"Florentina Holzinger upped the ante yet again in Venice with a postapocalyptic pavilion that opened with her suspended upside down from the clappers of a large bell. Inside, there was a woman riding a speedboat in circles, two others suspended at the top of a pole and another sitting entirely submerged in a tank. Oh, and no one was wearing any clothes."
"Viewers were invited to use two toilets so that their urine could be purified and pumped into the tank but what looked like a sewage disaster in another section of the pavilion suggested that this project threatened to go dangerously awry. The whole thing was so transgressive that four cops turned up when I was watching to ask what the hell was going on. It was immediately the talk of the town."
"Kantarovsky, 44, is a brilliant painter who was born in Moscow and whose family emigrated to the US when he was 10. His paintings are like stills from very intense films just what is going on in the one where a naked man is crouching in seeming despair at the foot of a bed while a dog cheerfully sits on the pillow? They're displayed in book-lined rooms with incredible Murano glass chandeliers, and the show culminates with an incredibly detailed sculpture of the head of a boy, also in Murano glass."
"Goliath was one of several artists who were caught up in controversy leading up to the biennale. The South African government banned her from appearing at the event because her piece called Elegy was a highly divisive tribute to a Palestinian poet. Goliath has staged the work anyway in partnership with London arts centre Ibraaz, at the Chiesa di Sant'Antonin, which is a short walk fr"
A Venice Biennale pavilion featured extreme, postapocalyptic performance elements, including performers suspended from a bell, riding a speedboat in circles, suspended atop a pole, and submerged in a tank. Viewers were invited to use toilets so urine could be purified and pumped into the tank, while another area resembled a sewage disaster. The installation drew police attention and became widely discussed. Elsewhere, a painter’s work appeared in book-lined rooms with Murano glass chandeliers, culminating in a detailed Murano glass sculpture of a boy’s head. Another artist’s mourners were tied to controversy after a government ban over a divisive tribute to a Palestinian poet, with the work staged in partnership with an arts center.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]