VENICE.- The Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, and Flash Art magazine are presenting Heterotopia Ⅰ, an installation by Peter Halley on the occasion of the 2019 Venice Biennale.

The installation is being held in the Academy of Fine Art’s exhibition space located in one of Venice’s historic salt warehouses, Magazzini del Sale, no. 3, at Dorsoduro 264, Zattere.

The exhibition is curated by Gea Politi, director of Flash Art, and will run through August 10.

Using the forty-meter-long exhibition space, Halley has assembled a sequence of eight interconnected rooms that employ digitally-printed wall murals, a varying palette of artificial lighting, and three-dimensional objects to create a hermetic, coded heterotopia – a term borrowed from Michel Foucault, who defined heterotopia as a differentiated, bordered space created for a special purpose that both mirrors and defines itself as separate from everyday spaces.

Halley has invited three artists to collaborate with him on this installation. Lauren Clay and Andrew Kuo have each created wall murals for one of the eight rooms. R.M. Fischer has constructed a large-scale, totemic sculpture which inhabits the final chamber. Additionally, original wall text was provided by writer Elena Sorokina.

Halley’s installation both echoes themes present in his previous work while adding new elements of architectural pastiche specific to its setting in Venice.

The exhibition has the kind support of MSGM. Massimo Giorgetti, creative director of the brand, has conceived a capsule collection MSGM/Flash Art, available only at the Magazzini del Sale in Venice.

Peter Halley (born 1953) is a central figure in the Neo-Conceptualist movement. Since the 1980s, Peter Halley has employed the language of geometric abstraction in paintings that explore the organization of social space in the digital age. Halley is also regarded as a writer, the former publisher of INDEX magazine, and a teacher, having served as Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale University School of Art from 2002 to 2011. Halley lives and works in New York City.
The set up of Heterotopia Ⅰ was made by FusinaLab.