"All the World's Futures" was
announced Wednesday as the theme for next year's 56th Venice Art
Biennale.
Curator Okwui Enwezor made the announcement after meeting,
with Biennale President Paolo Baratta, representatives of the 53
countries taking part in the event.
The 56th Biennale International Art Exhibition runs May 9
to November 22 at various venues in the lagoon city, primarily
at the Arsenale and the Giardini.
"The ruptures that surround and abound around every corner
of the global landscape today recall the evanescent debris of
previous catastrophes piled at the feet of the angel of history
in Angelus Novus," said Enwezor, echoing the words of American
art critic Walter Benjamin in his interpretation of Paul Klee's
painting of that name.
Benjamin wrote about the 1920 Paul Klee picture, which was
made through an oil-transfer method of Klee's invention, in his
essay Theses on the Philosophy of History.
Benjamin, who owned the artwork for many years, said it
"shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from
something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his
mouth is open, his wings are spread".
"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is
turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet," Benjamin wrote.
Enwezor said, "How can the current disquiet of our time be
properly grasped, made comprehensible, examined, and
articulated?"
"Over the course of the last two centuries the radical
changes have made new and fascinating ideas subject matter for
artists, writers, filmmakers, performers, composers, musicians,"
added the internationally imminent Nigerian curator, art critic
and writer.
"It is with this recognition that the 56th International
Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia proposes All the World's
Futures, a project devoted to a fresh appraisal of the
relationship of art and artists to the current state of things".
Enwezor said that rather than being a single, overarching
theme, All the World's Futures is "permeated" with overlapping
filters, a constellation of parameters that circumscribe the
many ideas that will be treated and carried out in a variety of
ways.
The Biennale will use as a "filter" the historical
trajectory that the art fair has itself undergone over the
course of its 120-year existence - a period that spanned
monarchy, fascism, two world wars, the birth of a republic, and
the industrialization in Italy. The Biennale will regard its own
"state of things" as a reflection of its history.
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