Dispossession

Collateral Event of the 56th International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia

The European Capital of Culture Wrocław 2016 is proud to announce the opening of the exhibition Dispossession, a collateral event of the 56th Venice Biennale. Dispossession takes as its departure point Wroclaw’s post-War history of displacements. The exhibition is guided by the recognition of a universal and atemporal dimension of dispossession in its psychological and material manifestations.

Artists living in Poland, Ukraine and Germany participate in the exhibition. A historical axis of displacements – Lviv-Wroclaw-Dresden – sketched out here serves as a departure point for thinking about contemporary migration in the light of current conflicts that have left hundreds of thousands of people homeless.

Dispossession does not mean only depriving somebody of their property, but also pertains to freeing from evil spirits, an exorcism that is meant to oust unwanted energies.

The exhibition focuses on a home, both in relation to its symbolic and spatial meaning. A home that is abandoned and which carries traces and histories of its former inhabitants; which is longed for and fought for; which can be given and refused; which might mean safety or death.

The exhibition located in the renaissance Palazzo Doná uses domestic spaces, such as bedrooms or a kitchen, to present site-specific installations in order to further complicate a dialogue between artistic intrusions and an intimate context.
Dispossession – curated by Michał Bieniek and Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz – is composed of previously unseen works by ten artists: Manaf Halbouni, Susanne Keichel, Thomas Kilpper, Szymon Kobylarz, Michael Merkel, Dorota Nieznalska, Tomasz Opania, the Open Group, Andriy Sakhaydakovsky and Oksana Zabuzhko.

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