Lower East

Venice Art Biennale 2015; A day in Arsenale

Impressions from our last day at the Biennale Arte in Venice. This time we spend the day at Arsenale, where we checked out the big common exhibition; “All the World’s Futures“ and the rest of the national pavilions.

Not our best day at the biennale, but we found of course splendid and interesting exhibitions and pieces of art; the always interesting William Kentridge, Georg Baselitz‘s series of eight new large-scale paintings titled Fällt von der Wand nicht (Doesn’t Fall From the Wall), the amazing The Phoenix by Xu Bing, Ibrahim Mahama, who created for the biennale a 300 meter-long, 3,000 kg patchwork installation entirely made of old jute sacks, titled Out of Bounds, the very fine Tuvalu National Pavilion, and Liisa Roberts’ photographs of elderly Russian workers, once models for heroic Soviet art.

Over and out from Venice. Ready for new adventures!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lower East in Venice – PROPORTIO

Being in Venice for the 56. Biennale, we went to see the exhibition PROPORTIO at the Palazzo Fortuny. Having read Mette Sandbyes enthusiastic review in the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen we went with high expectations. And YES it was AMAZING. The old beautiful Palazzo Fortuny with both a sense of decay and glory to it housed the exhibition curated by the dutch art collector Axel Vervoordt together with Daniela Ferretti. The exhibition presents a huge amount of art objects, architectural models and design objects from the 15. Century till today. The focus is on mans attempt to understand the human scale and proportion in space, geometry, the golden ratio etc.

The whole setting, the lighting and the surprising combinations of old and new works put together was exhilarating and so inspiring that you just got new energy to explore the three floors of the palace. We immersed ourselves into a great and mysterious “Wunderkammer”. The walls were covered with beautiful fabrics giving the space a warm and inviting ambience. An extra plus was the curators’ concern for the fact that visitors may get exhausted, deep huge couches draped with fabric in a warm and relaxing colour pallette, were placed in the middle of the exhibition. You could sit/lie/rest there, like if you were a guest of the house being taken good care of. GREAT.

 

 

dOCUMENTA (13) – 3

It’s closing time. dOCUMENTA (13) are closing the doors for the exhibition in Kassel, Germany on September 16. Be there – or you will have to wait until 2017 for the next documenta. If you manage to go there this week, you just HAVE TO see the William Kentridge installation ‘The Refusal of Time’.

Five films are projected on the walls of an industrial space at the train station. A large wooden “breathing machine“ with moving parts are placed in the center of the room. The sounds of speaking and music are transmitted through silver megaphones, one at each corner, each with a different soundtrack.

The room was magic! We would so much like to experience it again.