Slashstroke Magazine invited resident Art Critics Helen Nisbet and Rebecca Bell to be our eyes, ears and essence at this years Venice Biennale. I approached the Venice biennale this year with a small amount of trepidation. I found myself thinking that I might prefer to sit by a canal and drink a bottle of wine [...]
Review by Helen Nisbet The afternoon at the Giardini was blighted by a need to pee and to eat, so it was grumpily that we approached the Israeli pavilion. But great art has the power to cut through hunger and bladder weakness and I fell in love with the paintings of the late Raffi Lavie [...]
Review by Helen Nisbet. Back at the Giardini Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg’s ‘Experiment’ was supposed to be a “surrealist garden of Eden where all that is natural goes awry” and I loved every moment of it, finding it less sorrowful than the two films. Great, gruesome and wonderful flowers bled wax onto the ground. Films [...]
A review by Helen Nisbet The Arsenale was a totally different experience – room upon room one after the other of art, each room so separate from the other. Amongst some astonishing human sculptures rooted into and carved from trees a film was playing that kind of killed me. Berruti’s La figlia di Isacco was [...]
A review by Helen Nisbet One of the first pavilions we visited. Three sets of films were showing but I was most taken by 6 films, which at first looked like portraits depicting a moment in time of each subjects lives. I watched for a long time, initially because a well dressed woman was in [...]
A review by Rebecca Bell Another off-site exhibition is the Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan Pavilion. This time based in an enormous old building which feels basilica-like in its weight and height. Rafters are filled with pigeons, dust gathers on sculptures – we consistently learn at the Biennale that whilst it allows art to sit in [...]