Page 30 - La Biennale di Venezia issue of World of Art Magazine

LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
58TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION

AUSTRALIA
Assembly
ANGELICA MESITI, ASSEMBLY, 2019 Commissioner: Nazenie Garibian, Deputy Minister. Curator: Susanna Gyulamiryan.
THREE-CHANNEL VIDEO INSTALLATION Exhibitors: “ArtlabYerevan” Artistic Group (Gagik Charchyan, Hovhannes Margaryan,
IN ARCHITECTURAL AMPHITHEATER.
HD VIDEO PROJECTIONS, COLOR, SIX- Arthur Petrosyan, Vardan Jaloyan) and Narine Arakelian.
CHANNEL MONO SOUND, 25 MINS, © Venue: Palazzo Zenobio – Dorsoduro
PHOTOGRAPHY: BONNIE ELLIOTT.
ASSEMBLY opens with the ‘Michela’ machine, a 19th century
stenographic machine modeled on a piano keyboard, which is used
in the Italian Senate for official parliamentary reporting to ensure
transparency within the democratic process. The inventor of the
Michela was originally inspired by musical notation as a universal
language. Mesiti uses this device to record a poem by esteemed
Australian writer David Malouf, which is then arranged into a musical
score by Australian composer Max Lyandvert, and played by an
ensemble of musicians. Filmed in the Senate chambers of Italy and
Australia, the three screens of Mesiti’s ASSEMBLY travel through
the corridors, meeting rooms and parliaments of government whilst
performers, representing the multitude of ancestries that constitute
cosmopolitan Australia, gather, disassemble, and re-unite, to
demonstrate the strength and creativity of community in evolution.
In ASSEMBLY, a communal gathering is a precarious business, a
necessary corrective and a means for making those with authority
recognize the collective power of “the people”. (excerpt)

AUSTRIA

Discordo Ergo Sum
PHILIPPE SHANGTI Commissioner: Australia Council for the
LOSTPARADISE 02
Arts. Curator: Juliana Engberg.
Exhibitor: Angelica Mesiti.
Venue: Giardini

Discordo Ergo Sum (“I dissent, therefore I am”) is the title of Austrian
artist Renate Bertlmann’s site-specific installation for the Austrian
pavilion. In this rephrasing of the philosophical principle Cogito Ergo
Sum (“I think, therefore I am”), the artist attempts to cancel out the
supremacy of reason and to describe herself within her insurgent
world view. With a further modification of this principle, the phrase
Amo Ergo Sum (“I love, therefore I am”), Renate Bertlmann ironically
signs the pavilion’s architecture. This subversive treatment puts
the principle of her artistic approach in a nutshell. An expression
thereof is the installation of knife-roses in the courtyard, whose
form and content allows us to sensuously experience the dichotomy
of our existence. Renate Bertlmann juggles with social symbols,
breaks them open, and opens up a dialogue that revolves around
critical social phenomena such as gender relations, role models, and
power structures by confronting them at times ironically, at times
insurgently, often in a trans- or post human gesture. From the nimble
foundation of the artist’s two central figures, the lover and the
insurgent, emerges a transitional space where contradictions stand
side by side in accord, where incongruities convene, separate things
change sides, and hierarchies are set in motion. (excerpt)

30 WORLD of ART