Double Take

Double Take
April 15th – July 15th 2024
A plus A Gallery, San Marco 3073 Venezia 30124
curated by School for Curatorial Studies Venice
Free entry
Artists: Paolo Cirio, Jesse Darling, Simon Denny, Kasia Fudakowski, Enej Gala, Monilola Olayemi
Ilupeju, Eva & Franco Mattes, Ahmet Öğüt, Barbara Prenka.
Coinciding with the preview of the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia A plus A
Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Double Take curated by the 2024
participants of School for Curatorial Studies Venice, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year.
The term double take refers to the action of looking at something a second time that had escaped notice at
first glance, in order to discern something unusual or new that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Double Take is an invitation to reconsider, to pay greater attention and care to the content hidden inside
the works, to grasp their more implicit meanings. It’s an indication to see beyond the immediacy of mere
visual content, to take a critical stance, to move along the boundaries of an increasingly hyperconnected
and dematerialized reality. Our attention span has decreased. Deep scrolling, ad bombardment,
censorship and online subliminal propaganda are progressively changing the times and modes of content
consumption, which is ingested without assimilation. In the so-called age of hyper-information,
information overload is generating a phenomenon of mass distraction.
This is what Shoshana Zuboff calls !surveillance capitalism!, referring to the ma- trix of control over the
uncontrolled spread of information, a new form of exploi- table capital. In the digital panopticon of the
new millennium, founded more so on individuals’ self-monitoring online rather than explicit limitations,
an increa- singly dense network of control is being woven, the repercussions of which are also felt in art:
subjected to the imperative of ‘political correctness!;, artistic pro- duction suffers a loss of content. Artists
self-censor or look for new forms and

A plus A Gallery
San Marco 3073, Venezia

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+39 041 277 0466

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ways of artistic expression. As a result of these reflections, the gallery transforms into a hypothetical
surveillance office, where the works challenge the limit of what is allowed to be said, moving between
ambiguity and duplicity, in an at- tempt to circumvent imaginary control devices. On display are works
that reflect on the impossibility of explicit communication through codes and visual referen- ces,
requiring a second look to be understood, thus calling for a double take. To complement the works, the
office also includes a research room which exhibits historical documents of emblematic cases of
censorship during the history of the Biennale, including original photographs of the 1968 protests by
Graziano Arici.
Through an imagined act of transgression, the intention is to reclaim the inde- pendence of visual
language and to indicate in art a possible form of resistance, a stance against today’s conformity.

Double Take
April 15th – July 15th 2024
A plus A Gallery, San Marco 3073 Venezia 30124
curated by School for Curatorial Studies Venice
Free entry
Tuesday to saturda 11am – 6pm and by appointment
info@aplusa.it
curatorialschool@gmail.com
www.aplusa.it
www.corsocuratori.com