Fountain of Exhaustion. Acqua Alta – Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Fountain of Exhaustion. Acqua Alta is the title of Ukraine’s contribution to the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. From the website of artist Pavlo Makov:
The Pavilion exhibits the works of Pavlo Makov, whose artistic practices in the early 1990s focused on exploring the parallels between the human body and urban space and have since then largely shifted to elaborating the theme of “the world without us”. The artwork Fountain of Exhaustion is a serene and reflective project, which serves as a conscious extension of the original story of Fountain of Exhaustion (at once providing for the particularities of the exhibition location) and comes as a natural response to the theme Milk of Dreams.
Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, the Pavilion was curated by co-founders of The Naked Room, Lizaveta German and Maria Lanko, and chief editor of IST Publishing, Borys Filonenko. The visual identity was designed by Ukrainian studio 3Z, using Aeroport Mono by Brownfox and SangBleu Versailles by Swiss Typefaces.
IST Publishing on the catalog:
The 2022 Arsenale di Venezia exhibition is the first time Fountain of Exhaustion has ever been displayed as a fully-functional art object with a steady water supply, even though its original conception dates back to 1995 and was initially occasioned by a local context of Kharkiv, a large city in the east of Ukraine. The book features a comprehensive chronological account of the Fountain’s development in the years 1995–2022 as well as a careful selection of archive materials, illustrating the work’s evolution over the last 25 years.
It also provides additional textual commentary by various authors, exploring Makov’s artistic practices and the spatio-temporal connotations of Fountain of Exhaustion as an art object all the while reflecting on water, rivers, and channels, overflow and desolation, personally landscapes and the pressing global issues of the day.
