In a city where water is intruding every part of life, the boundaries between inside and outside are always blurred, life seems to take place in a decelerated state of „in between“.
The idea of this threshold, of a transformation at the point from one condition to another, also forms the basis of the current exhibition at Palazzo Fortuny, Venice: TRA. THE EDGE OF BECOMING.
Taking „tra“ literally – namely as „between“, „among“, „amidst“ –, as „ART“ in reverse as well as the „tra“ in „travel“, „transformation“ and „translation“, the curators have developed the group show on the approach of chaos in the moment of change – as the peak of energy when everything is still possible.
The result is a seemingly inexplicable exhibition that gathers artists like Lucio Fontana, Martina Abramonić, Richard Serra, Shirin Neshat, Auguste Rodin and James Turrell to present them next to sculptures from ancient Egypt and baroque paintings – in an environment of a fin de siècle palazzo.
The Gothic Palazzo Fortuny, once owned by the Pesaro family, was essentially shaped by Mariano Fortuny, a designer, painter, sculptor, architect and ingenieur, at the end of the 19th century for the use as an atelier of photography, stage design, textile-design and painting.
With its models for stage building, textile samples and original lamps it is still breathing Fortuny’s intellectual and artistic spirit at the turn of the 19th century.
Passing Giacometti’s „L’Objet Invisible’, standing under Martina Abramonić’s „Healed Inner Sky“ in the garden space, watching Shirin Neshat’s „Passage“, experiencing James Turrell’s framed emptiness „Red Shift 1995, 2007“, following the ways of the labyrinth in the attic, revealing Roman Opalka’s „Chronome“ and Günther Uecker’s „Schwebend Schweben“. Moving through the exhibition, through the changing atmospheres of the different rooms resembles a mind-blowing journey in which you are over and over thrown back on yourself.
Like a good journey, strolling through the rooms ranging from dark and enigmatic to wide and light, smelling the entering water washing around the stairs of the ground-floor and experiencing the artworks in-between walls that are art themselves due to their inscribed history, leaves you inspired and thinking – with the feeling that the experiences you have made have shifted something inside of you.
TRA. THE EDGE OF INFINITE BECOMING is going to end simultaneously with the Venice Biennale, on November 27th, 2011.
_Tabea Hamperl http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/palazzo-fortuny
