Overcoming: Art Practices for the New Normal

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, with the participation of Swatch Art Peace Hotel, presents Overcoming: Art Practices for the New Normal, a series of four workshops led by four artists devoted to public art and social practice, who employ an authentic, credible, and transparent approach to involve Generation Z, a young audience between 16 and 25 years of age in a process of change and emancipation. Current circumstances, including social distancing, restricted access to public spaces, new rules for gatherings, and remote meetings, have redefined interpersonal relationships. Four workshops will challenge creative and social processes for a “new normal” and overcome the limits imposed by circumstances.

Artists Jan Vormann, Stefano Ogliari Badessi, known as S.O.B., Alice Pasquini, and Cecilia Jansson will offer four points of view and four distinctive languages including sculpture, installation, street art, and drawing respectively. They will challenge their own practice with workshops that encourage actual or metaphorical interaction and exchange among participants, strengthen the sense of citizenship, and consolidate values such as participation, solidarity, and community. “Serving the future instead of recording the past” was one of Peggy Guggenheim’s goals at Art of This Century, her New York museum-gallery, and today it becomes the guiding motto of a project which challenges present circumstances. The four workshops of social practice will use a fresh, dynamic, and contemporary vocabulary to create an interactive dialogue with a young audience. These will take place between October 2020 and January 2021 and will be free. Three days of in-person workshops will be introduced by meetings via the Zoom platform. The in-person workshops will be held in Venice in full compliance with Covid-19 containment rules.

In addressing the issues of the contemporary world through the lens of art, Overcoming: Art Practices for the New Normal is part of the collaboration, which started in 2018, between the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and ASviS, the Italian Alliance for Sustainable Development that promotes the 17 Goals of the United Nations 2030 agenda. The project focuses on quality education, goal number four of the United Nations 2030 agenda.

“In 1942 in New York, at the height of the Second World War, Guggenheim inaugurated the museum-gallery Art of This Century, which she considered «a center where artists will be welcome and where they can feel they are cooperating in establishing a research laboratory for new ideas.» Art of This Century soon became the meeting place for different generations of artists, namely the representatives of the European avant-garde who had fled the war and totalitarian regimes, and the artists who would give rise to the New York School. Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, which now houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, was also a meeting place for international artists, writers and intellectuals during the thirty years that Guggenheim lived there. I am pleased that the museum remains a place of experimentation, exchange and encounters where different art practices and skills meet, thanks to accessible resources such as the museum itself and its works of art that are limitless sources of inspiration and beauty,” said Director Karole P. B. Vail.

“We are happy to collaborate on this project, which will offer young adults the opportunity to establish a reciprocal relation with the artists involved. The relation will be factual, as all workshops are, and it will also offer direct access to the artists and their creativity. Everyone will learn a lot from these meetings while also having a good time. This is certainly a fundamental aspect. If in addition to having learned something new, young people come out of these workshops with the ambition to overcome the present situation while having some fun, then we will have succeeded in creating a great experience,” said Carlo Giordanetti, CEO of Swatch Art Peace Hotel.

Overcoming will begin on October 1, with a four-day workshop with German artist Jan Vormann, Castles Made of Glass. Traditional solutions have to be adapted constantly to ever-changing paradigms, new solutions have to be found at a steady pace to keep up with contemporary challenges, and the public discourse needs to be reevaluated and renegotiated on almost a daily basis. The workshop will review the means of communication in public spaces, specifically through glass as a material. Participants will explore all the properties of glass, its beauty, either shattered or unscathed, and its ability to allow for transparency or to obstruct the view. The second appointment on October 29-31 will feature the Italian artist S.O.B. Stefano Ogliari Badessi. His workshop, Who Looks at What?, will examine the relationship between the city of Venice and water. The workshop will involve participants in the development and creation of an installation of found materials that will consist of two “floating eyes” to be towed along the canals. On November 27-29, Italian street artist Alice Pasquini will discuss her art and involve participants in the workshop Beyond the Wall: Art and Context. This will be an opportunity for reflection on urban transformation and recovery through the study of Street Art techniques and the elaboration of one or more works of public art. Swedish artist Cecilia Jansson will complete the series in January with Explore the Distance, which will look at the medium of drawing and at the human body as one’s measuring instrument and limit.

The collaboration with Swatch Art Peace Hotel allows the participation of two emerging international artists, S.O.B and Cecilia Jansson, past recipients of the artist residency designed by Swatch. Founded in 2011 by Swatch President Nick Hayek, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel brings together artists from various disciplines — dance, music, performance, photography, video art, visual arts, and creative writing — and gives them the opportunity to live and work for a few months in Shanghai. The Swatch Art Peace Hotel has hosted 370 artists from over 50 countries so far. This art community has turned the artist residency into a laboratory for contemporary creative experimentation and cultural exchange in Shanghai. Over the past thirty years Swatch developed a close connection with art and supported the creation of a place and a community for its free creative expression. The Swatch Art Peace Hotel translates such interest into a place of artistic freedom. Hence the wish to support the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and its values as a long-term corporate supporter of Guggenheim Intrapresæ and, in 2020, with this collaboration which focuses on and supports current art practices.

Workshops calendar