Archive for August, 2011

Luigi Ghirri

31Aug11

Greg Neville, installation view of Luigi Ghirri exhibition, Venice Biennale 2011 The Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale has a wall of photographs by the late Italian photographer, Luigi Ghirri. I’m not sure what they contributed to the Biennale theme, Illuminations, but these small colour photographs were enjoyable, and in their way subversive when the […]


File Room

25Aug11

Dayanita Singh, File Room 2011 “Storage rooms filled with paper archives demonstrating the aftermath of human presence.” Dayanita Singh’s grid of black & white photographs shows office back rooms in India, stacked with bundles of bureaucratic files, an archive from another time. It’s funny at first, in an alarming sort of way. Then you think […]


Natalia Andrianova, Sport Geometrisms. 2007-2011 Lingua Franca is the title of the Central Asia pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Eleven artists from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstanetc. show work in “a study of contemporary artistic practices as a kind of lingua franca – a language of global communication.” This is a true statement about the Biennale which includes […]


Cindy Sherman

22Aug11

Cindy Sherman, Murals 2011 Cindy Sherman is included in the Venice Biennale, four walls of mural prints on Photoext, a commercial display material. It’s a series of her dress-up portraits combined with 18th century engravings of woodland scenes. The figures seem to comprise a sort of family of eccentrics but it’s notable that she is […]


Hang

21Aug11

Charlotte Gyllenhammer, Hang 2006 A woman hangs from above, inside a wedding dress – or is she a living wedding dress? Charlotte Gyllenhammer’s video piece projects onto a ceiling of the gorgeous Palazzo Franchetti in Venice. The apparition in the darkened room is striking, like a moving, organic Venetian chandelier. The video work is in […]


Martyrs

21Aug11

Morteza Darehbaghi, Illumination and Peace You approach the Iran pavilion at the Venice Biennale with caution. What sort of art would the government of President Ahmadinejad approve? In fact there was a moving and disturbing installation showing hundreds of faces of the dead, not of the recent riots of course, but of the Iran/Iraq war […]


Magela Ferrero, 2011 The Uruguay pavilion at the Venice Biennale includes this work by artist Magela Ferrero, closeup photographs of fabric with written text; they are alluring images. The curator’s statement talks about affectivity: Ferrero’s work is a personal diary of private thoughts and memories. .


Bridge

17Aug11

Tim Davies, Bridge, 2011 The Wales pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale shows the work of Swansea artist Tim Davies. It includes some video pieces plus this installation of small framed artworks – postcards of bridges that have been sanded back to the structure. Davies had read about the destruction of the famous arched bridge […]


Eric Bouvet, from the series ‘Somewhere over Grozny’ War Photo Limited is an art gallery in Dubrovnik that shows war photojournalism. This must be unique though I can think of no more appropriate place for it; Dubrovnik was shelled by the Serbian military during the 1990s war that saw the break up of Yugoslavia. The […]



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