Open to the public from May 11th to November 24th, at the Giardini and the Arsenale, the 58th International Art Exhibition, titled ‘May You Live In Interesting Times’, will be curated by Ralph Rugoff and organized by La Biennale di Venezia chaired by Paolo Baratta. The pre-opening will take place on May 8th, 9th and 10th, the awards ceremony and inauguration will be held on May 11th.
As every year, the event will host numerous national pavilions, from about 90 countries, and a main exhibition. Among the Italian artists participating this year, it is interesting to note an important female presence: Liliana Moro (1961) and the late Chiara Fumai (1978 – 2017), with Enrico Davide (1966), in the Italian Pavilion, and Ludovica Carbotta (1982) and Lara Favaretto (1973) in the main exhibition.
Liliana Moro studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where she still lives and works today. Her work is characterized by essentiality, through which objects, sounds, and performances portray a crude and poetic reality, which invites the viewer to go beyond what is visible. She has already taken part in many other important collective exhibitions all over the world, but is her first experience at the International Art Exhibition.
This year the Italian pavilion will also host the works of the Bari artist Chiara Fumai, who died prematurely in 2017 and is remembered for her fiercely feminist lectures. She began her career when she was very young creating a fictional character, the singer Nico Fumai, making everyone believe that he really existed. She continued her career bringing back to life characters, above all women, who lived between the nineteenth and the twentieth century.
Ludovica Carbotta is an Italian artist who now works in Barcelona. Her art focuses on the connections between the individual and the environment that surrounds him, playing on the border between reality and fiction. Her most recent works are a set of installations, texts, and performances that creat medium-scale environments in which the concepts of place, identity and participation are investigated.
Lara Favaretto lives and works in Italy. The theme of ‘parties’ is the source of inspiration for all her works, through which it tries to offer a moment suspended in time and to make the wonderful tangible. Her works are not bound by any technique, but they are often performances that involve also the spectator. Among the most recurrent elements there is confetti, which often becomes a real sculptural material.
Cover ph: by Francesco Galli _ Courtesy of La Biennale