Aperto ’93 is the title of an exhibition of contemporary art conceived by Helena Kontova

Helena Kontova

Helena Kontova is an art critic and curator born on November 16, 1955 in Prague, Czech Republic. She has lived in Milan, Italy since 1977 and has been the editor of Flash Art International since 1979...

 and Giancarlo Politi

Giancarlo Politi

Giancarlo Politi is the founder of Flash Art Magazine.-Magazine:In 1967 he moved to Rome, where he started his own art magazine, called Flash, and then changed it to Flash Art...

, and organized by Helena Kontova

Helena Kontova

Helena Kontova is an art critic and curator born on November 16, 1955 in Prague, Czech Republic. She has lived in Milan, Italy since 1977 and has been the editor of Flash Art International since 1979...

 for the XVL edition of the Venice Biennale

Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...

, directed by Achille Bonito Oliva

Achille Bonito Oliva

Achille Bonito Oliva, is a recognized and respected Italian contemporary art critic, author of many essays on mannerism, and a professor of History of Contemporary Art at La Sapienza University in Rome...

 in 1993.

Concept and realisation

The show, entitled “Emergency/Emergenze,” signified a shift in the history of exhibition making. Instead of proposing a vision developed by a sole curator – or curatorial team – Aperto ’93 proposed a rhizomic or cellular model. In this model different points of view related to the then emerging scene, deeply influenced by the process of globalization, underlined the necessity of coexistence and cohabitation and furthermore a fragmentation of the way to think and criticize visual art.

Kontova the editor, together with Politi, of Flash Art Italia and Flash Art International (www.flashartonline.com), took over the legacy of “Aperto” the section of the Venice Biennale

Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...

 devoted to emerging artists created in 1980 and inaugurated with a show curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and Harald Szeemann

Harald Szeemann

Harald Szeemann was a Swiss curator and art historian.-Life:Szeemann was born in Bern. He studied art history, archaeology and journalism in Bern and Paris, and in 1956 he began working as an actor, stage designer and painter, as well as doing one-man shows. He started creating exhibitions in 1957...

 and then abolished in 1997 by Jean Clair

Jean Clair

Jean Clair is the nom de plume of Gérard Régnier . He is an essayist, a polemicist, an art historian, an art conservator, and a member of the French Academy since May, 2008. He was, for many years, the director of the Picasso Museum in Paris...

.

The curators altererd the emphasis from a mere section into a "show within a show," featuring works by 120 artists including: Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney is an American artist who works in sculpture, photography, drawing and film. His early works were sculptural installations combined with performance and video...

, Henry Bond

Henry Bond

Henry Bond is an English writer, photographer curator, and visual artist. In his Lacan at the Scene , Bond made a contribution to theoretical psychoanalysis....

, Christine Borland

Christine Borland

Christine Borland is a British artist and one of the Young British Artists . Borland attended the University of Ulster, and the Glasgow School of Art....

, Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist based in New York. He is known for his satirical sculptures, particularly La Nona Ora , depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite....

, John Currin

John Currin

John Currin is an American painter. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and...

, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, born in 1965 in Strasbourg, is a French artist working with video and installations. Gonzalez-Foerster lives and works in Paris and Rio de Janeiro. She won the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2002.-Exhibitions:...

, Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Félix González-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres was an American, Cuban-born visual artist."For Felix it was much more powerful to assume that the gay and straight audience was the same audience, that being a Cuban-born American is the same as being an American. And being American was something he was extremely proud of."...

, Lothar Hempel

Lothar Hempel

Lothar Hempel is a German artist based in Berlin. He attended Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1987 to 1992.-Artistic practice:...

, Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst

Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...

, Carsten Höller

Carsten Höller

Carsten Höller is a German artist. He lives and works in Farsta, Stockholm, in Sweden. Today, he also shares a house in Ghana with colleague Marcel Odenbach.-Early life and education:...

, Sean Landers

Sean Landers

Sean Landers is a contemporary artist working and living in New York, United States.Sean Landers was born in Palmer, Massachusetts. He is known for paintings with a central painted picture surrounded with text...

, Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy , is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.-Life:McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and studied art at the University of Utah in 1969. He went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute receiving a BFA in painting...

, Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican artist, who in 1998 was called "one of the most influential artists of this decade, and probably the next one too." He was born in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico and educated in the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas between 1981 and 1984. He then continued his education...

, Philippe Parreno

Philippe Parreno

Philippe Parreno is an Algerian artist and filmmaker, born in Oran, and currently living in Paris, France. Parreno's work primarily revolves around the interrogation of the nature of an image, as well as the modes of its exhibition.-Life and work:...

, Simon Patterson, Charles Ray

Charles Ray (artist)

Charles Ray is a Los Angeles-based sculptor. He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer’s perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways...

, Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist

Elisabeth Charlotte "Pipilotti" Rist , is a visual artist who works with video, film, and moving images which are often displayed as projections.-Life and career:...

, Andres Serrano

Andres Serrano

Andres Serrano is an American photographer and artist who has become notorious through his photos of corpses and his use of feces and bodily fluids in his work, notably his controversial work "Piss Christ", a red-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported...

, Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith is an American artist classified as a feminist artist, a movement with beginnings in the twentieth century...

, Rudolf Stingel

Rudolf Stingel

Rudolf Stingel is an artist based in New York.Stingel was born in Meran. His work engages the audience in dialogue about their perception of art and uses Conceptual painting and installations to explore the process of creation...

, Rikrit Tiravanija, Andrea Zittel

Andrea Zittel

Andrea Zittel is an American practicing sculptor, installation artist, and Relational artist.-Early Life:Born in Escondido, California in 1965, Zittel graduated from San Pasqual High School in 1983...

, Wu Shanzhuan

Wu Shanzhuan

Wu Shanzhuan is an artist based in Hamburg.Wu was born in Zhoushan. His art is Conceptual in nature, often dealing with issues surrounding language...

, Wang Youshen, Emmanuel Kane Kuei and Botala Tala.

Anticipating "the curators’ era," Aperto ’93 consisted of 13 sections, each of them managed by then-emerging curators, many of whom are now internationally acclaimed, such as Francesco Bonami (first Italian to curate the Whitney Biennial

Whitney Biennial

The Whitney Biennial is a biennale exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, USA. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932, the first biennial was in 1973...

), Nicolas Bourriaud

Nicolas Bourriaud

Nicolas Bourriaud is a French curator and art critic. He co-founded, and from 1999 to 2006 was co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris together with Jerôme Sans. He was also founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art , and correspondent in Paris for Flash Art from...

 (theoretician of Relational Art

Relational Art

Relational art or relational aesthetics is a mode or tendency in fine art practice originally observed and highlighted by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud...

), Jeffrey Deitch (director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is a contemporary art museum with three locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near Walt Disney Concert Hall...

), Matthew Slotover

Matthew Slotover

Matthew Slotover , is an English publisher and entrepreneur. He is co-publisher of Frieze and co-director of Frieze Art Fair with his business partner Amanda Sharp.-Life and career:...

 (founder of Frieze magazine and art fair), Benjamin Weil and Robert Nickas.

Critical reception

The show became a cult event of the ’90s, managing to frame what was happening at that time.

Artforum

Artforum

Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...

 published a review entitled "Aperto 93: The Better Biennale". The model of Aperto ’93 is often quoted by curators, and it was a source of inspiration for the 2003 Venice Biennale

Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...

 directed by Francesco Bonami, the first Moscow Biennale

Moscow Biennale

The Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art is one of the most important Russian cultural events and was founded in 2003.- First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art :...

, the second Johannesburg Biennale directed by Okwui Enwezor

Okwui Enwezor

Okwui Enwezor is an Igbo Nigerian-born American curator, art critic, writer, poet, educator, and specializing in art history. He lives in New York.- Biography :...

, and the first and second Gwangju Biennale

Gwangju Biennale

The Gwangju Biennale, which started in September 1995 in the city of Gwangju in the South Jeolla province of South Korea, was Asia's first contemporary art biennale. The purpose of Gwangju Biennale is globalization of art and it respect diversity rather than uniformity...

.