Category: Works

The 18th International Architecture Exhibition, “The Laboratory of the Future”, curated by Lesley Lokko and organised by La Biennale di Venezia, takes place from Saturday May 20 to Sunday November 26, 2023 at the Giardini and the Arsenale, and at Forte Marghera.

The Laboratory of the Future is curated by academic, educator and novelist Lesley Lokko, who is the founder of the African Futures Institute and the Graduate School of Architecture in Johannesburg. She has taught in the UK, the US, Europe, Australia and Africa, and is the recipient of a number of awards for her contributions to architectural education. The Laboratory of the Future is divided into six parts. There are 89 Participants, over half of which are from Africa or the African Diaspora. The gender balance is proportionate, and the average age of all Participants is 43. At the Arsenale, the 37 practitioners in the “Dangerous Liaisons” section (also represented in Forte Marghera in Mestre), all work across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, exploring new forms of collaboration.

New additions to features of the Architecture Exhibition, include the Curator’s Special Projects and Special Participants, where the Curator and her Curator’s Assistants have worked in close alliance to produce work in specific categories to complement the Exhibition. Three of these categories are Mnemonic; Food, Agriculture and Climate Change; and Geography and Gender.

In Guests from the Future, young practitioners from Africa and the Diaspora present their work throughout both venues and directly engage with the twin themes of this exhibition, Decolonisation and Decarbonisation. Another new entry this year is “Carnival”, a six-month-long cycle (May – November 2023) of events, lectures, panel discussions, films, and performances, exploring the themes of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition.

This year there are 64 National Participations, 27 will organise their exhibitions in the historic Pavilions at the Giardini, 22 at the Arsenale and 14 in various locations in the city centre of Venice. Niger participates for the first time on the island of San Servolo and Panama for the first time with its own pavilion. 9 Collateral Events are scheduled for the 18th International Architecture Exhibition.

As of March 2023, the new Mezzanine Bistrot curated by Vino Vero offers visitors to Palazzo Grassi a brand new ambiance, created in collaboration with Lightbox and life stylist Sergio Colantuoni.
Mezzanine refers to its location within the museum and is the ideal setting for a sophisticated culinary experience, combined with a selection of outstanding natural wines.

Already known for their work at Vino Vero wine bar in Venice, chef Lorenzo Barbasetti di Prun imagines a menu that pays attention to seasonal ingredients, whilst the team of sommeliers including Stella Croci, Camille Delia and Valeria Lozito bring together a meticulously researched wine list. Vino Vero will also take care of the offer at the caffetteria at Punta della Dogana.

Vino Vero continues its collaboration with Lightbox, a new series of events related to contemporary art curated by Mara Sartore. On a quarterly basis, international artists who work with nature are invited to present site-specific works in the window of the wine club adjacent to the bar.

Lupo Borgonovo (1985) lives and works in Milan. His most recent solo exhibitions include: Aplomb, Museo del Novecento, Milan (2020); Zeester, Museo Civico di Castelbuono (2019); Alexandra, Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan (2018). The artist has also been part of several group exhibitions, such as: Una Boccata d’Arte, Civita (2021); occupy and echo (a stage), curated by Tom Polo, Reading Room, Melbourne (2019); The Relative Naive, Galerie Weisser Elefant, Berlin, Germany (2019); #80 | #90, curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto, Villa Medici, Rome, Italy (2019), Volare, Reading Room, Melbourne (2022).

“Yelloween” is a site-specific work by Lupo Borgonovo, an artist whose work develops by combining and associating natural forms, historical artefacts and everyday objects. The artist’s practice mixes solids and liquids, existing and imaginary objects, refined and raw materials. “Yelloween” consists of a series of fruit casts that render the variety of natural forms through a synthetic material and presents the essential traits of Borgonovo’s sculptural practice, which he himself has defined as a “product by subtraction” and the creation of “forms sculpted by time”. The installation shows the presence of what was and is no more, the fruit is only present through its form.

The VETRINA project began on 25th September 2021 with the French artist Marie Denis, represented by the Galleria Alberta Pane Venezia – Paris, who created “Spathes” for Vetrina #1, an aluminum sculpture that takes inspiration from research on botany, made in collaboration with the Giovanardi textile company. For Vetrina #2, the artist Elham M. Aghili, an Italian-born artist with Persian roots who is finishing her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, presented “Hybrids”, an immersive installation recalling an ideal garden, a metaphor of our inner world, a microcosm of nature and humanity. Vetrina#3 hosted Matilde Sambo’s site-specific work, called “Subtle Instability”. Her artistic research explores the complicated relationship between the natural world and the human being. For Vetrina#4 Ignazio Mortellaro presented “Umfangsbestimmung”, a site-specific project that reproduces a wunderkammer of objects from the artist’s studio. For Vetrina#5 Lilla Tabasso presented “Rumore / Noise”, a site-specific work in collaboration with the venetian Galleria Caterina Tognon.

The next edition will see a new installation from Fabio Roncato.

With the series of exhibitions Vetrina, artists are invited to reflect on the theme of nature, a key element in the philosophy of Vino Vero, and to create a site-specific installation capable of communicating with a context distinctive far from the usual exhibition spaces in the city of Venice.

Vino Vero continues its collaboration with Lightbox, a new series of events related to contemporary art curated by Mara Sartore. On a quarterly basis, international artists who work with nature are invited to present site-specific works in the window of the wine club adjacent to the bar.

Lilla Tabasso (Milan, 1973), biologist and designer, lives and works in Milan. After studying Biology at the University of Milan, she began working with Murano glass, discovering the ancient and noble art of lampworking. Her artistic experimentation focuses on her passion for nature, combined with great technical skill. The artist’s work therefore focuses on floral themes. Her works are characterised by an incredible realism that draws from nature an infinite palette of colours, clear shades and also – fundamental for the artist – mutations and imperfections: dry branches, wilted flowers and withered leaves. These mainly refer to the concept of ‘Vanitas’, which has always been used in Art History to symbolise the transience of earthly life and the inexorable passing of time.

Lilla Tabasso for Vino Vero presents “Rumore / Noise”, a site-specific work in collaboration with the venetian Galleria Caterina Tognon. Lilla Tabasso’s VETRINA #5 is among the projects in the city included in the official programme of Venice Glass Week.

The VETRINA project began on 25th September 2021 with the French artist Marie Denis, represented by the Galleria Alberta Pane Venezia – Paris, who created “Spathes” for Vetrina #1, an aluminum sculpture that takes inspiration from research on botany, made in collaboration with the Giovanardi textile company. For Vetrina #2, the artist Elham M. Aghili, an Italian-born artist with Persian roots who is finishing her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, presented “Hybrids”, an immersive installation recalling an ideal garden, a metaphor of our inner world, a microcosm of nature and humanity. Vetrina#3 hosted Matilde Sambo’s site-specific work, called “Subtle Instability”. Her artistic research explores the complicated relationship between the natural world and the human being. For Vetrina#4 Ignazio Mortellaro presented “Umfangsbestimmung”, a site-specific project that reproduces a wunderkammer of objects from the artist’s studio.

The next edition will see a new installation from Lupo Borgonovo.

With the series of exhibitions VETRINA, artists are invited to reflect on the theme of nature, a key element in the philosophy of Vino Vero, and to create a site-specific installation capable of communicating with a context distinctive far from the usual exhibition spaces in the city of Venice.

Mara Sartore and Ignazio Mortellaro curated the contemporary art exhibition “Àlma Venùs” at the Noto headquarters of Cantine Planeta. The exhibition is part of the wider Planeta Session: Venus programme, which the winery is sponsoring.

Alma is the traditional epithet for Venus: the adjective almus derives from the verb alere, “to nourish, to nourish, to make grow” and thus indicates a force that gives and transmits life. Venus – Aphrodite for the Greeks – goddess of beauty and love born from the foam of the sea, in Latin culture she also became the protector of nature; Venus is the third brightest celestial body after the Sun and the Moon. Just as the Latin poet Lucretius, in his famous poem De Rerum Natura, invokes Venus as his guide, begging her to follow his writing alone – She who governs the nature of things and without whom nothing comes into being, nor is anything happy or lovable produced – Àlma Venùs’s exhibition is a contemporary ‘Hymn to Venus’, whose presence is the common thread running through the works of Luca Cutrufelli, Ignazio Mortellaro, Giovanni Ozzola, Matilde Sambo, Lucia Veronesi and Lorenzo Vitturi. The exhibition is divided into three archetypal moments of the discourse of love: the encounter, the journey and the mystery. Consequently, the exhibition was conceived to develop through three distinct spaces of the Buonivini Winery: the wine shop, the invisible cellar and the ancient wine press.

Planeta Sessions: Venus is a project produced by Planeta with Radiceterna Arte e Ambiente, in collaboration with Lightbox, with the aim of consolidating the bond between Planeta and the surrounding territory, through a hybrid encounter between the contemporary languages of art and music.

SPECIAL GUEST ARTIST: CLAIRE FONTAINE 

Claire Fontaine is an artist collective founded in Paris in 2004 by James Thornhill and Fulvia Carnevale. She has been  living and working in Palermo since 2017. In her artistic practice, Claire Fontaine uses video, sculpture, luminous texts  often in neon, painting and both literary and non-fiction writing. The artist refuses the obligation of formal recognition  in her work, considering it as experimental research in continuous evolution. For Planeta Sessions: Venus presents  the work Patriarchy = CO2 which, by adopting the visual language of advertising signs, conveys a disturbing truth:  patriarchal culture has generated a toxic capitalism that has led us to ecological disaster. Claire Fontaine’s work adopts  the sparse and enigmatic language of conceptual art, illuminating, magnifying words and creating a poetic effect that  activates the surrounding context. The territory of Noto, one of the most intensively cultivated areas in Sicily, appears in  the light of this sentence as a place wounded and crossed by tensions, a space in which violence has shaped the landscape  and contends with the incredible beauty of vegetation and ancient architecture. 

 

 

Volvo Studio Milano hosts an exhibition by Alessandro Calabrese: Hierarchy of Genres, curated by Mara Sartore for Volvo Car Italia.

Alessandro Calabrese is an artist and photographer whose artistic practice follows an anti-narrative approach. Interested in destroying images with figurative representations that fade into abstraction, he deconstructs the usual process of creating photographic language. On some occasions he experiments by sacrificing his authorship and delegating the search for images to an algorithm, on others he creates them himself.

The works exhibited at Volvo Studio Milano are a series of prints entitled ‘Hierarchy of Genres’. The fundamental idea behind the creation and development of the Hierarchy of Genres in the figurative arts from the 16th century onwards was the distinction between visual creation that yearns for the ideal, for the intellectual effort that ‘makes the universal essence of things visible’, and that which limits itself to the portrayal of reality, to the reproduction of its appearances.

In the creation of this project, Alessandro Calabrese started from the six categories that make up the Genre Categories: Historical Painting, Portrait Painting, Genre Painting or Scenes from Everyday Life, Landscape and City Painting, Animal Painting and Still Life, then divided them into two groups. For three of them, he created an archive of images he had created himself, while for the other three, he created an archive of images taken from the web, with one subject per category being chosen. Once the archive is composed, each image is printed in A4 format, on glossy photographic paper, on the wrong side: this causes the ink not to penetrate the fibre of the paper, forcing the image into a latent, temporary and unstable limbo. The only way to give permanence and stability to a finished composition is to photograph it again, to reproduce it mechanically.

The search for the intersection between the oneiric and the artificial, bringing human contact to the fore, makes Alessandro Calabrese’s works alive and touching and brings them closer to some of the key elements of the Volvo brand. Firstly, the focus on the Person, understood as an individual in constant evolution, whose centrality is affirmed in both the strategies and the concrete actions undertaken by the Swedish car manufacturer. But also interesting is the parallel that can be established between the artist’s practice and the construction philosophy followed by Volvo, in which authenticity with respect to tradition is integrated with the most advanced production techniques and the use of cutting-edge sustainable materials. In this way, while remaining true to its history, Volvo looks to the future. Added to this theme is the focus on the person, understood as an individual in constant evolution, whose centrality is affirmed in both the strategies and concrete actions undertaken by the Swedish carmaker.

Vino Vero continues its collaboration with Lightbox, a new series of events related to contemporary art curated by Mara Sartore. On a quarterly basis, international artists who work with nature are invited to present site-specific works in the window of the wine club adjacent to the bar.

The VETRINA project began on 25th September with the French artist Marie Denis, represented by the Galleria Alberta Pane Venezia – Paris, who created “Spathes” for Vetrina #1, an aluminum sculpture that takes inspiration from research on botany, made in collaboration with the Giovanardi textile company. For Vetrina #2, the artist Elham M. Aghili, an Italian-born artist with Persian roots who is finishing her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, presented “Hybrids”, an immersive installation recalling an ideal garden, a metaphor of our inner world, a microcosm of nature and humanity. Vetrina#3 hosted Matilde Sambo’s site-specific work, called “Subtle Instability”. Her artistic research explores the complicated relationship between the natural world and the human being.

The next edition will see a new installation from Lilla Tabasso.

With the series of exhibitions Vetrina, artists are invited to reflect on the theme of nature, a key element in the philosophy of Vino Vero, and to create a site-specific installation capable of communicating with a context distinctive far from the usual exhibition spaces in the city of Venice.

On the occasion of the Biennale Arte 2022, the exhibition dedicated to artist Stanley Whitney was accepted as an Official Collateral Event, presented on the piano nobile of the sixteenth- century Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, located along the central stretch of the Grand Canal.