Dutch and Nordic Pavilions

The Dutch and Nordic Pavilions were probably my favourite of the whole biennale. They joined together and invited a collaborative artist team to curate the show, which featured somewhere around 30 artists. The concept behind the show was that each pavilion was a house (one was for sale and one was owned by a collector, who featured drowned in a pool!). Therefore artists weren't identified and it was like you were a voyeur walking around someone else's home. Then you come across lots of disjunctures which disrupt the idea of these 'houses' as everyday abodes. Some photos below:

Australian Pavilion at last!

So I finally got around to photographing the Australian Pavilion and then my not so trusty camera died! So courtesy of Fi I have some piccies of the Shaun Gladwell exhibitions Maddest Maximvs: Planet and Stars Sequence, below.





See that little chair in the corner? I spent many hours in that chair! As Fi says, we must appear in thousands of photos - everyone who photographed Endoscopic Vanitas (the skull work) would have got us in the shot as well.

Before: Every night we covered the bike and car, here they are tucked into bed...

After: all uncovered ready for the public! I must say that this show was great to work on and full of new experiences - can't say I've ever had to wash an artwork, stop people for touching an artwork because they are making it clean, and tuck artworks into bed!

Last Day in Venezia

Well time has flown by as they say, and today is my last day working in Venice! I haven't posted everything I wanted to yet, so I might put some more things up in the coming weeks.

I'm looking forward to heading to Paris tomorrow and having a holiday! Then we're off to Madrid on Tuesday 29 September and on to London on Friday 2 October, before arriving back in Brisbane Sunday 11 October - so not that far away!

Ciao for now, or as Team Australia says, ciaofers!

Slovenia and Luxembourg

Miha Strukelj (Slovenia) - I really like his work.


The above is made from lego!

Collision Zone: Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert (Luxembourg) - I really liked this show as well. It is incredibly difficult to show in photos as it was pitch black with these blue and black videos throughout and incredibly loud noise.

Russia

I liked two of the artists in this year's Russian pavilion. The first was Irina Horina (below) and the second was Pevel Pepperstein who was also in the curated exhibition.


I think Eugene Carchesio would really like Pepperstein's work and I'm planning on sending him some images when I get back home. They are watercolours about utopia and the future and impossible fanciful structures.

Latvia: Miks Mitrevics

This was quite a fun show. When you entered the space you saw photographs of people in various landscape type scenes, and one video of a similar thing. They don't look quite right, and then you go into this room and discover the little constructed tableaus used to make them. The video is a live feed from this room into the front room - so you can see people that enter these scenes.

Regata Storica

Set up - floating a grandstand in the grand canal!

This is the boat that carried the fake 'Doge', the guys at the front were playing trumpets and drums.

The fake Doge

Ca'd'Oro

Ca'd'Oro generally features historical works, recovered from pillaged collections. However they also had a contemporary exhibition called L'Acqua on when I visited, which predominantly featured Bill Viola's work. Unfortunately it was a real let down, but I was interested in how they had chosen to show the exhibition and how this impacted on the palazzo exhibition spaces. Below is a photo giving an example of one of the modules that made up L'Acqua. While conceptually this was interesting, allowing the museum to display an exhibition within their permanent display, the modules were slightly too big, so walking either side of them there wasn't much room, and viewing the permanent collection was affected as a result.

A selection of works at Ca'd'Oro.

These were once lions, but the years have worn them away, and I love how they are now strange mutants.

Poland and Lithuania

Poland and Lithuania are two of my favourite exhibitions. Poland is definitely right up there - it was a fantastic show and I would love to see something by this artist realised at The Block, one of QUT's new media spaces at the Creative Industries Precinct.

The exhibition is by Krzysztof Wodiczko and is about immigration. It features numerous projections that give the illusion of people on the other side of large glass windows - the people are the same size as you. As you walk through you hear them talking and they also clean the windows, referring to some of the jobs that immigrants perform in the process of establishing themselves in a foreign country.


This is the ceiling projection, which makes the whole piece in a sense. When I was there the video was of someone cleaning leaves off.

The below images are from the Lithuanian pavilion, of a work by Zilvinas Kempinas. The work is a 5om long tube formed from the magnetic tape out of video tapes. It creates an amazing optical illusion as you walk through and really confuses your perception - I almost fell over a few times and it was hard to walk straight.