Venice Biennale : Corderie and Artigliere


Eclectic exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale showcasing curated contemporary art.

OK get ready the Biennale is vast so I’m going to cover it in four posts as it seems mean to try to look at so much in one hit but if I review each pavilion and artists we’ll be here for ever! I’ml reporting things I did in Venice in the order I did them so there will be a gap between stories. Let’s start in the way I started then with the Corderie on the Arsenale site. This is the main curated section entitled “May You Live in Interesting Times” showcasing 71 contemporary artists. Don’t panic I’m just going to mention my highlights!

I found the show quite cramped at first and much busier in September than I’d imagined but as you enter the taller sections the people seem to thin out or at least there is an illusion of more space. The show started well with lovely photo portraits of Calcutta street people by Soham Gupta cleverly shown with Anthony Hernandez’s photographs showing the beauty in rubbish and dereliction in Rome.

I was moved by Tavares Strachen’s neon installation on the first black astronaut and loved the work shown here by Alexandra Bircken of rubber deflated Gormley like figures which used the height of the space really well. There was a fun installation at the end by Zhanna Kadyrova of a market stall with all the fruit, veg and flowers made of mosaic.

 The best example of paintings were Michael Armitage’s pictures of following an election in Kenya, later in the week I saw his sketches for these in the Central Pavilion at the Giardini and they were exquisite. I strangely rather liked Arthur Jafa’s gig wheels and Christine e/and Margaret Wertheim’s crocheted reefs!

I think my favourite piece was Shilpa Gupta’s installation of a room of poems on spikes by poets who had been jailed or killed for speaking out. From old fashioned microphones over each spike the poems were read in an apparently random sequence. We popped back to this on our way out and managed to get the space to ourselves. A moment of peace in the bustle of the main show.

Closes 24 November 2019

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