The Art Newspaper

First announcements for 2011 Venice Biennale

France selects Christian Boltanski while Iceland chooses Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson

By Gareth Harris. Web only
Published online: 20 January 2010

london. France has beaten everyone in the race to select its 54th Venice Biennale artist: Jean-Hubert Martin, former director of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Kunsthalle Bern, will present veteran artist Christian Boltanski in the French Pavilion in 2011. France’s previous representatives in Venice include Annette Messager, who won the biennale's Lion d’Or prize in 2005; Sophie Calle followed in 2007 while Claude Lévêque featured in last year’s exhibition. Iceland was next, selecting Spanish-Icelandic duo Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, who met in the Netherlands in 1997 and who live and work together in Berlin. Their work is laden with social and political comment. “They collaborate with a range of people from chief executives and ministers to homeless people, political activists and fortune tellers,” according to a spokeswoman at the Center for Icelandic Art in Reykjavík. The duo won a €10,000 award as part of last year’s Dutch Prix de Rome award for their film about EU lobbyists, Lobbyists, 2009.