The Venice Biennale officially opened to the public this past weekend and with the hard part done, Will is now “conducting European research”. Hany’s exhibition has been very well received, even earning a bit of fashion cred with his gold lamé information tote being dubbed the “it” bag of the Biennale by the NYTimes.

For Hany Armanious, this is not his first Biennale. In his career, Hany’s work has been shown at the 9th Biennale of Sydney (1992), the Venice Biennale (1993), the Johannesburg Biennale (1995) and the Busan Biennale in Korea (2006) among dozens of other art exhibits both solo and group. Today, Hany’s work is held in private collections in Europe, USA and Australia, and public collections in Australia, New Zealand, Greece and the USA.

It’s his love of turning the everyday into works of art that Hany’s fans admire most. And his exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale, entitled ‘The Golden Thread,’ will not disappoint. The 11 pieces that Hany so carefully created (and Will along with the Italian installers so carefully prepared) are rooted in the process of casting (something we’re very familiar with at the Big Kahuna workshop). Hany has taken typically unappreciated, often discarded items and created castings of them in deliberately non-precious materials such as polyurethane resin (something else we’re very familiar with at the Big Kahuna workshop).

More than simply turning the ordinary into the extraordinary, Hany also contradicts the traditional intention of casting by using the process not to create multiple copies, but one unique object (a man after our own imagineering heart!) To take the significance of the casting to another level, the original object and the mould are often destroyed making the piece an artifact.

Anne Ellegood, Hany’s curator, described him extremely well when she said, “Armanious’ invocation of ancient forms and cultures, his embrace of a nearly alchemical transformation of one material into another, and his interest in incorporating the processes of making and displaying works of art into the sculptures themselves, underscore his desire to locate the mysterious within the mundane. By arguing that objects in our everyday life – leaf-blowers, vases, teapots, baskets, irons, window blinds, or even a cardboard Burger King crown – can carry as much visual pleasure, as much potential for beauty, as those things designed or deemed to be in the domain of aesthetics, his work is an acknowledgement that there is more to this world than meets the eye.”

Hany is undoubtably a prolific contemporary artist. Having been the specialist fabricator for Hany here in Sydney with Big Kahuna Imagineering, and then to be tapped as his service provider of choice on site, our managing director Will has had an exacting role to play and it has been an honour.

In 2009, the Australian Pavilion attracted almost 400,000 visitors. The Biennale runs from 4 June to 27 November 2011. Click here to check out the Biennale website.