In 2019, the Scotland + Venice partnership presented SaF05, a new single-channel video by 2018 Turner Prize-winning artist Charlotte Prodger. SaF05 is named after a maned lioness that figures in the work as a cipher for queer attachment and desire. This animal is the last of several maned lionesses documented in the Okavango Delta and is only known to Prodger through a database of behaviours and camera-trap footage logged across several years. These indexes of SaF05’s existence are intersected with autobiographical fragments from Prodger’s own life that fluctuate between proximity and distance.

Hovering between energy and mass in nine rooms of the Palazzo Pisani (S. Marina) is a solo exhibition of brand new ‘almost objects’ by the Scottish artist Karla Black. Intimately and painstakingly worked in situ into exquisitely detailed aesthetic forms, a still raw vastness of pure material and colour fills this 15th century Venetian palace. These abstract sculptures – pulverised, atomised, piled, layered, supported, suspended and spilled out onto the floor – offer a visceral experience of absorption in the material world. The artist’s professed love of powders, pastes, creams, oils and gels is in evidence here.

Curated by Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), Martin Boyce’s acclaimed solo exhibition No Reflections was commissioned by Scotland and Venice in 2009. Martin Boyce is one of Scotland’s most prominent artists and is well-known for his sculptural installations that recall conventional public spaces. Imagining an abandoned garden in the fading grandeur of a 15th century Palazzo, Boyce placed groupings of the newly commissioned works in the Palazzo’s seven interconnected rooms – suspended aluminium trees, scattered wax paper leaves, raised stepping stones, a wooden bird box, tables and benches. Drawing on the inner city landscape of Venice, Boyce conflated the internal and external, creating a heightened sense of displacement and abandonment. The works were subsequently reconfigured for the modern, award-winning galleries of DCA as part of our 10th birthday celebrations.

Scotland + Venice 2007 was an exhibition of new work by six artist, curated by National Galleries of Scotland and presented at the Palazzo Zenobio, in the Dorsoduro district of Venice.

Glasgow-based artists, Alex Pollard, Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan and Cathy Wilkes were chosen to represent Scotland at the 2005 event in an exhibition entitled Selective Memory. In the exhibition, curators Jason E Bowman and Rachel Bradley explored the notion of artistic labour and the process of making art.

The exhibition showed works specially commissioned from the three artists in a magnificent venue comprising five majestic rooms in the 17^th century Palazzo Giustinian-Lolin, overlooking the Grand Canal near the Accademia bridge. Alongside the main exhibition a screening and events programme ran in a more contemporary venue (a school gym), a few minutes’ walk away from the exhibition venue, in Dorsoduro in the opening week of the Biennale.

This programme of live events, performances and screenings included newly commissioned work from a wide range of artists including Dave Allen, Katy Dove, Graham Fagen, Luke Fowler, Rob Kennedy, Torsten Lauschmann, Rosalind Nashashibi, Stephen Sutcliffe, Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan.