For her third exhibition in Galleria Traghetto Anne-Karin Furunes presents an unknown series of portraits of Roma people who have lived through the historical tragedies and radical social changes in Europe and whose fate is still an open wound on the map of Europe.
The portraits remind us of the dignity of humans despite the differences in their cultural worldviews as compared with the general understanding of European societies.
We talk a lot about tolerance and the importance of supporting different identities and historical roots. How do we act in reality with all these liberal and well-meaning ideas? Action tells more about our philosophical ideas than talk.
 
Anne-Karin Furunes is totally enchanted by faces. In big cities she can walk along streets for hours just looking at the faces of the passers-by. It is an inexhaustible area that fascinates and intrigues her. She has portrayed groups of people whose fate the society rather forgot like the Jews deported from Norway as well as those who were subjected to the hideous practices of eugenics but also humans as fighting for something like the German soldiers during the Nazi occupation of Norway or the women soldiers who took part in the Finnish civil war in 1918. Her aim with these pictures is not political in any narrow sense of the term, instead it is a plea to remind us of the beauty and vulnerability of all people.
Maaretta Jaukkuri
 
Anne-Karin Furunes (Norway, 1961, lives and works in Trondheim, Norway) has been developing her special perforation technique since she was studying at the Art Academy of Trondheim 1993-94. Her years of study lasted for a decade consisting both of art studies in Oslo and Trondheim and architecture studies in Trondheim, Oslo, London and Copenhagen. She first graduated in art and architecture, then she chose to dedicate herself to art.
She has shown her work extensively in Europe, Australia and USA. Furunes’ work is present in collections such as The Museum of Art, Trondheim, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo and Barbican Art Centre, London, The National Museum of China, Beijing, The Tromso Museum of Contemporary Art, Norway, The Museum of Art and Design, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland.
Furunes has created a number of large-scale public works, which brings her perforated aluminium and steel plates back into the social space to which they are crucially connected. In 1999, she won a competition for creating a work in the National Theater train station in Oslo. This huge work, 500 meters in length, consists of hundreds of aluminum panels, many with images of faces. In 2001, the National Theater train station won the prestigious Brunel Award, an annual acknowledgment for the best train station and train design. Other public projects include installations for Telenor in Bergen, the office building Aker Solutions, Fornebu, Oslo, the airport tower in Trondheim, a North Sea oil platform, and a site-specific commission for Deutsche Bank in Sydney (Norman Foster building).
 
ANNE-KARIN FURUNES
Freedom Fighers
 
Galleria Traghetto, Campo S. Maria del Giglio, San Marco 2543, 30124 Venezia
tel/fax 041 5221188 - galleria.traghettoin.it – www.galleriatraghetto.it
 
opening: Sunday, May 26, 2013, at 6.30 p.m.
until July 31 2013
open from Monday to Saturday, 3-7 p.m.

On the occasion of the 55th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia ,
Jarach Gallery is pleased to present the collective exhibition “The Hundredth Window”.
The artists in show are: Simone Bergantini (Velletri, 1977), Giorgio Barrera (Milano, 1952), Guido Guidi (Cesena, 1941), Yamada Hanako (Ponte dell‘Olio, 1986), Kensuke Koike (Nagoya, 1980), Teodoro Lupo (Treviso, 1975), Yusuke Nishimura (Okayama, 1981), Daniele Pezzi (Ravenna, 1977), Mirko Smerdel (Prato, 1978).
 
Jeff: You know, much as I hate to give Thomas J. Doyle too much credit, he might have gotten ahold of something when he said that was pretty private stuff going on out there. I wonder if it is ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens. Do you, do you suppose it’s ethical even if you prove that he didn‘t commit a crime?
Lisa: I’m not much on rear-window ethics.
Jeff: Of course, they can do the same thing to me. Watch me like a bug under a glass if they want to.
Lisa: Jeff, you know if someone came in here, they wouldn‘t believe what they’d see.
 
[courtesy Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, Rear Window]

Art as a code of the extraordinary in the daily routines, witnessing escape attempts, and expressions which have been too long stifled and caged in rules that have lost credibility.
“Jan Mizo - Exposti” presents photos and works by a precursor of digital art, increasingly recognized internationally. Surprised by an apparently distracted, but participating lens in discrete observation, normality is fixed in its fleeting flash of poetry, in bursts of unpredictability for flat lives. The revelation comes along with content and good-natured smile, without judgment, looking at reality as someone who does not belong any more. Heroes of lives parked on the troubles of everyday stories, camouflaged in an ostentatious normality, met by chance in the street, are unmasked and stripped but only for a brief moment, immediately returned to the respect for their lives on the waiting list.
 
INFO: www.giudecca795.com

“Beware of the Holy Whore: Edvard Munch, Lene Berg and the Dilemma of Emancipation”
 
Galleria di Piazza San Marco
San Marco 71/c
30124 Venezia
 
‘Beware of the Holy Whore: Edvard Munch, Lene Berg and the Dilemma of Emancipation’ is a project organised by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, as the official Norwegian representation at the 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in 2013. The exhibition, which includes a series of rarely exhibited works by Edvard Munch in addition to a newly commissioned film by Lene Berg, revolves around emancipation as an issue always vexed with contradiction – between the realm of freedom and the consequences of the isolation that often accompany the pursue of a qualitatively different, ‘alternative’ life. In his Essay on Liberation, Herbert Marcuse notes that the striving toward a ‘new sensibility’ involves a psychedelic, narcotic release from the rationality of an established system, as well as from the logic that attempts to change that system. Such new sensibility, which resides in the gap between the existing order and true liberation, might lead to a radical transformation – and in this shift art functions as a technique through which to reconstruct reality from its illusion, its imitation, its harmony, towards a matter not yet given, still to be realised.
The impulse to operate in the margins – on the outside trying to break in or on the inside redefining the context – is one of the key driving forces in the history of art, and is also at the centre of ‘Beware of the Holy Whore: Edvard Munch, Lene Berg and the Dilemma of Emancipation’. The exhibition, curated by Marta Kuzma, Director, OCA, Angela Vettese, President, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa and Pablo Lafuente, Associate Curator, OCA, will bring together rarely exhibited works from the collection of the Munch Museum in Oslo with Lene Berg’s new film Ung Løs Gris (Dirty Young Loose, 2013) in order to explore the relationship between art, its social context and changing gender relationships, both in the age of emancipation in which Munch lived and today.
At the beginning of the 20th century, sexual norms and traditional gender roles were questioned amid new psychological theories of sex and politics and a struggle for women’s equality. Challenged by such developments, Munch faced the alienation that characterised the Christiania Bohemia, a society bidding for emancipation but trapped in ‘reality’, struggling between two options: assimilating shared values, or going beyond them in order to construct a new frame for perception. Munch’s emphatic treatment of these themes from 1902 to 1908, before entering the asylum, reflected an internal ambiguity and anguish. Munch described this period as an ‘eternal civil war’, after which his work moved to a more distanced treatment of subjects, in social caricatures in which he offers an ironic critique of an increasingly capitalist and permissive society. In Social Studies, Cause and Effect (1910), made shortly after, Munch also reflected upon the conditions of artistic production and its reception, via patronage, sales, criticism and public opinion, opening new dimensions for his work, from a psychological perspective into social and historical realms.
These issues are echoed in Lene Berg’s Dirty Young Loose (2013), a film that concentrates on three stereotypical characters who are interrogated about their roles as either victims or perpetrators in a complex situation. The film explores the interpretation of human behaviour based on preconceived concepts and established norms. Just like the exhibition as a whole, the film presents the deconstruction of an original scene which functions as a catalyst for a revision of the politics of liberation, of gender struggle and of internal conflict – the dilemma of emancipation.
 
Additional Events:
‘A Discussion with Peter Watkins and a Screening of Edvard Munch (1973)’
Edvard Munch is considered by Watkins as his most personal film. The work dramatises three decades of the life of the artist in the form of a docudrama that conveys Munch’s subjective vision about tragic family events, difficulties in his first sexual relationships, and opposition from the conservative forces in Christiania (Oslo) following his engagement with its bohemian circle in the mid-1880s. The film concentrates on Munch’s personal reactions to these events, enfolds them in the social and historical reality of the time, and shows how they directly affected the development of his style as a painter.
In parallel to his work as a filmmaker, Peter Watkins analysed and challenged for over four decades the widely accepted escalation of the standardised pictorial and narrative form of Hollywood within all forms of contemporary audiovisual communication, including modern internet technology. The artist Edvard Munch is often referred to as a ‘modern’ artist, but – Watkins asks – how are we to define ‘modernism’ in the broadest sense, in a world that idolises manipulative audiovisual forms which encourage mass consumerism, political passivity, and escalating environmental disaster?
 
For press inquiries, please contact Maria Moseng, OCA’s Press Officer on maria.moseng@oca.no. For Italian press, please contact Giorgia Gallina at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa’s press office on press@bevilacqualamasa.it.
 
‘Beware of the Holy Whore: Edvard Munch and the Dilemma of Emancipation’ will take place from 31 May to 22 September 2013 at Galleria di Piazza San Marco of Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa. This exhibition was made possible by generous loans from the Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway and with the additional support of Fritt Ord – the Freedom of Expression Foundation, Oslo. Lene Berg’s film is produced by Helga Fjordholm, Studio Fjordholm AS, and made possible with the additional support of NFI, the Norwegian Film Institute/Åse Meyer, Norsk Kulturråd/Arts Council Norway, Fond for Lyd og Bilde/Audio and Visual Fund, Norwegian Visual Artists Remuneration Fund.

“Unattained Landscape / Paesaggio Incompiuto”
 
Palazzetto Tito
Dorsoduro 2826
30123 Venezia
 
In conjunction with the opening of the 55th Art Biennale, Palazzetto Tito will host “UNATTAINED LANDSCAPE / PAESAGGIO INCOMPIUTO”, an exhibition organised by the Japan Foundation in collaboration with Bevilacqua La Masa and curated by Didier Fiuza Faustino, Akiko Miyake and Angela Vettese, together with Sumi Hayashi and Sachiko Namba.
 
The exhibition will explore contemporary Japanese art, covering the fields of visual arts, performance, sound, graphics and design, video and literature. Rather than trying to capture national identity, the project will be structured around a possible idea of national identity. The event will thus pose a wide range of questions.
 
Can a common cultural territory alone create a sense of identity? What is a common cultural territory? The answer may not always be the same: it may be an open production, an exhibition in a perpetual state of change, it may be a way of underlining the void… and at the same time of authorising the visitor to trace the outlines of his/her own territory. From June to October, the space in Palazzetto Tito will host a wide range of artists, working with various different media.
 
On the ground floor there will be space for sounds with the works of five artists (selected by Jim O’Rourke) as well as 12 literary texts (chosen by David Peace). The central hall will be transformed into a screening theatre, with six films chosen once again by Jim O’Rourke featuring the works of various artists, such as Marina Abramovic, Tacita Dean, Maurizio Cattelan, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Cerith Wyn Evans. Each of the four rooms, on the other hand, will host the works of one of the four following artists: Meiro Koizumi, Simon Fujiwara, Tomoko Yoneda and Shuji Terayama.