Wales in Venice
For Cymru yn Fenis/Wales in Venice 2015 we present ‘…the rest is smoke’ by artist Helen Sear, an official Collateral Event of the 56th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
Commissioned by the Arts Council of Wales and curated by Ffotogallery, ‘…the rest is smoke’ comprises a suite of new work conceived for and presented in five discrete spaces within the Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, a church and former convent in the Castello area of Venice.
Ffotogallery has enjoyed a longstanding relationship with the artist, publishing Sear’s thirty- year retrospective monograph Inside The View in 2012, and we previously exhibited her work on several occasions both internationally and in Wales.
For Cymru yn Fenis/Wales in Venice, Ffotogallery appointed to our exhibition team independent curator Stuart Cameron and assistant curator/project manager Kathryn Standing. Cameron curated the artist’s first major exhibition in Wales, and their relationship has been built up over thirty years engendering a strong basis of mutual respect and confidence. Cameron’s curatorial rapport with the artist, and sensitivity to the ideas and creative impulses in her work, has been critical to the development and realisation of this project.
As befits a collateral project, ‘…the rest is smoke’ is both rooted in the local and familiar landscapes of Wales, and responds to the wider context of the Venice Biennale. For the 56th edition of La Biennale di Venezia, curator Okwui Enwenzor has chosen the theme ‘All The World’s Futures’, examining the relationship between art and the development of the human, social and political world. Although ‘…the rest is smoke’ was not developed specifically in response to this theme, it chimes well with it. The affective qualities of the work actively engage the viewer in the illusionistic space of the image, in dialogue with the architecture of the physical space in which it is sited, disrupting the single point perspective in order to present landscapes and their relationships with the human body as something immersive and complex.
For this accompanying online project Experience Wales in Venice, we are pleased to be working closely with the selected artists of ACW's Invigilator Plus programme. As well as creating a web platform to showcase Helen Sear and the exhibition, we are working with the fifteen artists to document their individual experiences of Wales in Venice. We are making available a wealth of resources for online audiences, such as artist interviews, documentation of the exhibition evolving as well as downloadable workshops for schools. In addition to the fantastic work done in Venice by the invigilators we are hoping that the website will provide new audience insights and contribute to critical dialogue around Helen’s work internationally.
Channel
