So far, more than 30.000 paying visitors from Italy and abroad have visited the exhibition “‘Biennale 2011. Lo stato dell’arte. Friuli Venezia Giulia’, promoted by the Italian Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, which includes the CEI section “Free Port of Art”, organised by the CEI Secretariat and the "Trieste Contemporanea" Committee. The exhibition is located in a XIX century restored warehouse of the Old Harbour (Porto Vecchio) of Trieste, an exceptional location for the first time opened to the public.
With 33 artists covering the 18 CEI countries, the CEI section offers up-to-date information on the state-of-contemporary-art in the CEI area. In the selection of the artists, an active contribution was provided by the Italian Embassies and Italian Cultural Institutes in CEI countries as well as by the international network of experts and curators involved in the “CEI Venice Forum for contemporary art curators”, a CEI flagship event held in connection with the Venice Biennale since 2003.All the artists of the CEI section have an Italian experience in common: some have studied in Italy, some have worked here developing a remarkable career, some have even decided to live in Italy, many of them speak Italian and will compare their experience to that of other artists who have moved from Italy to other countries. (excerpt from the catalogue of the exhibition) “Overall, the exhibition constitutes an excellent sampling of the different positions the visual arts adopt with regard to the many deposits of history and social history that dynamically comprise contemporary multicultural and intercultural European life and which, to the East, are part of a recent past that is still strongly dialectic. Thus, we can see a work that documents the repression of the German community in Serbia (Dejan Atanackovic) and a strongly ‘political’ tribute to Piero Manzoni’s ‘Le Socle du Monde’ by Nemanja Cvijanovic; a computerised trace of the passages of people and cars in famous control points such as Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin (BridA / Jurij Pavlica, Sendi Mango, Tom Kerševan) and the ‘long duration’ of the problems of integration/identity of migrants that Timea Anita Oravecz personalises highly effectively in the interminable ‘polite’ and long-winded process of embroidery. Among the video works is one dedicated by Dalibor Martinis, a leading exponent of the Croatian art scene, to the Egyptian revolution last November, or that of HR-Stamenov, in which a train is swallowed up by a strange light on the railway lines of Bulgaria. Some splendid paintings are on show in Trieste: from the Albanian extraordinary and very paintings of Edi Hila to the intimate snapshots of reality on cold metal by the Montenegrin Jelena Tomasevic. These act as counterpoint to the high aesthetic quality of the minimalist London canvases by the Hungarian Tamas Jovanovics or the wild classical breadth of Živko Marušic. Several other paintings are on show and bear witness to the inexhaustible vitality of this artistic discipline (Ivan Kiuranov, Michał Powałka, Sasha Zelenkevich), while the symbolic world is something explored by Vana Uroševic and Radu Dragomirescu. Also on show are a number of photographic works: from the exceptional reportage that the by-then ‘Rome citizen’ Iljia šoškic made in 1975 nine hours after the murder of his friend, Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Idroscalo, to the disturbing images of children sniffing glue that launched the Ukrainian Sergey Bratkov in 2000 as the ‘enfant terrible’ of contemporary photography. But it is the tiny actions – at the limit of intimate history – that prevail in the exhibition. Art today reveals and comments in its own way the crucial contemporary shift of today’s society, which forgets to ask the individual to establish responsibility and focus and even less to seek to amplify genuine meanings. Thus Eugenio Percossi recounts – with a touch of enchantment – an ancient Czech tradition associated with the cuckoo’s call, which is not his, and Petra Feriancova denies her own authorship and realises a sort of post-production of a series of images taken by her father, and Stefano Romano draws from memory the rooms of other people in which he has been invited to sleep, and so slips us delicately in real life. For his part, Adam Vackar remains astonished – and we with him – of the difference in response he noted concerning a supermarket sampling of readers of poetry. Other works include studies for a future iconography of the ephemeral (Rok Bogataj), poetic transfigurations-redemptions of architectural eco-monsters (Driant Zeneli), an emphasis on our recent industrial past (Svetlana Ostapovici) or pure inventions of ordered spaces and refined illusions (Igor Eškinja). And more: easygoing and delicious actions of individual revolt (Pablo Chiereghin) and strongly critical inventive comments referred, for example, to the non-sense of much urban street furniture (Veronika Tzekova) and the many market deceits to which we give credence (Karin Pisarikova). And also crude (Aleksandrija Ajdukovic) or extraordinarily lyrical (Cristiano Carloni and Stefano Franceschetti) or visionary witnesses (Oleg Tcherny) of our lost co-participation and compassion.” Invited artists
Aleksandrija Ajdukovic SERBIA, Dejan Atanackovic SERBIA, Rok Bogataj SLOVENIA, Sergey Bratkov UKRAINE, BridA / Jurij Pavlica, Sendi Mango,Tom Kersevan SLOVENIA, Cristiano Carloni & Stefano Franceschetti ITALY (BOSNIA), Pablo Chiereghin ITALY (AUSTRIA), Nemanja Cvijanovic CROATIA, Radu Dragomirescu ROMANIA, Igor Eskinja CROATIA, Petra Feriancova SLOVAKIA, Edi Hila ALBANIA, Tamas Jovanovics HUNGARY, Ivan Kiuranov BULGARIA, Dalibor Martinis CROATIA, Timea Anita Oravecz HUNGARY, Svetlana Ostapovici MOLDOVA, Eugenio Percossi ITALY (CZECH REPUBLIC), Karin Pisarikova CZECH REPUBLIC, Michal Powalka POLAND, Stefano Romano ITALY (ALBANIA), Ilija Soskic MONTENEGRO, HR-Stamenov BULGARIA, Oleg Tchërny BELARUS, Jelena Tomasević MONTENEGRO, Veronika Tzekova BULGARIA, Vana Urosevic MACEDONIA, Adam Vackar CZECH REPUBLIC,
Sasha Zelenkevich BELARUS, Driant Zeneli ALBANIA. Venue
Warehouse 26 - Old Harbour of Trieste (Magazzino 26 - Porto Vecchio di Trieste) For more information: fabro@cei-es.org // tscont@tin.it // www.biennaletrieste.it
Photos by Fabrizio Giraldi