The curator of Germany’s pavilion for the 2015 Venice Biennale, Florian Ebner, has announced his concept for the presentation as well as the five artists chosen to execute it, reports the DPA. Ebner, who serves as the photography curator at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, selected Tobias Zielony, Hito Steyerl, Olaf Nicolai, Jasmina Metwaly, and Philip Rizk for the German contribution.
Ebner explained that the pavilion will question the trendy-enough, if rather well-covered topic of the “material and political nature of images in the digital age and in a globalized world.”
While Nicolai, Steyerl, and Zielony are more or less household names among the art world cognoscenti, Metwaly and Rizk, who work as an artistic duo in Cairo, are more or less unknown. Rizk runs a popular blog called Tabula Gaza, on which he says of himself: “I film, I write, I protest. I am a part of the Mosireen media collective.” Metwaly uses primarily video in her activist-oriented practice.
Ebner’s 2015 Venice Biennale pavilion follows two editions curated by MMK Frankfurt director Susanne Gaensheimer. Her 2011 pavilion, which posthumously featured Christoph Schlingensief won the Golden Lion. Last year, she curated a group exhibition, featuring Ai Weiwei, Romuald Karmakar, Santu Mofokeng, and Dayanita Singh. That took place in the French pavilion, the two country’s having decided to swap for the 2013 biennial. Anri Sala’s critically-acclaimed offering, “Ravel Ravel Unravel,” was France’s contribution, and it took place in the German Pavilion.