Rezzonico Garden 2796 Calle del Traghetto, Venice, 1st September 2007
A morning in what has become one of my favourite place in Venice, the curious, often macabre, Museo Fortuny, in the former Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei. Today the dark mystery of the interior was belied by a magnificent shimmering installation, Fresh and Fading Memories, by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui draped over the Campo San Benedetto façade. Inside the strange was made bizarre by an exhibition, ‘Artempo – Where Time becomes Art’, which combined the extraordinary contents of the idiosyncratic permanent collection with an eclectic gathering of contemporary and historical work to create a strong feeling of the uncanny: a Cycladic head and a deformed body by Hans Bellmer; a 17th century ecorche and a Warhol oxidation painting; a 16th century basilisk and an Abramovic sculpture; a 17th century naked Eve and skull shaped coral. History clashed with the modern and the antique; smooth sculpture confirmed our usual preconceptions of the body beautiful until figures stripped to their musculature and organs showed the reality below the skin. A giant curved mirror by Anish Kapoor was initially fun in an-end-of-the-pier-hall-of-mirrors way, but quickly became very unsettling as the walls and floor shifted with dizzying uncertainty and bodies were transformed into grotesques. Fantastical and singular objects brought together, fetishes blurring time and place, cultural boundaries and the lines between art and nature, in what has been described as ‘curatorial madness’.