Outposts Offer Views of Horrors Back Home
VENICE — When Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, fell to the Islamic State last June, members of the Ruya Foundation, an Iraqi nonprofit that set up the country’s pavilion at the last Venice Biennale, considered scrapping all plans for this year’s exhibition. “With all this carnage and death and rape, how could you even think of culture?” said Tamara Chalabi, chairwoman of the foundation.
In the end, the plans went forward because it was “a statement,” she said. “When there’s so much else being destroyed, this is also one way of trying to preserve culture.”
In the century since they first appeared, the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale here — today, there are about 90 of them — have acted as cultural outposts of the countries they represent. But what happens when those countries are in the middle of an armed conflict?
The art often reflects the horrors at home: Artists and curators, who view portraying reality as a duty, illustrate it in a range of media, and Venice becomes a platform for geopolitical frictions.
Conflict is certainly visible this year in the pavilions of Iraq, Ukraine and Syria, which are all privately funded. Iraq and Ukraine tackle the hostilities directly: Iraq evokes the brutalities of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) in drawings, watercolors and photographs, while Ukraine illustrates its ordeal through painting, sculpture and an installation with artists who are on a hunger strike.
“The Venice Biennale is revealing of the tensions in the world, and how nations want to present themselves,” said Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate museums.
A major focus of the Iraqi pavilion this year ( held at Ca’ Dandolo, a palazzo on the Grand Canal) is a set of drawings by adult Iraqi ref- ugees who fled the Islamic State’s onslaught.
These depictions — a hooded militant shooting a mother and child, a bandaged man whose bleeding heart is shaped like Iraq — were produced when the Ruya Foundation took paper, pencils and crayons to refugees in three camps in northern Iraq.
Of the five artists displayed at the exhibition, two have created works directly related to the Islamic State. Haider Jabbar, a young exile in Turkey, is showing expressionistic watercolors depicting a series of severed, bleeding heads, each with a case number (rather than a name) in the title. Akam Shex Hadi’s elegantly staged black-and-white photographs show isolated figures from communities under Islamic State attack standing with black fabric — representing the attackers’ flag — coiled around their feet.
“ISIS comes just to kill,” said Mr. Hadi, an Iraqi Kurd, adding that the flag was “like a snake” twisting around its victims.
All of the works in the Ukrainian pavilion, a glass box parked along the Grand Canal, represent the strife in Ukraine in one way or another. Inside, the Open Group collective is presenting a young artist on a hunger strike, sitting at a table with a water jug and a glass and staring at nine live video feeds showing the homes of Ukrainian soldiers who have been drafted. Whenever a soldier returns from the front, the artist ends his hunger strike and another takes over. Color photographs of tables in the soldiers’ homes, covered with their paraphernalia, are on the back of the grid of video screens.
Outside the pavilion is an encased outdoor sculpture by the Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan, made of damaged items from eastern Ukraine. They include concrete chunks from an apartment block that had been bombed and teacups melted into the glass shelf they once rested on.
The Syrian pavilion is the least overt in representing conflict. It was funded by non-Syrian (mainly Italian) sponsors and displays a mix of Syrian and European art.
“Syria is a country that’s going through a difficult period,” said Duccio Trombadori of Italy, the curator. “The intention here is to show that while politics and history are divisive, art is not.”
One work, by Ehsan Alar, shows a suite of sculpted feet in a trail of sand; according to Mr. Trombadori, it represents the migration of people. Another set, by Nassouh Zaghlouleh, are dim black-and-white photographs of window views and courtyards with no clear signs of war.
The pavilion also shows an unrelated selection of European pop-art collages and cityscapes, and, floating in the lagoon, a stainless- steel iceberg sculpture by the Italian-Albanian artist Helidon Xhixha, that denounces global warming.
A more slicing view of Syria is provided in the opening film by the Abounaddara group. In it, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is solemnly walking down a red carpet past a military formation. Suddenly, the screen goes blank and reads: “Sorry for this technical failure. Please keep enjoying the spectacle.”
War’s dark realities are on display at the Venice Biennale.