Enki Bilal — Inbox, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, 2015

Exhibition postcard / announcement card
Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
8 May – 2 August 2015

Offset print on card stock
Approx. 10.5 × 15 cm · Printed recto and verso

Condition: very good vintage condition. Light surface wear, minor handling marks, and faint age toning. The marks remain part of the record: evidence of circulation, storage, handling, and transfer.

The front reproduces a detail from Inbox: two spectral, blue-toned faces rendered in Bilal’s characteristic science-fiction palette, suspended somewhere between painting, cinema still, and hallucinated image. The reverse functions as an administrative support, carrying exhibition information, opening dates, institutional logos, and postal fields. Image on one side, distribution mechanism on the other.

Issued for Enki Bilal’s installation Inbox, presented during the 56th Venice Biennale at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Supported by Artcurial, the project marked Bilal’s first major exhibition within the Biennale context and extended his long-standing movement between comic art, painting, cinema, and immersive installation.

Bilal occupies a singular position within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century image culture. Emerging from the Franco-Belgian comics tradition before moving into painting, film, and installation, he developed a visual language of post-industrial bodies, political dystopias, synthetic skin, and damaged memory. His figures often appear as if passing between analogue and digital states.

A minor document from a major international art context. Retained evidence of passage through the Biennale economy. Shipping and handling included.