Uffe Isolotto’s We Walked the Earth, Pavilion of Denmark, Venice Art Biennale 2022

Uffe Isolotto, We Walked the Earth, Pavilion of Denmark, Venice Art Biennale 2022, installation view; photo © Riccardo Bianchini / Inexhibit.

Uffe Isolotto’s We Walked the Earth, Pavilion of Denmark, Venice Art Biennale 2022

Commissioner: Danish Arts Foundation
Curator: Jacob Lillemose
Exhibitor: Uffe Isolotto

At the Art Biennale 2022, the installation We Walked the Earth by Uffe Isolotto (b. 1976) featured in the Danish Pavilion brings us into a Gothic Nordic fairy tale. We Walked the Earth is set in an unspecified epoch, in which elements from the rural past of Denmark intertwine with mysterious, inexplicable events.
Despite the overly-accurate reconstruction of the farm that fills up the pavilion and the many objects scattered around it, nothing really explains what happened to the two centaurs inhabiting it.
The scenes we watch look as if they were frozen in time just minutes after an event the centaurs couldn’t (or didn’t want to) oppose. Or, perhaps, these creatures were just the outcome of a biotechnology experiment, a response to a time in which we have lost our relationship with a planet to live on which being human is no longer enough.

Uffe Isolotto, We Walked the Earth, installation views; photos © Riccardo Bianchini / Inexhibit. The hyperrealistic rendering of the dead centaurs’ sculptures makes Isolotto’s installation even more dreamlike and surreal.