Venice Biennial

This paper focuses on the role of contemporary art in international relations and world politics. In IR, art is often examined within the framework of cultural diplomacy, country branding, and soft power, or approached as a site of resistance. We argue that the concept of heteronomy offers an alternative conceptual framework for analysing contemporary art in world politics. It highlights the interaction of various fields such as art, commerce, the state and media. We concretise this approach with an analysis of the Venice Biennale. We show that the Biennale is heteronomous in the sense of being an arena where actors from various fields struggle for power by accumulating different types of capital. We focus our analysis on the Russian national pavilion in 2011–2015 and show how the efforts of the country’s elite to legitimise its position are intertwined with the projects of the state, sponsors, artists, curators and art market actors.

The author excavates the histories of both the Taiwan and Hong Kong Pavilions and their struggle to establish a “national” identity without having official national status within the Venice Biennial.


(Yishu: Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art.  Volume 12, Number 5, September/October 2013 )

This study offers an analysis of the critical reception and exhibition history of Courbet in Italy between 1920 and 1954, the year of the second retrospective dedicated to him at the Venice Biennale. Starting with detailed documentary research, the author also discusses some of the fortunes of Courbet’s paintings, supported by published and unpublished sources, or through iconographical hypotheses. The artists involved here include Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Socrate, Giorgio Morandi and Felice Carena. While Roberto Longhi continues to be central to the Italian reassessment of Courbet, in part conditioning how his work was received, the publication of texts in Germany and France contributed to the spread of images and the consequent revival of certain subjects.

Squisito al selz è un grande dipinto a olio esposto alla XV Biennale di Venezia del 1926 e oggi disperso. Il suo autore, Fortunato Depero, lo considerava la punta audace della sua ricerca. Non si tratta di uno studio preparatorio per uno dei tanti, bellissimi, manifesti pubblicitari eseguiti dall’artista. Nella didascalia che ha accompagnato ogni sua pubblicazione, Depero stesso si è preoccupato di precisare che si tratta di un «quadro pubblicitario – non cartello».
L'articolo discute la nozione di «quadro pubblicitario», con la quale il futurismo raggiunge la massima consapevolezza della centralità del linguaggio che oggi definiamo “mediatico”. Un linguaggio già allora maturo al punto da influenzare direttamente le arti visive, cosicché il pittore rinuncia a buona parte della propria autonomia creativa per adeguarsi a intervenire in seconda battuta rispetto al primato dell’immagine pubblicitaria. Depero realizza un doppio in pittura della sua produzione cartellonistica e lo espone alla Biennale. Grazie alla “macchina di visione” costituita dall’istituzione veneziana, egli rivela al pubblico dell’arte una verità che la consuetudine rischiava di lasciare inespressa: l’avvento di una nuova, potentissima estetica dell’immagine, fondata su di un linguaggio molto preciso ed efficace.
Compresenti in Biennale con il dipinto di Depero, Numeri innamorati di Giacomo Balla e Incendio città di Gerardo Dottori contribuiscono alla riflessione, assimilando dall’immaginario proto-mediatico tanto l’aspetto meccanico quanto l’impatto irresistibile.

Presentation as part of the international conference "Venice Biennial and the Arab World" at the Università Ca' Foscari in Venice, October 2017.

This paper proposes a study of the international exhibitions of Egyptian painter Inji Efflatoun (1924-1989) held during her lifetime, assuming that her individual trajectory can help tracing a transnational history of artistic modernities. While being an artist, Efflatoun was also a communist activist struggling for national independence and women’s emancipation until her imprisonment (1959-1963). This led her to be identified as an independent and rebellious artist, despite her nationalist commitment and her participation in official exhibitions and biennials (Venice 1952, 1968; Sao Paulo 1953; Alexandria 1959, 1965). Most studies dedicated to Efflatoun focus on the period prior to her release, occulting the fact that she subsequently got away from her radical stances. Since then, apparently paradoxically, her connections with the global communist network continued to influence her international career (Rome with Renato Guttuso, 1967; USSR, 1970s), while she contributed to state sponsored exhibitions as an artist (Algiers, 1969; Kuwait, 1988) and a curator (Paris, 1971, 1976). Her belonging to the elite facilitated her travels while it drove her to define her artistic career as a search for “Egyptian reality”, trying to distance herself from her milieu.

The entanglement between Efflatoun’s positioning in the art world and in politics allows considering nationalism as an impetus to international connections rather than a strictly local phenomenon. Almost all international exhibitions by Efflatoun problematically present her according to her national origin and gender. Nevertheless, the artist’s multiple identities suggest understanding these exhibitions as active statements stemming from her individuality and from negotiations with various forms of power. The example of Efflatoun as an emancipated woman and artist raises the issue of artists’ agency; it casts doubt on the idea of an instrumentalization of women Arab artists by the global art world and evidences their presence on the international scene on the long term.

This anthology on the global biennial phenomenon includes seminal republished texts collected from around the world as well as newly com missioned contributions by the leading scholars, curators, critics, and thinkers of bien nials today. By tracing the genealogy of the perennial exhibition format (understood here as including not only biennials but also other recurrent exhibitions such as triennials and quinquennials) and by examining some of from the biennials in Venice and Johannesburg to those of Havana and-tic, theoretical, political, and other ambitions of such large-scale exhibition projects against the grain of their resulting exhibitions. Poised to be a vital resource, The Biennial Reader of these exhibitions and argues for a new history of art written through their analysis. In the process, this "reader" of essays explores perennial exhibitions and the global hegemonic shifts that made them possible as well as their impact on contemporary art, curating, culture, and art institutions.

By means of several documents, mostly preserved in the Archives of the Biennale (ASAC), the essay Giovanni Boldini and the French artists’ participation in the first Venice Biennale focus on the role played by the Italian artist Giovanni Boldini, born in Ferrara but resident in Paris for over twenty years, in the selection of the artists for the French section of that exhibition. A selection that, notwithstanding the intentions and efforts of the promoters, disappointed both public and art critics, since many relevant French artists, among which Monet and Rodin, didn’t accept the invitation or sent to Venice works of minor quality, so that a reviewer of the time could write that the French section was “the poorest one”.

Art events in the modern world takes place in a number of stages ranging from exhibition centers, trade fairs, vanity galleries, temporal venues or as travelling exhibitions (e.g. Body Worlds, California). Variety in frequency and occurrences gave rise to the newest of expositions, the Biennale. Emerged as a pilot, Biennale of Venice set a trend that got itself absorbed in the urban fabric causing wavelets of transformations in course of time.
The true nature of urban impacts of Biennale cannot be generalized under one title since the type and origin, the nature of changes the event propagates while it travel across countries and time varies to some extent. Regardless of what happens within the walls of museums and venues, larger effects are evident in the way how the urban realm responses to the event. What can be borrowed from these events that affect the realm outside the walls of exposition is the area of interest here for an urban designer.

Kotlomanov A.O. It's boring and pathetic, but it’s art: Venice biennale 2017. Vestnik SPbSU. Arts, 2017, vol. 7, issue 3, pp. 373–377. (In Russian)
Котломанов А.О. Это скучно и пафосно, но это искусство: Венецианская биеннале — 2017 // Вестник СПбГУ. Искусствоведение. 2017. Т. 7. Вып. 3. С. 373–377.

The failure of the American state-building project in Iraq has hit back in the form of the ever-expanding caliphate of the Islamic State, disregarding former colonial boundaries both in the territories of Iraq and Syria, as well as in its online guerrilla campaigns. Once proxies of foreign interests, sponsored and radicalized through decades of colonization, instrumentalization, and invasion, today they have turned the tables. Now that the ever-expanding security apparatus of the Coalition of the Willing clashes with the ever-expanding Islamic State, we actually begin to remember.

The project focuses on the Cooperative Centre – a multipurpose public building most often set in a rural context. In villages, small towns and suburban areas they serve as venues for various administrative, economic, social and cultural activities. The cooperative centre has a specific architectural typology, whose purpose is to create an indoor public space that usually serves as a central space in the community, a place of social interaction and a hub that serves a range of local community needs.

Commissioner
Matevž Čelik Vidmar

Assistant to the Commissioner
Nikola Pongrac

Curators
Blaž Babnik Romaniuk
Martina Malešič
Rastko Pečar
Asta Vrečko

Pavilion Design
Obrat d. o. o.

Exhibition Design
Blaž Babnik Romaniuk
Anja Delbello
Nuša Jurkovič
Samo Kralj
Martina Malešič
Rastko Pečar
Aljaž Vesel
Asta Vrečko

Graphic Design
Anja Delbello
Aljaž Vesel

Architectural Models
Nuša Jurkovič
Samo Kralj

Video
Vid Hajnšek

Photography
Jana Jocif

Collaborator
‍Urška Cvikl

Coordinator in Venice
‍eiletz | ortigas architects

Producer
‍Museum of Architecture
and Design (MAO)

In this presentation, I discussed the presence of women artists from Egypt on the globalised scene from the beginning of the 1950s to the mid-1970s. I observed their inclusion into the Egyptian pavilion at the Biennale of Venice, Sao Paulo and Alexandria during this period of time, which covers the Revolutionary years and the Nasserist era. My intention was to confront these observations with a prevalent rhetoric stating that modern Egypt gathered sociopolitical circumstances favourable to the inclusion of women into the art worlds. Unprecedented statistics I made based on exhibition catalogues gave substance to this analysis. The presentation also introduced the work of some women artists who fell into oblivion despite having been, at some point, in the spotlight.

Presentation in the Symposium "The Arab Apocalypse. Art, Abstraction & Activism in the Middle East" organized by Nadia Radwan at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern in September 2018, in the framework of the Etel Adnan exhibition.

https://www.zpk.org/music-literature-theatreprogramme/calendar/947-symposium-7.html

Nel 1901 Vittorio Pica coniò la definizione di "ossessione nordica" come caratteristica assunta da molta pittura italiana a ridosso delle prime Biennali veneziane. Questo valse soprattutto per i pittori di paesaggio esaminati in questo contributo.