned out by this dislocation. Language learning is of particular significance for her as this is a codified method of cultural integration not only involving a symbolic “rite of passage” of the uprooted individual, but also the corporeal affect shaping this “speaking body”.
Her videos are examining norms of establishing individual relations from trying (and failing) to pronounce an other’s name (There Is No Is, 2006), up to procedures of removing an accent in attempt to extract the ‘foreignness’ within a subject’s speech (Perfect Sound, 2009). She also turned to situations in which a group effort is made to recover or improve abilities which are not motivated by dominant values of success and competition but rather consider an unwanted surplus of inadequacy, insecurity and ineffectiveness (Everything Is Gonna Be, 2008 and A Girl, the Sun and an Airplane Airplane, 2007).

By juxtaposing two artistic positions, our intention is not to create a seamless space of cohesion and harmony. It is rather the opposite: to mark the contesting zones of contemporary art as artist-specific (as well as sitespecific)and to gain something out of this relation/confrontation. It may still be our intention to represent what we understand as major concerns, as both specific to Serbian society but also to the larger world-in-crisis. Yet, we also suggest a way of sharing certain opposing worldviews articulated by different artistic approaches: one which energetically and methodically acts out and overtly identifies with its own space of fatalism, and one which by aiming simultaneously to our empathy and critical distrust shapes its own space of engagement.
Two illustrated catalogues will be published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade to accompany the exhibition with the contributions by Anke Bangma, Jan Verwoert, Mladen Dolar, Katarina Zdjelar, Branimir Stojanović, Frans-Willem Korsten, Stevan Vuković, Jasmina Čubrilo, Melentie Pandilovski and Alexandar Zistakis.

Muzej savremene umetnosti Beograd

http://www.zorantodorovic.com
http://katarinazdjelar.wordpress.com

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