Pedro Neves Marques will represent Portugal at the Venice Art Biennale in 2022
Portuguese artist Pedro Neves Marques will represent Portugal at the 59th Venice Art Biennale, to be held from April 23 to November 27, 2022, announced the Directorate-General for the Arts (DGArtes).
The performance will take place through the project “Vampires in Space”, by Pedro Neves Marques, presented by the curator duo João Mourão and Luís Silva.
“Vampires in Space”, selected in the scope of the competition promoted by DGArtes, has “the form of a narrative installation that transforms Palazzo Franchetti through films, installation elements, poems and scenography into an unexpected spaceship inhabited by vampires”, release the statement of DGArtes released today.
“The proposal uses the figure and expectations of what a ‘vampire’ is, to address issues of gender identity, sexuality and ‘queer’ reproduction, as well as non-nuclear family forms. The installation will contrast with the Gothic Venetian style of the Palazzo Franchetti with a scientific, fantastic and speculative sensibility typical of Neves Marques’ work, “concludes the description of the project.
The Franchetti Palace, on the banks of the Grand Canal in Venice, which receives an official Portuguese representation commissioned by DGArtes, is the new Portuguese exhibition space at the biennial, for which a protocol of use was signed for the next three years.
Pedro Neves Marques, who lives and works in New York, is a visual artist, director and writer.
He is one of the participants of the Gothenburg International Art Biennale, which ends next Sunday, and is one of the finalists for the 6th edition of the Art from the Generation of the Future award, to be announced in December, as part of the exhibition on display in Kiev, at Ukraine, which will close on February 27, 2022.
Last year, Neves Marques won the Coelho de Ouro award for best short film “A Mordida” at the Mix Brasil Festival of Culture and Diversity, in São Paulo, Brazil, which was also nominated for the awards of the European Academy of Cinema 2020, after the distinction at the Go Short ‘shorts’ festival, in the Netherlands.
The short film premiered at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival and screened at festivals in New York, Glasgow, Winterthur and Moscow, among others, in a total of 40 selections for national and international film festivals and shows.
Pedro Neves Marques is the author of the essay “Contamination by capital: Violence against the land, violence against our bodies”, published for Punkto Magazine.
He was also one of the 69 guest artists at the Gwangju Contemporary Art Biennale, which took place between February 26 and May 9, this year, in that city in South Korea.
The 59th Venice Art Biennale will take place under the theme “O Leite dos Sonhos”, curated by the Italian Cecilia Alemani.
The designation of the next edition of the exhibition is inspired by a book by Leonora Carrington, in which, as Cecilia Alemani says, “a theoretical surrealist artist a magical world where life is constantly rethought through the prism of the imagination, and where everyone can change, to be transformed, to become something and someone else”.
The limited competition for choosing the curatorial and exhibition project for the representation of Portugal, at the 59th Venice Art Biennale, was opened by DGArtes, last August.
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