Venice Biennale: Nordic Pavillion 2015
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The Giardini houses 30 permanent national pavilions.
Alongside the Central Pavilion, built in 1894 and later restructured and
extended several times, the Giardini are occupied by a further 29 pavilions
built at different periods by the various countries participating in the
Biennale. The Giardini are the property of the individual countries and are
managed by their ministries of culture.Countries not owning a pavilion in the Giardini are
exhibited in other venues across Venice. The number of countries represented is
still growing. In 2005, China was showing for the first time, followed by the
African Pavilion and Mexico (2007), the United Arab Emirates (2009), and India
(2011).The assignment of the permanent pavilions was largely
dictated by the international politics of the 1930s and the Cold War. There is
no single format to how each country manages their pavilion, established and
emerging countries represented at the biennial maintain and fund their
pavilions in different ways. While pavilions are usually government-funded,
private money plays an increasingly large role; in 2015, the pavilions of Iraq,
Ukraine and Syria were completely privately funded. The pavilion for Great
Britain is always managed by the British Council while the United States assigns
the responsibility to a public gallery chosen by the Department of State which,
since 1985, has been the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The countries at the
Arsenale that request a temporary exhibition space pay a hire fee per square
meter.
Nordic Pavillion 2015 ‘Rapture’ by Camille Norment
‘Rapture’,(curated by katya garcÃa-antón), unfolded during
the opening days of the international art exhibition as a set of performances
by musicians and vocalists at specific times; and a three-part publication
which explores the relationship between the human body and sound, through the
visual, the sonic and the architectural body. The oslo-based artist works with
the glass armonica – an 18th-century instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin
that creates ethereal music from the touch of fingers on glass and water – and
a chorus of 12 female voices. Weaving these elements together within the
pavilion itself, an immersive, multi-sensory space is created, which reflects
upon the history of sound, contemporary concepts of consonance and dissonance,
and the water, glass and light of Venice.
Norment comments, ‘I am interested in how music has long been used to facilitate both the forging and transgressing of cultural norms. Sound permeates all borders. Throughout history, fear has been associated with the paradoxical effects music has on the body and mind, and its power as a reward-giving de-centralizer of control. Recognized as capable of inducing states akin to sex and drugs, music is still seen by many in the world as an experience to be controlled – especially in relation to the female body – and yet it is also increasingly used as a tool for control under the justification of war’. ‘Rapture’ reflects on how the body can be defined and potentiated by sound, with the pavilion speaking of the tensions between harmony and dissonance. If, as the Norwegian experimental composer Arne Nordheim said, ‘music lives in the span between poetry and catastrophe’, the visitor to the Nordic pavilion walks into a sculptural and sonic installation torn between these two ideas, a space between a body in trauma and a body in rapture. Spanning performance, installation, drawing and sound, Norment’s work explores how the body is connected through sound with our environment, contemplating the power of dissonance and its ability to carve out a space for new, affirmative thinking.
References: www.e-flux.com
www.designboom.com
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