Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen created a huge sculpture of a woman seating in a giant airline seat at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale, to give life again to the people to whom those clothes once belonged and whose voices have vanished in the age of homogenization and globalization.

The 58th International Art Exhibition of Venice Art Biennale opened its doors to the public in Venice, Italy. This year's theme, titled "May You Live In Interesting Times", curated by Ralph Rugoff, serves "as a kind of guide for how to live and think in interesting times." The 2019 Venice Art Biennale was opened to the public on May 11 and can be visited until Sunday November 24, 2019, at the Giardini and the Arsenale.

The 2019 Venice Art Biennale highlights artworks whose forms function in part to call attention to what forms conceal and the multifarious purposes that they fulfil. 

"From the acceleration of climate change to the resurgence of nationalist agendas across the globe, from the pervasive impact of social media to the growing disparity of wealth, contemporary matters of concern are addressed in many of the works in this exhibition," said Ralph Rugoff. 

"But let us acknowledge at the outset that art is more than a document of its times."

Exhibited at the entrance of Arsenale, an installation, called Trojan, features a giant woman welcoming visitors dressed with an immerse clothed-fabric seating in a giant airline seat. 

The seat is also made of discarded clothes, bent over in a pose that we know to be the one that prepares a passenger for a plane crash, was at the front of a vehicle - which could be a plane, or perhaps, a Trojan horse?.

Xiuzhen's installation reflects the excessive development, consumption and globalization that largely defined post-1989 China. When it considered a terrorist attacking to a plane, or the Trojan threatening the Greeks, the artist deeply focused attention on threats to a population from one machine, be it of present or ancient times. According to the artist, technology is always a threat to individuals in society.

In her works, she uses soft textiles with an array of items – often of drastically contrasting textures and connotations – such as suitcases, concrete fragments, debris, metals, and industrial objects.

Best known for her works that incorporate second-hand objects, Yin utilizes recycled materials such as sculptural documents of memory, she seeks to personalize objects and allude to the lives of specific individuals, which are often neglected in the drive toward excessive urbanization, rapid modern development and the growing global economy. 

The artist explains, "In a rapidly changing China, ‘memory’ seems to vanish more quickly than everything else. That’s why preserving memory has become an alternative way of life."

The Exhibition is divided into two separate presentations, Proposition A in the Arsenale and Proposition B in the Giardini’s Central Pavilion, comprising 79 artists from all over the world.

The Exhibition includes 90 National Participations in the historic Pavilions at the Giardini, at the Arsenale and in the city centre of Venice. Four countries will be participating for the first time at the Biennale Arte: Ghana, Madagascar, Malaysia and Pakistan. The Dominican Republic participates for the first time in Biennale Arte with its own national pavilion.

All images © World Architecture Community 

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