With nationalism on the rise, political engagement is central to the artistic dialogue at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art fair, which opened on Saturday.
From the main show, Viva Arte Viva, curated by Christine Macel, to 87 national pavilions in the Venice Giardini, Arsenale and throughout the historic city center, artists are contemplating the world around them and giving a voice to under-represented populations.
Macel said artists “are able to respond to this moment of complexity” even if art “should not be reduced to politics.”
Photo: AFP/Vincenzo Pinto
The show runs through Nov. 26. Here are some highlights.
GREEN LIGHT PROJECT
Berlin-based artist Olafur Eliasson’s Green light is an onsite workshop where 100 migrants create lamps lit by green bulbs from simple materials.
Visitors can engage with the migrants — for many a faceless, nameless category repeated on the news — maybe pitching in, maybe asking their stories.
Eliasson says being a migrant is not an identity, but a condition. “What we see is ourselves,” Eliasson said. “The migrants are a little bit like actors in a play. Fair enough. But I am doing it on the condition that they are volunteers. They are given a subjective space, they are not being objectified.”
An immigration lawyer and psychological counselor are among 90 volunteers participating.
The project aims to help the migrants learn skills, and build self-esteem, while exploring a platform that could be repeated in other contexts.
DUTCH SELF-IMAGE
The Dutch pavilion examines the Netherland’s self-image as progressive and tolerant, which has been put to the test during Europe’s refugee crisis.
One film explores how the Dutch self-narrative papered over the difficult assimilation of mixed-race children of Dutch and Indonesian parents after Indonesia’s independence.
Artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh discusses the issues in three short films. Because the children entered the country smoothly as Dutch citizens, vast differences in their experiences have been overlooked, from those who were abandoned by their white fathers and impoverished, to the wealthy, well-educated arrivals who still found barriers to assimilation.
BREXIT MELANCHOLY
Phyllida Barlow’s show of sculptures for the United Kingdom’s pavilion titled folly isn’t about overtly about politics, but that did seep into the work as the Brexit campaign raged around her.
“As I was making the work, I began in April, before the referendum, I had this sense of unease, melancholia really, about this idea of occupying the British pavilion and what it means to be British ... when it’s leaving Europe and I feel I’m European,” Barlow said.
She said the mood permeated her sculptures, which while robust “show fragility, and a sense of things being uneasy.”
HUNGARIAN UTOPIA
For the Hungarian pavilion, artist Gyula Varnai discusses the “viability and necessity of utopias” in his show titled Peace on Earth. He uses many defunct communist symbols, including a reproduction of a large neon Peace on Earth sign from a building in Hungary, to a rainbow made of 8,000 pins bearing Cold War-era symbols.
Curator Zsolt Petranyi said they asked themselves “is it true, that we can just speak about dystopias, that there is not any positive vision?”
He realized that technology has become utopia’s stand-in, “covering the deeper problems of today. Wherever you go, from China, to Africa, to India, if there is a new kind of television, a new kind of whatever, everybody is celebrating it.”
ILLEGAL JOURNEYS
With cinematic tableaus, photographer Tracey Moffatt recreates scenes of “journeys, secret journeys, illegal journeys,” in a series called Passages for the Australian pavilion.
The opening photograph features a mother grasping a child seen through a fog looking out over the sea.
“The baby is squirming. The baby will leave her. She might be giving the baby away for her passage. There are many scenarios,” Moffatt said.
While the scenes bring to mind modern-day migrants, Moffatt said “for me it is old fiction. A fake old film. It is a celluloid that I claim I found in a vault.”
ADOLESCENTS THEN AND NOW
Troubled Polish adolescent girls are both inspiration and actors in US artist Sharon Lockhart’s show for the Polish pavilion titled Little Review, named for a pre-war Jewish newspaper by and for adolescents in Poland.
The broadsheet published weekly from 1926 to Sept. 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland.
Lockhart had the girls choose issues of the paper to reproduce each week at the Biennale, finding similarities in their lives and global political tensions, according to curator Barbara Piwowarska. They also appear in photographs, and a film they choreograph themselves.
Lockhart got to know the girls while filming them, `’then she realized they had this tremendous need” and has continued to work with them beyond the artistic collaboration to help get support and therapy, said Katy Siegel, a senior curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art who has worked with Lockhart.
GREEK CATHARSIS
George Drivas explores the complexity of the refugee crisis in his show for the Greek Pavilion.
In a video installation that draws on ancient Greek tragic theater, Drivas outlines a 1960s experiment where foreign cells endanger the native.
The show is designed to get people to ask, “What kind of societies do we have. What is the criterion how do we decide? These are the things that preoccupy me, without saying this is correct, that is correct. I don’t want to make a lesson. I want to raise questions, ‘what kind of Europe to we want?”’ Divas said.
Drivas wants visitors to slow down and let the allegorical meaning of the experiment sink in.
Anyone who rushes through his installation will miss Charlotte Rampling’s cameo, and possibly even catharsis.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located