This major international exhibition features monumental new works by four of the most exciting and renowned artists working today: Alexander Ponomarev (Russia), Hans Op de Beeck (Belgium), Adrian Ghenie (Romania) and Ryoichi Kurokawa (Japan). One of a Thousand Ways to Defeat Entropy is an Official Collateral Project of the 54th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art – the world’s oldest and most prestigious art festival – and will be on view at the Arsenale Novissimo from 3 June to 27 November 2011. The exhibition is organised by the AVC Charity Foundation (London) with the academic support of The Courtauld Institute of Art.

Entropy! A key term characterising the movement towards chaos – in physics, probability theory, sociology and information technology. The entropic end-state is nothing less than uniform oblivion, which recent art-theoretical discourse has associated with representations of melting and liquidification – an ocean of homogeneity. The exhibition throws light on this inescapable tendency (declared to be the second law of thermodynamics), demonstrating that resistance to it can only be carried out by a creative person. Only creators give birth to life energy that is capable of creating improbable structures. The bearers of this power – artists, engineers, poets – are a small army, the guides of evolution, warriors with cosmic noise. In June they will come together in a place where the concept of entropy takes on a strategic character: Venice, the sinking city. Located in the Arsenale Novissimo (a former shipyard) One of a Thousand Ways to Defeat Entropy is a fantastic machine, a vessel, sailing in the expanding cosmos of the imagination, leaving behind works in space that allow us – for a second at least – to doubt the inevitable domination of entropy.