HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND.- ArtSway is delighted to announce that, following its success in 2005, the New Forest Pavilion will be returning to Venice at the 52nd International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia, as an official collateral event. New Forest Pavilion brings together six international artists whose work explores, in a variety of methodologies and approaches, the experience of transformation, modification and change.

New Forest Pavilion introduces these six artists’ work to art professionals and a global audience, demonstrating how a rural gallery in the South of England contributes to artists’ development. The artists exhibiting at New Forest Pavilion are Simon Faithfull, Beate Gütschow, Anne Hardy, Igloo (Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli) and Melanie Manchot - who have all previously undertaken residencies at ArtSway - and Stanza, selected by SCAN (Southern Collaborative Arts Network) which is hosted at ArtSway.

Simon Faithfull exploits journeys that veer between the radical and the mundane, demonstrating a movement from the commonplace into the extraordinary or other-worldly. Faithfull takes a sometimes astonishing approach to invention and creation and was the first visual artist to undertake an ACE International Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey, sending daily drawings back to the UK using a Palm Pilot. Beate Gütschow’s work explores how the exterior landscape becomes a focus for utopian or dystopic ideas. Gütschow creates virtual landscapes, that refer to artistic conventions of the past using photo and video montage, and has recently exhibited as part of the European Month of Photography. She was awarded the Ars Viva Prize in 2006. Anne Hardy’s large scale photo works present spaces constructed within her studio. These fictional renderings of the underside of our world explore the contemporary human psyche, the structures and systems we set up in order to understand our world, and their inherent fragility. Hardy recently exhibited at Maureen Paley and was the first recipient of the Laing Solo award, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, UK, in 2004. Igloo make intermedia artworks, exploring the poetics of time, space & natural phenomena, questioning the reality of nature and how it can be influenced by individual experience & collective mythology. Employing many of the tools of the Military Entertainment Complex, they investigate the role of the ’real’ in virtual environments. Igloo are Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli who have earned a string of accolades including a NESTA award, a Royal Opera House Commission and a BAFTA nomination.

Melanie Manchot’s work across film, photography and video tugs at the threads that hold identities together and by which we differentiate ourselves from others, filming the transformations of subjects as they reveal and become strange to themselves. Manchot attempts to locate her investigations within an area of constructed activity, or the staged documentary, which can occur at the threshold between real life and fabricated situations. She exhibited at The Photographers’ Gallery, London in 2005, and is currently exhibiting widely in Europe and the US. Stanza is a London based British artist who specialises in net art, networked spaces, installations and performances. His works explore artistic and technical opportunities to enable new aesthetic perspectives, experiences and perceptions within the context of architecture, data spaces and online environments. Stanza is the recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Creative Fellowship 2006-09 for the project The Emergent City. ArtSway is the centre for contemporary art in the New Forest, the National Park in the South of England originally created as a hunting area by William the Conquerer in 1079. ArtSway’s rural location makes it a unique place to engage with contemporary art, and the Residency Programme, which has been in place since 2001, has offered artists unfettered time for research and creativity in a stimulating critical environment. New Forest Pavilion aims to explore, promote and exchange ArtSway’s approach as a public organisation engaged in providing legacy support and new opportunities for artists it has previously worked with.

For the 52nd International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia, the Palazzo Zenobio is also hosting the Scottish Pavilion, The Istituto Italo- Latino Americano Pavilion, one of the Australian Pavilion projects and the Armenian Pavilion. Mark Segal, ArtSway Director, comments: “ArtSway is very excited to be showing such high calibre artists at the 52nd International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia. To be able to profile our work and that of these artists before such a wide audience is a real privilege, and I would like to thank our collaborators, funders and sponsors for their insight in supporting the project.”

A full colour catalogue will accompany the exhibition with the following contributions: Martin Coomer on Simon Faithfull, Anna-Catharina Gebbers on Beate Gütschow, John Slyce on Anne Hardy, David Thorp on Melanie Manchot, Colm Lally and Cecilia Wee on igloo, and Charlotte Frost on Stanza.