About

What is the Venice Biennale?

The Venice Biennale is an enormous, biannual exhibition of global contemporary art spread across temporary sites throughout the city of Venice as well as a series of permanent exhibition venues: national pavilions featuring artists selected by each participating country (in the Giardini and various locales around Venice) and a large-scale exhibition of international art selected by the Biennale curator (at the Arsenale and the Padiglione Centrale). This year marks the 55th Venice Biennale and is curated by Okwui Enwezor with a theme of “All the World’s Futures.” While the art biennale is the longest-running and most prominent (est. 1893), Venice now hosts biennale exhibitions devoted to cinema, architecture, dance, music, and theatre in alternating years.

What is this website?

This site showcases the student-led research projects in Prof. Kate Mondloch’s “Global Currents in Contemporary Art and the Venice Biennale” course at the University of Oregon that took the 2015 Venice Biennale art exhibition as its central case study. In addition to studying the art on display, we used the exhibition to explore contemporary social, economic, and political topics such as globalization, national identity, cultural politics and tourism, and the impact of new technologies. As part of this effort, students developed multimedia resources documenting twelve national pavilions in their artistic, political, and social contexts.

Each multimedia research project is organized by region and by country; projects are accessible via the regions and drop-down menus posted at the top of this page. Multimedia content for each national pavilion includes: a video summary documenting each national pavilion and its art, an interactive illustrated google earth map*, a curated youtube video play list, and an annotated bibliography. *Please note that you will need google earth software installed on your computer to view the google earth maps. Getting started with google earth.

We hope you enjoy exploring the site!