Edmund de Waal’s latest installation is a hymn to writers in exile: a porcelain “library” with 2,000 books in translation
THE ATENEO VENETO, a grand 16th-century palace near the Fenice Opera House, once hosted a fraternal order which cared for convicted prisoners in their final days. For the past 200 years, however, the site has been a forum for discussion, drawing together people from the city’s many communities to contemplate art, literature, science and politics. Now it is home to a different set of noisy and troubled souls.
At the heart of this piece by Edmund de Waal, a British ceramicist and writer, is a lost library. In 1938, weeks after the Nazi invasion of Austria, his great-grandfather’s home on the Ringstrasse in Vienna was stormed and the library was seized and Aryanised. The story of the tragic dispersal of that household formed the basis of Mr de Waal’s bestselling family memoir, “The Hare with Amber Eyes” . “This is a project that I have always dreamed of doing,” he says of the Venice show.
Inside the library, alongside the shelves, are four glass vitrines holding small porcelain works. Mr de Waal says the layout of the space is intended to evoke the edition of the Talmud created by Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer, in Venice in the early 16th century—around the same time the Ateneo was built.
In the tumult of the Venice Biennale, there is something special about any spot that is quiet. The project encourages the visitor to reflect on returns, a theme that recurs throughout the artist’s work. Mr de Waal’s great-grandfather’s books were never recovered, probably dispersed throughout Austria or destroyed, but with this new “library of exile” he has devised his own kind of restitution.
“psalm”, an exhibition in two parts, continues in Venice until September 29th. The “library of exile” will be presented at the Japanisches Palais in Dresden from November 2019 to February 2020, and at the British Museum in London in 2020
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