Vik Muniz: Lampedusa, 05 May 2015 — 22 Nov 2015
Exhibitions

Vik Muniz: Lampedusa

Arsenale, Castello 2737/F

Lampedusa is a floating installation to be launched during the 56th Venice Biennale. For this public artwork, Vik Muniz (b.1961, São Paulo) employs his traditional use of unlikely materials and scale manipulation to generate wonder from predictability. Contextualized in the naval environment of Venice, Lampedusa is an effigy of a paper boat built to scale of one of the town’s traditional vaporettos. Boats of all kinds are a common sight in Venice but a forty-five feet paper boat will certainly disrupt the viewers’ impression of being part of a postcard.

The artist creates meticulously crafted visual puns and games, delighting viewers while at the same time raising more thoughtful questions about the nature and mechanics of illusion and representation.
Muniz draws with unusual materials such as chocolate, ash, dirt, or bits of paper, creating trompe l’oeil renderings which he later photographs into his own, final art work. Muniz’s highly-constructed works thus are not only ‘legible’ on various levels but also call attention to their own legibility, conveying an image without concealing the language – or rather, the linguistics — of the image conveyed. As Muniz himself has said: “When people look at one of my pictures, I don’t want them to actually see something represented. I prefer for them to see how something gets to represent something else.”

Beyond technical virtuosity and irreverent humor, Muniz‘s distinctive practice explores and revels in the instability that exists between craft and mechanical reproduction, between high art and popular culture, between the ephemeral and the perdurable, between the coded and the recognizable.

Contacts & Details

ADDRESS
Arsenale, Castello 2737/F
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