The official two volume catalog dedicated to the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Volume I of the two volume set dedicated to the Biennale Arte 2017 features four pages devoted to each invited artist. These pages include a critical essay and a statement by the artist supporting their works on display, as well as supplementary images that describe the artist's practice.
Volume II is dedicated to the national participations, the special projects, and the collateral events. Texts and images describe and illustrate each of the individual exhibitions.
These volumes are designed by Studio deValence, Paris, the firm that designed the graphic identity of the Biennale Arte 2017.
The Exhibition offers theme that unfolds over the course of nine chapters or families of artists, beginning with two introductory realms in the Central Pavilion, followed by another seven across the Arsenale through the Giardino delle Vergini. There are 120 invited artists from 51 countries; 103 of these are participating for the first time.
Each of the nine chapters or families of artists of the Exhibition represents a Pavilion in itself, or rather a Trans-Pavilion as it is trans-national by nature but echoes the Biennale's historical organisation into pavilions, the number of which has steadily increased since the end of the 1990s
From the "Pavilion of Artists and Books" to the "Pavilion of Time and Infinity," these nine episodes tell a story that is often discursive and at times paradoxical, with detours that mirror the world's complexities, a multiplicity of approaches and a wide variety of practices. The Exhibition is intended as an experience, an extrovert movement from the self to the other, towards a common space beyond the defined dimensions, and onwards to the idea of a potential neo-humanism.
Starting with the Pavilion of Artists and Books, the Exhibition reveals its premise, a dialectic that involves the whole of contemporary society, beyond the artist himself, and addresses the organisation of society and its values.
A series of parallel events will animate the Exhibition, following the same curatorial premise, which is to place artists at the heart of the exhibition. The catalogue is exclusively dedicated to the artists who are invited to present visual and textual documentation about their practice and their environment.