by Sophia Buck
Steam rises and settles in the wool fibres of my jacket. In this room, thin seams connect the flat pool of water to the frosted silver wall, obscured by clouds of water vapour hovering above the pool. Three flat Bolivian water lilies dot the water’s surface. I have just arrived in the Canadian Pavilion, and all I can smell is the wet stench of sodden skin and damp animal hair. The latter might come from the fur coat draped across a mossy rock outside, slick from the pavilion’s water filtration system and the rather ominous smatterings of rain that have christened the pre-opening of the 61st Venice Biennale.
Every so often, water drips through one of the coat sleeves. Few linger long enough to notice. Bathed in a meditative glow, Abbas Akhavan’s installation, Entre chien et loup, foreshadowed the sensory haze that would slowly seep through the city over the next forty-eight hours. The blurry room imitates the twilight hour; the title, meaning ‘between dog and wolf’, refers to this period of transition and uncertainty. The water lilies, taken from South America, renamed after Queen Victoria, and nurtured in European conservatories, have a long history of possession, transnational movement and imperial cultivation. The artist downplays this lineage, opting instead for a more elusive experience. Akhavan’s installation is one of several exhibits that sidestep overt critique in favour of an affective environment, where audiences, at least those receptive and willing, plunge into a somatic dialogue with the present moment. Like the rising steam, a question unfurls: whether the atmosphere is enough to pierce through art’s visual spectacle.
In the Giardini della Biennale, attendees huddle under five-euro umbrellas. The gardens are teeming with those hungry for the prestigious offerings of the global art milieu. This year’s Biennale is beset by controversy, unsurprising for an event with such global reach and patronage. Its curator, Koyo Kouoh’s untimely passing preceded the death of Heinrike Naumann, the artist co-representing the German pavilion, earlier this year. The South African Pavilion was cancelled, Israel and Russia contentiously participated, and, in protest, the Biennale’s international jury collectively resigned in the days leading up to the opening. The whole affair is further marred by the reality of crumbling western authority and the spectacle of the art world scrambling to impart moral virtue amid geopolitical turmoil. In media and conversations alike, voices, once again, shout atop one another. It is the antithesis of Kouoh’s curatorial remit, which urges us to tune in to the quieter resonances, the minor keys, reverberating across history, culture, and our everyday lives. So when I arrived in Venice, anticipating these relative frequencies, I chose to temper my expectations and instead allow the city to guide me through its damp streets, revealing its varied textures, with no solid plan or direction in mind.
I stand on the gravel path in the Giardini, mud splattered across my boots, staring at a section of a grubby, graffiti-covered wall. I walk around the corner to join a nearby line, and I realise the graffiti spreads across the entire German Pavilion, which is now looming in full view. Sung Tieu’s ginormous trompe l’oeil mosaic transposes the facade of her previous home, a former GDR apartment block, onto the pavilion’s neo-Greco fascist architecture. The latter was erected in 1938 during the period prior to WWII, when the Biennale was infiltrated by Mussolini’s fascist propaganda. Tieu’s former home, now scheduled for demolition, was one of the largest housing complexes for migrant workers in the GDR. Here, its image is both stable and illusory, shifting against the Pavilion’s facade to overlay the fascist permanence with the precarity of migrant housing. Since 1993, when Hans Haacke smashed its marble floor into shards, artists have reckoned with the Pavilion’s ideologically-charged design. The building crystallises the debate at the heart of the Biennale: whether national pavilions preserve fixed ideas of nationhood in a globalised art world. Their very structure, both conceptual and physical, asks artists to inhabit an imagined nationality, only for them to stretch, supersede, or demolish it entirely.
Inside, the central room is coloured tepid green, the same hue used in former East German Soviet Army barracks. Chairs, curtains and miscellaneous domestic objects pepper the walls, along with a flattened living room relief and a chainmail tapestry — the prodigious work of the late Naumann. Together, Tieu and Naumann’s show Ruin draws attention to the materiality of oppressive dogmas – whether that be a building facade or a teacup. These are the minor keys of domestic ideology, reminders that the barren and banal parts of life are often where true immorality lurks. It’s those everyday things we don’t spend long looking at — that feed us, house us, and fade ambiently into the background — that can be as oppressive as run-of-the-mill agitprop. In Ruin, the resonant atmosphere serves as a fine medium for critique.
After the political might of Tieu and Naumann’s partnership, the low-slung Japanese pavilion seems comparatively mellow. However, moments later, I find myself holding a six-kilogram baby in sunglasses and a galaxy-print onesie, feeling altogether overwhelmed by the weight of its fleshy thighs pressing against my stomach. This is a different kind of domesticity from Naumann’s. The sensation was uncanny, made all the more visceral by the invitation to carry the child upstairs and change its diaper in exchange for a poem. The absurd experience is underscored by sincerity: artist Ei Kawara-Nash draws upon their own shared responsibility of queer parenthood. Like many works across the Biennale, Kawara-Nash transforms invisible labour into a tangible experience. The exhibit’s élan comes from its belief that labour is best understood when physically rehearsed by the audience. Indeed, I was labouring to secure a grip on this hefty doll. Moon Babies has its own clear ecosystem, not solely atmospheric, but where its rhythm is produced by participants cycling through an awkward emotional experience and the physical weight of care. I returned the baby to its seat and headed back out into the rain.
Photographs courtesy of the author
The next day, at the nearby Arsenale site, I remember a recurring dream I had when I was younger. A long corridor wraps around the entire surface of the globe. I walk through the corridor to each country, taste its cuisine, watch wild animals roam, and feel the air change on my skin. The Arsenale pavilions are the closest I have come to experiencing this Borgesian dream. The former shipyard, added to the Biennale in 1980 to expand from the older Eurocentric pavilions, situates countries in long halls, where one can travel from Indonesia to Slovenia to the Philippines in seconds. Only Italy and China remain in self-contained spaces. Drifting through room after room, the scale feels large, the lighting is dim, and the materials are rudimentary: felt, wool, clay, rubble, glass and cardboard. Floor-to-ceiling tapestries woven by Moroccan artists follow piles of rubble hauled from the archeological site of a long-forgotten mosque in Slovenia. Heritage and history are best represented through softly charged objects; once again, reminders that forgotten remnants often best embody the ideology of the past. Nostalgia, the art world’s shameless vice, is wheeled out in varying degrees. The successful exhibits are those that forego sentimentality in favour of experience; here, this is in MAREUNROL’S and Bruno Birmanis’s Latvian Pavilion, where history is fodder for a vision of an untamed utopia. In the Giardini, it is Los revos, where the walls are murals made of postcards from flea markets — the most ordinary embodiments of memory, borders and the movement of ideas. In the Spanish Pavilion, the only wish is that we see the postcards’ other side.
After a ten-minute amble from Arsenale, I approach the site of Cyprus-born artist Marina Xenofontos’s exhibition, It rests to the bones. A converted brick warehouse spills directly onto the canal. Inside, the setting is sparse, and the scent is noticeable: musty, woody, sweet and a little sweaty, all at once. Archival histories are refracted abstractly through machines — a dying sparrow on a table, a small monitor with pulsing lights, cylindrical copper barrels whirring softly in the back room — but it is the building’s scent and the folk songs spilling from a speaker hung above the canal that best illustrate Xenofontos’s tussle between artistic production and cultural preservation. The water laps softly against her relatives’ melancholy chants. Through the open doors, I watch a gondolier scrub the seats in his boat. The space feels contemplative and faintly animate. Its sparsity will be lost to some, where the soft kinetic works struggle to outwardly articulate Xenofontos’s historical grounding. But the sensory impact of the installation, and the building itself, quietly suggests that objects carry memory through their movements and transitions. Preserving memory, perhaps, is about setting it in motion, rather than leaving it fully intact.
My final stop is discovered entirely by chance. At Joystick Space, a bizarre and spatially brilliant exhibition draws the well-established archival impulse into the realm of anonymity and self-eroticism. From the street, I am seduced by the array of richly coloured pillars standing proudly in the small room. Atop these filing cabinets, framed in seductive silver panels, hang dozens of self-portraits taken by a middle-aged woman known only as Florence. In each photograph, she sits in her home office, bound by chains, whips and vintage cuffs, staring contentedly at the camera. Wandering through the pillars, I feel lost in a jungle of this woman’s unabashed fantasies, her apparent pleasure, and her unassuming creativity. There is a haptic sensibility between the metal filing cabinets, the warmth of her smile and the whips’ leathery tangle hanging limply against her stockings. These photographs were discovered in an anonymous archive. It is refreshing to view an exhibition so intimate and enigmatic, where only one thing is known, and thousands of questions linger. I flirt with the possibilities, with Florence and her erotic rituals. My knee brushes against the cold metal, and I sense her titillation.
Somehow, this final exhibition sums up all I have felt, seen and heard. A pronounced view of history, heritage and the archive, experienced through movement, colour, scent, sound and negation, sometimes fetishised, and at other times subtle and probing. The dangerous and inevitable power of forgetting, and the miraculous nature of rediscovery. And the haptic moments drawn out through Kouoh’s bid to listen to the minor keys, the small voices that whisper beneath overt didacticism and ideology. These whispers, ever-present yet rarely heard, may be as profound as they are insidious. It appears that now the challenge is to decipher them.
A few hours later, now hot and sweaty, I trudge back over the Ponte della Constituzione to catch the bus to Marco Polo airport. I recall the steam and drizzle that welcomed me forty-eight hours earlier. Senses are powerful vessels for memory, and for maintaining contact with the world as it shifts in real time. Kouoh’s In Minor Keys ushered in works that engage the senses, glancing beyond identitarian critique towards a relational, atmospheric experience. Of course, there lurks the danger of the senses fading into watered-down ambience, used as a buffer for exactitude and criticality. I think of all the other ambient forces circulating around the biennial. The silent flows of industrial money, oil wealth, patronage, and institutional power. The unspoken soft power of the archive and of history itself. When archives and histories are leveraged in the name of contemporary art, used to stir feelings of resonance or sentimentality, the line between historical attentiveness and aesthetic consumption grows thin. While this subjectivity loosens the grip of overt didacticism, it is dangerous to forget the quieter systems of power that make such subjectivity possible. I reach the top of the bridge and stare out at the maze of canals disappearing out of view. The atmosphere indeed cuts through visual spectacle, but the forces shaping that atmosphere often remain stubbornly out of reach.
About the Author
Sophia Buck is a writer, researcher and fashion historian based in London. Her work is concerned with systems of fashion production and consumption, with a particular focus on investigating archival processes and modes of critical fashion practice. She is currently an assistant editor at Viscose Journal and curatorial assistant for the annual UK-based Fashion in Film Festival. She has worked for the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Arts, Crosscurrent (UK) and as a project archivist for Various Projects (NY).