Since its inception in 1895, the Venice Biennale has become one of, if not the most, prestigious contemporary art exhibition in the world, taking place every two years (in odd years) and includes the annual Venice Film Festival and the Venice Architecture Biennale, held in even years.

This summer, our intrepid VRMag/Arounder team caught part of the exhibition while attending the Panotools meeting in early August. For the first time in its 110-year history, the exhibition was composed of two specific and complementary shows of international contemporary art from the Seventies through today. The two projects - The Experience of Art and Always a Little Further - present, from different points of view, the best of contemporary art. A limited selection of artists was invited to share a series of their works that document their creative history.

Mare Verticale - Fabrizio Plessi
Fabrizio Plessi’s Mare Verticale (Vertical Sea), is perhaps the most prominent ‘new media’ artwork in Venice. A boat-shaped light-emitting structure on the water in front of the entrance to the Giardini, the permanent structure was promoted as “a metaphor of the journey towards [the] unknown but also a symbol of artistic creation”.

A big technological totem made of steel and aluminum, 44 meters high, Mare Verticale was first presented at the International Exhibition in Hanover in 2000 and will subsequently be exhibited in China in 2006 as one of the events for the year of Italy.

An Experiment in Navigation, Pump Room - Balázs Kicsiny
Held in the photogenic Hungarian Pavilion, Balázs Kicsiny’s four video-and assemblage-based works explore the peculiar existence of Venice as viewed through the lens of a landlocked country with strong images and absurdist humor, along with a dose of Magrittean Surrealism.

The work entitled Pump Room comments on the peculiar existence of Venice, a city built on the lagoons of the sea, still surviving, holding out against submersion. There are twelve kneeling human figures - men and women - wearing pajamas and a diver's helmet, who are drinking out of a sacrificial chalice.

Winterreise (Winter Journey), named after Schubert’s 24-song setting of Wilhelm Muller’s poetry, comprises two cassock-wearing mannequins, with fencing masks containing light bulbs where their heads should be. The duo face opposite directions on the same pair of overly long skis, with two tram power poles connecting their headgear to electric wires strung above.

Critic Peter Fitz remarks, “the idea of the exhibition is to query our common agreement and approach to space, time and orientation, and the potential representation of this in visual, plastic and spatial terms. The series of objects Kicsiny has applied here, like the anchor, the pajamas, the cassock, the chain, the trunk, and even the accessories of deep water diving, can be interpreted as a reference to Venice, a utopian city of European cultural history.

Your Black Horizon - Olafur Eliasson
On the outlying island of San Lazzaro, Olafur Eliasson exhibited a haunting light piece called Your Black Horizon in a custom-designed pavilion by David Adjaye, part of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Limited Edition Art Pavilions, which host unique specially commissioned sight-specific art projects on a rotating basis. David Akjaye designed the Pavilions to be flexible and easily adaptable structures with multi-purpose capabilities and over 400 square meters exhibition space.

In a windowless pavilion a thin horizontal line directed through a narrow gap at eye level serves as the primary light source. The light is constantly changing colors and rotates through the color spectrum of an accelerated day every 15 minutes – from reds and blues to white, pink and purple, fading into the blue evening lights - and is calibrated to the specific light condition of Venice. Light recordings were taken from sunrise to sunset to study the spectrum of light and its intensity.

While the light line is a recording of the actual daylight condition, it creates an after image of the complementary color. Eliasson explains: “The notion of the after-images depends on what kind of retinal material you might carry with you, in your eye, and of course the retinal material is not just physiological, it’s also our memory and what our brain puts into the eye that we project. An after-image, unlike taking in an image, is a projection. The concept that you are in fact constituting your surroundings by looking at it is something I found generous in the sense that the person looking is becoming the producer of her/his own surroundings.”

Italian Pavilion
This year, the Italian pavilion made a statement with soundproofed, dark spaces clustered together at the corners, allowing the paintings and sculptures to remain the focal point of the exhibition. Late artists such as Francis Bacon, Philip Guston and Agnes Martin filled the galleries, prompting Italian critic Vittorio Sgarbi to complain, “If you’re including dead artists, why not exhibit works by Raphael and Michelangelo!”

Nordic Pavilion
The Nordic Countries pavilion houses distinct projects on alternate days. Miriam Bäckström's sound installation, Amplified Pavilion, works like a giant hearing aid: microphones and speakers hidden in the ceiling intensify the noise that ripples through the space, so that birdsong outside is just as audible as people chattering nearby. Matias Faldbakken's video work Black Screen tracks through an empty cinema to reveal a void.