Venice Biennale Research Articles

What value in preserving a fragment of building? A sociological enquiry into the museum preservation of Robin Hood Gardens

ABSTRACT There continues to be much debate as to whether to preserve buildings, and this is particularly pertinent to post-war architecture, especially in the UK. This paper further explores the issue by concentrating on the acquisition of a fragment of Robin Hood Gardens by the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Smithsons’ key work was deemed a failed social experiment in its listing verdict, and the acquisition of the fragment during demolition sparked controversy when exhibited at the 2018 Venice Biennale. Devoid of its context in an exhibition setting, the fragment of building questions the applicability of traditional conservation values, particularly those relating to age or architectural value. This paper aims to demonstrate the value of taking a more sociological approach to this dilemma. It uses theories of collective memory, specifically Halbwachs and Bachelard’s variations, to explore multiple interpretations of the fragment’s physicality. Three frameworks have been chosen for analysis: the changing social housing rhetoric, its listing campaign, and finally the present, a speculative section on what the current interpretations of the past indicate for the future. Through this chronological analysis it is concluded that the Estate’s physicality is reduced to a semantic contribution, representative of our current crisis of collective memory.

Capitalizing on art and artifying capitals: China’s journey to Venice and scandal around the Kenya Pavilion

Embedded in a globalized framework, contemporary Chinese art operates as a powerful network of socio-economic and ideological relationships. Both China and Chinese artists have been assimilated into the global art system, which is firmly built on the basis of capitalism. The world saw a surge in artistic activism in the years between 2008 and 2014, with biennales emerging as the gravitational field in which left-wing theories critically addressed economic and cultural exploitation, as well as the disparities arising from the global capitalist system. While western discourses on contemporary art rejected complicity with the neo-liberal order, refusing to be reduced to ‘a consumable sign of opposition’, the Chinese artworld still upheld neo-liberal values at the Venice Biennale. The incidents involving Chinese artists ‘renting’ the Kenya Pavilion and representing Kenya for the 55th and 56th Venice Biennales in 2013 and 2015 became viral media sensations, prompting accusations of ‘neo-liberalism’ and ‘neo-colonialism’. This article takes the Venetian farce, with a focus on the Kenya Pavilion, as the point of departure to investigate the fame-driven image of China.

Digital China and its discontents: On the politics of Sinofuturism and image building at the Venice Biennale

This article examines how the China Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale attempts to reimagine a new ontology between contemporary Chinese art, artificial intelligence-generated art and artistic practices, as well as the official Chinese discourse on technological positivity. It argues that the China Pavilion can be read through the lens of a Sinofuturist discourse and how the pavilion is spatially and temporally situated in contemporary digital Chinese art. Taking the title ‘Meta-Scape’, the China Pavilion can be understood as a futuristic phototype that the Chinese state mobilizes in formulating a rhetoric of a cohesive digital civilization. This underlines the ways the pavilion not only generates technological inquiries to imagine new paths for artistic practices but also manifests the role that Chinese new media art has on rendering the nation’s international image. In exploring one of the AI-generated artworks titled Streaming Stillness (2022), this article investigates how the ‘techno-turn’ in contemporary Chinese art illuminates the digitalization of cultural memory in relation to the dynamics and discontents between technological aestheticism and China’s national image building process.

Gender and Deterritorialized Identity

This article explores the immersive audio-visual and sculptural art installations in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) of three transnational contemporary women artists with familial ties to former colonies and protectorates. The Afro-Caribbean artist Sonia Boyce, MBE, presented Feeling Her Way in the British National Pavilion, for which she won the Golden Lion, the biennale’s highest honor. Zineb Sedira, a Franco-Algerian artist who lives and works in Britain, exhibited Les rêves n’ont pas de titre (Dreams Have No Titles) in the French National pavilion. The Moroccan artist, Latifa Echakhch, who was raised in France and lives in Switzerland, represented Switzerland with Le Concert, a sculptural sound installation. Each of their multidisciplinary installations engages differently with the intersections of race, gender, and ethnicity to challenge cultural stereotypes and erasures—of women artists and histories of liberation struggles. This article introduces early works by each artist as a basis for understanding how their biennale projects are decolonial and feminist in order to argue that the deterritorialized may reterritorialize—create new spaces of enunciation—in and through culture. The Venice Biennale installations of Boyce, Sedira, and Echakhch bring light to intersections of present-day and historical politics and memory by engaging with identity—individual and collective—as constructed, negotiated, and always in flux. Their work is shaped by migration, displacement, refugee status, exile, and the frontier as site of obstruction and passage.

Art Is Magic

Art Is Magic

Ralegh Radford Rome Awards: Protesting celebrity: mass culture and the 1968 Venice Biennale protests

Ralegh Radford Rome Awards: Protesting celebrity: mass culture and the 1968 Venice Biennale protests

Erasure/Exposure: (Re-)Witnessing 1965 in Tintin Wulia’s Documentary-Making

Abstract: This article closely examines A Thousand and One Martian Nights (2017), an experimental documentary/installation created by the Chinese-Indonesian artist Tintin Wulia for the 57th Venice Biennale, as a form of intervention into Indonesian national history and memory. By threading together readings of Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (1984) and The Act of Killing (2012), the article situates Wulia’s work within a complex and hierarchised transnational terrain of competing images, narratives and representations which structure understandings of a history of violence in Indonesia with reference (or non-reference) to the mass killings of 1965–66. I pay attention to Wulia’s strategic imitations of and deviations from the aesthetics of documentary filmmaking, as she intermixes historical events with personal testimonies and fictitious settings. I argue that, in opening an audiovisual space for speculation and storytelling, Wulia problematises both the documentary genre and the international viewer’s claim to neutrality, while offering possibilities for self-representation for survivors and inheritors of the traumas of 1965.

Pera+Flora+Fauna: The Story of Indigenousness and the Ownership of History @ 59th Venice Biennale (23 April–27 November 2022)—An Exhibition Review

Commissioned by the People of Remarkable Talents (PORT), the Perak state’s creative and cultural agency, the exhibition, entitled Pera+Flora+Fauna: The Story of Indigenousness and the Ownership of History was curated as one of the official collateral events in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. It highlights the local inquiries and interpretations of indigenousness, ownership of history and nature through creative expressions of contemporary artists, towards further interrogating the inter-affecting relationships between inhabitants, culture, and nature in the context of Perak state (La Biennale di Venezia 2022; Nabila 2022; PORT 2022a). Through interviews with the stakeholders involved (i.e., organising and management team, curatorial team, and participating artists), this article reviews the curation, the exhibits, and the outreach of exhibition.

Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue The Frame as an Ordering Element of Hyper-Enactment

This essay aims to analyse the ordering role that the frame plays in Grosse Fatigue (2013) by French artist Camille Henrot. Presented for the first time at the 55th Venice Biennale, the work is a 'desktop documentary', which uses words and images to reconstruct the complex history of the evolution of the Universe and of humanity. With the help of some concepts taken from Object-Oriented Ontology, this article considers Grosse Fatigue as a ‘hyper-enactment’, a neologism used to describe the stage in which pre-existing images/objects (here well circumscribed by desktop frames) aggregate as both particle-weaves and event-objects, producing new narratives that prevent the punctual rediscovery of their references.

Vantage Points

A distinctive trait of the Chilean art scene, its insular condition came about as a consequence of the 1973 coup d’état, which interrupted foreign relations for a long time. The situation is only now being reversed, with local artistic production still being restricted to a homegrown market and audiences. Within this national circuit of the arts, almost entirely centered in the city of Santiago, artistic work is mostly limited to the activity of graduates and faculty from metropolitan universities, such as the Universidad de Chile and the Universidad Católica. The trend is now being reversed thanks to recent social events, primarily the 2019 uprisings or the increased market value of lithium, which put Chile back at the center of the global geopolitical agenda. In addition, a shift in media attention toward the art of indigenous peoples, which peaked in 2022, with examples such as the Venice Biennale, has allowed artists like Cecilia Vicuña, active since the seventies, to enter the so-called star system of art.

Representing Bodies and Identities in Global Exhibitions The Case of Female Photography in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale

The paper focuses on Japanese female photographers in international art exhibitions. Until recently, Japan’s photographic field was predominantly male‑dominated. Traditionally, women were considered incompetent with technical equipment and this long-enduring stereotype limited them to passive roles as models. However, from the late 1980s/early 1990s, a shift occurred, with female photographers gaining prominence. In parallel, the representation of Japanese women artists in international venues started to rise and more names began circulating in the global art circuits. This essay inspects in particular one of the most important events on the scene: the Art Biennale in Venice, the oldest and most prestigious of these large-scale exhibitions. Two important shows, held respectively in 2005 and 2009 at the Japan pavilion of the Venice Biennale, provide the starting point for this analysis: they were the only exhibitions ever dedicated to women photographers by the pavilion in its 70‑year‑old history. The artworks of Ishiuchi Miyako and Yanagi Miwa were showcased, two of the most important women photographers in recent years.

Retracted: Application Model of Public Health Visual Art Creation Concept Based on Artificial Intelligence Technology in Venice Biennale.

[This retracts the article DOI: 10.1155/2022/6546357.].

Practices of Care and Sites of Resistance in Contemporary Multimedia Multisensory Art

In the latest edition of Feminist Media Histories, the editors observe how the recent conceptual troubling of care has enabled possibilities for work in feminist media histories to reconsider both our contemporary moment of mediated care and earlier enactments of care by communities through media (Banner & Zeavin 2023). In imagining safe, inclusive, and interdependent spaces, artists working at the fulcrum of various media and social worlds have much to contribute, since maintaining a practice in neoliberal contexts means forging alternative ethics while nurturing sensitivities, relationalities, and resourcefulness (Millner & Coombs 2021). Using a multi-media multi-sensory artwork at the 59th Venice Biennale as a case study, this paper examines the relationship between sound, listening, and social practice art as affective modes of care praxis, where their intersection is a critical method for creating new formations of resistance, possibility, and community. Emerging from Sonia Boyce’s Devotional Collection (1999-ongoing) – a living archive that evidences the cultural contribution of Black British female musicians to international culture – Feeling Her Way (2022) brings together a series of shifting and evolving audio and video channels featuring five Black female musicians as they improvise, collaborate, and play with their voices. Boyce is the first Black female artist to represent the United Kingdom in Venice and was awarded the top prize at last year’s event. Grounded in notions of social interaction, freedom of expression, and improvisation, this immersive artwork amplifies the collective dynamism of the musicians brought together by Boyce yet does not rely on unity or synchronicity. Instead, the spirited and diverse interpretations of various prompts along with the range of performer’s capabilities create dense, layered, and intricate fields of sound, forming a deliberately multisensory sonic-social collage rooted in the physical, material space of the recording site, Abbey Road Studios, remediated within the U.K. pavilion. On multiple screens, viewers watch these singers vocalize shrills, screams, murmurs, and humming, together with melodies and chants throughout several open rooms accompanied by gold embellishments and vibrant patchwork wallpaper. Through artistic practice, Boyce embodies an ethics of care based on responsibility, collaboration, attentiveness, and attunement to the musicians she works with, in the practice of collecting, archiving, and displaying precarious materials, and in what she invites the audience to participate in through listening, walking, and moving through the space. This paper argues that by centring the embodied voices and embeddedness of Black female musicians and allowing the audience to bear witness through the visualization of their interaction, Boyce participates in the complex process of rewriting, rereading, and re-sounding history. Boyce’s approach to the issues of neglected and disregarded histories through sound, socially engaged arts, and relationality demonstrates how these modes contribute to practices and discourses of care, resistance, embodiment, and community. Examining mediations of care for and by minoritized and racialized subjects helps reshape historical knowledge of media and our understanding of mediation as a strategy of resistance and care that crucially overlap within the collective networks that they seek to foster.

“From Palestine with Art”: Dreams of Sovereignty and Acts of Resistance at the 2022 Venice Biennale

For the 59th Venice Biennale, curator Nancy Nesvet and the Palestine Museum US in Woodbridge, Connecticut, organized the Collateral Event “From Palestine with Art” at the Palazzo Mora (European Cultural Center). “From Palestine with Art” presents the work of nineteen contemporary Palestinian artists who invite audiences to imagine a new landscape and way of life in a liberated Palestine. The exhibition interweaves moments of joy with themes of struggle, resistance, and injustice. The artists and curators turn away from gratuitous images of suffering and violence to embrace creative forms of fighting and solidarity where happiness and presence is a radical act of resistance. As Israel continues to occupy Palestinian land and execute unprovoked military actions against unarmed civilians, the exhibition shows that Palestinians are still here. Their presence, even if far from the Biennale’s main events, is a visual argument for liberation, while its physical distance is indicative of the ways that many aim to neglect the current situation.

On Hijacking LED Walls

In recent years, the LED walls originally used in outdoor spaces by advertising companies to extend the consumption of images in our daily life have been appropriated by artists and installed in gallery spaces. When viewed nearby or when walking around them, LED walls become in some way dysfunctional: The images fade, points and color distortions appear, and the spectacle of the machine interruputs our habitual viewing patterns. This article focuses on three recent works which disrupt immersive viewing regimes through what I call “hijacking” advanced LED technology. Lucy Raven (Tucson, AZ, USA), Demolition of a Wall (Album 2), 2022. Eija-Liisa Ahtila (Helsinki, Finland), Potentiality for Love, 2018. Marco Fusinato (Sidney, Australia), Desastres, Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2022. These three artists use the sculptural and spectacular effect of freestanding LED walls to call attention to our habitual capitalist relation to LED technology. Through performative or narrative pieces, these artists deploy poetic and artistic effects to explore the politics of technological immersion in capitalist societies.

Ecophrastic Weaving: Cecilia Vicuña’s Multidimensional Ecopoetics in Kon Kon

A word in the air lets you hear the image see the sound –Cecilia Vicuña, “K’isa/Alangó/A Vibratory Disorder” It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. –Annie Dillard, “Teaching a Stone to Talk” By all accounts, 2022 was a banner year for Chilean poet and multi-medium artist Cecilia Vicuña. From May until September, she had a celebrated solo exhibition, Spin, Spin Triangulene, at the Guggenheim in New York and an equally heralded multimedia Tate Modern exhibition, Brain Forest Quipu, which opened in October. Earlier in the year, along with the German sculptor Katharina Fritsch, Vicuña won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Vicuña responded to this great honor in part by saying that she believes “art and consciousness can play a role in the urgent need to move away from violence and destruction, to save our environment from impeding collapse [ … ] we badly need to find a new way of being on Earth” (“Venice Biennale”). Her concern with the power of art to modify ontological preoccupations, especially as they relate to human-to-nonhuman interrelations, has long been part of her worldview. Perhaps this is what Cecilia Alemani, the curator for the 59th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale means when she expressed that, “Vicuña has travelled her own path, doggedly, humbly, and meticulously, anticipating many recent ecological and feminist debates and envisioning new personal and collective mythologies” (“Venice Biennale”). Clearly, many aspects of Vicuña’s oeuvre have anticipated the climate crisis by recognizing the importance of ecological thought in art and literature. In a 2013 interview, for example, she says that “toda la poesía pertenece a la tierra” [“all poetry belongs to the earth”] (Personal interview).1 She further explains that Indigenous poetry from around the world has always been “dedicado a escuchar al mundo suprahumano, al mundo más allá de lo humano” [“dedicated to listening to the suprahuman world, to the more-than-human world”]. Vicuña’s answer both rejects restrictions on poetry and accepts the idea that poetry always places humanity in a larger interconnected community and an ontological mesh of life. Her work speaks to an ecological or environmental reality by uncovering and listening to the human-to-nonhuman interrelationships of the world.

All the World’s Histories

Research Article| May 01 2023 All the World’s Histories: At the 59th Venice Biennale Selene Wendt Selene Wendt Selene Wendt is an independent curator, writer, and founder of The Global Art Project who is currently the curator for Vanderbilt University’s Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice program Artistic Activism and the Power of Collective Resistance and is also co-curating “Sustaining the Otherwise” with Amal Alhaag, among other projects. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nka (2023) 2023 (52): 120–135. https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-1043506 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Selene Wendt; All the World’s Histories: At the 59th Venice Biennale. Nka 1 May 2023; 2023 (52): 120–135. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-1043506 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsNka Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2023 by Nka Publications2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

C&EN talks with Ziba Ardalan, art curator

Ziba Ardalan is an Iranian-born art curator. She cofounded and was the first director of the art organization Swiss Institute in New York. In 2004, she started the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art in London. The not-for-profit contemporary art institution and educational charity operated from 2004 to 2023. But before becoming a voice in the art world, Ardalan was a chemist. She has a PhD in physical chemistry and worked in nutrition research. Her scientific background and curiosity have enormously influenced her work in the arts. Katharine Sanderson talks with her about how science has shaped her art curation and why she chose entropy as the theme for a show at the Venice Biennale in 2022. This interview was edited for length and clarity. Ziba, tell me about your education in Iran and Europe. It’s very hard to imagine now that women had so many possibilities, but before the

제59회 베니스 비엔날레 《꿈의 우유》의 포스트휴머니즘에 관한 고찰

이 논문은 제59회 베니스 비엔날레의 전시 주제와 구성에서 드러난 포스트휴머니즘에 대한 고찰이 다. 이러한 시도는 이번 비엔날레에 대한 논쟁이 성별과 국적의 편중성에 집중되었던 점에서 시작되었 다. 이러한 논쟁에 대한 객관적 평가를 위해 이 논문은 총감독 세실리아 알레마니의 기획 의도와 전시 구성, 선별 작품을 분석하였다. 이를 통해 알레마니의 기획 의도가 전시를 통해 효과적으로 뒷받침되었는지를 고찰하였다. 결과적으로 과거 여성 작가 중심의 전시 구성이 21세기적 관점의 포스 트휴머니즘을 드러내는 데 방해 요인이 되었음을 도출하였다. 이러한 고찰 시도가 향후 베니스 비엔날 레가 나아가야 할 방향에 대한 토론을 활성화하는 데 기여하길 기대한다.

We Made It in Venice! But Then …? Reversing Notions of Center and Periphery

We Made It in Venice! But Then …? Reversing Notions of Center and Periphery