Chewing in Venice 2: Chewing gum Forno

Simone Decker (1968) is well known in Luxembourg for several personal exhibitions at the Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, and for her participation in 1999 in the 48th Venice Biennale, as part of the Luxembourg pavilion. Her works most often take the architectural context as a point of departure, as well as the institutional context in which she is invited to intervene. These works are, as the artist emphasises, “realised in the place, but above all, with the place”. By means of interventions that are sometimes discreet, sometimes more explicit, they invite the spectator to renew his or her perception of the spaces. With the same logic, Simone Decker regularly uses elements that she finds on site in her installations, often revealing the “cogs and wheels” of the location, which she borrows for the duration of the exhibition before returning them. Another aspect of her approach consists of staging interventions on particular spaces by means of photography. This is the case, for example, in her series of sculptures in chewing-gum realised in the streets of Venice, using a system of trompe l’œil as simple as it is cunning (Chewing in Venice).