Curator Kazuo Shojima suggested, as we said, a simple and easy-to-interpret topic. People, they are known to be ubiquitous; inside the architecture and around it, somewhere more people meet, and somewhere less. For the authors of exhibitions and for journalists this year it was quite easy to tie their works to the main topic - it was enough to say that here people can meet too. In addition, the Biennale itself has always been a place where, in a relatively informal setting, one can meet "stars" of both international and national scale. So the topic is simply wonderful, light and lifelike (not like the year before last year's beyond, which imposed in the teeth so much that even in the new Biennale there were at least two exhibitions with this word in the title, the Albanian Beyond color at the Arsenal and the Beyond entropy of the Chini Foundation on the island of San Giorgio). People meet Shojima primarily provokes the gossip genre; we also decided to show several faces - people who met at the biennale.
However, let's start with one small event, about which we have not yet said anything: in the Armenian College located in Palazzo Zenobio, the exhibition “Director's Office” opened on August 26, dedicated to the memory of David Sargsyan, who died on January 7 this year. The exhibition was organized by Yuri Avvakumov and Yuri Grigoryan. This is not so much an exposition as a tribute to the memory and recollection of a person; its opening was to some extent a delayed commemoration, a meeting-wires, and in this sense it ideally fit into the theme of the Biennale.
