Lawrence Weiner, Ai Weiwei and Shirazeh Houshiary are among the art stars who will be featured in the 48 collateral events to take place during the Venice Biennale (June 1-Nov. 24) at locations throughout the city. All are organized by nonprofits. The biennale office released the full list today.
Weiner, hosted by Frankfurt’s Written Art Foundation, will show a text work, THE GRACE OF A GESTURE (2010), as the centerpiece of an exhibition at the Palazzo Bembo. Venice’s vaporetti will also be emblazoned with the titular text.
The ubiquitous Ai Weiwei presents Straight (2012), a project that will use steel reinforcing bars recovered from school buildings that collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. That project is presented by Venice’s own Zuecca Project Space.
Houshiary, invited by the Guggenheim Museum, will show Breath (2013), a four-channel video that presents Buddhist, Christian, Jewish and Islamic chants, “choreographed with images that capture the expanding and contracting breath of the vocalists,” according to the press release. That work will appear at the Arsenale.
Other collateral events include exhibitions by an impressive number of Asian nonprofits, such as the Nanjing Sanchuan Modern Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chengdu, the M+ Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong, the Guangdong Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
Resonating with the abundance of self-taught artists on the Biennale roster is James Brett’s Museum of Everything, an itinerant museum devoted to “the untrained, unintentional and undiscovered artists of our times.”
PHOTO: Ai Weiwei: Straight (2008-12). Installation view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, 2012. Via Hirshhorn.
