On Tuesday night Venice was hit by heavy rain, followed by a flood. The acqua alta (high water) reached 1.87 metres, the highest level since 1966, and there was more rain in the following days (St Mark's Square was closed this morning and a state of emergency declared).
The adverse events, clearly the result of climate change, as the city mayor highlighted, and the proof of the Mose project failure (designed in the late '80s to protect Venice from high tides, but actually never finished and never put into operation), caused structural damages on many landmark buildings of the Unesco world heritage site.
Most museums closed down, while the 58th International Art Exhibition venues closed on Wednesday, but reopened on Thursday (the organisers announced the main Biennale venues - the Arsenale and Giardini - are going to be open every day until the end of the Biennale, Sunday, November 24th, while most of the venues of the collateral events will remain closed), experiencing a record number of visitors – 1,300 people by noon on Thursday.
It is hard putting a brave face and being optimistic during catastrophic events, but art can help us, so let's look today at something colourful and upbeat on display at the 58th International Art Biennale - the Swatch Faces pavilion.
This space located in the Arsenale is sponsored by Swiss watch manufacturer Swatch and features a display dedicated to a group of young artists who did residencies at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel between 2017 and 2018.
Located in one of the most iconic buildings on Shanghai's Bund, the hotel allows artists coming from all over the world to live in its spaces for 3 to 6 months and work on individual or joint projects.
One of the first artists you encounter in the installation is Tracey Snelling who creates mixed media installations inspired by her travels and life experiences in China.
For the Swatch Art Peace Hotel the Berlin-based American artist created "Shanghai / Chongqing Hot Pot / Mixtape", a fantasy urban environment composed of tall buildings (not exact recreations of specific buildings, but the artist's own versions of real structures) in which she has integrated not just kitsch souvenirs and random objects, but also videos from her personal experiences.
Some of the windows in her buildings feature static images, others integrate videos showing her with friends as they mix drinks in a bar or as the artist gets her skin inked in a tattoo shop. Snelling's buildings are accompanied by a wall installation (from the "Clusterfucks" series), a layered and chaotic jumble of colours, props and paraphernalia that captures her complex and varied experience in a challenging country.
While Snelling's representation of a densely populated city links her with the architectural discipline, other artists seem to have random connections with fashion.
"This Moment is Magic" by South Korean artist Dorothy M. Yoon for example includes 24 embroidered magic wands and 7 multi-coloured costumes that wouldn't look out of place in a fantasy manga.
There is actually a story of pain behind the multi-coloured fabrics and threads the artist employed for her pieces: a few years ago, Yoon was diagnosed with cancer. Her chemotheraphy involved an analgesic injection that relieved pain, but also made her feel "vivid, colourful, electric flares, as if fireworks were fizzing everywhere inside myself," the artist recounts.
Yoon transformed her experience of pain and agony, reimagining the injection as a colour-striped magic wand and creating a wardrobe for her chemical arousal, personified by a magic rainbow girl fighting against evil.
The embroidered magic wands are combinations of the Eastern and Western zodiac signs, rendered in the same multi-coloured stripes Yoon used for the costumes.
Yoon's installation is an affirmation of joy and her artistic practice is focused on turned the memory of pain and suffering into a magic fantasy.
There is also another artist in this space that has some connections with textiles, but also with graphic design - Jessie Yingying Gong.
Gong's "Enfolding" project revolves around a fascinating topic - gendered scripts - that she combined with issues such as memory, identity, traditions and languages.
Born and raised in China, Gong moved from her own background and from her fascination with languages for this project and in particular from Nüshu, in Chinese "women's writing", a writing system developed by and only passed on among the female population of small villages in South Hunan Province. Derived from square Chinese characters, Nüshu has a whimsical shape, calling to mind dancing figures.
In more or less the same way in Japan women developed Onnade (Women's Hand or Hirogana) and used it for literature, private communications among each other and waka poems (while Kanji was instead used by men and used on official documents).
Gong employed the two characters to tell a story of history and memory about women giving themselves a voice in a patriarchal society. In her lenticular works Gong merged the two styles, to show how the Chinese characters combine with the Japanese tradition. Gong also did a round table embroidery session at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel with ordinary people who embroidered their own Nüshu characters on a black panel, creating a composition that seems to feature an abstract alien alphabet.
Last but not least, Spanish artist Santiago Aleman is also featured in the pavilion with his "Levo" polyptich. Aleman is trained as an architect, but creates paintings at the intersection between spatial structures and volumetric paintings. "Levo" is a 14-piece conceptual altarpiece with shapes and textures creating what may look like a simple composition, but actually resulting in a complex combination of colours that create abstract geometrical elements.
Swatch sometimes commissions designs for its products to the artists who did a residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel and it would be intriguing to see what kind of watches some of the artists included in this showcase may come up with. Maybe a rainbow-striped watch integrated into a magic wand or, who knows, a lenticular watch face? It is difficult to guess, but, somehow, you know that the colours and textures used by these artists would give you hope even in the darkest times.
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