Double Take

Coinciding with the preview of the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia A plus A Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Double Take curated by the 2024 participants of School for Curatorial Studies Venice, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year.

The term double take refers to the action of looking at something a second time that had escaped notice at first glance, in order to discern something unusual or new that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Double Take is an invitation to reconsider, to pay greater attention and care to the content hidden inside the works, to grasp their more implicit meanings. It’s an indication to see beyond the immediacy of mere visual content, to take a critical stance, to move along the boundaries of an increasingly hyperconnected and dematerialized reality. Our attention span has decreased. Deep scrolling, ad bombardment, censorship and online subliminal propaganda are progressively changing the times and modes of content consumption, which is ingested without assimilation. In the so-called age of hyper-information, information overload is generating a phenomenon of mass distraction.

This is what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’, referring to the matrix of control over the uncontrolled spread of information, a new form of exploitable capital. In the digital panopticon of the new millennium, founded more so on individuals’ self-monitoring online rather than explicit limitations, an increasingly dense network of control is being woven, the repercussions of which are also felt in art: subjected to the imperative of ‘political correctness’, artistic production suffers a loss of content. Artists self-censor or look for new forms and ways of artistic expression. As a result of these reflections, the gallery transforms into a hypothetical surveillance office, where the works challenge the limit of what is allowed to be said, moving between ambiguity and duplicity, in an attempt to circumvent imaginary control devices. On display are works that reflect on the impossibility of explicit communication through codes and visual references, requiring a second look to be understood, thus calling for a double take. Through an imagined act of transgression, the intention is to reclaim the independence of visual language and to indicate in art a possible form of resistance, a stance against today’s conformity.