LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA by david gil

Founded 116 years ago, La Biennale di Venezia has become  not only one of the biggest pilgrimages of contemporary art in the world today, but also one of the most prestigious art institutions. From June 1^st to June 3^rd the 54^th Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte will present the work of artists coming from 89 different countries in over 10.000 square meters of exhibition space. Afterwards, it will remain open to the public until November 27^th 2011, therefore transforming Venice in a contemporary museum-city.

According to the organizers of the Biennale chaired by Paolo Baratta and directed by international guest curator Brice Curiger, contemporary artists are less worried about provocation and anti-art; “Artists today are generously whispering ILLUMInations characterized by gestures that explore collectivity”. Questioning notions such as borders, nation, identity and community, the Biennale draws attention to unrecognized or dormant opportunities that might serve as models of the future.

Migrant or itinerant, contemporary artists are meeting and intermingling. New groupings of artists, communal happenings, collective experiences, convivial get-togethers, the art world is today fostering a process of mutual interactions among artists and new forms of collaborations transcending individual identity. 

Entre Siempre Jamas (between Forever and Never) is the tittle chosen by the Latin America pavilion. Quoting Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti, Entre Siempre Jamas explores independence and the significance of its social and cultural influences. Yamaikaleter, film by Alexander Apostol (Venezuela) portrays the citizens of a poor district of Caracas reading out loud one of Simon Bolivar’s letter from Jamaica. Since they are not fluent in English, the result is a grotesque babbling resembling the eternal promises and empty discourses verbalized by Latin American politicians.   

Estructura Completa (complete structure), filmed performance by David Perez Karmadavis (Dominican Republic) in which a blind Dominican carries in his arms a legless Haitian. The two form a complete structure that allows them to walk along the streets without their normal limitations and portraying the relationship between two dependent bodies forming a functional unit. Symbolizing the situation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic political units physically located on the same island, but separated by disabled cooperation due to national borders. 

Looting by Regina Jose Galindo (Guatemala) is a sculpture composed of eight very small sculptures in pure gold reincarnating the operation of plundering that characterized the Europe-America relation during the period of the conquest and colonization. The artist had her Guatemalan dentist make three openings in her molars and inlay them with national gold of the highest purity. In Berlin, a German dentist extracted the gold fillings from her teeth. 

Starie Novosti (old news) by Anastasia Khoroshilova is a multimedia installation organized by the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in the Biblioteca Zenobiana del Temanza. The installation consists of nine light boxes with nearly life-size portraits of mothers who were taken hostage by terrorists from September 1^st to September 3^rd 2004 in Belsan Russia. Most of these women saw their children perish in the attack during the first day of the school year. The project presents Khorishilova’s critical examination of the transience, pliability and frailty of a society’s collective memory.

For the Irish Pavilion Corban Walker (1967, Dublin) established himself as measure of his own art and used his body as a mirror. At the height of four feet tall, the artists investigates our perception of scale. Please Adjust is the name of the largest work comprising 160 interlocking stainless steel cube frames. Questioning the sculpture as a constant stable form, the sculpture makes reference to the recent economic crisis that affected his country. Each unit of his sculpture depends on each other for stability, just like humans depends on one another. 

Anton Ginzburg (1974, Saint Petersburg) strongly believes that mythological patterns are undeniably woven in the fabric of everyday life. This is why his Bienalle exhibition at the Palazzo Bollani called At the Back of the North Wind took the artists to map the void and search for the mythological land originally described by the ancient Greek writers Herodotus as the land of the Golden Age, offering pure bliss, perpetual sunlight and eternal springtime. “Hyperborea is like the metaphorical clay we embellish to communicate our experience of reality … like a dreamscape that articulates connections between the actual and potential inherent in our experience of the phenomenal world … its a blank canvas for the projection of our collective unconscious.” Explained the artist. 

 

Zinbabwe’s pavilion proposed a discussion about the role of the artists in a society and named the exhibition Seeing Ourselves, questioning our geographical landscape and the space we occupy from yesterday, today + tomorrow. The approach of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Venice is clear: to tell the story of this young independent nation thanks to the dreams of a new generation of artists. “Our goal is to re-engage our country with the international art community.” Raphael Chikukwa, curator, said. Misheck Masamvu’s powerful painting portraying a woman caught my attention. 

El asesino de tu herencia (the murderer of your heritage) by Adrian Villar Rojas (Argentina) is a monumental installation of monumental clay sculptures inspired from the theories of multiverses, which state that many different universes could coexist at the same time as a consequence of slight deviations in the evolutionary process of the cosmos. Next September these gigantic sculptures will invade the Tuileries in Paris. 

Ayse Erkmens (Turkey) site specific sculpture installation Plan B humorously transforms a room in the Arsenale into a complex water purification unit. The machines perform as sculptures, enveloping the audience inside the filtration process which is providing drinkable water back to the canal, a futile yet courageous gesture against the overwhelming scale of the ocean. The artist choreographs mechanisms of transformation.  

Art is all over Venice 

Even if it is missing ...

 David Gil