"All the World's Futures" was announced Wednesday as the theme for next year's 56th Venice Art Biennale. Curator Okwui Enwezor made the announcement after meeting, with Biennale President Paolo Baratta, representatives of the 53 countries taking part in the event.
The 56th Biennale International Art Exhibition runs May 9 to November 22 at various venues in the lagoon city, primarily at the Arsenale and the Giardini.
"The ruptures that surround and abound around every corner of the global landscape today recall the evanescent debris of previous catastrophes piled at the feet of the angel of history in Angelus Novus," said Enwezor, echoing the words of American art critic Walter Benjamin in his interpretation of Paul Klee's painting of that name. Benjamin wrote about the 1920 Paul Klee picture, which was made through an oil-transfer method of Klee's invention, in his essay Theses on the Philosophy of History.
Benjamin, who owned the artwork for many years, said it "shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread".
"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet," Benjamin wrote.
Enwezor said, "How can the current disquiet of our time be properly grasped, made comprehensible, examined, and articulated?" "Over the course of the last two centuries the radical changes have made new and fascinating ideas subject matter for artists, writers, filmmakers, performers, composers, musicians," added the internationally imminent Nigerian curator, art critic and writer.
"It is with this recognition that the 56th International Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia proposes All the World's Futures, a project devoted to a fresh appraisal of the relationship of art and artists to the current state of things".
Enwezor said that rather than being a single, overarching theme, All the World's Futures is "permeated" with overlapping filters, a constellation of parameters that circumscribe the many ideas that will be treated and carried out in a variety of ways. The Biennale will use as a "filter" the historical trajectory that the art fair has itself undergone over the course of its 120-year existence - a period that spanned monarchy, fascism, two world wars, the birth of a republic, and the industrialization in Italy. The Biennale will regard its own "state of things" as a reflection of its history.
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