GRENADA Biennale Arte 2017
Jason deCaires Taylor Khaled Hafez Rashid Al Khalifa Asher Mains Alexandre Murucci Mahmoud Obaidi Milton Williams Zena Assi
Location of Grenada National Pavilion 417 Zattere, Dorsoduro Venezia
Pure Grenada the Spice of the Caribbean
Grenada National Pavilion Commissioner, Ministry of Culture, Dr. Susan Mains Curator, Omar Donia Artists: Zena Assi Jason deCaires Taylor Khaled Hafez Rashid Al Khalifa Asher Mains Alexandre Murucci Mamhoud Obaidi Milton Williams
Advisory Board Amel Makkawi Dr. Luca Berta Hala Khayat Monica Mascaros Natalya Andakulova Sandra Louison
The Bridge Since the dawn of time, humans longed to belong to some sort of idea that they considered shaping their own identity. While in conversation with artists discussing the human race - the questions of “what” not “who” we are represents a center point of our dialogues. We are a small group of people in an island that is part of a large archipelago in the Caribbean Sea, in a continent with over half a billion people. We are a tiny particle of sand in an endless sandy beach, ever changing with the vagaries of man and the environment. A Conversation In Nature and Preservation Installations developed with elements from natural environments, Asher Mains’ work is a mix between organic elements that the artist collects from the his doorstep - the Atlantic ocean - formed in a multi layered color structures to produce a sense of the life and death of the reef. Rashid Al Khalifa’s installation is made of industrial steel entangled and shaped in a concave form, utilizing subtle organic colors that ease the viewer to the simplicity of natural beauty. Jason deCaires Taylor, known for creating life under water, develops a projection inviting us to be immersed in his imaginary underwater world. Alexandre Murruci summarizes the conversation in his installation through the view of the word “truth” in different languages. This quad-dialogue, though geographically thousands of miles apart is a statement of the commonalities between all of us without looking to ethnic background, color or religion. The Conversation In War and Conflict The “Spring” came and passed. It existed, ceased to exist and nations survived, it proved to be a diabolic plan to control through division. What we believe today that had happened is a delusion that was passed to us through the controlling-of-mind bodies/organizations. Khaled Hafez explores this idea in video. A discussion between the simple act of human sustenance and the provision for it becomes that of a Mac-Canned food culture. Conflict often removes traditional food sources from the people. Milton Williams builds an environment from pop-cultures utilizing materials that are found in every street shop. His act of collection includes the participation of others throughout the world, thus creating a sanctuary for these artifacts and memories. “The Bridge” is based on Grenada’s artists and others. The artists represent different backgrounds, artistic practices and methodologies forged into curatorial conversations under one roof creating a global dialogue that becomes the bridge between civilizations. Omar Donia, Curator
Omar moved from corporate life as a Private Banker to art 12 years ago where he founded a non-for-profit art publication called Contemporary Practices Art Journal (www.contemporarypractices.net) that acts as a platform to document the art movement from the region of Origin, i.e Middle East, starting 5 years ago he curated several shows is Dubai. in 2015 he was the commissioner of the first Pan-Arab project to get accepted as an Official Collateral event in Venice Biennale, where he added international artists to the mix to come up with one of the most successful shows in that edition. Later in 2015 he brought the project to Trio Bienal in Rio De Janeiro. Aside of the previous, he works as an Art advisor to the World Food Program (WFP) of the United Nations where he successfully organized two charity art auctions; both of them were administrated by the largest auction house in the world, Christies.
“Venice is the pinnacle of any person’s career, be it an artist, curator or a commissioner; to me I want to show a strong curatorial practice through a vision of bringing inter-linked projects together to form a one cohort body of work. What will come afterwards is a result of the hard work which I hope is success and recognition”--Donia Susan Mains from Grenada has many years of experience as an artist, curator, writer and arts activist. She was the curator for Grenada's first appearance as a National Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia in 2015. The world-wide network of artists developing from these international experiences has strengthened Grenada's artists, giving more opportunities for exhibition. Art School Greenz emerged in 2015 as the only art school in Grenada due to the efforts of Susan and Asher Mains. Art School Greenz has an alternative model and is focused on developing the pool of contemporary artists in Grenada.
:ZENA ASSI B. 1974 lives and works Beruit/ London website www. zenaassi.com MY CITY-WALL reflects the relations and conflicts between the refugees/migrants and the cities they are aiming to get to. Through Zena’s work, for more than a decade now, she have been trying to visually translate the city life of our modern society. Zena believes that the structures we build, the architecture language we adopt, and the borders we draw, all witnesses of our ideologies in one moment in time. They are the dialect with which history uses to write itself.. And now, unfortunately, we are witnessing the rise of walls again? The first series of 5 paintings titles are taken from the song ‘London Bridge is falling down’. It tackles the idea that the behavior we are now adopting towards each other is more like vertical inaccessible Towers, instead of horizontal connecting bridges. The video /movie ‘CHRONICLES OF A MIGRANT, is a short experimental animation of 3minutes, narrating the story of a migrant. The visuals are her own series of paintings on canvas, they are put in motion by her friend and colleague, Amandine Brenas, who is a French artist/animator living in Lebanon. The idea is to describe the daunting trip that any migrant/refugee takes to survive. The movie tells the story of a migrant’s awakening to the horrors of war and death in his home country; obliged to flee on a dinghy, he faces the dangers of the ‘passers’ and the sea. He is trapped in turmoil, where countries re-draw their borders, erect walls, demolish bridges and enforce segregation… all in the name of containing traumatized masses on the move. These are the chronicles of his passage, surmounting one conflict after the other… in a desperate attempt to reach the shore, bury his dead and finally build a new home.
Zena Assi Wood and Clay Will Wash Away Photo Courtesy the Artist
Zena Assi Iron and Steel Will Bend And Bow Photo Courtesy the Artist
JASON DE CAIRES TAYLOR b. 1974 website www.underwatersculpture.com My underwater sculpture installations aim to offer viewers mysterious, ephemeral encounters and fleeting glimmers of another world where art develops from the effects of nature on the efforts of man. The site-specific, works are designed on a practical level as a form of marine conservation and artificial reef, whilst subject to systems of growth and destruction, the works connect to contemporary debates of kinetics and time-based sculpture, to the impact of site and environment, and to debates centered on self-generative artworks. I try to address social and environmental concerns, ushering into the mainstream issues relating to marine ecosystem losses and the current humanitarian crises. Placed within the Anthropocene epoch the works are an attempt to re-contextualize our relationship to the planet with an ultimate aim of changing our understanding of the submerged world and highlighting our inherent fragility within it cycles. The works are constructed using pH neutral materials to instigate natural growth, create new habitats and attract visitors away from natural fragile marine areas. The subsequent surface changes are intended to explore the aesthetics of metamorphosis decay and rebirth.
Jason de Caires Taylor detail Vicissitudes Photo Courtesy the Artist
Jason de Caires Taylor Vicissitudes Photo Courtesy the Artist
KHALED HAFEZ b. 1964 lives and works France/Egypt website www.khaledhafez.net Khaled Hafez is born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963 where he currently lives and works. He studied medicine and followed the evening classes of the Cairo School of Fine Arts (Faculty of Fine Arts) in the eighties. After attaining a medical degree in 1987 and M.Sc. as a medical specialist in 1992, he gave up medical practices in the early nineties for a career in the arts. He later obtained an MFA in new media and digital arts from Transart Institute (New York, USA) and Danube University Krems (Austria).
As a practicing studio artist, my practice spans the mediums of Painting, video/film, photography, installation and interdisciplinary art approaches. My core research focus is the exploration of the complex nature of identity; for my painting practice, the identity I scrutinize is a one that is a composite of African, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Arab, Islamic, with ancient Egyptian and Judeo-Christian traces. In my current video, photography and other mixed media works, I am interested in movement, an element that was indispensable in ancient Egyptian painting, where all painted elements were in motion, as opposed to Egyptian sculpture that always caught the protagonists in a “pose�, nearly always static. I use a lot of symbols and codes from all ancient cultures, and from the universal heritage of the world. In a contemporary culture dominated by a century of film and animation, the similarity between the ancient and the current contemporary forms of the kinetic is intriguing to me, and a focal aspect of my research. In my painting, I use imagery of body perfection and treat them to reflect metamorphosis and the movement from one state to another; for the male figures I appropriate images of body builders, and for the female figures I use images extracted from advertising and from cheesy commercial tabloids. The images are enlarged in archival color and black and white photocopies and silk-screen prints. The choice of the image reflects always the perfection of body proportions, a criteria used in all Mediterranean mythology, and a trait that does not represent a significant proportion of ANY majority of any population living today. This approach provides for my desire to mingle fiction with reality. I link imagery of the ancient iconography with deja-vu contemporary advertising elements; the icons/images are manipulated to insinuate metamorphosis. I believe that we are at a point in history where there is cultural recycling: visual, conceptual, beliefs among other aspects. Throughout the diversity of the mediums I use, I explore this cultural recycling.
Khaled Hafez On Signs & Silence 90 minute video Photo Courtesy the Artist
RASHID AL KHALIFA b. 1952 lives and works Bahrain website www.rashidalkhalifa.me Born and bred in Bahrain, artist Rashid Al Khalifa moved to England in 1972 after being encouraged by the late Amir of Bahrain, by Shaikh Isa Al Khalifa. He studied Art and Design at Brighton and Hastings Art College. Architecture of Forms This collection of artwork for the Grenada Pavilion’s participation at the 57. La Biennale di Venezia is architecture of forms that emphasize geometry – lines, circles, cubes and patterns – compositional building blocks for each artwork and the vocabulary I use to affect it. I conceptualise my paintings as objects, using the physical structure of the service as a compositional tool to integrate with the surrounding environment. I purposely chose the three works from the “Shape of Time” series, alongside with my latest work, “Untitled,” 2017, to illustrate the architectural aspect of my vision and the way my hybrid paintings begin with a three-dimensional concept. I start with geometry to define the three-dimensional space around and within a given shape. The structure and colour are placed in dialogue with one another highlighted by ambient light and shadow effects; colour moves, they advance and recede, giving rise to contrasts, tone, density and direction, a perfect platform to demonstrate the power of light in art. Together this amalgamation explores how painting can grant an image the architectural thought process that vibrates with gentle energy and stillness.
Rashid Al Khalifa Untitled Photo Courtesy of Artist
Photo Courtesy Kenroy George
ASHER MAINS B. 1984 Lives and Works in Grenada, www.ashermains.com BA Calvin College, MFA Transart Institute SEA LUNGS We are inextricable from the sea. In an island environment, not only does it sustain us economically but also physiologically. This close relation is at the heart of “Sea Lungs”; imagining that the sea fans that wash up on the beach and resemble our own cardiovascular and pulmonary systems are in fact our own. A reminder that our own life force can be found in the sea. In an environment where art materials are less accessible, I focused on using materials that could be found locally. The sea fans are an organism of the reef that wash up on the beach when they die and detach from the reef. The material that makes up the pieces are sail cloth, typically used for the spinnaker, referencing our vital sailing community in the work. I use local faces and bodies in the work, again – contextualizing the materiality and visual references in our very specific place. Ultimately the work references an issue that exists globally but particularly in the Caribbean, our reefs are dying at a staggering rate. The Caribbean is home to nearly 10% of the world’s reefs yet some estimates report that 80% of the reefs have died in the last few decades. This work is about establishing our relationship with the sea and reefs as vital and then anthropomorphizing the reef responding to its own demise. Without necessarily focusing on cause or solutions, “Sea Lungs” is taking a moment to empathize not only with the reef but our societies as we recognize this reality. “Sea Lungs” is an immersive installation allowing the viewer to walk in and amongst the anthropomorphized reef and to perhaps bridge the process of grief and empathy as we are not separate from the fate of our reefs.
Asher Mains, Sea Lungs Photo Courtesy the Artist
ALEXANDRE MURUCCI Title – “Truth” (from Google Series), 2016 b. 1965 Lives and works Brazil In a world of recurring conflicts, more than ever, the version of the facts stands as one of the most dangerous weapons of action among actors involved in the construction of history. The concept of “Post-Truth” became the main figure of rhetoric, influencing all layers of narrative support, both on the side of winners and losers. Even with so much access to communication, man finds himself faced with a diffuse truth, diluted in false news, which runs the world at digital speed, run by large corporations, states and ideological groups, and we are never sure that our questions are properly translated, because, in the impossibility of an unsophismaly truth, we satisfy ourselves with the urgency of easy answers! And what we see, many times, nothing more are, than the shadows of the Platonian cave. From this reflection point, the work presents an installation – “Truth” (from Google Series), a sculpture built with a seesaw and lunettes at its ends sides, alluding the volatility of versions and visions of the truth. This set is inserted in a panorama constructed with a horizon line formed by word “Truth”, translated by 104 languages of Google Translator, the most onipresent tool of tools, as an analogy of power holding, because these are the languages “elected” by the multinational giant, relativizing our understanding of what the truth is. And since the verb, is our most tangible relation with the truth, the work also presents the word “Truth” and all its translations, on printed posters, which will be donated to the public. In this sense, the translation of this so determinant word, will be placed as a symbol of the difficulty in reaching the common denominators to diminish or solve our contemporary dilemmas, in a planet in eternal crisis, but also as a bridge to increase this possibility.
Alexandre Murucci Truth from Google 2016 photo courtesy of artist
MAHMOUD OBAIDI b. 1966 lives and works Canada website www.obaidiart.com
Mahmoud Obaidi is an Iraqi-Canadian artist whose work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. After leaving Iraq in 1991, he obtained his Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Guelph in Canada, and completed diplomas in new media and film from Toronto and Los Angeles, respectively. His work has been exhibited extensively, including at Qatar Museums Gallery, Doha; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Saatchi Gallery, London; the National Museum of Bahrain; the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; the National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman; Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Texas; and the MusÊe d’Art Contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec, among others. His work is part of the permanent collection of a number of significant museums, foundations, and private collections.
Mahmoud Obaidi Dress Code Photo Courtesy the Artist
MILTON WILLIAMS b. 1951 Grenada lives and works in the world My art practice is one of collection. I am inspired by the seemingly mundane things critical to our being and existence, and by the universal need to be free. Making art is one active way of liberating my creative mind and imaginings. It is a path for me to present my experiences and observations in a form that invite critical insight from outside; insight that contributes to my own growth. The gathering, creating and completion of each work, frees me a little more, to see new possibilities in art, as I travel around our world. The installation of my collection “Sustenance� emerged from the recognition of the creative work done by combined manufacturers, marketers and artists around the world, to attract their audience. The variety of their lure, informed by the language, culture and colour choices caught my eye. The display of the sardine tin lids also makes a statement as to the globalization of food. With the current political climate of world powers, will protectionism and isolationism halt the back and forth of goods, in a way that the oceans never will. The many collaborators in the physical collection and gifting of the lids including co-workers, friends, and family, make a social statement of our world-wide interaction, despite the dismal pronouncements and threats of tariffs of the current times. It is a statement of resistance. Of note is the placement of each piece of this work, together, allowing continuous movement as if endlessly connecting oceans.
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Milton Williams Sustenance Photo Courtesy the Artist
Sponsors Grenada Ministry of Tourism Grenada Tourism Authority – “Pure Grenada, Spice of the Caribbean” Art Bahrain Laluna Resort Grenada ACT art and design – Grenada Art and Soul Gallery – Grenada Century 21 – Grenada Grenada Arts Council Insurance Consultants Ltd. – Grenada Contemporary Practices Art Journal – Canada Contemporary Practices Consultancy – Canada Egypt Oil and Gas – Egypt Venice Art Factory Jenni Francis -- Grenada Elizabeth Greuner --Grenada Art Sawa -- Dubai Contemporary Art Platform -- Dubai
website www.grenadavenice.org facebook Grenadaat57thBiennalediVenezia instagram GrenadaNationalPavilionVenezia
Jason de Caires Taylor Vicissitudes Photo Courtesy of Artist
Copyright on all images belong to the artists. No use without permission.
Asher Mains Sea Lungs