Archaeological Park of Pompeii and Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice
present the first solo exhibition in an international museum
Wael Shawky
I Am Hymns of the New Temples
أنا تراتیل المعابد الجدیدة
by Wael Shawky
17 April – 30 June 2024
Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Ala Tribuna
Rugagiuffa 4858, Venice
Opening upon invitation only, with the artist and curators present
Tuesday 16th April 2024 | from 5pm to 8pm
On the preview days of the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia
(16-20 April 2024), free entrance for accreditation holders.
The solo exhibition (international museum premiere) I Am Hymns of the New Temples- أنا تراتیل المعابد الجدیدة of Egyptian artist Wael Shawky (Alexandria, 1971) will open to the public on Wednesday 17 April 2024, at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani (‘Ala Tribuna’) in Venice. Curated by Massimo Osanna (General Director of Italy’s National Museums), Andrea Viliani (Co-curator of the programme Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters) and Gabriel Zuchtriegel (General Director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii), the exhibition is organised in collaboration between the Museo di Palazzo Grimani and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.
The exhibition brings together the filmic work I Am Hymns of the New Temples- أنا تراتیل المعابد الجدیدة – realised by the artist in 2023 and which, after its premiere at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, is presented in Venice as an international museum premiere – and a selection of multi-material works and drawings realised by the artist between 2022 and 2024. The exhibition project is conceived as an ideal dialogue between different spaces and times, in which contemporary artworks coexist with the archaeological works and the historical halls of Palazzo Grimani, outlining a path that prospectively leads from the Camaron d’Oro to the so-called Tribuna, also known as the Antiquarium or Camerino delle Antichità, the true fulcrum of the palace and its narration.
The four rooms in the Tribuna wing of Palazzo Grimani Museum have been restyled by the artist Wael Shawky (Alexandria, Egypt, 1971) as a story that evokes the co-existence of many different spaces and times, historical facts and mythical tales, and of creatures that are simultaneously animal, vegetable and mineral: real and ficticious. As in the time of Giovanni Grimani, patriarch of Aquileia – who, taking his uncle Cardinal Domenico Grimani, as his model – made their noble villa the stage on which Greek and Roman antiquity encountered the appeal of the Renaissance – Shawky has set up these rooms to become a time machine, connecting them to engage visitors in a journey through memory and fantasy.
Built up over the course of the 16th century, the collection of sculptures, marble reliefs, vases, bronzes and gems assembled by Patriarch Giovanni Grimani made the palace, and in particular the Tribuna, one of the most extraordinary testimonies to the relationship between classical antiquity and Renaissance and humanist culture, famous throughout Europe and already then the object of visits by scholars, princes and high prelates. After the Patriarch’s donation to the Serenissima Republic and the transfer of the collection to the Marciana area in 1594, between 2019 and 2021 it will reunite with the rooms of the Palazzo.
The exhibition – which brings together the film I Am Hymns of the New Temples – and a selection of drawings and multi-material works in bronze, ceramics and glass – was conceived as a dialogue with the frescoes and decorations of the Palace, in which contemporary works stand side by side with the archaeological works of its collections, outlining a path that from Camaron d’Oro leads prospectively to the socalled Tribuna, also known as the Antiquarium or Camerino delle Antichità. This is the true fulcrum of the Palace and its historical and symbolic narratives, therefore lying ideally in line with Shawky’s films, as if the Grimani Tribuna and I Am Hymns of the New Temples could each be the mimesis of the other two versions of the same story. If the narrative in Palazzo Grimani articulates the theme of divine justice and the soul’s ascent towards the Christian God, in Shawky’s narrative, justice is affirmed in the succession of destructions and recreations, between the will of the divinities and the reactions of human beings in the ancient Mediterranean legends from which modern European civilisation originated.
As a narrator of cognitive and expressive processes suspended between the documentable and the imaginable, Shawky evokes a dimension of culture and nature that is both factual and imaginative, as if they could never be defined once and for all or from a single point of view, and predisposes us to a position of awareness and, at the same time, wonder at the mechanisms, ancient and contemporary, by which historical, social and cultural facts have been interpreted and passed down to us.
I Am Hymns of the New Temples – filmed among the ruins of an ancient city apparently destroyed in 79 AD by the eruption of Vesuvius, which became a legendary site that later re-emerged from the same ruins in 1748 – tells us of what makes Pompeii an a true multiverse in which reality and imagination are no longer distinguishable, a multi-species ecosystem, a magnificent theatre in which all Mediterranean cultures are inevitably connected. The work thus becomes an epic tale – embodied in the porous ensemble of temples, sculptures, frescoes and mosaics, but also in the fertile and fluid natural volcanic landscapes that surround them – of the need to invent, tell and pass on new stories, through which human beings have given and continue to give meaning to what they desire, fear, and do not know and to their urge for material and spiritual relations, justice and injustice, end and beginning. A need that the very dimension of myth manages to restore to us, even more than any historical chronicle, in its contradictory and irredeemable humanity. In the flow of the many languages and versions through which the ancient myths were written or portrayed Pompeii, in the vicissitudes of their gods, characters, rituals and simulacra, Shawky understands that these millennia-old stories are therefore new hymns (compositions, songs, fabulae… stories) because we have returned precisely to tell them anew, rooting our ever new, possible interpretations in them.
In this story of Pompeii – told by the artist in the light of previous tales by other authors – we not only return to remind ourselves that we have already become extinct and that we have already been reborn – after the primordial flooding just as after the eruption of Vesuvius – but also that the one who, in this story, the Greeks called Io, became Isis in Egypt, just as the son-companion Epaphas became Osiris: the stories in fact recall each other and overwrite each other, they are like new temples in which to continue telling our stories.
The exhibition is organised in partnership with the Regional Department for the Museums of Veneto – Palazzo Grimani Museum and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, and accompanies the artist’s participation in the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale in Venice, where Shawky represents the Arab Republic of Egypt in the Egypt Pavilion. The work I Am Hymns of the New Temples won the public competition PAC2020-Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea, promoted by the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, and constitutes the first work produced, in 2023, as part of the programme Pompeii Commitment. Achaelogical Matters promoted by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, the world’s first archaeological site to establish a longterm programme and permanent collection devoted to the contemporary arts, aiming to research and enhance the contemporaneity of the topics and values expressed by the Italian and international archaeological heritage. The partner institution for the international enhancement of films is LaM-Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain, d’art brut. The project also counted on the cooperation of the San Carlo Theatre Foundation and the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, with the support of Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan-Naples.