Moving Image Installation, Dance, and Resistance at the 2019 Venice Biennale

Abstract

IMAGE 1. Installation view of Moving Backwards (2019) by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz in the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2019; courtesy the artists; photograph by Annik Wetter. Can dancing be a survival strategy? Such is the question posed by artist Mirkan Deniz in her examination of a Kurdish “guerrilla dance” as a site of resistance. Deniz's query was included in the series of letters to the visitor distributed along with Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz's film installation Moving Backwards (2019) in the Swiss Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale (May 11–November 24, 2019). The urgency of our present moment permeated much of the sprawling biennial, grouped loosely under the apocryphal proverb and curse “May You Live In Interesting Times.” Artists tackled climate catastrophe, rising right-wing nationalism and authoritarianism, refugee crises, and other pressing social and political issues in a range of media and with a variety of attitudes. Moving image installation invites surrender to a different temporality amid the fast-paced tempo of both these “interesting times” and the packed itinerary of biennale tourists, and it figured prominently in the group show curated by Ralph Rugoff at the Giardini and Arsenale locations as well as in numerous pavilions and collateral events scattered throughout the city. Of the twenty-nine national pavilions of the Giardini—the Biennale's original location and where national pavilions first emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century—eleven prominently featured moving image artworks, and these ranged widely in both quality and tone. Laure Prouvost's beautiful, frenetic, and surreal journey film Deep See Blue Surrounding You (2019) and Larissa Sansour's tense two-channel take on the psychological sci-fi thriller in Heirloom …