• Monitor
• 26.06.2024.
• Author: Sonja Lundin
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A Recapitulation of the 60th Venice Biennale: Red rooms, Glass slabs, Corinthian pillars and Eurovision.

Foreigners Everywhere ushers the Venice Biennale into a long awaited theme, some might argue one long overdue. Did the Biennale fare better than its Deutsche counterpart, Documenta ’15, in its attempt to spotlight the voice of the other?

 

To pinpoint a foreigner is to imply they are strangers to a certain extent, perhaps emotionally, perhaps corporeal. The word itself has a different meaning when spoken from a first, second or third perspective (I am a foreigner, you are a foreigner, they are foreigners). It also implies there is another place, a lesser known country from which such people hail. The words “foreigners” and “everywhere” combined make an oxymoron, a foreigner loses their gravitas in abundance – but can the same be said for the diversity shared between artists at the Biennale this year?

 

Some pavilions stuck to the theme and some were as deaf as Kim Kardashian at the 2023 Met Gala, and ultimately it seems that the central exhibition spaces curated by the organisers left a meagre impression on visitors. Throughout my short career of visiting the Biennale I have personally always found the central curation difficult to follow thematically. Walking through the Arsenal doors inspires excitement reminiscent of Disneyland, your gaze unable to contain itself while trying to find a pace or pattern at which to consume the visual information. Careful not to miss the pieces that serve as separators between spaces nor to jump over smaller pieces lost in the grandiosity of the space. With its grandiosity it can be difficult not to rush through the Arsenal. In contrast, walking through the Giardini’s main gallery presents itself with another challenge, with its separate floors and rooms and no clear orientation. Indeed, filling such expanded areas, without seeming scattered, while juggling sponsorships and government censorship is an unimaginable task for any curator. Which is why it has come to be my belief that the Venice Biennale always tastes better with a grain of salt.

 

However obvious, if there is one thing the Biennale did right this year comparatively to previous years, it would be consistency. There were times when the line between art and museology became blurred, nevertheless the theme was poignant. My main quarrel, the same quarrel I had with Documenta ’15 yet felt too blatant to criticize, is the strenuous focus on otherness while trying to remain within the realm of a European gold standard. Although nowhere nearly as free-form on a technical level as Documenta ’15, it almost seems the Biennale attempted to compensate for this through the curatorial prose which can be argued for placing too much emphasis on the marginalization of artists, continuously reminding us of artists’ foreignness in an exhibition where the artworks speak volumes for themselves. Texts often left fantastic artworks such as that of the Dutch pavilion unexplained while focusing too much on satisfying the theme of the Biennale, this reduction of artists based on their background will create an ill-fate of type-casting, in the worst case, of further segregation if we don’t succeed in the integration of foreigners everywhere.

 

This year featured not only multiple takes on red painted walls (Britain, Spain), the curator’s love of of glass panels in displaying art, and Corinthian pillars as the end-all symbolism of ye old colonialism, it also seems to have followed the Eurovision down the path of political hypocrisy. Although Israel leveraging its exhibition (which can be seen perfectly through its glass walls) in the mission for a ceasefire is more favourable to Eden Golan’s Hurricane, criticism falls on the Venice Biennale for granting the same get out of jail free card Martin Österdahl granted the nation, while simultaneously silencing the voice of Russian artists as it lends its pavilion to Bolivia after reaching lithium agreements. It seems the only true solution would be to give Andrei Molodkin the Israeli pavilion for another one of his ultimatum pieces.

 

Without further a-do, here are the highlights from this year’s Venice Biennale:

 

#1: Spain

 

 

The Spanish pavilion this year featured Lima based Peruvian/Spanish artist Sandra Gamarra Heshiki with her work titled Pinacoteca Migrante/Migrant Art Gallery, curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, former director of Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC). Noted as the first migrant artist to represent the country, Gamarra Heshiki’s practice focuses on anthropology through the interplay of colonial perspectives overridden by indigenous narratives. Pavilion viewers are offered a glimpse of the inextricable deconstruction of archaic museological practices, intertwined with expressionist painting and combined techniques. The clash of the modern free-form in her pieces with the prosaic context it seeks to tackle breaks down the presumptuous mythology imposed by conquistadors with an impact so intimate you almost don’t notice how brazen it truly is.

 

 

The translucency of the red, turpentine-soaked renaissance and baroque imagery echo with maddening guilt, only to be draped by the warm and forgiving embrace of native quilts and cloaks. The simplicity in her paintings which consist mostly of two materials — vermillion pigment and gold-leaf — serve almost like a drum pounding in the background, serving the viewer with the same beat over and over as you walk. Ethnic busts turned into piggy-banks, an all but discreet symbolism, broken in a glass-lit display under a red hand-painted infographic with colonial portraits. Wherever you look handwritten messages send you deep into the artist’s ethos, laden with composure and methodical pacing, so as not to lose the attention of those inclined to look away. The exhibition is layered with intricate exposition of anthropological, biological, archeological and anthropocene stories topped with personal rumination on the morality of existing within a system such as this: engulfing the viewer through paraphrased orientalist motifs that otherwise encapsulate our Eurocentric fascination, while the imagery and subject matter itself couldn’t be more obvious in its critique.

 

 

Each room is painted in a dark hue, with the exception of the central spherical space, housing full-body portraits of notable figures through Latin American indigenous history — the silenced narratives — on glass panels, tucked into solid rock, nested next to it a smaller panel with native flora. On the backside, each portrait portrays the same crimson primary layer and, once again, handwritten messages in Spanish and English. The room is brightly lit and the floor is covered in the comfort of woven mats, quilts and indigenous literature, the lagoon-like serenity in a gallery of darkness shines a beam of light onto the altar-piece displayed in the opposite room, showing the true gleam of the gold-leaf and its materialistic inclination. Walking through each part of the pavilion you are reminded of the artist’s depth, sophistication and emotional capacities in capturing a history that beckons millions of unanswered questions.

 

 

#2: Singapore

 

Tied with Spain as an ultimate favorite was the Singapore pavilion, featuring the Seeing Forest by artist Robert Zhao Renhui, curated by Haeju Kim, director of Art Sonje Center. In contrast to Gamarra Heshiki, Zhao Renhui takes a more modern and indirect approach in examining the human relationship with nature. Having built his oeuvre through photography, the artist utilizes video installations as the primary medium in this exhibition, combined with the masterful curation of Haeju Kim.

 

 

The piece impresses upon us like puzzle pieces that neatly come together into one. On the outside walls of the room, which resides on the top floor of the Arsenal, the entrance to the viewing room greets audiences with a diagrammatic tree: connecting various points of human development to the biological world both of which come to encompass the Secondary forests of Singapore, forests under less ecological conservation and importance than their superior Primary forests. The diagram depicts naturally evolved species as well as species introduced in the 19th century through colonial activity which subsequently led to the degradation of the forests’ classification. The exhibition evolves around the impermanence of virgin land, almost rejecting the concept entirely in the face of a universal entropy introduced through human and non-human involvement. Seeing Forest sinks its fascination in on the forests protected by no one and deemed otherwise expendable.

 

 

The space is dark, to the right of the entrance screens of varying shapes and sizes are nested atop a wooden construction reminiscent of something made symbiotically by man and bird, the Trash Stratum (2024). Various objects tangled into the deepest of its exposed roots, taken from the Secondary forests, are listed on the opposite side of the room as part of the piece’s legend. This cabinet of curiosities reminds us of colonial, archival behaviour in the means of constructing and securing human histories.

 

 

Atop the former list is another consisting of animals featured in the two-channel video work. The screens face each other slightly and the benches across them mirror their position. Viewers are met with The Owl, The Travellers, and the Cement Drain (2024), a mesmerising black and white video synergy between animals behaving in tandem with objects, and humans behaving in tandem with nature found in the one hectare Queens Own Hill forest located behind an old colonial building, filmed by cameras perched at varying angles. A Butty Fish-owl turned away from the camera, a Water monitor struggling to climb into a container filled with rain-water on the forest floor, two migrants loitering through the forest commenting on their surroundings and the animals that pass by them unbothered. In certain moments of the film a direct contrast is made between the two screens which display the same scenery from different points throughout the day, one screen showing a human group making its way up into the forest to collect something while the opposite offers a family of wild-boars grazing the same hilltop.

 

 

There is a delicacy with which each interaction takes place, as you sit there it becomes apparent that the forest’s single hectare expands before you the longer you observe its many lives. In a world were criticism on the inflation of litter and human residue is just as polluting as the waste itself — Zhao Renhui’s piece offers us resilience and contemplation, he gives nature its credence towards humans, embracing the factual reality that this world is also being lived and seen through the gaze of other inhabitants of it. The alternations of the screens and their contents are solemn but not timid: sometimes showing the same thing from different angles or different times of day; sometimes showing two entirely different scenes or only one scene on one screen while the other sits black; at one point the video shifts to infrared recordings; at another an owl sits next to a rotating broken clay vase found in Queen’s Own Hill. Zhao Renhui controls the audience’s focus with a gentle yet intentional hand, he guides you through the experiences of the forest with an experienced understanding of the human gaze, hitting all the sweet-spots. From the over-stimulating jungle husks, leaves and ripples of water, to the swaying of snake scales and pitter-patter of mouse feet, the artist has created a moving painting out of the binary chaos.

 

 

#3 Australia

 

The piece de’la resistance and recipient of this year’s Golden Lion was the unwavering Kith and Kin by Archie Moore, curated by Ellie Buttrose, Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery. A piece in homage to the artist’s ancestors and one of the oldest living cultures on earth, consisting of three key elements: the artist’s handwritten genealogy, mountains of documents used in the incarceration of first nation’s people and a dark pool of water underneath it, endlessly swallowing light. Each segment visually uncompromising in the depiction of a truly vast history, and socio-psychological war waged in Australia for the remembrance and acknowledgment of its original inhabitants and the loss of their culture.

 

 

The Australian pavilion is a box-like room, it is large but very much in the manner of a white-cube gallery with no division of spaces nor windows. Two years ago we saw its utilization with Marco Fusinato’s audio-visual jam session takeover, featuring large scale screen and speaker installations, whereby epileptics were warned of the strobe lights and brightness. This time around the space takes an opposite approach: painted almost entirely black with the exception of the marble floors, in the center a sombre, floating platform supporting piles upon piles of documents so white, they too might as well come with a warning. Underneath it a pool of what seems to be black water. The first association I had upon entering the room was a vision of the 9/11 memorial center in New York, only darker.

 

 

This piece is a long, long thread taken directly from the fabric of a nation, it is blood-stained and it is aged, it is incontestable. The empty hum of the space vibrating across the water’s surface goes on forever in memory of the stories and cultures lost. Yet gazing upon Moore’s handwritten embodiment of a four year research project to trace his ancestry 65,000 years back is like looking at a cave-painting come to life in animation. Moore makes note of abandoning the western linearity of a family tree, instead filling in the same areas with plants, animals, waterways and land. The farther you tilt your head, the more names seem to compound, like cells in mitosis, until they eventually get to a quarter of the ceiling’s surface area where the chalk starts to fade and disappear. The delicate medium an intentional choice by the artist, leaving you wondering and wanting to find the names that would have filled the whole ceiling yet are lost to history. In the right hand corner of the frontal wall is a round space left hollow, amidst the family tree, a cold moon shining emptiness.

 

 

Moore’s research consisted of going through museum and state archives as well as using ancestry.com. The piece took several days to produce, wherein the artist and his crew had a regimented system to ensure their bodies could endure in light of the family tree’s scale. Names are stricken on the recorded documents of incarcerated people out of respect for the dead, while the Creative Australia website features a warning on the mention of deceased persons — out of respect for aborigines and first nation’s cultural prohibitions as well as due to distress caused to those related.

 

 

Notable mentions:

 

Pablo Delano – The Museum of the Old Colony, examining the polarising political state of Puerto Rico’s intricate history and current state as a resort-getaway appendage to the United States of America. Housed in the Giardini’s central pavilion.

 

Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise – an art collective made up of Congolese plantation workers turned artists, procuring funds through art and NFTS sales to buy back native lands currently held by multinational companies. Using their Lusanga gallery as a proxy venue to display a DRC artefact from the 1930s depicting Belgian colonizer Maximilien Balot, the death of whom was a result of colonial unrest from the Pende people, currently on loan from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA). Although controversy has followed this project for years as their initial pitch to the VMFA was rejected, and the NFT only soured relations, the penultimate decision to loan the object opens many questions on ownership, global responsibility, ethical trade and ethical exhibiting. Housed in the Dutch Pavillion at the Giardini.

 

Bouchra Khalili – The Mapping Journey Project are video retellings of migration routes trekked throughout the world by different migrants, using hand drawn markings on maps to illustratively guide audiences through the narrations. Followed by silkscreen prints of the routes turned constellations. Housed in the Arsenale.

 

The 60th Venice Biennale might seem underwhelming on first glance, but perhaps this is criticism of the curators rather than the artists themselves. Much like the theme implies, audiences should dare to go deeper in understanding the backgrounds of pieces. If we are truly to make space for other perspectives and not just those which build upon an already sturdy platform, we must be ready to invest in knowledge and in learning.

 

Apart from the ongoing political controversies and a few misaligned agreements between artists and institutions, the Biennale did indeed fare much better than other international arts and culture organizations. Although it endured a hefty petition against Israel’s representation, compared to Documenta ’15 the Biennale seems to have gotten by unscathed. Keeping within the safety parameters of political drama and leaving the press to the Italian foreign ministry. The events that unfolded at Documenta have unfortunately set precedent for curators who dare to take sides. Although we might remind ourselves that the Venice Biennale was originally formed to foster tourism in Venice and should therefore not be taken so seriously, the current state of overtourism in Venice has led to new taxation laws in an attempt to regulate. Furthermore, the Biennale is the make or break of artistic careers — it sits at the center of the art world’s line of vision and therefore, as the 2019 theme suggests, reflects the time within which we live in. We cannot help but become critical when such polarizing politics influence the arts, a space in which unflagging freedom of speech is given to some but not to others, especially in light of this year’s theme. Like the Eurovision promotes the campiness of gay politics and freedom of expression in the LGBTQ community, so does the Biennale promote philosophical pondering on colonialism, ethnic representation and historical revision in as long as you are protected by your country and it is protected by the global west. Although it swam the waters of representation and didn’t sink, the question is what’s in store for audiences in two years from now and whether the Biennale will build on top of what it worked to create this year, whether the art world is capable of upholding its diversity or if it will topple back into a dominant demographic. Only time will tell.