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
www.ilmondomagico2017.it
http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/index.html
“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
www.nzatvenice.com
http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/index.html
Lisa Reihana
The New Zealand Pavilion
Lisa Reihana: Emissaries
Michele Lamy
Photo courtesy – The Pavilion of Ireland
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
https://www.facebook.com/IrelandVenice2017/
http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/index.html
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.comCurator - 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 Casadioand Raffaela Cortese
