Jul 10 2007
The Art(s) of Venice
On our honeymoon last month, Emily and I were lucky enough to be in Venice during the heart of the 2007 Venice Biennale, one of the world’s most exciting and long-running art festivals. We saw many amazing installations and exhibitions and had a fabulous time exploring all sorts of art, as well as taking some (I think) cool photos, but I’ve found it hard to find the time to add the titles, tags and metadata to a full Flickr set. However, I’ve finally finished labeling the photos, so I encourage you to take a wonder through our captured fragments of the 2007 Biennale.
There were a number of highlights (and I’ll write about one more in a future post), but I wanted to mention a few things that really stood out. I thought Patrick Mimran’s installations and photography were amazing. His main show was an ironic set of photographs called ‘New York Parkings’ which looks at New York Car Parks, but Mimran also had an installation in Venice where a number of the rubbish bins were covered in “No Art Inside” billboards! 
Also outstanding was the Taiwanese ‘Atopia’ pavilion which combined an interesting take on manga and comic-book art with some neon installations created out of mechanical parts and ubiquitous objects to really create an interesting take on the life of everyday objects.
Wearing my academic hat, I have to say Sophie Calle’s ‘Take Care of Yourself’ exhibition in the French Pavilion was outstanding. Calle took an email she received from a lover ending the relationship and asked 107 women to interpret the email for her, with responses ranging from photographs and videos to responses from academics attacking grammar and psychoanalysts delving into the emailer’s inner psyche. I wish instead of having undergraduate lectures on multiple interpretations of a text we could just get students to immerse themselves in Calle’s work for an hour … I suspect they’d learn a lot more!
There were lots of other interesting exhibits, but one that really spoke to me (so much so I forgot to take any pictures) was the Aniwaniwa installation from New Zealand, which combined Maori dreaming with images of the 1900 hydroelectric dams to show the moment(s) when water became electricity!
Of course, there’s were one or two (!) other bits of art to be found in Florence and Italy, but for the rebellious amongst you, check out a glimpse of the healthy street-art scene from these two magnificent cities.
