Camille Henrot, Coupé/Décalé, 2010. Video, 3:54 min.

la Biennale di Venezia
55th International Art Exhibition
Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace)

Venice (Giardini and Arsenale), 1st June – 24th November 2013
Preview: 29th – 30th – 31st May

The 55th International Art Exhibition entitled Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace), curated by Massimiliano Gioni and organized by la Biennale di Venezia chaired by Paolo Baratta, is opening to the public from Saturday 1st June to Sunday 24th November 2013 at the Giardini and at the Arsenale. The preview will be held on 29th, 30th and 31st May. The award ceremony and the inauguration will take place on Saturday 1st June.

88 National Participations will be exhibiting in the historical Pavilions at the Giardini, at the Arsenale and in the city of Venice. Among these 10 countries are participating in the Exhibition for the first time: Angola, Bahamas, Kingdom of Bahrain, Ivory Coast, Republic of Kosovo, Kuwait, Maldives, Paraguay, Tuvalu and the Holy See. The novelty is the participation of the Holy See with an exhibition held at the Sale d’Armi, an area which is being restored by la Biennale and converted into permanent pavilions. This year the Italian Pavilion at the Arsenale – organized by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, with PaBAAC (General Direction for the Landscape, Fine Arts, Architecture and Contemporary Art) – is curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi.

Rudolf Steiner, Disegni alla lavagna, 1923. Gesso su carta nera, 102 x 153 x 3,8 cm

The Exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace) will be laid out in the Central Pavilion (Giardini) and in the Arsenale forming a single itinerary, with works spanning over the past century alongside several new commissions, including over 150 artists coming form 37 countries. The Exhibition draws inspiration from the model of a utopian dream by Marino Auriti who filed a design with the U.S. Patent office in 1955, depicting his Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace), an imaginary museum that was meant to house all worldly knowledge. Auriti planned the model of a 136-story building to be built in Washington, in that would stand 700 meters tall and take up over 16 blocks.

Paweł Althamer,  Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, October 2011 – January 2012

Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace) is a show about obsessions and about the transformative power of the imagination, the exhibition opens in the Central Pavilion with a presentation of Carl Gustav Jung’s Red Book. “In the vast halls of the Arsenale the exhibition is organized as a progression from natural to artificial forms, following the typical layout of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities. Just like Auriti’s Palace, these baroque proto-museums brought together man-made and natural wonders to construct visual compendia of the world through a science of elective affinities and magical sympathies. This associative process of knowledge, through its heterogeneous ordering of objects and images, draws interesting parallels between the wunderkammer and today’s culture of hyper-connectivity.” Through the many examples of artworks and figurative expressions on view, including films, photographs, videos, bestiaries, labyrinths, performances and installations, “The Encyclopedic Palace emerges as an elaborate but fragile construction, a mental architecture that is as fantastical as it is delirious. After all – says Gioni – the biennale model itself is based on the impossible desire to concentrate the infinite worlds of contemporary art in a single place: a task that now seems as dizzyingly absurd as Auriti’s dream.”

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