Cathy's Art Diary

Fun series of national pavilions and collateral events at the Venice Biennale scattered around town rather than at the main two sites. We managed to get round 12 of these which, looking at the map again now, seems if a bit amateur but we did only have a week!   Highlights included New Zealand’s talking trees and Catalonia’s look at the role of public statues particularly those that have been torn down. I loved the grey people came from Azerbajan’s pavilion which looked at virtual reality and communications. But I think my favourite was a touching installation by Sean Edwards, looking at his childhood in Cardiff which included authentic Welsh quilts.  Closes 24 November 2019 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph

Fabulous mix of exhibition and national Pavilions at the 58th Venice Biennale showcasing contemporary art. We started by going to the Central Pavilion that showed work of a lot of the artists who had been on show in the main exhibition at the Arsenale. However here they didn’t each have their own section but the pieces were mixed together and it made you look at them in a different way and it meant you realised which artists you had particularly liked as they bubbled to the surface in this show. For me I loved the sketches by Michael Armitage   for his Kenya election pictures. We then faced the 30 national pavilions with copious coffee breaks to keep us going. So highlights were the Belgium installation Mondo Cane by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, automated life sized puppets of serial killers and miserable people. It came with a good leaflet giving you the story of each figure. Poland showed an inside out plane. It was fascinating to see so familiar object in such a...

Wonderful variety of national pavilions at the 58th Venice Biennale on the Arsenale site. My second review is looking at the national pavilions on the Arsenal site. These tend to be smaller than the main pavilions at the Giardini but contained some fascinating and beautiful work. I liked the India pavilion which focused on artists who had worked with or been inspired by Gandhi to mark 150 years since his birth. I loved a wall of painted sandals and modern murgal style paintings. I loved the Ghana pavilion whose interior was designed by the architect Sir David Adjaye in the colours of the land and featured lovely paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and El Anatsui’s hangings made of bottle tops. Also the Luxemberg offering, shown here, of note books soaked in sea water and sculpture into different shapes. I also have to mention the Malta Pavilion for Trevor Borg’s re-imagination of an archaeological site on suspended black platforms, stark white objects on   a dark ba...