The Lia Rumma Gallery is pleased to announce the projects of Wael Shawky, William Kentridge, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Joseph Kosuth and Marina Abramović during the Biennale Arte 2024.
The exhibition by Wael Shawky at Museo di Palazzo Grimani and curated by Massimo Osanna, Andrea Viliani, Gabriel Zuchtriegel brings together the filmic work I Am Hymns of the New Temples – أنا†تراتیل†المعابد†الجدیدة†- realised by the artist in 2023 and which, after its premiere at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, is being presented in Venice as an international museum premiere – and a selection of multi-material works and drawings realised by the artist between 2022 and 2024. You can visit the show from 17.04 through 30.06.2024
The exhibition project is conceived as an ideal dialogue between different spaces and times, in which contemporary works coexist with the archaeological works and historical rooms of Palazzo Grimani, outlining a path that prospectively leads from the Camaron d’Oro to the so-called Tribuna, also known as the Antiquarium or Camerino delle Antichità, the true fulcrum of the palace and its narratives. A narrator of cognitive and expressive processes suspended between the documentable and the imaginable, Wael Shawky explores the ways in which stories have been written and told and analyses how they have also shaped historical reality. In his works – in which he articulates film, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, performance and theatre direction, always the result of research into historical and literary sources – Shawky in fact predisposes us to a position of awareness of the narrative mechanisms, both ancient and contemporary, with which historical, social and cultural facts have been interpreted and transmitted, and, crossing space and time, he evokes a dimension of history and society that is both factual and imaginary, as if they could never be defined once and for all, or from a single point of view.
For the Egyptian Pavilion, Shawky has created Drama 1882, a filmed rendition of an original musical play directed, choreographed, and composed by the artist, around Egypt’s nationalist Urabi revolution against imperial influence (1879-82).
In accepting the invitation to represent Egypt at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Shawky said: ‘This is a moment of global political urgency and revolutionary change. It seemed paramount to represent my country with a strong message at this time. To reflect on the historic occupation in Egypt felt timely, pressing, and important.’
For his new exhibition by William Kentridge at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation in Venice, the artist, in collaboration with curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, premieres the striking new nine-episode video series Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot. This exhibition, structured in short thirty-minute episodes and originally conceived to be enjoyed as an online series, on mobile phones or television, is an experiment in the physical embodiment and phenomenological experience of reality in the digital age, as well as a reflection on what might be happening in an artist’s brain and studio today. You can visit the exhibition from 17.04 through 24.11.2024. Discover the daily programme on Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation
Almost a year after the death of Ilya Kabakov, Fondazione Querini Stampalia and the Ilya and Emilia Kabakov Art Foundation pay tribute to him in Venice, on the occasion of the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale. The exhibition Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Between Heaven and Earth. A tribute to Ilya Kabakov is curated by Chiara Bertola remembers one of the masters of conceptual art, a brilliant experimenter of the poetry and the expressive potential of materials, celebrated celebrated as the most important USSR-born and naturalised US artist of the 20th century. You can visit the solo show from 14.04 through 14.07.2024.
For the first time some of the Kabakovs’ historical installations will dialogue with the rooms and the collections of the Querini Stampalia Museum. Their works become site-specific interventions designed for the environment that hosts them, as is the nature of the Querini Stampalia’s contemporary art program “Conserving the future”, which implies confrontation with a past to be protected and a future to be designed and involves the institution, the public, and the artists. These artists act as ferrymen between these worlds, revealing fractures, inventing connections and showing something that otherwise risked being lost or never seen.
On the occasion of the Biennale Arte 2024, Joseph Kosuth’s installation The Material of Ornament at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia was restored.
Twelve descriptions from the influential British art critic John Ruskin’s book ‘The Stones of Venice’ that identify ornamental and decorative details of Venetian Gothic and Renaissance architecture are reinscribed and returned to Venice as architectural ornament rendered as language.
Written and directed by Professor Dr. Apinan Poshyananda, Artistic Director of Bangkok Art Biennale, the film The Spirits of Maritime Crossing by Marina Abramović tells a story of a search for refuge and internal peace. On Abramović’s ghostly voyage, she encounters symbolic figures and visits sacred places. You can discover the film at Palazzo Smith Mangilli Valmarana, from 20.04 to 24.11.2024