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Posted on October 20th 2022
Venice Biennale Art Trip - October 2022
This October we had the pleasure of taking 15 art students from Years 11 and 13 to Venice to explore the 59th art Biennale.
The Venice biennale is one of the most prestigious international cultural events, this year hosting 213 artists from 58 countries, and showcasing a more diverse range of artists than ever before.
Apart from visiting the wonders of the Biennale, Venice is also an incredible place to experience with its myriad of walkways that criss-cross over and run alongside the interlocking canal system, and what better start could we have had than being brought into Venice, and to our hotel, by private water taxis!
This is us arriving by water taxi!
Once in Venice and after unpacking, we took an afternoon walk from our hotel along the Grand Canal to St Mary of Health, a beautiful church that looks over the Grand Canal, to get an idea of the Venice landscape. Eating ice creams and sitting along the waterfront, it was a great way to start the trip.
Day 2 - Exploring the Bienalle
Our second day in Venice was all about exploring the Biennale. The morning was spent at the Giardini della Biennale, which houses 29 pavilions each representing a different country, each country selects one artist to represent them.
Sonia Boyce was the artist representing Britain this year with her piece ‘Feeling Her Way’. This was a digital installation that immersed the viewer in the sounds of black female vocalists exploring themes of power, freedom and vulnerability.
Other pavilion’s that stood out were the Republic of Korea, with artist Yunchul Kim’s techno-physical installation that continuously reacted to physical events, such as the waterways of Venice, creating alien like sculptures that morphed as you watched them, Denmark’s Uffe Isolotto’s hyper-realistic hybrid world captured many of the student’s imagination, with the real-life models of centaurs telling a beguiling drama that is left to the viewer to construct.
The afternoon was spent at the Arsenale which is a huge exhibition space, further showcasing contemporary artists from around the globe who explore a variety of themes from feminism to the climate crisis, identity politics to AI. The scale and imagination of the entries was incredible, large installations that immersed the viewer into new, exciting and troubling worlds, reaching deep into the human psyche to question what it is to be a human being in 2022, and drawing awareness to so many issues and contexts from around the world. With such a range of work on offer there was something to inspire everyone and lots to make us think and re-think our relationship to our history and the world.
Sketching on the way to the Biennale
We walked 24.000 steps on this day
Uffe Isolotto - Denmark
Group picture after visiting the Biennale
Yunchul Kim - Korea
Simone Leigh - USA
Firelei Báez - Dominican Republic
Laetitia Ky - Ivory Coast
Preciou Okoyomon - USA
Day 3 - Peggy Guggenheim Collection
On the last day we took a more leisurely pace, once again walking to get ice creams and taking time to sketch the landscape. We visited the Peggy Guggenheim collection, which houses her personal collection of Western art from the early twentieth century. It is also situated in a beautiful position on the Grande canal where you can sit and watch the boats go by.
Our final stop was the Gallery Academia which houses an extensive collection of byzantine and early renaissance art. Students also took in the splendour of the mighty building, the gilded ceilings and grandeur of the marbled walls, whilst sketching from artwork often hundreds of years old.
Sketching at St Mary of Health Church
Sketching at the Guggenheim
Ceiling in the Gallery Academia
Cima da Conegliano: Madonna and Child on the Throne (1515)
After three days our trip came to an end. It was a joy to see the students’ experience of Venice unfold over the time we had there, which will have hopefully left students inspired and ready to immerse themselves back into their GCSE and A’ Level projects when we return to school.
We send our thanks to Adaptable travel who made the planning of the trip a huge success, and also to Phil Allison who secured us free tickets to the Biennale.
Clare Stanhope, Head of Art
