ARTISTIC OLYMPIANS
FIVE HITS AT THE VENICE BIENNALE
They used to call this waterlogged city the Most Serene Republic, but there is nothing serenissima about the opening days of the Venice Biennale.
The world’s longest-running and most extravagant festival of contemporary art opens to the public Saturday after a preview biathlon of fine art and financial profligacy that has grown more hectic than ever. The first days’ forecast included a severe rainstorm and a large pro-Palestinian protest, but both turned out to be milder than projected — and neither demonstration nor precipitation put a dent in the global art world’s pre-eminent celebration of its own good taste.
You hoof across bridges and shove through crowds. You exchange tips on shows not to miss. You judge, you gossip, you wash it all down with Prosecco. Have you seen the Uzbekistan Pavilion? Can you get me into the Tate reception? Do you have a boat? Do you know who I am?
This is the 60th edition of the Biennale to take place since 1895. Its massive crowds — the last edition drew some 800,000 visitors despite the pandemic — come to see a show in two parts. There’s a principal exhibition of hundreds of artists, all chosen by a single curator, which spans two locations — the genteel, Napoleonic-era park called the Giardini della Biennale and the massive Renaissance shipyard known as the Arsenale.
This year’s guest curator is Adriano Pedrosa, the director of the Sao Paulo Museum of Art. He’s brought some excellent new work for the show, called “Foreigners Everywhere”, including valuable displays of lesser-known Brazilian artists. He’s also assembled a pell-mell array of older painting and sculpture from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The success of this historical section is far less evident. (More on all this in the coming days.)
Alongside the main Biennale exhibition, nearly 90 individual nations mount their own shows — mostly in pavilions in the Giardini and the Arsenale, but also around town in grand palazzi, humble warehouses or, in one case, a women’s prison.
The United States is represented by Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw and Cherokee artist who has brightened up (or tarted up) the American Pavilion with 70s-style multicoloured wallpaper and hot-coloured mannequins bearing simple slogans (“We Want To Be Free”) and Google-depth historical citations (“1866 Civil Rights Act”). It’s politically obvious and visually juvenile, and the US pavilion feels especially weak in a year when other indigenous artists, from Greenland to New Zealand, have pride of place for subtler work.
On top of all this are Venice’s many museums, which time their biggest exhibitions to open right around now, plus dozens of special presentations, pop-up shows of professional to craftfair quality, and the odd yachtside private view. To assess it all takes both intellectual and physical fortitude, plus a reliable source of espresso.
My colleagues and I have been covering the lagoon to find out what everyone’s talking about ahead of tomorrow’s public opening, when a jury awards prizes to the show’s most outstanding contributions. — JASON FARAGO
NIGERIA PAVILION
There’s an easy way to tell how popular a national pavilion is at the Biennale. Look and see who’s walking around Venice proudly carrying the tote bag.
At this year’s event, the bright green tote from the Nigeria Pavilion seems to be the one that everyone wants. The bag has the name of the exhibition, “Nigeria Imaginary”, printed on one side, and “Na Condition Make Crayfish Bend”, a Nigerian proverb, on the other.
Nigeria’s pavilion has caused such a stir here partly because it’s the African country’s first major Biennale presentation. Aindrea Emelife, the pavilion’s curator, has created an exhibition featuring work by eight artists with Nigerian roots that includes stark photography, imposing sculpture and majestic painting.
In one room, Yinka Shonibare has installed around 150 clay replicas of Benin Bronzes, the ancient artefacts that, in 1897, British soldiers looted from what is now Nigeria. In another, Fatimah Tuggar has made a colourful installation centred on the calabash gourd — a hard-skined fruit that has multiple uses, including as a cooking vessel and a musical instrument.
When I visited the pavilion this week, visitors were taking selfies in front of every artwork. And there were no totes left. — ALEX MARSHALL
FRENCH PAVILION
This year’s French pavilion is a card-carrying member of the “more is more” club. The exhibition inside by French art-world darling Julien Creuzet is dense with sinewy sculptures made of thread, beads and netting. The intoxicating scent of lavender wafts from resin vessels shaped like ancient deities. And surreal animated underwater scenes play on large screens as a synth-heavy electronic soundtrack blares over the speakers. It’s a lot.
Raised in Martinique, Creuzet is the first French-Caribbean artist to represent France in Venice; he is also one of the youngest artists the country has ever selected. Much of his work explores the extraction of wealth from the Caribbean as well as the migration of people and the exchange of cultures in the diaspora.
These themes make Creuzet’s work a fitting companion to the central “Foreigners Everywhere” exhibition. But while much of the main show shies away from spectacle, Creuzet embraces it.
Navigating the pavilion felt like being at a disorienting, overcrowded party where radically different conversations are unfolding in several languages. The subtleties of the lyrical sculptures and the reference-dense videos would have been easier to absorb in a less crowded space. But if vibes were the mission, it was accomplished. — JULIA HALPERIN
JAPAN PAVILION
Given the Venice Biennale’s reputation as “the Olympics of the art world” — set in a spectacular city, no less — artists and curators here often favour grand, weighty gestures. This year’s Japan pavilion wonderfully eschews gravitas for modesty and play, while still getting at something profound.
For her exhibition “Compose”, curated by Sook-Kyung Lee, artist Yuko Mohri has created two installations of contraptions-slash-sculptures from local materials. One set, inspired by the DIY methods for fixing leaks in the Tokyo subway system, features tubes and everyday objects — like pans, rubber gloves and coat racks — rigged together and dangling through the air. The systems catch and recirculate water seeping into the pavilion, sometimes activating chimes in the process.
The second series features rotting fruit: apples, bananas, oranges and more arranged on tables and covered with flies and seeping liquid. Mohri has attached electrodes to the fruit that convert its moisture into signals that generate droning sounds in speakers or turn on suspended lightbulbs.
The result is less a cacophony than an intriguing symphony that just hangs together — and purposefully so. “Compose” captures the fragility of life in a sinking city in a warming world, but without the usual sense of doom. Instead, Mohri finds whimsical possibility — and by extension, a kind of hope — in our futile-seeming efforts to find a fix.
— JILLIAN STEINHAUER
GERMAN PAVILION
The asbestos apartment complex inside the German Pavilion is a haunting reminder for artist Ersan Mondtag, whose father died prematurely from the toxic effects of that construction material. The slow-moving actors who inhabit the space are like wandering corpses: completing tasks such as sweeping and folding laundry, or laying down on the floor and risking injury from the pointy stilettos and business boots of visitors clomping up the three levels of stairs.
But it’s only one part of the massive exhibition “Thresholds”, which includes work by Israeli artist Yael Bartana and a separate experience on the island of La Certosa, reachable by vaporetto, where artists Robert Lippok, Nicole L’Huillier, Jan St Werner and Michael Akstaller have contributed to a nature trail.
The cumulative experience is heavyhanded, maybe even predictable from a pavilion that regularly focuses on how the past haunts the present. But the curator, Cagla Ilk, attempts to put her own variation on the theme by leaning into the building’s creepy fascist aesthetic. Dark lights and booming bass music turn Bartana’s installation into a thunderously morose ode to space operas, complete with references to Richard Wagner and Star Wars. —
ZACHARY SMALL
AUSTRALIA PAVILION
Tucked away around a corner and up a hill in the highly trafficked Giardini, the Australia Pavilion might be tempting to skip. Don’t. In a Venice Biennale defined by ornamentation and sensory overload, the exhibition by Archie Moore is the visual equivalent of a meditative, mournful hum. At the centre of the room is a massive table covered in stacks of partially redacted documents related to the deaths of Aboriginal Australians in police custody in recent decades. Surrounded by a shallow pool of water, it’s nearly impossible to get close enough to read them.
The entire pavilion is an exercise in trying — and sometimes failing — to take in information that has been intentionally, systematically suppressed. On blackboard walls, the artist has handwritten a dizzying family tree that he says extends across more than 2,400 generations.
From the central point (“Me”) flows thousands of branches of kin that range from identifiable aunts and uncles (from the Bigambul and Kamilaroi people on his mother’s side, from Britain and Scotland on his father’s) to more elusive figures (“full blood Aborigine”, “Neddy’s wife”).
Looking up at the ceiling, the web becomes so dense that specific names are impossible to make out. The implication is clear: expand the aperture wide enough and we are all related. It’s a concept that could feel trite if it weren’t rendered with such poetry, rigour and specificity. — JULIA HALPERIN © 2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY