Summer 2011

During this summer i have been travelling a lot.

The trips very useful to my studies would be a trip to the Lyon biennale and the Venice biennale.

I thought that the biennale in Lyon was somehow depressing for me as i like bright colours in the works and there were almost none colourful works although Lyon is a beautiful city and i have enjoyed the experience altogether as there were a couple of other exhibitions i went to, like ht exhibition "Les enfants terribles" that was of lowbrow and pop-surreallist art that i actually adore! Especially i have enjoyed works by Caia Coopman and Jeff Soto. There i have also met Nicholas Thomas, one of the artists in the show, and the main curator too. It is useful to talk to people already in the industry i think, you get to fid out a lot of interesting things.

The Venice biennale was absolutely great! I did not like my country's exhibit but most of the others were good. The main pavilions curated by the biennale team were the best though, there were mainly works of already well known artists. I think that one of my favourite works was a work by Urs Fisher.

He did a sculpture out of wax (copy of a really old venetian statue) and actually lit it up as a candle. To his calculations, it has to burn until the end of the biennale. You should have seen it - the contradiction between the classic sculpture and its beautiful form to how it melts and chaotically drips down slowly disappearing... Also there was a show "a thousand ways to defeat entropy" where a frien of our family artist Alexander Ponomarev was exhibiting, they had a great opening with some opera singing, very inspiring experience!