Page 13 - The 60.Venice Biennial & MoMA issue of WOA Contemporary Art magazine

Claire Fontaine: Foreigners Everywhere (English), 2005, Tecnolux ultra violet,
10mm glass, back-painted, framework, electronic transformer, cables. Photo
by Studio Claire Fontaine, Copyright, Studio Claire Fontaine, Courtesy of Claire
Fontaine and Galerie Neu, Berlin

Maataho collective from Aotearoa/New Zealand presenting challenge the boundaries and definitions of modernism,
a large-scale installation in the Corderie. Queer artists presenting it as a speculative curatorial exercise. European
are featured throughout the exhibition, including a major modernism traveled far beyond Europe, often intertwined
section in the Corderie and a focus on queer abstraction in with colonialism, and many artists from the Global South
the Central Pavilion. journeyed to Europe to engage with it.
The Contemporary Nucleus will also highlight the In the Central Pavilion, three rooms are dedicated to the
Disobedience Archive, a project by Marco Scotini that has Historical Nucleus: Portraits, Abstractions, and the Italian
been documenting the intersection of artistic practices and Artistic Diaspora of the 20th Century.
activism since 2005. Designed by Juliana Ziebell, who also “The Portraits room,” Pedrosa continued, “includes works
contributed to the exhibition’s architecture, this section from 112 artists, spanning from 1905 to 1990. These pieces,
is divided into two parts: Diaspora Activism and Gender mostly paintings, but also works on paper and sculpture,
Disobedience. The Archive includes works by 39 artists and explore the human figure in diverse ways, reflecting the
collectives from 1975 to 2023. crisis of representation that marked much of 20th-century
art. Artists from the Global South, influenced by European
HISTORICAL NUCLEUS modernism through travel, study, or literature, bring their
The Historical Nucleus,” Adriano Pedrosa explained, unique perspectives to these works. The Abstractions room
“features works from 20th-century Latin America, Africa, features 37 artists, many exhibited together for the first
the Middle East, and Asia. While much has been written time, offering new connections and associations beyond
about global modernisms, the modernisms of the Global traditional categories.”
South remain largely unexplored. This section aims to Artists from Singapore and Korea, once part of the so-called

WORLD of ART 13