ART CITIES:Venice-Damien Hirst, Part I
Damien Hirst’s wide-ranging practice includes installation, sculpture, painting and drawing. Consistently challenging the boundaries between art, science and religion, his visceral, visually arresting work has made him a leading artist of his generation. Hirst explores the tensions and uncertainties at the core of human experience. Love, desire, belief and the struggle of living with the knowledge of death are all investigated, often in unconventional and unexpected ways (Part II).
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Palazzo Grassi Archive
Damien Hirst in the context of 57th Biennale di Venezia, presents the monumental project he’s been working on for almost 10 years “Treasures from the wreck of the Unbelievable” across 5,000 square meters of museum space uniting Palazzo Grassi and Punta Della Dogana. This is the first time that the two Venetian venues of the Pinault Collection are dedicated to a single artist. The exhibition brings together stories, objects, film, and photographs. The story goes back to 2008 when a vast wreckage site was discovered off the coast of East Africa.The finding lent credence to the legend of Cif Amotan II, a freed slave from Antioch, who lived between the mid-first and early-second centuries CE. Ex-slaves were afforded ample opportunities for socio-economic advancement in the Roman Empire through involvement in the financial affairs of their patrons and past masters. The story of Amotan relates that the slave accumulated an immense fortune on the acquisition of his freedom. Bloated with excess wealth, he proceeded to build a lavish collection of artefacts deriving from the lengths and breadths of the ancient world. The freedman’s one hundred fabled treasures were brought together on board a colossal ship, the “Apistos” (translation of the Greek word as: Unbelievable), which was destined for a temple purpose-built by the collector. Yet the vessel foundered, consigning its hoard to the realm of myth and spawning myriad permutations of this story of ambition and avarice, splendour and hubris. The collection lay submerged in the Ocean for 2000 years before the site was discovered in 2008, near the ancient trading ports of Azania at the South-East African coast). Almost a decade after excavations began, this exhibition brings together the works recovered in this find. A number of the sculptures are exhibited prior to undergoing restoration, heavily encrusted in corals and other marine life, at times rendering their forms virtually unrecognizable. A series of Contemporary Museum copies of the recovered artifacts are also on display, which imagine the works in their original, undamaged forms.
Info: Curator: Elena Geuna, Assistan Curators: Federica Ellena and Ilaria Porotto, Palazzo Grassi, Campo San Samuele 323, Venice & Punta Della Dogana, Dorsoduro 2, Venice, Duration: 9/4-3/11/17, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.palazzograssi.it
