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.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila is a contemporary visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Helsinki.
Icelandic art has been built on northern European traditions of the nineteenth century, but developed in distinct directions in the twentieth century, influenced in particular by the unique Icelandic landscape as well as by Icelandic mythology and culture.
Shu Lea Cheang is a Taiwanese-American artist and filmmaker who lived and worked in New York City in the 1980s and 90s, until relocating to the EuroZone in 2000. Cheang received a BA in history from the National Taiwan University in 1976 and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University in 1979. Since the 1980s, as a multimedia and new-media artist, she has navigated topics of ethnic stereotyping, sexual politics, and institutional oppression with her radical experimentations in digital realms. She drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination, crafting her own “science” fiction genre of new queer cinema. From homesteading cyberspace in the 1990s to her current retreat to post net-crash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral love, bio hack in her current cycle of works.
Eva Charlotte Gyllenhammar is a fine artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. She began her career as a painter, but swiftly moved on to sculpture and installation after completing her studies at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1993, she broke through the Swedish art scene when she suspended a 120-year-old tree over Drottninggatan, the main street in the center of Stockholm. The work entitled Die for You was the first step in a progression of images and environments that invert perspective. For example, confinement and inversion are evident in her video/photographic series of suspended women entitled Belle, 1998, Disobedience, 1998, Fall, 1999, and more recently Hang 2006. The series Hang is composed of both color or c-prints and gelatin silver prints. The photographs were first premiered at Paris Photo in 2006, in the Central Exhibition, which was dedicated to the Nordic countries, where Gyllenhammar represented Sweden.
Nikos Alexiou was a Greek artist who specialized in visual art, contemporary art, installation art and set design for theatre and dance. He exhibited his work at personal exhibitions and group events both in Greece and abroad.
Glasstress is a recurring exhibition that brings together art by contemporary artists made with glass. Launched in 2009 as a collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale of Arts by Adriano Berengo as a way of showcasing the works produced by Berengo Studio, it has since had editions take place in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2021.
Berengo Studio is a glass studio transforming the art of glass and glass art through collaborations with contemporary artists based in Murano, Venice, Italy.
Tabaimo is a contemporary Japanese artist whose immersive, thought-provoking video installations have been exhibited around the world. She combines hand-drawn images and digital manipulation to create large scale animations which evoke traditional Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) while presenting a pointed, complex view of Japanese society.
Wong Chi Hang Sara is a Hong Kong-based visual artist and landscape architect. Wong graduated with a BA degree in Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1992 and an MA in Landscape Architecture from the University of Hong Kong.
Desire Machine Collective is a group of media practitioners based in Guwahati, in the state of Assam in India. Collaborating since 2004 as Desire Machine Collective, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya employ film, video, sound, space, photography and objects in their installations and works. Their use of experimental techniques and the political character of their narratives have contributed to their growth as one of the leading artist collaboratives in India's contemporary art scene.
Dmitry Kawarga born in Moscow, Russia is a Russian artist. Kawarga began working in his own style of "biomorphism" striving to create a synthesis of science, art and technology. His art is featured in numerous museums and is part of the permanent collection of Erarta, Russia's largest private museum of contemporary art located in Saint Petersburg.
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.
Sandra Monterroso is a Guatemalan visual artist and designer. Art historian Virginia Pérez-Ratton writes about Monterroso's beginnings as a performance artist in Guatemala during 1999 and 2000. Alongside her were other Guatemalan female performers like Regina José Galindo, Maria Adela Díaz, and Jessica Lagunas. Recently Monterroso's work focuses not only in performance art, she works with different media as videoart, installations and mix media. Her work is related to power structures, gender issues and decolonial thinking. Her work is included in the Artist Pension Trust.
Grazia Toderi is an Italian artist working primarily in the medium of video art. Born in Padua, and trained in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Bologna, Toderi began working in the medium of media and video art in the 1990s. Currently working out of Milan and Turin, the MIT Museum describes her as "one of the most recognized visual artists working in Italy today". Toderi is inspired in part by Giotto and other early 14th-century painters, but "draws more heavily on contemporary experience, from distant views of cities glowing at night to the zero-gravity ballets of the U.S. space programs". Latvia's NOASS has described Toderi as first gaining critical attention in 1993 after participating in the 45th Venice Biennale, and "often referred to as one of the most important contemporary artists, working in fields of video projection and installation art and is recognized for her iconic use of aerial images of nighttime metropolitan cities." Much of Toderi's video art involves visualizations of the infinite, and Toderi credits this to a "formative moment in her childhood—watching the simulcast of the first moonwalk."
Carlos Rolón, also known professionally under the pseudonym Dzine, is an American contemporary visual artist of Puerto Rican descent. Rolón's work has been shown at museums and galleries internationally, including the Bass Museum of Art, Miami, Marta Herford Museum, Germany, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico and the 2007 Venice Biennale.
Lara Favaretto is an Italian artist. Favaretto lives and works in Turin, Italy.
Erika Tan is a London-based Singaporean contemporary artist and curator whose research-led practice emerges from her interests in anthropology and the moving image. Her recent research examines the postcolonial and transnational, working with archival artefacts, exhibition histories, received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices, and the movement of ideas, people and objects. She is a lecturer at the Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
Cumulus is a monumental sculpture carved from Italian marble and based on the dimensions and weight of an atmospheric cumulus cloud. The work was created in 2017 by American artist Karen LaMonte and first displayed at the Glasstress exhibition during the 57th Venice Biennale. Cumulus stands seven feet tall, weighs two-and-a-half tons, and was carved by hand and robot. LaMonte worked with scientists from the California Institute of Technology, who used a supercomputer and weather modelling software to generate a three-dimensional cloud surface for LaMonte to replicate in stone.
Bita Razavi is a contemporary artist living and working between Helsinki, Finland and Mahu, Estonia. Her works, which have been exhibited in various exhibitions worldwide, look into the inner workings of social systems in relation with the political structures and national events of historic proportions in various countries. She works with a broad range of media including video, photography, installation, sound and performance.
