Holy See to exhibit for first time at Venice's Biennale Arts Festival
(Vatican Radio) The Holy See is participating for the first time ever with its own
pavilion at Venice’s 55th Biennale D’Arte, an international arts festival held
every two years in the lagoon city. At a news conference in the Vatican on Tuesday,
the President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, and
other speakers described the reasons for the Holy See’s participation and spoke of
the theme chosen for its exhibit. Susy Hodges reports.
Listen to the report
whose text is written below:
“In his intervention,
Cardinal Ravasi said the council that he heads holds contemporary art at the heart
of its interests because it is one of the most important cultural expressions of recent
decades.
The Cardinal told Vatican Radio that the Holy See wishes to rebuild
an interrupted dialogue, or what was a kind of non-consensual divorce, that took place
between art and faith, especially in the last century. It’s for this reason, he continued,
that we want to try to create an authentic dialogue between religion and contemporary
art that has new and dramatic forms of expression. Cardinal Ravasi described this
upcoming participation in Venice’s Biennale festival as an attempt to reconnect
those very ancient and close links between art and faith in the world of culture.
The
theme chosen for the Holy See’s exhibit is “Creation, Uncreation and Re-Creation inspired
by the story told in the Book of Genesis. The curator of the project was Professor
Antonio Paolucci, Director of the Vatican Museums who also spoke at the news conference
in the Vatican. He said a group of internationally renowned artists had been selected
to illustrate the chosen theme, including the American artist Lawrence Carroll and
the Czech photographer Josef Koudelka.
The Venice Biennale opens this
years on June 1st and will run until November 24th with artists
from scores of countries around the world exhibiting their work.”