Image: Venice Biennale. Photo by Lugermad
La Biennale kicks off in Venice next week and this is no ordinary edition. Its 120 year anniversary and other transcendent ones, such as WWI and WWII, have laid the foundation for a unique and ambitious theme: the future of the world in 120 years of history. An initiative to reassess the relationship between art, the artists and the current state of affairs. Here are a few of the interesting concepts that we are looking forward to seeing come to life.
Image: © la Biennale di Venezia
This 56th International Art Exhibition has been designed by international writer and curator Okwui Enwezor, and it’s mission is to invite the world to reflect on the disconnect between how things are and how they appear to be. To bring forward this rather conceptual approach, there will be three different sub-themes: Liveness: On epic duration, Garden of Disorder; and Capital: A Live Reading.
Liveness: Epic duration
Enwezor is positioning All the World’s Futures as “a program of events that can be experienced at the intersection of liveness and display.” The whole exhibition will be considered q stage-set for changing narratives.
Image: 56TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION. Kutluğ Ataman, Sakıp Sabancı. © la Biennale di Venezia
Garden of Disorder
Taking place within the Giardini, the famed exhibition garden where artistic diplomacy has played an important role in history, this theme invites artists to create new work inspired by surroundings. The word garden has always been linked to the concept of paradise. As Enwezor explains, ”the Biennale Arte 2015 returns to the ancient ground of this ideal to explore the changes in the global environment, to read the Giardini with its ramshackle assemblage of pavilions as the ultimate site of a disordered world, of national conflicts, as well as territorial and geopolitical disfigurations.” Artists are invited to create sculptures, installations, films and performances in this icon deformed by society.
Image: 56TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION. Christian Boltanski – Animitas. © la Biennale di Venezia
Capital project
“Capital is the great drama of our age,” said Enwesor. “Today nothing looms larger in every sphere of experience, from the predations of the political economy to the rapacity of the financial industry. In All the World’s Futures, the aura, effects, affects, and spectres of Capital will be felt in one of the most ambitious explorations of this concept and term.” So why not start by reading the four volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital? Well why not. Over the 7 months of the Biennale, there will be a live reading that will evolve in different discussions and film screenings, and artists, professionals and the general public will be invited to participate.
Image: 56TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION. Adrian Piper – Everything Will Be Taken Away. © la Biennale di Venezia
Venice Biennale will take place in Venice from 9 May to 22 November. For more information visit http://www.labiennale.org
