THE WORLD Madrid
Madrid
Updated Friday, March 15, 2024-17:08
The Vatican pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale will include works by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan along with eight other artists who will occupy
a space in the women's prison on the island of Giudecca
.
Prison inmates will help create some of the artwork.
Cattelan is known for his controversial sculptures and installations.
Seeing him among the artists who will represent the Vatican, it is impossible not to remember
La Nona Ora
, a 1999 piece in which a life-size wax figure representing Pope John Paul II appeared on the ground, struck down by a meteorite.
Cattelan has also depicted Adolf Hitler kneeling, several dead animals and homeless people with a hyper-realistic appearance.
In 2019, at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, the Perrotin gallery premiered
Comedian
, a banana taped to a wall by Cattelan.
The work sold for $120,000 but an artist named David Datuna ate the fruit.
The second version of
Comedian
, exhibited at the Leeum Art Museum in Seoul in 2023, also ended up ingested by a South Korean student.
The Vatican has commissioned Cattelan to direct a 12-minute video installation, in which the artist
will collaborate with actress Zoe Saldaña and her husband, the Italian director and producer Marco Perego
.
The Giudecca dams will act in the film.
Others will contribute photographs of themselves as children for a piece by French artist Claire Tabouret.
The Vatican has also invited Lebanese-American artist Simone Fattal to create an installation that will use poems written by inmates.
The exhibition, titled
With My Eyes,
is curated by
Chiara Parisi
, director of the Center Pompidou-Metz, and by Bruno Racine, former president of the National Library of France.
It can be seen between April 20 and November 24.
Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Vatican's Dicastery for Culture and Education, said at a news conference that the decision to install Ward 2024 at the Giudecca women's prison was "
unexpected"
but honored the teachings of the Gospel.
"
With My Eyes
wants to focus our attention on the importance of how, responsibly, we conceive, express and build our social, cultural and spiritual coexistence," the cardinal wrote.
"
Seeing with one's own eyes gives vision a unique status
, since it involves us directly in reality and makes us not spectators, but witnesses. This is what religious and artistic experience have in common: none of the two stops valuing the totality and anti-conformist implication of the subject".