Think with the Senses - Feel with the Mind

52nd International Art Exhibition
Think with the Senses - Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense

　　Venice - Rome, March 6, 2007

　　The Biennale di Venezia Foundation, is setting up the 52nd International Art Exhibition, entitled "Think with the Senses - Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense." The exhibition is curated by Robert Storr, the first US director in the history of the most famous art review in the world, opening to the public from June 10 to November 21.

　　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 100 artists from all over the world with works - including site-specific and new productions - created in cooperation 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 that 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 is not based on an all-inclusive ideological or theoretical proposal," Storr said. "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".

　　The international landscape is enriched by works of 77 countries - the most ever in the series - displaying works in the historical city center as well as at the Giardini and Arsenale. Since 2006 the latter premises have been the permanent seat of the new Italian Pavilion, an area of central future development for the Biennale exhibition spaces, debuting this year with an exhibition curated by Ida Gianelli and representing one of the main attractions in the 52nd Venice Biennale Exhibition.

　　Storr's artistic project has chosen to include, as an integral part of the main exhibition, a Turkish Pavilion as well as a show representing African contemporary art (the "Check List Luanda Pop" exhibition from the Sindika Dokolo African Collection of Contemporary Art, Luanda, Angola, curated by Fernando Alvim and Simon Njami) in the Arsenale Artiglierie. The African exhibition includes Meskerem Assegued, Ekow Eshun, Lyle Ashton Harris, Kellie Jones and Bisi Silva, among others.