Mouna Rebeiz: The Soothsayer at the 59th Venice Biennale

From April 23 to November 27, 2022, for the 59th Venice Biennale and under the patronage of the Republic of San Marino, the Leba- nese-Canadian artist Mouna Rebeiz is presenting "The Soothsayer," a body of new works that invites the viewer to a symbolic and meta- phoric journey in the St. George Anglican Church in Venice, Italy.

The title of the exhibition, "The Soothsayer," refers to the character of Shakespeare's tragedy who warned the emperor Julius Caesar of his premeditated assassination in the Senate, but who was ignored and called a "dreamer." Mouna Rebeiz uses the idea of premonition as being one of the artist's missions.

The artist takes an interest in the unlikely meeting point between artificial intelligence and the mystic. Three works dialogue with each other and guide the visitor along the path of his own discovery and that of humanity: a majestic set of the revisited 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot of Marseille, a puzzle of colored pieces and an abstract totemic sculpture.

Arranged in an arc along the central nave, the reinterpreted 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot of Marseille, painted on polished aluminum plates using a singular pictorial technique, symbolize the psyche's original core and of self-awareness.

The puzzle wall of colored pieces, upright behind the holy water font, symbolizes the boundary between the real and the great beyond, in which ancestors, spirits, wisemen and new divinities cohabit. The puzzle pieces that compose the wall are associated with a production system of a prophecy through the sense of touch. It is projected in the church's space in a textual form.

A totem composed of transparent puzzle pieces made from recycled Plexiglas is in the entrance of the nave. It is also an offshoot of the gods, ancestors and wisemen who reign in another dimension and who choose to communicate with us. We can read on the totem, in gothic characters, the first quatrain of Charles Baudelaire's Correspondences.

In the very center of the St. George Anglican Church of Venice, the meditative vocation of the three elements of the performative work takes on its full dimension.