Venice Biennale 2019 ‘May You Live In Interesting Times’

Whilst I was backpacking in the summer, I was able to make it to the Venice Biennale. There was seriously so much going on no matter how much I ran around trying to see as much as I could, it is impossible to see all of the works or workshops throughout the biennial, but I did manage to see a lot of works I wouldn’t even know where start when discussing them.

There where so many works 

that I absolutely loved but there was this one part of the biennial that really stood out to me which was ‘the future is now’ by Phillippe Shangti. His work encouraged us to criticise the effects of exaggerated consumerism and superficiality and reconsider the consumerist present, leading us to an unsure future. Shangti’s work is envisaged as a protest despite the clean finished presentation and techniques he uses such as photography, sculpture and kitch audio-visuals. ‘the future is now’ was deeply about the criticism of consumerism but each piece looked completely different. I first thought the exhibition was a collective of different artists. As each piece had a completely different aesthetic and approach for the same point, one piece was a video installation of prisoners who where spender addicts, whereas another was a column completely covered in graffiti and collages involving people in power such as Vladimir Putin. The piece that caught my attention the most was ‘park of lost paradise’. Which is the piece to the right with the sculpture stepping into this surreal like image. This image of paradise is a land free of corruption, each section of the image has signs like “no animal killers here”, “no cloths here” and “no war here”. I just loved this exhibition all around though, I really liked how these serious messages where presented.

‘The spirit of Morano’ by Seguso. This had a really interesting interactive element in the work, where the public would write some kind of response to the installation and would post their response on Instagram using a hashtag where the artist could choose some to engrave onto glass throughout the Biennale. I ended up writing a little poem just to be cute.

Then there was Money talks’ by Alberto. Where he destroyed $1,000,000 authentic dollars. When I first saw this displayed at the biennial I absolutely hated it, I hated the fact he just destroyed this much money and if he just wanted to get rid of money or if he had the intention of discussing the ideas of corruption, then why didn’t he just give this much money to charities or to homeless, just something or anything good. And I completely had the intention to write about how much I hated this work and then when I researched it I found images that the artists had done where he is holding this sphere in public and I just found these images hilarious and now I don’t know how to feel about the work. It’s interesting how just seeing this same work displayed in different ways has a completely changed how I see and feel about the piece.