‘Our Time for a Future Caring’ at the India Pavilion forms part of the country’s ongoing celebration of 150 years since the birth of Mahatma Gandhi. Several intergenerational artists delve into his philosophies here, including 19th and 20th-century artist Nandalal Bose, a pioneer of modern Indian art; Rummana Hussain, the late Sahmant Collective participant; and multi-disciplinary artist Jitish Kallat. All of the artists either reflect on key moments in Gandhi’s life or provide conceptual investigations into his beliefs, extending to broader notions of agency, action and freedom.
German artist Georg Baselitz is the first living artist to exhibit at the Gallerie dell’Accademia outside of its pre-18th century collection. Curated by Kosme de Barañano, ‘Baselitz – Academy’ puts the artist’s work in dialogue with the Italian art historical tradition and the institution’s legacy. Seven rooms are dedicated to Baselitz, encompassing his Pontormo-inspired drawings, ‘upside-down’ portraits and large-scale nudes, some of which have been brought together for the first time. ‘Baselitz has often visited Italy and has kept a studio in the country for quite some time,’ states de Barañano, ‘and the exhibition will reflect how Italy has impacted his work over the years.’
It’d be wise to keep your wits about you in the Italian Pavilion, with plenty of Biennale visitors vexed by the maze-like scenography. The pavilion’s title, ‘Neither Nor: The Challenge to the Labyrinth’, was inspired Italo Calvino’s 1962 essay for Il menabò magazine. He wrote the article in an attempt to help his readers cope with the increasingly modern world, offering them an important instrument with which to draw a sort of Ariadne’s thread that might lead to a way out, or to the entrance of another maze of paths. Photography: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy of DGAAP-MiBAC
Curated by Milovan Farronato and supported by Gucci, the Italian Pavilion includes works by artists Enrico David, Chiara Fumai and Liliana Moro. Photography: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy of DGAAP-MiBAC
Lithuania’s Brechtian beach opera won the coveted Golden Lion for best national pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Conceived by artists artists Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė and specially adapted for the Venice Biennale, Sun & Sea (Marina) will be the first version of this piece in English, presented as a durational performance (the original version was produced by Neon Realism). The installation sees the Marinare Militare complex near the Arsenale transformed into a tableau vivant, complete with operatic sunbathers on the artificially lit beach warbling songs about pressing ecological issues. Photography: Andrej Vasilenko
‘I want to reach eternity with my images,’ says artist Brigitte Niedermair, who is putting fashion in focus for her Venice retrospective at the Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo. The exhibition ‘Brigitte Niedermair: Me and Fashion 1996-2018’ showcases more than 30 images and still lifes dedicated to fashion, which interplay with the majestic 17th and 18th century decoration of the museum’s first floor rooms. Read more here.
Ghana’s much-anticipated pavilion – its first at the Venice Biennale – features a stellar line-up of the country’s art stars, including El Anatsui, Ibrahim Mahama, Felicia Abban, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, John Akomfrah, and Selasi Awusi Sosu. David Adjaye loaned his architectural expertise, creating a series of elliptically-shaped interconnected spaces plastered with locally-sourced soil from Ghana. The pavilion, which can be found in the Artiglierie of the historic Arsenale, recognises the country’s history, independence and global presence today. Read more here. Pictured, A Straight Line Through the Carcass of History 1649, 2016–19, by Ibrahim Mahama. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube. Photography: David Levene
The US State Department was uncharacteristically late in announcing its artist for the Venice Biennale, leading to speculation that something Trumpian may well be afoot. Nevertheless, sculptor Martin Puryear this week unveiled his exhibition ‘Liberty/Libertà’ for the US Pavilion, a continuation of his career-long meditation on liberty and its complexities in society today. Left, A Column for Sally Hemings, 2019, and Cloister-Redoubt or Cloistered Doubt?, 2019, by Martin Puryear. Photography: Joshua White – JWPictures.com
Big Phrygian, 2010-14, by Martin Puryear, installation view at the US Pavilion. Photography: Joshua White – JWPictures.com
Irish artist Eva Rothschild is thinking big for her nation’s pavilion in the Arsenale’s Artiglierie. Curated by Mary Cremin, The Shrinking Universe comprises four monumental works that continues Rothschild’s ongoing investigation into sculptural presence. In Drift (2019), a wall of cast concrete blocks rendered in the artist’s characteristic geometric forms hold court with Spektor (2019), a cast bronze of towering head-like forms presiding over the pavilion. Elsewhere, visitors are invited to get hands on with Amphi (2019), a graffitied series of cast polystyrene blocks they may climb and sit on. Read more here. Photography: Robert Glowacki
The first international retrospective of artist Yun Hyong-keun since his death in 2007 has opened within the grand confines of Palazzo Fortuny, presented in tandem by Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary (MMCA) and Civic Museums of Venice (MUVE). Yun was central to the dansaekhwa movement: a monochromatic style of painting that emerged in his native Korea during the 1960s and 70s.
Curated by the MMCA’s Kim Inhye, the survey puts over 60 works from his career into startling new perspective. Yun’s dark and deeply stirring paintings echo the many traumas he endured in life, from the Korean War and Japanese colonial rule, to a near-death encounter at the hands of a firing squad.
Fondazione Prada is paying tribute to the late artist Jannis Kounellis, who died in 2017, at its Venetian outpost in the historic 18th-century palazzo of Ca’ Corner della Regina. The major retrospective, has curated by Germano Celant and developed in collaboration with Archivio Kounellis, traces his practice from 1959 onwards. Pictured from left, Senza titolo, 1962-63; Senza titolo, 1968; and Senza titolo, 1966. Photography: Agostino Osio - Alto Piano. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada
The artist’s early works (pictured), originally presented in the early 1960s, explore urban language. Kounellis would reproduce text and signs from streets in Rome, later transferring black letters, arrows and numbers onto white canvases and other surfaces. From left, Senza titolo, 1965; Senza titolo, 1967; and Senza titolo, 1960; and Senza titolo, 1964. Photography: Agostino Osio - Alto Piano. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada
Kounellis was partial to the medium of gold, here used in an installation that serves as a self-portrait of the artist. Pictured, Untitled (Tragedia civile), 1975 goldleaf-coated wall, coat rack, coat, hat, lamp. Photography: Agostino Osio - Alto Piano. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada
In ‘Elsewhen’ at Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia, French artist Philippe Parreno presents an immersive installation where past memories come together in ‘a disruptive temporality’. A grand luminous marquee with shifting louvres causes light to appear and disappear, its movements controlled by a unique digital programme based on Parreno’s interest in the activity of living microorganisms. The disorientating effect is only further enhanced by a phosphorescent yellow wallpaper, adorned with black irises. Photography: Andrea Rossetti
Carpenters Workshop has brought 14 of its designers including Nacho Carbonell and Mathieu Lehanneur to Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca’ d’Oro, a palazzo with a big presence on the Grand Canal. All the new works were created in response to either Venice or the decorative space itself. Pictured, ‘Alaska Alaska’, by Virgil Abloh. Read more here and here.
Edmund de Waal unveiled his ‘most significant sculpture to date’: a pavilion housing 2,000 books by exiled writers that forms one half of two exhibitions the artist and author is presenting in the Jewish Ghetto’s Ateneo Veneto. Meanwhile, at the Canton Scuola – a 16th-century synagogue in the Ghetto Nuovo – de Waal has installed ten new works around its storied spaces, paying homage to the area’s literary and musical heritage through porcelain, marble and gold. Read more here.
Phi, an arts and culture organisation based in Montreal, is exploring the intersection of art and technology through the lens of two female artists, Marina Abramović and Renata Morales. The latter is displaying a sprawing multimedia installation at Ca’Rezzonico Gallery (next to the Ca’Rezzonico Museum). Spanning two of its galleries with ceramic sculptures of female figures, chimeric beasts and more, Invasor (pictured) is set against a backdrop of found objects and debris transported from from José Noé Suro’s ceramics studio, Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico where Morales has been fabricating her works.
The Mexican artist’s dystopian installation of 70 used tyres painted in glossy candy hues and vast self-portraits printed on distressed textiles seeks to challenge visitors’ perceptions of texture, touch and beauty. Pictured, Invasor, 2019, by Renata Morales, installation view at Ca’ Rezzonico Gallery
Also presented by Phi, Marina Abramović’s virtual reality work Rising invites viewers to make contact with her digital avatar before unfolding a dramatic glacial scene where they will be confronted headfirst with the realities of climate change. Pictured, still from Rising, 2017, by Marina Abramović. Courtesy of Acute Art
Swiss-Icelandic provocateur Christoph Büchl’s Venice project Barca Nostra is making waves at the Arsenale. Seen here at the NATO base in Melilli, Sicily, this fishing vessel – intended to accommodate a crew of 15 – was carrying hundreds of migrants when it collided with Portuguese freighter in the Mediterranean on 18 April 2015. Only 28 on board survived, with upwards of 700 people presumed missing. The boat was recovered by the Italian government at enourmous expense, now finding its way to Venice – an apt destination, in the ‘city believed to have been founded by fleeing refugees’. Photography: © BARCA NOSTRA
Joan Jonas, too, was preoccupied with climate concerns. The American performance artist inaugurated the revitalised San Lorenzo church with a multimedia installation, a culmination of three years of research in aquariums worldwide and a residency with Alligator Head Foundation off the coast of Jamaica. Following its closure for over a century, the church has become the permanent home for the newly minted Ocean Space, an interdisciplinary arts centre with a focus on marine conservation spearheaded by TBA21-Academy. Read more here.
Commissioned by Scotland + Venice, Charlotte Prodger’s new work (pictured, still from SaF05, 2019) at the Arsenale Docks builds upon the artist’s continuing exploration of ‘queer wilderness’. It is the last in a trilogy of videos that began with Stoneymollan Trail (2015) followed by BRIDGIT (2016), for which she was awarded the 2018 Turner Prize.
Not one to shy away from colour, Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir (also known as Shoplifter) has transformed a Giudecca warehouse into an immersive kaleidoscopic cave using her signature material: synthetic hair. Photography: Ugo Carmeni. © The artist
Arnardóttir’s Chromo Sapiens comprises three distinct sections: Primal Opus, a dark passage of volcanic earth tones; Astral Gloria (pictured), a chromatic cathedral of sorts; and the palette-cleansing Opium Natura, which tempers the installation’s wild palette with shimmering whites and soothing pastels. Photography: Ugo Carmeni. © The artist
