2024-04-19 14:21:56
The Venice Biennale has every reason to celebrate. What is probably the most important international art exhibition is taking place for the 60th time. In the Giardini, the Arsenale and the many venues spread throughout the city, trends are set, artists are rediscovered and some forgotten ones are rediscovered. The focus is on the art of the “Global South”. It is a political signal from this year’s artistic director Adriano Pedrosa from Brazil to confront the dominance of the West with often overlooked trends.
And the current crises are also noticeable at the Biennale: Poland and Ukraine keep alive the memory of a war raging in the middle of Europe. Israel doesn’t even open its pavilion. And demonstrators shout their cowardly slogans in front of the Israeli, American and German pavilions. So one can be very curious to see what the arguments are that are presented in Venice using the means of art.
Migration dramas
No entry into the German Pavilion. A large pile of earth was poured between the pillars. A long line forms in front of the side entrance. There is a lot to see in the monumental building (after the rather dull performances recently). Inside, it’s overwhelming.
A house within a house. Bauhaus style. Scratch plaster on the facades, including on the interior walls of the pavilion, which always becomes an issue in view of its Nazi past. This is a clever cheek from the dramaturge Ersan Mondtag, one of the two artists in the German Pavilion.
With the dramatic power of a theater maker, he tells the story of his father, who came to Germany as a Turkish guest worker, worked in a company that manufactured fiberboard and ultimately died as a result of exposure to asbestos. As you climb into the house, in the stage fog (or is it dangerous particulate matter?), you encounter actors creeping exhausted through small rooms and lying naked on the floor. It’s laid out thickly, but touching.
Performance by Ersan Mondtag and video installation by Yael Bartana in the German Pavilion
Quelle: picture alliance/dpa
But the second post is oppressive. In the apse, where a martial sculpture by Arno Breker glorified National Socialism in 1939, a video by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana is playing: six women in white dresses on the moss floor of a forest. They hold hands, form a circle, raise their heads imploringly, some wear animal masks, all open their arms as if they were receiving a message from heaven. Cut.
A flame approaches from the edge of the forest, a naked giant comes into a nighttime clearing, a torchbearer who Leni Riefenstahl couldn’t have staged more pathetically. This aesthetic association is garnished by a science fiction story in two adjoining rooms. There, a prehistoric computer-animated spaceship glides through the ether, transporting a large forest and docking at a station. Bartana calls it the “pre-enactment” of a coming cosmic migration movement. Escapism? In any case, you don’t want to stay here, you just don’t want to go there either. woe
Israel’s embassy
The demand of an activist group called the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) has been tragically fulfilled. In an open letter they called for a boycott of Israel’s pavilion and for the country to be excluded from the art community. The Biennale had resolutely opposed the call. But now the pavilion is closed.
There is a poster hanging on the window with what all this means written on it: “The artist and the curators of the Israel Pavilion will only open the exhibition once an agreement on a ceasefire and the release of the hostages has been reached.” Ruth Patir , whose theme was supposed to be motherhood, “hate” that she had to make that decision. But she wanted to send a signal of solidarity with Israel, for the prisoners who are in the hands of Hamas terrorists.
The art crowd, which largely takes one-sided sides with the Palestinians, takes little notice of this. ANGA dismissed the artist’s protest as a hollow and pandering gesture aimed at press coverage. About 100 activists demonstrated in front of the pavilion, carrying flyers that read “No Death in Venice. No to the Genocide Pavilion” were distributed. The group then moved on to the American and German Pavilions.
An Italian soldier guards the Israel National Pavilion
Source: dpa
Speakers described Israel as a “terrorist state” and Germany as a “fascist state”, and the anti-Semitic slogan “From the river to the sea”, which calls for the annihilation of Israel, was also chanted. The question is how the protesters were able to get onto the Giardini grounds – the preview days are exclusively for invited guests, accredited journalists and employees. woe
Painted male love
Is queer art automatically outsider art? At least that cannot be said about Salman Toor and Louis Fratino. Both American artists are shooting stars and enjoy painting intimate, domestic scenes between men, a dozen of which can be seen at the Biennale. Toor has dreamlike scenes reminiscent of James Ensor, while Fratino moves between cubism, Georgia O’Keeffe and David Hockney.
Both represent friends and lovers, both also ask about the role of painting in the times we live in and what it has not yet shown. They can be seen in Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition – “Foreigners Everywhere”. Strangers are also people who do not live in exile or have emigrated, but simply live differently than society would like.
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In the photos taken by South African Sabelo Mlangeni we see the residents of the Royal House of Allure, a safe space for queer people in Lagos, Nigeria. Omar Mismar from Lebanon creates antique mosaics that show not only the guards of an archaeological museum in Syria but also men in love.
And at the beginning of that long series of rooms in the Arsenale, if you look closely at Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s installation “Rage is a Machine in Times of Senselessness,” you can make out two skeletons in lesbian lovemaking. The fact that queer art already existed 90 years ago is demonstrated by small nudes by Filipo de Pisis (1896–1956), which were only shown privately for a long time and were hung next to the pictures by Louis Fratino.
Louis Fratino, „Kissing my Foot“, 2024
Quelle: © Louis Fratino/Courtesy the artist, Galerie Neu and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
There was no openly exhibited queer art historical tradition in the 20th century. But the approach of the show itself is not new. Several previous biennales have dared to look at the forgotten, and Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 edition consisted practically entirely of female artists. bp
Bombs on Venice
The poster glows red from the Venetian house wall: a reference to the next air raid shelter. A brief moment of shock. Why would anyone bomb Venice? But it is a reference to the Ukrainian pavilion.
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Hedwig Richter and Bernd Ulrich
While the art world is celebrating, a European country is at war. What does this do to the Biennale? Russia is not represented; in the Ukrainian pavilion in the Arsenale you can see videos of European actors performing stereotypical Ukrainian refugees. This is serious and funny at the same time.
A video is playing next to it that consists of cell phone footage of civilians who have come under fire – so real, so contextless, so full of curses that the room becomes completely silent. Reality doesn’t need any staging.
Where is the nearest shelter?
Those: Boris Pofalla
The Polish pavilion will show two films in which Ukrainians recreate the sounds of the weapons that terrorized them – cruise missiles, rockets and tanks. Visitors can also learn this in front of microphones. “Repeat after me” is a karaoke bar from hell – and one of the strongest pavilions in Venice. bp
Art collector on the cross
It smells like chocolate in the Dutch pavilion. But the atmosphere doesn’t match this sweetness. A good 20 Benin bronze-brown sculptures look as if they were cast from metal, but are actually made from a mass of cocoa and palm oil.
An “angel of money” spreads his wings, a woman is raped, a conqueror is beheaded. There is the monument of a “fish protector” and a “plantation master”, the statue of a poisoned monster, then an art collector is crucified.
View of the exhibition in the Netherlands pavilion
Quelle: Peter Tijhuis
Many themes come together that determine the biennale: art, power, big money, colonialism, exclusion, resistance. The collective Cercle d’Art des Traivailleurs de Plantation Congolaise is calling for a departure from the colonial past, an end to exploitation or the reforestation of their sacred forest.
The artist Renzo Martens has proven that art can actually be a vehicle for this new beginning, when he had a “white cube” built in Lusanga, Congo, as a museum and meeting place (architectural office OMA), thereby redirecting the economic flows of the global art system into the country. “The International Celebration of Blasphemy and the Sacred” is one of the few projects that combines activism and art without questioning one or the other. It deserves the Golden Lion. woe
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