1-4 October. Venice Biennale

Having returned home and looking back, my overall feeling about the curated part of this Biennale is 'more is less'. Both the Pavilion at the Giardini and the curated section of the Arsenale were stuffed full - to the extent that my memory is quite clouded by the overall abundance.

The huge curated exhibition spread across the Giardini and Arsenale greets visitors at the Giardini Pavilion with a row of black drapes – which sets the tone somewhat. In the entry lobby is a carefully arranged pile of old suitcases and various versions of ‘The End’ in frames around the wall. The suitcases, the work of Fabio Mauri, represent journeys, in particular forced and fatal journeys. Mauri was born in 1926 and was so affected by the war that he suffered severe psychiatric problems. 

Turning left is a brief video of a man coughing up blood which was arresting to say the least. I did not really get much out of the next few rooms until I arrived at the one with a large tree lying on the floor, a series of mirrors embedded in it. 

This work was by Robert Smithson who was also responsible with Nancy Holt for a video featuring wheat. Alexander Kluge presented three sets of film labelled ‘News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital’ and Thomas Hirschhorn had a room full of what seemed to be suspended packaging rubbish. 

Then, there were a series of one-minute films by Samson Kambalu, featuring various unlikely events like a man confronting a cash machine horizontally. The following room contained Rirkrit Tiravanija’s drawings of revolution pictures and then the next very large room housed Teresa Burga’s work. Next to cause me to halt for its duration was the film (The end of carrying all) by Wangechi Mutu of an African lady carrying a load on her head that got larger and larger until it slid down the edge of the cliff, causing a small volcano. The same artist provided the arresting sculpture ‘she’s got the whole world in her’.

A small side room had an interesting film by Mika Rottenberg called Time and a Half that showed a pair of tapping fingers in slow motion. 

The following room had a series of painting by Ellen Gallagher, plus totems by Huma Bhabha and a large abstract by Emily Kame Kngwarreye. 

Adjoining this were housed three huge canvases with the words ‘come out to show them’ typed repetitively and in overlay. 

Another room had a set of paintings by Kerry James Marshall, resembling Rorschach.

Next door were a series of skulls by Marlene Dumas. 

A participatory room organised by Hans Haacke displayed the attitudes (mainly liberal) of visitors to various exhibitions and invited visitors to this room to complete a poll, coming back instantly with the results so far. For virtually every item, I seemed to be in the median group, which was illuminating.

Andreas Gursky presented photographs of stock exchanges and Vietnamese weavers showing the scale and sort of symmetry of workers. 

In another room Rosa Barba presented a looped film with an enormous and complicated projector. 

Next door was a music room by Charles Gaines. 

Then came for me the standout room. This was a three screen installation by John Akomfrah, called Vertigo Sea, showing scenes from the oceans – both man’s intervention and nature left alone. With shocking images of olden day shooting and skinning of polar bears and hunting of whales, the film was upsetting but also beautifully presented and crafted.

The final room was by Jeremy Deller with images of the message given to zero hours contract worker not wanted that day (Today you have a holiday) as well as a mock up of an arm with the tracking contraption Amazon forces workers to wear and a jukebox playing the sounds of industrial machinery and processes.  

The Giardini pavilion had as its hub ‘the arena’, theatrical space which hosted various events throughout the day. One such was a reading out loud of Das Kapital, described as ‘an epic live reading’ and ‘the linchpin of the ARENA program’.

 The arena also hosted the singing of factory songs, conceived by Jeremy Deller and the reading of the ‘diary of a photographer’, the photographer in question being Abdallah Farah who shot hundreds of reels of film in Beirut between 1997 and 2005. The readings are descriptions of the previously undeveloped photographs.

The rest of the curated exhibition was in the Arsenale and had a somewhat different feel to that in the Giardini and gave the impression of being even more crowded. The first room had some interesting neon signs by Bruce Nauman. One cleverly overlaid DEATH onto EAT.

This led to a room containing amongst other items some vast trumpets by Terry Adkins and a bust of Mao on a stack of amplifiers by Melvin Edwards. 

The room also contained ‘impossible bouquets’ by Taryn Simon – assemblages of flowers that never flower at the same time. 

The next large room contained the double sided film by Steve Mcqueen, ‘Ashes’. On one side of the screen was the life of Ashes on his boat; on the other was the carving of his tombstone and burial. The audio told the story of how he had found some drugs one day on the beach, an event that led to his killing. 

The same large room contained a collection by Lili Reynaud Dewer of pink cloth posters with comments about aids on them.

Next to this were some clever/amusing slogans by Karo Akpokiere.

Oscar Murillo provided cloths that had been put on the desks of schoolchildren around the world and upon which they had written their thoughts.

Ayoung Kim was responsible for a Kuwait film and Saadane Afif had The Laguna’s Tribute, to be performed at sunset  at Zattere. Tables of sunrise and sunset were provided with the piece to be performed each month.

The same huge room also contained a church slate roof and a video of the derelict church. This piece by Theaster Gates was really quite sombre. Nearby was a two screen showing of a nonsense language by Sonia Leber and David Chesworth and also a rant on church by Sonia Boyce.

Moving though, the next room contained games without rules by Boris Achour as well as some clever anagrams by Newell Harry.

This room also contained a bell from Iraq, installed by Hiwa K as well as the participatory piece by Adrian Piper which invited guests to sign up to a pledge such as “I will always be too expensive to buy”. This had won the Golden lion and was interesting to participate in, for the feelings it provoked.

The next room included a wind chime by Chritian Boltanski as well as The Propeller Group’s ballistic in glass – where the discharge of the US M16 and the Russian AK47 (Kalashnikov) weapons had been caught and frozen in glass.

The room also contained cut out faces by Kay Hassan and the opportunity to spend 10 euros on a catalog by Marco Fusinato.

Lorna Simpson contributed graphite portraits of women.

The next room included an anthology of films by Harun Farocki as well as Maja Bajevic’s clever tapestries of stock/commodity prices.

Mika Rottenberg’s ‘no nose knows pearls’ and some giant printing stamps, entitled Urban Requiem by Barhelemy Toguo were also in this room alongside cloths for a Putin demonstration by Yakimanskaya Gluklya and upside down figures by Georg Baselitz.

Gulf Labor coalition contributed a huge poster provoking one to question where the labor came from that was building the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi.

Throughout all these room were a set of flickering lights by Philippe Pareno while the pathway outside was bedecked with sackcloth.

Turning the corner brought one to a moving film about a Korean factory worker by Im Heung-soon. This told the tale of a woman who had worked impossible hours on the buses before getting her job in a factory. It certainly gave pause for thought on the conditions people work under and how lucky we Biennale visitors are.

The next room contained the thousands of portraits suspended above the viewer  by Kutlug Ataman of people whose paths had crossed that of Sakip Sabanci, a Turkish businessman who died a decade ago. The room also housed a collection of portraits of passengers caught off guard by Chris Marker and the bricks one could buy, thereby contributing to a Chinese workers’ rights organisation by Rirkrit Tiavanija.

Finally, the room contained ‘a house divided by Gary Simmons.

The curated exhibition continued right at the far end of the Arsenale in the Giardino delle Vergini. On the way there in the large sheds were housed two phoenix by Xu bing. The sheds were those from which Marco Polo set off and the Phoenix referred to this.

 In the giardino itself, the videos, housed in individual sheds were all interesting but time precluded viewing them in full. One by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc featured a turned down book proposal; another had Maria Eichhorn’s ‘Militant’, featuring a girl reading a book. The most arresting was by Abounaddara entitled ‘Syria: Snapshots of history in the making’. This was a really powerful film by those suffering the Assad regime.

Also in the Giardino was an interesting installation by Sarah Sze who had suspended objects in the trees and shrubs.

National Pavilions

Giardini

Great Britain featured a series of yellow phalli by Sarah Lucas, the first of which, named Maradona, greeted visitors on the steps and the first room. The show under the title ‘I scream Daddio’ also presented manequins with cigarettes protruding from their vaginas. All in all not the most uplifting pavilion.

Next door, Canada was far more engaging. The pavilion looked a bit like a tree house and visitors walked in to a Quebec corner shop, that seemed normal at first with a greeting wave from a Japanese toy cat. However, walking through the shop all the labels were blurred by a clever vibration. Walking though led one up steps to a level where intricate shutes had been constructed for visitors to launch euro coins eventually to go into what was like a giant pinball cascade. I’m not sure what it all meant but it was certainly engaging.

France provided three trees that moved around autonomously

while next door the Czech/Slovak pavilion featured a large painting that was to be viewed in reflection. Entitled, Apotheosis and the creation of Jiri David, the work paid homage to an historic saga of the Czechs and Slavs by  Alphonse Mucha from the first quarter of the 20^th century.

Nearby the Japanese pavilion had one of the more beautiful exhibits with a huge cloud of red wool with thousands of attached keys dangling into two boats.

Korea had a multi-channel film installation, entitled ‘The ways of folding space and flying’. The excerpt I saw featured a striking girl in a film playing inside and on the glass wall of the pavilion. Then came Russia, which made use of the room with a glass floor. The pavilion was in the hands of Irina Nakhova. It featured on the way in a cosmonaut whose eyes followed you around. This led to the upstairs from which one was able to see the people in the room below.

Venezuala featured  a film of three women coming on to a stage to breast feed in front of an audience.

The adjoining Swiss pavilion was hard to fathom. Under the title ‘our product’, the centrepiece was a large tank to which one was led down a passage. It contained a liquid apparently matching a standardised northern European skin tone.’

On the opposite side of the path, the Nordik pavilion featured sound made by glass and water. Entitled ‘rapture’, this glass armonica caught one’s attention immediately with its array of large broken windows. The sound is ethereal and apparently was banned after the era of its being played by Mozart because it was thought to induce sexual arousal in women.

Next door, Denmark’s pavilion was in the hands of Danh Vo, with the title ‘Mothertongue’. The pavilion contained a dozen objects, some with provocative titles such as ‘do you know what she did, your cunting daughter?’ This for a small figure of Christ.

The US entry was by Joan Jonas with the title ‘ They come to us without a word’. Consisting mainly of videos, each room represented a particular creature – (Bees Fish), object (mirror), force (wind) or place (the homeroom) .

In a row, the Netherlands caught one’s attention with a stone outside with the words ‘veritas existentiae’ carved on  it. It is a philosophical proposition by the 17^th century French philosopher Pierre Gassendi that the truth of existence is that what exists is what it is and nothing else. The pavilion contained the remainder of the exhibition by Herman de Vries and included a collection of sickles and a rather arresting circle of rose buds entitled 108 pound rosa damascene.

Then Belgium gave over their pavilion to their colonial past.

Spain seemed to feature a comment on Italy with a kiosk displaying headlines about Berlosconi .

Finland’s pavilion housed a very dark room with an installation by IC-98 entitled ‘Abenland (hours, years, aeons) with music for double bass and electronics by Max Savikangas.

Germany had converted one of its rooms into something akin to a club. One was invited to lie back in reclining chairs and watch the large screen showing Hito Steyerl’s ‘Factory of the sun’. The Germans also hosted Tobias Zelony’s series ‘the citizen’ that was concerned with the representation of refugees in the media. The work included a newspaper by Africans responding to Zielony’s invitation to offer their points of view. It made sobering reading, including the item ‘if you want to die now, nobody will stop you’ that relates the story of Jeano, Patrick and Ali’s departure from Libya for Italy. The German pavilion also claimed to house on its roof three people who ‘unseen by visitors’ will ‘carry out a mysterious job there’. Whether this was truth or fiction remains a mystery!

The Hungarian Pavilion contained a quite simple but memorable installation of pipes running above one’s head through the rooms with large balls passing through them, propelled by fans – resembling the air tubes used to pass the takings in supermarkets. By Szilard Cseke, ‘sustainable identities’ with its intersecting routes was supposed to provide ‘an opportunity to reinterpret personal identities on a global basis’. Being not entirely sure what that means, I’m not entirely sure it had that effect on me but I certainly found the installation engaging, as I did the breathing foil cushion that continuously inflated and deflated.

Australia had a quite disturbing installation that seemed to centre on death and mortality. 

Across the bridge, the Romanian pavilion hosted Adrian Ghenie’s ‘Darwin’s Room’ – a collection of the artist’s portraits of Darwin as well as his “exploration of 20^th century history as an expanded ‘laboratory of evolution’”.

Rather confusingly, Romania also hosted work by several artists under the heading ‘Inventing the truth: On fiction and reality’ in a offsite location – the Palazzo Correr.

Next to the Romanian pavilion was Poland. They screened a film under the title ‘18*48’of”N 72*23’01”W”. The coordinates refer to Cazale, a village in Haiti inhabited by the descendents of Polish soldiers who had somehow ended up there in Napoleonic times. The film at the Biennale records the one-off performance of an opera, Halka, before the Polish descendents of Cazale, the opera being something of a Polish national opera and telling the story of a young virgin deflowered by her mighty landlord. The project was inspired by  Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.

The Venice Pavilion celebrated the city’s creativity with ‘9 stories from Veneto: digital – not only digital’. This was followed by Egypt and Serbia.

Austria’s entry seemed more architectural. The responsibility of Heimo Zobernig, he had installed a huge false ceiling in the pavilion that cast it with a gloomy shade. 

Brazil had blasted holes in the wall of its pavilion which proved tantalizing.

Arsenale

Walking through from the curated exhibition, the first pavilion was Sweden. This housed the work of Lina Selander and consisted mainly of video. Then came Slovenia with an interesting installation that became animated with a female singer and two male accompanists. The title was ‘The violent necessity for the embodied presence of hope’ but I cannot say how the title and the work are related. Beside that was Albania and next was Chile with an entry entitled, ‘poetics of dissent’. Kosova occupied the next space, followed by Tuvalu. Their entry was memorable, consisting of a large lake across which bridges had been provided for the visitor. This was a reference to Tuvalu’s precarious relationship with global warming and rising sea levels.

Ireland’s entry was by Sean Lynch. Entitled ‘Adventure: Capital’, it was a video projection with voiceover together with a series of sculptures. From the blurb, it “follows a wandering spirit as s/he encounters and narrates the hegemonic structures that anchor contemporary life’. It left me a bit cold.

Ireland was followed by one of the stand-outs – Latvia. They had constructed a tree-house where one sat and watched a video while the tree house rotated. Taking two visitors at a time, this was an engaging part of an engaging entry. Much of the entry by Katrina Neiburga and Andris Eglitis under the title ‘armpit’ focused upon soviet-era garages converted into workshops.

The last in this part of the Arsenale was the Italian-Latin American Institute pavilion that consisted of a long row of loud speakers, the significance of which were lost on me.  An adjacent building, I think newly restored for this year, housed on one level Argentina, the Vatican, Mexico and the UAE. Of these Mexico caught my attention with their ‘possessing nature by Tania Candiani and Luis Felipe Ortega. They provided a striking installation of a long steel screen that one could gain a better vantage point by climbing some steps. The room also contained a table and four chairs.

The other level of this building had the pavilions of South Africa, Peru, Turkey, Singapore, Georgia and Macedonia.

Towards the far end of the Arsenale complex was Mozambique and Indonesia, followed by China and Italy. All quite intriguing. Indonesia housed an extraordinary creation by Heri Dono called a Trokomod. This dragon like vessel was a hybrid of a Trojan horse and a Komodo – Indonesia’s iconic dragon. Visitors were able to enter the Trokomod and see what was to be seen through its periscope. Suspended from the ceiling around the trokomod were a series of Perahu Arwah or spirit boats.

China’s entry, as usual had an indoor and outdoor section. The outdoor was a long row of large bent rods that would be animated and make music with the breeze. Guests were invited to add pieces of writing and attach these, thereby altering the notes given off. Inside were a series of mainly videos as well as references to old China. One of the videos was particularly engaging, telling the tale of a woman visiting her grandmother.

The Italian exhibition did not quite work for me. It seemed over complex and too clever for its own good.

Off site.

Thailand’s ‘Earth, Air, Fire & Water was a series of gigantic stainless steel printing rollers representing the four elements as well as a painting. It was only just off-site, housed in the café at the entrance to the giardini.

Macao presented the memories of the artist Mio Pang Fei whose life was, as he saw it, blighted by. being brought up under Mao. He thought both older and younger people were luckier than he. The courtyard contained a striking presentation of clothes and other objects from the time he was referring back to, like Mao caps and jackets.

Hong Kong’s entry was a somewhat complex idea under the title ‘the infinite nothing’ and presented as a series of video installations. 

Estonia’s entry was entitled ‘Not  suitable for work, A Chairman’s tale. It featured the case of someone who rose to be Chairman of his territory, only later to be accused of homosexual acts and imprisoned. His life was cleverly presented on a time line and one room contained two videos re-enacting possible episodes that led to his downfall.

Cyprus was one of the recommended pavilions and contained a room with three striking mosaics as well as a hugs pile of shredded Cyprus Pound banknotes. The overall presentation under the title Two days after forever’ apparently referred to ‘the invention of archaeology and its instrumental role in forging the master narrative of history’. Although this was rather lost on me, the individual items were engaging. Apart from the mosaics and banknotes, there was also, in the courtyard, a Cypriot street sign, representing a proposal to commemorate Ioustos Sigismoundos, a pioneer of Cypriot graphology. The exhibition also contained pairs of shoes made from material from fake designer handbags as well as a large fountain containing a sheet of copper, apparently acting as a cathode.

The Philippines returned to the Biennale after an absence of 51 years with a three room exhibition at the Palazzo Mora. The first room screened a film Genghis Khan. It had been made by a Filipino in 1950. The second room contained A Dashed State – a sound and video installation, referring to a part of the disputed South China Sea while the third room housed Shoal – a vast red installation, referencing the Sierra Madre, a boat run aground by the Philippine government in 1999 and maintained as a small garrison – according to the literature.

Also within the Palazzo Mora was the Mongolia Pavilion featuring the work of two artists under the title ‘other home’. Both artists referred to the nomadic nature of Mongolian Life. The younger of the two, Enkhold Togmidshiirev, ‘painted’ with unconventional materials like horse dung and animal skin. He also set up his ger (a type of yert) as an installation. The elder, Unen Enkh, presented sculptural works made with unusual materials like felt and horsehair.  

The Seychelles was the third country housed in the Palazzo Mora. One of the artists, Leon Radegonde, presented works with burlap canvas, referencing his ancestors. The other, George Camille, created creepers from metal cable.

The floor above these pavilions also housed an exhibition, Black Forest by Marcello Martinez-Vega  and in some rooms the floorboards had been removed allowing the visitor to look down onto the installations. This vantage point was particularly arresting for the Philippine’s Shoal. Black Forest itself was an installation made up of objects and templates made for the creation of brushes and proved for me less than memorable.

Outside, a Gormley-type man sat on the Palace parapet.

The same Palazzo also housed the Personal Structures: Crossing Borders exhibition with Marc Fromm's brilliantly doomed boatload of waving cats that reached the edge of the ocean and fell off the earth.

It also included more conventional piece and an extensive catalogue:

Iran hosted a large and I thought excellent pavilion. The main part of the exhibition was under the title ‘the great game’ and included the works of many artists from the countries covered by the title. One of the cleverest entries was a windscreen wiper used to wipe away tears. I was also taken by a surreal ‘Alice on wonderland’ type film about a rabbit, projected cleverly onto the rough wall of the pavilion.  The pavilion also housed a sub-exhibition entitled Iranian highlights, covering the work of four Iranian artists.

The Iraq pavilion was also absorbing. Under the name of Rabab Ghazoul, In different rooms were videos of members of the public relating to Tony Blair’s testimony to Chilcott. One video had them repeat the words; another got them to comment on Blair’s body language – often very revealingly (e.g., speaking down like a head teacher). The exhibition under the title Invisible Beauty also contained some haunting head and shoulder portraits.

Guatemala hosted an entertaining collection of items, including Charlie, a skull by Sabrina Bertolelli with multi coloured pencil for hair and the same colours reflected in the teeth. The exhibition also included a giant daschund and a Virgin Mary landing on mars in a sputnik. 

Luxemburg’s pavilion seemed odd. By Filip Markiewicz, his Paradiso Lussemburgo seemed to delight in insulting its host as a nation of tax dodges – maybe true but he must have been lucky to get sponsorship. The exhibition specialised in seemingly slick slogans such as that at the entry ‘the world is a stage but the play is badly cast’.

Mauritius was housed in a lovely light-filled Palazzo and was quite humorous with a sculpture by Nirmal Hurry of a circle of dogs sniffing each others’ bottoms. It also housed a clever orb of birds’ nests, labelled ‘home’ by Sultana Haukim and representing the fragility of the earth as well as Tania Atoshina's distorted objects - rather reminiscent of Dali's clocks. The final entry to strike me was by Krishna Luchoomum and comprised a washing line with the different clothes appropriate for different stages of life, entitled ‘birth to death’. It started with a nappy and ended with a shroud.

Montenegro’s entry was quite dark but perhaps that tone came chiefly from a video of a dogfight.

San Marino made clever use of its space with a wolf greeting visitors at the doorway and then a pack of wolves circling a copy of Michelangelo’s Pieta on a plinth in the large cloistered courtyard. All of them had bloodied mouths and conveyed an air of pack menace.

This was the second courtyard, the first containing a giant mushroom made of coloured ribbons.

San Marino had two further pavilions that I did not get to and the whole presentation went under the title ‘friendship project’, referring to bring together San Marino and Chinese artists. So, the wolves were by Liu ruo Wang and the mushroom was by Tony Margiotta.

Portugal presented work by Joao Louro under the title ‘I will be your mirror / poems and problems’. A complex exhibition that included a ladder propped on the wall and the cover of a Samuel Becket book, the handout contained the poem ‘I will be your mirror’ that I noticed one visitor had said was the best bit of the Biennale.

Grenada’s entry was under the title ‘present nearness’ and according to the promotional video it was to convey empathy but also hope. One artist had collaborated with cocoa farmers in making their portraits but the most striking entries were the clothes lying on the entrance to the pavilion and the hues Mickey Mouse type figure inside.

Collateral Exhibitions

Ursula von Rydingsvard occupied a small park near the Giardini. It contained a set of the tree truck like statues she assembles from small cubes of wood, first seem at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Sean Scully had a show entitled ‘land sea’ which featured his abstract works. This was an engaging display with small opposite large in some rooms and a series on aluminium.

Scotland’s entry by Graham Fagan was also grouped under the collateral heading. Housed in the Palazzo Fontana, one was led through the rooms to one screening the Slave’s Lament by Robert Burns and sung by a Reggae singer and musician, Ghetto Priest. Fagan’s exhibition also included ‘Rope Tree’, a bronze sculpture cast from lengths of rope. 

Highway to Hell was striking for its apparently beautiful objects that turned out to be pills as well as equally beautiful skulls.

One of the most remarkable exhibits for me was the film by AES+F at the Palazzo Nani Mocenigo. Showed on a gigantically long screen, this animation completely captivated me with its setting against classical music. 

The Union of Fire and Water was housed up a high staircase from which one could see the first exhibit, a lion made of brick in the garden, blending so well that it had to be drawn to my attention that it was not a permanent part of the Palazzo Barbaro. Inside, the main exhibition was reached by negotiating a staircase maze. This led through to a series of interesting rooms. One projected pictures on to the inside of a cupboard. Another projected the words ‘do not fear’ through a light shone through ingeniously arranged swords. There was also a video in several rooms – fire talks to me. The common denominator of the exhibition was the link between Venice and Azerbaijan.