Exhibition review: BORDERS | FUTURE LANDSCAPES
Venice | August 30/31 – September 19, 2021
THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space | Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello

ITSLIQUID Group, in collaboration with Venice Events and ACIT Venice – Italian-German Cultural Association, is proud to announce the great success of FUTURE LANDSCAPES, third appointment of BORDERS – Venice International Art Fair, hosted in Venice, at THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space from August 30 to September 19, 2021, and at Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello from August 31 to September 19, 2021, with the participation of more than 100 artists from more than 30 different countries.

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The festival focuses on the concept of “borders”, between the soul and the body, the human being and the city, the city and the ground; it analyzes the idea of human and urban borders, how people live them and how they are modified in contemporary society. Every human being lives in a world in which the limits and borders shape its attitudes and behaviors, limiting freedom and creating a sense of alienation. The human being reacts by breaking the limits and finding a new way of life. We imagine a world of “liquid cities”, where differences create new possibilities instead of being social barriers.

FUTURE LANDSCAPES analyzes how human creativity and imagination can shape our landscapes. Cities are leading to a new aesthetic change that aims to rebalance the combination of humans and nature to restore natural systems and ecological integrity and deliver beautiful, engaging and remarkable landscape experiences. Today we face many challenges that require a big effort in mixing new frontiers to create new extraordinary places and spaces. We aim to generate future landscapes without mental and physical borders, in which the human being is completely free.

The opening event at THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space started on August 30 with a long series of video interviews in which Director Luca Curci talked with some of our selected artists about their creations. The young Italian artist Alice Pagnossin uses fashion brands to customize her single-subjected paintings, made by digital prints and a touch of acrylic paints. She wants to displace the brands giving them a new meaning through common objects. Her visual language is very simple and direct, allowing anyone to understand its essence and making the works accessible to a wide audience. Isha Will came from Jamaica to tell us about her main women’s inspirations in life. They are the subjects of all her charcoal drawings, and their strength and freedom were really visible in her works and words too. Among the powerful women that we had in this exhibition, Consuelo Palma, a Chilean-born artist currently living in Croatia, explained to us the connection with her Latin-American origins through her sculptures. The shapes and colors of her works are minimalistic, intimate and spiritual and, at the same time, somehow ‘universal’, because they helped her to create an empathy with other people about the inner world and the topic of being an expatriate.

Gloria Marquez and Ellen Grael as well delighted our visitors with their artworks and stories; they both started from real landscapes and topics, to arrive at the imagination. Gloria Marquez’s style is the Magic Realism heritage she got from her Colombian roots, which made her fresco paintings be like dreamlike atmospheres. The series “The waters of Venice” presented by Ellen Grael, instead, was strongly linked to the city of Venice and the water element. The Dutch artist was affected in 2018 by the signs of the floods around the city and created these pastels on paper collection, and only after the high tide of 2019 she realized that her project could give special emphasis to environmental issues through art. Anna Tozzi worked above all on the making of her paintings: her main interests are the materials and techniques she uses, in particular, the mix of acrylic and PVA glue that is poured on top of the canvas and spread with the brush or the spatula for creating lines and boundaries. The paintings took on their ultimate shape and colors only when they dried, forming a more distinct “sign” as if to convey the imprint of the artist’s emotional state.

The “Girl with turban” photo of Nicola Ducati, representing a young girl from the Kyrgyz minority of the Pamir region, in Afghanistan, welcomed people on the wall at the entrance of the venue. The girl’s face stares at the visitors with her deep gaze and expression, remembering us that borders are something very subtle, especially in this historical moment. Even the border with the Future can be very tiny. Beste Ozcan and Valerio Sperati, a creative duo of artists and scientists, showed it to us through their diorama project that reproduces a utopian temple on the planet Mars. When life conditions will be no more sustainable, there will be the need for an alternative world. This way, they want to raise awareness about collective consciousness and the environment, and they imagine a new strong connection with Mother Nature on the other planets. Casa Jaguar Studio, a Spanish-based multidisciplinary art collective composed of Latin-American artists in diaspora, presented us their celebration of the history, culture and diversity of Latin America through contemporary art, audiovisual technology and pre-Columbian art. The link with Nature is ubiquitous in their works, from the raw burlap used as canvases, to the rural landscapes represented on them. The paintings of Eric Hubbes connected the human being with the infinite Universe: there were figures and faces made by lots of small fractals, hidden on the surface, that led to a deeper meaning: we are all linked to the core of the universe and all connected to each other. John Gorman focused his attention on the problem of the limits or boundaries between spaces by exploring ancient themes from all mythologies and the Bible. His powerful drawings showed liminal creatures, with veiled faces, unfinished bodies, often of indeterminate sex, and analyzes themes such as the difficult passage from youth to maturity, and the solitude that everyone has to face, with a delicate and intimate pencil stroke.

At Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello we welcomed both visitors and artists on August 31 from early morning to the evening. The audience was amazed by the huge paintings of Karine Prette and of the Manila Wall Art duo (Aida Vila and Manu Martin). The ones of Karine Prette were abstracts, almost monochromatic, and represented the dialogue of the artist with the canvas, that guided her to express herself with all kinds of palettes, spatulas and brushes. The results are paintings very expressive, in a continuous balance between rigor and freedom of gesture. The works of Manila Wall Art, instead, are figurative ones and belong to the “In Pandemic” series, related to the Covid situation we all faced. The five pieces narrated a story in different scenes, and each of them is named in relation to a song and is exhibited together with a QR code that links to a video of it, to create an immersive experience to wonder about the topic and reflect on the potential learnings. The art manufacture of Joel Douek, from the UK but currently living in Los Angeles, was something really interesting to discover for us. He used natural woods together with metals; they appear to contrast starkly, but actually, they don’t. The metal is natural as the wood; its tendency to rust is an expression of its own vulnerability as well as the way it blooms into colors as rich as a flower. They are the ever-present forces of entropy, to which he often applied gold as a symbol of enduring permanence in all this entropic chaos, to illuminate.

Michaela Ortner-Moosbrugger and SAPO-Grég Jomain as well focused their artistic production on the theme of Nature. For Michaela Ortner-Moosbrugger, plants are our great grandparents and forests are our living ancient families – their shapes look like human bodies and gestures – so she invites us to connect with the life of the woods to find our inner roots and accept life’s circumstances. For SAPO-Grég Jomain, everything that surrounds him is a source of inspiration, and above all nature and travels. He started his creations with an abstract background and then he put figurative elements that connect each element to the others, like in the real world.

The “Threat of touch” diptych of Antanas Zabielavicius took a whole wall at palazzo Albrizzi-Capello. Two hands hidden behind a kind of separated and remote space try to have contact with our world; the Lithuanian artists worked on the concept of isolation and fear of touching each other that we all are used to feel in this historical moment, and highlighted the importance of tactile sensations for the humankind. Even for the Italian Rachele Amadori art is a way to solve problems and create new ‘worlds’. She began to paint for the need to express herself in a different way than the one showed by the society, and so she started a psycho-anthropological path of re-elaboration of a long series of stimuli, that now she is able to emotionally fix on the canvas with lines and colors. Tasha Wolff, with her tridimensional artworks, demonstrated that she wanted to get out from a certain art tradition – in particular, the one of the Soviet realism – and released all her energies and force in her intensive pieces. Bianca Boros as well mixed her feelings and emotions to the context around her, and this way she created a series to capture Venice and its relation with the water using fluid shapes and techniques in order to better describe the city’s landscapes.

The whole event was delighted by a video screening projection and a live performances program. “The List” by Chelidon Frame, an experimental electronic musician from Milan, was a site-specific multichannel sound sculpture that broadcasted an algorithmic composition made from the numbers included in UNITED Against Refugee Deaths’ List of Deaths. The continuous and repetitive sound wanted to point out the way in which nowadays the same topic repeats over and over again, becoming nothing more than the detail of an ever-changing present. David Carvill surprised the audience with a two-people show inside a big inflatable space that explored the relationship between restrictions and connections. Claudia Hilda Rodriguez Pozo presented “Quarks”, a choreography dialogue on social isolation, intimacy, and the reinvention of real and imaginary spaces. The term ‘quarks’ in Physics, in fact, names an elementary particle whose existence is never isolated.

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 Silvia Baldereschi, Camilla Morandin, Ilde Strobbe
graphic designer Marina Caracciolo
supported by B.B. Art | Children Have Dreams Too, Einstein Electrical Corporation | Enfasia | Fondskwadraat | Haan 

VENUES
THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space
Calle Larga San Marco, 374 – 30124 Venice, Italy
August 30 – September 19, 2021
09:30 AM – 05:30 PM | Monday – Friday

Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello
Cannaregio 4118 – 30121 Venice, Italy
August 31 – September 19, 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.

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