Venice Biennale Research Articles

The material and immaterial in Lyotard, Benjamin and contemporary Indigenous art

ABSTRACT Powerful arguments have been made that art is moving from the material to the immaterial in an age of ‘virtual reality’ (Jean-François Lyotard). Equally powerful arguments have been put that it is moving from the immaterial to the material in an age of mechanical reproduction (Walter Benjamin). In this essay, we propose that the material and immaterial are inseparable, and that this is what both Lyotard and Benjamin are ultimately suggesting. This would go against those critics who claim that art is becoming too material (Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried), and they themselves can be seen to be admitting that this materiality is possible only because of a certain immateriality. In response to this, Rosalind Krauss’ notion of ‘post-medium’ can be read as an expression of the immateriality that allows the materiality of medium. We conclude by considering three examples of Australian Indigenous art that also point to the inseparability of the material and immaterial: the digital exhibition Connection, the street sign works of Yolngu artist Wanapati Yunupingu and the installation kith and kin by Kamilaroi Bigambul artist Archie Moore, recently exhibited at the Venice Biennale.

An Archaeology of Disability: A Dialogic Essay

An Archaeology of Disability is a research station designed for the Venice Biennale, Architettura 2021 by David Gissen, Jennifer Stager, and Mantha Zarmakoupi and exhibited later at La Gipsoteca di Arte Antica of Pisa in 2022, at the Canellopoulos Museum of Athens in 2023, and at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki in 2024. The research station works with languages and forms used by contemporary disabled people to reproduce elements—a ramp, a seat, an art gallery—from the ancient Acropolis in Athens that vanished long ago and that have little or no extant material forms. Among the many people who contributed to the research station are two performers, Christopher Tester and Pia Hargrove, who performed, respectively, the ekphrastic film and audio description Sēmata (Signs) (2021). The following dialogic essay draws on conversations with the curators and performers led by Brooke Holmes and Pasquale Toscano. This dialogic form surfaces some of the collaborative aspects of the research station to highlight the ways in which such collaboration brings different lenses to antiquity.

International Exhibitions of Architecture and Selective Cross-Histories

A review of Helen Thomas, ed. Architecture in Islamic Countries: Selections from the Catalogue for the Second International Exhibition of Architecture Venice, 1982/83. Zürich: gta Verlag, 2022, 120 pages, 55 illus. ISBN 978-3-85676-436-4. Gta Verlag’s 2022 reissue of the 1982–83 Venice Biennale Architecture in Islamic Countries catalogue is a timely invitation to reevaluate its history. This review assesses both the new catalogue’s original content and the newly commissioned essays, highlighting criticisms of Pier Paolo Porteghesi’s curatorial approach, primarily driven by a postmodernist methodology rather than a decolonization commitment. Its significance notwithstanding, the new catalogue replicates some of the original’s limitations in thoroughly engaging with the Islamic world’s architectural cultures during the 1980s, reflecting ongoing challenges in integrating these histories into Western-dominated architectural discourse.

Role of women artists in the presentation of contemporary Ukrainian art at the Venice Biennale: gender analysis

Role of women artists in the presentation of contemporary Ukrainian art at the Venice Biennale: gender analysis

Towards resilient communities through prototypes for human-centered public spaces

MARCELLA DEL SIGNORE Architect, urbanist, educator, scholar, and the principal of X-Topia, a design-research practice that explores the intersection of architecture and urbanism with technology and the public, social, cultural, and cognitive realm. She has been involved in evidence-based research and applied-design projects investigating the intersection of architecture, urbanism,emerging technology, livability, and emotional/cognitive spaces. She is an Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Science in Architecture, Urban Design at New York Institute of Technology. Since 2007, she has taught Architecture and Urban Design in international institutions of higher education in the USA and Europe, and in 2019 she received the NYIT Presidential Award for the integration of Technology and in 2023 the Outstanding Faculty Research Award. She has published five books on urbanism, human-centered design, and emerging technologies, including Urban Machines: Public Space in a Digital Culture (LISTLab, 2018; OROEditions 2020) and "Data, Matter, and Design" (Routledge, 2020). She co-curated the Data and Matter exhibition during the 2018 Architecture Venice Biennale. She was invited to exhibit at the 17th Architecture Venice Biennale in 2021 in the Italian Pavilion Resilient Communities, and she was the deputy curator of the NYIT Students as Researchers Collateral Event at the 18th Architecture Venice Biennale in 2023.

The Venice Biennale, French porcelain and historical retrospective on marketing and expertise in the field of fine arts

The relevance of this article is based on shaping new modern world’s market relations one of which is the art market. The aim of the research is the analysis of the marketing interrelations and tendencies in the market of the 20th-21st centuries together with the previous historical periods. In order to hit the goal of the research, theoretical, empirical and comparative researching methods have been used. It sets theoretical foundations of the visual arts marketing and the ways of their practical application. Already before the modern art market as an element of a total capitalistic market came to exist, the movement of visual art works, in the ancient epoch, included elements of marketing approaches and technologies caused by the then-existing processes of sale and purchase of art works, their exchange and collecting. The article is about the expertise of their quality and originality; definition of the already existing methods of promoting art works in the society. It is worth paying a particular attention to ceramic products like porcelain (china) that, in its turn, occupies an important place among art works, together with paintings and sculptures. In the beginning of the 18th century, the porcelain arrived to Europe from China. Collectors have for three centuries admired porcelain products. It should be admitted, there is a particular category of the Venice Biennale visitors. They are porcelain collectors. The practical value of this research stays in the analysis of the marketing instruments in the modern art market for the benefit of not only modern artists but also of the managers of all levels who work in the field of visual arts, at exhibitions, for companies producing collection ceramics tableware, at auctions and in the world’s museums

Weathering the Storm

Abstract Over the last two decades, red umbrellas have increasingly appeared in campaigns to end violence against sex workers, oppose harmful legislation, advocate for decriminalization, commemorate lost community members, and broadly express sex worker pride. Originating with the work of the artist/activist Tadej Pogačar and the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art’s contribution to the 2001 Venice Biennale (“The Prostitute Pavilion”), red umbrellas were originally presented as a visual symbol of self-help, organization, and protection for sex workers. Since then the red umbrella has been adopted and adapted to a broader range of meanings related to sex worker activism, including decriminalization, opposition to antitrafficking discourse, and more. The umbrella has also come to convey the “big tent” concept—that all sex workers are together under its canopy, unified as one coalition. But like any symbol, the red umbrella’s use has limitations. The red umbrella risks amplifying negative rhetoric employed by the antitrafficking movement, which casts sex workers as passive victims in need of salvation, or of oversimplifying a complex, multifaceted political movement. The Curated Spaces section of this issue presents a brief history of the red umbrella as a symbol for sex workers’ rights and images that demonstrate its varied uses.

Reindeer and the Venice Biennale

Reindeer and the Venice Biennale

When the Computer Entered the Music Scene: The Collaboration between the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale and La Biennale di Venezia

Abstract The era of collaboration between the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC) and the Venice Biennale in the early 1980s marked a real breakthrough in the development of technological art and computer music. Thanks to this collaboration, computer music, which in those years was confined to research laboratories with auditions for insiders, entered the global contemporary music scene. This interview by Sergio Canazza, current director of CSC, with two leading figures of that endeavor aims to bear witness to that creative turning point.

Presenting Korea. Two Architecture Exhibitions at the Korean Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 1996 and 2014

Le pavillon coréen de la Biennale de Venise est le dernier pavillon national dans les Giardini, construit en 1995. Pourtant, il s’agit de la plus ancienne plateforme durable pour l’architecture coréenne, malgré son existence à l’étranger. Cet article explore deux expositions d’architecture majeures qui se sont tenues au pavillon coréen en 1996 et 2014. La première fut la première exposition d’architecture au pavillon et une introduction importante de l’architecture coréenne à un public international lors de la Biennale. Parallèlement, elle est restée obscure et négligée dans les discussions nationales coréennes. La seconde exposition a remporté le premier Lion d’or de toute l’histoire du pavillon, présentant les architectures de la Corée du Sud et de la Corée du Nord, et répondant à l’ambition initiale du pavillon conçu en 1995. En couvrant l’histoire globale, le texte examine le parcours paradoxal du pavillon coréen, qui a commencé avec un bâtiment dominant tous les contenus qu’il contenait et qui a évolué vers une harmonisation de ses expositions pour résonner avec sa propre histoire ainsi qu’avec le contexte de la Biennale de Venise. Ce faisant, le texte discute de la politique culturelle inhérente à la Biennale et de son influence sur la représentation et le développement de la culture et de l’identité locales.

Intercultural communication in contemporary art: From provocation to integration

The article analyzes the forms of transmission of cultural values (meanings) through modern works of art. The novelty of the approach to artistic creation lies in it being studied both as a result of intercultural communication and as a means of conveying cultural meanings. The purpose of this article is to identify, analyze and describe the forms of transmission of values through works of contemporary art. The author identifies three forms of value translation in art: provocation, similarity, integration. Provocation means that the artist shows the interaction of the values of different cultures, focusing on their hostility and inconsistency. As an example, an art object is given by a Russian artist living in America, a representative of Sots Art A.S. Kosolapov ?Lenin - Coca-Cola.? Similarity, on the contrary, is a form that demonstrates the proximity of meanings, the search for common ground in the value systems of society. This thesis is visualized by the sculptures of Buddha and Christ by the Chinese artist Zhang Huan. The third form of translation of values in art is designated as integration, when the work expresses values that are universal for all peoples: a clean environment, security, peace, health, freedom, justice and others. The works of the winners of the Venice Biennale 2019 (opera-performance ?Sun and Sea (Marina) ? by the Lithuanian National Pavilion and ?White Album? by American cinematographer Arthur Jafa) are given as an example. It is concluded that art, thanks to its supranational, symbolic and universal language, is able to build intercultural communication between peoples.

Laure Prouvost’s Deep See Blue Surrounding You

This paper aims to demonstrate how Laure Prouvost’s artistic practice requires an immersion of the viewer in intermedial installations composed of objects from the most disparate spatial and temporal origins. Since the early 2000s, the French artist has intentionally created surreal mise-en-scenes which, by blending video, painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance, can be understood as compositions or collages made of visual references taken from different contexts such as pop culture, the web, and private photo albums. Prouvost’s works are “unstable visual entities,” made of images that aggregate in heterogeneous configurations, generating eccentric atmospheres and cancelling every hierarchical order between the observer and the observed. Viewers are encouraged to fill the space by becoming objects among other objects. By using the Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as philosophical and methodological support, this paper will focus more closely on the analysis of Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre (2019), the project Prouvost produced for the French Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. On this occasion, her work They Parlaient Idéale (2019) – a video documenting the Mediterranean Sea journey that brings her to the Venetian lagoon – was the cornerstone of a multifaceted environmental installation. Assuming a critical and analytical approach, this contribution then discusses the role Deep See Blue Surrounding You plays as a “hyper-enactment:” it is a mise-en-scene that consists of interrelationships between “things/images” that aggregate as objects, but it is also a composition in which the viewers are “viscously” asked to generate their personal, non-linear narration.

Collective data-based drawings

The laboratory ALICE (Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) advances a comprehensive approach to data-based drawing oriented towards architectural and urban co-design processes. This drawing methodology has been key in the contributive design process they have applied over the last seven years, covering a range of scales and contexts, both within the public and private spheres. Contribution has become a relational strategy that unites a diverse range of participants, each hailing from various backgrounds and carrying unique needs, which come together around the drawing. For this reason, the cultivation of a robust drawing culture, from their teaching to their research and design activities, has become a cornerstone of ALICE’s philosophy, where drawing is embraced not merely as a representational tool but as a constructive means for design work. Their methodology has now evolved to include data-based drawing techniques, skillfully merging precise surveying with qualitative data analysis, thereby bridging the gap between quantitative and qualitative facets of design. This article explains this data-based approach to drawing through a series of projects developed in the Greater Geneva region. Throughout them, they explain how ALICE’s situated data-based drawings facilitate intricate coordination among students, leading to real-scale interventions; explore the potential of transforming main roads into landscape infrastructures that promote sustainable mobility and urban development; or offer an innovative lens to comprehend the affective connections between citizens and their urban surroundings, transcending traditional cartographic representations. Finally, these efforts are summarised through the analysis of a single drawing showcased at the 2021 Venice Biennale, illustrating the potential of this methodology to harmonize the collective efforts of various stakeholders.

Natives of Ethnic Ukrainian Lands at the Venice Biennale: Louise Nevelson

The purpose of the article is to study the peculiarities of the presentation in the projects of the Venice Biennale of 1962 and 2022 of the works of the outstanding American sculptor, assemblage master, L. Nevelson (1899-1988), a native of Pereiaslav, Kyiv region, to consider the specifics of the artist's creative biography from the point of view of the influence of various sociocultural factors on her professional progress. Research methodology. Achieving the goal of the research ensured the application of a set of such methods as art criticism, biographical, historical, and among general scientific methods – observation, generalisation, analysis and synthesis. Scientific novelty. The issue of presentation of L. Nevelson's works in the projects of the Venice Biennale was not previously considered separately in the scientific literature. For the first time, a review and generalisation of three art projects of different years, which exhibited the sculptor's artistic works as part of an international art exhibition, was carried out. Conclusions. The article expands knowledge about the artistic heritage of a prominent artist, introduces her name into the Ukrainian cultural context, emphasising the significance of the sculptor's work for modern world art and culture. L. Nevelson's works presented at the Venice Biennale characterise her as an extraordinary artist, the progenitor of the idea of installation in American art. Her work is not limited to this format, but it is the monumental monochrome assemblages immersed in the plane that brought her true fame. In American art circles, L. Nevelson was as famous as Andy Warhol, she made an important step in the history of art, which due to eternal sexism, when women artists were not taken seriously, did not receive due recognition. Keywords: Louise Nevelson, Venice Biennale, exhibition, contemporary art, sculpture, installation, assemblage, intercultural dialogue.

Encyclopedia of Relations: Observing through Embodiment and Movement Research

The present paper proposes a (post- and) eco-critical reading of Alexandra Pirici’s ongoing action, Encyclopedia of Relations, staged at the Venice Biennale in 2022. While it addresses a considerable gap within Romanian performance art studies, this article aims to offer a case study of how artistic practice can generate alternative modes of being together. With no doubt, as Rosi Braidotti stated at the Biennale conference, the art exhibited at the 2022 edition works collaboratively with theory to become an imaginative tool of research. Following this lead, the article discusses Pirici’s performative work that takes the task of exploring non-human relational modes through cognitive embodiment. This approach underlines how performance art practices move beyond the aesthetic sphere, projecting solutions to emerging environmental crises and offering a fresh perspective on knowledge production.

Re-claiming the lost home: The politics of nostalgia and belonging in women's art practices in the Middle East

In recent years, discourses on migration and movement have been featured prominently in contemporary art and curatorial practices. For example, during the past decade, the migration crisis was a central theme for several pavilions at the Venice Biennale. Considering current developments, understanding critical issues regarding the migratory experience is a matter of urgency. This article addresses the issue of how the migratory experience is articulated in the works of women artists who use domestic objects to create uncanny environments that represent their contested homelands. This article also emphasises women's experiences, as women have frequently been marginalised from official histories. Through visual analysis of the works, a new perspective is gained in understanding women artists' strategies when representing their home in exile, and their homeland (both 'lost' and existing). The discussion unpacks projects that use 'un-homely devices' to re-construct the experience of 'home': home as a site of personal and family histories, and home as the place of danger and distress. It will specifically examine the work of Klitsa Antoniou, Lia Lapithi, Raeda Saadeh, and Andrea Shaker, all of whom have challenged in their practice the concepts of 'home', 'exile', and 'belonging'.

Together in the dark?: Investigating the understanding and feeling of intended emotions between viewers and professional artists at the Venice Biennale.

Together in the dark?: Investigating the understanding and feeling of intended emotions between viewers and professional artists at the Venice Biennale.

Judy Watson

Artist Judy Watson, a member of the Waanyi people of north-west Queensland, has spent several periods in Italy, including on a residency in Tuscany in 1992, and when selected to present her work in the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and as a speaker at the aabaakwad gathering of First Nations artists at the Biennale in 2022. In the interview, Watson reflects on her connection to culture and Country and speaks of the works inspired by her stays in Italy. She also comments on changes over time in the Venice Biennale, as well as the interest in Indigenous Australian artists in Italy.

The decolonial wor(l)ds of Indigenous women

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Indigenous women’s narrative and storytelling tradition and its relation to decolonial ecologies. It argues that Indigenous women’s narratives, both written and orally transmitted, constitute sites of defiance to the eco-social structures of settler colonialism and imperialism. Drawing on the case of Palestine, the article reveals that ‘zoocentric environmentalism,’ as represented by an Israeli installation at the Venice Biennale, incarnates the material and symbolic constituents of Zionist blooming enterprise. That is, such presumed forms of progressive ‘non-anthropocentric’ engagements with ecological calamities unveil the historical continuity of the Zionist project that aims to erase Indigenous Palestinians and their multigenerational, more-than-human place thought. To counter universalising environmental projects and their inherent colonial violence, the article engages with place-based stories of a Palestinian woman’s novella; more-than-human ancestral knowledge shared by Palestinian women elders; and a visual-media project showing Palestinian refugee women returning to their ancestral villages. The article’s overall aim is to advance an Indigenous situated approach to decolonising today’s environmentalism and to centre Palestine in the wider social and cultural geography debate on Indigeneity, decolonial ecologies, and storytelling.

Exhibition Review: Paradise Camp at the Aotearoa/New Zealand Pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale

Exhibition Review: Paradise Camp at the Aotearoa/New Zealand Pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale