Venice is a city built on reflections: water mirrors stone, history mirrors the present, and nowhere is that more apparent than at the Biennale. Beneath the glamour of the art world's most celebrated gathering lies an uncomfortable contradiction - a festival of international creativity funded and structured around the very national identities that many of its artists seek to challenge. This year’s edition, shaped by Koyo Kouoh’s poignant epilogic curatorial vision, offered not only extraordinary art but also a compelling meditation on power, memory, colonial legacies and the increasingly fragile state of our shared world.
Text by Alistair Hicks
The Venice Biennale is a mirror to the world’s problems caused by nationalism. Some hundred nations pay for pavilions (or alternative spaces) to put their cultural wares in the Venice window. This event, perhaps the finest in the global art calendar, not only glorifies nationalism, but is paid for by nationalism. Luckily artists are artists, and their subversion and that of some curators and commissioners, and the art on show is often at war with the platform it sits on.
Much has been written about the politics of the show. Koyo Kouoh’s dying message to the world as the curator of the Biennale’s theme, In Minor Keys, is a powerfulpaean in praise of those resisting not only Imperialism itself, but the legacy of Colonialism. There is a delicious irony in the location of the Biennale, as Venice saw its best days long before it was reduced to be being part of a country. It was a bubbling, effervescent city state.
Tired of the contemporary! Just go into a church! The great advantage of this for the visitor is that by definition the hit rate in this old art is going to be much higher, as the five-hundred-year gap has weeded out most of the rubbish. Renaissance art is not just an antidote, sometimes it can be complementary to the art of our contemporaries. Three of my high points were quite close to each other: Fiona Pardington in the New Zealand pavilion, Giovanni Bellini’s San Zaccaria altarpiece (1505) and Merike Estnain the Estonian pavilion.
Pardington, whose ancestors include both Maoris and Scots, has photographed stuffed birds that are either extinct or on the in-danger list. There is an extra edge to this as taxidermy was often a tool of the Colonialists in their drive to categorise and put the world (its creatures, fauna and humans) into little boxes. For the New Zealand pavilion she has created a dark shrine. The photographs are placed one against the other like an iconostasis. There is a soundtrack that leads you into another world, or rather other worlds. On reflection I remember the space rather like a dream, half-nightmare, half-serene. It is a dream that occurs as the night turns to dawn and the birds have the world largely to themselves, so their chorus is strong and vibrant, and their individual voices pierce the cracks and crannies of our all-too-often brittle brains and hearts.
I caught Merike Estna dressed in a white, Pierrot-collared smock, half-way up a ladder in the Estonian Pavilion. She had a wide brush in one hand, laden but not dripping in paint. She was making her famous moiree, zigzag patterns on the wall. Ostensibly here she was creating something purely beautiful – aesthetics over politics. Circumstances and the human ability to find to locate danger even in the most calming atmosphere adds another element. It is no accident that Pussy Riot came to the Estonian pavilion as part of their rebellion against the decision to let Russia and Israel compete for the prizes in the Biennale.
The angel at the foot of Bellini’s Madonna in San Zaccaria is playing a lire a braccia, a precursor of the violin. One can almost hear the music as sweetly as that of Fiona Pardington’s lost birds. Estna’s work has an echo of the Giorgionesque tranquility in the paintwork. But don’t think you can escape politics for long. When Napoleon sacked Venice in 1787, he carted this picture off to France. He was not a good caretaker. Dictators, despite their own delusions of benevolence are not usually as careful with our heritage as they should be. The picture still bears the scars.
I feel guilty as I have hardly mentioned African art, and it does undoubtedly supply the main thrust In Minor Keys. Syeni Awa Camara’s ceramic figures set the tone as one enters the main pavilion. These multi-headed explosions of identity are like Temple guardians leading one in. There is a hint of the fragmentary world of Kadia Attia, but the 78-year old Senegalese artist, who sadly died just before the show had a less aggressive vision.
The truth is that there are almost as many paths to take through the Biennale as there are alleyways and dead ends in Venice itself. It is often in the remote spots that one finds the graffiti statements: ‘Give prizes in Lotteries not in art – Free Biennale.’ In his usual acerbic way Joseph Kosuth finds a quiet spot over on the Guideca at theBerggruen Institute Europe in Casa dei Tre Oci to remind us how confused we are all are. At the heart of this exhibition is a poster he made to ‘help’ navigate the 1976 Biennale. It is a spoof of the Vaporetto map, but it looks more like the Knossos maze. I will let Kosuth do the talking. Here is his introduction:
‘It is one thing to know where you want to go, and another to find a route direct and appropriate.’ He posits three routes through the mire. The first is for bureaucrats (art dealers, critics, curators all get lumped in here). The second is for artists of all descriptions, those that make the works. Finally route three is for the succours who are the audience.
There are surprises. The Mongolian Pavilion provides one this year with a reminder that the Mongols were one of the most feared invaders of all time, yet their culture literally continues to evolve, on the hoof as it were. There are several other artists I would love to dwell on (Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nilbar Gures, Marcia Kure, Alice Maher, Alan Phelan …) but it is perhaps Bonnie Devine who comes up with a series of works that capture the spirit of the Biennale – a series of small images with competing captions that act rather like a rudimentary animation to warn us that humans must change the ways we interact with animals and nature. One poor unsuspecting valley is given the text: ‘A good location for a company to build a sulphuric acid plant.’
The protests remind us that the Biennale is far from perfect. Pussy Riot described the Director of the Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, as ‘a man as small as Putin.’ Maybe this a subtle reminder that we have to respond to what the mirror on the wall tells us.The Biennale is serving its function. The slight changes needed in the Biennale are but nothing compared to the changes we need to make in the world. If I had a magic wand, I would ban all borders. There would be no nations. Buttafuoco would not like this as another income source would be threatened, on top of the European Commission’s warnings, but the real losers would be the other dictators Putin and Xi, and would-be dictators such as Trump and Erdoğan.
