Vogue Italy highlights Uruguay's participation at the Venice Art Biennale 2022

The Art Biennale 2022 offers a tour around the world getting to know the different artistic expressions of several countries. In a recent publication of Vogue Italia, it is a hybrid creature, disobedient and assertive. She gives voice to women, to minorities. She gives her opinion on the future, on ecology (of the environment and of thought), on politics, on the relationship with technology. It happens in the spaces of the Central Pavilion and in the Arsenale occupied by the exhibition Il latte dei sogni, The Milk of Dreams, curated with passion and determination by Cecilia Alemani (here you will find everything you need to know about her) but it also happens in the National Pavilions, those spaces that, in every Biennale, are entrusted to individual countries that decide to present to the world their artistic vision. There are 80 of them, spread between the Giardini, the Arsenale and the spaces in the historic center of Venice (5 new entries: Cameroon, Namibia, Nepal, Oman, Uganda, Kasakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan): wandering through these spaces is like going around the world in a cube.

The garden visit

We will focus on those located in the Giardini, for a tour of the Biennale Arte that will take you three hours and penetrate under your skin. When you reach the main entrance, go straight ahead: the first surprise is painful and significant. The impressive Russian Pavilion is barricaded: a guard checks that no one approaches to demonstrate. The artists and the curator decided, after the war, to abandon the event as a sign of protest against Putin's government, which they were supposed to represent in Venice.

In a small adjoining pavilion, that of Uruguay, they literally take our measurements, leaving notes on a piece of paper of the 'tailor-puncher': we are invited to participate in 'Persona', a suggestive project by Gerardo Goldwasser that starts from a family story (the grandfather who was saved from the Nazi fury because he knew how to sew military uniforms) and reaches a reflection on the dress, the uniform, the size of the bodies.

On Thursday, April 21, the official opening of the exhibition Persona by artist Gerardo Goldwasser will take place at the Uruguayan pavilion of the Biennale Arte 2022. The event will be attended by the National Director of Culture, Mariana Wainstein; the coordinator of the National Institute of Visual Arts and curator of the consignment, Silvana Bergson; the artist, Gerardo Goldwasser; and the curators, Pablo Uribe and Laura Malosetti Costa.

Persona proposes a critical reflection that puts on stage an aspect as basic as it is complex in human societies: the ways of covering and exhibiting bodies, of disciplining them and also of distinguishing them. The proposal proposes a link between art, tailoring and violence. In her work we can see tailoring as a trade, as a drawing subject to precise rules, as repetition and institution of norms, all linked to memory and trauma from her family history. His work is constructed from a German tailoring manual inherited from his grandfather, a Jewish tailor who managed to save himself from the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald thanks to his trade, making uniforms, and thus arrived in Uruguay.

The installation consists of four works. The first consists of a mirror and a pallet at the entrance to the pavilion, where the public can stand and see themselves in the mirror, which in turn is reflected on the biennial's gardens. Once inside the pavilion, on one of the walls there is a collection of sleeves under the name El saludo and at the end of that wall there is a ruler inspired by the centimeters used by tailors. The work located in the center of the pavilion consists of three large-format fabric rolls (2.8 meters high), which is inspired by the cutting tables and how these become spools in a sort of winding of the long tables.

Uruguay's participation in the Biennale Arte 2022 is promoted by the Ministry of Education and Culture of Uruguay, through the National Directorate of Culture and its National Institute of Visual Arts, together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Uruguay.

The consignment is supported by Associação Anna Laura, Magma, Galería Herlitzka + Faria, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry and Fundación Ama Amoedo.

The 59th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia can be visited from April 23 to November 27, 2022.

Photo credits: Rafael Lejtreger