From April 23 to November 27, 2022, for the 59th Venice Biennale, the Lebanese-Canadian artist Mouna Rebeiz exhibits in the heart of Venice in the Anglican Church St. George a body of work that invites to a symbolic journey.

 

The title of the exhibition, “The Soothsayer,” refers to the character of Shakespeare’s tragedy who warned the emperor Julius Caesar of his premeditated assassination in the Senate, but who was ignored and called a “dreamer.” Mouna Rebeiz uses the idea of premonition as being one of the artist’s missions.

 

The artist takes an interest in the unlikely meeting point between artificial intelligence and the mystic. Three works dialogue with each other and guide the visitor along the path of his own discovery and that of humanity: a majestic set of the revisited 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot of Marseille, a puzzle of colored pieces and an abstract totemic sculpture.

 

Arranged in an arc along the central nave, the reinterpreted 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot de Marseille, painted on polished aluminum plates using a singular pictorial technique, symbolize the psyche’s original core and of self-awareness.

 

The puzzle wall of colored pieces, upright behind the holy water font, symbolizes the boundary between the real and the great beyond, in which ancestors, spirits, wisemen and new divinities cohabit. The puzzle pieces that compose the wall are associated with a production system of a prophecy through the sense of touch. It is projected in the church’s space in a textual form.

 

A totem composed of transparent puzzle pieces made from recycled Plexiglas is in the entrance of the nave. It is also an offshoot of the gods, ancestors, wisemen and soothsayers who reign in another dimension and who choose to communicate with us. We can read on the totem, in gothic characters, the first quatrain of Charles Baudelaire’s Correspondences.

 

In the very center of the St. George Anglican Church of Venice, the meditative vocation of the three elements of the performative work takes on its full dimension.

 

ABOUT MOUNA REBEIZ

A Lebanese-Canadian contemporary artist, Mouna Rebeiz lives and works in London. Her remarkable style was shaped in contact with master works stretching from the Renaissance to the present day. She makes use of these varied influences and a singular pictorial mastery to capture the meaning and existential queries of the human being. A psychologist by training, her work constitutes a vast reflection on the human psyche.

 

ABOUT THE VENICE BIENNIALE

The Venice Biennale is one of the oldest and most prestigious artistic events in Europe and the world. Since 1893, it has given pride of place every year to contemporary art, dance, music, cinema and architecture in Venice’s most emblematic sites.