THE IMPORTANCE OF THE VENICE BIENNALE
Why La Serenissima, aka the Venetian Republic, is the world’s most kickass platform for contemporary art every two years!
Every two years, droves of art aficionados converge on Venice to experience the Art Biennale, the splashiest, most cosmopolitan show on which all other biennales are based. Curators, culture vultures, monied up collectors and influencers of diverse tastes and preferences flock to view the newest output from the art world’s most hyped-up (and hushed-up) virtuosos. Visitors rich and poor don’t mind the long lines, the undulating crowds, the feeding frenzy or the shortage of public restrooms so long as they can bear witness to all the visual-cultural razzmatazz Italy has to offer.
The Biennale is host to around 80+ national pavilions; nearly 1/3 are in the Giardini (the city’s plush gardens built by Napoleon Bonaparte) and the rest are deployed in the Arsenale, the city’s ancient shipyard, and in random spaces, ancillary shows and pop-ups around the port. The nucleus of the event is always a conceptually-driven ‘main exhibition’ around a unifying theme, constructed by a visionary curator. Last time round in 2022, it was Cecilia Alemani, an Italian who explored the fluidity of the human condition and civilization’s varying states of entropy. This year Adriano Pedrosa, a dashing Brazilian (below), has been tapped as artistic overlord, who will explore the motif of ‘foreigners everywhere’ — that is, nomadic culture, artistic peregrination, marginalization and swirling globalism.
At the Venice Biennale there's always the WOW, gee-whiz factor that leaves an indelible impression. We attended the show a few seasons back, right in the wake of the GFC. Bice Curiger (2011) was the curator-sage then and the world seemed like a dumpster fire blazing on the frontier of a dark age. But the show was spiked with a keen political-economic-social sense, and transformed that era's junk pile of culture into something altogether enlightening, revelatory, and visionary. ‘ILLUMinations’ was Curiger's curatorial motif, and like the Dadaists, she sought to skew our view of everyday reality, subverting and reanimating certain institutions with explosive, positive energy. The WOW factor was stratospheric, and artists like Christian Marclay, Franca Pisani and Jannis Kounellis integrated their works into dynamic wholes making the Biennale a serious psychic blast!
The Venice Biennale is a sprawling, awe-inspiring circuit of competing philosophies, methodologies, nationalities and esthetics. The curators and artists slice, dice and aggregate fragments of visual and cultural information, and intermix them to form new circulatory flows. Synthesized from an ocean of sources — architecture, sculpture, transmedia, multiculturalism and more — La Serenissima is arguably the greatest showcase ever for global art!
And true to its nature as a trading entrepot through the centuries, it also provides the meeting point for the crowds and the cash that have always made up the magical, constantly mutating DNA of the art cosmos. At the 60th Venice Biennale starting next month, we look forward to seeing works from Eddie Martinez, Zeng Fanzhi, Marina Abramović, Inuuteq Storch, X Vitamin, Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir and more.
The Venice Biennale 2024 starts April 20th and goes through November 24th. Images via the Venice Biennale and courtesy of the artists mentioned.
