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Valencia Bienal announced - Front Page
Art in America, May, 2003 by Raphael Rubinstein
With a theme ("the ideal city") that is slightly less vague and pretentious than those of most international biennials, the second Bienal de Valencia opens in Spain's third largest city on June 8, following a two-day press preview. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the director, Italian curatorial impresario Luigi Settembrini, has invited an architect (Will Alsop, who will collaborate with artist Bruce McLean), a filmmaker (Mike Figgis) and a photographer (Sebastiao Salgado), as well as two museum curators (Jean Louis Maubant, who will team with philosopher Francisco Jarauta, and Lorand Hegyi), to create five separate exhibitions. There will also be several other components to the Bienal, including proposals and maquettes from various architects for "a more beautiful and habitable city," a show of children's drawings on the event's theme and a series of theatrical performances (including productions from director Peter Brook and the National Ballet of Cuba).
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Alsop and McLean plan to create a "store" in a former convent. It's not clear just what will be for sale in their venue, which they are calling "A & M: Department of Proper Behaviour," but they promise that it will be a "place where everything is unique and most importantly a place where ideas, objects and behaviours can be tested, and if necessary can fail with dignity." Figgis, who is best known for directing Leaving Las Vegas and Timecode, envisions an installation titled "The Museum of Imperfect Past" that, he says, "will be a deconstruction of cinema, my cinema." Salgado, the famed Brazilian photojournalist, is making 100 photographic portraits of individual Valencianos, which will be presented as part of an audio-visual installation. Maubant and Jarauta will curate "Micro-Utopia," bringing together works by artists such as Daniel Buren, Jordi Colmer, Rita McBride, Tobias Rehberger, Jeff Wall and Dan Graham with architectural models by Constant, Peter Cook, Yona Friedman and other architects.
The Bienal component that promises to be the most interesting is Heygi's show, "Solares (or On Optimism)," for which he has invited 35 artists to create works in vacant lots and abandoned spaces throughout central Valencia. Heygi describes Valencia's solares (Spanish for vacant lots) as "gaps, rifts that uncover the interior of a microcommunity." Among the participants are Txomin Badiola, Danica Dakic, Clay Ketter, Matthew McCaslin, Oleg Kulik, Javier Tellez, Richard Nonas, Sergio Belinchon, Dennis Oppenheim, Kim Sooja, Bertrand Lavier, Mihael Milunovich, and Gilbert & George.
The Bienal de Valencia will remain on view through Sept. 30.
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