Two of the curators of the 2015 Venice Biennale national pavilions, Philippe Van Cauteren and Mihai Pop, meet for a relaxed dialogue about Adrian Ghenie’s work and its retrospective at the S.M.A.K. Museum, about what it means to curate a pavilion at the Biennale Arte and the sinuous paths one should walk to find his way in today’s art world.
‘Ghenie’s dense and tactile paintings with their complex structure offer a contemporary vision of major political narratives and such fundamental, universal topics as the abuse of power, exploitation and oppression, and also of a personal, individual human struggle. His critique is never direct, however, but always takes a roundabout route. Ghenie obscures all his historical and political references by fusing them with personal memories, film references, clichés from the entertainment industry and elements from art history. This gives rise to a continuous metamorphosis between fact and construction, a grid of fragmented stories on collective and individual catastrophes. Ghenie depicts a journey through the darkest realms of human existence, where a glimmer of hope nevertheless persists.’
—Philippe Van Cauteren
Philippe Van Cauteren is artistic director of S.M.A.K. Museum for Contemporary Art in Ghent. He co-curated the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013, and was invited to curate of the Iraqi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2015.
Introduced by Corina Șuteu, Curator of Public Events
http://darwinsroom.ro/events/
