The 58th International Art Exhibition will probably be very excited. Open to the public from Saturday, May 11th to Sunday, November 24th, 2019, at the Giardini and the Arsenale, May You Live in Interesting Times is curated by Ralph Rugoff that has been the Director of the Hayward Gallery of London since 2006.

So let’s start from the title, May You Live in Interesting Times: as the president of Biennale di Venezia Paolo Baratta says, “could be interpreted as a sort of curse, where the expression interesting times evokes the idea of challenging or even menacing times, but it could also simply be an invitation to always see and consider the course of human events in their complexity, an invitation, thus, that appears to be particularly important in times when, too often, oversimplification seems to prevail, generated by conformism or fear.”

This Biennale Arte edition will be a double face one full of hope for the future or a sort of curse, maybe because it’ll not have a theme per se but will highlight a general approach to making art and a view of art’s social function as embracing both pleasure and critical thinking. This atypical approach will suggest a new way to discover the artist’s works. The Exhibition will develop from the Central Pavilion (Giardini) to the Arsenale and will include 79 artists from all over the world.

The Exhibition will also include 90 National Participations in the historic Pavilions at the Giardini, at the Arsenale and in the historic city centre of Venice. Four countries will be participating for the first time at the Biennale Arte: Ghana, Madagascar, Malaysia and Pakistan. The Dominican Republic for the first time at the Biennale Arte with its own national pavilion. The Italian Pavilion at the Tese delle Vergini in the Arsenale will be curated this year by Milovan Farronato.

…And two special projects: one by the artist Ludovica Carbotta in Forte Marghera, inside the building called the Austrian Polveriera; one by Marysia Lewandowska in the Pavilion of Applied Arts located in the Arsenale, Sale d’Armi.

Article by Bianca Felicori

There are no longer any barriers between electronic music and art, on the contrary, these two disciplines are increasingly overlapping to offer the public a single total immersive experience. SKALAR is a spectacular installation born from the collaboration between the light designer Christopher Bauder and the French musician Kangding Ray.

SKALAR is based on the theory of the American psychologist Robert Plutchik, who considers emotions as an adaptive response, which is why the work was conceived in a huge space: the physical components of the installation are suspended from the ceiling, are moved up and down so that the kinetic mirrors interact with the beams of colored light alter the perception of the surrounding space.

Meditative sounds are combined with slowly moving lights, while marked rhythms are combined with patterns that flash rapidly.

Below is the video of the performance of the two artists:

The Handmaid’s Tale, the TV series distributed by Hulu, is the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel that tells the story of Gilead, which was once the United States, and which has become a totalitarian country based on strict rules that point to an obsessive and sick return to “tradition”.

The second season, which ended in July 2018, left us with a thousand questions and with the hope that June/Difred, the protagonist played by Elisabeth Moss, could lead a real revolution, supported by all the other Handmaids. The trailer published a few hours ago raises our expectations. We see in fact what would seem to be an entire army of Handmaids, Serena who takes the side of June and the latter who finds herself with her daughter, but to get all the confirmations to our assumptions we will have to wait until June 5, 2019. 

Meanwhile, we know that for the third season have been reconfirmed all the actors of the previous ones, including Joseph Fiennes and among the new faces include Christopher Meloni (Law & Order, Oz) and Elizabeth Reaser (Hill House, Twilight). 

Watch the trailer for The Handmaid’s Tale below!

John Grade, an American artist we had the pleasure of talking about earlier here, has placed his latest installation Reservoir inside the Parco di Arte Sella in Borgo Valsugana. The work consists of five thousand droplet shaped ampoules, each of which is delicately attached to translucent nets, supported by tree trunks.

The artist has explained that:

“I became most interested in the way rain falls through this grove of trees, the canopy delaying the droplet’s journey to the ground as well as how quiet and sheltered the forest was during a heavy rain”.

The installation is built with thermoformed plastic parts and steam-bent Alaska cedar strips: each droplet is attached to fishing line nets which are then incorporated with stainless steel rings to maintain tension and support the tree trunks above the structure.

The shape of the containers is given by casts of hands placed in a cup, when the rain falls or the snow settles, the water accumulates inside the transparent bags of Reservoir, giving them the shape of a drop.