In Venice, a Mexican artist staged a performance dedicated to Donetsk, Ukraine

Performance, dedicated to Donetsk/Screen from the video

On the eve of the opening of the Venice Biennale, the Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Gemmer staged a performance called “Agglomerate of Pulse” dedicated to the city of Donetsk. This event does not belong to the official program of the festival.

The event took place on April 17. In his speech, the artist referred to his installation “Pulse Room”, presented in 2013 at the Center of Contemporary Art “Isolation” in Donetsk. The performer announced this on his Facebook page.

During the exhibition in Donetsk, Lozano-Gemmer recorded the heartbeats of over a hundred visitors to “Isolation”. Three months after the completion of the project, the Russian military occupied Donetsk and also shelled the “Isolation” premises.

This year, during a performance at the Biennale, Lozano-Gemmer invited visitors to “add” their heartbeat to the audio recordings he made in Donetsk, creating a living monument to the fallen. Each new record displaced one of the old ones. This is how the artist seeks to remind about the need to remember the deaths in occupied Donetsk.

Heartbeat records were stored on special technical equipment that reproduces the rhythm of the heart on lamps attached to it. After adding a new heartbeat, local performer Gregorio Magnifici, to whom this equipment was attached, walked the streets of Venice.

Venice Biennale officially starts on April 20 and ends on November 24. The main theme of the 60th international art exhibition was Foreigners Everywhere. Its curator was the artistic director of the Museum of São Paulo, Adriano Pedrosa. In total, 90 national pavilions will be presented at the biennial, in particular, Benin, Ethiopia, Tanzania and East Timor will take part in the event for the first time. And Nicaragua, Panama and Senegal will present their own pavilions for the first time.

Ukraine will be represented at the 2024 Venice Biennale by four art projects united by the concept of Weaving Nets. The metaphor of weaving a masking net contains the idea of ​​the joint action of horizontal connections and the union of different experiences.