A wunderkammer - this is definitely the best way to describe Fiona Hall's "Wrong Way Time", the installation representing Australia at the 56th Venice International Exhibition (until today).
There are indeed hundreds if not thousands of objects and elements inside the Australian Pavilion, some of them displayed under glass cabinets, others lined around the walls or occupying a section of the floor.
There are sardine tins cut and turned into sculptures of plants, figures and endangered marine creatures from the Kermadec Trench in the South Pacific; skulls painted on empty perfume bottles; bread sculptures on atlases; lead sculptures of potatoes that turn into Platonic solids; Chinese cork-landscape dioramas; zoomorphic pieces of driftwood; nests made with banknotes; endangered animals woven from military uniforms and desert grasses; knitted heads and figures made from military camouflage garments, bones and teeth, and clocks painted with a variety of messages and slogans.
The installations in the pavilion - inspired by Hall's combined passion for African, Oceanic and Aboriginal art - tackle three main themes - global politics, world finances and the environment.
Hall is interested in exploring greed, terror and the cruelty of our world, factors that are killing our planet and ruining our lives on a daily basis.
Yet the artist is interested in analysing such factors by using her deep love for life and for our planet, and a childish wonder that turns even the most common material she finds on her path into a fantastic and at times disturbing object.
While dark moods and nuances prevail and, on the surface, the outlook of the pavilion looks pessimistic (reminding people that Hall is inspired by Dante, William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch...), Hall actually provides visitors with a life-affirming inter-cultural message as her works (that could be interpreted as votive offerings or surrealistic excesses) possess an invisible glowing interior light that has the power of shattering our global fears and anxieties.
The items on display are indeed a way to ward off evil and spread around the artist's vitality.
Hall affirms her strength and energy by knitting, weaving or carving out of the most disparate materials she can find numerous shapes and forms.
Through them the artist prompts all visitors to ponder about stories of terrorism, climate change, extinction, environmental pillage, migration and collapsing markets.
News stories become in some cases Hall's main inspiration for very unusual representations of the world.
Her human beings made of bread scattered around the Mediterranean area on an atlas showing Europe, hint at the many migrants who lost their lives at sea as they tried to flee their home countries.
A cruise ship carved out of bread and left on a map of Italy calls to mind the Costa Concordia that capsized and sank off the Isola del Giglio in Tuscany in 2012.
Hall's nests made of shredded US dollar bills ("Tender", 2003-06) remind us that habitats have been destroyed by thirst and money.
The empty nests replacing natural habitats are not nurturing creatures, but greed and they are not resting among cocooning tree branches, representing therefore pure artifice and the sadness of transnational monopoly capitalism.
In other cases Hall overimposed leaves on banknotes to juxtapose the images on banknotes and therefore the human kingdom made of heroes, heads of state and patriotic symbols, with the image repertoire of the plant kingdom.
For her installation "Kuka Irititja" (Animals from Another Time, 2014), Hall wove endangered or extinct animal species together with eleven women (Roma Butler, Yangi Yangi Fox, Rene Kulitja, Niningka Lewis, Yvonne Lewis, Molly Miller, Angkaliya Nelson, Mary Pan, Sandra Peterman, Tjawina Roberts, and Nyanu Watson) from the Tjanpi Desert Weavers from the Central and Western Desert region of Australia.
This collective of Aboriginal women artists is well known for their works of fibre art, but the sculptures made for the Australian Pavilion were made using two main materials - desert grasses and bits and pieces of camouflage fabrics from military uniforms.
The animals represent part of the past heritage of these women, reminding visitors that they disappeared for two main reasons - either they were killed by the nuclear bombings in the '50s or they disappeared when Aboriginal Australians switched their eating habits with white people's foods.
The installation "All the King's Men" - comprising several free-hanging three-dimensional heads with distorted features or caught in grimaces of horror - was made using the same materials.
The camouflage fabrics included in the animals and in these warring evil forces and scary masks of death symbolise a pattern stolen from nature and commandeered into warfare, hinting at the displacement of Aboriginal women under colonial regimes and the secret British nuclear bombings on their lands in Maralinga in the 1950s.
The scariest pieces included in the event are probably the large group of floor and mantle clocks forming the installation "Wrong Way Time".
Each clock is painted in a different way, but many of them are characterised by skeletons; messages and graffiti cover other pieces.
A red-U-turn painted anticlockwise over the growth rings of a tree reveals us that Hall thinks we are heading backwards, while the masked assassin from early propaganda videos from the Islamic State depicting the beheading of a journalist in 2014, reappears on several clocks, joining a graveyard of painted skulls.
Yet, once you start reading deeper into Hall's art, you realise that her clocks are not omens of death, but memorial totems and protest signs urging people to change their habits and lifestyles.
From artist, Hall becomes therefore a collector, historian, scientist, and philosopher: her manic manual activity of cutting, shredding and knitting turns into a clever weapon to defeat without using violence the evil forces of the world, while reminding us that too many artists nowadays focus on conceptual pieces with obscure final meanings or produce works of art manufactured by professional factories rather than made by hand.
Hall's process of manually making her pieces stretches the time, making the past and the future collide.
One part of her installation includes vintage Chinese cork dioramas locked in cabinets with live spiders: these pieces are living mini-museums, exotic landscapes destroyed in real life by urban developments, in which Hall has reintroduced nature (the spiders) hoping that the latter will take over.
The clusters of objects, images and worlds that form "Wrong Way Time" could be considered in the same way, a museum in which Hall's symbols – skulls, clocks, camouflage fabrics, plants and animals – are turned into the grammar of a witty discourse. In this dialogue nature plays the role of saviour from the many illnesses infesting our society and our planet, suggesting us we should shift from economy to ecology.
As the Biennale closes, it's interesting to see how some of the installations and art it featured have assumed further messages after the recent stories about terrorism: Hall's works can definitely be read along new lines, proving they can pass the test of time, forcing visitors to enter a nightmarish iconography only to find a better life and more reasons for living in our complex existences.
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