November 22nd marked the close of the 53rd edition of the International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy. For over a century now La Beinnale Venice has been host to grand cultural events that celebrate various art forms and their contemporary expression – art, film, music, theatre, architecture and most recently, Dance. In 1893 the Venetian City Council passed a resolution to set up a biennial exhibition of Italian art, which eventually began on April 30, 1895. Today the art exhibition is considered one of the most prestigious and spectacular among contemporary art events, and has an immense influence on the making and viewing of new art histories. It is sad, therefore, that India does not have a permanent pavilion within the exhibition, considering the range, standard and popularity of contemporary Indian art.
Titled ‘Fare Mondi’ – ‘Making Worlds’ this year’s main exhibition was curated by Daniel Birnbaum (b. 1963 in Sweden), the youngest curator in the Biennale’s history. Rector of the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, Birnbaum was responsible for the exhibition sections in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Palace of Exposition) and the Arsenale, with the display of work by ninety artists from the world over. Besides this, participating countries amounted to the record number of 77, with exhibitions in their own pavilions in the Giardini and other venues, and 44 collateral events from international institutes and organizations exhibited across Venice. The venues have their own history, with the Arsenale and corderie being the ancient shipyards and warehouses that used to build and fit the fleets of the Venetian Republic, converted to exhibition halls, and the 29 pavilions within the picturesque gardens built by different nations forming a sort of anthology of important twentieth-century architecture – many having been designed by architects of eminence. Another first connected with the curator is that he chose to include the work of deceased artists alongside well known and virtually unknown contemporary artists. This enhanced the richness of the show and created an interesting layering of dialogue between history and the contemporary, familiar and new. Birnbaum said in his note, “A work of art is more than an object, more than a commodity. It represents a vision of the world, and if taken seriously must be seen as a way of making a world. A few signs marked on paper, a barely touched canvas, or a vast installation can amount to different ways of world-making, and the strength and vision is hardly dependent on the complexity of tools brought into play. It is only through the plurality of languages that the theme of this year’s International Art Exhibition emerges …” The graphic design used to create the exhibition’s identity constituted familiar symbols from national flags, building new meanings through repetition and variation of forms. It shaped the basis for the idea that the exhibition brought together individual visions that also reflected nationalities and cultures but in the end united in ‘making’ a common picture, with new worlds emerging from the intersection of individual ones. His idea was to concentrate on the role of the biennale being a site for production and experimentation; the exhibition was without sections and in that way very successful as it was able to produce open ended translations, and probably allowed for every visitor to make their own story of art.
The curated show included the work of four Indian artists. Sheela Gowda’s (b. 1957) large-scale installation Behold (2009)of metal bumpers and lengths of ritually shaved hair stood out prominently in the dramatically lit interiors of the Arsenale. The work continued her long term engagement with gender politics and caste consciousness that form an underlying layer of Indian society, while also critiquing the ‘use and throw’ mentality of the world today, creating a paradox with her juxtaposition of material. Sunil Gawde’s (b. 1960) minimalistic metal construction Aliteration depicting astronomical bodies that alternatively appear and disappear following a motorised mechanism within the piece, was also set within the Arsenale. Anju Dodiya’s (b. 1964) paintings had an entire room to themselves; her finely layered narrative compositions from the series All Night I shall Gallop mixed stories and symbols from personal memory and observed realities, put together with techniques inspired by methods as diverse as Japanese Ukiyo-e prints and European Tapestries. Nikhil Chopra (b.1975), whose work was housed in a small shack within the Giardini presented part of a series of performances where he assumes a character – here, his own grandfather – embodying certain characteristics and making drawings and paintings exploring issues such as post-colonialism and ethnicity in Indian contemporary life through the charade. Asian artists were well represented in the show, Haegue Yang, Chu Yun, Yoko Ono, Huang Yong Ping and Att Poomtangon to name a few. The inclusion of Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso was appreciable; his aesthetic language of traditional Thangka paintings camouflaging unmistakable but gentle political commentary. It was also good to see contemporary art from small countries in central and western Asia like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan who had put quite some effort into presenting their work.
The biennale had every possible artistic medium to offer – from painting and sculpture to photography, video and sound art, multimedia construction, installation, site specific work, interactive art and performance, and combinations of several together. Venice is able to provide varied settings for the art – the bay and canals, the harbour and docks, gardens and heritage buildings besides the structures formally laid out for the exhibitions– the whole city takes on the mantle of the biennale while it is going on. In the vast number of works one got to see at the exhibition, some really made strong impressions – Tomas Saraceno’s splendid space construction resembling constellations that examined the innate geometry of a spider’s web; Pascale Martin Tayou’s investigations of connections between forms, histories and cultures through the construction of an entire African inspired village scene; Michelangelo Pistoletto’s dramatic and rather violent installation of massive cracked mirrors delving into issues of identity; Andre Cadere’s innocuous coloured rod-objects that were inserted randomly through the display; Miranda July’s mirth-inducing outdoor work Eleven Heavy Things, with viewers participating in completing the meaning of the labeled objects that contained head, arm and leg shaped holes; Tobias Rehberger’s (Germany) transformation of the cafeteria space into an atmosphere of optical illusion, this last having won him the Golden Lion for the Best Artist of the exhibition. The Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist in the exhibition was given to Nathalie Djurberg of Sweden, whose haunting construction of a Garden of Eden gone awry drew crowds who returned repeatedly to experience the conflicting emotions it generated.
The biennale provided a treat for all the senses; there were works that shocked, confounded, disturbed and disgusted, there were those that produced awe, urged laughter and provoked thought and social concern, there were many that were so aesthetically harmonious that the audiences simply kept coming back. Many made bee-lines to the pavilions of their own countries; some like Japan, France, U.K and U.S.A - the last being the award winning country pavilion with the presentation of Bruce Nauman’s Tropical Gardens - had a single artist representing the country, while others had more than two, with Italy showcasing twenty artists work in the special Padiglione Italia section. This was very impressive, and interestingly showcased a lot of painting, in larger than life sizes – Davide Nido’s brilliantly coloured abstract compositions, Gian Marco Montesano’s monochromatic realism, and Marco Cingolani’s spiritually inclined scenes of life being part of the exhibit.
In selecting particular artists’ work to represent their national pavilions, countries like Chile, Russia and Denmark and the Nordic countries made strong cultural and social as well as artistic statements – Ivan Navarro’s impressive installation Threshold for the Chilean display brought together metallic and mechanical material and transformed it into thought-provoking interactive work. Part 1, ‘Death Row’ consisted of 13 aluminum doors lit by neon lights and containing mirrors, creating an illusion of multiple doors and corridors; using mirror and neon light again, ‘Bed’ was Navarro’s piece consisting of a circular section like a well, with the neon word ‘bed’ reflecting infinite times into unknown space. ‘Resistance’ was made up of a bicycle dragging a chair constructed from fluorescent tubes that lit up with the act of pedaling. An adjoining video showed a cyclist laboriously taking the cycle all over paradoxically well lit spaces like Times Square, NY city. The work drew attention to unfinished business and illusion, to forms of social and political masking and what lies beneath a surface. Venezuela and the IILA (Instituto Italo-Latino Americano) also presented complex and stirring work from the South American continent.
Russia’s ‘Victory Over the Future’ structured work by seven artists around the idea of Victory being a phenomenon with a vast number of philosophical, culturological, social and emotional interpretations bringing out interrelations between individual behaviors and society’s as a whole. Though looking at positive artistic experiences of the past, there was an underlying aspect of society’s fear over the future – something a nation like Russia has seen through years of political and economic turmoil. All the artists’ work touched on references of history and the present; Pavel Pepperstein’s absurdist drawing of landscapes of the future and Alexei Kallima’s fluorescent fresco of crowds at a football stadium, that suddenly disappeared on the automatic extinguishing of the ultraviolet light, leaving the spectator in emptiness – were particularly noteworthy.
The prize winning curation of the Denmark and Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden) Pavilion was every bit worth it. Titled ‘The Collectors’ and curated by Elmgreen & Dragset the two spaces were woven into an exhibition of work by 24 artists, designers and collectives, representing fictional domestic settings and satirically looked at modern mentalities of collecting, the impulse of owning objects and the increasingly porous spheres of the private and public, tracing imaginary lives. The informal and innovative manner of presenting artistic practice while tackling complex human sociological and psychological factors was fascinating.
Spaces like the Biennale bring to the fore achievements, ideas and trends in the art field that perhaps may not be seen on a single platform even in the regions they are produced. The juxtaposition of different kinds of art, generates a satisfaction for the viewer that is incomparable, and one wishes that the opportunity might be closer at hand for India. There is good, bad and mediocre for everyone’s tastes. Audiences from all over the world leave their footprints within the exhibition for the six months that it is displayed, and it is visibly an immense responsibility to create the mechanism that runs the show on clockwork with such precision from day to day – entry tickets, stall management, canteens, reading rooms, book shops, wash rooms and security – two years seems a short while for the organization. Venice in fact, takes a breather from showcasing its monuments, and becomes instead a vast canvas for the artists to adorn.
(An excerpt of the piece was published in the Sunday Herald, Bangalore on November 22, 2009) |
