Portrait of Koo Jeong A for La Biennale di Venezia at Korean Pavilion (2024).
Koo Jeong A (they/them) is constantly in orbit, living and working everywhere. In their practice, architectural elements, texts, drawings, paintings, sculptures, animations, sound, film, words, and scents play a significant role. Throughout the years, Koo Jeong A has investigated and blurred the lines between their artwork and the space it occupies. The artwork adds new layers to any given space and Koo Jeong A manages to merge small intimate experiences and large-scale immersive works.
The curatorial approach for the Korean Pavilion 2024 has been to combine some of the key subjects and sculptural elements that Koo Jeong A has worked with during the last three decades. With the new commission Odorama Cities, created especially for the Korean Pavilion, Koo Jeong A delves into the nuances of our spatial encounters, investigating how we perceive and recollect spaces, with a particular emphasis on how scents, smells, and odors contribute to these memories. With the pavilion itself, Koo Jeong A explores an expanded tactility. Some of the prominent interests in Koo Jeong A’s art, such as immaterialism, weightlessness, endlessness, and levitation, are keywords throughout the Korean Pavilion. They are embedded and engraved as infinity symbols directly into the new wooden floor, manifested as two floating wooden möbius-shaped sculptures and a levitating, scent- diffusing bronze figure, and last but not least symbolized in the scents that transforms the pavilion into a collection of olfactory memories.
Portrait of AHMED UMAR for La Biennale di Venezia at the international exhibition Arsenale, Venice (2024)
Ahmed Umar (Arabic: أحمد عمر, born 10 February 1988) is a Sudanese-Norwegian visual artist and LGBT activist. He[A] grew up in a conservative family in Sudan and later fled to Norway. His artwork mixes Sudanese (e.g., the Black Pharaohs of the ancient Kingdom of Kush) and Western influences. He was profiled in the 2020 documentary The Art of Sin.
Ahmed Umar lives in Norway and performs his Sudanese roots shaped by a childhood in Mecca, embodying queer histories of Muslim migration. Talitin, The Third (2023) enacts a Sudanese bridal dance that traditionally culminates weeklong wedding celebrations. Umar performs the bride expected to display her beauty and wealth while choreographing the newlyweds’ journey from courtship onwards. Talitin, meaning “third” in Arabic, alludes to a local insult – being “the third of the girls” – targeted at boys interested in so-called womanly activities. Through its wearables, fabrics, and braids, the artist reclaims a practice that he witnessed first hand from the women in his family – until his exclusion once he reached puberty. The songs played are a praise to the bride’s family and also the soundscape for her to showcase her new curves. For the performance, Umar increased his intake of Norwegian chocolates to enlarge his physical silhouette. The jewellery displayed comes from Cairo, a vital city in Umar’s practice and his diasporic gateway to today’s turmoiled Sudan.
Portrait of Jean-Louis Etienne, Polar explorer, for Les Echos. Paris, France (2021).
As a doctor specialising in sports biology and nutrition, Jean-Louis Etienne has taken part in numerous expeditions to the Himalayas, Greenland and Patagonia.
A tireless defender of the planet, he has led several educational expeditions to raise awareness of the polar regions and understand the role they play in the life and climate of the earth. And in April 2010, he succeeded in making the first crossing of the Arctic Ocean by balloon.
He was the first man to reach the North Pole alone and succeeded in making the longest crossing of the Antarctic by dog sled: 6300 km.
Portrait of Carlo Ossola for La Croix.
Carlo Ossola is an Italian philologist, literary critic and literature historian. Since 2000, he holds the chair of modern literature of Neo-Latin Europe at the Collège de France. He has previously taught at the University of Geneva, University of Padua and University of Turin, and from 2007 to 2017 has directed the Institute of Italian studies at the Università della Svizzera italiana. He is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
Carlo Ossola is an Italian philologist, literary critic and literature historian. Since 2000, he holds the chair of modern literature of Neo-Latin Europe at the Collège de France. He has previously taught at the University of Geneva, University of Padua and University of Turin, and from 2007 to 2017 has directed the Institute of Italian studies at the Università della Svizzera italiana. He is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
