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Plural

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Review

Randy Lee Cutler is a Vancouver-based writer, artist and educator. She contributes essays to catalogues and art magazines as well as maintains an experimental relationship to pedagogy, gardening and walking. Her art practice takes up themes of food and sustenance through performance, video and textual strategies. In the intersections of gender, art, science and technology, she investigates the emergence of new cultural forms and expression. She is an associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC.

All the World’s Futures, the 56th Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, focuses its energies on politics apparently founded in a belief that works of art have the power to address the global inequality of capital and opportunity. This vision is shaped by three filters, _Liveness: On epic duration, Garden of Disorder, and Capital: A Live Reading._ The theoretical and performative heart of this Biennale, located at the Giardini’s central pavilion, is an active space called _ARENA_ designed by artist-architect David Adjaye. Among its diverse program of live events are film screenings, piano performances, choral pieces and a seven-month durational reading of Karl Marx’s three-volume _Das Kapital_, directed by English artist Isaac Julien. Ironically, a new film installation by Julien, in collaboration with Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, debuted during the opening week of the festival, highlighting perhaps the economic extremes that have come to represent biennales worldwide. All this leads me to wonder how the curatorial premise informs the ways in which the artists at the Biennale are implicated in the very systems that they critique; and if this calls the function of such critique into question?

As the Biennale’s first curator of African descent, Enwezor has brought together artists seldom represented on such an international scale, with Africans in particular taking centre stage. _All the World’s Futures_ showcases 136 artists from 53 countries, 89 of them appearing at the Biennale for the first time. This of course is admirable and important, despite the fact that much of the exhibition feels repetitive due in part to the dominance of video, the density of work on display and the often didactic quality of Enwezor’s aesthetic choices. While some individual artists stand out, especially Taryn Simon, Mika Rottenberg, Hito Steyerl and Steve McQueen, this Biennale was not as engaging as Massimiliano Gioni’s 2013 _The Encyclopedic Palace_, which highlighted a greater appreciation for visualizing knowledge and personal cosmologies in contrast to Enwezor’s curatorial reimagining under the aegis of global action and social change where political theory more often than not has replaced the material energy and aesthetic wonder of artistic practice.

In addition to the two large curated spaces, the Arsenale’s Corderia (rope factory), an extraordinary 316-metre–long building, and the Central Pavilion in the Giardini di Castello, an oasis of greenery laid out during the Napoleonic era, are 29 national pavilions, built in various periods by the participating countries themselves. Additionally, the many national pavilions set in palazzos around Venice and the 44 collateral events further expand the project. The Australian Pavilion housing Fiona Hall’s negotiation of money and labour and herman de vries’ exploration of natural processes at the Dutch Pavilion are memorable examples of accumulation and engagement with local histories. The Golden Lion for Best National Participation was awarded to the Republic of Armenia, whose exhibition involves a breathtaking 10-minute boat ride to the monastery on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, where artwork by contemporary artists from the Armenian diaspora speaks predominantly to the now 100-old Armenian Genocide. Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, cited in Enwezor’s curatorial statement, the future is behind us as we move with our backs towards it and all we see is the accumulating detritus of our collective past.

Within this larger framework, the Canadian Pavilion stands on the Giardini grounds, hosted by the National Gallery of Canada and guest-curated by Marie Fraser with an installation by the three-person artist-collective BGL (Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère and Nicolas Laverdière). The work begins with the augmented lettering on the outside of the building spelling out _Canadassimo_, a literal sign that the pavilion has been amplified, expanded and transformed into something much more than itself. The suffix _\-assimo_ is a common form of emphasis in Italian, adding a qualifier of remarkable extremes. In this case, the Canadian Pavilion, with the appearance of a site under perpetual construction due to its scaffolding and recycled materials, is an art world version of Canadiana and more specifically an ode to the architectural and cultural vernacular of _la belle province de Québec._

The pavilion is accessed through the replica shopfront of a classic Québec dépanneur (or “dep”), a store that sells beer, canned food and other household convenience items. (Apparently the material for the installation was transferred by boat, filling three 12-metre-long shipping containers.) With its poor lighting, stained walls and seemingly out-of-date goods, the _simulacrum_ is initially quite convincing. The artists have altered much of the packaging by blurring images and text, making for a drunken effect that evokes a midnight run to the local dep for emergency cigarettes and cheap wine. The aesthetic would have been more convincing had all the objects been transformed; instead, only some of the boxes of Kraft Dinner, cans of Habitant soup, et cetera have been treated with hallucinogenic alteration. Once through the beaded curtains of this anteroom, the viewer finds the living space of the proprietor-artist-\_bricoleur\_, though it can also be experienced as another promising, but unfinished concept: there are few signs of habitation. The next room, what BGL has dubbed “the studio,” is where our corner store entrepreneur reveals a hoarder’s sensibility with an endless display of objects and materials. The debris includes discarded sports equipment, recycled junk, tools and shelves of terracotta sculptures. These latter forms, perhaps effigies to different gods, allude to the fact that many dep owners are often immigrants who bring their own cultural interpretations to these popular Québec institutions. In the centre of this room, tin cans are covered with colourful drips of paint. BGL’s sensibility is playful yet unresolved especially when these overly aestheticized objects are juxtaposed with the more mundane, more real _bric à brac_ surrounding them. The kaleidoscope of paint cans suggests the residue of some kind of labour, perhaps the decoration of the terracotta figurines and yet they remain in their raw, untreated state. Ultimately there are too many gaps to make the entire proposition convincing. Is _Canadassimo_ one large and inconsistent artifice or the uneven narra- tive of an outsider artist holed up in the back rooms of his dépanneur?

Conceivably, an engagement with labour and value is made manifest in the last of these adjoining rooms where a staircase leads to a second-floor outdoor terrace built of scaffolding and recycled materials with an elaborate Plinko contraption. The viewer can drop change into a slot and watch the money roll down the transparent walls inside the pavilion. The accumulation of stuff, whether old consumer goods, multi-faith sculptures, cans of paint and now money falling from above, points to themes of value (and devaluation), accession and excess. _Canadassimo_ offers a seemingly lighthearted reflection on the Biennale’s curatorial theme and the principal questions that it poses: “How can artists, thinkers, writers, composers, choreographers, singers, and musicians, through images, objects, words, movement, actions, lyrics, sound bring together publics in acts of looking, listening, responding, engaging, speaking in order to make sense of the current upheaval? What material, symbolic or aesthetic, political or social acts will be produced in this dialectical field of references to give shape to an exhibition which refuses confinement within the boundaries of conventional display models?”[^1]

Merging with the larger questions posed by the Biennale, the notion of the shop as studio is an intriguing motif that echoes beyond _Canadassimo_. For example, Francesc Ruiz’s magazine concession at the Spanish pavilion sells queer erotic graphic novels in homage to Salvador Dali. While the focus is not on the vendor _per se_, the installation points to the dominant role of art as commodity. Meanwhile Greece welcomes the viewer to _Why Look at Animals? AGRIMIKÁ._ Here, artist Maria Papadimitriouís has transported all the effects of a real tannery shop from the port city of Volos to the pavilion. The work is simultaneously a commentary on how humans coexist with animals and an allegorical reflection on the state of democracy wherein rights do not apply equally for all living beings. The highlight of the installation is an unsentimental video portrait of an older man recounting his life experience in this trade. The camera’s focus on his weathered hands evokes the passage of time and the very leather produced from years of toil.

Across Venice, on the other side of the Accademia bridge, is the Newfoundland & Labrador exhibition hosted by the Terra Nova Art Foundation at the Galleria Ca’ Rezzonico on the Grand Canal. The exhibition titled _Under the Surface_ and curated by Chris Clarke presents work by Jordan Bennett and Anne Troake. Bennett’s _Ice Fishing_ comprises an installation of a fishing shack and multiple video projections. The intimate documentary account between the artist and his father offers insight into the role of ice fishing in cultural and daily sustenance. The piece, both charming and informative, includes a banal voice-over by the artist that devalues an otherwise poetic rendering of life on the eastern edge of Canada. Troake’s 3D video projection, _OutSideIn_, is a haptic exploration of two dancers crawling their way through earth, roots and tree branch structures. The portrayal of landscape as a formative space where local ecology ultimately transforms the self into a collective force is generated across the two works. This sensual engagement with the natural world is in sharp contrast to the Canadian Pavilion where hidden artistic ambitions meet vernacular entrepreneurship.

It is unclear whether and how the national pavilions are meant to take up the Biennale’s larger curatorial theme. _Canadassimo_, with its dramaturgical space, is a playful figuration of disorder, accumulation and excess though the execution of the concept has yet to be fully realized. The most intriguing reading of Capital is Mika Rottenberg’s _NoNoseKnows_ installed at the Arsenale. Framed as yet another shopkeeper’s space where the product is raw pearls, the work’s focus is a looping and hallucinatory video projection of rows of Chinese women labouring in the manufacture of cultured pearls. (Rottenberg incorporates “real” documentary footage of the prodigious pearl-making facilities of Zhuji, south of Shanghai.) Above the production floor, and linked by a human-powered pulley that makes a fan spin, a large Caucasian woman sits in an office sniffing bouquets in an ill-fitting suit, and suffering from an allergic reaction to the flowers. As her nose becomes impossibly irritated and elongated she violently sneezes out plates of Chinese food and pasta, ostensibly for the women working below. In this surreal vision, everyone is enslaved in a haunting depiction of global commerce, women’s labour and the inhumanity of all the world’s futures.

Despite some inspiring work and a deserving curatorial premise, the Biennale continues to underscore the particularly troublesome, entangled relationship between international relations, the art market and capital. With its focus on the politics of labour, information and spectacle, Marx’s analysis of the fetishization of the object as commodity has been dialectically subsumed under the sign of art.

[^1]: Okwui Enwezor, Curatorial Statement. http://universes-in- universe.org/eng/bien/ venice\_biennale/2015

Writer

Poetry

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This is a review of the 56th Venice Biennale showing from May 9 to November 22, 2015\. 

All the World's Futures: The 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice

Magdalena Miłosz is a Polish-Canadian writer and intern architect living and working in Kitchener-Waterloo. She recently earned her professional Master of Architecture degree at the University of Waterloo, where her thesis focused on developing a critical, decolonial perspective on the architectural history of Indian residential schools. Her texts have previously appeared in _Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy and Breach._

Two screens face each other in a dark room, only a bench off to the side interrupting the space between them. Settling into this interstitial expanse of Shirin Neshat’s _Soliloquy_ (1999), viewers become mediators, with the series of scenes on each screen flowing not past, but through this audience – asking them, perhaps, to act as witnesses to the ensuing visual dialogue. The titles begin, in English and Persian; then, the sole character appears, clad in black robes and played by Neshat herself. She is looking out of two different windows: one in Albany, New York; the other in Mardin, Turkey, not far from the artist’s native Iran.

Neshat completed _Soliloquy_ in 1999, one piece in a diverse repertoire comprising photography, installation and a feature film. Six copies of _Soliloquy_ have found permanent homes in various institutions around the world. The one installed at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery this past winter arrived from the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal through its Momentum series, which tours major works in its permanent collection to different cities. As a digital artifact, _Soliloquy_ could easily be duplicated further, but the life-sized void between the two screens is integral to the configuration of the piece. The installation hinges on more than just the flatness of the screen and its illusory three-dimensionality, rather it depends on real space as the locus of interchange.

The projections alternate between the phenomena of observing and being observed, envisaging the simultaneity of these two states and their overlapping effects on the subject in multiple contexts. When Neshat’s protagonist is active on one side, she is often still on the other, her gaze focused beyond what is in front of the plane of the image – the ribbons of highways in America, the labyrinthine city in Turkey – towards the other screen, which functions something like a reminiscence or dream. As this woman gazes across the space of the gallery, the audience cannot clearly see what she is looking at, and the opposite screen becomes peripheral, both literally and figuratively. Likewise, if we turn to see it more clearly, we can no longer observe Neshat observing and we lose track of what she is communicating in the image of her silent contemplation.

The work encourages us to grapple with the impossibility of existing in two cultural contexts at once while revealing the potentially rich and complex experiences of the in-between. Much of Neshat’s work is concerned with the identity of the exiled, someone who exists neither fully here nor fully there, but paradoxically in both and in neither, and perhaps even in a third space that tentatively reconciles two seeming opposites. Based partly on her own experience of migration from Iran to the US and back, _Soliloquy_ takes up this theme quite literally, but also subtly produces an exilic effect on viewers as they physically occupy an indeterminate position between two visually distinct milieus.

Both the “West” and the “East” portrayed in the installation rely heavily on the built environment as a cultural symbol, in addition to composing the physical form of the protagonist’s story. In the “Western” half of the projection, Neshat drives down a congested highway, then stands in the bustling lobby of the World Trade Center in New York (before 9/11), watching her other, “Eastern” self reminiscing in a palace. In the next scene, she is walking up the grand staircase of the Cultural Education Center, a large Brutalist building completed in 1961 as part of the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York. Finally, she emerges once more in Manhattan, looking down into the light-filled interior of St. Peter’s Church, a modern structure, nearly devoid of ornament, sunk into the ground below a tall corporate tower. The stark contrast between the monumental, contemporary spaces of the “West” and the winding, complex, ancient spaces of the “East” is simple, perhaps, but nevertheless highly evocative of the genius locus of each place.

Because the images are hyperbolically juxtaposed, they serve to underscore that each place is a kind of ghost of the other, for we are always, sometimes painfully, aware of the other’s absence. In this way, Neshat touches on the modern condition of “homelessness,” which renders many of us unsettled, even though in the West, we are, of course, for the most part, settlers of one kind or another. She recognizes, too, that through our presence and absence, we change both the places where we move and the places we have left behind. In each sequence, the woman comes upon a group of others. There are Christian worshippers clad in white at St. Peter’s and Muslim mourners in black within the palace, their Eastern and Western chants overlapping in a final crescendo, followed by a quieting. The contradictions are tentatively resolved through a ritual cleansing on a rooftop. The woman in black is seen, on both sides, running into the distance, towards two vanishing points of solitude.

In both its form and content, _Soliloquy_ is heavily concerned with space and the ways it is moved through, occupied, produced and perhaps left behind. Although not explicitly political, it poses serious questions about migration, identity and culture that are relevant in a new way in increasingly “global” and digitally connected societies, possibly societies in conflict. _Soliloquy_ is no doubt now seen in a somewhat different light than when it was first shown 16 years ago, but the sojourn undertaken by its protagonist remains a powerful study in finding one’s place.

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This article reviews Shirin Neshat’s Soliloquy which shows at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery from January 16 to March 15, 2015\. 

Shirin Neshat: Soliloquy

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