National and Post-National Performances at the Venice Biennale: Site-specific Seeing through the Photo Essay

Abstract

This article makes three contributions to research on visuality and international relations. First, it provides a theoretical framework through which sites and their politics can be understood. Sites are places where certain objects and structures are shown and engaged with. Visitors to sites experience them visually and bodily and visiting sites is a social process. Second, the article introduces the format of the photo essay as an epistemology and a method through which the seeing of sites can be captured. Photo essays about site-specific seeing select photos that convey particular, embodied experiences. Photo essays make photos as important to the analysis as text and they adopt a suggestive form of writing that encourages the reader to see and respond to images in specific ways. Third, the article introduces the Venice Biennale as a site where international relations are performed. National exhibitions called ‘pavilions’ are a central part of the Biennale. Some pavilions invoke ‘the national’ as the privileged lens on world politics, other pavilions challenge this lens. The article provides an analysis of the Serbian, Armenian and Icelandic pavilions in the 2015 Biennale and the national and post-national performances they involved. The analysis draws on an original photo essay composed from a research visit and photo shoot in May 2015.