With over 30 new artworks in an immersive installation conceived specifically for the Museum, Hernan Bas (Miami, 1978) will present The Visitors at Ca’ Pesaro.
Drawing inspiration from Venice, a city uniquely attuned to tourism and continually shaped by its consequences – and also the site of a recent residency undertaken by the artist – Bas has created a new body of work featuring tourists in scenarios both imagined and real. These protagonists – predominantly white, western and male – inhabit a shifting terrain of bucket-list attractions, historic sites, sacred spaces, seedy entertainment venues and sanitised examples of the natural world. With the fundamental disconnection between these ‘visitors’ and the worlds they traverse, Bas exposes the absurdity of iconic clichés of tourism such as the Mona Lisa or the Trevi Fountain; dark tourism destinations such as Chernobyl, Alcatraz and the Aokigahara Forest; and tourist traps designed to con, swindle or disappoint.
Bas has been long celebrated for narrative works permeated by humour, decadence, oddities, the occult and layered codes. He explores the intricacies of self-identity through figures poised at moments of transformation, where the ordinary slips into the extraordinary. In The Visitors, this sensibility turns outward. Like the dandies and flâneurs of Bas’s earlier works, these new figures hover at thresholds: between curiosity and arrogance, encounter and violation, experience and spectacle.
Photo credits Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
