TASWIR at the 53rd Venice Biennale 2009

Almut Sh. Bruckstein Çoruh of ha'atelier presents the project and concept of TASWIR within the context of Continental Breakfast at the 53rd Biennale in Venice.

In November 2009, a large scale exhibition called "TASWR – Pictorial Mappings of Modernity and Islam" will take place at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, one of the most impressive exhibition buildings in Europe. Artists from various backgrounds and nationalities, such as Rebecca Horn, Wolfgang Laib, Yayoi Kusama, Walid Raad, Mona Hatoum, or Nalini Malani, among others, are as much participants in this show as are the representatives of classical modernity such as Pablo Picasso or Max Ernst. The show takes its title from an Arabic, Persian, Ottoman word signifying "image" or "image-making".  Based upon the method of Aby Warburg’s associative "Mnemosyne-Project", the "TASWIR" exhibition project creates a diachronic, heterotopous Picture Atlas, including classical artifacts of Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, Chinese and other provenience into a contemporary kaleidoscope of critical contemporary art practice.  The exhibition questions the ethnic, religious, or regional parameters upon which mainstream definitions of both "classical Islamic art" and "Middle Eastern" contemporary art are based. It does so in an admittedly  fragmentary and subjective way, but in cooperation with more than forty artists from various backgrounds and nationalities without any regional categorization other than the parcours that is created by the various poetic themes of the exhibition

Continental Breakfast is a project of the Fourth CEI Venice Forum for Contemporary Art Curators from Central Eastern Europe.

Place: UNESCO Palazzo Zorzi

Vernissage: June, 3rd 2009, 9.30 - 13.00 hrs und 14.30 - 18.00 hrs

The presentation together with Beral Madra (BM Suma) will be at 15 o'clock.

TASWIR is generously supported by the Robert Bosch Foundation and the Allianz Cultural Foundation.