Renate Bertlmann, Discordo Ergo Sum – Austrian Pavilion, Venice Art Biennale 2019

Renate Bertlmann, Discordo Ergo Sum, knife-rose field, installation view, Austrian Pavilion, Venice Art Biennale 2019. Photo © Riccardo Bianchini / Inexhibit

Renate Bertlmann, Discordo Ergo Sum – Austrian Pavilion, Venice Art Biennale 2019

Featuring a site-specific installation by Renate Bertlmann (b. 1943 in Vienna), Discordo Ergo Sum is the exhibition of the Pavilion of Austria at the 58th Venice Art Biennale.

A play of words around Descartes’ famous proposition “Cogito ergo sum”, the installation title can be translated to “I dissent, therefore I am”. Indeed, Bertlmann’s work ironically subverts and redefines social phenomena and symbols such as gender relations, role models and power structures.

The installation is, by and large, divided into two parts.
Inside the Austrian Pavilion – designed by Josef Hoffmann in the early 1930s – black-and-white charts, drawings, photographs and sketches, which Bertlmann created since the 1970s, are installed on a sequence of thin white-colored horizontal and vertical planes which unfolds throughout the pavilion like a giant cartographic map.

Renate Bertlmann, Discordo Ergo Sum, interior views. Photos © Riccardo Bianchini / Inexhibit

In the pavilion’s back courtyard, the artists created a vivid sculptural installation consisting of 312 red glass roses pierced by sharp steel knives. Again, with her knife-rose installation, the Austrian artist focuses on the dichotomy of the human existence and on the ambivalence of the social and cultural paradigms we are all influenced by.

Renate Bertlmann, Discordo Ergo Sum, the knife-rose field. Photos © Riccardo Bianchini / Inexhibit