The 2021 Biennale Architettura opened in Venice over the weekend, where it will remain on view at the Arsenale, the Giardini, and Forte Marghera through November 21. Titled “How will we live together?”, the 17thedition of the International Architecture Exhibition includes 112 presentations from 46 countries, as well as a program of other exhibitions and events, presented in partnership with Rolex.
“The question, ‘How will we live together?’ is at once ancient and urgent,” said curator Hashim Sarkis. “It is indeed as much a social and political question as a spatial one. More recently, rapidly changing social norms, the political polarization between left and right, climate change, and the growing gap between labor and capital are making this question more urgently relevant and at different scales than before.”
Photo by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy of La Biennale de Venizia.
Housed in the Arsenale and the Giardini’s Central Pavilion, the main International Exhibition has been divided into five scales: Among Diverse Beings, As New Households, As Emerging Communities, Across Borders, and As One Planet. Featured across these concepts are participants like the Los Angeles-based Lucy McRae, Peju Alatise from Lagos, the Netherlands-based Studio Libertiny, Seoul’s SsD, Arquitectura Expandida from Bogotá, BASE studio from Santiago, Chile, the Boston-based NADAAA, Basel’s HHF Architects, Tel Aviv’s Ifat Finkelman & Deborah Pinto Fdeda, SKULL studio + MOLOARCHITEKTI of Prague, Sao Paolo, Brazil’s spbr arquitetos, and TVK of Paris, as well as first-time participants from Grenada,Iraq, and Uzbekistan. The main exhibition also encompasses a sector dedicated to children’s play at the Forte Marghera, titled “How will we play together?”
Outside of the competing presentations, the biennale will also include programming like the research-based “Stations” and “Co-Habitats,” each featuring several presenters from around the world, an intervention by Michal Rovner, and “Future Assembly,” which features a collaboration between Studio Other Spaces and 6 co-designers. Visitors should also look out for Giuseppe Penone’s installation The Listener at the Arsenale, presented by Vuslat Foundation, which features a collaboration with Chus Martinez looking at creating spaces for listening in a 21st century context.
Photo by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy of La Biennale de Venizia.
Additional happenings include things like a collaboration with the 15th International Festival of Contemporary Dance, coinciding with the biennial from July 23—August 1; the Special Project at the Pavilion of Applied Arts presented by the Victoria and Albert Museum, “Three British Mosques”;the roster of Meetings on Architecture exploring the question of the year, “How will we live together?”; and 17 curator-approved events at various Venice art spaces meant to enhance the narrative of the main exhibition.
“A hundred and twenty-six years of La Biennale di Venezia history demonstrates how its contemporaneity goes well beyond the forms of art it represents, welcoming the teaching, thought, and provocation of artists from every corner of the world,” said Roberto Cicutto, President of the Venice Biennale. “If there is one thing in this first year of my presidency that has powerfully touched me it is realizing the incredible observational vantage point the Biennale affords us: the Biennale represents a geopolitical map of the world that brings together the most diverse realities from the point of view of politics, economics, and the human condition of those artists who coalesce in Venice from so many radically different places.”
Photo by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
