Installation revealed for Georgian pavilion at 2019 Venice Biennale
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A new installation by contemporary artist Anna K.E., bringing together motifs from the creative’s previous work, has been unveiled as the winning project for the Georgian representation at next year’s Venice Art Biennale.
Picked out of submissions by a team of Georgian and foreign curators and art professionals, REARMIRRORVIEW Simulation is Simulation, is Simulation, is Simulation… will be displayed at the next high-profile art event.
The “large-scale architectural environment” has been devised by the young artist, curated by Margot Norton of the New Museum in New York, and will be presented in collaboration with New York’s Simone Subal Gallery and Project ArtBeat.
The work is comprised of a steel framework and visual representation of digital pixels. Image: Russell Kirk.
The project has been picked out of ten submissions to the national competition held by the Creative Georgia state agency, with the contest open through September and October.
Dubbed the “most ambitious [work] to date” by the artist, the 2019 installation is seen as a convergence of major motifs in her work to date.
In keeping with the concept of the Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times, K.E. here questions the structures of language and translation, methods by which information and meaning are conveyed”, a Creative Georgia preview for the work said.
It is comprised of a steel framework and coloured tiles creating an impression of “digital pixels at low resolution”, all serving to place viewers in a visual of a “sleek synthetic model”, the summary also noted.
Video works produced by the creative are distributed throughout the installation, while sculptures derived from shapes of the historical Georgian writing system of Asomtavruli spell out the word “deranged” within it.
REARMIRRORVIEW has been selected as the project for the Georgian national pavilion in Venice by a team that involved Beral Madra, Head of Turkey’s BM Contemporary Art Centre, Eva Gonzalez Sancho of Norway’s Oslo Biennale, and Saul Anton, a Humanities and Media Studies Professor at the United States’ Pratt Institute.
The Georgian members of the selection board were Ketevan Shavgulidze, art historian and lecturer at Tbilisi’s State Academy of Arts and Mikheil Giorgadze, the First Deputy Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of Georgia.
They deliberated over the work by the Georgian-born, New York-based artist whose work centres around the relationship between objects and their environment.
Absurd yet poignant allegories for contemporary life, K.E.’s works invite us to consider unconventional vantage points, illuminating how seemingly incongruous notions can coexist“, a Creative Georgia profile for the artist said.
She has exhibited in solo displays at venues including the Simone Subal Gallery (2018, 2015, 2013) and the Queens Museum (2017-2018) in New York, the United States, Primary in Nottingham, the United Kingdom (2017) and the Sommer Gallery in Tel Aviv, Israel (2016).
Her display at the Simone Subal Gallery in 2017 was called a “monumental centrepiece” of the show by an Art in America magazine review.
The concept for the 2019 Venice Biennale has been devised by Ralph Rugoff, curator of the display.
The theme is seen to bring together works “which give opportunity to the visitors to newly rethink objects, images, gestures and situations”.
The Biennale will officially open on May 11, 2019.