On jury recommendation, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia has chosen to entrust the Swiss Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia to the artist Latifa Echakhch. Living in Fully (Switzerland) with a French-Moroccan background, she has gained considerable international renown over many years in the contemporary art world. Latifa Echakhch has made a name for herself thanks to the fine balance between forcefulness and fragility in her interdisciplinary installations, her visual language including surrealist and conceptual elements, and her use of symbols that – in her own words – are both political and poetic.
More information here and in the press release.
The Venice Biennale 2019 ended a few days ago, after an exhibition period of almost seven months. The Swiss Pavilion was a great success thanks to the curatorship of Charlotte Laubard with the new commissioned work by artist duo Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. It was incredibly well received by the Swiss and international media, and was often picked among the best pavilions of the Biennale, notably on artsy.net, news.artnet.com, theartnewspaper.com, garage.vice.com, Vogue Italia, W Magazine, designboom.com and many others. We are sadden to close up this edition but excited for the new projects to come at the Swiss Pavilion!
The Salon Suisse 2019 ' s l o w ' presented one opening event during the Biennale's opening days supplemented by three long weekends of events, talks and cultural happenings with invited guests such as artists, art historians, performers, musicians, cooks, choreographers, medical doctors and others, to explore the meanings and values of slowness as the main tool to question productivism and our society.
More images and information here.
From December 2019, Rein Wolf will be directing the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam, NL. Alongside his dictartorship, he will pursue his role as juror for the Swiss Pavilion of the 2021 and 2023 Art editions of the Biennale di Venezia.
More information here.
The project team for the 2020 Swiss Pavilion is currently touring around Switzerland to get material for the upcoming their exhibition presentation in Venice in May 2020. To follow the team's moves across the borders of Switzerland:
https://swissbordertour.ch
Read more here.
22 – 24 November 2019
Closing performances at the Swiss Pavilion during the Biennale’s final weekend
During the closing weekend of the 58th Venice Biennale, taking place from November 22–24, 2019, the Swiss Pavilion presents reading performances by artists and performers Marbles Jumbo Radio and Julie Cunningham.
These final performances take place in the garden and sculpture hall of the Swiss Pavilion, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday November 22–24, every day from 10am to 1pm, and from 3pm to 5pm.
The official catalogue of ‘Moving Backwards’ at the Swiss Pavilion is now out!
The publication includes statements by the artists, and various authors, experts and activists. It also comprises an essay by curator Charlotte Laubard on the viewers’ experience of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz’s installation at the Swiss Pavilion; an essay by scholar André Lepecki on queer temporalities and poetics in relation to the notion of “moving backwards”; as well as a postface by Marianne Burki, Head of visual arts at the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. |
After a successful launch of the Salon Suisse s l o w coinciding with the opening of the 2019 Venice Biennale, the programme continues with three autumn salons in 19-21 September, 17-19 October and 21-23 November 2019.
For this year's Salon Suisse, the Salonnière Céline Eidenbenz (middle) with her co-Salonnières Victoria Mühlig (left) and Anja Radomirovic (right), were interested in questioning the rhythm of creation and its intrinsic slowness in a time governed by productivism and rapidity.
Click here for more information about the Salonnières.
While walking artist Hamish Fulton is currently exhibiting 7 pannels at Stadelhofen train station in Zurich titled Connecting the Footsteps of 21 Walks, let's look back at the artist's 1 hour 'walking performance' that took place during Salon Suisse in Venice in the courtyard of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia last May. This year's Salon Suisse is titled 's l o w ' and is about slowing down our processes and finding one's own rhythm.
Currently in Zurich: https://haeusler-contemporary.com/hamish-fulton-tableau-zu…/
Salon Suisse: Retour de Venise
Saturday 17 August, 2.30-9.00pm
Jardin botanique alpin (JBAM), Meyrin, Switzerland
As an extension of the collateral event Salon Suisse at the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia on the theme " s l o w ", the event “Retour de Venise” (return from Venice) takes place in Meyrin, near Geneva in Switzerland, with a whole day of discovery and relaxation. As part of the programme FACM@JBAM#2019! the event takes a stand on slow practices by offering guided strolling, a yoga workshop with artist Vidya Gastaldon, a presentation of the Venice Biennale with the 2019 Swiss Pavilion curator Charlotte Laubard, and the 2019 Salonnières Céline Eidenbenz and Victoria Mühlig, ending with a slow food buffet in the garden with a mural film projection by artists Chonja Lee, Jérémie Gindre, Vidya Gastaldon, accompanied by a dj set by Nevena Pulj.
Further information here.
ARTIST TALK ALERT
PAULINE BOUDRY / RENATE LORENZ
WITH IRENE REVELL AND LISA LONG
27 JULY 2019 | 6:00 PM | JSC BERLIN
On the occasion of their solo exhibition ONGOING EXPERIMENTS WITH STRANGENESS at JSC Berlin, artists Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz will be in conversation with curator Irene Revell and curator of the exhibition Lisa Long.
The conversation will focus on the various political threads running through their moving-image installations. The discussion will also examine Boudry / Lorenz’s use of staging both on- and off-screen, and how the exhibition works as a choreography for the viewer. In addition, the talk will feature their new work Moving Backward (2019), which is currently on view at the Swiss Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennial.
ONGOING EXPERIMENTS WITH STRANGENESS is Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz’s most comprehensive exhibition to date. Spanning the ground floor and first-floor cinema of the collection’s Berlin gallery, the show comprises four large-scale moving-image installations, stage elements, lights, and sculptural objects. The moving-image works featured in the exhibition are Telepathic Improvisation (2017), Silent (2016), I Want (2015), and To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (2013). All draw on musical scores, scripts, and speeches, adapted and interpreted by performers. Collectively, the artists and performers explore the works’ various political and sexual potentials, examining power relations among themselves and with the viewers.
ONGOING EXPERIMENTS WITH STRANGENESS is part of horizontal vertigo, a year-long program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Dusseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.
More information here: https://biennials.ch/home/ProjectDetail.aspx?ProjectId=39
And here: https://www.facebook.com/biennials.ch/posts/2349518861751449
The recent phenomenon of ever more frequent and ubiquitous largescale exhibition formats –often dubbed with the critical term „biennalization“– both has the potential of shifting the focus of the (predominantly western) art world to other, less visible art scenes, artists and locations, but has also been criticized as a new form of colonial gesture and as catering to purely economic motives.
Given these debates, how can one define the scope of action of the individual actors–artists, curators, critics, visitors–within this context? What curatorial or artistic forms can we imagine that are neither paralyzed by the current state of global exhibition making, nor ostentatiously embrace the rhetorics of social change through curatorial practice? What curatorial approaches does and should global exhibition making engender? Is bigger always better? And how can the personal, aesthetic and political interest be developed into a certain „curatorial ethics“(Maura Reilly)?
These questions will be discussed by Charlotte Laubard (curator of the Swiss Pavilion, commissioned by Pro Helvetia, at the Venice Biennial 2019) and Nora Sternfeld (documenta-Professor Kunsthochschule Kassel).
The series of eikones-talks „Schnittmengen“ is conceived and moderated by Katharina Brandl and Claire Hoffmann. The talk will be held in English.