This is not the first time that the art world seems to want to embrace non-Western creations… The exhibition Magicians of the earth, in 1989 in Paris, mounted by Jean-Hubert Martin, opened the ball. But since then, despite numerous attempts signaling good intentions, both museums and the art market have primarily retreated to the New York scene, after having repeatedly opened up to the world…
But this time could well be the right one.
The title of this 60e Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere [Étrangers partout]sets the tone. Since 2004, this phrase has been used in several of the works of the collective Claire Fontaine — founded by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill —, including a neon installation at the Arsenale. But it actually comes from a group of anarchist and anti-racist activists from Turin who had been using it since the early 2000s.
Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art, but who studied comparative literature at the California Institute of the Arts in the United States, is the first curator of the Biennale to come from South America. He uses this phrase to develop an event where migrants, emigrants, exiles, all foreigners, all queers excluded from mainstream society, in a word, the marginalized, are honored. The result is an exhibition where a majority of the artists on display will be unknown to you. There are outsidersartists from the global South as well as creators sometimes bordering on folklorism, which the curator was criticized for…
Certainly, in the pile of creations by the 331 artists presented, several works will seem less strong. This is particularly the case in the portrait section, in the central pavilion of the Giardini, a section that offers a reinterpretation of art between 1915 and 1990 with non-Western artists. A somewhat mishmash section. Here we are witnessing a reshuffling of values, a desire to revisit the canons of contemporary and even modern art. This is sometimes done with unconvincing inclusions, but we leave this exhibition with the feeling of the need to continue this breaking down of boundaries.
Certainly, given such a committed exhibition, we would have liked a section of art in the public spaces of the city… It is quite obvious that the queerness is presented here in a protected space, to an audience of convinced people who, despite the words of the curator, will not see much “provocation” in the chosen works. Especially since the notion of queer is often reduced here to a freedom of identity, a concept far removed from the ironic, sarcastic, parodic, sometimes scathing attitude that black gay and queer Americans had established around this word… Queer would be- has it become the new normal and even a new morality?
Christoph Büchel and William Kentridge
Despite the quality of the subject of this biennial, it is an exhibition by the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel, which is stealing the show in Venice these days. Already in 2019, Büchel had disturbed the public with Barca Nostra, boat installed in the Biennale space. But it was not just any boat… It was a trawler which had sunk at sea during the night of April 18 to 19, 2015, taking with it the migrants who were trying to reach Sicily from Libya. . Nearly 900 people were on board, but only 28 people escaped. The Italian government at the time decided to raise the wreckage from the water in order to identify the victims and give them a burial. And Büchel took the opportunity to borrow the ship…
This time, Büchel strikes at the art world and our capitalist world with his installation. Mount of Pietà at the Prada Foundation. From 1834 to 1969, the palace where this Foundation is now located served as a pawnshop. The history of this place serves here as a starting point for the artist for a gigantic and very sad conceptual installation. The work speaks of the relationship of our societies to money, profits, speculation. The visitor leaves it troubled. Everything seems for sale or potentially a source of profit, even armed conflicts. In this immense bric-a-brac that the Prada Foundation has become, we find everyday objects as well as weapons of war or works of art… Buchël signs here a major work, which will not change the art world or society, but which makes us think.
This magical alliance between form and content is also found in an off-biennial exhibition by William Kentridge, a video installation entitled Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot. If you can’t make it to Venice, take note that his videos are also available on the MUBI platform, which is very focused on auteur cinema.