Rome via Brooklyn

Word count: 840

A few months ago, my friend Sabrina and I met at the Whitney Biennial, and I told her how I was thinking of doing study abroad in Rome. She told me she had been thinking about going to the Venice Biennale, and I told her if she did that I would meet her there. And here we are!

Sabrina and I have been friends for 7 years, but since she lives in Maryland I unfortunately never get to see her. I love talking about art with her, and I could not have gone to the Biennale with a better person.

I went to Venice when I first arrived in Italy (I will post about it eventually I swear), which now feels like forever ago. So it was nice to go back and have more time, but also to go back solely for the purpose of art.

After a snack-lunch in the park, we started with the Giardini venue, and went around to different pavilions before tackling the main exhibition space. I think we were both so exhausted from the travel day that we had a hard time thinking too critically about much of the things we saw, but I’ll drop in some favorites!

We went back to our hostel, had dinner, and stumbled upon a Red Hot Chile Peppers cover band playing in the lobby, because obviously the Red Hot Chile Peppers are very Italian….

We slept in the next day and then made our way to the Marina Abromovich show, but stumbled upon a small gallery on the way with a show titled Spirits of the Maritime Crossing. I think one of the best parts about the off-site galleries is just how beautiful the spaces they’re exhibited in are, and how they interact with the artworks. It was nice to take a break from the ancient and time travel to the modern, as well as to see the ways that they reflect on each other.

The Abromovic show was at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, which began with a few galleries of Renaissance pieces before we got to the main exhibition space. I’m really not a Renaissance art person, if I was on my own I would have breezed through the first part of the gallery. But Sabrina’s curiosity rubbed off on me, and we had a lot of fun looking up the stories of all the different myths, and paying a bit more attention to things I usually don’t take note of.

We finally made it to the exhibit, titled Transforming Energy. As well as a retrospective on a few of her pieces, it also allowed the visitor to interact with a series of crystal-based artworks, with performance scores guiding you through each experience.

I loved it, it gave me so much to think about, and felt like a reflection on the coursework I’ve done on medieval performance over the past year or so. I especially enjoyed the ironically singular non-crystal piece, a room with a series of chairs sat across from metronomes. I enjoyed the meditativeness of it, as well as thinking about how the piece formed a community of those in the room, syncing up each person’s experience of time.

After the exhibit, we went to the medieval section. I particularly loved a 14th century apocalypse series by Jacobello Alberegno, specifically his depictions of the Whore of Babylon and the many-eyed beasts, namely this cow.

Our goal was to wind our way to the Arsenale Pavillion, but we stopped at so many pavilions and small galleries along the way. The Taiwan Pavilion gets a special mention because it was our favorite. It was an animated film titled Screen Melancholy by Li Yi-Fan, set in a digitized version of the gallery it was shown in, down to the seats we sat in. It was unsettling, funny, and impossible to look away from. We couldn’t stop talking about it the rest of the trip.

We FINALLY arrived at the Arsenale at 5pm so we had to be quick and strategic with what we wanted to see, especially since the Arsenale is so vast. I really loved the pieces that felt all encompassing, like they built a world you could enter just for a moment.

After the exhibits closed, we grabbed dinner and slowly wound our way back to the hostel, where I had a much better night’s sleep than I had the night before. Even though I found out the next day that I somehow missed the Hildegard-inspired Vatican Pavilion, it was still a weekend of beautiful art, and I’m really happy I made the time to go.