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Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere
curated by Adriano Pedrosa⁠
Giardini and Arsenale⁠
April 20 — November 24, 2024⁠

The Exhibition will take place in the Central Pavilion (Giardini) and in the Arsenale, and it will present two sections: the Nucleo Contemporaneo and the Nucleo Storico.

Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, the title of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, is drawn from a series of works started in 2004 by the Paris-born and Palermo-based Claire Fontaine collective. The works consist of neon sculptures in different colours that render in a growing number of languages the words “Foreigners Everywhere”. The phrase comes, in turn, from the name of a Turin collective who fought racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s.

“The expression Stranieri Ovunque – explains Adriano Pedrosa – has several meanings. First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners— they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.”

WangShui’s (b. 1986 in Texas, USA) work explores the strange loops of mediation we exist in today. The materials activated in their practice range from the organic to the mechanical, often incorporating live matter and generative image technologies. Their obsession with the paradoxes of perception, between detail and distance, transparency and opacity, haptics and optics challenge fixed notions of matter and scale. Autofictions, technological affects, and new cosmologies find entanglement in multichannel video weavings, metallic abrasion, and machine learning. Adding to the lineage of human/machine depiction, WangShui captures the feeling of dematerializing into an algorithmic interpolation of being.

For more information visit the La Biennale’s website →

Image:

WangShui
Lipid Muse, 2024
La Biennale di Venezia, Arsenale

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