Vice Versa

ice versa, the catalogue of the Italian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, explores the complexity that characterizes Italian contemporary art. Following Giorgio Agamben's concept according to which to interpret Italian culture it is necessary to identify a “series of polarized conjugate concepts,” Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, curator of the exhibition, has chosen seven binomials around which the show and the catalogue are structured: body/history, view/place, sound/silence, perspective/surface, familiar/strange, system/fragment and tragedy/comedy. The book is divided into seven chapters, one for each pairing, that present the work of two artists with a critical text, a wide selection of images of the works, technical specifications and information on the artists' research. Artists—Francesco Arena, Massimo Bartolini, Gianfranco Baruchello, Elisabetta Benassi, Flavio Favelli, Luigi Ghirri, Piero Golia, Francesca Grilli, Marcello Maloberti, Fabio Mauri, Giulio Paolini, Marco Tirelli, Luca Vitone, Sislej Xhafa.