Binary Vision
The decision to have only two artists represent South Africa at this year’s Venice Biennale is making waves,
‘It’s impossible to think about Venice without thinking about the North African migrants’
‘I'm meditating on this idea of people who are trying to escape some place to get to another’
EVERY two years the heavyweights of the art world descend on Venice in May for what has been, since 1895, the world’s most prestigious and gargantuan art show — the Venice Biennale. The show, which consists of a main exhibition and more than 70 national pavilions, is a highly competitive space, an Olympics for art where thousands of artists jostle for attention and recognition, struggling to reflect the mood of the times.
South Africa has had a national pavilion at the last three editions of the biennale and because of the potential global recognition that the pavilion offers, the choice of curators and artists for the exhibition is a hotly contested and often controversial one.
Previous curators have held group shows in South Africa’s well-located space within the city’s public gardens, the Giardini. This year, however, under the curatorship of former Johannesburg Art Fair curator Lucy McGarry and her assistant curator Musha Neluheni, the decision has been taken that South Africa will be represented by only two artists — Candice Breitz (who has made her home in Berlin for over a decade) and the 2016 Standard Bank Young Artist winner Mohau Modisakeng.
The biennale is an environment that Sarah Thornton, in her book Seven Days in the Art
World, once described as like “a threehundred-ring circus”. On top of that, the nationalism that the biennale’s seemingly oldfashioned divisions emphasise poses questions about how these two artists — one a diasporic white woman concerned with “the structure of identity and global capitalism” and one a South Africa-based black man, deeply concerned with history and its effects on the black body — might engage with the ever more hotly contested notion of what it is to be South African.
Breitz says that “no single artist or group of artists could adequately represent the complex and diverse range of ways in which it is possible to be ‘South African’, which means that no matter which artists are selected for the privilege of exhibiting in Venice, we are by definition destined to fail in the task of ‘representing’ the country”.
“Perhaps what’s important is less the extent to which the artists presented in the pavilion can be ‘representative’ of South Africa, and more the extent to which the works that are exhibited might be able to invite visitors to the pavilion into dialogue with certain questions and certain urgencies that are specific to the South African experience.”
Breitz is also aware that there may be criticism of her selection because she’s lived outside the country for so long, but she points out that it would “certainly have made my life much easier if I had traded my South African passport in for an American or German passport, but I still feel very South African. I’ve never managed to establish a sense of belonging to either America or Germany, the two countries where I’ve spent most time outside of South Africa. I remain deeply invested in this country, though my relationship to my nationality is complicated by the fact that I’m not here full time.”
She’s remained active in the cultural landscape of South Africa and when we meet, she’s purposefully wearing a T-Shirt bearing the slogan “Decriminalise Sex Work Now,” in support of SWEAT (Sex Workers Education & Advocacy Taskforce), the organisation that recently mobilised against “Our Lady,” an exhibition at the Iziko National Gallery that included a work by murder-accused artist Zwelethu Mthethwa.
She explains that the photograph by Mthethwa in “Our Lady” is of an anonymous woman and “those of us who protested the exhibition found this curatorial choice highly objectionable, given that it is precisely the perceived anonymity of those who live at the margins of our society that makes it possible for violence to continue being perpetuated against them. Given the fact that sex work remains criminalised in our country, people like Nokuphila Kumalo — the sex worker who Mthethwa is charged with having brutally murdered — are virtually voiceless within our society.”
Kumalo was killed a few streets down from where we’re talking and Breitz points out that “it’s easy to pretend that all that’s going on in Woodstock is flat whites and galleries hung with cutting-edge art, but of course parallel to all of that there are communities trying to survive very difficult odds, including the severe pressure that gentrification imposes on low-income residents of the neighbourhood. The ‘Our Lady’ protests forced into visibility the intertwined existence of the art community and those living precariously within the same urban territory.”
While Breitz isn’t able to divulge too much about the work she’ll be showing at the biennale, she’s thinking about issues of displacement and migration that are brought to the fore by the history of cities such as Venice — which has historically been “a centre for trade between the most distant of nations, trade in goods but also in bodies. Displaced individuals have moved and been moved through the city for centuries: slaves, migrants, wanderers and exiles.
“In the contemporary moment, Venice of course remains an epicentre of displacement . . . It’s impossible to think about Venice without thinking about the North African and South Asian migrants who play such an important role in the city’s informal economy. The works that Mohau and I are planning . . . will be in dialogue with this defining feature of Venice’s past and present.”
In his studio a few blocks down the road in Woodstock, Modisakeng says that he’s been thinking about “the refugee crisis which has produced all these images of stranded black bodies trying to cross bodies of water as they run away from civil war and all these things, although that journey ends up being fatal for most of them.
“Again I’m meditating on this idea of people — migrant workers — who are trying to escape some place to get to another place and find themselves in a perilous situation because of that crossing, which is usually a crossing over water. Part of my research while I’m thinking about that work is looking at the news, looking at all these images of capsized boats, watching documentaries.” As an artist who marries the personal with the political and social he’s also been thinking about his own parents, who moved to Joburg for work, his father as a teacher and his mother as a nurse.
Modisakeng produces sitespecific performances that are recorded and these recordings will be exhibited in Venice.
It’s the moment of their creation that he finds most rewarding. He believes that “what happens in the space is something that I’ve never really been able to predict. In that space it’s not just you and the people you’re performing with that constitute the work — half of that work is happening in the audience, in the people who are watching these things and are collaborating and participating in what they’re looking at. The conversations that people will have about what is happening and what they’ve seen is another part of the work . . . I like the fact that once the performance is done all that remains is what you saw of it and what you remember but with a video you can go back to it and read it like a text almost.”
While he’s conscious of the art world politics that are an inescapable part of the biennale, this will be the first time that he will be “exposed to that kind of hierarchy on that level. I still don’t know what it means so when I speak to people now a lot of people have great things to say about Venice and what happens to an artist’s career afterwards but I’m not aware of what sort of politics decide that.”
How the conversation between his work and Breitz’s will play itself out in the Giardini in May will be interesting to see and whether the decision to have only two artists pays off will be left up to the thousands of visitors to decide. For now it’s clear that these two artists are engaged in their different attempts to reflect not only on the world but also on a country where, as Breitz observes, “It’s impossible not to constantly be questioning who we are. In almost every daily interaction, it’s necessary to consider how it is that what we’re saying or doing reflects, undermines or enhances our position within a social hierarchy that is in desperate need of transformation. That makes South Africa an engaging and exciting and very fraught context in which to think about and ask questions about identity.”
The 57th Venice Biennale runs from May 13 to November 26. For more information, visit thesouthafricanpavilion.co.za