Lockwood Smith
The older participants of the Venice Biennale bask in the best conditions – their own personal purpose-built pavilions in the pleasant setting of the Giardini. The newer national participants, however, find themselves at best in the Arsenale, or failing that, in hard-to-find rented venues throughout the city. In spite of their relative inaccessibility and lack of publicity, they offer an array of artistic, political, and social statements that are at once overwhelming and fascinating.
Iran
The Iranian pavilion, organized by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, is situated in a series of low-ceilinged, small rooms that might easily be office space at other times. Artist Morteza Darehbaghi has provided light-box installation Illumination and Peace, creating a claustrophobic corridor that has to be navigated before entering a smaller inner space. The light-boxes are covered with rows of ID photos representing victims of the Iraqi invasion of Iran and the subsequent war. It’s hard to avoid thinking that the choice of this work for Venice also serves as a reminder that Iran too suffered from the aggression of Saddam Hussein (at the time supported by the USA). The work is a powerful piece, if a little too reminiscent of French artist Christian Boltanski’s better known work on the Holocaust, which takes over the whole of the French Pavilion.
Morteza Darehbaghi’s Illumination and Peace (2011). Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
Also exhibiting for Iran are the photographer Mohsen Rastani, well-known for his family portraits and images of daily life, and the husband-and-wife team of Mohammed Mehdi and Monir Gahnbeigy, whose beautiful ceramic cubes refer to similar ones found in ancient Persian burial sites. It’s significant to note that the committee constituted by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art chose such contrasting practices from the 235 candidates they considered. The exhibition is thoroughly incoherent, although one could say it’s thematically balanced, with Darebaghi providing a political statement, Mehdi and Gahnbeigy making reference to Iran’s rich and ancient cultural past, and Rastani offering a photo-journalistic view of Iran. All the bases are nicely covered, but the curatorial criteria can be seen as particularly weak (far from an isolated phenomenon in this edition of the Biennale).
Iraq
In spite of its proximity to the Arsenale, it’s quite a challenge to find the pavilion of Iraq, which returns to Venice after a 35 year absence. “Pavilion” seems like an inappropriate term for the venue, located in a run-down labyrinth of former carpentry workshops. Some eyebrows may be raised on hearing that the curator of the Iraqi show is American, but Mary Angela Schroth is a passionate, self-taught curator who has lived in various parts of the world for the last thirty years. Deliberately ignoring the Biennale’s theme of “ILLUMInations,” Schroth and her Iraqi colleagues focused on “the lack of water [as] a primary source of emergency in Iraq,” in an apparent move to distance the exhibition from issues of politics and war. Nevertheless, such subtexts are unavoidable particularly when dealing with artists in exile, as exemplified by Halim Al Karim’s video Nations Laundry, which shows the laundering of an American flag, painstakingly washed by hand in a basin.
Ali Assaf’s “Narciso” (2010). Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
Conceptual video works predominate in the Iraqi exhibition, including Beauty Spot by London-based Kurdish artist Walid Siti. The piece consists of a room-sized 5,000 dinar bill torn open through the middle and revealing a video of the Gorge of Ali Beg waterfall, a famous landmark actually featured on the banknote. In 2009, the increasing state of drought in the region made the waterfall dry up, and the Kurdish government had water pumped from elsewhere in order to maintain it.
Bangladesh
The energetic Mary Anne Schroth is also involved in curating the Bangladeshi Pavilion, located next to the Iraqi one in the former carpentry workshops. The diverse practices in Bangladesh’s are strangely at home, and their success is heightened by the dilapidated character of the venue. Unlike many of the artists representing their countries in Venice, these Bangladeshi artists have not emigrated to the cultural capitals of the world; they all continue to live and work in Bangladesh, which undoubtedly influences their practices. For example, Mahbubur Rahman’s exploration of Muslim prejudices is powerful and direct. In an installation of barbed-wire cages housing fiberglass pigs dressed in cowhide, the artist repeatedly writes the Bengali word for mother in neon.
Imrain Hossain Piplu’s “Warrassic Period” (2010). Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
A surprisingly tongue-in-cheek reference to war comes from Imrain Hossain Piplu with his fossils from the “Warrassic Period”, presented as both photographs and relief sculptures of skeletal remains of (modern) weaponry with names like Coltasaurus or Guntasaurus. Much less humorous is the work of young artist Promotesh Das Pulak: by superimposing his own image on archival documents, he reflects on how his life is influenced by wars that took place before he was born. Completing the exhibition, Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty’s drawings and animations portrays him suffering as Medusa, and Tayeba Begum Lipi installs a boutique display of shiny metallic bras made entirely of razor blades.
Haiti
Haiti’s pavilion confronts viewers with a range of disciplines and accomplished works. Its curator, Giscard Bouchotte, anticipates the difficulties of presenting such a survey by pointing out that this is the nature of art and life in Haiti: “the works shown here do not answer to the criteria of production. Here chaos has laid down its laws in both form and content.” Haiti’s representation in Venice is divided into two sections. One is Bouchotte’s exhibition, comfortably installed in the pristine exhibition rooms of the Fondazione Querini, and another one titled Death and Fertility is located in two freight wagons on the Riva dei Sette Martiri.
Michelange Quay’s “Mange Ceci est mon Corps” (2011). Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
The exhibition at the Fondazione features 13 artists and works that range from sculpture made of scavenged junk to photography, video, painting, and installation art. There is a joyful chaos in all of this, with considerable references to the strong Haitian preoccupations with religion, voodoo, the economy of poverty, and the specter of colonialism. Among the work that resonated for this visitor was Guyodo’s Chaise Roulante Kokobe (Kokobe Wheelchair), a crazy wheelchair inhabited by a robotic humanoid made from all kinds of engine and computer parts, clothes, shoes, flippers and diverse objects, the whole thing sprayed shiny silver. Another one was Pascale Monnin, whose installation L’Ange Sacrifié (Sacrificed Angel) is composed of a suspended mobile with a hollow porcelain head that has a jawbone jutting out from behind, a goat’s skull projected from it on an armature, and all of this dripping with pearly beads and decorative metalwork. As a backdrop to this piece, a four-panel polyptych displays election posters veiled by a gauze surface. Monnin’s piece, like many others here, sums up Haïti’s situation as it oscillates between ancient spiritual rites and a desperate desire for modern political and economic progress.
Azerbaijan
My next stop was the pavilion of another recently recruited nation, which was also hard to find in the labyrinth of palazzos. Azerbaijan’s exhibition also displayed a diverse set of artistic practices and harbored the highest quality artworks of any exhibition I’d encountered in these “outlying” national pavilions. Once again, the majority of the six artists from Azerbaijan live elsewhere, in New York, London or Moscow. On the other hand, they all hail from the capital city of their homeland, from which the exhibition gets its name: Relational, of Baku.
Aidan Salakhova’s “Black Stone” (2010). Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
Perhaps the most visibly intellectual of the Azerbaijan artists is Zeigam Azizov, who recently completed a PhD at the University of London. His Symposium installation consists of a video and slideshow piece presenting texts superimposed on images of children playing in the poor neighborhoods of Baku, among other scenes. In Symposium Azizov explores inequalities between economic models, and contrasts the lumbering weight of Western economies with the hobbled potential of developing economies.
Drawings, plans, contraptions and devices, often incorporating video footage, make the techniques employed by New York-based Aga Ousseinov seem worlds away from those used by Azizov. That said, Ousseinov has a similar relationship to models of the past and future when he says that: “My pieces reference exploration and the human desire for progress… [they] appear as artifacts of past inventions… envisioning a world infected with a futile hope for progress.” Ousseinov’s periscopes and stereoscopic devices have a displaced Victorian aesthetic, but his drawings often display a frenetic and timeless (or time-capsule) quality.
Aidan Salakhova also cuts a particularly inventive and atypical figure. A well-known artist in Azerbaijan, she is also the founder and director of a successful art gallery. Salakhova comes from a liberal, Muslim background but has mostly lived in orthodox Christian contexts, currently in the heart of Moscow. In Venice, we witness Salakhova’s preoccupation with the veil as the central theme of her work. It’s nuanced and controversial: she sees the veil as a mechanism of concealment and sexual attraction, a position that would please neither Muslim hardliners nor westerners who see the veil as a symbol of repression. Here she presents drawings as well as a successful first foray into marble sculpture. Her veiled figures capitalize on the cool, seductive translation of drapery that the medium affords, while also allowing it to evoke liquids, or perhaps bodily fluids, in works such as a series of marble droplets arranged on a wall. The shapes refer at once to male and female genitalia as well as to the title Tears, with all its connotations. With unpretentious work and extraordinary humor, Aidan Salakhova “addresses political, sociological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions” (according to curator Beral Madra), and at the same time challenges their pomposity, as well as that of the international art world of which she is now an integral member.
