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The Vatican will take part for the first time this year in the Venice Biennale, a contemporary art exhibition with a reputation for avant-garde works.
The theme of the Vatican’s pavilion, “Creation, Un-Creation and Re-Creation”, will have the aim of promoting modern dialogue on faith. It will use the first 11 chapters of the Book of Genesis as its narrative thread.
The event will take place in Venice from June 1 to November 24, with exhibits from 88 different countries.
Three artists or studios have been entrusted with illustrating the theme, and the exhibit is being co-ordinated by the director of the Vatican Museums, Antonio Paolucci.
Paolucci said Creation has been given to the Milan-based multi-media group Studio Azzurro, “which places the immaterial image, light, sound, and sensory stimuli at the centre of their artistic investigation”.
Un-Creation is the responsibility of Czech photographer Josef Koudelka, whose black and white image panorama “speaks of the opposition between the human being and the world with its laws — moral and natural — and the material destruction that comes from a loss of a moral sense”.
Re-Creation was entrusted to American artist Lawrence Carroll, “who is capable of giving life to salvaged materials, transfiguring them through processes of reconsideration and regeneration”, Paolucci said.
According to Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, the project “is not only extraordinarily innovative, but also responds to its own objectives, that is instituting and promoting occasions of dialogue within an ever broader and diversified context”.
He said the pavilion will not present art destined for the liturgy and sacred spaces. “We want to rebuild relations between art and faith, a relationship that went through a divorce, although not all contact was severed.”
The display will cost the private Foundation for the Heritage and Artistic Activities of the Church a total of $1,180,000, and the costs will be covered entirely by donations.
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Image: CNN
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