In Arabic, Persian and Urdu the word "raqs" indicates a whirling state of meditation. In the practice of New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, the term also stands as an acronym for "Rarely Asked Questions".
Founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, the collective focuses indeed on questioning a series of themes, including history, social issues and political philosophy in both the international and the Indian cultural context.
The collective developed their early investigations into such themes via documentary films, but in the last few years they expanded their practice, working as artists, curators, educators, writers, editors and theatre directors.
The pieces are all part of a project entitled "Coronation Park", the place where the Delhi Durbar (Court of Delhi) - a mass assembly that marked the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary as emperor and empress of India - took place in 1911.
Yet Raqs Media Collective's statues are quite peculiar: some of them may look like proper ones from behind, but, when you look better, you realise that in some cases the face is missing or the subject is only half present; in other cases the entire head seems to have been chopped off while the body is a hollow cave covered in a rigid mantle or cloak, a sort of empty shell.
In a statement, the members of Raqs Media Collective claimed the project is about "the inner life of power and its deepest fear, the fear of abdication".
The sculptures do indeed look like ominous and dark hollow ghost-like presences representing partial subjects stripped of their royal status. Each statue is also accompanied by a plaque with a quote from Shooting an Elephant, an essay by English author George Orwell who wrote it while serving as police officer in colonial India and Burma.
The comic effect in some cases is guaranteed: a solemnly kneeling statue with no face is accompanied by the sentence "It was at this moment, as he stood there with the weapon in his hands, that he first grasped the hollowness, the futility"; a pair of chopped legs are commemorated by a plaque reading "He was hated by large numbers of people, the only time in his life that he had been important enough for this to happen to him."
Apart from colonialism and the power of political and financial forces, there is actually another key theme tackled in the statues: the vulgarity of hierarchical authority. The fiberglass sculptures stand indeed on bitumen (oil-based tar) and paraffin (a petroleum-based wax) coated wooden pedestals, materials that point towards the hydrocarbon economy and global capitalism.
In yesterday's post we looked at an artist using clothes in an art installation that doubles up as a political protest against Vladimir Putin. Let's continue the Russian thread today with a duo mainly creating immersive audio and video installations about pre-linguistic communication and architectural language.
Sonia Leber and David Chesworth usually explore architectural forms and try to read their symbolism, analysing the social narratives that may be embedded in these landmarks and exploring their capacity to influence individual's behaviour. The duo brought at the 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice their 2013 work entitled "Zaum Tractor".
Shot in Rostov-on-Don (where the artists did a 3-month residency), Russia, with additional filming in Armenia and Georgia, this 2-screen HD video work mainly examines issues of individual freedom and collective belonging in Russia.
This juxtaposition of themes is represented by a visual clash between past and present, the rational and the transrational, with individuals reading and performing "zaum poetry", images of dramatic Constructivist Soviet architecture including the tractor-shaped Gorky Theater in Rostov-on-Don, military and religious ceremonies and shots of young people diving inside a derelict roofless building, a pre-revolutionary warehouse, filled with water and turned into a rather unusual swimming pool.
The term "zaum" was created by the Russian Futurist poet Aleksei Kruchenych (1886-1968). The word was supposed to describe his "transrational" language, a sort of universal primordial form of speech in which sounds embodied rather than signified their referents (the poet's dream of universal communication failed since only other futurists could understand his language).
The most poetic shots in this video remain the ones of the young people perched on ledges and beams before plunging into the deep water below.
Just like language avoids fixed meanings in non-signifying zaum poetry revealing pure sounds and wild rhythms and turning therefore into a universal form of communication, the warehouse has lost its original purpose and therefore its main architectural meaning. Colonised by groups of young people it becomes a symbol of life after ideology, a leisure place where ordinary acts of bravery take place and where the universal language of youth develops and thrives.
Clothes transform, describe and define us, revealing what we are and often sending out messages to the people surrounding us. But, if garments are a form of non-verbal communication, they can be used to silently tell the story of our lives, they help us explaining how we may feel on a day to day basis, and they could even be employed as political statements or banners to protest and make our voices heard. At least that's what artist Natalya Pershina-Yakimanskaya - better known as Gluklya - suggests us.
Born in Leningrad and dividing her time between Saint Petersburg and Amsterdam, Gluklya has developed quite a few projects moving from clothes and garments.
Together with Olga Egorova (Tsaplya) she became a co-founder in 1995 of artist collective The Factory of Found Clothes (FFC; in 2012 Gluklya took over the leadership of the group, while becoming also an active member of the Chto Delat? - meaning "What is to be done?" - platform).
The collective was mainly set to tackle, through installations, performances, videos and social research, modern issues such as the dichotomy between the private and the public sphere or the position of marginal and liminal groups of people in our society.
In Gluklya's practice clothes transform therefore into tools, elements that link and connect art and everyday life. In her latest installation currently on display at Venice's Arsenale during the 56th International Art Exhibition, the artist questions visitors about the legitimacy of Putin's election.
Derived from the FFC's ongoing performance "Utopian Clothes Shop" (2004-), "Clothes for the demonstration against false election of Vladimir Putin" (2011-2015) consists in a series of garments hung on wooden posts, like banners.
Each garment is different from the other: there are white tutu-like tulle dresses and heavy coats in military green; partially burnt garments with slogans such as "Stop Slavery!" and pieces decorated with prints or embroidered motifs; a dress with a large red rose appliqued around the chest area tragically evokes blood, while black cones of fabric conceptually erupt from one simple white dress and a random valenki boot provides a temporary and surreal head for one of these silent protesting banners.
Though different one from the next, all the vestments have the same purpose: they challenge the legitimacy of Vladimir Putin's re-election to president. In this way the garments cross the private and personal sphere, changing aim and objective, turning into public and political weapons, assuming new values and meanings, and becoming even more ominous when considering the recent reports by monitor organisations and Western diplomats, claiming that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is slowly continuing - even though Moscow says it's sticking to a ceasefire agreement - and may lead to a summer offensive.
"The place of the artist is on the side of the weak", states the FFC manifesto that also considers the artist as "a friend" and "accomplice". Gluklya's new installation does exactly that, positioning the artist next to ordinary people and prompting them to stop being afraid and make their voices heard.
Your installation inside the Arsenale - entitled "Clothes for the demonstration against the false election of Vladimir Putin" - challenges the legitimacy of Putin's re-election. In your opinion, how difficult it is for an artist - and in particular a woman artist and feminist - to be heard in Russia at the moment without incurring in problems such as censorship or repression? Gluklya: I actually do not think there is much risk because people in power are not interested too much in art. Yet I do think that contemporary art must have this risk-taking component in its concept. One of the pieces features a slogan by poet and literary theorist Pavel Arseniev, the representative voice of progressive forces, stating "Represent us? You can't even imagine us!"
How many garments are there in your installation and what do they symbolise - fears, hopes or change? Gluklya: The installation is part of the concept of Utopian realism, an idea I have been developing for the last 12 years. There are 43 garments in this work and they symbolise the courage and internal beauty of oppressed people who decide to resist injustice. Fears, hope and change are also tackled. Through this work I also want to show people's aggressiveness - and in particular the aggressiveness of victims - and anger, their bitterness and grief. People may be passive and patient for many years, but, eventually, a time will come when they rise and they rise with an axe. My work is about the aspect of "becoming human" and rising again after too many years spent sleeping and about the euphoria generated by being together. You could argue that the protest dramatically failed as people went again to sleep, that's why there are some black pieces on the ground in the installation, to call to mind a graveyard, a cemetery. Yet the objects express also my tenderness and love to the people who found dignity and protested.
Did you take inspiration for the garments from any particular Russian artist such as Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov Popova for what regards the shapes, colours and themes? Gluklya: I do not actually call them "garments" as I conceive them as "speaking clothes". I love Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov Popova of course, but I did not take inspiration from them. The inspiration comes from the Russian avant-garde in general and that unique historical moment when art and politics were united together.
In your installation you use clothes almost as banners. Your coats, dresses or shirts include indeed slogans, pictures, or cones of fabric that protrude from them. Do you feel that at the moment in Russia it is important first to be seen in order to be heard? Gluklya: If I were a a singer or a speaker, I would say that to be heard is the most important thing. But as a visual artist I think this is the most organic way to express my ideas.
Did you ever think about working with a Russian fashion designer and maybe develop a collection of clothes that may provide people with garments charged with political meanings? Gluklya: That would be great, but I wouldn't do it with a Russian designer or any other fashion designers, maybe I would do it with a clever producer. It would be great to know somebody in the UK for example who may be interested.
In this year's Biennale quite a few artists responded to Okwui Enwezor's brief "All the World's Futures" with works focusing on themes such as politics, immigration and social issues. In which ways can art be turned into a powerful weapon for the most disenfranchised people in the world in a context such as the Venice Biennale where there are many wealthy visitors, collectors and gallerists? Gluklya: That is actually a sophisticated question for a PhD dissertation, a book or a film. I think you have to try your best to be honest with yourself and other people and doing good art which can move somebody and force them to think also in other directions, and ponder more about the world's situation rather than just about finding a strategy to raise your own personal capital. Actually, at the beginning of my involvement in this year's Biennale when it wasn't clear yet what I was going to show, I proposed to let in for free all those people bringing with them some clothes that had a story. This idea came from my long-term project entitled the Museum of the Utopian Clothes.
Will you be taking part in any other events/exhibitions in the next few months? Gluklya: My video "Wings of Migrants" (which Okwui also wants to show at the Biennale) and other works were on display until last week at the Barbara Gross Gallery in Munich, as part of the event "Female Views on Russia" that also features Anna Jermolaewa and Taisiya Krugovykh. I'm also working on the installation dedicated to Joseph Brodsky at the Achmatova Garden in Saint Petersburg and on a social opera with the TOK curatorial team about the struggle of local people against gentrification and other infringed human rights. I'm currently thinking of working with special fire resistant textiles, a discovery I made while I focused on the installation for the Biennale. I do also hope that I will find the necessary funds to make a new theatre performance - "Debates on Division N. 2" (the first "Debates" took place at Manifesta this year) - in Tbilisi, Georgia.
"The opera is going to start in a few minutes' time," the woman at the entrance of the Polish Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition announces, and your mind instantly conjures up grand theatres, opera singers in opulent costumes and awe-inspiring sets. Yet the performance awaiting for you inside the pavilion is very different from the operas you may see in proper theatres and that's why even people who do not like the genre will feel attracted to it.
"Halka/Haiti 18°48'05"N 72°23'01"W" - the project deviced for the Polish Pavilion by C.T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska - consists indeed in a panoramic film projection of the opera "Halka" by Stanisław Moniuszko (premiered in Warsaw in 1858), staged in February 2015 on a road between several houses, for the inhabitants of Cazale.
This village located in the mountains of Haiti (as indicated by the coordinates in the pavilion's title) has strong links with Poland. Cazale is populated by the descendants of Polish soldiers who - sent to Saint-Domingue by Napoleon in 1802 and 1803 to put down the slaves' rebellion - ended up uniting with the local insurgents. The soldiers were therefore granted an honorary legal status of blacks in the newly established republic.
The main inspiration for this project was Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, with the main character dreaming of building an opera house in Iquitos, but this unique staging of "Halka" can't be really accused of exploiting the locals.
Five soloists, members of the Poznan Opera House, and twenty-one musicians from the Holy Trinity Philharmonic Orchestra from Port-au-Prince led by the conductor of the Poznan Opera House, provide voices and music, but the project is not just about music and images, since it tackles a wide range of themes, including migration, transplantation and cultural colonisation.
Halka's tragic story of seduction, rejection and sacrifice combines with the echoes of the 1846 peasant revolt and hints at the class relations between Polish landlords and their feudal subjects. This Polish opera becomes therefore a piece with political, historical and anthropological connotations, that also makes people ponder about the silencing of the Haitian Revolution.
As visitors watch a Polish national opera taking place in the Haitian tropics, they instantly question the genuine efforts of cultural promotion, but they realise the performance has a universal geographic, historical and sociopolitical power.
The project could be considered as a collaborative process since it engaged the local community as well, with eighteen dancers from Cazale joining the workshops, and local men working as translators.
This cinematic installation curated by art historian and critic Magdalena Moskalewicz, will transform Poland's national pavilion into a Haitian village for the duration of the Biennale, but it will hopefully be touring not just museums but selected dcinemas as well, reminding new audiences that opera can be used to embody, represent, and, question many issues of modern society and can take place everywhere and not just in grand theatres for an audience of wealthy people in designer clothes.
Image credits for this post
All images in this post: C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska, "Halka/Haiti. 18°48'05"N 72°23'01"W", 2015. Soloists from the Stanisław Moniuszko Grand Theatre in Poznań, the St. Trinity Philharmonic Orchestra from Port-au-Prince and dancers from Cazale during the performance. Cazale, Haiti, 7th February, 2015. Photos: Bartosz Górka.
In yesterday's post we mentioned a series of themes, including flip-flops, plastic, pollution and consumption. Let's continue the thread through further artworks part of the "Vita Vitale" exhibition in one of the Azerbaijan Pavilions at the 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice.
As highlighted yesterday, the country is displaying works in two different places, Ca' Garzoni in Calle del Traghetto o Garzoni, and Palazzo Lezze in Campo S. Stefano, and there are three projects on the second level of Ca' Garzoni that touch upon these issues in interesting ways.
Khalil Chishthee's life-size figures holding hands in a circle - a symbol of unity and solidarity - look for example like evanescent ghosts. Upon examining them more closely you realise that they are made with white plastic garbage bags, a way for the artist to comment upon plastic pollution threatening our ecosystem.
Most figures holding hands are incomplete and they prompt visitors to think about time passing and humans being erased by plastic damaging the planet. In this way the artist urges people to act together soon, otherwise we will dissolve, just like these ominous presences.
On the same floor, Chris Jordan's "Midway: Message from the Gyre" exposes the effects of plastic pollution through moving images.
Shot on Midway Atoll, remote islands more than 2000 miles from human habitation, the images in Jordan's film show plastic waste discovered inside dead baby albatrosses, illustrating the journey of our uncontrolled use and disposal of plastic products that, travelling from shops and houses, end up in rivers and oceans, killing the wildlife.
Bas Princen's large photographs are on display on the walls of the main corridor of level two. Princen's images show densely populated places covered here and there with piles of rubbish.
Mokattam Ridge (Ancient Quarry), a former sandstone quarry where some of the stones used to build the pyramids were mined, and Mokattam Ridge or Garbage City, reveal historical, geological, topographical and cultural transformations of the urban landscape in the most liminal places of Cairo - its eastern edge.
Around 30,000 Zabbaleen people (Coptic Christians descended from migrant farmers) setttled in this area. Here they recycle the mountains of rubbish piled around them (roughly half of all the rubbish in Cairo...).
There are no water and electricity in these areas nor a proper sewage system, but the community has streets, shops, a church and a waste management system through which scraps are fed to animals, damaged or broken items are repaired, while others are re-purposed or sold.
These works and installations mainly look at the consequences of collective consumptions, though Princen's images suggest us that new strategies can be created.
In the same way, the ground space of this pavilion - consisting in a room immersed in a dark environment and simulating a scientific laboratory - displays projects or theoretical ideas that may be employed in future to reduce plastic consumption and pollution.
Entitled the IDEA (International Dialogue for Environmental Action) Laboratory and curated by Newcastle University Professor of Experimental Architecture Rachel Armstrong, this space gathers ambitious long-term projects by scientists, artists and designers and draws inspiration from Venice' ecological concerns.
A set of aquarium tanks filled with water, light, and air bubbles introduces visitors to the main project of the laboratory, Zanzara Island.
A collaboration between Rachel Armstrong, Newcastle University Experimental Architecture and Marine Science, Davide De Lucrezia, Julian Melchiorri and Mike Perry, Zanzara Island is an hypothetical place, an island grown from plastic fragments and a culture of algae in a location 500 metres in the southeast direction of San Michele.
Can an island grow from a mixture of systems and forms including the millions of plastic bottles left around by the tourists visiting Venice every year?
Visitors won't be provided with an immediate answer to this question, but the set of installations in this room explores the interaction between plastics and algae in a clever way. If the two will turn into one heterogeneous body during the Biennale, a soil may be formed and this fragment of body may then end up forming the first nucleus of Zanzara.
The laboratory introduces visitors to Julian Melchiorri's Silk Leaf. As you may remember from previous posts, this synthetic biological leaf revolves around the concept of photosynthesis.
Melchiorri's leaf can absorb water and carbon dioxide and produce oxygen like a plant as the synthetic biological breathing leaves refresh polluted air and could therefore be ideal for applications in the design or architectural fields and even in space exploration.
While Mike Perry collects plastic and what he calls pebble plastiglomerates from beaches, building his own archives of findings (some of them on display in this laboratory as well), architect Azusa Murakami and artist Alexander Groves, founders of Studio Swine, use these artificial materials to produce furniture such as Sea Chair, a stool made with plastic found on the beach and remoulded through a custom-made device that employs the magnified rays of the sun.
Last but not least, "H.O.R.T.U.S. - The Venice Lagoon Experiment" by EcoLogicStudio reinterprets the briccola - the traditional Venetian oak posts that mark navigable channels through the lagoon - as bio-digital organisms that can regulate the traffic flow, offering a new equilibrium for the lagoon.
Zanzara Island is probably the most absurd of these projects, but also the most original, as it opens up new possibilities and could be considered as a project with a great environmental impact but also as an installation at the intersection between art and architecture.
It should be highlighted, though, that this fantasy island does not promise a happy future: while visitors may find it fascinating for its human, scientific and technological connotations, Zanzara may actually bring some solutions to the lagoon but further destruction as well. For the time being, though, it remains among the very few projects showcased at the 56th Venice Biennale linking art with science in an inventive and exciting way.
As seen in yesterday's post, quite often a work of art assumes different meanings from the ones originally given to it by the artist who created it. At times our own backgrounds and experiences project on the work such meanings; at others events that may happen in the news allow the work of art in question to absorb further and deeper messages.
Take for example one of the latest accidents that happened on Wednesday in the two-story Kentex Manufacturing Corp footwear factory in Valenzuela City, a suburb of the Philippines capital of Manila. Over 70 workers were trapped inside and died when a fire broke out at the main entrance to the building. The fire was probably produced when sparks from welding equipment used to repair a broken inner gate ignited flammable chemicals stored nearby triggering an explosion. The factory produced rubber flip-flop sandals for the local market.
The accident highlights once again the disregard of safety regulations in factories producing garments and accessories. Investigators are currently working on finding out why people were unable to escape from the second floor when there was a wide stairway to the back of the building - even though there were bars at the windows - and whether there were more people inside the building than allowed.
The Philippines fire comes just two weeks after the second anniversary of the collapse of the Rana Plaza apparel factory in Bangladesh and, while there are campaigns calling for things to change, quite often you get the impression that the world is collectively pretending that appalling factory conditions such as the ones analysed in Im Heung-Soon's "Factory Complex" or workplace fatalities are something normal while they should be rare and sporadic.
In the light of these events Mike Perry's images of shoes and flip-flops found on beaches assume more tragic meanings. Perry's project is part of the "Vita Vitale" exhibition in one of the Azerbaijan Pavilions at the 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice (the country is displaying works in two different places, Ca' Garzoni in Calle del Traghetto o Garzoni, and Palazzo Lezze in Campo S. Stefano).
"Vita Vitale" (Vital Life) features quite a few international artists and focuses on environmental sustainability and the impact that our irresponsible behaviour is having on the world.
Perry's project is entitled "Môr Plastig" - "Plastic Sea" in Welsh - and revolves around two main themes, the impact of plastic objects in the living world and the erosive power of nature.
The artist's photographs show indeed a series of flip-flops and shoes that washed up on the coasts of West Wales, Cuba, Tanzania ad Sri Lanka and represent a sort of personal archive commenting upon pollution and the power of the sea, sand and sun to transform objects.
Each shoe is presented on white background and the artist invites visitors to contemplate the power of erosion, the environmental dangers posed by plastic materials and, last but not least, something less tangible but equally destructive, the consequences of consumerism.
Perry continued to collect detritus from the sea in his residency at the Oriel y Parc in The Pembrokshire Coast National Park. Among his latest finds there are also crates and boxes and a Chinese flour sack.
Found on Aberbach Beach in an area of Wales renowned for spotting seals, dolphins and sea birds, the sack's 8000 km journey from China to Wales becomes a tangible witness of ocean pollution.
Besides, the sack also hints at the global reach - and demand - of Chinese manufacturing, and ultmately reminds us something that we often forget when we hear news of accidents in factories manufacturing products such as garments and accessories for the Western countries: the distance that separates us from some of the people we indirectly exploit may be shorter than we imagine.
Quite a few visitors wandering around the Arsenale at the 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice picked one of the double-sided posters left on wooden pallets outside Steve McQueen's film installation entitled "Ashes".
The posters featured on one side a blown-up, grainy image of a handsome young man - Ashes - sitting on the prow of a boat and looking at the horizon, facing away from the camera.
On the other side the image is overprinted with a transcription of the short script that accompanies the video installation. The latter consists in a projection of footage shot on Super8 film in 2002 by Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller.
The images - part of unused takes for McQueen's short Carib's Leap - show Ashes, a young Grenadian man sitting on the prow of a fishing boat at sea, at times smiling and grinning at the camera. The story on the soundtrack is told by Ashes' friends and was recorded by McQueen after he returned to the island in 2010 and found out that the young man had been murdered after he discovered a stash of drugs on a beach.
The film - originally commissioned by Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, and showcased also in a London-based gallery at the end of 2014 - is accompanied in Venice by another video that shows Ashes' remains being transferred from an unmarked grave to his final resting place.
The re-burial phase introduces viewers to a new stage in the mourning process, but also prompts people to stop in the chaos of a huge art event such as the Venice Biennale and ponder about the loss of a young life.
As you watch the film, Ashes turns from a handsome young man into an abstract figure, a symbol that alerts viewers about the premature death of many young people, and of many young black men in particular. The fate of the young Grenadian man indirectly makes us think about episodes of racist violence such as Michael Brown fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last year, or Freddie Gray dying last month while under police custody in Baltimore.
Last year, in his acceptance speech for the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal at Harvard University, McQueen stated "The only doctrine I have as an artist is to not allow the dust of the past to settle." In a way, visitors picking a poster outside McQueen's installation help the artist and director not to let the dust of the past settle, since through the posters, Ashes' story keeps on circulating.
If you can't pick a poster at the Venice Biennale, here's Ashes' story, as recounted by his friends in the video: "I know Ashes as a friend. All of us were young, man. We grew up in one neighborhood. So, it's like we used to live in a ghetto. You understand. All of us dive together. Going fishing, diving, you know, everything. But you know, Ashes is a good guy, a brilliant guy in the ocean. You understand. But with this thing with the drugs thing there, I don't know where he found the drugs. I didn't know. He come out from the island, I just came from school in the evening, cleaning the house. And he came and he walk into the house with all the wet clothes on him, all the sand on his feet, and I ask him 'Ashes, I say what kind of thing is that? Don't you see I am cleaning and you just walk in like that?' He say 'right now, I am rich, I can do anything'. So I turn to him and my next friend turns to him and asks him 'well what?'. He turns and says, 'we found something on the island and we can't spend the money now'. So Kevin turned to him and says 'well just give it back'. We never knew he had found the drugs. You understand. But we go out as normal. And until we, till we hear other talk that they were camping in Isle de Ronde, you understand so they were going below the land, to behind, for the fish and they saw some drugs on the beach, so they saw it and nobody was there so they took it. And then things, some guys came investigating, finding out who is Ashes, who is this, who is that, you understand, who are the other guys. Then they kidnap one guy, I think the one guy say they beat him. So he had to talk for his life. So he talk and he sell out them others. And then they keep one guy, go with him in the van, they drive him around and they ask him to show them who is Ashes. So then the guy shows them who is Ashes. The night we sat down by the bus terminal and somebody came in and say 'Ashes, I just pass some guys in a car asking for you, you know' and Kevin says 'well if so, Ashes you better come out on the road now'. He says 'Man I don't really care you know'. When they came for him they said 'come let's go.' He says, 'I'm not going anywhere with all of you if you have to kill me, kill me here in me people's presence for them to see, I'm not going anywhere' and then they shoot him in the hand for him to let go of what he was holding. And when they shoot him in the hand, he let go but he tried to run and then they shoot him in the back and when he fell one of them guys went over to him and shoot him up around his belly and his legs and thing. And that was about it."
In yesterday's post we looked at two women artists showcasing their work in the Arsenale at the 56th International Art Biennale. Let's continue the thread with another artist who puts women at the centre of her artistic practice with a post focusing on Maja Bajevic.
Born in Sarajevo, but based in Paris, Bajevic has worked throughout the years with different media, including film and video installations, audio pieces, drawings and performances. Like Mika Rottenberg she often tackles the notion of identity and the presence (or the absence) of women within the recent historical context.
The collective aspect of her performances combined with feminine and domestic practices developed in public places wounded by conflict and the notions of social, manual, artistic labor are further key aspects to analyse and understand Bajevic's work.
In previous installations the artist filmed for example a group of Bosnian women survivors of the 1995 massacre and expulsions in Srebrenica while they worked on an immense embroidered tarpaulin to be hung on the façade of the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
In the last few years Bajevic started adding to her installations texts and text-based messages. In the pieces on display at the Arsenale she integrated instead graphics referencing financial and economic data.
Entitled "Arts, Crafts and Facts" (2015), the installation includes a series of rugs, carpets and tapestries in which traditional Bosnian embroidery is used to replicate the fluctuations of the Stock Market indexes around the world. In this way the artist plays with the material/immaterial dichotomies, turning intangible financial data into a tangible product.
Production worker's pay and federal minimum wage; productivity and average wage; the production and sale of oil and gas, poultry and beef, milk, sugar and coffee, rice, corn and wheat, soy bean, palm oil and cocoa are replicated on the rugs and tapestries in bright yarns on pieces of colourful fabric.
As seen in yesterday's post, Mika Rottenberg comments in her videos upon the value of a product, highlighting how its real value is in the actions that produced it and in the efforts invested in its making.
In the same way, Bajevic questions through these tapestries the concept of value, asking visitors what kind of value we place on the craftsmanship and other manual skills of her women artisans and ultimately using their traditional skills as a way to react to the relentless homogenisation caused by globalisation.
Among the most photographed works of art at the 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice there is Katharina Grosse's immersive environment recreated in one of the rooms of the Arsenale. Her colourful lunar landscape ("Untitled Trumpet") covered in bright paints has so far attracted the attention of many visitors (offering many photo opportunities to the selfie obsessed crowds...).
Though the Berlin-based artist never gave up painting on canvas in her studio, she expanded this notion: transferring her skills to architecture and the outdoor environment, she started eliminating the canvas and taking the role of a graffiti artist, appropriating the space and at times recreating it artificially indoor.
Grosse applies the paint in her site-specific three-dimensional works with an air compressor and a spray gun, a technique that allows her to control the trajectory of the aerosol in paint in a planned way.
The origins of this practice can be traced back to cave panting, and Greek, Roman and Renaissance frescoes and, while some critics can detect in her installations the power of sublime borrowed from Romanticism, Grosse's landscapes also evoke digitally enhanced colours or dystopic visions of the future.
The immense installation inside the Arsenale in Venice features draped textiles, huge blocks of Styrofoam carved into shapes that resemble fragments of meteorites, masses of earth and rubble, and piles of cement. Somehow the more you stare at it, the more you have the feeling you will soon see her work being used as a set for a catwalk show or as the ispiration for a fashion collection.
While real and artificial meet and combine in Grosse's work, real and surreal prevail in Mika Rottenberg's colourful video installations. Quite often her stories take place in brightly coloured fictional places such as factories where women manufacture real products using surreal means (in a previous work maraschino cherries were made from blood-red fingernails...).
Rottenberg's main preoccupation is indeed to put the female body in relation with systems of productions and her works started revolving more around the theme of value and labor after she read the writings of Karl Max, a key figure to this year's Biennale as Das Kapital is being read daily in the Arena (the auditorium designed by David Adjaye inside the Giardini's Central Pavilion).
Like machines, Rottenberg's protagonists keep on repeating stressful actions that in some cases result in bizarre products.
In "NoNoseKnows" her installation inside the Arsenale, Rottenberg takes the visitors through a pearl factory. This is actually a perfect connection with Venice if you think not just about pearls, but beads as well and the works of the "impiraresse" (literally, workers who threaded beads). These Venetian women worked in the late 1800s and early 1900s for the local "conterie" or factories producing glass beads.
In Rottenberg's installation visitors are first taken through a small pearl factory and then shown a video introducing them to the cultured pearls industry in China.
The artist actually visited the pearl-making facilities of Zhuji, in the south of Shanghai, and decided to integrate documentary footage showing Chinese women seeding pearls in her 21-minute long video.
Including shots of depressing apartment towers and manufacturing buildings around Zhuji, "NoNoseKnows" features not just the workers (who in this case are not interviewed as it happened instead in Im Heung-Soon's "Factory Complex"), but also a rather mysterious woman, interpreted by Bunny Glamazon. The 6'3'' fetish performer acts as a sort of Western overseer who in turn becomes another clog in the machine.
Metaphorically locked in an elaborate fiction, but physically trapped into the factory (the tightly framed shots contribute to convey this impression to the viewers), she opens and closes doors that only lead into tiny rooms in which surreal soap bubbles fluctuate in the air like ethereal pearls; or, even more bizarrelly, Bunny sits in her office filled with flowers and located beneath the production floor. Here her nose grows long and red until she sneezes, Chinese food bursting from her nose and providing nourishment for the pearl workers.
As actions endlessly and irritatingly repeat and gestures lose their meaning, the artist reminds the viewers that the final product is useless and worthless. Its value stands indeed in the actions that produced it and in the efforts invested in its making.
Roughly a month ago the Pantone Color Institute® announced a new shade - Minion Yellow. You don't need to be a cartoon connoisseur to guess the colour was inspired by the infamous little cute creatures (that from June will also grace a capsule collection by different fashion designers/brands) in the Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment's Despicable Me films and the yet to be released Minions prequel.
"Just as the sun's rays enliven us, Pantone Minion Yellow is a color that heightens awareness and creates clarity, lighting the way to the intelligence, originality and the resourcefulness of an open mind - this is the color of hope, joy and optimism," stated in an official press release Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute.
Eiseman's statement about this extroverted, playful and warmth shade may come to mind to many visitors of the 56th International Art Exhibition as soon as they step into the British Pavilion.
(Young) British Artist Sarah Lucas painted indeed the entire pavilion in a shade of vibrant custard-yellow to evoke the colour of the sunlight and put everybody in an uplifting good mood.
The British General Elections took place during the Venice Biennale Press Preview days and the results saw the Scottish National Party (SNP) securing 56 out of 59 seats, but the main themes and shade of the pavilion doesn't have anything to do with politics or with the SNP's yellow tide.
While pointing back at previous works such as "Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab" (1992; View this photo) and "Self-portrait with Fried Eggs" (1996; View this photo ), the iconic image of Lucas photographed with a pair of fried eggs slapped on her breasts, this colour has got more to do with the fact that Lucas wanted the show to have the appearance of a sea of custard, of Crème Anglais and therefore of a delicious dessert (if you don't believe her, well, the catalogue of the show also includes a recipe to make the perfect Île flottante).
The gigantic yellow abstract sculptures on the portico of the pavilion and in the first room - maybe a body stretched in a rather unusual position, a fetishistic praying mantis-like erection or an ambiguous representation of a totemic phallus with dangling sagging balls (or are those breasts?) - are called "Gold Cup Maradona" and "Deep Cream Maradona".
The rest of the space is populated by nine rough casts of the bottom halves of women - Lucas' muses - who take the role of meringues in this yellow space.
To make these sculptures Lucas cast some of her longtime friends, including gallerist Sadie Coles and chef Margot Henderson.
This intimate process led to the creation of a series of pieces spread on an office desk, leaning on a table, hugging a toilet seat, sitting on a chair, or lying on a chest freezer (that, Lucas explained to a press officer from her team, contains blokes...).
Are these forms waiting for or recovering from sex? Is the artist commenting upon the objectification of the female form in the male art history? We don't really know and the artist doesn't tell us, so the dilemma remains.
A further dilemma is represented by the cigarettes that poke out of orifices (navels, bums, vaginas...) of the scuptures in a cheeky and irreverent way, hinting maybe at perversion, titillation and pleasure, while reminding art connoisseurs of a cast of Lucas' bottom half with a cigarette in her vagina that went lost in the fire in the Momart storage facility in 2004.
Further works include sculptures of black bronze cats - Lucas' "Tit Cats" (though one figure represents an octopus standing on a Spam tin plinth...) - derived from models made with tights. The sculptures are characterised by deflated and drooping breast-like formations and sit on random pieces of furniture or on breeze-block supports.
The pavilion also includes a spot painting made with tabloid pictures of topless young women. According to Lucas, this "British emblem" (think about Damien Hirst making spot paintings...) acts as a substitute for the Union Jack while providing the tops to her bottoms of women.
Toilets, chairs and a random washing machine vomiting a yolk yellow plastic spot ("Washing Machine Fried Egg") represent domestic simulacra, strengthening the impression Lucas is humorously and disturbingly taking the piss out of visitors and farting via her cigarettes in the face of the wealthy and pretentious art collectors and gallerists populating the biennale.
In a way you wish this is Lucas' main aim and objective, otherwise the show would look rather shallow and weak compared to other pavilions that seemed to have stronger and more socially relevant messages.
The title of the show will also induce some some linguistic confusion in the Italian speaking visitors: while the word "daddio" may be a reference to "daddy-o", in Italian "addio" means "goodbye", while "da Dio" means "like God/at God's". Besides, the expression "da Dio" (like God) is often used by uneducated young Italians (imagine the Italian equivalent of chavs) in sentences such as "Sto da Dio" (I feel like God).
So there will be a few Italians interpreting the title of the pavilion as "I scream goodbye" or "Ice cream at God's" or "I scream like a God".
In a nutshell the exclusively bespoke Kvadrat bags for the pavilion screaming "DADDIO" may look slightly risible if you wear them in any other place in Italy apart from the Arsenale/Giardini in Venice.
Maybe they should have added another award to the Biennale - The Saussure Award for the best Signifier/Signified Pavilion, or maybe they could have opted for a simpler and trendier title such as "Despicable Me".
Yet, while colour-wise the pavilion will inspire many fashionistas (do you prefer Pantone's "Minion Yellow" or Sarah Lucas' "Deep Cream"?) in many ways the show doesn't add anything new to the British artist's practice, even though it shifts the attention towards women artists.
There were actually quite a few visitors who noticed a strong presence of inspiring women: while wandering around the Arsenale I bumped into a distinguished elderly Italian man (a critic? an artist? or maybe a gallerist?) walking with two sticks accompanied by a friend. As he read the name of an artist off the wall label and realised it was a woman he commented, "So, I see, women are producing refreshing art, while male artists have turned into a bunch of c*nts!". Somehow you know that Lucas would have loved his comment.
Sarah Lucas's British Council commission is at the Venice Biennale, until 22 November 2015.
