Scotland’s presentation at this year’s Venice Biennale is to have an official visit from a Scottish Government minister for the first time in its ten year history. Fiona Hyslop MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs, is visiting the Scotland + Venice presentation at the Palazzo Pisano on Wednesday 29 May and Thursday 30 May. The show opens to the public on 1 June.
Hyslop said: “La Biennale di Venezia is the world’s largest and most prestigious showcase for contemporary visual arts, and the ideal showcase for our nation’s world-renowned creativity. Previous Scotland + Venice presentations have achieved tremendous critical success, and I am sure this year’s programme will further enhance Scotland’s global reputation for producing cutting-edge visual art.”
The exhibition has been curated and produced by The Common Guild, Glasgow, and features new works by Corin Sworn, Duncan Campbell and Hayley Tompkins, all of whom studied at The Glasgow School of Art.
Corin Sworn‘s work for Venice comprises installations of floor tiles as well as a new film entitled The Foxes, which mixes slides taken by her father during his field work in Peru as a social anthropologist in the 1970s with footage from her most recent trip to the same location. Sworn is also presenting an assortment of photographic works that mimic the colour separation of RGB (red, green, blue) techniques, overlapping and merging scenes both past and present in the same image.
Duncan Campbell has produced a film that draws inspiration from Chris Marker and Alan Resnais’ 1953 essay film Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues also Die) to offer a meditation on life, death and the longevity of objects. His other video work on display, It for Others, combines archive material with his own filmed footage, scrutinising notions of cultural imperialism and commodity.
Hayley Tompkins is showing an assemblage of floor-based pieces made up of plastic trays, water bottles and photographic prints contained in boxes. The images presented in the latter are sourced from the Internet and convey painterly reflections of light, colour and form.
Amanda Catto, Portfolio Manager for Creative Scotland, said: “Scotland + Venice has a ten year history of promoting new work at the Venice Biennale and we are delighted that this year the Cabinet Secretary for Culture will be among the first to see this show.”
Scotland + Venice runs 1 June – 24 November. For more information visit scotlandandvenice.com
