The odd tag

link: FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange – Venice Biennale

Artist: Vesa-Pekka Rannikko
Curator: Laura Köönikkä

txt: Vesa-Pekka Rannikko Represents Finland at the 2011 Venice Biennale

My choice was influenced by the versatility and re-inventiveness of the artist as well as his ability to take charge of architectonic space. Rannikko’s international fame will also enhance Finland’s visibility at the multinational Biennale”, says exhibition curator Laura Köönikkä.

Amongst Vesa-Pekka Rannikko’s most recognisable works are sculptures that reproduce objects in three dimensions, mimicking paintings. Rannikko has also created several location-specific works where the usual boundaries between viewer, work of art and space are blurred. His works challenge the limits of viewing and experience: an image becomes a material object while the space of the work becomes an image. Viewers feel impelled to question the veracity of many of the works, due to the juxtaposition of their theme and the way they are realised.

For Rannikko, one starting point for the exhibition at the Venice Biennale is the Aalto Pavilion in Venice. Ceated by Alvar Aalto, it was originally meant to be a temporary structure. Now Rannikko is keen to explore its role and character as a stage for what is Finnish.

video: Finland Pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai: 2010

links:
www.labiennale.at
Venice Biennale 2011 Austria on Facebook

txt: Commissioner’s Statement

In his Venice project, Markus Schinwald examines the Austrian Pavilion built 1934 by Josef Hoffmann, an architectural landmark in and around the Giardini district.

Markus Schinwald, who scored success with complex installations he realized mainly in museums and art institutions outside Austria, as for example in Zurich, Frankfurt, Brussels, and Budapest, has a comprehensive oeuvre to show for, with his works combining performative with painterly, sculptural, filmic and architectural elements.
With subtlety and finesse, Schinwald explores dispositifs of control, disciplining, and self-improvement, which inscribe themselves in the human body, shaping and pervading it to re-emerge on the body surface as psychologically charged inner worlds, visible and palpable.

This approach also makes itself felt in his Biennale contribution: the viewer turns into a performer, the pavilion into a closed stage. By dissecting the interior space along vertical axes, a new mode of perception emerges which makes the human body its structural frame of reference: “Although these constructional components are of course architectural elements, it suggested itself to use psychoanalytical terms for a concise definition; after all, the space created is dissociative rather than
than actually fragmented: claustrophobic above and nothing below. Or, if you will, the mind in neurosis, the crotch in psychosis. However, unlike in the spatial sculptures of Bruce Nauman or Robert Morris, the space intervention is not an autonomous act here, but also a kind of stage system or environment for the display of different works. It is, for one thing, an attempt to establish various different elements and, at the same time, to avoid explicit categorizations through contrastive positioning”, Markus Schinwald explains.

video: Approaching Venice – Jörg Heiser