PORTUGUESE PAVILION
54th International Art Exhibition
La Biennale di Venezia 2011
4_June > 27_November_2011
Pavilion Opening:
1st June 2011 at 6 pm
Commissioner:
Directorate-General for the Arts /
Portuguese Ministry of Culture
Curator: Sérgio Mah
Venue:
Fondaco Marcello,
Calle del Traghetto o Ca' Garzoni,
San Marco 3415 Venezia
http://www.dgartes.pt/scenario/index_en.htm
Organisation and production:
Sponsors:
PRESS RELEASE
PORTUGUESE PAVILION
AT THE 54TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION
LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 2011
4_JUN > 27_NOV_2011
Fransisco Tropa is Portugal’s representative at the 54th International Art Exhibition – La
Biennale di Venezia. The artist whose work will occupy the Portuguese Pavilion at the
Biennale was selected by the curator of this official representation, Sérgio Mah, appointed per a proposal from the Directorate General for the Arts of the Portuguese Ministry
of Culture.
The Directorate General for the Arts has regularly overseen national participation in the
Venice Biennale since 1997, ensuring high quality and excellent results vis-à-vis the
public and national and international specialty criticism. In 1997 Portugal was represented by the artist Julião Sarmento, followed by Jorge Molder in 1999, João Penalva in
2001, Pedro Cabrita Reis in 2003, Helena Almeida in 2005, Ângela Ferreira in 2007
and Pedro Paiva and João Maria Gusmão in 2009.
Sérgio Mah has had a notable career as a curator. The quality, ability and sensitivity of
his work have allowed him to gain a thorough understanding of Portuguese artistic
creation and to become an integral member of the respective community. The conceptual singularity of Sergio Mah’s work naturally led him to international confirmation as a
curator. Along with his academic background, teaching activity, participation in national
and international juries and research on subjects concerning contemporary art, this
grounded his choice from both the formal and conceptual standpoints.
Francisco Tropa (b. 1968) is one of the most outstanding Portuguese contemporary
artists, whose consolidated career path has earned broad institutional and critical
acclaim in recent years – a highly productive period marked by creative excellence
during which he has produced some of his most paradigmatic work.
Individual shows of his work have been held at major Portuguese contemporary art centres such as the Serralves Museum (1997, 1998, 2006 and 2010), the Modern Art
Centre of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2003) and Culturgest (2006).
02 | 09
Tropa has taken part in various landmark international events such as the Biennials in
São Paulo (1999) and Melbourne (1999), and in Manifesta (2000). He also participated
in the 2003 Venice Biennale, invited by its curator Francesco Bonami to join the central
exhibition on “Dreams and Conflicts”.
Another of the fundamental reasons behind Sérgio Mah’s choice of Francisco Tropa
concerns the undeniably idiosyncratic nature of his work. Besides its formal and conceptual quality, his oeuvre is based on singular imagery and a deeply sensitive and symbolic language that sets it apart in the national and international context. The curator has
also stated that “during the current historical time it is especially relevant to put forward
an artist whose work persistently questions the role of the artist and the nature of the
artistic act, questions which are also a pertinent and decisive way to approach an event
with the historic scope and spatial and symbolic resonance of the Venice Biennale”.
The Portuguese exhibition will be held at the Fondaco Marcello, an exhibition space
situated in a historic 16th/17th century Venice building, originally conceived as a warehouse (Fondaco), which has been leased until December 2012. It is located on the
Grand Canal, very close to the Grassi Palace, between the Academia and Rialto bridges and in front of the San Tomà vaporetto station.
03 | 09
SCENARIO
FRANCISCO TROPA
Scenario is an exhibition which articulates sculpture, image devices and fragments
of nature. The general ambience is timeless and enigmatic, in which objects and
images have a heuristic quality, seeking a sensitive and subjective understanding
of the nature of things and consequently of the experience of creation and the origins of art.
Since the early 1990s Francisco Tropa’s work has favoured the practice of sculpture,
frequently in liaison with the performing arts, drawing and technical imagery. Also significant in his work is the attention paid to assembly and occupation of the exhibition
space, to the placement of things, their nature and relationships, so they can be seen
and experienced. Such inclinations are present once again in the show titled Scenario,
specifically contrived by the artist for the Fondaco Marcello. Inside this old warehouse
next to the Grand Canal are items of various kinds: projection devices conceived as
small sculptures that follow the operational principles of magic lanterns, projecting images onto plaster screens over wooden walls. The images have their origin in objects
seen at the base of each projector: an hourglass, a light bulb’s incandescent filament, a
dead fly, a dry leaf, and various situations in which drops of water fall via a thread, a
small glass plate, a tube or a tiny bottle. These strange yet enchanting images rework
and shift perception to a plane of wavering between figuration and abstraction, between
fixed and moving, between copy and original.
Various objects are placed next to some of the wall-screens: wooden boards and
boxes, easels and tree trunks. As components of a ‘sculptural scene’, these objects
integrate the space that forms from the projectors to the walls, asserting their physical
and symbolic presence, as well as their shadow over the projected image plane.
The overall ambience is mysterious and enigmatic, a timeless place in which objects
and images have a heuristic quality beyond their specific value, the search for another
understanding of the nature of things, i.e., for a (non)knowledge that favours the sensitive and subjective. In this regard, the title Scenario recalls the construction of a space,
the indication of a suspended space, which suggests a huge possibility: to hold our
attention, to summon up the experience of creation, to empower the urgency of imagination as a way to reach the truth of nature and consequently the origins of art.
Sérgio Mah
Curator
04 | 09
SÉRGIO MAH
Sérgio Mah (b. 1970) studied sociology and communication at university. Besides his
activity as an exhibition curator he currently teaches at the Faculty of Social and Human
Sciences of Nova University of Lisbon and the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of
Lisbon. He has researched and written about image-related matters, especially the
areas between photography, video and cinema.
Since 2002 he has curated numerous individual and collective exhibitions involving
artists such as Thomas Demand, Jeff Wall, Walid Raad, David Claerbout, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Roman Signer, Joel Sternfeld, Tacita Dean, Erwin Wurm and Pedro Costa.
He was head curator of LisboaPhoto in 2003 and 2005 and artistic director of PhotoEspaña from 2008 to 2010.
This is the second time that Sérgio Mah has worked closely with the artist Francisco
Tropa. In 2005 he curated the exhibition in which Tropa presented one of his most
essential and paradigmatic works, The Assembly of Euclid.
Sérgio Mah lives and works in Lisbon.
FRANCISCO TROPA
Francisco Tropa was born in Lisbon in 1968. He studied sculpture at Ar.Co – Centro
de Arte e Comunicação Visual in Lisbon from 1987 to 1992, at the Royal College of
Arts of London in 1992 and at the Kunstakademie Münster in 1995 and 1996.
Since his first individual exhibition in 1991, Francisco Tropa’s artistic output has
focused mainly on sculpture, although drawing, the performing arts and more recently
photography and film have become frequent and significant modes of expression in his
artistic imagination and practice.
Tropa’s work has earned widespread critical and institutional acclaim and he is now
considered one of the most unique and idiosyncratic figures on the Portuguese art scene. Individual shows of his work have been put on at major national contemporary art
centres such as the Serralves Museum (1998), the Modern Art Centre of the Calouste
Gulbenkian Foundation (2003) and Culturgest (2006). He has also taken part in international landmark events, among them the São Paulo Biennial (1999), the Melbourne
Biennial (1999), Manifesta (2000) and the 2003 Biennale di Venezia, where he was
invited to join the central exhibition ‘Dreams and Conflicts’ by head curator Francesco
Bonami. In 2011, besides taking part in the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the artist will be present at the upcoming Istanbul Biennial.
Francisco Tropa currently lives and works in Lisbon.
05 | 09
IMAGES
High resolution images are available at
www.dgartes.pt/scenario/imprensa_en.htm
Image credits: Francisco Tropa, Scenario, 2011 | © Pedro Tropa
06 | 09
IMAGES
07 | 09
IMAGES
08 | 09
EXHIBITION
Artist: Francisco Tropa
Curator: Sérgio Mah
Graphic Design: Pedro Falcão
Photographs: Pedro Tropa
Set-up: J S Querido
Construction of the Space: Dipinture F. lli Pepe, Enzo Lidiano
Local Architect: Daniele Vicentini
Local Assistant: Alessia Pugliatti
Transport: Iterartis
ORGANISATION AND PRODUCTION
Directorate-General for the Arts / Portuguese Ministry of Culture
Director-General for the Arts: João Aidos
Deputy Director: Fátima Marques Pereira
Executive co-ordination: Antonia Gaeta
Communication and Public Relations / Coord: Maria José Veríssimo
Editorial Production: Alexandra Fonseca, Helena Garrett, Pedro Couto
Website: Susana Neves
Budget management: Maria Helena Cardoso
SPONSORS
Douro Prime
Continente
Delta Cafés
CONTACTS
Directorate-General for the Arts | Portuguese Ministry of Culture
[email protected] | [email protected]
www.dgartes.pt
www.dgartes.pt/scenario/index_en.htm
09 | 09