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 ; while the other events hosted by the Foundation; spanning theatre, music, and dance, as well as Venice's film festival, are held annually in various parts of Venice.
Biennale, Italian for "biennial" or "every other year", is any event that happens every two years. It is most commonly used within the art world to describe large-scale international contemporary art exhibitions. As such the term was popularised by Venice Biennale, which was first held in 1895. The phrase has since been used for other artistic events, such as the "Biennale de Paris", "Kochi-Muziris Biennale", Berlinale and Viennale. "Biennale" is therefore used as a general term for other recurrent international events.
Kirstine Roepstorff is a Danish visual artist who lives and works in Fredericia (DK). Roepstorff studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1994-2001 and Rutgers University, Mason School of Fine Art (MFA), USA (2000). In 2016 she was appointed to represent Denmark in the Danish Pavilion at the 57th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia 2017, entitled “VIVA ARTE VIVA” and in 2018 her work are presented at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in the extensive solo exhibition Renaissance of the Night
James Castle was an American artist born in Garden Valley, Idaho. Although Castle did not know about the art world outside of his small community, his work ran parallel to the development of 20th-century art history. His works have been collected by major institutions. The Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of Castle's work which toured nationally in 2008–09. Castle's work entered the international arena with a major exhibition in Madrid, Spain at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2011 and was included in the 2013 Venice Biennale exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace. In 2014 The Smithsonian American Art Museum featured their recent acquisition in the exhibition Untitled: The Art of James Castle and the Whitney Museum of American Art included their acquired collection of Castle's work in the 2017 exhibition Where We Are.
LEE Mingwei is a Taiwanese-American contemporary artist currently living and working in Paris, France and New York, USA. Lee Mingwei creates participatory installations, where strangers can explore issues of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness, and one-on-one events, in which visitors contemplate these issues with the artist through eating, sleeping, walking and conversation. Lee's projects are often open-ended scenarios for everyday interaction, and take on different forms with the involvement of participants and change during the course of an exhibition. He has had solo exhibitions in museums worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others.
Pedro Cabrita Reis is one of the foremost visual artists of his generation and also one of Portugal’s most internationally renowned artists. His work features a wide variety of media – painting, sculpture, photography and drawing – and has been exhibited and included in numerous national and international museum collections. He lives and works in Lisbon.
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla are a collaborative duo of visual artists who live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They were the United States Representatives for the 2011 Venice Biennale, the 54th International Art Exhibition, in 2011.
Hassan Sharif was an Emirati artist and prolific writer. He lived and worked in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He is widely regarded as a central figure in contemporary and conceptual art in the region, often known as the father of conceptual art in the Gulf. He founded Al Marijah Art Atelier, and through his extensive work and writings, he inspired the next generation of artists in the United Arab Emirates. His work is represented in major public collections, such as the Guggenheim New York, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Centre Pompidou, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Sharjah Art Foundation.
Antoni Miralda is a Spanish multidisciplinary artist.
Kimsooja is a South Korean, multi-disciplinary conceptual artist based in New York, Paris, and Seoul. Her practice combines performance, film, photo, and site-specific installation using textile, light, and sound. Kimsooja's work investigates questions concerning the conditions of humanity, while engaging issues of aesthetics, culture, politics, and the environment. Her principle of ‘non-doing’ and ‘non-making,’ which follows a conceptual and structural investigation of performance through modes of mobility and immobility, inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor.
Dora García is a contemporary Spanish artist. García draws on interactivity and performance in her work, using the exhibition space as a platform to investigate the relationship between artwork, audience, and place. García transforms spaces into a sensory experiences by altering perception and creating situations of interaction, often using intermediaries to enhance critical thinking. By engaging with the binary of reality vs. fiction, visitors become implicated as protagonists either in the construction of a collective fiction or questioning of empirical constructions–sometimes knowingly, and sometimes not. Since 1999 García has created several artworks on the web
Mario García Torres is one of the most internationally renowned Latin American artists. He has used various media, including film, sound, performance, ‘museographic installations’ and video as a means to create his art.
Paolo De Grandis is an Italian contemporary art curator and president of PDG Arte Communications. He lives currently in Venice.
Leonor Antunes is a Portuguese contemporary artist who creates sculptural installations. She lives and works in Berlin.
Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian artist who currently resides in London, England. She is into photography, film, sculpture, and installation art. Some of her works include Tank (2003), Bethlehem Bandolero (2005), Happy Days (2006), Cairo Taxilogue (2008), The Novel of Novel and Novel (2009), Falafel Road (2010), Palestinauts (2010), Nation State (2012), In the Future, They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2016), and Archaeology in Absentia (2016).
The Egyptian pavilion is a national pavilion of the Venice Biennale. It houses Egypt's official representation during the Biennale. The building is part of a complex that Brenno Del Giudice designed in 1932 to house Venetian decorative arts on Sant'Elena Island—an expansion of the Biennale from its main Giardini area. The building later served as Switzerland's national pavilion before the country moved to a new pavilion in 1952 and left the building to Egypt. The national pavilions for Serbia and Venice flank the Egyptian pavilion. Egypt's 1995 exhibition won the Biennale's Golden Lion award for best national pavilion.
The 57th Venice Biennale was an international contemporary art exhibition held between May and November 2017. The Venice Biennale takes place biennially in Venice, Italy. Artistic director Christine Macel, the chief curator at the Centre Pompidou, curated its central exhibition, "Viva Arte Viva", as a series of interconnected pavilions designed to reflect art's capacity for expanding humanism. The curator also organized a project, "Unpacking My Library", based on a Walter Benjamin essay, to list artists' favorite books. Macel was the first French director since 1995 and the fourth woman to direct the Biennale. A trend of presenting overlooked, rediscovered, or "emerging dead artists" was a theme of the 57th Biennale.
Anne Imhof is a German visual artist, choreographer, and performance artist who lives and works between Frankfurt and Paris. She is best known for her endurance art, although she cites painting as central to her practice.
Petrit Halilaj is a Kosovar visual artist living and working between Germany, Kosovo and Italy. His work is based on documents, stories, and memories related to the history of Kosovo.
