Carla Gutenkauf-Grün

Merging the traditions of art house and splatter, Mondo Veneziano: High Noon in the Sinking City pokes fun at the bloated importance of discursive theories in contemporary art. Cast in an abandoned Venice – a derelict film set in Luxembourg, as it turns out – this short fiction relates a meeting of a curator, a theorist, a painter and a “relational” artist who appear to engage in complex theoretical debates. Their verbal confrontation – a grotesque patchwork of quotes that mocks the art world’s infatuation with sampling and referencing – is punctuated by a string of dreamlike sequences in which the stereotypical characters are seen killing each other in the best tradition of mondo films.