Venice Biennale 2022 - part 2

The second day in Venice was the first day to visit the Biennale. As the opening time is at 11 am, we could see a parallel exhibition walking towards the Biennale. This exhibition is called "Remember Us" by the artist N'Dorah one of the founders of the F.R.O.M Foundation (Fantastic Republic of Motherland) and who works with garbage and hair as fetish materials. And within the line of the Biennale, as said before, the big question is: and in the end what will be left? The digital or the organic? The human body and the environment in constant transformation through technology is the basis of her poetics. The artist transforms the space of a commercial store into a gallery and invites the spectator to think about the search for immortality.

Then we went straight to the Arsenale and started our visit there, which certainly gave me a different perspective than if I had followed the normal suggested route and started at the Giardini. What jumps to the eye immediately is an appreciation of very handmade works, even tribal ones or ones that talk about decolonization. At the entrance you can see the large-format ceramics by Argentinian artist Gabriel Chaile, or the enormous sculpture representing a black woman by American Simone Leigh, which also occupies the entire American pavilion at the Giardini. You will also see a lot of embroidery, a lot of figurative painting, and a selection of artists from remote places, 180 of whom have never before exhibited internationally. A nice surprise is that, for the first time, the massive presence of women or artists without a defined gender is the majority. Which is revolutionary and reflects a choice by the curator to rethink the historical centralizing role of the white male in the visual arts.

Another very interesting aspect are the five "time capsules", historical sections and mini-exhibitions within the Biennale that bring together artworks, documents, and videos, starting in the 19th century and serve to tie together the central themes and reveal affinities between artistic methods and practices even if they are separated by different eras. The two inside the Arsenale are: A Leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a pot a box a container and Seduction of a Cyborg. The first one touches me immensely because it is an iconology about containers, which is directly connected to my artistic research and has a very feminine and ethereal delicacy in the works of Ruth Asawa and Maria Bartuszová. The starting point is the 1986 essay "The Carrier bag Theory of Fiction" by sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin, which connects the beginning of civilization not to the invention of weapons, but to objects and tools that serve to store, hold, and carry such as bags and hammocks, i.e. containers. Thus these containers function as spaces for the expression of life. The Seduction of a Cyborg, based on texts by philosopher Donna Haraway, uses the figure of the cyborg, organic and technological, human and non-human, in an unexpected way and starts from references such as documents, objects and artifacts from artists of the early twentieth century, from movements such as Dadaism, Futurism and Bauhaus that have already begun to explore the issues of technology, natural versus artificial. From then on the exhibition starts to get colder, more grim and uncomfortable, with the human being little by little replaced by robotic figures, animals, and gets post-apocalyptic tones with a huge garden, full of life. Brazil is represented at the Arsenale by Rosana Paulino, Solange Pessoa, Jaider Esbell and Luiz Roque.

At the exit of the exhibition we can visit some international pavilions, such as those of Argentina, Malta, Mexico and the Philippines. The enormous Italian pavilion, one of the largest, also explores the decadence of the industrial era as if we were walking through an abandoned factory. After so much information, we still went to an exhibition about the Metaverse that I confess not to have been very interested in.

Then we rested a bit at the hotel and in the afternoon we went to see Katherina Grosse's exhibition Apollo, Apollo at the Espace Louis Vuitton, much smaller than the one here in Paris, we tried to see Claire Tabouret's exhibition at Palazzo Cavani, but when we arrived it was already closed. But next door we managed to see Trees Grow from the Sky, by Rony Plesl, czech sculptor and designer who has an impressive work with glass, in the Santa Maria della Visitazione Church. Then we dropped dead, obviously with our feet in crumbs!

To be continued in the next post.

APOLLO, APOLLO
Calle del Ridotto 1353
April 23 – November 27, 2022
Organizing institution: Fondation Louis Vuitton
https://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/fr

Claire Tabouret: I am spacious, singing flesh
Palazzo Cavanis, Dorsoduro 920
April 23 – November 27, 2022
Organizing institution: FABA Fundación Almine Y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte
https://www.fabarte.org

Rony Plesl: Trees Grow from the Sky / Gli alberi crescono dal cielo
Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione, Fondamenta Zattere ai Gesuati
April 23 – November 27, 2022
Organizing institution: House of Art Ceske Budejovice
dumumenicb.cz/en/
ronypleslbiennale.com