Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Biennale di Venezia: Il Palazzo Enciclopedico



As every two years Venezia is holding the International Art Exhibition organized by la Biennale di Venezia, reaching the 55th edition this year. Entitled Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace) and curated by Massimiliano Gioni, it offers a great vision of what contemporary art is, the different channels artists use to express ideas, and the way art is influencing the world and viceversa.

At the entrance of the Arsenale the following paragraph tells us what we are going to experience:
"On November 16, 1955, self-taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti filed a design with the U.S. Patent Office depicting his Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace), a museum that was meant to house all the world's knowledge. Auriti worked on his brainchild for years, constructing a model of 136-story building that would stand seven hundred meters tall."

Auriti never carried out his dream project, and through history, artists, scientists and humanists have tried to reunite universal knowledge, the complete understanding of what surrounds us.

In this 55th edition of la Biennale of Art the whole exhibition has been designed as a compendium of artworks, strange objects and artifacts from the early twentieth century to the present which depict very personal visions of the universe. Humanity creates a way to organize the universe, concentrating abstract perceptions into palpable objects. This Venetian Encyclopedic Palace has space for all kinds of curiosities and excentricities, coming from all over the world.

Enjoy this particular vision of nature, the origin of life, science and technology. A sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinet of curiosities made real at the twenty first century.

Roberto Cuoghi - Belinda, 2013

Ştefan Bertalan - detail from the series Snails and Spirals, 1976

Robert Crumb - The book of Genesis illustrated (detail), 2009

Papa Ibra Tall, tapestries

Pawel Althamer - Venetians 2013 (a surreal portrait of Venice)

Karl Schenker (curated by American artist Cindy Sherman, a particular project that focuses in the representation of faces and bodies)

 
Pavilion of Chile - Alfredo Jaar - Venezia, Venezia

Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain - In A World Of Your Own
Mariam Haji - The Victory, 2013 (details)

 Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo - Petrit Halilaj

 Pavilion of the Italo-Latin American institute (IILA) - El Atlas del Imperio

Pavilion of Italy - Vice Versa
Elisabetta Benassi - The Dry Salvages, 2013

Pavilion of South Africa - Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive
Artists who use materials of the past to comment on the contemporary
Wim Botha


More info here


Photography by When Audrey Met Darcy

NOW on whenaudreymetdarcy.com



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