12-16 September 2017. Venice Biennale Viva Art Viva.

12 Sept. Belarus

In a small building near the Giardini, the Belarus presentation centred upon a 33 minute film of 33 characters. Named the Table, the film paraded the characters, so that as one disappeared to the left, another appeared to the right. The viewer sat at a table opposite. It was a quite captivating experience and I sat through it in its entirety. It started with the artist and also featured a naked model, a woman with a very ample bust, another woman in three stages of being let down on a date (preparation, waiting and realisation).

Giardini Marinaressa. An installation of sculptures of bathers by Carole Feuerman, part of the European Cultural Centre ‘Personal Structures: Open Borders’ exhibition.

Cyprus. Housed in a building by the Arsenale, the exhibition entitled 'The future of Colour', featured works by Polys Peslikas.

13 Sept. In the Giardini

The central pavilion featured two parts of the exhibition Viva Arte Viva.

Rather than describing all of it, the exhibits that stood out for me were:

McArthur Binion. A great display of seven or eight of thid artists identity behind a grid paintings.They were excellent and followed on for me the exhibition in London at Massim del Carlo.

Marwan. These were also excellent paintings – of heads.

Firenze Lai. An interesting set of paintings, including one of a man on a woman’s lap, entitled Autism.

Rachel Rose. A very pleasing animated video called Lake Valley, showing a dog’s life at home and going for a walk in the park. It seemed to go into a dream sequence before concluding by panning out from the park to the town it was set in.

Other than these, I thought the following were interesting:
Yelen Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev. The artist is asleep.

Tibor Hajas. A series of quite strange photos of the artist naked and experimenting with his body.

Sebastian Diaz Morales. A video of a man in suspension / floating.
Francis Upritchard. Some disturbing sculptures - with a voodoo feel

Huguette Caland. Interesting 

Nevin Aladao. His works entitled 'Traces' featured instruments that self-played in public spaces. 

Cerith Wyn Evans. A video at the spot where Pasolini dies, featuring a large ‘sign’ with the words “on the banks of the Liveriga, silver willows are drowning in wild profusion of the boughs dipping into the slowly drifting waters.” The sign was set fire to. Quite engaging.

Olafur Elaisson. This was a room containing a workshop staffed by unpaid refugees. They were making the wooden struts that were to make up lampshades.

Outside, in the Stirling Pavilion, there was a library of books chosen by the exhibiting artists, together with the Mondrian Fan Club.

National Pavilions.

In my order of appreciation, the pavilions worh writing up were:

Germany. This extraordinary performance required queuing under the mosquito infested trees. The performance called Faust by four actors was all in slow motion and felt disturbing and abusive. We strained to watch through glass apertures in the walls and more extraordinarily though a glass floor. Conceived by Anne Imhof the normal performance is four hours long. However, in the summer it is only 1.5 hours because of the heat and really we only got a glimpse. Outside, two dogs in a cage added to the sense of menace but also of how the threat can be neutered by collaboration as one of the actors interacted with the dogs by adopting their pose.

Australia. The pavilion showed two videos. One, vigil, was a clever short film of refugees cut in with horrified onlookers – horrified at the plight or the prospect of the refugees. The other film was an imagined film made by indigenous people of Australia of Sydney harbour before the English ‘discovered’ it.

Poland. A film of five adolescents who one by one came into the room and started to chant “trust, hate, love hope”. An engaging film which reminded me of the Belarus use of people entering and leaving the frame.

United States. Mark Bradford’s work was arresting. One entered the pavilion to a room with a huge Kapoor-like blob, made up of pulped posters. It is entitled Spoiled Foot. Then a room with a threatening medusa and another called Saturn Returns with faeces-coloured material covering the walls. Next a room with three paintings. The way out had a looped video called Niagara of a man walking away down the street.

Canada. A pleasing water installation. I don’t know what it meant but it was nice to engage with it.

 Greece. The installation by George Drivas was called ‘Laboratory of Dilemmas’. It centred on An imagined ‘discovered’ film of a medical experiment to come up with a cure for hepatitis. After seeing the video on a set of screens upstairs, viewers had to negotiate a labyrinth downstairs to get out. It felt quite disturbing.
Austria. A fun time for visitors who were invited to enter a caravan with various holes cut in it. They then follow instructions to poke their arms, legs or head through.

Japan. The Pavilion had been transformed by Takahiro Iwasaki to realise 'Turned upside down, it's a forest.' Unsuspecting visitors outside climbed stairs to find themselves poking their head through a hole in the  floor.

France. An innovative idea by Xavier Veilhan who invited musicians from all over the world to come and collaborate in the pavilion.

Finland. Finland housed an installation called The Alto Natives. This seemed a technically clever installation of a blob and virtual reality films. It was meant to represent God and a human coming back to inspect earth.
Czech Republic and Slovakia. The pavilion featured a multi-media installation by Jana Zelibska.

Switzerland. A homage to Giacommetti who apparently never represented Switzerland. The main item was a double screening of two films with the same soundtrack.

Great Britain. Phylida Barlow filled the pavilion with large objects all under the title folly.

14 September

Fondazione Prada. The boat is leaking. The Captain lied’. An exhibition curated by Udo Kittleman of works by Thomas Demand, Alexander Kluge and Anna Vierbrock. This extraordinary exhibition/installation took up three floors of the huge and incredible palazzo in which it was found. Alexander Kluge’s assemblies of film clips as well as presentations of films in their entirety stole the show for me, alongside the extraordinary constructions by Anna Viebrock to make the Ca’ Corner della Regina suitable for the exhibition. It was absorbing and I could have spent days watching the films, I felt.

Nigeria at San Stae. This quite small ‘pavilion’ comprised three pieces. The entrance was  draped with material coupled with small mirrors. Then inside were a collection of eight black angels.

Beauty and the Beast by Judi Harvest and Quentin Garel An exhibition with pessimistic and optimistic outcomes. Artistically, I preferred the pessimistic

Antigua and Barbuda. This pavilion deserved support for its exhibition of work by the late Frank Walter.

Iraq. The highlight of this for me was the collection of artefacts. These were incredible with a 6000BC effigy of a woman and a 4000BC toy. Quite amazing.

Palazzo Bembo. A continuation of the European Cultural Centre ‘Personal Structures: Open Borders’ exhibition. There were a number of artists were on display. I particularly like the work of a Lithuanian – Jolanta Smidtiene.

Suse Benedict Stoisser - Now more than ever

Ty Watlinger - Austria

Denis Defrancesco - King Kong Balls

Denis Defrancesco - The Pin Lady

Guatemala. A quite large exhibition curated by Daniele Tedeschi featuring amongst other items a huge toilet brush on a flower pot.

Scotland. The film by Rachel Maclean had received good reviews. Although it was engaging, I doubt that I will remember this story based upon the Pinnochio fantasy for long. The programme notes reveal the idea that it was about the temptation to sell out to untruth, thinking it is just as good as truth and will get you further. However, Maybe I was too tired at the end of a day’s walking around Venice.
The Golden Tower by James Lee Byars.

15 September At the Arsenale

Continuation of Viva Art Viva

Standout artists at this rather mediocre exhibition were:

Lee Mingwei. He had a clothes repair table to which exhibition goers could bring items for repair.

Anna Halprin.

An interesting film of a San Francisco ‘tree hugging’ ceremony born from multiple murders in a national park.

Charles Atlas. A huge screen with an array of sunsets and a conforting environmental voiceover

Marie Voignier. An interesting video of a hunters’ assistant reading out his memoirs about his loathsome clients.

Michel Blazy. A strange installation of books with water dripping on and destroying them. Plus a collection of trainers with plants in them.

Guan Xiao. An amusing video on the statue DAVID

Irina Koruna. A garish installation reached by climbing a flight of noisy stairs.

Huguettwe Carland. An interesting trio of woman made up of what resembled cooking smocks.

Kader Attia. A clever installation of screens with an opera singer whose voice activated pans of semolina.

Pauline Jardin. An irreverent look at the girl whose visions are the basis for Lourdes.

Nevin Aladag. An amusing tryptich of videos of self-playing instruments.

Liu Jianhua, A large installation at floor level of gold blobs.

Alicja Kwade. The best was last. The mirrors and objects of 'One in a time' made an engaging ending for this part of the Arsenale.

Outside there was a collection of stones which had sound installed in them. Entitled Pars pro Toto, the work was also by Alicja Kwade and attracted a lot of bemused looks

National pavilions worth recording were:

Tunisia. Issuing passports in a playful citizens of the world piece.

Singapore. A huge boat assembled with wax.

Argentina. An enormous horse and small girl.

Turkey. A clever sound installation occupying a huge space.

Malta. A rather irreverent exhibition poking at the islands Catholic roots.

Georgia. A standout installation of a shed-house with water pouring into it.

Latvia. Some crazy fantasies of giant grasshoppers eating tourists and eating human worms.

New Zealand. A huge video based on Captain Cook

Italy. A staggering installation of water and mirror by Giorgio Andreotta Calo accessed by climbing a flight of stairs to see the roof reflected in the water and everything reflected back in the vertical mirror. It felt very disconcerting.

Lebanon. An amazing installation of sound a light in a huge space in Arsenale Nord.

In the Giardino delle Vergini, I liked;

Hassan Khan's 'Composition for a public park' was a sound installation in the garden.

Attila Csorgo’s hypnosis video.
Fiete Stolte. Printing My Steps. An ingeniously simple installation.

16 September.

In the pouring rain, I made my way to the Wales in Venice installation by James Richards. The entrance room contained a rather lovely sound installation that made the visit worthwhile. On the other hand, the videos and inkjet prints left me rather cold. The main video was inspired by some extraordinary archive photos of Albrecht Becker who seemed to use his body as an experiment and art work. These were interesting enough but the rest of it seemed to me rather pretentious.

Next was the far easier to understand “Doing Time” by Tehching Hsieh. This extraordinary performance artist spent a year in 1980/81 waking and punching a time card on the hour every hour. Five months later, he spent a further year  in New York living outdoors and without taking shelter of any kind. He had also jumped from a second floor window, recording it in the name of art:

and laid out photographic paper, filming them darkening before flipping them over:

From there, I made my way to the Diaspora Pavilion. This exhibition in the Palazzo Pisani, Santa Marina needed the purchase of the guide booklet to make sense of it. Even then, a lot of the exhibition seemed rather inaccessible or unnecessary. I give you the bathroom not to be confused with a real bathroom as an example.

However, other bits were thought-provoking. For me Yinka Shoinbare’s “The British Library” stood out. It was a room with a vast number of books, each with the name of of first and second generation migrants to Britain who have made a significant contribution – e.g., Freddie Mercury

Finally, I visited the Azerbaijan Pavilion, which contained an interesting entrance with the words of many people projected on the walls, talking about their country.

Upstairs were some interesting installations comprised of musical instruments.

And so ended my Biennale, apart from a sighting in a gallery of two amorous golden tortoises.