In Venice, the most serene capital of Italy’s Veneto region, there are 118 islands, a number seemingly matched by the amount of collateral and off-site exhibitions of the Venice Biennale.
That of course is an exaggeration, but there are dozens of exhibitions beyond the walls of the Giardini and Arsenale this year. It’s not that the Venice Biennale itself doesn’t provide plenty to see – for its 59th edition, there will be 79 national pavilions participating, and the curator Cecilia Alemani’s surrealist exhibition, ‘The Milk of Dreams’, includes the works of 213 artists. But the case for visiting these coinciding exhibitions is the way that they’re sewn into the fabric of the city: They pull visitors down Venice’s narrow corridors and over its bridges with a sense of purpose. As with every edition of the biennale, with all eyes on Venice, acclaimed curators are launching new platforms and artists are debuting never-before-seen works. These shows take place in the splendor of gilded palazzos, former hospitals, and current prisons; they offer the opportunity to ogle lesser-known marvels of architecture, often on the quieter islands where tourists rarely venture. Below is a brief list of suggestions for enjoying Venice off the beaten path.
Ugo Rondinone, ‘burn shine fly’
Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia
Presented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Gladstone Gallery, New York; kamel mennour, Paris; and Kukje Gallery, Seoul
April 20 – September 17
So far the artist Ugo Rondinone has provided scant details ahead of the big reveal of his solo show ‘burn shine fly’, curated by Javier Molins. But what has been announced is that it will include familiar works alongside new ones, conceived specifically in dialogue with the site, the sprawling Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista. Founded in the 13th century by a fraternal order, the scuola is housed in a complex that has noteworthy examples of Gothic, Renaissance and Venetian Baroque art, and ornate reliefs that have accumulated over the centuries. Recalling Rondinone’s previous works at the Château de Versailles, Rockefeller Center in New York, and the desert outside Las Vegas, Molins describes the new work as ‘a contrast with the architectural space’. Taking his title from the late John Giorno’s 1994 book of poems, you got to burn to shine, Rondinone in a statement says, ‘The work aims to coax the sublime from the subliminal.’
‘Danh Vo, Isamu Noguchi and Park Seo-Bo’
Fondazione Querini Stampalia
Presented by White Cube
April 20 – November 27
Danh Vo’s celebrated practice of bringing art and objects together as vessels of layered historical resonance is an ideal match for ‘Conserving the future’, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia’s exhibition series led by the curator Chiara Bertola. For each edition, Bertola invites contemporary artists to engage with the 16th-century palace where the foundation is based, the preserved former home of the noble Venetian Querini family and their storied collection of art, books, and objects. With Bertola, Vo is staging a dialogue between the home’s Baroque interiors and the works of two esteemed minimalists – the Dansaekhwa pioneer Park Seo-Bo and late sculptor Isamu Noguchi – in addition to his own. He will be including Park’s ‘Écriture’ paintings, a series begun in the late 1960s as a simple meditation on the strokes of a pencil, and Noguchi’s much-loved paper Akari light sculptures.
‘Planet B: Climate Change & the New Sublime’
Palazzo Bollani
Presented by Radicants
Part I, April 20 – June 26; Part II, July 8 – August 26; Part III, September 8 – November 27
The curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud is launching the new platform Radicants, with the aim of providing the key resources for independent curators to realize exhibitions, publish books, and most importantly, be adequately compensated for their work. In this mixed commercial-curatorial model, Bourriaud explains, ‘If the works are sold or the exhibition travels to a new location, the curator will continue to be paid from the project’s revenues.’ Ahead of the opening of Radicants’ official space in Paris in May, its inaugural exhibition will run during the biennale at Palazzo Bollani. Titled ‘Planet B: Climate Change & the New Sublime’, the show will feature work by nearly 30 artists, including Anna Bella Geiger, Thiago Rocha Pitta, and Ambera Wellmann. Underlining the urgency of the titular subject, it seeks to interrogate the impact of climate change through the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke’s particular definition of the sublime: ‘a delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror’.
‘Penumbra’
Ospedaletto and Church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti
Presented by Fondazione In Between Art Film, Rome
April 20 – November 27
The penumbra, on the outer edges of a shadow, is a literal gray area where darkness transitions into the light. The eight new films produced and commissioned by Fondazione In Between Art Film, by artists including Karimah Ashadu, Jonathas de Andrade, and Ana Vaz, accordingly deal with the liminal spaces between binary states: ‘vulnerability and immunity, memory and history, truth and fiction, and visibility and opacity’, and of course, art and film, the initiative’s founder, Beatrice Bulgari, said in a statement. As both a patron of the arts and a former costume designer, Bulgari initially launched In Between Art Film as a production company in 2012, changing course in 2019 with the creation of the foundation to support artists, curators, and writers working in the field of the moving image. Its inaugural exhibition is being staged at the cultural venue Ospedaletto Contemporaneo, a 16th-century former hospital.
Pauline Curnier Jardin, ‘Something Out of It’
Casa di Reclusione Femminile
Presented by LIAF – Lofoten International Art Festival, Norway
April 18–24
In Venice, Rio Terà dei Pensieri works with incarcerated people on their reintegration into the workforce, and for the 2017 edition of the biennale, stewarded a collaboration between Mark Bradford and Casa di Reclusione Femminile, the women’s prison on the island of Giudecca. This year, the social cooperative has been collaborating with Pauline Curnier Jardin, the Lofoten International Art Festival, and curator Francesco Urbano Ragazzi in leading the inmates of the prison to reimagine their social spaces, using projections, furniture, and wall paintings. With Curnier Jardin, they have also scripted their own film based on the history of the prison itself and its former life as a 16th-century convent, where the nuns would use the parlor as a stage for performances.
‘Raqib Shaw: Palazzo della Memoria’
Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Ca’ Pesaro
Presented by White Cube
April 22 – September 25, 2022
Raqib Shaw and the Ca’ Pesaro could be said to be kindred spirits, united by their affinities for opulence, as well as the Asian and European art of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. The Baroque marble palace, impressively located directly on the Grand Canal, is the site of Shaw’s solo exhibition, curated by Norman Rosenthal. Looking specifically at the works of Italian masters, including Giorgione, Tintoretto, and Panini, the artist inserts himself into their paintings, transcribing personal memories into the resulting landscapes. The centerpiece is Shaw’s imaginary miniature retrospective of more than 60 shrunken versions of previous works in a single image. The rich, bejeweled surfaces of his works exemplify his singular process of working enamels and metallic paints into his compositions using a porcupine spine, his own gilded quill.
Lita Albuquerque, ‘Liquid Light’San Pietro di Castello
Presented by bardoLA, Los Angeles
April 23 – November 27
In a uniquely cosmic fashion, the Los Angeles-based Lita Albuquerque engages in both the monumentality of Land Art and the ineffable qualities of Light and Space. Since the early 1970s, through film, sculpture, and large-scale environmental interventions, her focus has been on defining our positions in the universe, both physically and temporally. Liquid Light, the second film in a trilogy by the artist, chronicles the celestial and terrestrial travels of an unnamed protagonist as a new mythology, taking place in some hybrid era between the ancestral past and distant future. The premise encapsulates Alemani’s description of her own curatorial themes, which include representations of ‘the relationship between individuals and technologies, and the connection between bodies and the Earth’. The exhibition is sited at a distance from Venice’s crowds in the basilica of the quiet island of San Pietro di Castello, said to be the city’s oldest inhabited area.
African Art in Venice Forum
Hotel Monaco & Grand Canal
April 20–21
It’s no secret: the Venice Biennale has a representation problem. In 2017, a group of art professionals founded the non-profit African Art in Venice Forum (AAVF) to raise the profile of contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas during this prestigious opening week, launching a returning two-day program of conversations. This year, various leaders from national museums, ministers of culture, curators, and artists are gathering to discuss an array of salient topics. The artists Ayana V. Jackson, Lebohang Kganye, Laetitia Ky, and Raquel van Haver are joining a conversation about female leadership, and the Eritrean-born, Bologna-based artist Muna Mussie is hosting a screening and Q&A of her new film Oblio. Other guests will be broaching the subjects of restitution and repatriation, NFTs, and more.
Janelle Zara is a freelance writer specializing in art and architecture. She is the author of Masters at Work: Becoming an Architect. She currently lives in LA.
Top image: Saint Mark's Campanile and Palazzo Ducale, Venice, September 2017. Crop from a photograph by Martin Falbisoner. Creative Commons.