Those were long days I have behind me. My time in Venice is ending. Day 5 and Day 6. Day 5 turns out is a Monday, which means nothing is open. All galleries, art exhibitions are closed and I had no definite plans. I chose to just walk around Venice, see what I had run past in previous days, take photos and do a little bit of drawing. Overall, I did not do much, except the most notable art related thing I did was watching a movie "Daughters of the Dust"by Julie Dash. Turns out European Nextflix offers movies like that. It even had Shirin Neshat's "Women without men." In short that was all of my day - a long walk and some self-made art. Oh...and packing my bags all over again.
On my last day I had decided to give myself a break. Seeing all that art was amazing but it was also very tiring and on today's evening I will get to see my family again after two years. They are coming to pick me up and celebrate my return with a trip through Italy. Instead of stressing out about not making to all exhibitions and not managing to spend sufficient time with all works, I just made peace with it and visited other museums in Venice. There are a lot of galleries and places to see but I chose the most predictable ones, the St. Marco's Square museums. After all, I have to see them at least once in my life.
They weren't anything spectacular ( I guess I can say that after living in Europe most of my life and seeing abundance of old palaces and buildings...after a while they all start to look the same). There were only a couple things that were the most notable, the Shirin Neshat exhibition as one of the collateral events happening at the time of Biennale and the Palazzo Ducale. The older, 15th century part of the building, contained some of the most decorated and beautiful rooms I have seen. They were used as meeting rooms for the courts and Senate. In fact, one of these rooms were the largest room in Europe! This is the one museum I would suggest people to go and see. I put some photos in the ravel journal/gallery section.
The Shirin Neshat exhibition was a pleasant surprise. I did not expect to see her work at the Biennale but I was glad that I did! I had reserched Neshat's work extensively for one of my school projects. For the most part, she is a filmmaker and photographer with her own style. The photographs she makes are very often portraits with hand-written Arabic written over them. She prints the photos large scale and then hand writes on them. It is beautiful work!
The only other place I visited on my last day was the Pavilion of Humanity. It was placed in a regular Venetian house right by the Ponte dell'Accademia (the second famous bridge in Venice). Two artists had taken over the building and through collaboration produced work that examined anonymity people in uniforms experience and the violence that come out of that feeling of not being seen, or being seem as one of many, a crowd. They examined the politics of such violence, they examined the gender relations - the men's world and the women's world. And finally they examined intimacy. I took pictures of it all and the small artist statements, which I will be including in just a moment. Ekin Onat and Michal Cole worked each in their own room for the mot part, coming together only at the very end in the most intimate space - the bedroom. They both talk about different aspects of the larger concept of human rights - Cole is more domestic oriented but Onat looks at public encounters and politics. Please read my initial nots in my ournal, look at some photos and enjoy!
And that is it for me. I hope you learned and enjoyed the journal and the blog. As for me, I am off to get some much needed family time! Cheers!
