My sister Natasha and I met up with two friends at the Venice Biennale. Four days of delicious food, wandering through Venice, and some amazing art.
We saw an enormous wire head in a church (Jaume Plensa), an army of muslin and resin bodies (Magdalena Abakanowicz), found objects in Italy sculpted together by a Native American who lives in Paris (Jimmy Durham).
We saw copies of Greek and Roman statues tagged and displayed on boxes as if they were in storage (Prada Gallery), a man who recreates workshops were he manufactures futurist glow in the dark aardvarks (Mark Dion), and charcoal burnt city (Mathew Day Jackson.)
We saw an exhibit from an archeologist in the future who found old objects (from a time still in the future from our present) including a space suit (Arseny Zhilyaev), a Vietnams artist who made maps based on data from the Syrian war data (Tiffany Chung), and a Japanese artist who hung tens of thousands of keys on red strings (Chiharu Shiota).
And these were just a few of the objects and art we stumbled upon. Our friends at dinner said that the purpose of great art is that you then see the world differently. My world looks very different now . . . reveling in the unusual and unexpected.