All the World’s Futures: The UK in Venice

Founded in 1895, the biennale will be celebrating its 120th anniversary; and the 89 participating countries are sure to make this a rich survey of art with diverse perspectives. The UK has strong representation with presentations by some of today's leading artists. ArtRabbit congratulates all those participating in this year’s Biennale and would like to especially highlight those from the UK.

Great Britain at Venice

Sarah Lucas
Viale Giardini Pubblici

Sarah Lucas is considered a core member of the YBAs (Young British Artists) and is well known for her sculptures and photographs of food and ordinary household objects appearing like human body parts.

Lucas was part of the first wave of what came to be known as the YBAs, exhibiting alongside other students of Goldsmiths art college in the now legendary Freeze exhibition in 1988. She quickly established a signature bawdy style – her first two solo shows were titled The Whole Joke and Penis Nailed to a Board, while a 1999 self-portrait pictured her wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with fried eggs over her breasts. “The embarrassment factor can be quite important,” she has said, “because then you know you’ve touched a nerve, even with yourself.”

The executive director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Gregor Muir, who was on the selection panel, said Lucas had “affirmed her status as a leading international artist” with exhibitions around the world in recent years. “Having consistently pushed the limits of her practice, there’s a sense that Lucas – seemingly more active than ever – is coming into her own.

Scotland at Venice

Graham Fagen
Palazzo Fontana
 Cannaregio

Graham Fagen is one of the most influential artists working in Scotland today. Throughout his career, Fagen has regularly incorporated elements of his own national, cultural and social identity into his work. Often using the artifice of theatre for the development of a narrative, Fagen will use the 16th-century palazzo as an historic backdrop for his presentation, choreographing an entirely new body of work across four rooms of the palazzo to create a path through which visitors can effectively become performers within the piece.

Drawing on his long-term commitment to collaboration, Fagen will bring together internationally renowned composer Sally Beamish, the musicians of Scottish Ensemble, reggae singer and musician Ghetto Priest and music producer Adrian Sherwood to realise an ambitious installation. Sound that draws on very different musical traditions—Scottish folk song, classical music and reggae—will pervade the rooms of Palazzo Fontana.

An illustrated publication which documents the breadth of Fagen’s career, including his presentation for Scotland + Venice 2015, will be published by Hospitalfield to coincide with the opening of the exhibition in Venice. Texts include contributions from Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain, and Katrina Brown, Director of The Common Guild, alongside an interview with Scottish novelist Louise Welsh and Graham Fagen, with an introduction from Lucy Byatt, Director of Hospitalfield.

Ireland in Venice

Sean Lynch. Adventure: Capital
Artiglierie of the Arsenale


The work Adventure: Capital traces a journey from myth to minimalism around Ireland and Britain. Combining sculptural, video and archival elements, Adventure: Capital will be Lynch’s most ambitious project to date, bringing together Greek river gods; public art at regional airports; quarries and the art of stone-carving; an abandoned sculpture in Cork; and a traffic roundabout, on a storytelling journey that unravels notions of value and the flow of capital through an anthropological lens.

Sean Lynch forensically investigates anecdotes, hearsay and half-truths, unearthing marginalised stories that have been overlooked or fallen by the wayside. His idiosyncratic, yet meticulous research and fieldwork, absorbs these disparate fragments—social and cultural blind spots—and forms them into alternative arrangements of history, opening up new understandings of our world. For Adventure: Capital, Lynch’s narrative inhabits a wandering spirit, encountering the hegemonic structures and entwined flows of capital, migration, and neoliberal spatiality. Through his ethnographic methodology and allegory, Lynch playfully evokes the Irish bardic tradition, interrogating the complex motifs that connect an individual to a historically determinate environment and society.

Particular subjects and events have been resurrected through Lynch’s previous enquiries including: Joseph Beuys’s visit to Ireland in 1974; Celtic Revival architecture; and the mythical island of HyBrazil. Recent acclaimed projects have seen Lynch uncovering illicit sculptures made by Irish stone-carvers, the O’Shea brothers, in Oxford; exploring socially conservative reactions and vandalism to modern art in Ireland; working with the fast-food outlet on the site of the first museum in Britain; and locating repurposed remnants of the infamous DeLorean car factory at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

56th International Art Exhibition: All the World’s Futures
Venice Biennale
9 May - 22 November 2015
www.labiennale.org