For most visitors, it's a madcap flying tour through a selection of the 88 national participations + the central exhibition of 83 artists + the approximately 50 'collateral events'. The speed of the ride is determined by each visitor independently but generally governed by the standard entry ticket costing 20euro and permitting a single entry to each main arena - the giardini and the arsenale - as well as there being more than anyone has time to see during a week in Venice anyway, not including the biennale.
This makes the Danish pavilion as a whole, and the installation I'm working in in particular, a peculiar approach to exhibiting in this event. The Danish pavilion is showing a thematic exhibition exploring freedom of speech. Speech Matters includes 18 artists from 12 countries. This confuses a lot of the visitors (partly because most people enter through the 'back' entrance where there is no obvious signage or information desk), so the most common question I field is - 'Which pavilion is this?' Usually followed up with a comment about being confused by the inclusion of China / Chinese art. Less often they mistake it for the Greek pavilion because of the mural by Stelios Faitakis covering the façade (which includes a portrait of Mao, compounding the confusion about China).
Anyway, for those of you not taking the ride this year, here are a few picks of what's been on show.
But where to begin? Ok, outside. I'll begin with some picks from the outside pavilions.
Lithuania
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| The piazza outside San Francesco della Vigna. The church hall Finn is in front of there housed Lithuania until they closed in September. |
The Lithuanian pavilion was totally great, probably my favourite. This was partly due to the concept being a perfect reciprocal for the installation I sit in everyday, so I'll explain it a little. Dealing with archives, state art collections, and national art exhibitions, the artist, Darius Mikšys, sent an invitation to some 300 Lithuanian artists who had been recipients of an art grant from the Ministry for Culture over the past two decades. The invitation was to contribute a work created with the funding to this year's biennale exhibition. The exhibition subsequently held some 200 donated works Behind the White Curtain, and also depicted in a large, beautifully produced catalogue. With the works stacked away out of sight, visitors to the exhibition were invited to select which work/s they wanted to see from the catalogue and make a request to the exhibition handlers. They would then retrieve the work and display it for you. People loved it. For five or ten minutes or how ever long they chose to be there, that was their painting, or photo, or sculpture, or whatever. I loved it too, getting the opportunity to be on the receiving end of a request for a change. And the people staffing it were really friendly - we could exchange stories about how much people love momentarily owning something in the biennale, and I could reciprocate the invitation to make requests when they visited the Danish pavilion.
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| And this was my page in the catalogue. A series of documentary photos from a winter solstice festival in a Lithuanian village. It was enough to make me want to go their for our post-Italy winter holiday, but not quite enough to convince Finn. |
Well that was a bit long-winded, I'll try to be briefer about the rest.
Slovenia
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| Maseyk-esq breasts in Slovenia. Detail from Mirko Bratuša's, Heaters for Hot Feelings. |
Future Generation Art Prize
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| A ship's skeleton by Hector Zamora at the Future Generation Art Prize. Fantastic palazzo on the Grand Canal. |
Venice in Venice
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| Laddie John Dill, green neon installation. |
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| Pink Peter Alexander wedge. Great exhibition in the amazing Palazzo Contarini Dagli Scrigni. |
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| Great radiators too. |
Luxembourg
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| Wobbly walls, like all good Venetian palazzo... |
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| Mirrors to infinity as well as great parquet flooring! |
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| We had a lot of fun in this exhibition. |
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| A giant Mickey Mouse erection for McLeod. |
Future of a Promise
Ukraine
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| Wooden eggs painted by women prisoners. |
Arsenale
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| Urs Fischer's wax replica of Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Woman. I'll compare it with the original when we get to Florence. |
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| The only sane aspect of the Italian Pavilion - the view outside. |
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| Adan Vallecillo's Physiology of Taste in the Latin America Pavilion |
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| A still from Frances Stark's video My Best Thing. Kept us well entertained for far too long. |
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| Around the back of the Arsenal, headed in the direction of South Africa. |
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| And then back, because it had closed early. |
In the Giardini...
Finland
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| After a tree fell on the Alvar Aalto pavilion and it was forced to close. |
Russia
Great Britain
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| The room I thought I'd already been in... |
Denmark
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| Our last family lunch - Sunday 27 November. |
For more about the giardini see Finn's post on Occupy, and for Anish Kapoor's installation on San Giorgio see the Salute post.
And of course, if you wish, there are some of my early early postings.
3 December 2011
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