Dancing with Myself

“Dancing with Myself” was the result of close collaboration between Palazzo Grassi-Punta della Dogana director Martin Bethenod and Florian Ebner, curator of the Museum Folkwang’s photography collection. It was designed as a joyful, poetic, political and wild dance through contemporary art from the 1960s to the present. The guest artists, including Adel Abdessemed, Boris Mikhaïlov, Marcel Bascoulard, Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman, Giulio Paolini and Paulo Nazareth, played a key role both as actors and as material for their creations, using their bodies, their biographies, their social and/or sexual identities and their emotions. They showed that there are other ways of depicting the self beyond the self-portrait. The show brought together 140 works with unique temperaments and attitudes around four main themes: melancholy, identity, politics and raw material. 

Eighty of the hundred or so works from the Pinault Collection that were exhibited in dialogue with an original selection of pieces from the Museum Folkwang had never been shown in Venice before.