The theme for this year's biennale is Making Worlds.
"Making Worlds is an exhibition driven by the aspiration to explore worlds around us as well as worlds ahead. It is about possible new beginnings-this is what I would like to share with the visitors of the Biennale," says exhibition director Daniel Birnbaum.
An exhibition that explores "the blindness of sight" with a vast collection of faces is representing Hungary at the exhibition, which runs until November 22.
The exhibition, by Péter Forgács and curated by András Rényi, is called Col Tempo / With Time, after the inscription held in the hand of the subject of Giorgene's famous portrait of an old woman, La Vecchia.
The bulk of the material for the exhibition comes from an archive of photographs and films established by the Austrian anthropologist Josef Wastl between 1939 and 1943. Forgács spent two years researching the archive before creating Col Tempo, specifically for the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
The exhibition, "while it treats, and in part documents, historical material, is not a historical show; rather, it highlights the social-anthropological dimensions of the power of sight that reveal themselves in full complexity in the common context of everyday life," Rényi says in the catalog.
"Col Tempo explores the blindness of sight....The anthropological fact that everyone has a face creates some sort of a universal reciprocity among people: we see others through it and offer our own face to be seen. To this extent, the face is the place for exchanging glances: a common ground. However, for the very same reasons it is a battlefield that is subjected to human hierarchies, the constraints and dynamics of social and power relations."
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
Photo: daylife.com
