La Biennale di Venezia. 50ª Esposizione internazionale d'arte. Sogni e conflitti. La dittatura dello spettatore

The Biennale di Venezia presents the 50th International Art Exhibition, directed by Francesco Bonami.
Dreams and Conflicts; The Dictatorship of the Viewer.

This year's Biennale di Venezia's 50th International Art Exhibition presents an "exhibition of exhibitions" throughout the spaces of the Arsenale, the historic Giardini della Biennale, the Museo Correr in San Marco, and various projects within the city of Venice to be included in the section Interludes, making it bigger than any previous Biennale Exhibitions.

Francesco Bonami has strived to exploit the unique nature of the Biennale di Venezia's exhibition structure in order to organize a major international exhibition that takes into consideration the diverse characteristics of the world of contemporary art. To achieve this, the exhibition will be composed of different projects (like islands in an archipelago), each with its own identity and autonomy.

The End of the XXth Century
At the last 49th Visual Arts Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia Harald Szeemann presented the symbol of the show-the masterpiece entitled "The End of the XXth Century" by the German artist Joseph Beuys. This work signalled the end of the cycle of large scale thematic exhibitions which began in the late 1960's. As a result, the vision of the 'omnipresent' curator transformed, forcing him/ her to acknowledge the broad and fragmented field of contemporary art. It became clear that any notion of the 'global,' (either in a formal or discursive sense) as driven by the last three decades of curatorial practice, could no longer be framed by the sole vision of the curator/ author.

The 50th Visual Arts Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia considers this phenomenon as a starting point to reflect on the very idea of the 'large scale international exhibition,' questioning the validity of this form as representative of the current status of contemporary art, its multiplicity of languages, and the inevitable autonomy of new geographic, political and cultural contexts.