2nd International Art Exhibition

Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense

From 10th June to 21st November 2007
The Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, presided over by Davide Croff, is setting up the 52nd International Art Exhibition, entitled Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense and curated by Robert Storr, the first director from the United States in the history of the most famous art review in the world, opening to the public from 10th June to 21st November, 2007.

The central international exhibition, set up in the Arsenale Corderie, in some spaces of the Arsenale Artiglierie and in the Italian Pavilion at the Giardini, will present about a hundred artists from all over the world with works – including site-specific and new productions – created in co-operation with the Venice Biennale for this occasion.

“While this show looks forward, it does not look back”: with this definition, Storr has underlined the guidelines of a wide reconnaissance which has led him to invite living and active artists and, in the rare cases when they were not alive due to premature or unexpected deaths, to display works testifying a vitality that makes them more relevant than ever. “This exhibition – explains Robert Storr – is not based on an all-inclusive ideological or theoretical proposal. It is rather founded on a fundamental approach to art aimed at presuming that analytical dichotomies between perceptual and conceptual, thought and feeling, pleasure and pain, intuition and criticality, too often obscure and deny the complex presence of all these aspects in our experience of the world, as well as the presence of all these dimensions in the resulting art. Each work will be there to speak for itself. In whole, correspondences among works – whether harmonious or discordant – will, in my opinion, stimulate the public’s attention to the diversity of feelings, materials, topics and ways of involving visitors that distinguishes these art works, which, though created in different languages, are all conjugated in the present tense”.

5th International Festival of Contemporary Dance
Body & Eros

Body & Eros is the theme of the 5th International Festival of Contemporary Dance of the Biennale di Venezia, presided over by Davide Croff, and is the final chapter in a three-year program that has allowed director Ismael Ivo to elaborate an articulated reflection on the body. A place that reflects the contradictions, the needs, the questions of our time, the body and dance, which it generates, dialogue with contemporary thought – scientific, philosophical, artistic, poetic…- in a relationship that constitutes the distinctive feature of the Festival.

-The journey through the body alights this year in the territory of desire, observed through the complexity of the esthetic experience, with its tensions and its limits. The 15 companies and 31 artists and choreographers who will participate in the 5th International Festival of Contemporary Dance – in Venice from June 14 through 30 – have been invited by the Biennale to express, through their work, their personal vision on the