The Venice Biennale reports. Part 3: Protests and modern slavery at the Arsenale

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Xu Bing, The Phoenix, 2015. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

The Venice Art Biennale is 120 years old and i can’t believe they’ve waited that long to give the reins of the event to an African curator. It was high time and bloody welcome.

Okwui Enwezor explained in his curatorial statement:

How can the current disquiet of our time be properly grasped, made comprehensible, examined, and articulated? Over the course of the last two centuries the radical changes – from industrial to post-industrial modernity; technological to digital modernity; mass migration to mass mobility, environmental disasters and genocidal conflicts, chaos and promise – have made fascinating subject matter for artists, writers, filmmakers, performers, composers, musicians, etc.

The 56th Biennale is thus set against the backdrop of economic, ecological and humanitarian crises. Any kind of art or design event has to pretend that they care for the state of the world these days (unless they are the Frieze art fair of course) but somehow this edition of the biennale demonstrates far more energy, determination and spirit in tackling the sufferings of our world than many much younger and openly socially-engaged events i’ve attended recently. It has both political gravitas and lightness of language. Humour and vigour. It even has music and graphic design.

A bit of a user’s manual wouldn’t have gone amiss though. You find yourself navigating a sea of works, they are accompanied by a title and the name of the author. Nothing else. In some cases you know the work, in others the piece is pretty self-explanatory but far too often you look at something that might or might not appeal to you and you’ve no idea what it represents and comments on.

But let’s get to the works, shall we? First stop of the Biennale was, as always for me, the Arsenale, the city’s former shipyards and armories:

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GLUKLYA/ Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya, Clothes for the demonstration against false election of Vladimir Putin, 2011-2015. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

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GLUKLYA/ Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya, Clothes for the demonstration against false election of Vladimir Putin, 2011-2015. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

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GLUKLYA Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya, Clothes for the demonstration against false election of Vladimir Putin, 2011-2015

Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya lined up against the Arsenale’s brick wall dozens protest “signs” designed as clothing to represent different groups who are under or misrepresented in the political climate of Russia. The clothes are imaginary but they do reference the 2011 Russian protests.

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Chandra McCormick, Farming at the Louisiana State Penitentiery at Angola, 2004

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Keith Calhoun & Chandra McCormick, from the series Slavery, The Prison Industrial Complex. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

Keith Calhoun & Chandra McCormick have been documenting Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, since the 1980s. Angola is located in Louisiana, the state that tops the country’s list of states by incarceration rate. Angola’s nickname is The Farm because inmates work in plantations under the supervision of guards on horseback.

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Taryn Simon, Paperwork and the Will of Capital: An Account of Flora As Witness, 2015

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Taryn Simon, Paperwork, and the Will of Capital, 2015. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

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Taryn Simon, Paperwork, and the Will of Capital, 2015. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

Taryn Simon looked at archive photos documenting agreements, contracts, treaties, and decrees signed by powerful men. Most of the photos showed floral arrangements in the background. The signings involved the 44 countries present at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. This conference led to the establishment of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Simon worked with a botanist to identify the flowers that marked each signing. Over 4,000 plant specimens were imported to Simon’s studio from the world’s largest flower auction, in Aalsmeer, The Netherlands. Everyday millions of flowers are shipped there from all over the world and are then distributed to the world’s flower shops. These flowers symbolise globalisation. Simon recreated the bouquets from each signing and photographed them against background and foreground colours informed by the colour schemes in the historical records of the original ceremonies.

The installations showed Simon’s usual care and precision but it has far less bite or sense than her previous works. It looked pretty and you can draw parallels between the dried up flowers and the disintegration of any desire to regulate the financial order if you’re so inclined but i couldn’t see the point, to be honest.

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Karo Akpokiere, Zwischen Lagos und Berlin, 2015

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Karo Akpokiere, Zwischen Lagos und Berlin. Photo by Karo Akpokiere

Karo Akpokiere’s drawings are inspired by his experiences of living in Lagos and Berlin.

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Maja Bajevic, Arts, Crafts and Facts, 2015

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Maja Bajevic, The Unbelievable Lightness of Being, 2015. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

Maja Bajevic’s Arts, Crafts and Facts is a series of rugs and pieces of fabrics in which traditional Bosnian embroidery reproduces the fluctuations of the Stock Market indexes around the world, turning intangible financial data into tangible needle work.

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Mykola Ridnyi, Blind Spot

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Mykola Ridnyi, Blind Spot. Installation views at the 56th Venice biennale for contemporary art, 2015. Photo: Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

I’m going to simply copy/paste the text of the artist:
According to the assumptions of ophthalmology, there is a blank area called the blind spot , there is a blank area called the blind spot in our eyeshot, between right and left eye. Accordingly to this phenomenon, we are unable to fully see what is happening around us. We construct the missing image of reality and try to fill the blind spot, relying our knowledge, memory or compelling influence of information. Usually we are not aware of this constant construction of reality. Exception of the rule is the disease, when the blind spot is perceptible and becomes genuine darkness absorbing the reality. Everything may start from small, a gradually expanding black dot or like a tapering tunnel which consequently devours vision as long as everything is obscured. When it spreads about the society, inability or limitations in the vision become the mechanism of human self-defense that brings about unsolicited blindness against escalating violence. There is also another form of blindness – one imposed by the machine of war propaganda which produces a binary vision of reality and creates “us” and “them”, “brothers” and “enemies”, “citizens” and “aliens”. Those divisions do not have any reasonable basis in reality. As we move into the future, it seems that we are destined to ‘repeat the mistakes of history’ because we refuse to see our past. Tragic events will be engulfed by fading light and our memory will keep only chosen heroes, leaving behind unsung victims. Victims are always omitted, and the price of human life becomes devaluated, while sides of the conflict remain engaged in defending their rightwards. In the „Blind spot” series, photographs taken from a number of reports about the war on the East of Ukraine are interlinked with the phenomenon of gradually going blind and a resulting narrowed field of vision: the imagery is almost completely obscured by black ink.

More photos. No comments:

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Lavar Munroe, To Protect and Serve, 2012

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Newell Harry, Untitled (Objects + Anagrams for R.U. & R.U., Part II, 2015

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Terry Adkins. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

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Terry Adkins, Muffled Drums (from Darkwater), 2003

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Terry Adkins, The Last Trumpet, 1995

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Monica Bonvicini, Latent Combustion, 2015

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Monica Bonvicini, Latent Combustion, 2015. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

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Monica Bonvicini, Latent Combustion, 2015. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

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Pino Pascali, Cannone Semovente (Gun), 1965

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Carsten Holler & Mans Mansson, Fara Fara, 2014. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

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Xu Bing, The Phoenix, 2015. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo / la Biennale di Venezia

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Qui Zhijie, Jingling Chronicle Theater Project, 2010-2015. Photo by Isabella Balena / la Biennale di Venezia

Bits of untitled, unintentional art in and around the arsenale:

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All of the World’s Futures – The main exhibition of the 56th Venice Art Biennale was curated by Okwui Enwezor. The biennale remains open until 22 November 2015.
More photos? This way!