Rhinoceros: Luxury’s Fragile Frontier
The rhino and Venice have a wondrously entwined history. This exhibition and accompanying symposium brings together these two unlikely companions. Both events seek to highlight and interrogate the consequences of luxury consumption on an endangered beast and an endangered city.
Every eight hours a rhinoceros is killed to satisfy demand…
Every day an average of 60,000 tourists descend on the fragile city of Venice.
In November 2018, an international collaboration of artists, conservationists, poets, writers, and historians, explored the paradoxical magnificence and fragility of Venice and of the Rhinoceros. In a symposium designed to launch an accompanying exhibition, they revealed the history of the rhino horn as a unique object of desire; they tell the tale of Clara the rhino in Venice; they highlighted the distinctive oeuvres of four artists inspired by the rhino; and they unravelled the complex threads involved in the mass tourism market of Venice.
Supporting Dr Catherine Kovesi, Historian of Early Modern Italian History at University of Melbourne, with the launch of her symposium and exhibition: Rhino + Venice: Luxury’s Fragile Frontier. A not-for-profit event held at the Magazzino Gallery, Palazzo Contarini Polignac; in the relic and fragile city of Venice.
Event branding included; design and development of her existing Emporium website to support a separately developed event page, printed materials for the symposium and art exhibition, with digital media and eDM templates.
Branded materials included a 100 page exhibition catalogue transcribed in three languages (English, Italian and Traditional Chinese), sitting side-by-side, rather than singular language books; an event program available on the website and as hardcopy during the month of the exhibition; A0 posters of poems by the poet Ronna Bloom; directional totem signage; rhinoceros illustration for the catalogue; along with eDMs and eventbrite material.
Rhinoceros: Luxury’s Fragile Frontier’ was conceived from through encounters between Catherine Kovesi and rhinoceros obsessives: Lynn Johnson, Gigi Bon, and Shih Li-Jen, and the poet Ronna Bloom.
