VENICE, ITALY.- Peter Finnemore, Laura Ford and Paul Granjon will represent Wales at this year’s 51st Venice Biennale of Art, opening in June. In addition to the exhibition at the Ex-Birreria, Giudecca, we have a residency by Bedwyr Williams, a partnership between Wales at Venice and Cywaith Cymru . Artworks Wales.

Peter Finnemore was born in Llanelli, Wales in 1963 and studied at Glasgow School of Art and Michigan University. He has exhibited in Britain as well as in the Netherlands, Switzerland, the USA, France and Croatia. Peter Finnemore’s new work for Venice is a 3-screen video installation that investigates themes of memory and identity in all its complexity.

Laura Ford was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1961. She studied at the Bath Academy of Art and Chelsea School of Art in London where she now lives and works. She has exhibited widely in Britain and abroad and is represented by Houldsworth Gallery, London. Ford’s sculptures, often part human, part animal, resemble strange hybrid creatures. For Somewhere Else she has created a series of new works, together entitled Glory Glory and one other solitary creature called Beast.

Paul Granjon was born in Lyon, France in 1965 and has lived in Cardiff for ten years. He founded Z Productions (http://www.zprod.org) in 1988 before graduating from l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, France. Solo shows include ZLab and Z Food Across the World which both toured extensively. Paul Granjon has created a Robotarium for Somewhere Else - a sort of robot zoo where we see three automatons going about their daily life.

Born in St Asaph, Wales in 1974, Bedwyr Williams now lives and works near Caernarfon, Gwynedd, following studies at Central St Martins School of Art, London and Ateliers, Arnhem, Netherlands. Creating work in several media, he has exhibited in Britain and abroad and won a Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Art in 2004.

Bedwyr Williams is ‘our man in Venice’, intrepid detective, reporter, non-participant observer, loose cannon on the island of Giudecca. He has been stationed in a studio overlooking the garden of the Ex-Birreria taking up the challenge of his residency, armed only with a trusty camera and laptop and a seriously black sense of humour. The residency has inspired the creation of a book, Basta (Enough) in which Bedwyr observes the strange, the mundane and the obvious around him while critiquing what he is doing.

Karen MacKinnon, Curator said of the selected artists ‘from that ever-elusive somewhere else, somewhere outside the inside, they reveal a clearer sense of our contemporary condition.’