Tibet Pavilion

The Chiesa di Santa Marta houses once again the Tibet Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale.

Since the beginning, the Venice Biennial has given each country the chance to show their own and most representative artistic works, through the National Pavilion. The appeal for people’s dignity can be expressed also through an artistic project. A form of cultural redemption strongly wanted by many countries and for Tibet Pavilion – never country’s pavilion – even assumed a sort of socio-political valency.
As Angela Vettese notices in her article Art regains geography and identity: “Evidently, the Venice gymnasium is able to attract attention on one’s own emergencies. Participating means proving that you exist and resist. Even if “the culture is not edible”, it is part of those necessary things that build up identity…”.

Tibet Pavilion, arranged by Ruggero Maggi, aims to bring together the sensitivity of contemporary Western culture and Tibetan Sacred Art. A single theme declined in the manner of painting, sculpture, performance, video to realize a great event that emphasizes the deep spiritual sense of the Tibetan universe founded on the concepts of peace and non-violence and create a bridge sensitive to introduce the visitors to a greater knowledge of this country, whose spirit is embodied by the central figure of the Dalai Lama, point of light of Tibetan People.

The central theme of Tibet Pavilion 2015 is represented by the umbrella: emblem of protection, protest. Protest in 2014 was exercised by students in Hong Kong that have become spokespersons of social problems prevailing in China.
All the works are dedicated to Tibet, its spirituality, its symbols and to its march toward freedom, creating a large choral installation.
The umbrella-object becomes the container, the support of artistic interventions. The artists are invited to participate on the same basis, an umbrella with its fabric, with its own structure to create umbrella-poems, umbrella-sculptures that, as a great and unique ceremonial umbrella, one of the eight auspicious symbols present in the stupa (symbol of the nature of the mind), according to the great vehicle (Mahayana) of unlimited compassion and wisdom.