La biennale 2015
As the Venice biennale nears a close for 2015, I am belatedly drawn to attempt to sum up my thoughts from the show and pavilions this year. It is, as always, an utter joy to visit the magical world of Venice, but the biennale also left me feeling particularly energised this year.
The theme of 'All the world's futures' set by curator Okwui Enwezor offered a fairly open field for choice of works, and the fair information employed some typically art-world speak to explain the methodology behind it: 'informed by a layer of three intersecting filters: Garden of Disorder, Liveness: On epic duration, and Reading Capital ... a constellation of parameters, which will be touched upon in order to imagine and realise a diversity of parameters'. Yet two coherent trends emerged for me walking around. The world's futures, it seems, are in a rigorous engagement with its pasts, and in an understanding of the importance of stuff. Two sentiments which, of course, I am likely to be attracted to.
Many of the works this year showed particularly strong concerns with imperial and colonial legacies. In the Polish pavilion, a wonderful curved immersive screen showed an opera taken to Haiti. The project was to see whether this European cultural form had any resonance with colonial descendants on the island. It was a rich and visually rewarding result. In the Serbian pavilion, artist Ivan Grubanov produced a striking installation with flags. The defunct symbols of 'United Dead Nations' had been dripped with paint to form coloured pools on the floor.
The Canadian pavilion was just one that involved a riot of objects. It was transformed by artist collective BGL into the anarchic store, workshop and games rooms of an eccentric collector. From shelves packed with familiar but slightly out-of-focus branded packaging to a studio full of cheap sculptures painted to look like terracotta, visitors climb up to a huge DIY games machine where you could watch your coin roll down slides to become part of the vast central wall installation. The Greek pavilion recreated an animal skinner's workroom and shop, packed with tools, skins and the rich patina of a life spent with a dying art. In the Japanese pavilion, Chiharu Shiota wove a red web around thousands of donated keys.
Artists in the large exhibition spaces in the Giardinieri and Arsenale employed piles of suitcases, overlayed maps, vitrines filled with objects and illustrated books, benches covered with prints and ethnography, too many to mention. My favourite, however, has to be Fiona Hall's installation 'Wrong Way Time' for the Australian pavilion. Hall has created a modern cabinet of curiosities, working with a range of different indigenous groups. She combines found and made objects (in the manner of all good cabinets) from bones to engine parts in a display of carefully massed and lit objects. Most compelling is the series of banknotes 'When my boat comes in', all featuring ships and painted with indigenous botany.
For me Hall's installation exemplified a thoughtful approach across the 2015 biennale to the different countries' cultural, political and artistic histories, as well as their common concerns. It was a joy to walk out into Venice from, arguably the ultimate European city where East meets West and past meets vulnerable future.