19-23 October 2007
A weekend trip to the oldest and most prestigious contemporary art festivals in the world, the Venice Biennale. Held every two years, the Biennale is an excellent opportunity to see works by leading, international and up-and-coming contemporary artists. Over 65 countries take part, and an estimated 900,000 people are likely to visit in 2007.
There are two main strands to the Venice Biennale: the Giardini which houses 30 permanent national pavilions. Tracey Emin will be representing Britain in the Giardini, only the second female ever to represent the UK at the Biennale with a solo exhibition (the first was Rachel Whiteread in 1997). There is also a large, international exhibition curated by the Biennales director which takes place in the buildings of the adjacent, formal naval dockyard, known as the Arsenale. This years director is the American Robert Storr, the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York.
Other Biennale exhibitions take place in venues spreading across the city of Venice. Scotland will be presenting the work of six artists, in an exhibition curated by Philip Long, Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. The selected artists are Charles Avery, Henry Coombes, Louise Hopkins, Rosalind Nashashibi, Lucy Skaer and Tony Swain. The works will be housed in the Palazzo Zenobio, home to the Armenian Cultural Institute in the Dorsoduro district of Venice.
Northern Ireland’s presentation will feature the work of Willie Doherty in a show curated by Hugh Mulholland, and Wales will show the work of Richard Deacon, Merlin James and Heather & Ivan Morison, curated by Hannah Firth.
We will visit the best of what the Venice Biennale 2007 has to offer.
29 June 2006 at 6pm
Spin keeps the spirit of the 51st Venice Biennale alive with this duo of exciting contemporary artists . . .
For Northern Ireland’s inaugural group show at the Venice Biennale, The Nature of Things (curated by Hugh Mulholland) Seamus Harahan presented the widely acclaimed film Holylands.
Bedwyr Williams was one of four artists who represented Wales as part of the exhibition, Somewhere Else, curated by Karen MacKinnon. Williams spent three months as artist-in-residence on the Venetian island of Giudecca. He produced a series of humorous, tourist-style publicity posters and the very amusing book, Basta, which details his experiences of Venetian life.
Here in Edinburgh, the Collective Gallery have invited both artists to exhibit works that draw our attention to the cultural, economic and political independence that has affected the UK since devolution in 1999.
Seamus Harahan’s Holylands portrays a series of events shot within a short distance of the artists home in Belfast. Filmed in real time over two years, the piece has been edited down to 32 minutes. Like a voyeur spying on other peoples lives, Harahan captures the marginalised and individuals who operate on the edges of society, while at the same time commenting on the lack of social provision that is prevalent in Northern Ireland. You may already have seen his work at Transmission Gallery in 2004. Other past exhibitions include Project Arts Centre, Dublin and group shows at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and Lux Center, London.
Bedwyr Williams works in a range of media including performance, installation, video, drawing and photography. For the Collective, he has created an installation entitled Sir Bedivere. Written on the walls of the gallery are cocktail recipes which reveal Williams strong sense of surrealist humour and sharp critical mind. Williams was recently identified by Adrian Searle, art critic for The Guardian, as one of seven artists who will ‘colour the future’. At only 30, he has already had a solo show at Chapter in Cardiff as well as receiving the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Art in 2004.
