AWARDS AT THE 54th VENICE BIENNIAL

The jury to the 54th Venice Biennial, headed by Egyptian Hassan Khan (visual artist and experimental musician), and made up of Chinese Carol Yinghua Lu (curator and independent art critic); Italian Letizia Ragaglia (specialized on museology and contemporary art); French Christine Macel (write, art critic and curator at Pompidou Center), and American John Waters (movie maker, actor, writer, artist and art collector), awarded the Golden Lion to Germany’s Pavilion (sited in the Garden of the Biennial), for the best national participation.

The jury supported its criteria on the “intense multidisciplinary practice and strong personal vision” displayed by artist and movie director Christoph Schlingensief, whose works are exhibited in the pavilion. (Schlingensief set up the exhibition and, after he died in August 2010, the work was finished by curator Susanne Gaensheimer, who was also awarded by the Biennial).

American Christian Marclay (United States, 1955) was distinguished with the Golden Lion to the best artist of ILLUMInations exhibition for his work “The clock” (La Corderie in Arsenal); movie that was screened during 24 hours without interruption, in which different scenes from past and present films were alternated, while an image showed the same time in the woman’s wrist. In the case of Marclay, he’s master-piece artist who, as they highlighted, “has set limits between artistic forms and different genres during the last 30 years.”

The Silver Lion to the Young Promise was given to Haroon Mirza (Great Britain, 1977. Work that was exhibited in La Corderie in Arsenal and the Central Pavilion in the Garden of the Biennial), who creates installations with second hand object, for the “way in which his work immediately captures the spectator with his refreshing use of contrast between weakness and power.”

Likewise, Lithuania’s Pavilion got a mention “due to its capacity for containing in a conceptually elegant and productively ambiguous way that country’s art history” (“Behind the white curtain”, with the curatorship of Kestutis Kuizinas); a mention was also given to artist Klara Lidén (Sweden, 1979. Obra sin título or Tarro de Basura, 2011, exhibited in Arsenal): a “confirmation of her work’s strength, intelligence and fury”, while “the artwork’s capacity, for transporting the typical logic of a public art intervention in an expositive space, is recognized.”

Venice Biennial’s Board of Directors, headed by Paolo Baratta, as suggested by curator Bice Curiger, awarded Sturtevant’s work (United States, 1930) and Franz West’s (Vienna, 1947), who share the same love for experimentation and a off-the-wall way of understanding art.

Sturtevant was awarded for his one-of-a-kind and fascinating career and the development of an extremely coherent work after been literally in the “shadow” of the most significant artistic experiments in the 20th century. “His work generated questions on originality and authorship before those topics became intense philosophical and theoretical debates”. In Franz West, his innovative diversity in sculpture, collage and installations, from an aesthetic language related to the body, psycho-analysis, literature, philosophy.