Venice Biennale, Day 3 Afternoon National Pavilions at the Arsenale

The Biennale catalogue lists 26 national pavilions in the Arsenale. Those are in addition to the 29 official ones at the Giardini and the scores of them in apartments, shops, palaces, warehouses, and other venues hidden across the city. I’ve selected only a few that particularly caught my attention.

Because I made a couple of trips Amazon Peru in the ‘90s, starting in Iquitos, I was quite taken by Christian Bendayán’s rather complex installation in the Peruvian pavilion, “Indios Antropofágos”. A Butterfly Garden in the Jungle. Based on “exoticized images of jungle natives,” his Spanish tile compositions depicted transgender and transvestite characters enacting exaggerated versions of early 20^th-century postcards of native people of Peru. Versions of the postcards, showing native Peruvians dancing or posing in groups are also included in this richly conceived installation.  The backgrounds of the tile compositions copied watercolors of Iquitos – on view in the exhibition - by the lepidopterist Otto Michael, who published books on Amazon butterflies after three multi-year expeditions to Peru between 1885 and 1921. Michael’s books are also on display, titled “Butterfly Hunter of the Amazon,” and Bendayán has included collages of Amazonian women with butterfly wings. This is a rich and dense installation, full of history, anthropology, socology and biology, very rewarding if one takes the time to look carefully. And the tiles, azulejos, are brightly colored and cheerful.

 

The Luxembourg Pavilion included a vast installation by Marco Godinho, Written by Water, of blank books that have been washed the water of various oceans. It is accompanied by a video documenting the books being washed by waves. The array of blank books, each a slightly different color of white and each with differently curled pages, was both peaceful and disturbing. Blank books, the ocean as a factor, and the whiteness of the pages call to mind bleaching coral and the power of the earth’s elements.

Kosovo’s Family Album is a video installation by Alban Muja that captured my attention for many minutes, as adults describe the meaning and memories they derive from photographs of themselves as children displaced by the Kosovo War of 1998-99. Their straightforward descriptions of the events they survived and their calm demeanor made the stories chilling.

The Ukraine Pavilion was somewhat ephemeral, but engaging, especially to Tom. As their entry to the Biennale, Ukraine sent the worlds largest cargo plane the Antonov AN-225 MRIYA on a flight over Venice on May 9, 2019, casting its shadow over the Giardini del Biennale.  In the cargo hold was a digital directory of all living Ukrainian artists.

brochure cover about the Antonov 224 cargo plane

The installation that touched me the most was another of multiple similar objects, this one from Saudi Arabia:  Zahrah Al Ghamdi’s After Illusion. It refers to a line from an ancient Arabic poem by Zuhayr bin Abi Sulma (520-609) referring to his attempt to recognize his home after having been away for 20 years. The installation is made up of thousands or round, sea-form like sculptures made from leather, attached to translucent lighted white shims and clustered on the floor. It was pleasant to walk through, evoking a world of peace and artistic creativity.

Layers of suspended black paper made up the installation by Joël Andrianomearisoa for the Madagascar Pavilion, that country’s first representation at Venice. It is beautifully simple, dark but not completely negative in feeling.

Latvian artist Daiga Grantina presented an installation of brightly colored forms suspended from the ceiling, leaning on the walls and resting on the floor, titled Saules Suns. They seemed playful, organic, cheerful, and a little menacing.

Ghana also had its first representation at Venice and chose to make a substantial pavilion, designed by Sir David Adjaye, the Ghanian-British architect. Among several artists included there were Lynette Yiadom-Bonkye, a very good painter, Felicia Abban, a photographer, and the famous ubiquitour El Anatsui, with several enormous wall pieces made as usual, from bottle caps and the like. They were so big I couldn't capture them in photographs.

Felicia Abban, Untitled Self-Portraits, ca. 1060s-70s

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, The Mighty, Mighty Lines, 2019, oil on linen

El Anazui, Yaw Berko, 2019, aluminum printing plates, bottle tops, and copper wires.

Walking toward the end of the Arsenale, outdoors, we came upon a very old decrepit-looking boat, suspended near the water, obviously salvaged. We did not know at the time that this was the boat named Barca Nostra, which had sunk off the coast of Libya in 2015, drowning about 900 immigrants. The Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Bűchel had brought the boat to Venice. There are online images of it being transported to the lagoon.

Among the several large pavilions at the end of the Arsenale building, we were most interested in India. The installation, Our Time for aFuture Caring, is based on the memory of Mahatma Gandhi. It opens with images of Gandhi and a quotation from him, “I am not a seer, rishi or philosopher of non-violence; I am only an artist on non-violence and desire to develop the art of non-violence in the realm of resistance,” Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The works of several younger artists and senior artists like Nandalal Bose, all refer to Gandhi’ s teachings and impact on India. I’ve chosen to focus on just two. The first installation, by GR Iranna, We Together, 2012, two walls full of single Indian sandals of the type worn by Gandhi, is another example of repeating the same element, in this instance peasant sandals, to larger effect than just a few sandals, a photograph or a painting would have. To me it spoke of all the kinds of people who wear this footwear, and all the walking Gandhi and his followers, and Indians, do.  Of Bodies, Armour, and Cages by Shakuntala Kulkarne, includes several cane dresses, headdresses and other forms, as well as photographs of women wearing the dresses. While being beautifully and artfully constructed, the works speak profoundly of women’s real and imagined constrictions.

GR Iranna, We Together, 2012

Shakuntala Kulkarni, Of Bodies, Armour, and Cages, 2010-2012

If you wonder where the Italy and China pavilions are, I did not photograph any of the works in these two very large venues. I did make a point of seeing the installation by Tomás Saraceno, an artist whose work has fascinated me since I first saw it at an earlier Biennale. On the Disappearance of Clouds, in one of my favorite parts of the Arsenale complex, relates conceptually to the effects of global warming, apparently moving with the motion of the tides, and accompanied by scores for music compositions on the same subject, these clouds were not as evocative as the webs we have seen by Saraceno in Venice and other venues. And I discovered, this installation was part of the curated exhibition. Some things were not very clear as we wandered through the spaces.

Venice Biennale, Day 3, May You Live in Interesting Times

We spent our third day at the Arsenale, seeing half the curated group exhibition, May You Live in Interesting Times, and several national pavilions. When I was the director of the Spencer Museum of Art I was known for my interest in political art, art with a point of view and a concern for contemporary life, and perhaps injustice. We purchased such objects as Faith Ringgold’s Flag Story Quilt and Robert Arneson’s Nuclear Warhead (which after 1989 we actually thought had become obsolete!). But now we are starting to feel bombarded with a vast range of injustices present all over the world, which artists often present through either straightforward video documentaries or interviews. I understand and appreciate that politics plays a profound role in the arts these days, but when so many issues bombard us in an exhibition with multiple points of view from all over the world, I get tired and Tom is overwhelmed. This is why I liked Christine Macel’s 2017 biennale exhibition, Viva Arte Viva so much. She chose objects that expressed joy and creativity as much as political engagement, and I found it uplifting. I myself question the goal of feeling good in art exhibitions, but it seemed a welcome change from feeling helpless to solve all the problems of the world at once.

Like all the titles of Venice’s Biennale curated shows, this one was designed to permit anything to be included. I was drawn to many of the objects.

The striking black and white images by South African Zanele Muholi (b. 1972 Durban, South Africa) of herself in various elaborate garments and headdresses made from unlikely everyday materials had impressed me at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town last year. Here they were blown up to enormous size, like JR’s images, but not like his work at all.

Near the exhibition entrance was a series of photographs by Soham Gupta (b. 1988 Kolkata, India) of street people in India, heart wrenchingly charming and loving. The photographs show the humanity of people we usually avoid looking at and therefore seeing.

Unfortunately, these images were accompanied by the sounds of Christian Marclay’s (b. USA 1955, lives London) contribution, simultaneously projecting 48 war movies overlapped, with all their soundtracks playing at once, the sound of chaos and fighting booming from the room where the video is on view. Making separate spaces for different artists resulted in more bleed from one artist’s display to the other’s than I remember in previous Arsenale installations.

Christian Marclay, 48 War Movies, 2019, video

Very traditional, reminiscent of John Chamberlain but more evidently carefully constructed, I liked the large sculptures by Carol Bove (b. Geneva 1971, lives New York City), twisted interlocked forms with smooth surfaces and gentle colors (the catalogue calls them candy-colored). One must walk around them to see them and some have surprises on the other side.

There were quite a few very large sculptures. Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963, lives and works in Beijing) for example, created a huge pair of tires with metal connectors, suspended above the floor, next to Trojan, a gigantic image of a person bent over in an airplane seat in emergency landing mode. Her sculpture is hollow, presumably like the Trojan Horse.

Yen Xiuzhen, Trojan, 2016-17

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu had a chair with metal tubes that occasionally sprang to life, propelled by forced air, and Can’t Help Myself, 2016, the huge trapped painting machine that was on view a while ago at the Guggenheim. The first is pretty obvious, the second is actually touching, as the machine alternately clears and spatters paint and thrusts its ‘arm’ into the air as if in desperation. While a New York Times reviewer complained that most of the artists in this exhibition had already been seen in New York, he seemed to forget that there may be more people attending the biennale than New York art experts who have attended every gallery and museum there.

Speaking of artists who have been seen in New York, I was pleased to see work by Jimmie Durham (b. USA 1940, lives in Berlin), an artist I first saw decades ago, who virtually disappeared into Germany, and now is becoming visible everywhere, including a retrospective at the Whitney last year. He created European wild animals from skulls, metal tubing, an armoire, and clothes.   Like the mechanical paint brush, the works are amusing and touching at the same time, evoking their models with a sense of how they might be envisioned after they have gone extinct.

Ulrike Műller (b. 1971 Austria, lives in New York City) exhibited both rugs and paintings with her tight abstract designs. I loved that Rug (con tacones), a rug depicting what would walk on it, was hand woven in the workshop of Jeronimo and Josefina Hernandez Ruiz, Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca. This is a huge traditional rug-weaving center in Mexico. Her smaller abstract paintings seemed oddly traditional to me, but lovely. I could not see the critique of hierarchies, feminist or queer content attributed to her work in the label and catalog. Somehow the compositions of the smaller paintings are compelling. 

I was very much taken the Crochet Coral Reefs by Christine and Margaret Wertheim (b. 1958 Australia, live in Los Angeles), as well as a list of other makers added to the installation. Using totally unexpected materials, they call attention to an issue particularly urgent in Australia, but crucial to all of us. Bleached Reef and Toxic Reef I photographed.

Bleached Reef

Toxic Reef

Toxic Reef, detail

Toxic Reef, artists

Another work suggesting disappearing resources, but lovely as an object is Otobang Nkanga’s (b. 1974 Nigeria, lives in Antwerp) Veins Aligned, made of marble, glass and paint and snaking along the axis of a large room. It suggests a river and only as you reach the end, 26 meters away, do you see that it changes from lovely blue to a fierce red, suggesting contamination and pollution.

Anthony Hernandez’s (b. 1947 Los Angeles, lives in L. A. and Idaho) photographs of contemporary unfinished and failed projects in Rome may challenge the wastefulness of urban renewal but they are often beautifully composed images that abstract the structures.  

And Tavares Strachan’s (b. 1979 Nassau, lives in New York and Nassau) neon text, Robert, 2018, shocked and distressed me as many of the more vocal videos did not.

Market, by Zhanno Kadyrova (b. 1981 Brovery, Ukraine, lives in Kyiv) near the end of the curated show, amused us as a ceramic tile, cement, mirror and stone recreation of an outdoor market, and was a good installation to lead us into lunch.