Europe, Headlines

/ARTS WEEKLY/ITALY: The Dictatorship of the Viewer

Ernesto Ferrini

VENICE, Italy, Jul 1 2003 (IPS) - ‘Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer’ is the theme of the 50th edition of the Biennale di Venezia, Europe’s most prestigious international exhibition of contemporary art, which presents the works from 230 artists representing 63 countries.

Venice’s biennial visual arts exhibition dates back to 1895, when the first edition was opened in the presence of the Italian King and Queen of that time, Umberto I and Margherita di Savoia. Since, the most famous artists from the 20th century have exhibited their works at the Biennale: Klimt, Picasso, Renoir, Chagall, Klee, Magritte.

This edition of the Biennale, which runs through Nov. 2, has been conceived by its director Francesco Bonami as a polyphony of different projects, directed at representing "the current status of contemporary art, its multiplicity of languages, and the inevitable autonomy of new geographic, political and cultural contexts”.

Bonami says that the exhibition is not an attempt to forget about the world’s problems, nor solely a documentation of the world and its conflicts. On the contrary, it is "the result of a clash between the aesthetic dream and the document of a conflict. The dream and the conflict are the two poles that create tension in our society and in the artist’s work”.

Many of the Biennale’s projects aretes timony to the conflicts and crises that are occurring in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Through these projects, the viewers are able to experience the real world as transformed by the vision and experience of artists coming from these regions of the world.

Such is the case of ‘Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes’, curated by Gilane Tawadros and produced by the Forum for African Arts, a project that explores the events that are shaping the African landscape, both locally and globally.

Fault lines, fractures in the earth’s surface that may be a sign of major shifts or imminent disasters, are the metaphor through which 15 artists reflect on the effects that colonialism, post-colonialism, migration, and globalisation have on the African landscape.

The artists not only cover a wide range of subjects, but also media: from painting and sculpture through photography and architecture. While Salem Mekuria uses film installation to evoke Ethiopia’s recent history of war, famine and exodus, Algerian photographer Kader Attia portrays the lives of Algerian transvestites and transsexuals that live on the periphery of Paris, migrants "sans papiers", alienated and excluded from both Algeria and France.

‘Zone of Urgency’, curated by Hou Hanru, intends to understand another problem that is affecting different parts of the world, particularly in the Asia-Pacific: the chaotic and explosive expansion of urban spaces.

As urban expansion, driven by globalisation and migration takes place at unprecedented speed, urgent solutions have to be invented in order to create conditions for sustainable development and life.

Artists, intellectuals, and activists, along with urban planners and architects, struggle to create projects to deal with these circumstances. They experiment with more flexible solutions that often take inspiration from the inventive tactics and the alternative strategies of resistance developed by communities marginalised by globalisation.

‘Zone of Urgency’ presents the works of 40 artists, mainly from China, Japan, and Korea, in an attempt to comprehend the interaction between explosive urbanisation and the urgent experiments that, while searching for a new model of modernity, aim at providing creative solutions to the problem.

‘The Structure of Survival’, curated by Argentinean Carlos Basualdo, is instead an exploration of an array of themes related to the effects of political, economic and social crises in the developing world.

The works of artists from all over the world, though predominantly from Latin America, reflect on conditions such as the contradictory results of globalisation and corporate capitalism, which are widely held responsible for the deterioration of living conditions in the developing world.

Interestingly, the powerful image of shanty towns emerges again and again in this project. They are depicted as evidence of the deterioration of the developing world and of the consequent reaction of their populations as a form of self-organisation and resistance.

In addition, two other projects come from the developing world. These are ‘The Everyday Altered’, curated by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, and ‘Contemporary Arab Presentations’, an exhibition that aims to displace and subvert the traditional depictions of territorial conflicts developing in the Arab region.

Besides the projects – eight in total including ‘Clandestine’, ‘Individual Systems’, and ‘Utopia Station’ – the 50th edition of the Biennale is completed with two other exhibitions: ‘Delays and Revolutions’ and ‘Painting; from Rauschenberg to Murakami , 1964-2003’, both organised by Bonami.

It is precisely painting, or the return of painting, that is one of the big surprises of the exhibition. While painting was eclipsed by video and installation in the previous editions of the Biennale, this year’s edition shows that painting, particularly portrait, is not dead.

‘Painting’, at the Correr Museum in St Mark’s Square, reviews the history of the Biennale di Venecia from 1964 to the present day through a series 50 works by previous biennale exhibitors: Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Rauschenberg, and Fontana, to mention the most renowned ones.

The 50th edition of the Biennale di Venezia is, as described by Bonami, an "exhibition of exhibitions" where the spectator intervenes navigating across several experiences and identities.

"The different projects work on a subject and not on a geographic definition of contemporary art," says Bonami. "The exhibition is thus an art journey that reflects on the real world: it begins with contemporary art and arrives at the interpretation of reality, society, and politics." (END/IPS/EU/AE/EF/SS/03)