Exhibition review: BORDERS | FRAGMENTED IDENTITIES
Venice | July 12/13 – August 01, 2021
THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space | Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello

ITSLIQUID Group, in collaboration with Venice Events and ACIT Venice – Italian-German Cultural Association, is pleased to share the great success of FRAGMENTED IDENTITIES, second appointment of BORDERS – Venice International Art Fair, hosted in Venice, at THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space from July 12 to August 01, 2021, and at Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello from July 13 to August 01, 2021, with the participation of more than 95 artists from more than 25 different countries.

Click here to see the photo full reportage

BORDERS ART FAIR is a contemporary art fair that presents collective and solo projects by leading and emerging international artists; it is divided into three appointments: BODIES+CITIES SKIN, FRAGMENTED IDENTITIES and FUTURE LANDSCAPES. The 2021 edition represents a forum for direct exchange of ideas and contacts between collectors, artists, photographers, designers and art professionals. The art fair features paintings, sculptures, photography art, installations, video art and live performance.

The festival analyzes the idea of human and urban borders, how people live them and how they are modified in contemporary society. Human identities are both separated and related one to another into a big mosaic that completes the existence and the world culture. All identities can be considered as fragmented pieces of human beings ready to be unique and shareable in a universe with physical limits. In art, people are mixed together in a melting pot of sensation and fluctuating emotions. The challenge is to see all those fragmented identities, recognize and use them to see things through many different points of view and imagination in order to break all barriers and boundaries of everyday life and to create the relationship between man and space, including man-built and natural spaces.

At THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space, we opened the space on July 12 and received lots of artists in the morning ready to introduce us to their art and works. Maria Goretti Bello Serans talked us about her life through Australia, New York and Spain, and how all these trips influenced the creation of her stained-glass pieces – beautifully designed works with colors and symbols used to trigger the senses and to instill the environments with light. Sandra Salvat interpreted the ‘fragmented identity’ concept by painting a solitary scene of an architect sitting on a wheelchair (her husband) in a ruined place, an abandoned building that incorporates the sense of loss and fragmentation of the man who is unable to move. Also the Russian-born artist Liubov Bochkova, who studied and currently lives in Milan, in her big canvas reflected on the sense of disorientation and fragmentation of the self: she represented an illusionary urban landscape in which the expectations blend with reality, transforming the real city into one of the protagonist’s dreams.

Ms. etui and Irina Vytyaganets are both fascinated by the human psyche. Ms. etui was trained by many years of therapeutically oriented work, with people suffering from mental disorders, and now she translated this experience in her abstract paintings focused on the perception and polarities of the mind and consciousness. Irina Vytyaganet instead, originally from Russia but now living in Spain for more than 10 years, worked mostly on the idea of persons as a combination of layers of experiences from their background and surrounding context. It clearly appeared in her canvas, where each color outlines an individual, and all the edges are mixed together.

VaRu (Vanessa Rusci), from Italy, created her works starting from her international experience in the research about Artificial Intelligence and learning machines. The portraits she presented in the exhibition were made by AI algorithms that realize a sequence of microimages on a photo and superimposes them until the artist selected the sequence that she considered most harmonious. Andreea Moon Ciucico explained to us her choice of realizing mixed media artworks: through the use of many different media, she was able to fully express herself making art objects that with beads, interactive lights and synthetic grass, portrayed different characters from her world of aliens, monsters and masks inspired by the Venetian tradition, like in this case.

Jonathan Banks exhibited his strong photo reportage about Torture survivors: men and women persecuted for joining opposition political organizations, standing up for freedom, or fighting against gender-based violence. Their faces are obscured by a photo dear to them, to remark that their identities are now forever fragmented. The abstract artworks of Doyeon Kim, from South Korea, and Friedhard Meyer, from Germany, were explosions of colors bringing positive energies and vibrations. Doyeon Kim worked with warm colors on dripped canvases, with the aim of reaching the observer with happiness and powerful feelings. Friedhard Meyer seems to reproduce the rhythm of the world in his huge and hypnotic works through colored lines that blend the ones with the others.

At Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello the opening event started on July 13. This time, on the ground floor we had the pleasure to present the solo exhibition of Fant Wenger, a Swiss artist who worked on a project all about frequencies. Big canvases on the walls, mannequins with wires on their heads in the garden, and old-technologic stuff like a radio with headphones on a table and in many of his paintings, as well as telephone poles, parabolic antennas and satellites: they told us that no connection is accidental between this and other worlds. Even the installation of the young Italian artist Paolo Bianchi, on the first floor of the building, was focused on the links between people and machines. When the visitors stepped onto the real grass carpet, they appeared in the four ray tube televisions placed in front of them. The result was disorienting at a first sight: each one’s image was split, and as the image also the identity felt disjointed. How do people react to that? How will they deal with the technology? And how will every one of us deal with the world around us, nature and the others especially? It is what Paolo Parenti mainly analyzed in his metaphysical paintings, trying to discover the comfortable and uncomfortable feelings that lead to the construction of our own individuality.

Philip Wittmann, Ernestine Faux and Thomas Gonzalez all reflected on shapes in their works. Philip Wittmann, from Belgium, studied the impact that the association of ancient characters/signs has on our imagination since for him signs do represent a kind of match-makers between writing and abstraction. For Ernestine Faux, from Austria, geometric forms and colors, and how we perceive this fundamental relationship, have always been the core of her art. She was particularly interested in the liminal space where one color moves into another and in the perceptions’ shift when a color tonality is not clearly demarcated from the other but gradually blurred, and the viewer experienced a sensation of depth, motion and melting. Thomas Gonzalez’s drawings, instead, were agglomerates of lines, strange forms and vivid colors, that outline abstracts head shapes that seemed to reflect more the inner aspects of human heads, than the outer ones.

The photos of Robert Jaso represented injured bodies and displaced faces and fingers: his experimental and unique artistic technique fuses photographic imprints to paper, like strokes on a canvas, to drive the observer to an interrogative disorder that forces him/her to look in-depth. Even the bold and unconventional photos of Michael Greg are centered on bodies, but this time the women in his shots expressed sensuality through their movements and gazes. The powerful reportage of Mitchell Bahr, at the opposite, portrayed the homeless community of Austin, Texas – an unusual subject for pictures – and he was able to give to them a sort of sacrality as if they could be any one of us. John Bodkin presented his large abstract canvases, where the brilliant colors expressed his own emotions and suggestions: it was like he could find something that we can’t see. Otto Ganz displayed a series of 9 mixed media drawings depicting human-like monsters in creeping scenes, maybe they are just the distorted humankind in search of its own place in the world.

The FRAGMENTED IDENTITIES exhibition included also a rich video screening program, with talented artists such as Katarzhina Zakharova who talked to us about her video-art work about the need for an open dialogue in the modern world, in spite of cultural, social, and religious differences, and the idea of environmental and emotional noise that could generate modern humans. Finally, to end the great opening event, the live performance of Lilian Frei surprised everyone: she wanted the audience to reflect on how the current flood of information, above all during this pandemic period, infected all of us, and on what will be the consequences on everyone’s perception of self and others.

organized by ITSLIQUID Group
curator Luca Curci
in collaboration with ACIT Venice – Italian-German Cultural Association, Goethe Institut, Venice Events
project manager Giulia Tassi
project coordinators Veronica Piras, Giulia Spagnuolo
collaborators Camilla Serafini, Ilde Strobbe
graphic designer Marina Caracciolo
supported by Bam Bottega Antonio Manta | Concello De Ribeira | Crearts | Częstochowa University Of Technology | Dorimar Cotto Rodriguez | Enfasia | Haan | Salvat Sprungala

VENUES
THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space
Calle Larga San Marco, 374 – 30124 Venice, Italy
July 12 – August 01, 2021
09:30 AM – 05:30 PM | Monday – Friday

Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello
Cannaregio 4118 – 30121 Venice, Italy
July 13 – August 01, 2021
10:00 AM – 06:00 PM | Monday – Friday

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COVID-19 Protection Concept – ITSLIQUID Group

The health and safety of our staff and visitors are of predominant importance to ITSLIQUID Group. This Protection Concept governs how we intend to operate after Italy’s lockdown has ended, the rules that will be applied inside the exhibition spaces and how these will be implemented in practice. Read more.

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ABOUT US

ITSLIQUID is a web based information platform, founded in 2001 by Luca Curci, dedicated to world wide distribution of information about calls for entries, exhibitions and events at some of the world’s leading art galleries, museums and foundations selected. ITSLIQUID has already built a readership of more than 250.000 qualified subscribers. Among them architects, designers, artists, collectors, art critics, curators, dealers, and other personalities of the International art, architecture and design world. It provides advertising services, press office services for events and projects, articles and specials published on the website, media partnerships services.

During the last 20 years, ITSLIQUID Group has became a cultural hub between creatives, exhibition spaces and art lovers. Among our international partners, Art Now Fair, Art Vancouver, Design Tokyo, INDEX Qatar, INDEX Saudi, The Big 5 Construct Dubai, The Big 5 Construct Qatar, Photo LA Los Angeles and international magazines like Art Style. ITSLIQUID Group supports some of the most important no-profit organizations, like UNFCCC – United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, SSCS – Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, One Tree Planted, The Ocean CleanUp and Plastic Oceans, with the goal to increase public awareness about environmental issues. Click here to find out more.

ITSLIQUID GROUP includes a section dedicated to the organization of international art events, managing exhibitions of painting, photography, video art, installation and performance; it organizes solo and collective shows, art residencies and international contests. Its object is to use new technologies to globalize the language of art, to connect artists working in every part of the world.

ITSLIQUID Group manages a variety of art spaces all over the world; among them THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space in the heart of San Marco Square in Venice and different historical buildings, THE LINE Contemporary Art Space in the London city center and other different partners worldwide. Since its beginning, the group has organized more than 250 events all around the world, involving more than 5.000 artists, in more than 60 international venues in Italy, USA, Canada, UK, Spain, France, etc. Most of the last events have been realized in museums (CCCB – Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in Spain, NCCA – National Center for Contemporary Arts in Moscow, etc.), galleries and private foundations.

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OUR LOCATIONS

THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space, located in San Marco square, in the heart of Venice is available to host solo show and group exhibitions of the most talented emerging and established artists, designers and architects selected by our professional team among the numerous show participation requests.

Overlooking the unique San Marco square, THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space presents a rich program of exhibitions, talks, meetings, workshops and courses about art, architecture, design and fashion with architects, designers, artists, collectors, art critics, curators, dealers, and other personalities of the International art, architecture and design world. Being part of our program is an exciting opportunity to improve your network and get new inspirations.

THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space is a fascinating and prestigious venue where our professional team will be at your disposal to assist you, offering a unique exhibition experience, giving you the opportunity to display your artworks in Venice, one of the most suggestive cities in the art world, and broadening your artistic career and exhibition background.

Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello is one of the most known palaces of the Renaissance in Venice. It is an historical building dated back to the 16th century, and it has been owned by several noble venetian families, as demonstrated by the frescoed ceilings, the artistic stuccos and the fine furnitures that enrich its rooms. The Palace welcomes visitors with its beautiful private garden on the ground floor, and then it gathers the guests in its large first floor salons, in which past and present dialogue together. The restored Old Masters’ frescoes and the contemporary art masterpieces that are periodically shown in the exhibitions hosted here, make Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello the perfect location for the balance between old and new, between ancient environment and contemporary art, architecture and design.

Today the building is managed by ACIT Venice – the Italian-German Cultural Association – which is considered one of the most important intercultural associations in Europe. Thanks to the ACIT unceasing cultural activity, Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello has nowadays frequent collaborations with the Goethe Institute and with other local and international institutions, maintaining its ancient reputation. Because of these relations, it presents a huge program of memorable art exhibitions, conferences, congresses and concerts. Among the last institutional exhibitions, its participation in the 58th Venice Biennale with the Guatemala pavilion, the Dominican Republic pavilion and the Grenada pavilion. ITSLIQUID Group already had the pleasure to held some festivals and exhibitions in Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello, as MORPHOS Festival and FUTURE IDENTITIES Festival, both in 2014.