56th Venice Biennale | |
---|---|
Genre | Art exhibition |
Begins | May 9, 2015 |
Ends | November 22, 2015 |
Location(s) | Venice |
Country | Italy |
Previous event | 55th Venice Biennale (2013) |
Next event | 57th Venice Biennale (2017) |
The 56th Venice Biennale was an international contemporary art exhibition held between May and November 2015. The Venice Biennale takes place biennially in Venice, Italy. Artistic director Okwui Enwezor curated its central exhibition, "All The World's Futures".
The Biennale is the world's most prestigious art exhibition, [1] an international show of contemporary art. It is a major event for art world cosmopolitans. [2] The 56th Biennale began one month sooner than usual, and ran between May 9 and November 22, 2015. [2] The opening coincided with the Frieze Art Fair in New York, which affected early attendance. [1] At the 56th Biennale, 136 artists represented 88 nations. Nearly a third of the artists had exhibited in a previous Biennale. The 56th Biennale was the first for the newly constructed Australian pavilion, the 30th national pavilion in the Giardini, and the first in the new millennium. [2] Kenya and Costa Rica both withdrew from this year's Biennale. [1]
Okwui Enwezor served as the 56th Biennale's curator, its first from Africa. [1] His theme was "All The World's Futures". Enwezor created the Arena, an interdisciplinary space for live performance in Giardini's Central Pavilion. The Arena's main performance was a live reading of Das Kapital (Karl Marx). It also hosted a performance by Olaf Nicolai and a memorial for Julius Eastman. [2] Enwezor also curated the Arsenale, a group exhibition for 200 artists without permanent national pavilions. Additionally, 44 events sanctioned by Enwezor ran in conjunction with the Biennale. [2] The most common media throughout the Biennale were film, photography, and documents. [1]
Artnet News recommended the American, German, Danish, Belgian, Icelandic, and Cyprian pavilions. Of the external events, the magazine recommended the collaboration between Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana (of India and Pakistan, respectively), the installation by Simon Denny (New Zealand), and the exhibitions of Peter Doig and Cy Twombly. [2]
The Guardian 's Laura Cumming wrote that the Biennale felt "more like a glum trudge than the usual exhilarating adventure". [1] Most of the Biennale's art, she described, was "flat" in the Giardini and thematically "straight into the heart of darkness", highlighting international issues such as work conditions, pollution and ecology, arms trade, prisons, and asylums. Sarah Lucas in the British pavilion, for instance, stood out for her lack of political themes but also signaled "the end of the YBA revivals at Venice". [1] Cumming highlighted a disassembled Nigerian magazine in the German pavilion as particularly lazy. [1]
Cumming wrote that the Biennale was steeped in its contradictory dependence on and criticism of capitalism, which she felt was embodied by British artist Isaac Julien's participation in both the Rolls-Royce pavilion and the Arena Das Kapital live reading. [1]
She recommended the Russian, Japanese, Albanian, American, and Australian pavilions. Fiona Hall in the Australian pavilion made a "museum of wondrous objects" that used present materials to make ancient objects, like "warrior masks knitted out of military fatigues". [1] She praised Hall for her response to current politics instead of "simply rehearsing the usual art-scene rhetoric". [1] The Japanese pavilion, an installation of red nets carrying thousands of keys, was Cumming's "clear winner, by general consent". [1] In comparison, Cumming described the Das Kapital performance's audience as nearly empty and likened the other pavilions to Commonwealth Institute lectures. [1]
Hyperallergic later named Enwezor's central exhibition among the decade's best, [3] and following his death in 2019, curators said his exhibition embodied his career of internationalizing contemporary art beyond Europe and North America. [4]
The Venice Biennale is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of its kind. The main exhibition held in Castello, in the halls of the Arsenale and Biennale Gardens, alternates every second year between art and architecture. The other events hosted by the Foundation - spanning theatre, music, and dance - are held annually in various parts of Venice, whereas the Venice Film Festival takes place at the Lido.
Okwui Enwezor was a Nigerian curator, art critic, writer, poet, and educator, specializing in art history. He lived in New York City and Munich. In 2014, he was ranked 24 in the ArtReview list of the 100 most powerful people of the art world.
El Anatsui is a Ghanaian sculptor active for much of his career in Nigeria. He has drawn particular international attention for his "bottle-top installations". These installations consist of thousands of aluminum pieces sourced from alcohol recycling stations and sewn together with copper wire, which are then transformed into metallic cloth-like wall sculptures. Such materials, while seemingly stiff and sturdy, are actually free and flexible, which often helps with manipulation when installing his sculptures.
Chika Okeke-Agululisten is a Nigerian artist, art historian, art curator, and blogger specializing in African and African diaspora art history. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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SUPERCOMMUNITY is an editorial project by e-flux journal commissioned for the 56th Venice Biennale and supported by Wuhan Art Terminus (WH.A.T.), Remai Modern Art Gallery of Saskatchewan, and Microclima. Since launching on May 5, 2015, texts are published Tuesday–Sunday at the Biennale and on the supercommunity online platform. All the World's Futures, the 2015 Venice Biennale was curated by Okwui Enwezor.
Masimba Hwati is an interdisciplinary artist from Zimbabwean, working Internationally at the intersections of Sculpture, performance and sound, known for unconventional three-dimensional mixed media sculptures. Hwati graduated from Harare Polytechnic School of Art and Design in 2003 where he majored in Ceramics and Painting. Hwati taught Visual Arts and 3D Art at Harare Polytechnic School of Art and Design. He is a PhD Candidate at Akademie Der Bildenden Künste Wien ,Österreich,an MFA from Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design University of Michigan, Ann ArborHe was most recently, included in the Montreal Museum of Fine Art's (MMFA) exhibition, Face To Face: From Yesterday to Today, Non-Western Art and Picasso. In 2015, he was also one of three artists selected for Pixels Of Ubuntu/Unhu for the Zimbabwean Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. He is an honorary research fellow at Rhodes University Fine Arts Department in Grahamstown, South Africa.
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