Wolfgang Ennenbach / Focus Featu
Art
The Curator of Willem Dafoe’s Movie ‘Inside’ Takes Art on Film to a New Level
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The new movie Inside, starring Willem Dafoe as an art thief, is both a psychological thriller and an art collector’s nightmare. For Italian curator Leonardo Bigazzi, it was also an unprecedented logistical challenge to stage the exhibition within the film.
The movie may be entirely a work of fiction, but its portrayal of an art thief trapped inside a Pritzker-winning architect’s home incorporates real and replica works from some of the world’s most famous living artists far beyond standard set design.
“At this scale, this has never been done before,” said Bigazzi, whose film and art career include work as curator of the Lo schermo dell’arte – Contemporary Art and Cinema Festival, curator at Fondazione In Between Art Film as well as commissioning and producing over 20 artist’s films.
The most shocking thing Bigazzi told ARTnews was the large risk artists took if they loaned original items to ‘Inside’. “The artists had to accept that if it was a real artwork, it would not be insured,” he said with a laugh. “I had to gain their trust.”
In addition to the unusual insurance arrangement, the process of getting the valuable art collection to set involved long conversations about the role of specific artworks to the movie’s plot, complicated licensing agreements, as well as questions about what makes something a prop, a replica, or an artist’s original creation.
Bigazzi chatted with ARTnews about these issues, and more.
A stand-in for an invisible antagonist
In conceptualizing the unseen owner’s art collection, Bigazzi proposed a sophisticated selection for Inside through abstract pieces, strong design elements, political themes, as well as representations of elitism and wealth.
A range of mediums and artists would illustrate the character of its absent owner and the plight of Dafoe’s character, an art thief named Nemo.
As a result, the film’s luxury apartment includes paintings, sculptures, photography, drawings, installations, video, as well as conceptual works. The artists featured include Maxwell Alexandre, John Armleder, Maurizio Cattelan, Joanna Piotrowska, Egon Schiele, and Alvaro Urbano.
“It represents his passions, his loves, his encounters in life, but also, of course, his obsessions, and [the] obscure, let’s say, aspects of his personality,” Bigazzi told ARTnews.
There’s a simple reason why Bigazzi only worked with living artists. The Italian curator learned fairly early that the foundations of artists, like American sculptor Alexander Calder or Argentine painter Lucio Fontana, prohibited replicas.
“When I started facing all these questions, I understood that the way to go but also the most fascinating way was to really work with living artists who would be interested in taking part in this film and this narrative,” he said.
Direct integration into the script
The movie’s relatively little dialogue also meant the chosen art works needed to help drive the emotional narrative of the film and reinforce Nemo’s psychological disruption after his unexpected entrapment.
Several times, Bigazzi was asked by director Vasilis Katsoupis, producer Giorgos Karnavas, and production designer Thorsten Sabel for art works that would serve specific scenes. Seven gelatin prints by Joanna Piotrowska were chosen for this reason. They show photographs of Piotrowska’s friends that she had asked to build shelters inside their apartments. Piotrowska’s idea of building a safe space within someone’s home mirrors what happens later on during Inside, when Nemo has to construct his own shelter.
“This beautiful series of works really shows what is our relationship with our domestic environments and the objects that relate to that,” Bigazzi said.
Courtesy of Focus Features
During one long scene in the film, a long shot focuses on a 2007 still photograph by Albanian artist Adrian Paci. “Centro di permanenza temporanea” shows refugees waiting on a staircase for a plane that will never arrive. The title is a reference to centers where immigrants are placed after arriving in Italy. “They’re stuck in this limbo between not being in their own, within the place where they’re coming from, but they haven’t yet arrived where they wanted to go,” Bigazzi said. While it’s a completely different political situation than Dafoe’s character of Nemo, it’s similar to his physical condition. “He’s not able to go where he wanted to be,” Bigazzi said.
Paci’s photograph also gave the film’s director the idea for Inside‘s dream sequence in which the staircase materializes in the video installation room.
An opportunity for commissions
In addition to loans and replicas, Bigazzi also commissioned original works from artists. A version of Rayyane Tabet‘s 2013 work Steel Rings was requested for a scene in the film when Nemo attempts to smash a window.
Courtesy of Focus Features
A version of Alvaro Urbano’s 2020 sculpture Noches en los Jardines de España embodied the film’s concept of time and served as a contradiction to the idea of organic decay. The sculpture — five realistic navel oranges made out of concrete with three painted to appear severely moldy — also served as a tool Nemo could try to use to escape. “Those oranges are almost there representing the impossibility of organic matter,” Bigazzi said, “which is obviously part of surviving.”
Meta-questions about authenticity
The question of what was a prop, a replica, and an original artwork blurred. An acrylic on canvas work by Maurizio Cattelan was a replica in theory. But it was made by Cattelan, travelled in a professional art crate to the set, and it went back to the artist’s studio. “If he signs it, it’s a work,” Bigazzi said. “But the moment it was on set, it was a prop, legally speaking.”
In Bigazzi’s mind, the same logic applies to the replica photographs Piotrowska made for the film, since they were produced in the same dark room in London as her original images.
In the case of Tabet’s Steel Rings, the film’s version was made exactly as the artist would have done, and then Bigazzi sent the sculpture back to the artist to use. “Why would I produce something that then is wasted by being thrown away?,” he said. “You might as well do it in a way in which what you’re doing has a reason to exist also after the film.”
Managing a new level of risk
Since original works on set could not be insured due to the risk of fire and water damage, Bigazzi chose items that could either be replaced, such as David Horvitz’s neon sign All the time that will come after this moment (2019) or the damage would become part of the work. In the case of The Moth Costume by Petrit Halilaj, which was originally developed for the Venice Biennale in 2017, stains and rips are signs of its use throughout the life of the Kosovan installation artist. “When he wears it in a performance, if its gets dirty, it’s okay,” Bigazzi said. “It’s part of the life of a work as much as the skin of an animal or our clothes.”
Bigazzi said there was a simple explanation for how Dafoe’s character treated the artwork in the film. “Since the very beginning, the conversation with Vasilis was if an artwork gets destroyed, it has to be for a purpose,” he said. “It’s either for physical survival, or for psychological survival.”
Despite the craft and caliber of the artists’ contributions to the collection in the film, Bigazzi has no hard feelings for how many of them were treated. “Anything that gets destroyed, it’s a replica, it’s not a real work, so it’s okay,” he said.
A legacy past the closing credits
Even with all of that, Bigazzi said the artists featured in Inside were excited about the possibility of their work reaching a much wider audience that normally isn’t exposed to contemporary art. “Maybe through this movie they’re going to ask themselves some further questions about some of the works,” he said.
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There is a sour tendency in cultural politics today — a growing gap between speaking about the world and acting in it.
In the domain of rhetoric, everyone has grown gifted at pulling back the curtain. An elegant museum gallery is actually a record of imperial violence; a symphony orchestra is a site of elitism and exploitation: these critiques we can now deliver without trying. But when it comes to making anything new, we are gripped by near-total inertia. We are losing faith with so many institutions of culture and society — the museum, the market, and, especially this week, the university — but cannot imagine an exit from them. We throw bricks with abandon, we lay them with difficulty, if at all. We engage in perpetual protest, but seem unable to channel it into anything concrete.
So we spin around. We circle. And, maybe, we start going backward.
I’ve just spent a week tramping across Venice, a city of more than 250 churches, and where did I encounter the most doctrinaire catechism? It was in the galleries of the 2024 Venice Biennale, still the world’s principal appointment to discover new art, whose current edition is at best a missed opportunity, and at worst something like a tragedy.
It’s often preachy, but that’s not its biggest problem. The real problem is how it tokenizes, essentializes, minimizes and pigeonholes talented artists — and there are many here, among more than 300 participants — who have had their work sanded down to slogans and lessons so clear they could fit in a curator’s screenshot. This is a Biennale that speaks the language of assurance, but is actually soaked in anxiety, and too often resorts, as the Nigerian author Wole Soyinka deplored in a poem, to “cast the sanctimonious stone / And leave frail beauty shredded in the square / Of public shame.”
This year’s Biennale opened last week under an ominous star. The Venetian megashow consists of a central exhibition, spanning two locations, as well as around 90 independent pavilions organized by individual nations. One of these nations is Israel, and in the weeks before the vernissage an activist group calling itself the “Art Not Genocide Alliance” had petitioned the show’s organizers to exclude Israel from participating. The Biennale refused; a smaller appeal against the pavilion of Iran also went nowhere. (As for Russia, it remains nation non grata for the second Biennale in a row.) With disagreements over the war in Gaza spilling into cultural institutions across the continent — they’d already sunk Documenta, the German exhibition that is Venice’s only rival for attendance and prestige — the promise of a major controversy seemed to hang over the Giardini della Biennale.
As it happened, the artist and curator of Israel’s pavilion surprised the preview audience by closing their own show, and posted a sign at the entrance declaring it would stay shut until “a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.” A small protest took place anyway (“No Death in Venice” was one slogan), but the controversy had only a tiny impact on the Prosecco-soaked Venetian carnival that is opening week. Right next door, at the U.S. Pavilion, twice as many visitors were waiting to get inside as were protesting.
One could strain to read the Israeli withdrawal productively, as part of a century-long tradition of empty, vacated or closed exhibitions by artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Graciela Carnevale, and all the way back to Marcel Duchamp. Probably it was the only possible response to an untenable situation. Either way, the Israel pavilion encapsulated in miniature a larger dilemma and deficiency, in Venice and in culture more broadly: a thoroughgoing inability — even Foucault did not go this far! — to think about art, or indeed life, as anything other than a reflection of political, social or economic power.
That is certainly the agenda of the central exhibition, organized by the Brazilian museum director Adriano Pedrosa. I’d cheered when he was appointed curator of this year’s edition. At the São Paulo Museum of Art, one of Latin America’s boldest cultural institutions, Pedrosa had masterminded a cycle of centuries-spanning exhibitions that reframed Brazilian art as a crucible of African, Indigenous, European and pan-American history. His nomination came a few weeks after Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s first far-right prime minister since World War II. And Pedrosa — who had successfully steered his museum through Brazil’s own far-right presidency of 2018-22 — promised a show of cosmopolitanism and variety, as expressed in a title, “Foreigners Everywhere,” that seemed like a moderate anti-Meloni dig.
But what Pedrosa has actually brought to Venice is a closed, controlled, and at times belittling showcase, which smooths out all the distinctions and contradictions of a global commons. The show is remarkably placid, especially in the Giardini. There are large doses of figurative painting and (as customary these days) weaving and tapestry arranged in polite, symmetrical arrays. There is art of great beauty and power, such as three cosmological panoramas by the self-taught Amazonian painter Santiago Yahuarcani, and also far less sophisticated work celebrated by the curator in the exact same way.
In the brutal rounding-down arithmetic of the 2024 Venice Biennale, to be a straniero — a “foreigner” or “stranger,” applied equally to graduates of the world’s most prestigious M.F.A. programs and the mentally ill — implies moral credibility, and moral credibility equals artistic importance. Hence Pedrosa’s inclusion of L.G.B.T.Q. people as “foreigners,” as if gender or sexuality were proof of progressive bona fides. (Gay men have led far-right parties in the Netherlands and Austria; over at Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a wonderfully pervy show of the polymathic Frenchman Jean Cocteau, who praised Nazis while drawing sailors without their bell-bottoms.)
Even more bizarre is the designation of the Indigenous peoples of Brazil and Mexico, of Australia and New Zealand, as “foreigners”; surely they should be the one class of people exempt from such estrangement. In some galleries, categories and classifications take precedence over formal sophistication to a derogatory degree. The Pakistan-born artist Salman Toor, who paints ambiguous scenes of queer New York with real acuity and invention, is shown alongside simplistic queer-and-trans-friendly street art from an Indian NGO “spreading positivity and hope to their communities.”
Over and over, the human complexity of artists gets upstaged by their designation as group members, and art itself gets reduced to a symptom or a triviality. I felt that particularly in three large, shocking galleries in the central pavilion of the Giardini, packed tight with more than 100 paintings and sculptures made in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East between 1915 and 1990. These constitute the bulk of what Pedrosa calls the show’s nucleo storico, its historical core, and this was the part of the Biennale I’d looked forward to most. It had promised to demonstrate that the world outside the North Atlantic has a history of modern art far richer than our leading museums have shown us.
Indeed it does. But you won’t learn that here, where paintings of wildly different importance and quality have been shoved together with almost no historical documentation, cultural context, or even visual delight. It flushes away distinctions between free and unfree regimes or between capitalist and socialist societies, or between those who joined an international avant-garde and those who saw art as a nationalist calling. True pioneers, such as the immense Brazilian innovator Tarsila do Amaral, are equated with orthodox or traditionalist portraitists. More ambitious exhibitions — notably the giant “Postwar,” staged in Munich in 2016-17 — used critical juxtaposition and historical documentation to show how and why an Asian modernism, or an African modernism, looked the way it did. Here in Venice, Pedrosa treats paintings from all over as just so many postage stamps, pasted down with little visual acuity, celebrated merely for their rarity to an implied “Western” viewer.
You thought we were all equals? Here you have the logic of the old-style ethnological museum, transposed from the colonial exposition to the Google Images results page. S.H. Raza of India, Saloua Raouda Choucair of Lebanon, the Cuban American Carmen Herrera, and also painters who were new to me, got reduced to so much Global South wallpaper, and were photographed by visitors accordingly. All of which shows that it’s far too easy to speak art’s exculpatory language, to invoke “opacity” or “fugitivity” or whatever today’s decolonial shibboleth may be. But by othering some 95 percent of humanity — by designating just about everyone on earth as “foreigners,” and affixing categories onto them with sticky-backed labels — what you really do is exactly what those dreadful Europeans did before you: you exoticize.
And yet, for all that, there is so much I liked in this year’s Biennale! From the central exhibition I am still thinking about a monumental installation of unfired coils of clay by Anna Maria Maiolino, a winner of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, that recasts serial production as something intimate, irregular, even anatomical. Karimah Ashadu, who won the Silver Lion for her high-speed film of young men bombing across Lagos on banned motorbikes, gave the economic intensity of megacity life a vigorous visual language. There are the stark, speechless paintings from the 1970s of Romany Eveleigh, whose thousands of scratched little O’s turn writing into an unsemantic howl. There are Yuko Mohri’s mischievously articulated assemblages of found objects, plastic sheeting and fresh fruit, in the Japanese Pavilion, and Precious Okoyomon’s Gesamtkunstwerk of soil, speakers and motion sensors, in the Nigerian Pavilion.
Beyond the Biennale, Christoph Büchel’s frenzied exhibition at the Fondazione Prada assembles mountains of junk and jewels into an impertinent exposé of wealth and debt, colonialism and collecting. In the Palazzo Contarini Polignac, a hazily elegant video by the Odesa-born artist Nikolay Karabinovych reinscribes the Ukrainian landscape as a crossroads of languages, religions and histories. Above all there is Pierre Huyghe, at the Punta della Dogana, who fuses human intelligence and artificial intelligence into the rarest thing of all: an image we have never seen before.
What all these artists have in common is some creative surplus that cannot be exploited — not for a nation’s image, not for a curator’s thesis, not for a collector’s vanity. Rather than the sudsy “politics” of advocacy, they profess that art’s true political value lies in how it exceeds rhetorical function or financial value, and thereby points to human freedom. They are the ones who offered me at least a glimpse of what an equitable global cultural assembly could be: an “anti-museum,” in the phrase of the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, where “the exhibiting of subjugated or humiliated humanities” at last becomes a venue where everyone gets to be more than a representative.
I still, unfashionably, keep faith with Mbembe’s dream institution, and the artists here who would have their place in it. But we won’t build it with buzzwords alone, and if anyone had actually been paying attention to the political discourse in this part of the world in a time of war, they would have realized that two can play this game. “An essentially emancipatory, anticolonial movement against unipolar hegemony is taking shape in the most diverse countries and societies” — did someone in the 2024 Venice Biennale say that? No, it was Vladimir Putin.
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A Scottish artist who uses cars, worship bells and Irn-Bru in her work is among the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize.
Glasgow-born Jasleen Kaur’s work reflects her life growing up in the city’s Sikh community.
She is up for the prestigious art award, now in its 40th year, alongside Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson and Delaine Le Bas.
Turner Prize jury chairman Alex Farquharson described it as a “fantastic shortlist of artists”
Works by the nominated artists will go on show at London’s Tate Britain gallery from 25 September.
They will receive £10,000 each, while the winner, to be announced on 3 December, will get £25,000.
In a statement, Farquharson said: “All four make work that is full of life.
“They show how contemporary art can fascinate, surprise and move us, and how it can speak powerfully of complex identities and memories, often through the subtlest of details.
“In the Turner Prize’s 40th year, this shortlist proves that British artistic talent is as rich and vibrant as ever.”
The shortlisted artists are:
Pio Abad
Manila-born Abad’s solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford included drawings, etchings and sculptures that combined to “ask questions of museums”, according to the jury.
The 40-year-old, who works in London, reflects on colonial history and growing up in the Philippines, where his parents struggled against authoritarianism.
The title of his exhibit is a nod to Mark Twain’s 1901 essay To the Person Sitting In Darkness, which hit out at imperialism.
Jasleen Kaur
Kaur is on the list for Alter Altar at Tramway, Glasgow, which included family photos, an Axminster carpet, a classic Ford Escort covered in a giant doily, Irn-Bru and kinetic handbells.
The 37-year-old, who lives in London, had previously showcased her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum by looking at popular Indian cinema.
Delaine Le Bas
Worthing-born Le Bas is nominated for an exhibition titled Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning. Staged at the Secession art institute in Vienna, Austria, it saw painted fabrics hung, with theatrical costumes and sculptures also part of the exhibit.
The 58-year-old artist was inspired by the death of her grandmother and the history of the Roma people.
The jury said they “were impressed by the energy and immediacy present in this exhibition, and its powerful expression of making art in a time of chaos”.
Claudette Johnson
Manchester-born Johnson has been given the nod for her solo exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery in London, and Drawn Out at Ortuzar Projects, New York.
She uses portraits of black women and men in a combination of pastels, gouache and watercolour, and was praised by the judges for her “sensitive and dramatic use of line, colour, space and scale to express empathy and intimacy with her subjects”.
Johnson, 65, was appointed an MBE in 2022 after being named on the New Year Honours list for her services to the arts.
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Turner Prize shortlist includes art showcasing Scottish Sikh community
A Scottish artist who uses cars, worship bells and Irn-Bru in her work is among the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize.
Glasgow-born Jasleen Kaur’s work reflects her life growing up in the city’s Sikh community.
She is up for the prestigious art award, now in its 40th year, alongside Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson and Delaine Le Bas.
Turner Prize jury chairman Alex Farquharson described it as a “fantastic shortlist of artists”
Works by the nominated artists will go on show at London’s Tate Britain gallery from 25 September.
They will receive £10,000 each, while the winner, to be announced on 3 December, will get £25,000.
In a statement, Farquharson said: “All four make work that is full of life.
“They show how contemporary art can fascinate, surprise and move us, and how it can speak powerfully of complex identities and memories, often through the subtlest of details.
“In the Turner Prize’s 40th year, this shortlist proves that British artistic talent is as rich and vibrant as ever.”
The shortlisted artists are:
Pio Abad
Manila-born Abad’s solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford included drawings, etchings and sculptures that combined to “ask questions of museums”, according to the jury.
The 40-year-old, who works in London, reflects on colonial history and growing up in the Philippines, where his parents struggled against authoritarianism.
The title of his exhibit is a nod to Mark Twain’s 1901 essay To the Person Sitting In Darkness, which hit out at imperialism.
Jasleen Kaur
Kaur is on the list for Alter Altar at Tramway, Glasgow, which included family photos, an Axminster carpet, a classic Ford Escort covered in a giant doily, Irn-Bru and kinetic handbells.
The 37-year-old, who lives in London, had previously showcased her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum by looking at popular Indian cinema.
Delaine Le Bas
Worthing-born Le Bas is nominated for an exhibition titled Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning. Staged at the Secession art institute in Vienna, Austria, it saw painted fabrics hung, with theatrical costumes and sculptures also part of the exhibit.
The 58-year-old artist was inspired by the death of her grandmother and the history of the Roma people.
The jury said they “were impressed by the energy and immediacy present in this exhibition, and its powerful expression of making art in a time of chaos”.
Claudette Johnson
Manchester-born Johnson has been given the nod for her solo exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery in London, and Drawn Out at Ortuzar Projects, New York.
She uses portraits of black women and men in a combination of pastels, gouache and watercolour, and was praised by the judges for her “sensitive and dramatic use of line, colour, space and scale to express empathy and intimacy with her subjects”.
Johnson, 65, was appointed an MBE in 2022 after being named on the New Year Honours list for her services to the arts.
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Turner Prize: Shortlisted artist showcases Scottish Sikh community
