53a Bienal Internacional de Veneza abre no dia 07 de junho de 2009

A 53a Bienal Internacional de Veneza abre no dia 07 de junho de 2009 com o título: Fazer Mundos //Making Worlds // Fare Mondi // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes ... ocupando os pavilhões no Giardini e os galpões do Arsenale, bem como outros espaços espalhados na cidade.
Coletivas de imprensa e as vernissages acontecem nos dias 4, 6 e 6 de junho. O encerramento será no dia 22 de novembro de 2009. O  Leoni d’oro , seu principal prêmio, será outorgado a Yoko Ono e John Baldessari, por suas carreiras e importância no cenário da arte contemporânea internacional.

O sueco Daniel Birnbaum é o curador desta edição da Bienal e conta com o apoio, entre outros, de Savita Apte, Tom Eccles, Hu Fang, Maria Finders bem como de Johen Volz, curador do Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim.  

Do Brasil foram convidados os artistas Cildo Meireles (59 anos), Renata Lucas (37) e Sara Ramo (33). Trabalhos de Lygia Pape (1927 - 2004) também estarão expostos.
Os artistas que representarão o Brasil em seu pavilhão são o fotógrafo paraense Luiz Braga e o pintor alagoano Delson Uchoa, ambos escolhidos pelo curador Ivo Mesquita

Mais informações: http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/
veja também informações no site do mapa das artes
leia também entrevista do curador Daniel Birnbaum concedida a ArtForum: http://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=200905&id=22616

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Daniel Birnbaum nasceu em Estocolmo, Suécia, em 1963.  É reitor da Academia Internacional de Arte Staedelschule em Frankfurt bem como diretor do "Novo-Portikus" um espaço de exposições na mesma cidade.  Foi co-curador da 1a bienal de Moscou bem como curador de exposições do Centro Pompidou em Paris e na Serpentine Gallery de Londres. Fez parte da comissão de arte da Manifesta 2002.  Contribui como editor na revista Artforum em Nova Iorque e escreve ensaios críticos para catálogos.

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entrevista do curador Daniel Birnbaum concedida a ArtForum

http://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=200905&id=22616

ON JUNE 7, THE 53RD VENICE Biennale will open, curated by DANIEL
BIRNBAUM—himself no stranger to the biennial format, having organized
grand shows over the past decade in locations around the world, from
Turin, Italy, to Yokohama, Japan. Titled “Fare Mondi//Making
Worlds//Bantin Duniyan//Weltenmachen//
Construire des Mondes//Fazer
Mundos . . . ,” Birnbaum’s exhibition seems particularly reflective of
both his cosmopolitanism and his inclusiveness, featuring more than
ninety artists and expanding the exhibition’s parameters beyond the
traditional venues of the Giardini and the Arsenale. Last month,
Artforum editor Tim Griffin phoned Birnbaum—who is director of the
Städelschule in Frankfurt as well as a longtime contributing editor
for the magazine—to discuss plans for this year’s Biennale amid
uncertain cultural and economic circumstances.


Tomás Saraceno, Galaxy forming along filaments, like droplets along
the strands of a spider’s web, 2008, elastic, dimensions variable.

TIM GRIFFIN: You recently wrote in the essay “The Archaeology of
Things to Come” that Francesco Bonami’s Fiftieth Venice Biennale in
2003 marked a kind of end for biennials as an experimental
format—because, you said, his show “tried to exhaust all possibilities
at once, and pushed the plurality as far as possible.” I know that you
were speaking to that specific exhibition’s simultaneous presentation
of numerous curatorial efforts, with its inclusion of Catherine
David’s “Contemporary Arab Representations” alongside, say, Molly
Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “Utopia Station.”
And yet you collaborated on the show with Bonami as well. So I wonder
what the implications of your observation might be for your own
Biennale this year.

DANIEL BIRNBAUM: Well, of course, in that text I was only playing with
the trope of the “end” of things. If Roland Barthes wrote about the
end of the novel, he wasn’t saying there wouldn’t be any more novels.
Rather, he was underscoring that any search for new beginnings must
start with the acceptance of a crisis within a given form.

That said, you might rightfully ask, How should the search for a new
beginning be conducted today? But maybe one doesn’t have to look so
hard for an answer. I mean, something is falling apart right now, and
not only in the art world. However tempting it may be to say
simplistic things about the current financial crisis, one can safely
surmise that we are at a turning point, culturally and creatively
speaking. And so my hope is that this Biennale does not merely present
fragments of something that has broken down but will also offer a
glimpse of something still to come—if not as a new, totally coherent
vision, then at least as an emerging plurality of possibilities.

TG: You’re establishing a very different tone from other
biennials—ostensibly less polemical. In fact, in your first public
statements about this Biennale, you’ve simply said that the show would
feature a number of different but interwoven thematic strands.

DB: There will be a few thematics, let’s say, and one always wonders
whether they will be visible to anyone but my colleague Jochen Volz
and me. But such elusiveness is part of the very title of the
exhibition, which consists of innumerable translations of the phrase
making worlds. In every language, the words have a slightly different
connotation: In English, they conjure a sense of craftsmanship and a
very down-to-earth approach to making things; in French, on the other
hand, construire des mondes has a more technical ring; in German,
Weltenmachen sounds a bit bombastic; and, in Swedish, Skapa världar
has theological connotations steeped in the idea of creation.

TG: The title itself begins to disappear, lost in translation—or
becoming more about the act of translation than about any given word
by itself.

DB: I think that the Biennale can be seen as a place where more or
less successful translations and productive misreadings take place.
This is what makes it a creative site and not simply a place where one
culture is put on display for another’s consideration, in a way
tantamount to treating each culture as something static—or as a fixed
essence, which almost inevitably means stereotyping it. Instead, there
is the possibility of truly poetic confrontation, what Édouard
Glissant, the poet and intellectual, calls an éclat—a clash that also
creates sparks of novelty. If it is true, as he suggests, that with
each language’s disappearance from the world something of the
imaginary in the world disappears with it, then it is likewise true
that the imaginary is enriched with every language’s translation into
another. Perhaps new worlds emerge where different worlds meet.

I don’t really know what Stvaranje svjetova, Facere de lumi, Pasaul,u
radišana, Karoutsel Ashkharhner, or Dünyalar Yaratmak sound like to
the people who speak these languages. Yet for me, underlying all these
valences of making and worlds is the impulse to move away from any
understanding of this show as a museumlike presentation of beautiful
objects. I know that is hardly a revolutionary conceit for a biennial
today, but we can still place particular emphasis on its character as
a site for production and experimentation.

TG: Our conversation has to range from the theoretical to the concrete
and down-to-earth, then: How is that emphasis on production and
experimentation manifested uniquely here?

DB: Most notably, perhaps, the Italian Pavilion, in the Giardini, is
being renamed the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and will remain open
year-round as a platform where all the disciplines—art, architecture,
dance, theater, and cinema, each of which is the subject of a biennale
in Venice—will come together. With that interweaving in mind, Paolo
Baratta—the president of the Biennale, whose idea this was—asked me to
approach different artists to help create semipermanent spaces in the
building. So, for example, Tobias Rehberger has designed a new
cafeteria for the pavilion, Rirkrit Tiravanija created a bookstore,
and Massimo Bartolini is making an educational space.

TG: I can’t help but wonder about historical implications and timing
here. On the one hand, I know that you have a keen sense of the
Biennale’s history, since you’ve written extensively on Harald
Szeemann—who comes to mind here because he inaugurated the show’s
Arsenale section in 1999. In this light, your project seems another
kind of first, representing a similarly fundamental shift in the
Biennale landscape. On the other hand, this particular undertaking is
highly reminiscent of work made during the 1990s, when artists often
created social and educational settings. And the cultural context has
changed a bit since then.

DB: I have actually been wondering how people might receive this
project, particularly given that Rirkrit and Tobias don’t really make
that kind of work anymore. But I think it’s important to realize that,
in fact, they are being asked to do something different from what they
were doing in the ’90s. Rirkrit is not making some kind of “model for
communication,” for instance, but an actual, functioning,
semipermanent bookstore. And Tobias is not making some meeting space
where you can sit down and eat, but an actual cafeteria. Similarly,
Massimo’s educational space is really there for students. These aren’t
model-like situations, where the model is not identical with reality.
Rather, the reality game—or whatever we want to call the relational or
social engagements of the last decade—happens to be reality itself
this time.

TG: It’s interesting that Baratta should ask you to engage the actual
institutional structure at an uncertain cultural moment. The framing
device itself is literally in play, however modestly.

DB: And this is true elsewhere as well. Baratta, in his expansive,
slightly Napoleonic approach to the Venetian situation, is also
opening another garden—the Giardino delle Vergini—that has never been
used before. The buildings there are like ruins, with a strange tower
and a very romantic-looking old storage building. I mean, it’s so
beautiful that one doesn’t even know whether one should put anything
there. But that’s where Miranda July, for instance, will make very
humorous, joyous sculptures with messages on them like SELF-DOUBT WILL
NEVER DEVOUR HER DREAMS, with which people can pose for photographs to
send back home. William Forsythe will lay out sets and props so that
you, the viewer, are a dancer in the garden. And in the tower, Nikhil
Chopra, an artist from India, will perform in his own installation.

TG: And so the decidedly multidisciplinary character of the newly
named pavilion is reflected by your entire exhibition.

DB: We just want to involve all the things that visual arts can
embrace. In the Arsenale, for example, there will be performances
related to Dante by Joan Jonas, and the Moscow Poetry Club will
present readings every month in both the garden and the Bartolini
auditorium space. I know that Arto Lindsay, the Brazilian musician and
artist, is going to do a parade in the city between the venues during
the Biennale opening; it’s called If You See What I Mean, which is
appropriate, since it won’t be so easy to define genre-wise.

TG: And architecture?

DB: Architectural experimentation will play a very important role,
since there will be numerous large installations dealing with
visionary, utopian takes on society. For instance, Yona Friedman, an
architect and artist who was working on futuristic visions of cities
as early as the ’50s, will be collaborating with many young artists on
a project. And Tomás Saraceno will occupy the opening space of the
Palazzo delle Esposizioni, presenting a large yarn work obviously
inspired by Friedman and perhaps also by the Archigram group and Peter
Cook. All these works are preoccupied with alternative modes of
being-in-the-world, so to speak, as they might be made possible
through architecture and urbanism.

TG: If I may play devil’s advocate, these projects, as you describe
them, would seem to look back in order to move forward. How is that
distinct from other recent, more nostalgic looks back at modernist
precedents?

DB: Actually, when it comes to bringing back things from the past, I
should say that the show’s title was also inspired by American
philosopher Nelson Goodman’s book Ways of Worldmaking [1978], which
has a great observation in it: “Worldmaking as we know it always
starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking.” And
perhaps, beyond what you are asking, this is also a good way to think
about deceased artists in the show, such as Gordon Matta-Clark and
Öyvind Fahlström. Matta-Clark is perpetually being reinvented by
younger artists, while Fahlström is perpetually being forgotten, no
matter how many times he has been recuperated by historians—and
despite the fact that his work offered some of the first artistic
perspectives on globalism. His name does not even appear in the
October editors’ otherwise successful book Art Since 1900, which I
find almost unbelievable. We’re installing one work in this vein, Dr.
Schweitzer’s Last Mission, which first appeared in Venice in 1966.

But you know, someone decidedly contemporary—and key for me in
thinking about this show—is Wolfgang Tillmans. Incredibly, he’s never
been shown in Venice. Most interesting to me, however, is that while
he is perhaps the best-known portraitist of his generation—documenting
raves and protest marches and alternative communities—he has always
been interested in abstraction. He seeks a kind of pure visibility in
certain photographs; he even calls them metaphysical pictures. And yet
these are not separate from his more political projects. They are all
part of the same process.

TG: Is this a potential “new beginning” in the show?

DB: While we will not have Russian Constructivism in the show—it just
was not possible—I think it’s useful to remember how such work
represented a moment when abstract art was not apolitical. Abstraction
wasn’t somehow outside the world. It was part of a vision. It was a
promise of something.

TG: Abstraction as such is not immediately quantifiable, perhaps,
within any preexisting system. Is this another way to think of the
multidisciplinary impulse here?

DB: Well, perhaps that’s a decent way to describe the role for
painting—or for the “painterly”—in the show. Tony Conrad’s “Yellow
Movies” series [1972–73], for example, is not painting per se, but its
beautiful, abstract screens possess a painterly sensibility. André
Cadere offers nothing more than these stupid walking sticks,
technically speaking, but they change a space wherever they’re placed
or moved, making the room pictorial, like a painting. And with such
loosening of categories in mind, you can also think of Ulla von
Brandenburg, who is making an installation with colorful,
Constructivist-style textiles. Or there is Cildo Meireles or
Michelangelo Pistoletto, who is creating a performance in which huge
mirrors will be smashed. Actually, we’re also reconstructing a large
painting installation that Blinky Palermo created for Venice in 1976;
it was destroyed after the Biennale then, and we’ll do the same after
the show this year.

TG: Creation through destruction, so to speak.

DB: Or by offering counterproposals to the precious object. You know,
I remember this beautiful science-fiction story by Italo Calvino with
passages about the first “sign”: There is the world, and suddenly
there is something else; it’s not the world, but it’s about the world.
Yet that sign, while it doubles the whole universe, can be an
infinitely small thing. That’s certainly true in this show. We’re
going to present Yoko Ono’s “Instruction Pieces,” for instance, and
some of them are very short, like ones that say FLY or LOOK INTO THE
SPOT UNTIL IT TURNS SQUARE.

TG: What makes such gestures seem pertinent now?

DB: Of course, I’m aware to some extent of the need or desire for
alternatives to the market, given its loosening grip on things. Ono
seems relevant in this regard, since her instruction pieces are really
not possible to sell or collect. They’re like poems. And then
Fahlström was also obsessed with art for everybody; he thought art
should be like an LP.

TG: But how much work in the show actually employs that model of generosity?

DB: Well, Thomas Bayrle, who has always been interested in mass
production, contributes a very large pattern on the wall: It’s
wallpaper that is free and infinitely reproducible. Then there’s
Aleksandra Mir, who is making a million picture postcards of Venice;
anyone can pick one up and send it back home. But here again, one can
look back to history in order to find a way forward. There’s also a
room devoted to Gutaï, the Japanese avant-garde movement that was
interested in multiples and activities and Happenings—things that are
not about the original object at all but rather about a given activity
in itself. And after all, if one is to take “making worlds” seriously,
one must think of how a world is normally something shared, no? The
world is inhabited by more than one person, and so “making” revolves
around building something common.

TG: On that note, again, I find it interesting to see ephemeral,
performance-based, or multidisciplinary work functioning specifically
within an institutional frame.

DB: Earlier you mentioned curatorial predecessors and models, and
Harald Szeemann specifically. Obviously, Szeemann was incredible. Yet
for me personally—and perhaps this is because I grew up in Stockholm—I
cannot help but think of Pontus Hultén, who was never a Biennale
curator. He was a museum director. In the end, however, he made the
museum as expansive as possible. In fact, the Moderna Museet in
Stockholm, which he founded, must have been the most progressive
museum in the world in the ’60s. He turned the whole museum into a
playground for nearly a month, for example. He also sponsored a show
called “Poetry Must Be Made by All!” which was about replicas and
multiples and copies and Happenings and readings all taking place in
the museum setting. It tried to blend Lautréamont with Karl Marx; thus
the subtitle, “Transform the World!” The first open-air museum was
introduced by Hultén, in the garden of the Moderna Museet.

Now that I collect museum-exhibition catalogues, I can truly
understand what incredible things such early projects were. And of
course, I know we can’t just repeat those things. We have to create
things for our own times, and the vision of a classless society in
which art is a collective, integrated element that belongs to everyone
might simply seem naive. But I would say those museum projects are at
least as interesting as some of the best-known Biennale shows.

TG: And yet might there be some shade of a possibility for a
combination of those elements now?

DB: Look, this is a kind of retroactive fantasy on my part. I was
playing in the Moderna Museet playground in 1968. But I understand now
that Hultén offered a visionary moment in the history of curating
institutions. And while that was a museum for a very different moment,
it’s still an inspirational place to think about as, for example,
today’s market crisis creates problems for everyone. But along the
lines of what we were saying earlier, for the past few years there has
been a kind of iron grip on the world of art when it came to market
forces, which is loosening up. Sure, certain things are bound to fall
apart. But maybe something else also emerges.