Le Muse Inquiete – Where Venetian history meets a stream of the contemporary

For the 125th anniversary year of La Biennale di Venezia and Cecilia Alemani, all its Artistic Directors have been invited to design the historical exhibition ‘Le Muse Inquiete’

Honoring the period over which La Biennale de Venezia has enduringly revealed or generated institutional rifts and political and ethical crises as well as creative languages, the exhibition ‘Le Muse Inquiete’ (The Disquieted Muses) features one-of-a-kind sources of the Historical Archives of La Biennale and other Italian and international archives.

The exhibited works illuminate Venetian history’s key events during the 20th, which crossed path with La Biennale, following the guide headline ‘When La Biennale di Venezia meets History’. «In a period of global instability that over a few months has brought a succession of environmental disasters, pandemics, and social revolutions, La Biennale di Venezia serves as a wellspring and channel for the most innovative currents in the artistic disciplines of our era—but also continues to bear witness to the shifts and crises that have supervened from the late nineteenth century to the present, like a seismometer recording the tremors of history», states La Biennale.

Diving into the facets of research to examine the times when La Biennale has overlapped with the history of the world, the Artistic Directors of La Biennale’s six departments have curated first-hand accounts and a range of artworks of that period.

Spread over the rooms of the Central Pavilion in Venezia, the exhibition weaves through the six disciplines: from Fascism (1928-1945) to the Cold War and new order (1948-1964), to the unrest of ’68 and the Biennales chaired by Carlo Ripa di Meana (1974- 1978), from postmodernism to the first Architecture Biennale until the 1990s and the beginning of globalization.

The displays are constructed around a selection of materials and elements. Frames and tables in plywood are composed with colored textiles and prints of photographs and documents sourced from the archives. Utilizing a three-dimensional modular system serving as room sectioning further allows a play of compositions that enables the Directors to adapt the works to the Giardini’s Central Pavilion spaces. «The exhibition designed by Formafantasma is conceived based on the possibility of demounting, repairing, and eventually recomposing the structures in different arrangements for future archival Biennale exhibitions».

‘La Muse Inquiete’ is an exhibition by Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC) and is being held in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini Della Biennale from Saturday, August 29 to Tuesday, December 8, 2020.

Photo Credits
Marco Cappelletti – Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Formafantasma Team
Gregorio Gonella, Jeroen Van De Gruiter

Biennale team
ASAC, Marta Papini

Curators
Cecilia Alemani
Alberto Barbera
Marie Chouinard
Ivan Fedele
Antonio Latella
Hashim Sarkis