The board of directors for Venice's International Architecture Exhibition have revealed the five jury members who will award prizes when the show kicks off on 20 May.
ADVERTISEMENTThe 18th edition of La Biennale di Venezia - or the International Architecture Exhibition - kicks off in Venice on Saturday 20 May and the board of directors behind the six-month-long event has announced, with recommendations from curator Lesley Lokko, its international jury for this year.
Euronews Culture takes a look at the members who will be responsible for awarding the official prizes, including the Golden Lion for best National Participation, the Golden Lion for best participant in the International Exhibition ‘The Laboratory of the Future’ and the Silver Lion for a promising young participant in the International Exhibition 'The Laboratory of the Future'.
The jury are also entitled to award a maximum of one special mention to National Participations and a maximum of two special mentions to the participants in ‘The Laboratory of the Future’ if they see fit.
The awards ceremony will take place during the opening of the festival in Venice on 20 May and the Biennale runs until 26 November.
Jury members
Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli is the president of the jury. An Italian architect and curator based in Milan, he founded the interdisciplinary agency 2050+, which works across technology, politics, design and environmental practices. He also curated ‘Open’, the Russian Pavilion at the 2021 Biennale. Laparelli teaches at the Royal College of Arts in London and has put on exhibitions including Aquaria at MAAT in Lisbon and Penumbra in Venice, as well as designing the space for the Fredriksen’s collection at the National Museum of Norway in Oslo and working on the transformation of La Rinascente’s modernist building icon in Rome.
Palestinian architect and curator Nora Akawi lives in New York and is an assistant professor of architecture at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She co-curated the Pavilion of Bahrain at the 2018 Biennale and currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals ‘Faktur: Documents and Architecture’ and ‘InForma’, the architecture publication of the Universidad de Puerto Rico.
American Thelma Golden is the director and chief curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, which is the world’s leading institution devoted to visual art by artists of African descent. She has previously worked for The Whitney Museum of American Art and serves on the Board of Directors for the Barack Obama Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Crystal Bridges Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2010, Golden was appointed to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House by former US President Barack Obama.
Zimbabwean Tau Tavengwa is the co-founder, curator and editor of ‘Cityscapes’, a publication which showcases different ideas and narratives from global cities from African, Latin American and South Asian perspectives. He is also the curator-at-large at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and curator of the 2022 Lisbon Architecture Triennale’s Multiplicity exhibition.
Izabela Wieczorek hails from Poland but is currently a registered architect in Spain and a researcher and educator based in London. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Reading’s architecture department and her work has been presented across Europe, including at the 2018 Biennale’s Spanish pavilion and in publications including 2021’s ‘Cartographies of the Imagination’ and ‘Works+Words Biennale of Artistic Research in Architecture’. She also curated the ‘In-Between’ public lecture series at Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Denmark from 2013 until 2016.
Euronews Culture will be covering all the action from the Biennale so make sure to follow along from 20 May.
