Venezia '17

From Urbana to Venice

Punta  della Dogana

The first thing I visited in Venice was the restoration project by Tadao Ando. It's actually a pretty recent project completed in 2009. It's funded by the French Billionaire and art collector, François Pinault. The building was originally built as the customs center since it's in the intersection of two biggest canals. 

Ando kept all the old structures and added his signature concrete to create a second floor

The stairs serve as the separation of old and new. Ando left a gap between the new materials and the old.

Arte Biennale 2017

The Venice art Biennale is the original biennale since 1895. The biennale invites artists from all around the world to display their arts. It has two permanent exhibition locations: the Arsenale and the Giardini. The Giardini houses multiple pavilions of different countries, kinda like the World Expo, and they are mostly designed by architects around 20th century, for example: Carlo Scarpa and Alvar Aalto. I will not show all the art works from the exhibition because that is not the point of this blog. 

Entrance of the exhibition at Arsenale

The Earth tent invites people to take off their shoes and play instruments inside the tent

From my observation, there are a lot of arts that's related to time. These pieces seek interactions from the visitors and create a specific moment of experience. A lot of the arts are also site-specific, they were created under the intention of being displayed either in the Arsenale or Giardini.

The gif above is an example of including time into the design: the artist use the water to erode the newspaper  

The artist blended the reality and imagination together into this piece

This is one of my favorite pieces in the Arsenale exhibition. It's created by the artist Alicja Kwade, who's originally from Poland, and now lives and works in Berlin. It says in the introductory panel:

In the Corderie, Alicja kwade creates a sculpture-and-performance-based installation. kwade plays with the viewer's knowledge and proposes a disjointed walk through the work. The sculptures are meant to found a new metaphysical order, where materials are connected to moments of time carefully chosen by the artist. As a thought experiment about object in time, the installation presents a boulder transferred into steel and then to stone and wood, leading back to bronze and stone..."

In the Russian pavilion, there's a section where walls are made out of black fluted polypropylene. The opaque and transparent effect are absolutely amazing. (Please refer to the gif below)

It's a cafeteria

German Pavilion displays arts underneath the glass floor

You can probably guess which country of pavilion this is

And Finally, one of my favorite pavilions in the Giardini, the Nordic Pavilion by Sverre Fehn. It's a solid design that invites the light in and adjusts according to the site and the existing trees.

Let me know what yall think!