Venice Art Biennale 2015 | Australia, Norway, USA

Venice Art Biennale 2015 | free associations part 4: pavilions of Australia, Nordic Countries, and the USA

Australian pavilion 
Fiona Hall – Wrong Way time
Artist: Fiona Hall
Commissioner: Simon Mordant
Pavilion architecture: Denton Corker Marshall

After two decades, a new national pavilion has been built in the Venice Biennale’s gardens, it’s the pavilion of Australia.
The new building, designed by Melbourne-based office Denton Corker Mashall, is a rigorous, black colored, monolith, overlooking the canal that splits the Giardini di Castello in two. The visitors access the pavilion by a long ramp that , through an open-air terrace, leads inside the 240 square-meter building.

Bones, cuckoo clocks and disquieting ancestral figures populate the pavilion.  Wrong Way Time, the multi-sensory installation by Fiona Hall that represents Australia at the 56th Art Biennale,  is a gloomy depiction of the political, financial and environmental issues of the world  of today, in the artist’s own words “a minefield of madness, badness, and sadness in equal measure.”

Nordic Pavilion
Rapture
Artist: Camille Norment
Commissioner: Office of Contemporary Art Norway

For the first time in Biennale’s history, the magnificent pavilion of the Nordic Countries, designed in 1958 by the Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn, features an exhibition organized by Norway only, presenting a work by Camille Normand.

Inspired to the sound produced by the Glass Armonica, a legendary instrument of the 18th century, famous for its intriguing and ethereal voice but banned because deemed “too-exciting”, Rapture, the site-specific installation by Camille Norment, explores the relationship between body and sound, and transforms the pavilion itself into a sort of creature which experiences “raptures and ruptures” and “harmonies and dissonances”.

USA Pavilion
They come to us without a word
Artist: Joan Jonas
Commissioner: Mit List visual Arts center, Cambridge, Massachussetts, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of State

The pavilion of the United States at the Art Biennale 2015 presents the installation They come to us without a word by Joan Jonas.
The work alludes to the fragility of Nature, as well as to the frantic and dramatic changes of its state.
The installation is divided into five rooms, each presenting a theme: Fish, Bees, Mirrors, Wind, Homeroom. Fragments of dark stories from the oral tradition of Nova Scotia, bind together the subjects depicted into the rooms.

Photos © Inexhibit, 2015