Kvadrat at 59th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia

Danish textile manufacturer, Kvadrat is a Supporter and Official Supplier of the 59th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia 2022 and proud to work with artist Kapwani Kiwanga and the design studio Formafantasma.

Kvadrat is actively involved in supporting contemporary art through frequent collaborations with international artists and designers on significant exhibitions, projects, installations and individual art and design works. This creative expression is an essential part of the Kvadrat culture. Each new project and collaboration pushes the boundaries of textile manufacture and application, leading to investigations in materiality and space and opening up the possibilities of textile design. Kvadrat textiles have been used in the work of artists including Olafur Eliasson, Aamu Song, Thomas Demand, Haegue Yang, Wu Tsang, Pipilotti Rist and Dahn Vo, amongst many others.

Kvadrat is committed to long-term collaborations with the artists and designers it engages with. On the occasion of the Biennale Arte 2022, Kvadrat is honoured to continue collaborations with Kapwani Kiwanga on her new commissioned piece Terrarium and Formafantasma on the Time Capsules exhibition design.

Exhibition design by Formafantasma
​As visitors move through the exhibition in the Central Pavilion and the Corderie, they encounter five smaller sections: miniature constellations of artworks, found objects, and documents, clustered together to explore the exhibition’s key themes through different art historical perspectives and trans-generational affinities.

These “cabinets”, or architectural spaces, have been developed by the design duo Formafantasma using 710 metres of Kvadrat textiles including, Forest Nap by Akira Minagawa, Vidar from the Kvadrat/Raf Simons collection and Moiré by Vincent Van Duysen and Avalon upholstery textile from the Sahco collection. This follows a successful collaboration with the design studio, where the duo used Kvadrat textiles for the exhibition design of Caravaggio-Bernini Baroque in Rome at Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (2020).

Terrarium by Kapwani Kiwanga
​Terrarium is a new artwork by Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga for The Milk of Dreams. The installation introduces fluidity into the space of the Corderie, through a maze-like environment composed vast paintings and sand-filled glass sculptures.

Using 57 metres of the transparent Zulu curtain textile by Giulio Ridolfo and 97 metres of Air curtain textile by Erik Ole Jørgensen, Terrarium creates an immersive environment with a desert sunset palette, combining large semi-transparent paintings on fabric with a series of glass sculptures containing sand. The installation imagines sand as a political material: a harmful product of the oil industry, the raw material for glass, and a reminder of an increasingly arid planet. Terrarium is a development on Plot, the site-specific installation the artist created for Haus der Kunst München in 2020, which was also supported by Kvadrat.