On display “Double Carousel with Zöllner Stripes“ by the Belgian artist Carsten Höller, the winning work of the Enel Contemporanea Award 2011, the prize organized by Enel within the Enel Contemporanea project, now in its fifth year, that leads to the production of artworks on the theme of energy by artists of different nations (www.enelcontemporanea.com).
In the large Enel hall of the museum, visitors will be able to interact with two moving carousels created by the artist. The carousels move very slowly, in opposite directions, allowing people to freely get on and off, as if they were enormous windmills or millwheels on which seated persons approach and are separated by the constant rotating motion. Around them, visual lines in an apparently intersecting pattern create an overall destabilizing effect, in an experience that distorts spatial perceptions.
Gathered on 2 June in Venice, in coordination with the opening of the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, of which Enel is the Main Sponsor, the jury selected the winner from three renowned artists of international stature – Carsten Höller (Belgium), Bruce Mau (Canada) and Paola Pivi (Italy) – invited to submit a project by the Artistic Director of the Award, Francesco Bonami.
The jury was chaired by Gianluca Comin, Director of External Relations of Enel, and included representatives of some of the world’s most prestigious art institutions: Joseph Backstein (Commission of the Biennial of Contemporary Art of Moscow), Luca Massimo Barbero (Director of the MACRO, Rome), Iwona Blazwick (Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London), Massimiliano Gioni (Artistic Director of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan), Ivo Mesquita (Chief Curator of the Pinacoteca do Estado of Sao Paulo), Jack Persekian (Director of the Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem).
Born in Brussels in 1961, after taking a degree in Agronomy, specializing in phytopathology with a thesis on olfactory communication among insects, Carsten Höller thinks of art as a cognitive tool, investigating objective reality and its perception by using disorientation as an indispensable characteristic of all his works: from the rotating mushrooms suspended from the ceiling of the Prada Foundation in 2000 to the five steel chutes of Test Site installed in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London in 2006 for the Unilever Series, all the way to his latest exhibition, Soma, at the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin. His work has been featured in many group shows and solo shows, in some of the world’s most important institutions, including the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum of Rotterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Zagreb and the Kunsthaus Bregenz. The artist represented Sweden at the 51st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennial, and has participated several times at the Biennial of Sao Paulo and at Documenta. The New Museum in New York will soon present a solo show of his work. He lives and works in Stockholm.