The curator of the 12th Architecture Biennale in Venice is Kazuyo Sejima

On Monday, November 9, 2009, the president of the Venice Biennale, Paolo Baratta, announced that the curator for the 12th Biennale in 2010 will be Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima, who already has years of experience with the Venice Biennale: in 2000, she was the curator of the Japanese pavilion and in 2004, she won the Golden Lion for the project of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. Last year's Japanese pavilion exhibition was handled by Junya Ishigami, who worked for four years in the studio SANAA led by the duo of Japanese architects Sejima and Nishizawa.

As the main theme of the Biennale, Sejima proposed a series of connecting contradictions: “inside and outside, personal and public, program and form, physical and virtual ... but also art and architecture, nature and man. Perhaps this oxymoron (witty contradiction) can become a new productive paradigm, perhaps these binary compounds can lead to a duality capable of blurring those boundaries. How can unexpected interdependencies of unusual spaces lead to a common/symbiotic dialogue between neighborhoods (adjacencies). This is joined by another area that interests me equally: people in architecture, human encounters in both public and private scenarios, as both creator and user of architecture. This is one of the aspects of individual life in exchange with the community. It can simply be named 'People meet in architecture'. Overall, the Biennale can be a new and active forum for the presentation of contemporary ideas but also for intensive exploration of buildings.”

The twelfth edition of the International Architecture Exhibition in Venice will take place from August 29 to November 21, 2010. Info>