La Biennale di Venezia inaugurated the exhibition "Gulnur Mukazhanova. Memory of Hope", curated by Luigia Lonardelli, in Sala delle Colonne at Ca' Giustinian, headquarters of the Biennale in San Marco, open from 10 December 2024 to 10 February 2025.
The exhibition represents the second stage of the Special Project by La Biennale di Venezia’s Historical Archive, titled "The Wind Makes the Sky. La Biennale di Venezia on the Traces of Marco Polo", which retraces Marco Polo’s travels on the 700th anniversary of his death (1324 – 2024). Istanbul will be the third city touched by the project in the fall of 2025.
During the first stage in Hangzhou – with the exhibition titled "The Perfect Path", inaugurated on November 9th this year at the CAA Art Museum and visited by the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella – the project concentrated on the latest generation of Chinese artists who are searching for their own personal path. This Venetian stage instead considers a geographical area traversed by a lesser-known journey, that of Niccolò and Matteo Polo, Marco’s father and uncle. During their early explorations, they conceived the notion that they could push further east, travelling across the wide-open steppes of Kazakhstan to follow one of the infinite routes that, from Ukek to Bukhara, led to the Far East. The desert areas on the Eurasian border have always constituted a natural border and for thousands of years their populations have been at the centre of a process of mediation connecting the European and Asian areas.
The protagonist of this exhibition, artist Gulnur Mukazhanova, born in Kazakhstan and based in Berlin for over ten years, brings the knowledge and tradition of textile art to Venice. Her artistic practice layers wool, silk fibres and ancient fabrics in a loose and delicate weave that evokes impressions of the Far East, blending decorative motifs and materials that are quite distant, often to the point of dissonance, which her hands marry to achieve harmony.
“Like a waterline, her intervention pervades the entire space –explains the Curator Luigia Lonardelli–, following a design inspired by the sign of infinity and the sinuous lines of the dragon-serpent, an element which in Asian culture conjures the energies of the earth, completely redefining Sala delle Colonne and absorbing its columns within a total reading of the space”.
Like in Hangzhou, this phase in Venice is again accompanied by the stage created by the artist Cevdet Erek from Istanbul, commissioned by La Biennale to follow these travels. In Venice the artist redesigned the stage, presented in the Laboratory of the Arts at Ca’ Giustinian, drawing inspiration from the boatyard space in which it is located: its architecture has been disassembled to highlight its structural elements, exposing its base components which are strewn around the space, before departing again on their journey towards Istanbul, the next stop for "The Wind Makes the Sky".
