“Ensemble” by Mehretu and “Liminal” by Huyghe in Venice

Artificial intelligence forcefully bursts into the new exhibition season of the Pinault Foundation in Venice, which anticipates the artistic wave that will invade Venice in April with the 60th Art Biennale and all the corollary of collateral exhibitions.
Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana have already inaugurated on Sunday 17 March the two exhibitions that will characterize the 2024 exhibition season of the Parisian foundation, together with an appendix at the Teatrino of Palazzo Grassi, the video installation by Edith Dekyndt “Song to the Siren” which takes a young woman intent on delicately cleaning, almost in a dance, the monument to the Partisan by Augusto Murer which lies among the waves of the San Marco basin, right in front of the Biennale Gardens.

“Liminal”

Punta della Dogana

“Liminal” (until 24 November) is the exhibition conceived by Pierre Huyghe for the spaces of Punta della Dogana. It is the first exhibition dedicated in Italy to the French artist, who for the occasion has chosen unpublished works alongside others (which partly come from the same Pinault Collection), created over the last ten years. The exhibition, which Huyghe created in close collaboration with the curator Anne Stenne, delves into the disturbing and fascinating world of Artificial Intelligence, analyzes the thin line of demarcation between man and machine, wants to make us experience the limit, the labile border between human and non-human, between space and non-space, time and non-time. It is a courageous and in some ways shocking exhibition, which cancels out the certainties, the comfort zone in which each of us places ourselves. Created in a dark immersive atmosphere, nourished by philosophy and science fiction, the exhibition itinerary that Pierre Huyghe has created through works that self-generate and develop thanks to machine learning, invites the viewer to question what it means to be human or what there was before the appearance of the human race on earth.New bodies and new idiomsThe video that gives the title to the entire exhibition, “Liminal”, stages a simulacrum of a body with feminine features but without a face, also emptied of the brain, which evolves through the stimuli it receives. Among aquariums populated by different entities, videos that self-edit in real time thanks to AI, self-generating tools that modify sounds and lights, and mental images generated by deep neural networks, even humans/inhumans wandering around in the darkness of the halls wearing golden masks : these capture sounds and vibrations that will give life to a new language, “Idiom”, which not even the artist yet knows. In short, Pierre Huyghe transforms Punta della Dogana into a dynamic and sensitive space, constantly evolving: an exhibition made up of creatures that contaminate reality with other possible realities, in which artificial intelligence plays a basic role together with the subjective experience of visitors.

Grassi Palace

From the darkness of Punta della Dogana to the explosion of colors of Palazzo Grassi where “Ensemble” is on display until 6 January 2025, the largest Julie Mehretu exhibition ever presented in Europe. Everything revolves around an impressive nucleus of over fifty works created by the Ethiopian-born American artist, chosen by herself together with the curator Caroline Bourgeois from among those created over the last twenty-five years to date.

Mehretu – one of the leading abstractionists on the contemporary art scene – wanted to combine her own works with those of other artist friends, who together created a working group that gives the exhibition a sense of community: from Tacita Dean to David Hammons, Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Robin Coste Lewis, Paul Pfeiffer and Jessica Rankin. The result is a “monograph plus”, as the director of Palazzo Grassi Bruno Racine defined it, a choral exhibition that shows diversity of approaches but real friendship and common visions. The artists chosen for “Ensemble” are people with lives and very different artistic paths, but in dialogue, in discussion with each other on the most urgent issues of the present, as happens in real life. Starting from a principle of visual references, the dialogue actually works, both between more or less recent works by Mehretu herself and between her works and those of her artist friends. The result is an interesting non-chronological journey that highlights above all an intense work of stratification and superposition in all the works. Layers upon layers in Mehretu’s paintings, abstract signs that overlap with dense drawings of architecture and cities, traces of human bodies, spots, lines, dots, signs that accumulate on the surface of the paintings and refer to other ways of abstractionism. But also the sheets of paper and plastic bags by David Hammons or the dense embroideries on canvas by Jessica Rankin are other stratifications that multiply the images depending on the point of view and to which corresponds the idea of ​​artists working together to create a metalanguage significant.Beautiful, in this sense, the latest works created by Julie Mehretu,