The 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale will take place in 2011, directed by Bice Curiger. The title chosen is ILLUMInazioni / ILLUMInations - Preview: 1-2-3 June 2011 - Official Opening: 3 June 2011 - Public opening: 4 June/27 November 2011
The Biennale is one of the most important forum about knowledge and the 'enlightenment' of new developments of international art. The title of 54. Exposition, ILLUMInations literally puts the spotlight on the importance of these developments in a globalized world.
txt:Don Giovanni in Venice 23 > 25 September Palazzo Pisani, Conservatorio B. Marcello of Venice Labyrinth Opera
The Don Giovanni by Mozart becomes Don Giovanni a Venezia, a totally new opera installation that inaugurates the 54th Festival and presents itself as a synthesis of the themes running through it. A concentration of many simultaneous events – musical, scenic, theatrical, visual – dispersed throughout the spaces of the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello in Venice and cyclically “switched on”, Don Giovanni a Venezia disrupts our perceptive habits and creates interference between different eras. Conceived by director Luca Francesconi, Don Giovanni a Venezia is a singular experiment in production with young artists from the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello and the Accademia di Belle Arti who will measure themselves on the professional stage against the singers and musicians of one of the major opera theatres, the Teatro La Fenice, against the composers, soloists and actors involved in this operation. A complex stage organization, engaging over 130 artistic and technical professionals, made possible by the joint commitment of four Venetian institutions: the participants in this project by the Music Biennale are the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, which not only put its young musicians and composers to work, but also offered its historic headquarters at Palazzo Pisani in Campo Santo Stefano, one of the most fascinating Venetian palaces, as the venue for the performance; the Teatro La Fenice, which involved its entire choir and orchestra ensemble, and opened its storerooms to lend the costumes and props; and the Accademia di Belle Arti, which will create the sets for Palazzo Pisani.
Titled Don Giovanni and the man of stone, the Festival refers not only to the famous opera by Mozart, but to one of the central myths of western culture, the myth of Don Giovanni: within the conflict between human finiteness and its aspiration to eternity, between the body and the spirit, reverberates the relationship between the immortality of the work of art and the inexorable breath of time, between the written and the oral, between tradition and modernity. These themes weave through the 54th International Festival of Contemporary Music and find their synthesis in the opening event, the opera-installation Don Giovanni a Venezia.
The independent and parallel sections: International Critics’ Week - Giornate degli Autori-Venice DaysThe screenings schedule includes 11 days, from Wednesday 1st to Saturday 11th September. - VENICE DAYS YEAR 7 31 august - 11 september. Independent, auteur and creative cinema has for seven years found a home in Venice and its flag at Venice Days, a free space promoted by the Italian filmmakers associations ANAC and 100 Autori. - Circuito Off 2010 August 31 – September 4.
Interesting links between Venice and Australia: a Biennial, the love (and the concern) for the sea, the openness to the new, a (sort of) vaporetto, the islands. In this case, Cockatoo Island, an island in the middle of Sydney Harbour, home of the 17th Sydney Biennial...
[it] Interessanti link tra Venezia e Australia: una Biennale, l'amore (e la preoccupazione) per il mare, l'apertura verso il nuovo, un vaporetto, isole. In questo caso Cockatoo Island, in mezzo alla baia di Sidney, sede della 17th Sidney Biennale...
Distance allows us to be ourselves, despite the many capacities we share. We are all the same, but different, and it is our differences that make us – according to the circumstances – beautiful, terrifying, attractive, boring, sexy, unsettling, fascinating, challenging, funny, stimulating, horrific, or even many of these all at once. All this is underlaid by our essential similarity to each other, often much greater than many care to acknowledge. More importantly, the idea of distance expresses the condition of art itself, which is to be of life, run parallel to life and sometimes to be about life. But for art to be art, it must maintain a distance from life because without this it has no authority. Art can reflect the sweetest or strongest of emotions and also represent the most threatening or traumatic events but, unlike in life, nobody gets hurt. And we do live at a time when our capacity for the destruction of both ourselves and nature seems to be unsurpassed.
The Board of the Venice Biennale, chaired by Paolo Baratta, met on 12th May 2010 and appointed Bice Curiger as Director of the Visual Arts sector for the 54th International Art Exhibition (2011) and Àlex Rigola ad Director of the Theatre sector in the two-year period 2010-2011.
A graduate of the University of Zurich, Bice Curiger is an art historian, critic and curator of exhibitions at an international level. Since 1993, she has been curator at the Zurich Kunsthaus, one of the most important museums in the world for modern and contemporary art, and which has for years implemented a major exhibitions programme of international significance. Bice Curiger is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Parkett, one of the most authoritative and innovative contemporary art magazines in the world, published in Zurich and New York since 1984. Since 2004, she has been publishing director of the Tate etc magazine produced by London’s Tate Gallery. She is also the author of various publications and catalogues of contemporary art.
This year’s Festival takes a close look at a wide geographic area, with two focuses on Canada and Quebec, Australia and New Zealand, together with other new projects from Italy and elsewhere. Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal contend the primacy in dance with such cities as New York thanks to their major events that have been held for some years, such as the Festival International de Nouvelle Danse and the more recent BC Scéne, Festival TransAmériques, Push Festival, and through the ferment and variety of choreographic offering. Australia too offers more than 60 official dance companies, hundreds of independent artists and 21 universities offering institutional courses dedicated to dance, which all lead to this discipline gaining in breadth. But what is interesting above all is the cultural uniqueness of New Zealand, which blends an indigenous culture and 200 different nationalities.
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Marathon of the Unexpected (June 12, Teatro Piccolo Arsenale) is the space dedicated to novelty that the Biennale has created within the Festival: all the pieces are new and lightning-fast – not more than 5 minutes each – and selected via a competition to try and provide visibility for works that would otherwise have little exposure. Go&Go Dance Party (June 12, Tese delle Vergini) will instead be an evening of shared festivity to celebrate the joy and beauty of dance and so crown the Festival.
Capturing Emotions is the title the director, Ismael Ivo, has chosen for this Festival, because dance, he writes, “is a workshop of human emotions and shared visions”.
The Festival, organised in collaboration with the Fondazione Teatro La Fenice and with the expected support of the Veneto Region, focuses above all on two geographic and cultural macro-areas: Quebec and Canada on the one side, and Australia and New Zealand on the other, placing consolidated names such as those of Marie Chouinard and the Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal alongside young names – from Europe – that include the young and dynamic companies of the Kidd Pivot and Chunky Move.
Alongside the active presence of artists from or working in these areas, the spaces of the Arsenale in Venice (Teatro alle Tese, Teatro Piccolo Arsenale, Tese delle Vergini), of the Teatro Malibran and of the Sale Apollinee in the Fenice, of the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove and of the Teatro Toniolo in Mestre will host choreographers from Italy, the United States and Sweden with original works presented as world premieres for the Biennale.
A new feature for the Festival will be the opening of a separate space dedicated to the most experimental experiences in the field of dance, revealing pieces that would otherwise be little visible. Marathon of the Unexpected will be a space concentrated in a single day (12 June, from 3 to 10 p.m.) and comprising very short performances –not more than 15 minutes– to be chosen and presented on the basis of a call for entries (deadline 10th April 2010)