www.gujralfoundation.org

The Gujral Foundation is delighted to announce My East is Your West, a Collateral Event of the 56th Venice Biennale, which unites for the first time at the Venice Biennale the historically conflicting nations of India and Pakistan in a collaborative exhibition by artists from both countries. 

Internationally recognised artists Shilpa Gupta (India) and Rashid Rana (Pakistan) will work together on a shared presentation located in the Palazzo Benzon, in the centre of Venice on the Grand Canal. As neither India nor Pakistan has a permanent national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, this presentation will provide a unique platform for artists from the Indian subcontinent to enter into a dialogue through the arts. My East is Your West is conceived by Feroze Gujral, Director and Founder of The Gujral Foundation, with Natasha Ginwala as Curatorial Advisor and International Curator of Public Programming. The Gujral Foundation have partnered with the Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta on the project with Head Curator, Martina Mazzotta, programming collateral events in Italy. 

“Whilst we share a common history, we have a divided present. We are now working together for a more collaborative future.” 

–Feroze Gujral, Founder & Director, The Gujral Foundation 

Born out of the desire to reposition the complex climate of historical relations between the South Asian nation-states of India and Pakistan, My East is Your West will present these two countries as a singular region within the context of the Venice Biennale. The thought of how the world would have been different had India and Pakistan not been measured by borders lies dormant but is ever present. In view of their practices, and as one artist from each country, Gupta and Rana have been invited to work together to create a unique presentation that will express the integral essence of a people divided, a history which spans antiquity, colonial modernity and a cosmopolitan present entangled in conflict.

This journey towards conceiving a shared platform in Venice builds on the artists’ concerns to negotiate between the individual and the communal in relation to the “everyday” experiences of collective consciousness. Within their practices both artists explore notions of location and dislocation, transnational belonging, and the impact of cultural and political conditioning in determining our relationship to geographical and national territories. With works that challenge the modern nation-state and its divides, Gupta and Rana have developed a material aesthetic that surveys the potential of a common region, separate from the state and its model.

Concept and curation: Feroze Gujral, Founder/ Director, The Gujral Foundation

Artists: Rashid Rana (Pakistan) and Shilpa Gupta (India)

Curatorial Advisor and Public Programmes Curator: Natasha Ginwala 

Italian Partner Foundation: Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta

Advisory Board: Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Amin Jaffer, International Director Asian Art, Christie’s 

My East is Your West

5 May–31 October 2015  Preview: Monday 4 May–Friday 8 May

Palazzo Benzon San Marco 3917 Venice 30124

Parallel Convergences con Paweł Althamer e Anatoly Osmolovsky alla Casa dei Tre Oci

V-A-C Foundation, a not-for-profit, Moscow-based institution, committed to the international presentation, production and development of Russian Contemporary Art, is proud to present the exhibition Paweł Althamer and Anatoly Osmolovsky: Parallel Convergences. This unique project brings together for the first time the work of these artists – one Polish and the other Russian – both of whom are from the generation shaped by the decisive shift from communism to post-communism, experienced in Russia and the Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s, and whose work shares many interesting parallels.

The exhibition pairs Althamer with Osmolovsky in a fluid conversation that acknowledges the differences between their works as well as the many similarities and overlaps. Despite the different forms and media they adopt – ranging from sculpture, installation and video, to more politically engaged actions and social forms of practice – the work of both artists often pivots around the idea of the body and modes of perception.

Paweł Althamer (b. 1967, Warsaw) will be represented by works that embody some of the central concerns tackled in his practice: collaboration, self-portraiture and the centrality of subjective human experience. Althamer’s major video cycle So-called Waves and Other Phenomena of the Mind from 2003-4, an eight-screen installation of short films made in collaboration with the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, will be shown in its entirety. The videos document Althamer’s experiments with an array of mindaltering substances, ranging from hashish, LSD and magic mushrooms to peyote and truth serum, while also exploring hypnosis and the varying psychological states engendered by all of these means. Consciousness, rather than an altered conscious per se, is enacted in one of the videos titled Weronika (2004), which chronicles, in graphic but objective detail, the birth of the artist’s daughter.

The video then jumps forward several years to father and daughter playing in a park together and the way in which seeing things anew through her eyes transforms Althamer’s perception and understanding of the world around him, and through which the quotidian and mundane become marvellous. Althamer will also present a large-scale new bronze cast of the work Parys, which continues the investigation into monumental and statuesque forms of the human body that has spanned his career. 

Anatoly Osmolovsky (b. 1969, Moscow) will be considered in the exhibition by a survey of his work in all media dating from the early 1990s until now, most of which have seldom been seen outside Russia. Osmolovsky began his career in the (then) Soviet Union as a writer in the late 1980s and staged a series of confrontational political performances in Moscow as the leader of the E.T.I. (Экспроприация Территории Искусства – Art Territory Expropriation) movement. Most of his production in those years was characterised by collective participation, working closely with the members of the Radek Community, who saw art as a tool for protest. 

These important actions will be represented in the exhibition through a series of films and documentary photographs. In 1995, Osmolovsky founded Radek magazine, a Russian journal that put forward a politically radical and intellectually wide-ranging agenda, during the rise of Eastern Europe’s period of ‘wild capitalism’. By the early 2000s, Osmolovsky once again began to consider the more formal aspects of his art practice. Osmolovsky’s move into sculpture over the last decade or so will be examined in the exhibition through a series of major works such as Hardware and Breads, which manifest his radical shift towards investigating the vexed legacy of both Russian icons and the early-twentieth century avant-garde. New works by Osmolovsky that have not previously been exhibited will also be presented.

Althamer and Osmolovsky will also collaborate together on a new sculptural work for the V-A-C exhibition, which will evolve through an exchange of ideas between the two artists.

Paweł Althamer and Anatoly Osmolovsky: Parallel Convergences is curated by Nicholas Cullinan, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

V-A-C Foundation supports as donor the 55th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

A fully illustrated catalogue will be produced to accompany the exhibition. V-A-C is dedicated to the international presentation, production and development of Russian contemporary Art – across a multitude of forms and within the framework of an invigorated and informed educational programme. Particularly important to the new generation of artists in Russia, V-A-C’s focus is on practically supporting and expanding the platform for home-grown talent, giving artists the opportunity to experience, engage with and interrogate international cultural practices whilst developing an authentic and autonomous artistic language. It is deservedly considered as one of the key proponents in opening out contemporary Russian culture to the wider world, and practically supporting and developing emerging artists through finding new international platforms for exhibition and opportunities for commissions as well as ways of encouraging cross-cultural exchange – especially important in the current climate.

Casa dei Tre Oci
Giudecca 43
Venice, Italy
(Vaporetto Stop “Zitelle”)
www.treoci.org

Opening hours
Tuesday to Sunday
10am – 6pm (free admission)

Newfoundland in Venice

About Turn presents new bodies of work by Will Gill and Peter Wilkins, contemporary artists based in Newfoundland, Canada. The exhibition is spurred by complementary explorations of mundane narratives. The work, which spans video, photography, and painting, deftly plays within the boundaries of abstraction and narrative; the recognizable and the intangible. Gill’s works blend a feigned naïveté with formal control, lifted from family life and fleeting dreams. Wilkins’ images bridge the art historical and contemporary, employing subtle, distilled abstractions of duration and form. - 

The Terra Nova Art Foundation was initially formed in 2010 to showcase Newfoundland & Labrador artists on the international stage, in particular at Venice Biennale. In 2012 the Terra Nova Art Foundation (TNAF) was incorporated as a not-for-profit art foundation to fulfil this aim.The Terra Nova Art Foundation’s Board of Directors is made up of curators, academics and patrons and were appointed by a group of founding members.

Place Galleria Ca' Rezzonico, Dorsoduro 2793