Rocking the Venice Biennale--MIT Style

A new multimedia installation—only a whisper of an idea now—will represent the United States at the world’s prestigious contemporary art event next May. That’s so MIT—and so fitting for Joan Jonas, an MIT professor emerita.

“All my work is about the present,” the 77-year-old artist told the Boston Globe. “I don’t take a period piece and try to reproduce it.”

Joan Jonas’s The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things

Jonas, who has taught performance and 3D art at MIT since 1998, will deliver her fresh vision and forceful images in some combination of performance art, drawings, text, and video at La Biennale di Venezia 56th International Art Exhibition. Her focus will be on nature, in particular “the ocean as a poetic, totemic, and natural entity, as a life source and home to a universe of beings.” Jonas is both a pioneer of her medium and one of the most important contemporary artists today.

Although Jonas has shown at the Biennale's international pavilion and many other prestigious venues, her role as the US representative filling five galleries is thanks to a proposal by commissioner/curators with MIT ties—Paul C. Ha, director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Ute Meta Bauer, founding director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology as well as Singapore’s Centre for Contemporary Art at the Nanyang Technological University.

To get a flavor of what might appear next spring, you can watch this video of Jonas describing Reading Dante, her 2009 Venice Biennale offering. If you live near Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts will show a live Jonas performance in November titled Reanimation.

Jonas’ exhibition is not MIT’s first gig at the Venice Biennale. Jennifer Allora SM ’03 represented the US in 2011 in Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla: Gloria, organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Earlier the List presented Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am in 2003 and Ann Hamilton: Myein in 1999.