Seminar with Roger Palmer

I thought Roger Palmer's seminar was the best to date in the series, 'Artist, Space, Practice', as the Director of the Fine Art Programme had really put together a well structured and informed talk about three artists, who had featured in the Venice Biennial, and Palmer had an obvious interest in what he was talking about.

The Venice Biennial is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years (in odd years) in Venice. The formal Biennale is based in the Giardini Park, which houses 30 permanent national pavilions. However Palmer focused on three Aperto events, i.e. an exhibition that coincides with the Biennial and one that is usually put together by artists of a national origin that does not feature in one of the permanent national pavilions.

Monica Sosnowska (b. 1972) represented Poland

- Her work, 'Poloni' (roughly translated 1 to 1), refers to the scale of the work and has sport connotations

- Sosnowska took a pre-fabricated metal framework, which was a standard frame for Polish council houses during the Cold War and had a construction company in Warsaw build the structure.

- She created this full-scale, three storey unit of social housing in the industrial space and then had the metal frame squashed so to fit within the Italian pavilion

- Within the space in the Biennial, the raw structure seemed to be squashed by the high architecture of the Venetian walls and floors of the pavilion building

- The intense collaboration between the artists and the technicians, who had to do numerous crushing tests, was amazing, as the metal frame was actually 'stuffed' within an existing building

- The deliberate distortion of the shape and form was incredibly melancholy and it seemed to reflect how newly allowed countries are having to be squashed into exhibition spaces all around Venice

Angela Ferreira

'Maison Tropicale'