Rhetoric, market rules and trinkets

The artworld’s most beloved sport: to speak poorly of current exhibitions, praising instead the past ones (which were criticized in their time). Christian Costa has some nasty questions after visiting the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale 2024

Glicéria Tupinambá, Olinda Tupinambá, Ziel Karapotó, Ka’a Pûera: we are walking birds, Brazil pavilion, 60th art Biennale in Venice 2024, fot. Christian Costa

The white cube rulez

Why do most of the exhibition spaces religiously follow the white cube rules at the most important event in the world of art? Why is it that despite budget, possibilities, organization at the highest possible level, even the historic and often notable spaces of the National Pavilions are almost never reconfigured, turned upside down, used as environments, conceived as part of the artworks, etc?

Is it the anxiety of recognizability that leads to standardization or the anguish of not succeeding that drives conservatism?

The only exception this year (apart from German Pavilion, more about that in a moment) is the Brazilian Pavilion (Glicéria Tupinambá, Olinda Tupinambá, Ziel Karapotó), which, as often happens with them, with a small budget and lots of ideas transformed its environments into something other. A few leaves on the ground and some simple spatial elements are enough to turn the exhibition space into a crucial component of the representation. Well done!

Art is a simple game. Many try to score and, at the end, the Germans always win

Is there an anthropological difference in understanding the substance and role of contemporary art? Many critics were struck by the radical contrast in ratings of the English and German Pavilions.

For many people from the ‘warm’ countries (Slavic, Mediterranean, etc.) the British Pavilion was completely unbearable, while many people from the Anglo-Saxon world rejected the German Pavilion (see Frieze: : https://www.frieze.com/article/venice-biennale-2024-national-pavilions-review-litany-absences).

Ersan Mondtag, Monument eines unbekannten Menschen, German Pavilion, 60th Art Biennale in Venice 2024, fot. Christian Costa

The German Pavilion, despite its somewhat confusing mix of themes and the vagueness of a certain sci-fi escapism, seemed to be the only project this year at the Biennale (along with Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition at Punta della Dogana and Christoph Büchel’s at the Prada Foundation) daring to try to go further. It didn’t settle for simple narratives. It tried to shape a sort of ‘multimedia totalism’, a monumental Gesamtkunstwerkism that would leave us with more questions than (sterile) answers.

Yael Bartana, Light To The Nations, Generation Ship, German Pavilion, 60th art Biennale in Venice 2024, fot. Christian Costa

An onion structure in which Yael Bartana built the middle layer, a science fiction and neo-mythological utopia, while Ersan Mondtag gave shape to the external layer (the entrance to the building swallowed by the nothingness of a mountain of dirt) and the innermost one (with an intimate narrative that becomes an environment within an environment). A system that has also expanded to the island of La Certosa, where you get lost among the sound installations. A slightly intricate, but extremely stimulating polyphony of voices.

Nicole L’Huillier, Encuentros, German Pavilion, island La Certosa, 60th Art Biennale in Venice 2024, fot. Andrea Rossetti

The British Pavilion, on the other hand, provoked totally contrasting reactions of appreciation or strong rejection. John Akomfrah proposed a cycle of eight “cantos” with dozens of screens and hours and hours of projections.

As the curator herself, Tarini Malik, says, the video materials proposed follow the “methods of bricolage”: archive materials, field recordings, devotional music, Mark Rothko’s paintings, altarpieces, climate change, forced migrations, marginalized people, the Global South, Gandhi, the events of India and Pakistan, apartheid, Caribbean emigration, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Ghana, Congo, Malcom X… the list of contents printed in the publication distributed on site is endless.

John Akomfrah, Listening all Night to the Rain, 60th Art Biennale in Venice, fot. Christian Costa

But does this overlapping of relevant themes end up generating a synthetic discourse? It seems to me that giving voice, at the same time, to all the world’s problems ultimately only produces a lot of noise. It is the denial of the very idea of ​​representation or democracy. It is a device for dispersing dissent, exhibiting a genericity wonderfully shot, edited and produced with great technical expertise, but to be observed like a diorama, just for a few moments and nothing more.

After all, the artist himself declared that “It’s not really about communicating anything. […] It’s about listening”. Isn’t this a trivialization of the political and social issues that the author himself took so much effort to enumerate?

Hence the doubt about an anthropological difference. It seems clear that this redundancy of content ends up pushing viewers to consider careful viewing as non-essential, and the videos themselves as a ‘visual tapestry’. By imposing an unnerving length on the observers, the artist ends up frustrating their desire for participation and, consequently, emotional adhesion to the cause. This configures a role for art, which must not create conflict, but represent it in a vague and harmless way.

In the end, doesn’t such an all-encompassing device, that absorbs dozens of problems and emergencies without generating any discourse or action, end up playing a strongly conservative function?

60th Art Biennale in Venice 2024, fot. archive of Fundacja Bęc Zmiana

The Disobedience Archive, curated by Marco Scotini at the Arsenale in the main exhibition, also presents hours and hours of videos by many different artists. On its own it would require a whole day of viewing. Who does it? Nobody. And the lack of information on individual artworks transforms everything into a kaleidoscope to be observed briefly, as a whole. The artworks and the artists disappear in the curatorial-exhibition concept.

Adriano Pedrosa is the first curator in the history of the Biennale to come from South America. The main theme he proposed, Foreigners Everywhere, has turned into endless historical sections with dozens of, mutatis mutandis, ‘similar’ artists from different continents. Does this strategy help discover new authors or does it lead to the homogenizing of themes and individually expressive threads? Does grouping works from different periods and geographical locations, therefore, give or take away visibility from artists, themes, curators?

This is the Biennial of beads, sublimated colonial guilt, and pseudo-folk

Between rainbows of beads (Kapwani Kiwanga, Canada) and artworks from the Global South, presented pretending not to be a still colonial country (Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, Holland), in many projects we ask ourselves who is the subject and who is the object of representation.

Jeffrey Gibson, the space in which to place me, United States of America Pavilion, 60th Art Biennale in Venice 2024, fot. Timothy Schenck

The American Pavilion, almost to please Pedrosa’s curatorial statement, presents an artist who is simultaneously native, queer and outsider. It is always a little perplexing when a nation that has racism and violence towards marginal communities strongly written into its DNA decides to ‘celebrate’ figures who fall into such stereotype. In a frenzy of beads, ribbons and very vivid colours, I liked Jeffrey Gibson’s excess. Maybe I liked more the sculptures than the paintings, but certainly the simple but catchy final video featuring the Sisters The Halluci Nation (feat. Northern Voice) track.

In Pedrosa’s main exhibition identity topics as well often appear to be on display like a religious relic. Too many artworks without process, without interaction, without any exchange, that must only be passively experienced and observed. As mystical objects to be accepted fideistically, without question. Thus many artworks with queer themes slide on us like rain on raincoats (Switzerland, Arsenale). Is transforming complex issues and difficult life events into exotic postcards to observe for a moment a progressive or conservative operation?

Are we sure that exhibiting outsider, indigenous or queer artists in a context like Venice will end up decolonising the Biennale? Or is it not, rather, the Biennale ending up re-colonising (again) these authors, placing them in a Western, capitalist, bourgeois grid?

In the end, the much criticized and (apparently) obsolete division by National Pavilions ends up being reinforced by the neo-colonial approach of many countries, which reaffirm the twentieth-century geographies from which the structure of the Biennale took its inspiration.

More artworks, less artists, please!

This Biennial continues the trend started by Massimiliano Gioni in his 2013 edition: the main exhibition in the Central Pavilion and at the Arsenale presents a large quantity of outsiders, non-professionals, artists not recognized at their time, etc.

This stack of artworks – some are better, some are worse – is, as usual, explained with the desire to give visibility to less recognized artists. What is striking, however, is the repetition, on almost every illustrative panel, of the writing “This is the first time the work is presented at Biennale Arte” and the dates of birth/death. Very often these are deceased or elderly artists.

Huguette Caland (1931-2019), Suburb, 1969, Main Exhibition 60th Art Biennale in Venice 2024, fot. archive of Fundacja Bęc Zmiana

It is therefore unclear whether this edition of the Biennale effectively introduces the topics promised in the curatorial text into the public debate, but it certainly puts on the market several hundred artworks (with a generally low value, but which will be re-evaluated several times just for the fact of being showed at an event of this kind) WITHOUT launching their AUTHORS (dead, elderly or outsiders) as well.

This ends up revealing the essentially mercantile and economic profile of this operation, which maximizes the relevance of the artworks and minimize the role of the artists.

It’s difficult not to remember that the Biennale was created to promote what is new, with some fitting tribute to the past. NOT the opposite.

I also can’t avoid thinking, that in 2050 we will have to endure a Biennial that will explain to us how many beautiful artists there were in 2024…

War and Peace is a russian classic

There are two wars going on in Europe and its immediate vicinity (or maybe they are scenarios of the same conflict). Let’s take a look at who has spoken out on this matter and how.

In the Polish Pavilion (Open Group), refugees from Ukraine describe in films the sounds of war that they have learned to recognize (helicopters, cannons, missiles, alarms, etc.), inviting us to repeat these sounds with them. The work achieves its goal because it is built on ease of understanding that goes hand in hand with complexity of representation. It tells us, starting with Ukraine, about every current, past and future war. An extraordinary, moving result.

Open Group, Repeat After Me, Polish Pavilion, 60th Art Biennale in Venice 2024, fot. archive of Fundacja Bęc Zmiana

Apart from the excellent Polish Pavilion and an intense Ukrainian Pavilion (Katya Buchatska, Andrii Dostliev, Lia Dostlieva, Daniil Revkovskyi, Andrii Rachynskyi, Oleksandr Burlaka), there is the Bolivia Pavilion, which surprised by settling in the building of the Russian Pavilion, closed since the full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine. This ‘subletting’ says a lot. A smart russian move to be there without being there. The brochure on Latin American art written in Cyrillic is not to be missed.

What about the rest of the world?

Wael Shawky, Drama 1882, Egipt Pavilion, 60th Art Biennale in Venice 2024, fot. archive of Fundacja Bęc Zmiana

There are long lines at the Egypt Pavilion to see how the artist Wael Shawky has successfully composed a game of objects and video-opera to mock and denounce British (and therefore Western) interferences in their recent history. A polite but sharp way to make a statement. But it is hard to forget, watching this charming film, that today’s Egypt is a dictatorship of an authoritarian president supported by the military, who imprisons and kills opponents and inconvenient people, such as the Italian Giulio Regeni. For his doctorate at Cambridge University, Regeni went to Egypt to study the activities of the trade unions there. His death in 2016 caused sharp diplomatic tensions between Italy and the Egyptian government.

And what about the Israel Pavilion’s curators’ ambiguous declaration of intent? Faced with daily protests in support of Palestinians during the Biennale’s opening, and citywide gestures of support for Gaza’s civilian population, Mira Lapidot and Tamar Margalit announced that the Pavilion would remain closed until a “ceasefire and hostage release agreement is reached”. However, the Pavilion’s glass walls allowed for the presentation of some films and artworks behind closed doors. A less ambiguous position would have been more appreciable.

One of the many protests in support of Gazan civilians during th Art Biennale in Venice 2024, fot. archive of Fundacja Bęc Zmiana

Finale

Neutrality does not exist in politics: a progressive project, if it fails, ends up having conservative consequences (and vice versa). The result of all this empty progressive rhetoric, in the end, is an operation with strong commercial implications and the reduction of delicate identity issues to harmless flags to wave.

Ultimately, Pedrosa’s hyper-institutional curatorial concept looks rather empty and politically weak. It’s hard to avoid the impression that he values ​​political hyper-correctness more than the reality of the issues the artworks focus on.

Christian Costa – visual artist, born in Warsaw, Poland. He lives and works in Naples, Italy and in Warsaw. He worked on several public art projects: Progetto Isole (Palermo, 2005-11); N.EST (Naples, since 2007); Spazi Docili [Docile Spaces] (Florence, since 2008); Biennale Urbana (Venice, 2014-16 together with STALKER and Officina Marinoni). In 2015 he worked in a Syrian refugee camp in Bar Elias, Beqaa Valley, Lebanon, through the e-scape. Transitional settlement project organized by the American University of Beirut. In 2017 he explored the Balkan route through which many immigrants try to enter the European Community: Greece, Serbia, Croatia, focusing in particular on the refugee ‘camp’ of the old Belgrade railway station. Since 2022 he represents Poland in the social theater festival Quartieri di Vita as Artistic Director and Playwright. The idea of place and the mutual relation between identity/memory and physical space are his media. He’s focused on the consequencies socio-economic processes have on cultural perception of space.