This year’s is Viva Arte Viva, a show inspired by humanism! Long live the arts! ” was the motto chosen for the 2017 Venice Biennale by French curator Christine Macel. The celebration of culture is well-needed in these times.
The Biennale comprises a central exhibition, organized this year by Christine Macel, chief curator of the Pompidou Center in Paris; Â In the Venetian Arsenal and the Giardini area 85 national pavilions, which feature solo or thematic presentations.
Art can take us anywhere. The 57th Venice Biennale transports you round the globe as never before, from Inuit whaling boats to Brazilian rainforests, from Korean barber shops to Iraqi minefields and Antiguan beaches. I believe I will ever get a better sense of Finland slightly shamefaced progressiveness than through Erkka Nissinen and
Nathaniel Mellors absurdist satire, featuring animatronic eggs; or nearer to Kosovo than the tragic bakelite phone that never rings in Sislej Xhaf Lost and Found booth, commemorating the disappeared. Spectacular as ever, Russia pavilion opens with a dramatic double-headed eagle rising out of a ghostly wheat field composed of a million tiny workers, and ends with bodies literally and metaphorically blocked in stone for the crime of hacking. Acute visions of Soviet past and Putin present.
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