Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler and Carol Bove have been asked to contribute to “Women of Venice,” an exhibition that will investigate Alberto Giacometti’s refusal to participate in the Venice Biennale. (The artist famously declined participating in the biennial on many occasions, believing he was an international maker, unbound by any specific state identity.) The exhibition is a part of Philipp Kaiser’s curatorial vision for the Swiss Pavilion for the 2017 Venice Biennale.

Hubbard / Birchler will present their pseudo-documentarian film installation Flora, an in-progress work about the little known artist Flora Mayo, a contemporary of Giacometti’s—as well as the artist’s lover—who never achieved his level of renown. Carol Bove will take Giacometti’s figurative sculptures as her starting point, creating a grouping of works that will reflect on his history and legacy. Hubbard / Birchler’s exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York was reviewed by critic Jeffrey Kastner for the April 2011 issue of Artforum. Writing about the duo’s pieces titled Grand Paris Texas, 2009, and Méliès, 2011, Kastner said, “Like much of their quietly elegant, keenly intelligent video work, the two ambitious projects by the artist team of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler . . . made significant demands on, and richly rewarded, viewers’ attention.”

Bove’s ghostly ink portrait of British fashion model Twiggy, 2004, made the cover of the January 2005 issue of Artforum. For his feature on Bove, critic Barry Schwabsky wrote, “Bove’s presentation of ‘The Future of Ecstasy’ [a recorded reading of an article from Playboy written by Alan Watts in 1971] is a reminder that utopian social thought inevitably orients itself toward a future in which its every kink and idiosyncrasy will become accepted wisdom. The strikingly ingenuous yet imperious faces that we squint to perceive in Bove’s drawings seem to be wondering why we, their future, have ended up even more fucked up than they were.”