Visualizing Venice

The Portland State AB Lobby Gallery will present Venice in Portland, a documentary on the 2011 Venice Biennale by Horia Boboia, PSU assistant professor of art. The film will be shown in conjunction with the art exhibit Made in Italy currently on display in the MK Gallery.

In the film, which has no voiceover, Boboia guides viewers around one of Italy’s oldest artistic gatherings, the Venice Biennale. With Venice in Portland, Boboia seeks to provoke interpretive questions about the nature of art to his viewers. These questions include: What is art? When is art? How is art? Is this art?

Since Venice Biennale’s inception in 1895 as part of the International Art Exhibition, it has become one of the most prestigious cultural displays in the world. The 2011 Biennale invited 83 artists, featured 89 national pavilions and hosted 37 collateral events such as musical performances. A total of 440,000 visitors attended.

“The Biennale is like a wind machine. Every two years, it shakes the forest, unveils hidden truths, gives new strength and light to new sprouts, showing older trunks and persisting branches from a different perspective,” said Biennale President Paolo Baratta on the event’s website. “The Biennale is a great pilgrimage, where in the works of artists and in the work of curators the voices of the world meet, to talk about their own and our future. Art here is meant as a continuous evolution.”

All of these artists, assembled in one place, inspired Boboia to produce the documentary.

“If nothing else, it was the place to see what is happening in the arts now,” he said. “Combine that with the perennial beauty of Venice, and you’ll have a great dialogue about what is ‘contemporary’ and how it turns into ‘history.’”

Boboia hopes to capture the love of art and culture that Italy represents. Because he filmed the indoor and outdoor displays without a running commentary—rather than merely describing them one by one in the manner of an automated museum guide—he believes that viewers will interpret the Biennale’s art in their own ways.

“In less than an hour, you will be seeing a substantial segment of our contemporary arts selected and compiled as a broad documentation, and also a personal way of experiencing it,” Boboia said.

Simultaneously, the MK Gallery is hosting the art exhibition Made in Italy, a compilation of students’ artistic reactions to their time spent living and making art in Macerata, Italy, with Boboia himself and professor Bill LePore.

Together, Made in Italy and Venice in Portland give viewers a multimodal expression of the same subject.

“It is ideal to both watch the film and see the exhibition for a full experience,” Boboia said when asked how the two exhibitions relate to each other. “This video is also intended as a tool of research for our art courses, as an alternative to the usual but somewhat dry Power Point presentations.”

In Venice in Portland, Boboia gives viewers a silent yet telling picture of international cooperation and a demonstration of art as a multidimensional enterprise. The film will be shown through Jan. 27.