How does humanity’s conception of time shift when confronted with illness or death? What are the deeper implications surrounding the plastic materials we handle every day? Are there energies in nature imperceptible by the human eye? Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung presents an exhibition that tackles these questions and more in the group show Imagine Another Perspective.
The works of the three international artists included in the presentation aim to illuminate areas of the natural world around us that are often unnoticed: the unseen, the overlooked, and the surprising, which are however central to our survival. The exhibition is an attempt to train our vision and perception, in hopes of gaining a different perspective on our environment. By experimenting with a variety of tools and optical techniques, the artists also explore the process of photography itself.
The photographs of British artist Mandy Barker (*1964) initially resemble fantastic creatures and galaxies. Only upon closer inspection is it revealed that the images are, in fact, made up of marine plastic waste from around the globe, collected by Barker herself, sometimes inviting others to contribute their finds as well. Collaborating for over a decade with scientists and explorers, Mandy Barker has gained global recognition for raising awareness about plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, highlighting its harmful effects on marine life, climate change, and ultimately ourselves.
She believes that photography has the power to encourage people to act, to move them emotionally, or at the very least make them take notice. Photographs have the power to stimulate debate and ultimately evoke change. American artist Caleb Charland (*1980) combines a scientifi…
The Helmut Newton Foundation celebrates its 20th anniversary in June 2024 with the group show Berlin, Berlin! – and simultaneously pays tribute to the city where Newton was born. In the fall of 2003, Helmut Newton established his foundation in Berlin to house parts of his archive, which opened to the public in June 2004 at the historic Landwehrkasino next to Zoologischer Garten station. It was from this very station that Helmut Neustädter, facing constant threat of deportation as a Jew, fled Berlin in early December 1938 – returning 65 years later as the world-famous photographer Helmut Newton. Since then, the Helmut Newton Foundation and the Berlin Art Library have jointly resided in the historic building now known as the Museum of Photography. After the death of June Newton (also known as Alice Springs) in April 2021, the entire collection of works by Helmut Newton and Alice Springs, along with all archival materials, have been housed in the foundation’s archive.
Helmut Newton trained under the legendary photographer Yva in Berlin-Charlottenburg from 1936 to 1938, following in her footsteps to carve his path in the three genres of fashion, portraits, and nudes. After stints in Singapore and Melbourne, Newton’s career took off in Paris in the early 1960s, a period during which he frequently returned to Berlin for fashion shoots in magazines like Constanze, Adam, and Vogue Europe. In this exhibition, we encounter Newton’s models posing at Brandenburg Gate before the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall. We also see his controversial 1963 fashion series, Mata Hari Spy Story, featuring Brigitte Schilling near the Berlin Wall. In 1979, the newly relaunched German Vogue commissioned Newton to retra…
How can a city’s spatial and architectural development dynamics be visualised photographically? How can photography capture time and life? In two new bodies of work, the internationally renowned photographer Michael Wesely traces fragments of past realities preserved in historical architectural photographs of Berlin. In doing so, he explores the archival dimensions of the medium of photography.
For "Doubleday", Wesely precisely superimposes his own photographs over old photographs of 19th and 20th-century architecture in Berlin, creating breathtaking leaps in time between the past and the present: 19th-century strollers on Alexanderplatz encounter today’s tourists; reconstructed copies of the buildings are superimposed onto ruins; and a park has taken the place of Monbijou Palace.
In his "Human Conditions" series, the artist focuses on the traces of people’s lives around 1900 enclosed in the Prussian Photogrammetric Institute’s large-format photographs. Wesely is particularly fascinated by the spooky disappearance of people in motion, whose contours have not been captured by the long exposure times, and whose shadowy figures he meticulously exlicits.
The Museum für Fotografie is also presenting works by Michael Wesely from previous years. These include the recently completed cycle about Leipziger Platz and Potsdamer Platz that followed the development of the new city quarter from 1997 to 2021. Another group of works shows demonstrations and protest gatherings, each of which Wesely photographed with exposure times of a few minutes and whose transient nature has left only traces and ghostly apparitions. These photographs are brought into dialogue with photojournalistic images of urban life and d…
Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to present the Contemporary African Photography Prize 2024 in Gallery 1. The CAP Prize is the international award for contemporary African photography given annually since 2012 to five photographers whose works were created on the African continent, or which engage with the African diaspora. The exhibition at Photo Museum Ireland will showcase the work of the five winning artists alongside the shortlist for this prestigious award.
About the Open to artists of any age and descent, the CAP Prize aims to raise the profile of African photography within the arts and to encourage a rethinking of the image of Africa. Each year five winners are selected by an internationally sourced panel of judges, enabling the promotion of African photography worldwide, raising the winners' international exposure and building a high-level network for future projects. The five winning entries are showcased in a series of exhibitions in collaboration with significant photography events and institutions in Africa and the rest of the world.
Since its inauguration by Benjamin Füglister in 2012 the number of artists’ submissions has grown to over 1000 annually, coming from up to 88 countries worldwide. The core team of the CAP Prize consists of artistic director Benjamin Füglister and development director Paul Geraghty, a former Chair of the board of Photo Museum Ireland. The team works closely with local partners and networks in Africa and internationally to promote the prize.
Photo Museum Ireland is thrilled to invite you to the opening exhibition of the African Irish Artist Residency Award 2024-25. This special exhibition showcases work from our newly selected award recipients: Ishmael Claxton, Sabrina Faria, and Tolu Ogunware.
This exhibition marks the beginning of an exciting opportunity for these artists to develop their artistic practice while visitors have a unique chance to see the early stages of their creative journey at Photo Museum Ireland. Over the next 12 months, these artists will evolve and expand their practices, culminating in the creation of new bodies of work. Be sure to return in 2025 for our New Talents Exhibition, to see how these artists have deepened their artistic approach.
Kay Walkowiak’s evocative exhibition ‘Traces of Time’ at ‘Waassertuerm+Pomhouse’ in Dudelange explores the intricate and multifaceted nature of time through powerful imagery and thought-provoking artworks.
The conceptual core and starting point for the exhibition is the cinematic short film Shapes of Time (2024), which radically challenges western perceptions of time: the clocks’ hands complete their round in an hour, suggesting the possibility of a cyclical, rather than linear, notion of time and addressing the fact that our perception of time is always culturally shaped. Within the exhibition, the series Eternal Now (2023), Display (2024) and Nowhere (2023) expand the notion of time and space while the new filmic work Rise and Fall (2024) further opens up an intercultural dialogue about the concept of time in a broader sense by inviting visitors to reflect on the theme of time and temporality in alternative ways. The works Misfits (2024) and The Prophecy (2024), meanwhile, question the Western-framed narratives of (Art) History, as well as their side effects and legacy in today's hegemonic world.
With its themes of Time, History, Art and their interconnection, as well as its “time-capsule-like” presentation, Kay Walkowiak’s work deeply resonates with the CNA, its missions and the challenges it faces as a national archive. As guardians of audiovisual heritage, we are daily confronted with the notion of time, its passing, and the aim of preserving it. Due to our function as a museum, we are also particularly interested in the issues of cultural representation, “historical canon” and their societal legitimacy as addressed by Walkowiak in the series Misfits and The Prophecy. This correlation between our activities and Walkowiak’s works is further enhanced by the artist’s use of all the different media forms – photography, film and audio –, which make up our archival collection.
Exhibition created with the support of the Ministry of Culture, Austrian Embassy in Luxembourg, Ville Dudelange, MNAHA
In its fifth edition, the international photography triennial RAY presents contemporary photography and related media at various exhibition venues in Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region. In exhibitions and events, the triennial's artists explore and reflect on challenges and areas of tension in self-perception and human interaction, all under the theme ECHOES: they create an echo that draws attention to their themes.
The exhibition "RAY Echoes Memory" shows seven international artistic positions that deal with the role of photography as a carrier of memory. In their works, the artists question how missing or blurred memories can be (re)created using photographic images. They visualise how elastic our memory is when it comes to storing and reproducing the past and show how what we have seen fades and is replaced by new images.
In her series "memories I don't have", German artist Johanna Schlegel searches for a way to visualise missing memories of her childhood. By chemically processing photographs from her family album, she creates blurs on the surfaces of the images that express the gaps in her memory.
The feeling of anxiety and climatic threat that the American artist Mimi Plumb associates with the memories of her youth in small-town Walnut Creek on the US West Coast also permeates the cool photographs in her series "The White Sky".
The German artist Jana Bissdorf creates a connection between different time levels and narratives in her group of works "Paths to Happiness", for which she physically combines found black and white photographs with her own colour photographs, thus building new associative spaces between the present and the past.
Having primarily photographed vacant interior spaces—museums, depots, and newly constructed residential buildings—in the past, Satijn Panyigay now shifts her attention to urban exteriors with her new series “Nightcall“. Embarking on solitary nocturnal strolls through her hometown of Utrecht and Frankfurt am Main, she seeks unintentional compositions within urban structures. Utilizing the minimal light of the moon and street lamps in her analogue photographs, Panyigay blurs the distinction between them. Thus, amidst the bleak, monotonous, and utilitarian industrial landscape, captivating contrasts emerge.
Paradoxically, the absence of people in Satijn Panyigay's photographs evokes a sense of presence. Drawn to the ethereal realm of the night and its enigmatic ambiance, the artist invites us into encounters with a parallel world, reflecting our own, albeit with an eerie distance.
Satijn Panyigay (b. 1988 in Nijmegen, Netherlands) studied photography at the Utrecht School of Art, where she continues to live and work. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Centre D’art Contemporain de Meymac, France, and in the Netherlands at Museum Escher in the Palace; Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen; Fotomuseum Den Haag; Museum Tot Zover; Verwey Museum Haarlem, Villa Mondriaan. Her works are in the collections of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Museum Tot Zover, Museum Van Bommel Van Dam, Museum W., DZ Bank, KPMG, among others, as well as in numerous private collections. Panyigay’s artist book VOID was published by Hartmann Books (Germany) in 2023.
The Swiss-born Brazilian photographer and activist Claudia Andujar (*1931) serves as a role model for many politically motivated artists today. She is not only an outstanding photographer but also an activist who uses her artistic voice to draw attention to social injustices and defend the rights of indigenous communities. Her political commitment is reflected in her photography, which is not only artistically documentary but also carries a clear political message.
After fleeing the Nazis, she decided to pursue a career as a photojournalist and became involved in the fight against dictatorship and violence in her new home of Brazil. From the early 1970s, she documented not only the daily life of the Yanomami indigenous community in the Amazon in northern Brazil, but also the conflicts they faced due to mining, land disputes, and diseases. Andujar henceforth dedicated her life and work to the struggle for the rights of the Yanomami, a community she joined.
As part of her five decades of dedication to the protection of the Yanomami, Andujar has taken over 60,000 photographs. She has advocated for the Yanomami through her art and has also become a vehement supporter of their rights. Her efforts helped to draw international attention to the threats they face. Many indigenous activists today refer to Andujar’s impactful work over the past decades.
Today, Claudia Andujar is considered one of the most important figures in photography in South America. Her works have been exhibited in renowned museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. She has received numerous awards and recognitions for her artistic and social work.
"What I don't understand is how I was able do so many things in the same period. That's amazing! And completely different things! It was a very beautiful life. I don't want to start over because it's not advisable. But I regret nothing." - Sabine Weiss
To mark the centenary of Sabine Weiss's birth (1924-2021), Photo Elysée is presenting an exhibition that pays tribute to the photographer and has invited the visual artist Nathalie Boutté (France, 1967) to engage in dialogue with her work.
A major figure in French humanist photography, Sabine Weiss was not only a street, fashion, and advertising photographer but also a photojournalist for numerous international magazines. Over the course of sixty years, she explored all aspects of her profession.
In contrast to Sabine Weiss, who built her body of work by photographing on the street or undertaking studio commissions, Nathalie Boutté creates paper works, inspired by images produced by important photographers. Her process is meticulous: she cuts hundreds of strips of paper bearing texts related to the chosen image—here, quotes from Sabine Weiss—before assembling them to reconstruct the original photograph. The grayscale tones of the paper strips create gradients, similar to pixels on a digital screen. Up close, the text on the paper strips is revealed, but it is by stepping back that the image is revealed. By opening the photographer's archives to Nathalie Boutté's gaze, Photo Elysée unveils an unknown aspect of Sabine Weiss's work, notably her studio work.
The exhibition presents a selection of iconic works by the photographer and reveals some treasures among the numerous negatives, prints, and contact sheets that make up her archives. In 2017, aware of the importance of preserving her work, Sabine Weiss chose Photo Elysée to house her archive, which arrived in the museum's collections at Plateforme 10 at the beginning of 2024.
Cindy Sherman is considered to be one of the most important American artists of her generation. Her ground-breaking photographs have interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades.
In this new body of work, the artist collages parts of her own face to construct the identities of various characters, using digital manipulation to accent the layered aspects and plasticity of the self. Sherman has removed any scenic backdrops or mise-en-scène–the focus of this series is the face. She combines a digital collaging technique using black and white and color photographs with other traditional modes of transformation, such as make-up, wigs and costumes, to create a series of unsettling characters who laugh, twist, squint and grimace in front of the camera. To create the fractured characters, Sherman has photographed isolated parts of her body–her eyes, nose, lips, skin, hair, ears–which she cuts, pastes and stretches onto a foundational image, ultimately constructing, deconstructing and then reconstructing a new face.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue by Hauser & Wirth Publishers.
"To be totally liberated from painting and its aesthetic implications" was the first avowed aim of Man Ray (United States, 1890-1976), who began his career as a painter. Photography was one of the major breakthroughs of modern art and led to a rethinking of notions of representation. In the 1920s and 30s, the photographic medium came to the forefront of the avant-garde movement, and Man Ray soon made a name for himself with his virtuosity. As a studio portraitist and fashion photographer, but also as an experimental artist who explored the potential of photography with the people around him, Man Ray was a multi-faceted figure. Considered one of the 20th century’s major artists, close to Dada and then Surrealism, he photographed Paris’ artistic milieu between the wars.
EXHIBITION
Curated from a private collection, the exhibition explores the artist’s extensive social contacts while presenting some of his most iconic works. In addition to providing a dazzling who’s who of the Parisian avant-garde, the works also highlight the innovations in photography made by Man Ray in Paris in the 1920s and 30s.
ARTIST
He took his first photographs in New York in the 1910s, but it was in Paris that his career took off. Even before opening his studio in Montparnasse in 1922, Man Ray worked for a year in his hotel room. The photographer's reputation grew, and before long, the artist's studio was flourishing. Fashion photographs alternated with portraits of the artistic figures of the day who had made Paris’ no…
Set and setting presents the first institutional solo show of Swiss artist Tamara Janes. Janes is fascinated by how we see, question, and change the post-modern conditions of the image. She addresses these issues by utilising a unique blend of high-culture and popular culture sources that captivate audiences and humorously expose both profound and mundane aspects of contemporary visual culture. A large part of the exhibition shows bodies of work she made after researching the New York Public Library Picture Collection in 2018. It acts as a source of images for her, which she later organizes, adjusts, recontextualizes and modifies based on her artistic preferences. Tamara Janes was awarded the Swiss Design Prize in 2023 for the Copyright Swap series.
On the occasion of this exhibition, Biennale Images Vevey presents at L'Appartement – Espace Images Vevey, the series Funny Snow Face, created by Tamara Janes and Natalia Funariu.
Olga Cafiero has been given carte blanche to explore the Naturéum's collections. Through her photographic series, she captures the perpetual accumulation of time. She plays with colors and materials to create and represent each object. By bringing zoological, botanical and geological specimens to life, she opens up new perspectives on the natural sciences.
Olga Cafiero takes over Plateforme 10's Le Signal L space at the suggestion of Photo Elysée and Naturéum.
Located in the extension of the Arcadia restaurant, Plateforme 10's venue Signal L gives artists the chance to showcase our corner of the country, the Canton of Vaud, each in their own way and style.
Several times a year, an artist is invited to come and take a cross-sectional look at an institution or event in French-speaking Switzerland to broaden and vary the scope of Plateforme 10's artistic action, extending beyond fine arts, design and photography.
Visitors’ Lobby, Gallery A, 1st Avenue at 46th Street New York NY 10017 www.un.org
This summer, the report by the laureates of the 13th edition of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award dedicated to the ecological and human challenges of e-waste in Ghana is on display in two exhibitions at the United Nations Headquarters in New York and at the Fondation MRO in Arles.
With the support of the Fondation Carmignac, investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas, and photojournalists Muntaka Chasant and Bénédicte Kurzen, spent a year and a half documenting the transboundary flows of e-waste between Ghana, and Europe, and further. Their collaborative report highlights the complexities of this global issue, revealing both its economic importance for thousands in Ghana and its significant human and environmental impacts.
Kurzen travelled to the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany to document e-waste outbound flows and communities involved, challenging stereotypes and shedding light on the inefficiencies within European e-waste management systems. In Accra, Chasant studied e-waste workers' social structures and migration journeys, from the rural North to the capital’s scrapyards. Aremeyaw And Anas went undercover to unveil corruption, dubious working conditions and illegal e-waste flows re-entering global markets. This exhibition offers a nuanced perspective on a critical and complex global issue.
NEW YORK – June 28 - August 31, 2024 in partnership with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR)
United Nations Headquarters, Visitors’ Lobby, Gallery A, 1st Avenue at 46th Street, New York, NY 10017 Open Monday to Friday: 9:00 am – 5:00 pm Free admission More information on www.un.org/en/exhibits
Ahead of the retrospective Libres expressions, dedicated to Jean-Claude Gautrand by the Musée Réattu in Arles this summer (June 29-October 6), Les Douches la Galerie is pleased to present, for the first time, a solo show dedicated to French photographer Jean-Claude Gautrand (1932-2019). You are invited to discover his early experiments from the 1960s, with a selection of vintages from his iconic series. The book Recompositions by Jean-Claude Gautrand, published last April by Contrejour editions, accompanies these two exhibitions.
"To photograph is to engage in a race against erasure, disappearance, nothingness. It is a fight against time, a challenge to oblivion. The camera, a magical instrument capable of immortalizing the fleeting, but also the irremediable."1
It is certainly this "irremediable" quality that demands the most attention in the work of Jean-Claude Gautrand, who photographs the disappearance of things, constructions, or places to inscribe them into eternity. Photography witnesses a battle where destructive forces ally with time to erase what was thought to be eternal. The various post-war photographic clubs he frequented hardly inspired him. "Apart from the world of reporting, the photographic field was then reduced to either illustrative or documentary photography of distressing conformity".2 He discovers in volumes I and II (catalogs of the exhibitions Subjektive Fotographie I and II, from 1952 and 1955) organized by German photographer Dr. Otto Steinert, a different photography that struck him as "an atomic bomb in the mire of photography."
The exhibition provides a fine insight into Laurenz Theinert’s oeuvre, which includes photographic works, light art and light + sound performances. In addition to five light installations, the exhibition also features photographs from various of his series.
In his work, the Stuttgart-based artist strives to create a reduced visual language that develops without any recognisable reference to the objective world. He is not interested in depicting reality in his photographic work. His photographs do not document things; they are neither narrative nor do they represent anything. For Theinert, the visible world is merely a starting point that allows him to use the means of photography to investigate the medium itself, as well as processes in space and time, such as changes in perspective or changing colour effects. His research, which is more intuitive than planned, results in images of great creative lucidity.
In his Randerscheinungen [Peripheral Phenomena], Theinert reverses the photographer’s conventional gaze: instead of concentrating on a central motif, he focuses his attention on the usually insignificant margins of his visual field. In the multi-part series Every Now and Then and Tagundnachtgleiche [Equinox], he examines for instance changes in colour in different light situations. And in the series Farbreste [Leftover Colours], his concern is with visualising colours that are present in even the greyest of greys in a concrete wall or stretch of masonry, enhancing them by means of digital image processing to create psychedelic colour compositions.
The desire to create dynamic, dematerialised art led Theinert to light art. Using light as a medium, he has succeeded in creating changing colour effects and intimating m…
Every summer since 1970, over the course of more than forty exhibitions at various of the city's exceptional heritage sites, the Rencontres d'Arles has been a major influence in dissiminating the best of world photography and playing the role of a springboard for photographic and contemporary creative talents.
WORLD.NATURE.HERITAGE – "Humanity has opened the gates to hell", warned Secretary- General António Guterres in an impassioned speech on the margins of the UN General Assembly in September 2023. UN General Assembly in September 2023 to politicians, entrepreneurs and activists, he warned of the terrible consequences of increasingly extreme weather events. "Our concern is that all climate action will be dwarfed by the scale of the challenge”, as humanity is heading for a temperature rise of 2.8°C.
An appeal to the world that has long been inscribed at the heart of our festival. It is our duty to preserve the poetry of creation for our children. On the fundamental issues of urbanisation, biodiversity, natural resources, environmental pollution and global warming, we will try to use images to provide, if not solutions, then at least food for thought. Therefore, in our seventh festival year, we will be showing the work of the great masters of environmental photography: Nazli Abbaspour, Evgenia Arbugaeva, Yasuhoshi Chiba, Joana Choumali, David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes, Nadia Ferroukhi, Sacha Goldberger, Richard Ladkani, Lucas Lenci, Luca Locatelli, Pascal Maitre, Beth Moon, Maxime Riché, Sebastião Salgado, Alain Schroeder, Vee Speers, Brent Stirton, Lorraine Turci, David Turnley, Peter Turnley and Cássio Vasconcellos.
"We all need Eden as a horizon," writes Cyril Drouhet in his essay in the festival catalogue. "There was a time when we had a rainbow in our heads: We believed in the future, in progress, our dreams were full of utopias. In the third millennium, this colour has turned grey. But life needs radiant colours like in photography to enchant the world again. That is the cha…
The third edition of the Biennial for Visual and Sonic Media düsseldorf photo+ from 17 May to 14 July 2024 is themed "On Reality". In exhibitions and concerts, talks, panels and other events, current and updated photography as well as media-based art in its most diverse facets can be experienced throughout Düsseldorf. The artists will reflect in a wide variety of ways on how media significantly shapes our understanding of reality today and in the past. Computer-generated worlds of images and sounds surround us everywhere, and the Biennale integrates these into the art trail and links analogue-generated audiovisual realities. In total, the Biennale offers over 50 exhibitions and events in museums, collections, galleries, independent exhibition spaces and universities. This year's düsseldorf photo+ is being organised under the artistic direction of Pola Sieverding and Rupert Pfab. Ljiljana Radlovic oversees the project management.
Highlights from our varied exhibition programme:
In photographs, now seen as historic, Allan Sekula critically illuminates social structures operating within the industrial workforce of the USA at Galerie Konrad Fischer. The group exhibition at the gallery boa basedonart, another retrospective show, focuses on social stereotypes in relation to self-portraits. Sumi Anjuman offers a contemporary insight into gender inequality at the private Philara Collection.
Toby Binder also takes a sociological standpoint with a look at crisis-ridden milieux at the gallery Clara Maria Sels. The exhibition at Julia Ritterskamp further investigates this stance in a show of t…
The international Triennial of Photography RAY is celebrating the diversity of photography in Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region for the fifth time with a focus on "ECHOES". Eleven institutions and exhibition venues in Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region will be showing works on the theme of "ECHOES" by contemporary photographers and artists. With exhibitions, numerous events, and a three-day festival on the triennial theme of "ECHOES", RAY offers a multifaceted exploration of photography.
How do images contribute to the understanding of our identity, our memories, our emotions, and the ability to grasp and process current social, communal, and political challenges? RAY Echoes offers no answers to these questions, but rather – like a laboratory – it offers many perspectives and opportunities for individual exploration.
The artists of the RAY 2024 – Triennial of Photography use photography and related media to explore and reflect on the challenges and tensions of self-perception and human interaction. Their works span the past, present, and future, from the intimate and personal to the collective. By capturing these diverse moments and phenomena, they generate an echo that draws the public’s attention to their themes. Similar to a sound experience, they create reverberation that is perceived as an independent event beyond what is depicted. On this basis, RAY Echoes concentrates on three focal points: identity, memory, and emotion.
In the exhibition RAY Echoes Identity at the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (3 May – 1 September, 2024, opening on 2 May), the artists explore the making and breaking away from identities. Echoes are present in the form of reflections on personal experience…
The 60th International Art Exhibition , titled Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere , will open to the public from Saturday April 20 to Sunday November 24, 2024 , at the Giardini and the Arsenale; it will be curated by Adriano Pedrosa and organised by La Biennale di Venezia . The pre-opening will take place on April 17, 18 and 19 ; the awards ceremony and inauguration will be held on 20 April 2024 .
Since 2021, La Biennale di Venezia launched a plan to reconsider all of its activities in light of recognized and consolidated principles of environmental sustainability. For the year 2024, the goal is to extend the achievement of “carbon neutrality” certification , which was obtained in 2023 for La Biennale’s scheduled activities: the 80th Venice International Film Festival, the Theatre, Music and Dance Festivals and, in particular, the 18th International Architecture Exhibition which was the first major Exhibition in this discipline to test in the field a tangible process for achieving carbon neutrality – while furthermore itself reflecting upon the themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation.
The Exhibition will take place in the Central Pavilion (Giardini) and in the Arsenale, and it will present two sections: the Nucleo Contemporaneo and the Nucleo Storico.
As a guiding principle, the Biennale Arte 2024 has favored artists who have never participated in the International Exhibition—though a number of them may have been featured in a National Pavilion, a Collateral Event, or in a past edition of the International Exhibition. Special attention is being given to outdoor projects, both in the Arsenale and in the Giardini, where a performance program is being planned with events during the pre-opening and closing weekend of the 60th Exhibition.
Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, the title of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, is drawn from a series of works started in 2004 by the Paris-born and Palermo-based Claire Fontaine collective. The works consist of neon sculptures in different colours that render in a growing number of languages the words “Foreigners Everywhere”. The phrase comes, in turn, from the name of a Turin collective who fought racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s.
«The expression Stranieri Ovunque - explains Adriano Pedrosa - has several meanings. First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners— they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.»
