Featured Events in Venice in April 2024 (July Updated)

In the exhibition "Trumpett Yeung: Double Affiliated Hospitals, Hong Kong in Venice", Trevor Yeung explores the relationship between humans and aquatic ecosystems through his personal experience and keen observation. His works are inspired by his father's seafood restaurant, aquarium shop, Feng Shui decorations, and the few small fish he raised as a child. In Trevor Yeung's fishless aquarium landscape, desire, desire and power are fully revealed. His works use the concepts of absence and dependence to reflect on the social systems that construct our lives, and allude to the current climate crisis. The exhibition invites viewers to think about the emotional alienation and power relations that are unique to contemporary society.

Two immersive environments explore how images are constructed and memories are formed. Sze will take over the gallery with a new moving-image installation and present a suite of new paintings in surroundings that bring the of Sze’s New York studio to a nearby Venetian apartment, uncannily evoking a sense that the artist has just stepped away from her place of work. Sze’s latest video work transforms the gallery with an array of ever-changing projections suspended throughout the space. Carefully composed, the projections invite the viewer to visually navigate the work, forming a personal narrative by journeying from one image to the next. Interested in shattering the singularity of an image, and in dismantling any hierarchy of visual material, Sze’s installation questions the nature of looking and underscores how images are fundamental to memory. On view in the salon rooms of an apartment opposite the gallery, Sze creates a total environment with a series of paintings presented within a simulation of the space in which they were made. Again considering the perception of images, Sze’s enquiry is one of orientation: how does one locate oneself in a painting, and how can a painting’s effect be one of disorientation? Compositionally complex, the works incorporate both art historical strategies and digital techniques. These are paintings that reward the act of looking: the eye is always engaged in a process of putting the paintings together and taking them apart. A sense of discovery and indulging the pleasure of being lost rather than arriving at a destination has informed all of Sze’s oeuvre, and the experience of Venice as a place, its unique invitation to wander, is echoed within the exhibition. All of the works on view incorporate imagery – even if layered and hidden – that Sze has captured or created in the city. About the artist For the past thirty years, Sarah Sze has developed a singular visual language that challenges the static nature of art with a dynamic body of work spanning sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation. Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1969, Sze lives and works in New York. Sze represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. The artist has exhibited in museums worldwide, and her works are held in the permanent collections of prominent institutions, including Tate, UK; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; MUDAM, Luxembourg; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Sze has also created public works for the High Line in New York, the city’s Second Avenue Subway Station, and the new LaGuardia Airport. Current and recent solo exhibitions include: Sarah Sze: Timelapse, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2023) and a solo exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (until 18 August 2024). Sarah Sze: , a new work co-commissioned and co-produced by Artangel, UK, OGR Torino, Italy, and Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark, opens at ARoS on 18 May and continues until 20 October 2024.

A Comparative Dialogue Act, a project by the Luxembourgish artist Andrea Mancini and the multidisciplinary collective Every Island will represent the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. The project of the Luxembourg pavilion challenges the entrenched notion of individual artistic authorship by presenting a collection of works where artists relinquish ego in favour of a profound exploration of collective creativity through the medium of sound. A Comparative Dialogue Act uses sound as a tool to explore different perspectives on identity and artistic research. An unprecedented collaboration by four emerging artists from diverse backgrounds, it brings together Spanish musician and performer Bella Báguena, French transdisciplinary artist Célin Jiang, Ankara-born performance Artist Selin Davasse and Swedish artist Stina Fors to offer four intersecting approaches to the multiple ways identity, performance and sound can meet. Navigating the realms of gender identity, Báguena weaves sounds inspired by intuition, motivation and a tableau of influences from pop culture to personal experiences. Jiang adopts a decolonial cyberfeminist approach, intertwining arts, technologies and digital humanities to provoke contemplation of identity within the context of transcultural aesthetics. Repurposing literary and performative techniques, Davasse embodies various feminine beasts with distinct syntactical, vocal and gestural characteristics to intimately traverse a speculative ethics of hospitality. And finally, Fors uses choreography, performance, drumming and vocals to explore the depths of a ‘sounding body’, unleashing a powerful voice that alternates between lethal force and seductive allure and showcasing the complexities of the self. A Comparative Dialogue Act offers a rich composition of singular voices brought together in a blurred sound artwork that pushes the boundaries of contemporary art production. This exhibition investigates the transformative potential of sound as a medium for cultivating connection and understanding. It aims to transcend the limits set by singular perspectives of what sound can lend to the acts of interpreting, distorting and appropriating.