The Venice Biennale is 125 years old. And it celebrates with an exhibition on its history

La Biennale di Venezia, on the 125th anniversary of its founding, presents the exhibition The Restless Muses. La Biennale di Venezia Facing History, which will be held at the Central Pavilion of the Giardini della Biennale from Saturday, August 29 until Tuesday, December 8, 2020, created by theBiennale’s Historical Archives - ASAC.

The exhibition is curated for the first time by all the Directors of the six Art Sectors who have worked together to retrace, through the unique sources of the Biennale Archives and other national and international archives, those moments when La Biennale and the history of the twentieth century were intertwined in Venice.

Cecilia Alemani (Art), Alberto Barbera (Cinema), Marie Chouinard (Dance), Ivan Fedele (Music), Antonio Latella (Theater), and Hashim Sarkis (Architecture) drew not only on materials from the Biennale’s Historical Archives and theIstituto Luce-Cinecittà and Rai Teche, but also documents from the archives of the Galleria Nazionale Arte Moderna di Roma, Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Archivio Ugo Mulas, Aamod-Fondazione archivio audiovisivo del movimento operaio e democratico, Archivio Cameraphoto Arte Venezia, IVESER Istituto Veneziano per la Storia della Resistenza e della società contemporanea, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia Roma, Tate Modern London.

President of La Biennale Roberto Cicutto, in presenting the exhibition expressed his gratitude for “the generous support that the Directors, the staff of the Historical Archives and the staff of La Biennale as a whole have given to the construction (in parallel with the commitments related to Exhibitions and Festivals) of a project that strengthens even more La Biennale as a permanent laboratory for research in contemporary arts, an indispensable engine of investigation into the present and the future and a strategic tool of development, including economic development, for contemporary society.”

The directors have selected testimonies, rare films and works for this exhibition and constructed research paths that focus on those moments when the past of the Venetian institution intersected with the events of global history, manifesting and generating institutional fractures, political and ethical crises, but also new creative idioms.

The exhibition is articulated in the halls of the Central Pavilion in an itinerary through the six disciplines: from the Years of Fascism (1928-1945) to the Cold War and the New World Orders (1948-1964), from ’68 to the Biennales of Carlo Ripa di Meana (1974-78), from Postmodernism to the first Architecture Biennale to the 1990s and the beginning of globalization.

In a period of global instability that only in recent months has seen alternating ecological catastrophes, new pandemics and social revolutions, La Biennale di Venezia thus distinguishes itself not only as a place of production and reflection of the most innovative trends in the main contemporary art disciplines, but also confirms its role as a privileged witness of multiple changes, dramas and social crises that have followed one another from the end of the 19th century to the present, recording like a seismograph the tremors of history.

The exhibition design is by Formafantasma.

For all information you can visit the official website of the Biennale.

The Venice Biennale is 125 years old. And it celebrates with an exhibition on its history

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