De Renava – The Bonifacio Biennale presents its second edition from May 10 to November 2, 2024, celebrating contemporary art in the heart of an ancient city and one of the most beautiful natural reserves in the Mediterranean. The event continues its exploration of contemporary questions, practices and technologies, bringing together monumental works alongside conceptual proposals in a spirit of engagement, curiosity and innovation. De Renava takes place throughout the citadel with the former Montlaur barracks as its epicentre, an exceptional space of 5,000 m2 previously unused for more than 30 years.
Entitled Roma Amor, the exhibition of this second edition looks to the Mediterranean past to grasp the mysterious prophecy at work in the mechanism of the fall of empires. It particularly highlights the dialectical interplay between decadence and emancipation, vandalism and heroism, ruin and foundation. The stages that always accompany the inevitable questioning of each civilization.
The works are chosen for their equivocal beauty, as well as for their commitment, not limited to a historical reading of the theme, but which rather approaches “the empire” as an entity of political, moral or cultural domination to be re-examined. The exhibition invites to travel through time in the heart of Bonifacio’s heritage. A city which was the target of numerous powers (Pisan, Genoese, Aragonese, etc.) and even the temporary home of an emperor: Napoleon Bonaparte.
Roma Amor tells of the nostalgia for lost paradises, the emancipation of thought, the slow conquest of freedom and the cyclical nature of the construction of an ideal which already carries within it the seeds of its destruction.
For this second edition, the Biennale De Renava invites 18 international artists to work alongside emerging island creators.
The Biennale is pleased to present : SHIRIN NESHAT, LAURENT GRASSO, SOPHIA AL MARIA, ALI CHERRI, ALEXANDRE BAVARD, BLANCA LI, ENERI, JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, SALOMÉ CHATRIOT, YOUSSEF NABIL, VALÉRIE GIOVANNI, HIWA K, ESMERALDA KOSMATOPOULOS, SERGIO ROGER, KEHINDE WILEY, MADGALENA JETELOVÀ, AES+F, BILL VIOLA.
Press release from the Biennale De Renava
Image: Alexandre Bavard. Temps Mort. 2024. Exhibition view at the Biennale De Renava 2024. Photography by Biennale De Renava
