Optical Allusions

Venetian Blind

Public Art Commission

2019 Venice Bienale

2021 Deakin University

The exhibition is curated by Professor David Cross and Associate Professor Cameron Bishop from Deakin's School of Communication and Creative Arts, and is run by the University's research initiative, the Public Art Commission.

The original was a hybrid exhibition/public art event, involving the commissioning of six public art projects across Venice over six months from May through to November 2019.

The project title is a word play on the famous Venetian architectural invention, referring to the artists entering into a project with little knowledge of what they’re expected to do. The curators constructed six specific briefs, in which artists were asked to consider one of a range of issues to do with class, sexuality, colonialism, race, globalisation and political structures. These big-picture themes were framed by specific stories, people and places relating to the history of this remarkable city on the water.

Working in six teams, one for each month of the Biennale, 23 researchers and PhD Candidates were each asked to deliver a series of creative responses using their own personalised box of assorted objects containing art-making materials and artefacts, which included films, drawings, texts, installations and documentation. The artists were invited to make one or more artistic works in response and display them throughout the public spaces of Venice, and to then exhibit them along with documentation at the Palazzo Bembo gallery space.

The artists responded to various historical events and sites around the public spaces of Venice, specifically its filmic and architectural histories, and the power relations between the people, its rulers, its natural environment and those that would seek to challenge the city's geopolitical position between the Adriatic Sea and greater Europe.