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.
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