In a part of the Arsenale, a vast hangar-like space that hosts the central exhibition of the Venice Biennale, a giant automated mop created by the Chinese duo Sun Yang and Peng Yu repeatedly sweeps up what appears to be blood on the floor, only to chase it again as it seeps and spills elsewhere. In another corner, a rotating metal gate by Shilpa Gupta, reminiscent of India’s vaunted gated colonies, oscillates violently between zero and 180 degrees. Each time it slams into a wall, debris falls and collects like a reminder of acts of exclusion. On the edge of the waterfront outside, a giant boat lies berthed.
Relentless pace
It had borne refugees who fled war-torn Libya before a deadly collision in which 800 people died at sea. Bereft of a label, this entry from Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel provokes strong reactions, to the border policies of the West as much as to the times in which we live.
As the greatest art show on earth, the Venice Biennale brings in eager backpackers and billionaires in private yachts to test the pulse of ‘global’ art. In the country pavilions — mainly in the beautifully laid out Giardini and the large spaces of the Arsenale — the mood is sombre, the concerns around ecology a grim reminder of man’s disastrous descent into an unstable nature.
In the Japanese pavilion, a folk tale demonstrates the beginnings of the earth, which is represented by four cosmo-eggs or primal islands before Nagasaki, the tsunami and the cumulative impact of man on the human environment.
In the relentless pace of the Biennale — you can only see it at a trot — other artist-curators evoke the environment in ways that are irreverent and wildly inventive. In the French pavilion, the artist Laure Prouvost, a Turner Prize awardee, has dug deep into the ground to lay out the detritus clinging to the Grand Canal, even as she has created an octopus’s shape to project her whimsical film on.
That environmental protection may come in quiet forms was best demonstrated by the American pavilion, which 77-year-old African-American artist Martin Puryear lit up with his flowing poetic forms. A collection of individual, breathable pieces that recall birds’ nests or shells, each made in natural material, also lend themselves to individual, poetic interpretation. Borne of his travels and work in places such as Iceland and Japan, Puryear seems to lend grace and reflection in the sweeping shift from minimalism to craft and beyond, to the urgent concerns around the environment. In his work ‘Swallowed Sun (Monstrance and Volute)’ the star appears to be a sunburst of wood, while a dark long, curved tail form seems to consume it. Against the backdrop of Venice as a seat of Catholicism, its grand churches and mercantile history, this piece with its comment on good and evil seems particularly appropriate.
Yet away from the grandeur of San Marco’s square and the Doge’s palace and the baroque excesses of the rising palazzos on the Rialto, in the small congested alleyways of the city, the stagnant smelly canals speak of another Venice, deprived of funding and decrepit with the passage of time. The rising waters, the influx of tourists, and a lack of resources speak of an alternate history even in the seat of wealth. Ralph Rugoff, the director of the the Hayward Gallery and curator of the Venice Biennale 2019, who gave his artists the challenge of the theme ‘May you live in interesting times’, creates abundant space for voices from the margins. Rugoff has said in an earlier interview, “Art is about unlearning your habitual responses, so that your imagination can get off its leash, wander around and explore.”
As one enters the Arsenale, ‘Angst’, a photo series by Soham Gupta depicting the poorest of Kolkata, engenders a visceral reaction. Gupta, 29, creates a nocturnal view of the abandoned and the homeless, a surreal Diane Arbus-like incursion into the self and the city. “This work is not about the city at all, though it is… about a night-time hellhole dwelling in my imagination.”
Rocking the world
Rugoff draws upon multiple sites of irresolution — the self-portrait of Japanese artist Mari Katayama with her amputated limbs, the picture of longing in the midst of teenage bedroom clutter, and the homoerotic staging of the paintings of Nicole Eisenman, who stuns with her stylistic simulations of the old masters and her satiric sculptures of men. Large black-and-white prints of African subjects by Zanele Muholi dot the Arsenale, reminding us that the burden of Africa sits uneasily on the ageing shoulders of Europe.
Issues of race in the superb paintings of Henry Taylor, interspersed with those of Julie Mehretu, and the extraordinary staging in the surreal domesticity of female relations in Kaari Upson’s ‘There is No Such Thing as Outside’, make a chunk of the Arsenale unforgettable viewing.
For some reason, Rugoff then goes careening into techno mash-ups, one after the other, before finally closing his show on a quieter note. It’s as if the weight of the world needs to be rocked before it settles into a semblance of normality.
First-time outings by Ghana and India were among the most contemplative of the national pavilions. Ghana stands out with an extraordinarily powerful film, ‘The Elephant in the Room’, by John Akomfrah, on the great denuding of the African landscape.
Renowned architect David Adjaye used Ghanaian mud to create the interior, while Okwui Enwezor, in one of his last assignments, served as advisor. A powerful installation by El Anatsui, the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and the self-portraits of Felicia Abban create a dazzling image in broad strokes.
The smaller scale and intimacy of the Indian experience is brought out by Roobina Karode, curator of the India pavilion, in a selection of works that communicate Gandhi as a concept, as a monument to India’s past, and as an ethical crucible for our own times.
Gayatri Sinhais an art critic and curator who runs www.criticalcollective.in.