My Art Guides Venice Top 20

Top 20 Projects at the
60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

Christoph Büchel: Monte di Pietà
Apr 20 — Nov 24, 2024
Fondazione Prada
The project develops in an immersive environment, taking over Ca’ Corner della Regina it weaves together spatial, economic, and cultural narratives. It consists of a fictitious bankrupt pawnshop filled with diverse historical artifacts, contemporary artworks, and immersive installations.

Egypt: Drama 1882  – دراما ١٨٨٢
Apr 20 – Nov 24, 2024
Giardini
A natural storyteller, Wael Shawky takes historiographical and literary references as starting points for his concentrated narratives, in which he interweaves fable, fact and fiction. Tackling notions of national, religious and artistic identity through film, performance, painting and sculpture, based on extensive periods of research and enquiry, Shawky frames contemporary culture through the lens of historical tradition and vice versa.

Rebecca Ackroyd: Mirror Stage
Apr 20 – Nov 24, 2024
Fondaco Marcello
Ackroyd’s site-specific installation, influenced by Lacan’s mirror stage concept, explores the duality of mirrors as tools for self-insertion into the surrounding world and a symbol of the division between conscious and unconscious states.

Nebula
Apr 17 – Nov 24, 2024
Complesso dell’Ospedaletto
Nebula is a meditation upon the unstable borderline between seeing and understanding, between what we perceive and what we believe. The eight artists have been invited to create their works in close dialogue with the spaces to further deepen the narrative and spatial interaction between moving images and the architecture.

Benin: Everything Precious Is Fragile
Apr 20 — Nov 24, 2024
Arsenale
The first-ever Benin Pavilion at the Venice Biennale emanates from a deep exploration of traditions addressing the contemporary world’s fragility marked by ecological challenges, conflicts, and social inequalities. In collaboration with traditional rulers, the curatorial team shaped the pavilion’s concept, humbly embracing fragility and the ephemeral nature of existence.

Berlinde De Bruyckere: City of Refuge III
Apr 20 – Nov 24, 2024
Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore
The third in a series of exhibitions by the artist thematizing art as a place of refuge and shelter-a theme accentuated here by the spiritual intensity of the place. In the Sacristy, De Bruyckere’s post-apocalyptic tableau invites contemplation on nature’s renewal, resonating with the adjacent religious imagery.

Holy See: With My Eyes
Apr 20 – Nov 24, 2024
Giudecca Women’s Detention Home
The project is dedicated to the theme of human rights and people living on the margins of society, and seeks to draw the world’s attention to those people who are largely ignored while fostering a culture of encounter. On display in an unusual unprecedented venue, the pavilion illustrates the ability of inmates to welcome art to transform their lives.

Poland: Repeat after Me II
Apr 20 – Nov 24, 2024
Giardini
“Repeat after Me II” is a collective portrait of witnesses of the war in Ukraine. The protagonists of two films from 2022 and 2024 are civilian war refugees who speak of the war as recalled through the sounds of firearms, and then invite the audience to repeat after them. The artists use a karaoke format.

Guglielmo Castelli: Improving Songs for Anxious Children
Apr 15 — Jul 7, 2024
Istituzione Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa
The diverse site-specific works, conceived for Palazzetto Tito explore the delicate boundary between fragility and violence. Drawing inspiration from a children’s book, Castelli reflects on the universal experiences of first times, attempts, and the inexorable failures of childhood.

Argentina: Hope the Doors Collapse
Apr 20 — Nov 24, 2024
Arsenale
Curved woods and scaffolding tubes create a transmateriality, generate a mechanism in which each part is fundamental: there is solidarity between the elements and structures that make up that system, that community. Lamothe believes in a queer proposition of her work based on what these materials are saying, which are living bodies.

Italy: Due Qui/To Hear
Apr 20 – Nov 24, 2024
Arsenale
The exhibition interweaves forms of expression closely connected to national identity with manifestations and symbols that belong to many other cultural traditions, in search of the shared roots from which everything springs. The practice of listening that characterizes the pavilion inspires the introspection that is an aid to finding our selves, an essential condition for welcoming others.

Alex Katz: Claire, Grass and Water
Apr 17 – Sep 29, 2024
Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Island of San Giorgio
Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero and supported by Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, the exhibition presents one group of paintings based on the clothes of mid-century American fashion designer Claire McCardell accompanied by large-scale close-up depictions of inky oceans and grassy terrain in shades of green and yellow.

Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania
Mar 23 — Oct 13, 2024
Ocean Space
Two site-specific commissions by Indigenous practitioners highlighting ecological issues that impact the Pacific region: Latai Taumoepeau’s immersive sound installation using song to bring attention to deep sea mining; and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta’s space of learning, sharing and reconnecting to ancestral stories that draws on Māori concepts.

Kosovo: The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin
Apr 20 – Nov 24, 2024
Museo Storico Navale della Marina Militare
Investigating the joint deindustrialization of the economy and deregulation of the labor market, Kastrati encounters the (im)material forms of precarious employment in light industries in the aftermath of the 1999 Kosovo War, a period marked by a radical and abrupt transition from a socialist to free-market system.

South West Bank: Landworks, Collective Action and Sound
Apr 20 – Nov 24, 2024
Magazzino Gallery, Palazzo Polignac
Artists + Allies x Hebron and Dar Jacir look at aspects of land, agriculture and heritage in a rapidly ever-shifting topography. Sharing a voice centered on historical transmissions of memory and collectivity, the works embody the idea that home is rooted in many traditional practices.

Willem de Kooning and Italy
Apr 17 – Sept 15
Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia
The exhibition brings together around 75 works, making it the largest presentation of the artist ever organized in Italy. The influence of Italy on de Kooning’s work in America has never before been thoroughly researched. The lasting effect of the Italian creative periods is revealed in an outstanding selection of works.

Luxembourg: A comparative dialogue Act
Apr 20 – Nov 24, 2024
Arsenale
The definition of a collective artwork is expanded in the pavilion, hosting a number of guest artists who will perform. The artists will never physically cross paths during their respective residencies but will only share a collection of their sounds before the opening as a basis for each of their works.

Cosmic Garden
Apr 20 – Nov 24, 2024
Salone Verde – Art & Social Club
The exhibition features paintings and sculptures by Madhvi and Manu Parekh, and a series of new crafted works and sculptures created by Karishma Swali and the artisans at Chanakya School of Craft, a Mumbai-based non-profit institution committed to the emancipation of women through craft.

From Ukraine: Dare to Dream
Apr 20 – Aug 01, 2024
Palazzo Contarini Polignac
Departing from Ukrainian lands and its history of forced migration, the exhibition sounds subdued voices that become songs of resistance and resilience. It addresses Earth’s ecological disasters while imagining a new utopia, where mythology merges into an alternative garden of Eden.

Eva Jospin: Selva
Apr 10 — Nov 24, 2024
Museo Fortuny
Jospin’s research explores nature in all its semantic and visual articulations, captured both in its original state and in multiple iconographic and iconological interpretations presented over time. Using humble materials, she creates plastic impactful compositions of large dimensions.