Navin Rawanchaikul at his studio in Chiang Mai. Photo ART iT


While many artists use the Venice Biennale as a platform to critique, parody or invert expressions of national identity, Navin Rawanchaikul is the very embodiment of just such an impulse. Born in 1971 in Chiang Mai to parents of Hindu-Punjabi heritage and now a permanent resident of Japan, Navin has been selected to represent Thailand at the 54th Venice Biennale, but he can hardly be contained by one pavilion alone. ART iT met with Navin at his studio in Chiang Mai to discuss his exhibition for Venice, "Paradiso di Navin," and the possibilities for specific but universal communities.



Interview:


ART iT: This year marks Thailand's fifth participation in the Venice Biennale. How do you anticipate this time differing from previous years?

NR: More than a Thai Pavilion, I plan to make a "Navin Pavilion." The site will be the Paradiso Gallerie near the entrance of the Giardini, which houses a restaurant and bar and also has a beautiful balcony. The exhibition will take place on the ground level of the venue in a sort of collaboration with the bar and restaurant, in that I will turn the entire space into an artwork. There are two titles for the project, "Navinland Pavilion" and "Paradiso di Navin."


ART iT: Can you elaborate on your concept for the pavilion?

NR: To date, the "Navin Party" project in which I search the world for people who share my name has in a sense been about creating a new kind of community. This project was undertaken in opposition to the idea of national boundaries, and seeks to identify a possible universal platform. It was inspired by my realization that there are Navins in Thailand, India, Japan and all other places. Developing from "Navin Party," the idea behind the "Navinland Pavilion" at Venice is also to make a new territory without any domain, one that can exist anywhere in the world, but this time I will push the format further to allow participation even by people who are not named Navin.
First, evoking Coldwar Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie, I will create a Navinland checkpoint. Staff will be continuously stationed there to register participants in the project and collect their signatures. In one room will be an overview of alll the "Navin Party" works to date, such as the "Little Red Book" produced during the China edition of the project, as well as Bollywood-style videos. In another room will be a participatory project in which visitors help to draft a Navinland Constitution. In this way, alongside the personal narrative that connects my works there will also be a political narrative. I am also producing a monumental, seven-meter-long painting of all the Navins in the world, which will also be on display.
But Navinland will not be a utopia. It is the people who come and participate in the drafting of the constitution that will determine what kind of community Navinland becomes. The current political issues in Thailand are widely known, with the yellow- and red-shirt factions divided between supporters for the deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and those who oppose his return to power. Nor does such upheaval apply only to Thailand. It is also apparent in this year's Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East with citizens raising serious questions about their leadership and the policies and directions of their nations. As the official representative of Thailand at Venice this year, I want to address these issues. Thus even though it is the Thai Pavilion, in putting forward the fictional platform of "Navinland" I hope to reflect upon not only the Thai situation but also the world situation.
I should say that I am critical of events like the Venice Biennale that divide artists up on the basis of nationality. I have tried to make my project as open as possible. Usually, Thai national representations involve traditional dance, or are determined on the basis of manifesting some kind of national identity, but this project has Indian elements, Pakistani elements - even a Chinese little red book - and so it encapsulates aspects of many disparate nations. It's not only about Thai national identity, it's also about the world.




Navin Rawanchaikul inspecting a sculptural work under production at his studio in Chiang Mai. Photo ART iT


ART iT: Did you think of the "Navinland" concept only after you were selected to represent Thailand?

NR: I began the "Navin Party" project in 2006, but had been thinking about what to do next. When I was invited to represent Thailand at Venice, the details started falling into place.
It seems that the Ministry of Culture is anxious about my project. I understand their concerns about politics so I am doing my best to explain the details of what I am planning to them, but actually I feel that they still do not completely accept my ideas. The work does not explicityly comment on the current political situation in Thailand. The reason for creating a "Navinland Pavilion" was that in a small country like Thailand it is only this kind of idea that can transcend local politics. It's not red or yellow - maybe it's a different color altogether. Through the work I want to critique the problems of national identity circulating in the world, and the Venice Biennale is the perfect venue for doing that.


ART iT: How do you feel about representing Thailand at Venice?

NR: First, I feel it's a great opportunity to show my works in a historic exhibition that will be seen by people who come from across the entire world. On the other hand, when the Biennale was founded in 1895, because relatively few people in Europe then traveled beyond the continent, perhaps the idea of national representations made sense. However, today national representation is an outdated concept. Recently the German Pavilion and the Nordic Pavilion have been among those to present works by non-national artists. In that sense, my selection for the Thai Pavilion is both an honor and a predicament, in that there is a possibility I will be squeezed into the framework of being a so-called Thai artist.
For me, how to make art that can be interesting and significant involves not only the artist, and not only a relationship with a specific community or the artworld, but also something more than that. This project responds directly to the context of the Biennale. There are two problems, though. One is that the artworld is extremely insular. The concept behind my project for Venice has nothing to do with the competition or the nation, or the artworld as represented by institutions such as museums. Instead, what is most important for this project are world communities, such as the Navin community, or relations between ordinary people. The other problem is that of national identity. What's the agenda behind doing the Thai Pavilion? Visitors might think, "Where is Navinland? In what country?" That's why the Ministry of Culture has had a hard time accepting my proposal. But that is exactly why I am doing this.


ART iT: Why are you so interested in the notion of community?

NR: I do not make political art; I view the world through my own personal perspective. I was born in Thailand and live between Japan and Chiang Mai, but the one thing that I understand best is community. My identity is deeply related not only to art but also to humanity. When I think about how to make art, I believe that it can become even more interesting if it can go beyond the limits of the artworld, as in my prior project turning Bangkok taxis into mobile galleries. In this way an art project can involve an entire community - children, parents, friends. I do workshops for children, or I do performances - which are not contemporary art - in the middle of Chiang Mai's Warorot market, and these activities take on significance from the participation of all kinds of people. These projects are comprehensive works, but when I carry them out, even if I say they are artworks or even if I call myself an artist, that doesn't mean they are complete in and of themselves. To justify something just because it is an artwork is not enough to persuade viewers to accept it - nor is it possible to control the viewers' responses. Rather, I want to do something that can make people feel engaged. My projects can only be realized in tandem with their specific sites and with the people who constitute the communities of those sites. And that is what I intend to bring to Venice.


The 54th Venice Biennale, "ILLUMInations," opens to the public June 4 and continues through November 27.

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Venice Biennale - ILLUMInations: 54th International Art Exhibition

From "The Inadequate," Spanish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale.


Born in 1965 in Valladolid, Spain, and currently based in Brussels, Dora García uses live actions, institutional space and online platforms to explore the dynamics between performance and spectatorship. She has been selected to represent Spain at the 54th Venice Biennale, in an exhibition entitled "The Inadequate." ART iT corresponded with her to learn more about her plans for Venice and how they relate to her broader artistic practice.



Interview:


ART iT: You are known for projects that explore the dynamics between scripted and spontaneous action and how situations affect behavior. How does the situation of national representation affect your approach to the Venice Biennale? Is this something that you will address directly in your exhibition?

DG: I feel very ill at ease with representing a nation. I think obviously the structure of national pavilions is anachronistic, and that is its default but also its virtue. Most probably the Venice Biennale has very little to do with art. Contemporary art is not made to be visited quickly and at such a massive scale. Often, the visitors to the Biennale literally run through the exhibition. Everything is a bit ridiculous and again that is both a problem and an advantage. I have tried to make a project that honestly deals with all those contradictions and malaise. It is indeed a project that is specially made for the Biennale, but very probably it is also completely inadequate for such an event, hence the title: "The Inadequate."


ART iT: Your selection to represent Spain at Venice comes right as you are developing a project on social and artistic margins, "Mad Marginal: antipsychiatry tradition and marginality as artistic position, inspired by the thought and activity of Franco Basaglia." Can Venice be considered a solely mainstream event, or does it allow room for deviants? Do you identify yourself as a mad marginal?

DG: I am not a mad marginal; I am merely a groupie of mad marginals. I like them, and I enjoy and frequent their company. I am an artist because I love some art and some artists and this project is, as with all the others, a strategy to spend time with them. Venice is everything: a mainstream event that as said has very little to do with art and a lot to do with social gathering; but it has many fringe events and structures and every possible attitude has room to fit. So my proposition too, why not? Franco Basaglia was born in Venice and I think he died there as well.


ART iT: Your recent performance projects have portrayed a series of fictitious and real characters, such as the beggar Filch from "Beggar's Opera," the comedian Lenny Bruce, the actor William Holden and the filmmaker Jack Smith. Does this focus on characters mark a shift in your attitude towards performance from earlier projects like the series "Inserts in Real Time"?

DG: No, these works all lie on a continuum. "Inserts in Real Time" was a structure created for what I called at the time, "low profile performance, barely distinguishable from daily life," which in spite or in fact because of its low key-ism, managed to create the constant suspicion that something was going on - representation, performance, act, character. Slowly a feeling of comedy and humor emerged, the idea of comedy as critical tool (Bruce, Smith, Brecht) and the idea of verfremdung - estrangement - led to the present performance work.






Top: Just Because Everything Is Different It Does Not Mean That Anything Has Changed, Lenny Bruce In Sydney (2008), video HD, 60 min. Collection Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, CA2M, Móstoles, Madrid. Bottom: Performance view of Real Artists Don't Have Teeth (2010). Performer: Jakob Tamm. Courtesy Moderna Museet and Index, Stockholm.


ART iT: Many of your projects are extensively documented through writing on your website as well as in book form, and you often refer to the concept of novelization. For the reader, the diaries from "The Glass Wall," for example, blur the line between documentation and fiction in a way that parallels the blurring of acting and normative behavior that occurs in the performance, while the texts that result from "The Notebook" also read as a kind of schizophrenic literature. Can you explain more about your relationship to writing and literature?

DG: I am a reader and an admirer of some writers; to me this has nothing to do with being intellectual, but is a matter of company and enjoyment. Short fiction has directly inspired many of my works, and the idea of the "diary" - literature-after-performance - came to me as a solution to the persisting problem of documentation. Documentation influences and changes performance. When a camera or a recorder is there, behavior changes, so I had to do without them, but then how to tell what happened? Through the diaries - diaries often not even written by me, but by the performer or the public. Diaries also create feedback: what you read or wrote yesterday influences the way things are or seem today. Then from the diary and the novel in turn came the idea of the script - the script and the speech - moving more towards theatre.


ART iT: To what extent do you anticipate your exhibition in the Spanish Pavilion will build upon or depart from your previous body of works?

DG: I think it will be a very natural outgrowth. Every work I do is a reaction to a situation in which I try to find a new equilibrium between the work I have done so far and the new situation. The first reaction when confronted with the prospect of Venice was embarrassment, malaise; I felt as if something was not quite fitting. So I have tried to adapt my baggage to that feeling.



The 54th Venice Biennale, "ILLUMInations," opens to the public June 4 and continues through November 27.

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Venice Biennale - ILLUMInations: 54th International Art Exhibition

Production photo from Mur i wieża (Wall and Tower) (2009). Photo Magda Wunsche & Samsel. All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.


Currently living between Berlin and Tel Aviv, Yael Bartana has been selected to represent Poland at the 54th Venice Biennale in an exhibition entitled "...and Europe will be stunned." Bartana has long dealt with issues related to life in Israel in her works in video and other media; it could be said that this interest is indeed what led her to begin a trilogy of short films shot on location in Warsaw imagining the activities of a quasi-fictitious organization seeking the return of three million Jews to Poland, the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP). ART iT corresponded with Bartana to discuss the JRMiP trilogy, which will form the core of the Polish Pavilion, and why it is necessary to critique nationalist agendas.



Interview:


ART iT: Previously you've made works that address aspects of Israeli society and politics, and now you are working towards the completion of your trilogy of films about the quasi-fictitious Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP). Has your selection to represent Poland at the Venice Biennale changed anything for you in terms of how you view your work, or your approach to national identity?

YB: I wouldn't say that it's changed how I view my works so much as it has created a situation where my fiction has become a reality. For a long time I have been interested in moving beyond the bubble of the artworld in order to touch reality in a more direct way. Being selected to represent Poland has allowed me to cross that border between art and reality or fiction and reality. This is the biggest success for me in a way, this realization of my vision - my fantasy - of dealing with real issues through the tools of art.


ART iT: And the JRMiP also has started to take on life beyond the project, is that correct?

YB: Yes. In 2012 we will hold a congress in Berlin as part of the Berlin Biennale. I'm working closely on the concept with the Polish artist and filmmaker Artur Żmijewski, who is the biennale director. The JRMiP generates a lot of curiosity. I gave a presentation on the movement at the Berlinale film festival in Berlin last February, and the audience asked many concrete questions of me - for example, how the movement would deal with property rights. There is a serious demand to deal with real issues, and high expectations for the movement. But I think the metaphor and the symbolism behind the idea are important to maintain, so the biggest challenge is to find the right line between the real and the fictional, to find a way to deal with the two worlds and to play with that.
The members of the movement are not necessarily Jews. It's not my intent to limit the project only to issues of Polish Jews. This is a very specific study case but it touches upon more universal issues that reflect on social changes and migration in Europe and Middle East, and the possibilities or impossibilities of living with others, and the extreme nationalism and racism that is everywhere and currently increasing. It's important for me strategically to deal with something very concrete, with the history and the current situation between Israel and Poland or Jews and Poland, but the project can also speak for other nations.






Both: Video still from Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) (2007). Courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw.


ART iT: Your works can have an alienating effect on viewers, in part because of the specificity of the subject matter and also because you appropriate strategies of propaganda film in their composition. It is difficult to sympathize with the subjects of the films - whether Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) (2007) or Mur i wieża (Wall and Tower) (2009) - nor is it possible to wholly sympathize with the eye of the filmmaker. But this actually can prompt reflection on one's own position with regard to nationality and its underlying issues. Is that an objective of the work?

YB: Rethinking nationality absolutely has been my main topic for the past decade - the issue of constructing an identity through nationalism and how that is symbolized and communicated. Nationalism is an imaginative and manipulative way of creating a sense of belonging, and I think the JRMiP employs that as well. But I'm criticizing fascism even as I use elements that originate in fascist aesthetics. Probably this can be confusing for viewers, but I wish to create optimistic conditions, not oppressive conditions. The aesthetics of propaganda I find to be very powerful, direct, communicative and simple, which allows everybody to connect to the work on some level. At the same time those images are also registered in our collective memory, related to a very different and negative history. It's my strategy also to flip these relations. I think that's where the artistic element comes through. Only in art can you allow yourself to mix emotions in that way.


ART iT: For example, where do your sympathies lie in a film like Mur i wieża?

YB: The film is a criticism. It is a criticism of a positive utopia that turned into a tragedy. I think it underlines the tragedy of nations and, specifically in the case of Israel, the tragedy of the utopian idea of creating a safe place for the Jews, which has led to the complete erasure of another culture. I see the project as a mirror that reflects back the images of Europe and the Middle East. My hope is to develop it further, not to only position myself in terms of criticality, but also through the congress at the Berlin Biennale to propose something - first of all to propose that politics should not stay only in the realm of government.






Both: Video still from Mur i wieża (Wall and Tower) (2009).


ART iT: As suggested by the questions you have received about how the JRMiP would deal with property rights, the outrageousness of inviting three million Jews to return to Poland also seems to underscore the complacency with which we accept the default conditions of political agency. It seems like it would be a natural reaction even for liberals in Poland to completely reject the idea of inviting three million Jews to return.

YB: Fanatics on both sides are going mad from this project. I have received many negative critiques from both Poles and Israelis who take the project literally. There are people who are horrified that the proposal might actually be realized and that suddenly there would be a massive return to Poland of Jews who would take over the land and positions in the workforce and run the economy. And then in Israel, so many Jews leaving for Poland would lead to an opening for the Palestinians to return to their homes, so there is this additional aspect of right of return involved in the project.


ART iT: Your earlier videos were often anthropological or even structural in their composition, and then around the time of Summer Camp (2007), following a group of Israeli, Palestinian and international volunteers as they rebuild a Palestinian home that was destroyed by Israeli authorities, you shifted toward a more cinematic vocabulary. What triggered that shift for you?

YB: It's difficult for me to answer. I think it's related to my fascination with propaganda films. For a long time I wanted to create a dialogue with those early propaganda films - specifically Zionist films but not limited to that - because I think they are aesthetically very strong, and also because I thought it could be a way to directly discuss the tragedy of the state of Israel. It started actually with the film A Declaration (2006) [in which a man rows to Andromeda's rock in the harbor of Jaffa, and replaces the Israeli flag that flies there with an olive tree]. That was my first attempt to deal with those early films, working with more narrative and less abstract elements. It has slowly developed from there.


ART iT: Are you doing anything differently with the new film, the last in the JRMiP trilogy?

YB: I think you cannot watch the third film without first knowing the first two films, because it is about the assassination of the leader of the JRMiP. It's about his death, and it's an attempt to make the idea of the return to Europe more complex. It incorporates more voices - even Zionist voices - and there is another layer that talks about the ghosts of the six million Jews.


ART iT: What is your relationship like with the actors who participate in the films?

YB: In Mary Koszmary, the man who gives the speech inviting the Jews to return, Sławomir Sierakowski, is not an actor. He is an activist, journalist and philosopher who is trying to create a new Left in Poland. When I was doing my research in Poland I was looking for a collaborator there who believes in shaking up the status quo. He believes in the project, and he believes from his heart that the return of Jews and other minorities is necessary for the culture, because after the war Poland became such a homogenous society. For me he is not an actor, he's a figure or a protagonist who is dealing with the issue in real life as well as in the fiction. So as I said there is a thin line between the fictional and the real for me. For the new film I have also invited a Holocaust survivor to give a speech, as well as an art historian who is considered a minority, and who speaks about the possibilities of minorities living together in Poland. All the people involved in the project understand what I'm trying to do even if they don't necessarily believe such a project is actually feasible.




Video still from A Declaration (2006).


ART iT: You have dedicated the past decade to confronting issues of nationalism through your works. Why do you feel it is necessary to do so?

YB: In terms of Israel, the danger of nationalism is that many people have been brainwashed and tend to think in a close-minded and conformist way. It's very simplistic. They are not able to understand complexity or the perspectives of others. It is a kind of damaged mentality, very scary, very aggressive and violent, and one that supports extreme power. Certainly I think every country should be able to protect itself, but for me the situation in Israel goes beyond the whole idea of Judaism and extends to issues of territory and diaspora and the changes that happened with the creation of the state of Israel. I'm trying through my artworks to learn about these issues and to be very open about my feelings. Even if they look didactic, for me it's a way to create a discourse. I know my works can be provocative, but even if I'm insulted, if I can cause people to speak out then it allows me to see the diversity of society.
I can't make promises about how long I will continue this approach but I can say with regard to the current project in Poland it's been extremely interesting to also work in a country that is connected to Israel in a very specific way. For most Israelis, Poland still represents the Holocaust, because that's where most of the Jews were killed. Yet I'm also aware it's a very risky project. Sometimes I have fears that I am the one who will be assassinated.


The 54th Venice Biennale, "ILLUMInations," opens to the public June 4 and continues through November 27.

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Venice Biennale - ILLUMInations: 54th International Art Exhibition

From Welcome to Birdhead World Again in Tokyo 2011 - What we take before, now, and in the future is all the same. All images: Courtesy the artists.


Established by the artists Ji Weiyu and Song Tao in 2004, Birdhead is a collaborative unit that uses photography to explore the social and built landscape of contemporary Shanghai and the artists' physical relations to that environment. The unit's works have been selected for inclusion in the artistic director's exhibition at the 54th Venice Biennale, "ILLUMInations," curated by Bice Curiger. ART iT corresponded with Ji Weiyu and Song Tao to learn more about their plans for Venice and their distinctive approach to photography.



Interview:


ART iT: You will be included in this year's Venice Biennale, which takes the theme "ILLUMInations." How do you think your work relates to the exhibition concept?

Birdhead: Bice Curiger has stated about her exhibition, "I have found in the works of numerous contemporary artists (those that most interest me) a shared exploration of light that, whether rational or feverish, strongly evokes the same exploration of light that made Tintoretto's late-period paintings so vivid. Tintoretto similarly dedicated himself to subverting the conventions of his era, producing works through an almost reckless methodology in order to overturn the well-defined classical order of Renaissance art. What interests me about the light that appears in these paintings is not rationality but, rather, beauty." In our view the recklesness that Curiger refers to in this passage, as well as her interest not in rationality but in beauty, coincides exactly with the concerns of our long-term project.


ART iT: Your installation Tang Poetry - On a Gate Tower at Yuzhou (2011), recently on view in the "Artist File 2011" exhibition at National Art Center Tokyo, uses photographs of urban signage to recreate a Tang dynasty poem by Chen Zi'ang, and your project for this year's Venice Biennale includes a similar work that will recreate a poem by Song dynasty poet Xin Qiji, "Chou nu er - Writing on the Wall along the Path to Bo Mountain." Can you explain more about your interest in poetry and how you came to incorporate it in your photographic projects?

Birdhead: Ah! You ought to know about the manga series Dragon Ball - seven dragon balls have been scattered across the world, and it is said that whoever can gather all seven together can summon a dragon that will grant one wish. We search for those Chinese characters that are either still repeatedly in use or are almost obsolete in contemporary life, and then we collage them into classical poems that we like. It is really the same mindset as Dragon Ball. We have realized this wish.


ART iT: Why is it important for you to make the poetry works through photographs? Does this emphasize the idea that words are also objects with their own histories?

Birdhead: It is not our intent to only emphasize the words' material histories. In completing the classical poems through photographing the Chinese characters that circulate in contemporary Chinese society, what is important are the links that are produced through the juxtaposition of the significance of the poetry and the significance of the photographs that we constantly take of people in our physical environments, and the atmospheres that they each establish.






Top: Installation view of Welcome to Birdhead World Again in Tokyo 2011 - What we take before, now, and in the future is all the same at the National Art Center, Tokyo, 2011. Bottom: From Welcome to Birdhead World Again in Tokyo 2011 - What we take before, now, and in the future is all the same.


ART iT: How would you describe your approach to photography? For example, you have said, "What we take before, now, and in the future is all the same," so what does that mean for each individual photograph, or even a specific project like Xin Cun (2006)?

Birdhead: We use formats ranging from 135 film to 4x5 negatives, shooting as we wander about the city, and we also set up specific locations if we feel it's necessary. The large volume of photographs that we have made since 2004 all originate from various aspects of our lives, so for us an individual photograph can never be more than only a small fragment that has been cut out from that. Maintaining this kind of habitual practice, we think photography takes on significance in continually doing the same thing. To put it exactly, through the medium of photography and the recurring connections with our physical environments that it enables, we attain a kind of spiritual discipline. A project like Xin Cun can also be considered part of this.


ART iT: The way we make and look at photographs has been changed by digital technology, which allows for more volume and less selectivity when shooting, and a wider accessibility to images for viewers. Do you think about this aspect of contemporary photography at all in relation to Birdhead? Has it affected your approach?

Birdhead: We have no concern at all for this aspect of contemporary photography. From the moment we first came into contact with the medium of photography to the present, we have always used film. We were not led to take large volumes of photographs because of developments in digital technology. We shoot so many photographs because it is a necessity for us. We certainly have that many photographs that we can shoot, he, he!




Installation view of Tang Poetry - On a Gate Tower at Yuzhou (2011) at National Art
Center, Tokyo, 2011.


ART iT: Finally, was there any reason for choosing Xin Ciji's poem for Venice? How about the selection of photos that will also be there?

Our overall plan for Venice has two parts, Song Poetry - Writing on the Wall along the Path to Bo Mountain, and a separate installation of over 200 photographs. The photographs will be selected from those that we have taken from 2004 to the present. They will be arranged on the wall in an orderly grid. The associations between each photograph will manifest different moods, from joy to sorrow to tranquility to anger, and the significance of the poem and the atmospheres contained in all the photos on display will form a complete presentation.


The 54th Venice Biennale, "ILLUMInations," opens to the public June 4 and continues through November 27.

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Venice Biennale - ILLUMInations: 54th International Art Exhibition

Abdulla Al Saadi - Naked Sweet Potato (2000-10), detail, engravings on rock. Photo Mohamed Somji.



Based in Istanbul where he is research director of the newly established cross-disciplinary organization SALT, Vasif Kortun is curator of the UAE Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, for which he has organized an exhibition of three artists under the title "Second Time Around." Kortun was founding director of one of SALT's predecessors, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, and founding director of Proje 4L, Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art. He has curated and co-curated international exhibitions including the 6th Taipei Biennial, the 3rd and the 9th Istanbul Biennials, and the Turkish Pavilion for the 52nd Venice Biennale. He is a regular contributor to ART iT. ART iT corresponded with Kortun to discuss the context behind the UAE Pavilion and to revisit a previous correspondence he carried out in 2001 with the Mexico City-based critic and curator Cuauhtémoc Medina on "The Local Tango and the Global Dance."



Interview:


ART iT: In 2001 you carried out a correspondence with the Mexico City-based critic and curator Cuauhtémoc Medina that was reproduced in the catalogue of the Walker Art Center's exhibition "How Latitudes Become Forms." Described as an "unfinished conversation," this correspondence problematized issues related to locality and globalism, center and periphery, inside and outside. Now, 10 years later, you have just inaugurated another new institution in Istanbul, SALT, and are curating the UAE Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Were you to resume the conversation, where would you begin?

VK: You're asking me a difficult question regarding the conversation with Cuauhtémoc Medina in relation to what's happening right now in Istanbul and with the UAE Pavilion at Venice. It's a different world, a different time. While I think many things still hold true in terms of what we were discussing - it was a pretty good discussion of its time - I should say none of the things I'm doing now are modulated by a continuation of that conversation. Certain cities east and south have become power corridors. The difficulty for us producers is that we have been part of this empowerment process, and sometimes its progenitors.
Now, we are being edged out due to radical financialization, and we have little knowledge of how to deal with this situation. So we have to take a different tack. One is that the institution we're building in Istanbul at this moment is not strictly a contemporary art institution; it houses different temporalities and different disciplines without the disciplinary knowledge that comes with them. I believe SALT is a model institution for the future that will be emulated pretty soon, probably in ways that will be more successful than what we have been able to achieve so far. We have tried to move beyond issues of local and global, which don't really interest us, although we are working quite a bit with what - for lack of a better word - might be called local and regional contexts. But SALT is an institution with a particular kind of conscience, which I think is critical at this moment. Good politics is necessary. You have to be exemplary in many ways, but also, let's say, joyful. It's going to take time.


ART iT: Can you elaborate on what has changed since 2001? For example, have we moved any closer to what you referred to then as the "emancipation of the contemporary"? Alternatively, has such a concern been rendered obsolete?

VK: The emancipation of the contemporary! No, not really: the last decade developed into the invasion and commercialization of the contemporary. There was also in 2001 my deficiency in understanding some of the nuances of history to which I am increasingly drawn now. I assume this has in part to do with our research at SALT into the history of local exhibitions and writing.


ART iT: What appealed to you about curating this year's UAE Pavilion?

VK: I was approached last year with the possibility of doing two different projects in an either-or situation: one was the UAE Pavilion and the other was a bigger project that I couldn't have taken on at this point in my life. I've been going to the UAE for a long time, and was involved with the Guggenheim project there early on. I have an intimacy with the place and think there is still a possibility for the Gulf to fill a vacancy in the cultural production of the region in particular, which is why I was willing to curate the UAE Pavilion. It's a much more intimate situation than one would think. But that was all before the Arab Spring and the following political clampdown, so it now comes with all those complexities. To navigate through all this with some sense of ethics and moral responsibility is increasingly complicated.


ART iT: In 2007 you curated the Turkish Pavilion at that year's Venice Biennale, which ultimately took the form of a solo project by the late Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin. Prior to that Biennale you said that you think of Venice as a "non-specific place" and that the pavilion was not intended to be a reflection of the state of things in Turkey. Does that experience affect your rationale for selecting the three UAE artists - Abdullah Al Saadi, Lateefa bint Maktoum and Reem Al Gaith - each of whom have distinct artistic approaches and concerns?

VK: You remember very well that I said Venice is a non-specific place, and it still is - it has the luxury to be so. It's a shrinking city - we know all of that already - and it has 100-odd years or so of precisely filling that role. It's like the first pre-post-industrial city, the first "experience city" in the world. The Turkey Pavilion in 2007 was not intended to be a reflection of the state of Turkey, even if that was the case to an extent, whereas the UAE Pavilion is comparitively more representational. It's not intended as a representation exhibition - but it is representational of the UAE at this moment.
The rationale for selecting the artists for the pavilion was very simple and clear - they are all great artists. I conducted many studio visits and we could have had perhaps more artists in the exhibition - that was also a possibility. It's a coming of age for art in the UAE, there are many young artists there at this moment who deserve more than what they have had in terms of coverage and interest at both local and international levels. However, an exhibition is a limited space. At the end of the day it's not the national team, it's three artists from a particular place, that's it.






Top: Lateefa Bint Maktoum - The Last Look (2009), photo montage, archival print, 150 x 100cm. Bottom: Reem Al Ghaith - Dubai: What's Left of Her Land (2011), mixed media, 8 x 8m.


ART iT: The title of your exhibition for the UAE Pavilion, "Second Time Around," refers ironically to the first UAE Pavilion, which in turn was itself a self-conscious reflection on the project of national representations. Do you think it is necessary - or inevitable even - for a national pavilion in this day and age to exhibit an aspect of self-awareness?

VK: The UAE Pavilion in 2009 was different. It was very mediatic in its approach to the UAE, and Tirdad Zolghadr is an amazingly sophisticated curator. He is very good at contextualizing and rethinking the exhibition as a discursive tool. Our practices are quite different, and I wanted to approach the project from another angle - a simple angle focusing solely on the artists.


ART iT: International attention has been focused on the UAE - specifically, Sharjah - since the dismissal of Jack Persekian from his post as artistic director of the Sharjah Art Foundation over the inclusion of a work in the Sharjah Biennial by the Algerian artist Mustapha Benfodil, which was determined to be offensive to public sensibilities. Coincidentally we also have the detention of Ai Weiwei in China and the summary alteration of a work by the artist Simon Fujiwara at the Singapore Biennale. Do these incidents in any way affect your assessment of conditions for art in the UAE in particular and the identity of international art in general?

VK: Frankly I would not put everything you mention in the same box. I would not put Ai Weiwei and Jack Persekian in the same box - that would be a great insult to Ai Weiwei and it would not serve Jack any better. I don't know what Jack's situation or agenda is, but it's really embarrassing that other people have stood up for him while he has not stood up for himself. I don't want to be so harsh but it pisses me off.
With the Singapore Biennale obviously, yes, we're facing censorship all around the world at this moment. It just happened that these things coincided in March and April but a similar event has also just happened in Izmir and other things will happen in the future.
You have to realize that the current censorship of artistic or exhibition production is occurring in the context of the mainstreaming of the business of art. It's not like the old days. Art is now taken notice of because it has a huge institutional structure behind it. It has become a huge business or even economy of sorts, and within that economy there are different kinds of regulatory practices at hand and many of the places where this censorship is happening - UAE, China, Singapore, Turkey - are places that are quite new to the dissemination and production of contemporary art at a given level. It's not like they have 200-year-old traditions of this kind of production. At the same time, you see the same things happening in France or the US - just look at what happened in Washington, DC, with the removal of a work by David Wojnarowicz from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery after Catholic groups targeted it as "hate speech." That's what it is.
These are very, very tough times and I can't quite figure out what's really happening, but it's not looking bright at the moment. The citation of things like local sensibility is the most absurd thing on earth. Who decides who gives the authority to the censor masters or the editors that something is censorable in one place and not in another place? What are they protecting - who are they protecting from whom, and what are they protecting from what? There's no maturation at this moment, certainly in these regions, but also in the global context as well. The world is not a good place right now. It's on a suicidal run, it's on an ugly run, and this is all the more reason why we should continue doing what we do with conviction.
There's one thing to say here, that I don't like shock-and-awe tactics. I don't like avant-gardist transgression, I don't like many of the things that people think are critical. I think of criticality as a long-term process that relies on research and substantial involvement. I don't like criticality as it's produced in one image or another - that doesn't interest me, that doesn't further the discourse. That plays right into the hands of the market and this mentality that if you want criticality, you can go and put your thing on the cover of Colors magazine. That doesn't produce criticality - that produces shock. We have to separate some of these issues. Some people I'm sure would love to show the work of Mustapha Benfodil. I wouldn't. I don't like the work in the first place. But once it's up there, it cannot be taken down.



The 54th Venice Biennale, "ILLUMInations," opens to the public June 4 and continues through November 27.

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Venice Biennale - ILLUMInations: 54th International Art Exhibition

Dayanita Singh - From "File Room" (2011), pigment print, 60 x 60cm. Courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London, and Nature Morte, New Delhi.


The artistic director of the 54th Venice Biennale, Bice Curiger is curator of Kunsthaus Zürich, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Parkett and publishing director of Tate Etc. She has organized monographic exhibitions for artists including Meret Oppenheim, Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke, Fischli/Weiss and Katharina Fritsch. ART iT corresponded with her to discuss the context behind her exhibition for the Biennale, "ILLUMInations."



Interview:


ART iT: While many critiques of the Venice Biennale focus on the perceived anachronism of the national pavilions, in such a context the artistic director's exhibition can also be problematic. Is it a referendum on the state of international contemporary art, or intended only as a thematic counterpoint to the national presentations? In organizing "ILLUMInations," have you given any consideration to the identity of the artistic director's exhibition in relation to the overall Biennale format?

BC: With this year's Biennale I want to show the audience where art has come today: art must be an instrument of thought and illumination, but it also has to defend its specificity. Nowadays we don't have to fight to make contemporary art popular. On the contrary, maybe we have to fight to protect art, to preserve it from vulgarization. We have to keep art popular without destroying its complexity. I've always been fascinated by this peculiar structure, since my first visit in 1980. I think national pavilions are what make the Venice Biennale so unique. I don't mean to be conservative: the history of pavilions is a sign of the countries' desire to participate in an international exchange, a way to highlight cultural developments in a globalized context. I see the Biennale as a sort of borderless map - you can move around without a definite goal.


ART iT: "ILLUMInations" features a significant number of young artists who will be receiving their first major international exposure. Was there anything in particular that you looked for in the young artists? On the other hand, does the inclusion of older artists like Guy de Cointet, Lynn Foulkes and Sturtevant - all diverse in their own rights - point to anything that should be reintroduced to or maintained in the contemporary conversation?

BC: The exhibition is primarily focused on artists who are under 35-years-old, whose works I know and appreciate. I wanted to show younger positions to a broader public that may not be familiar with many of these less-established artists. Works from an older generation deserve to be shown because of their highly contemporary character, which still contributes to the artistic discourse.


ART iT: Your exhibition seems to have a relatively large number of participants working with photography - Birdhead, Shannon Ebner, David Goldblatt, Cindy Sherman, Dayanita Singh to name a few. Is this light-based medium a key point of emphasis for you in realizing the theme "ILLUMInations"? Does the selection of artists working with photography take into account the way that digital technology has affected the production and appreciation of photographic images?

BC: Digital technology has intensified our connectedness to the world of images. It is now a younger generation that is offering innovative insight into the use and reflection of the medium of photography. One might have thought that all has been said after Jeff Wall, or the Düsseldorf School with Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, or after Wolfgang Tillmans, but these younger artists show us that there is still a lot to say.






Top: Song Dong - Intelligence of the Poor: Living with the Tree (2005), installation with steel pipe, wooden door, wooden bed, withered tree, bed sheets, 392 x 245 x 265cm. Courtesy Pace Beijing. Bottom: Jack Goldstein - Untitled (1985), Acrylic on canvas, 183 x 183 x 5cm. © Gerhard Born / Ringier Collection, Switzerland.


ART iT: Your introduction of the "para-pavilions" to this year's exhibition will pair works and structures, respectively, made by four pairs of artists. How did you select the pairs? Did you choose them based on correspondences and/or tensions between their works, or were there preexisting relationships between the artists?

BC: The para-pavilions represent an alternative approach to the national pavilions. The aim with them is to create dynamic moments that can break up the additive structure of a big exhibition. In this way things come together differently and the communication between artists is fostered. I asked Franz West, Oscar Tuazon, Monika Sosnowska and Song Dong to create sculptures that could host other artists' works. Tuazon's para-pavilion will host Asier Mendizibal's slide projection, which would probably get lost were it in the Arsenale, while Franz West's will welcome works by the Indian artist Dayanita Singh. In Monika Sosnoskwa's will be exhibited David Goldblatt's photography and an installation by the young artist Haroon Mirza. Song Dong's para-pavilion will host works of some other artists, as will West's.


ART iT: There are, unfortunately, no artists from Japan in this year's exhibition, but in addition to your citations of Rimbaud and Benjamin in your curatorial statement on "ILLUMInations," one also thinks of Junichiro Tanizaki's essay, "In Praise of Shadows" (1933), which sought to articulate differences between Western and Japanese aesthetics. For Tanizaki, the light of Modernity could be a blinding, sterile light - a light that obscured even as it revealed. What are some of the shadows in your exhibition?

BC: I have read Junichiro Tanizaki's wonderful text. In fact, I hope that by introducing paintings by Tintoretto and works by some contemporary artists like James Turrell, Christopher Wool, Mai-Thu Perret and Jack Goldstein there is also a certain aspect that critiques the sterility of the "light of Modernity."



The 54th Venice Biennale, "ILLUMInations," opens to the public June 4 and continues through November 27.

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Venice Biennale - ILLUMInations: 54th International Art Exhibition

Installation view of the French Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, "Chance," by Christian Boltanski, with kinetic installation The Wheel of Fortune in foreground and the interactive multimedia work Be New in background. All images: Photo Didier Plowy


In July 2010 Christian Boltanski came to Japan to inaugurate a new permanent installation on the island of Teshima, The Heart Archive, as part of the first Setouchi International Art Festival. ART iT met with Boltanski at that time to discuss his relationship to the Internet, his Devil's bargain with the millionaire art collector David Walsh and his plans for the French Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. The ideas discussed a year ago have now materialized in a new exhibition of works that turn the French Pavilion at Venice into a frenetic environment where constantly moving elements evoke the never-ending lottery of life. We present a revised version of the interview here, with new images of Boltanski's French Pavilion, "Chance."



Interview:


ART iT: Throughout your career you have often addressed through your works the idea of the archive. Now that the Internet has become a kind of universal archive, has it altered how you conceive your works?

CB: I think the Internet is incredibly important for the future, but with its excess of information it's also a little dangerous. It would have been very easy to upload The Heart Archive project to the Internet, but I preferred the idea of putting the work in Teshima, so that people must travel to experience it, and maybe think about it as they travel, maybe anticipate what kind of heartbeats they will hear.
I think the beauty of the Internet is that it can connect so many people, and you can be in two places at the same time. I am actually using this aspect of the Internet for my current project streaming video from my studio in France to the collector David Walsh in Tasmania. I had long wanted to make a show in a gallery in which I would be at my studio the whole time and people would go to the gallery to see me making new works, but the works themselves would not be physically present. And then someone could buy an hour in the life of Christian Boltanski for example, and during that time I would be doing something.
But in terms of the Internet as an archive, if I search "Christian Boltanski," there will be something like 20,000 results [an estimated 172,000 results when this interview was first published in July 2010; 389,000 results as of May 2011], which is totally ridiculous because nobody can read all of them, nobody can understand what they mean, and if you read them, half are wrong, but you don't know which are right and which are wrong.


ART iT: Isn't that uncertainty also a mechanism in your installation works using biscuit tins filled with information that nobody else can access?

CB: For me the idea has always been about hiding something - hiding information and having viewers understand that the information is there, but hidden. The difference with the Internet is that nothing is hidden; everything is given. It's beautiful for this reason, but perhaps a little dangerous because there is no mystery anymore.


ART iT: You also use found photographs in your works, so has the Internet changed your relationship with images, to the extent that they are no longer physical?

CB: Yes. If I want a photo of Buenos Aires it's right at my fingertips, whereas before it was difficult to find. Because finding images on the Internet is so easy, you have to know what you want to do with them.
I was actually planning to use the Internet for my presentation in the French Pavilion at next year's Venice Biennale. I was going to make a very large map of the world with red and blue lights over every city. When somebody dies somewhere a blue light would flash over that location, and when somebody is born a red light would flash. But it's not possible because I think something like two people die and four people are born every second, so the map would be constantly lit. I found a website that counts the number of people who die and you see the numbers escalating every second - it's so quick. Of course these are statistical projections and not actual deaths, but I am still thinking about how to address the representation of birth and death for Venice.





Both: Installation view of Last News from Humans in the French Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, "Chance," by Christian Boltanski. Top: The Births. Bottom: The Deaths.


ART iT: In that sense your work has often addressed - sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly - the idea of the Holocaust.

CB: It's true and it's not true. It's true that the Holocaust has been important for me personally, and also because such a large number of deaths occurred. What's strange for me with the Holocaust is that I can imagine 1,000 deaths, but I really can't imagine six million. I believe it's also something that could equally apply to Hiroshima or elsewhere.


ART iT: But if we consider death as a metaphor, perhaps the Holocaust anticipates the Internet in showing us the new volumes achieved by technology.

CB: What you say is very interesting because the volume is very important for me. That was the idea behind the installation I just did for the Monumenta project at the Grand Palais in Paris, Personnes (2010), with the piles of used clothing. To kill somebody is certainly terrible, but what is even more terrible is to erase that person's name. In the Nazi death camps the victims had their names taken away and replaced by numbers, and for me that is the truly terrible aspect of what happened.
There's another piece I did that is in a way related to the Internet, Les Abonnés du Téléphone (2000), for which I collected thousands of telephone books from around the world and installed them in a small room. The installation contains something like 600,000 names, although of course now the telephone books are obsolete because all the information is on the Internet. But I envision this piece as a kind of library of all the people who were living on Earth at a given time.
In my work there's always this idea of uniqueness in big numbers. So even if I were able to assemble all the heartbeats in the world in my Heart Archive, it would be one unique heartbeat after another, and even if all the heartbeats seem very similar to each other, there would always be something individual within the collective.


ART iT: Your early works reconstructing your childhood as well as your mail-art projects seemed to operate on a much more intimate or personal scale. When did you start to think in more expanded, universal terms?

CB: I think I have always been concerned about the idea of disappearance. At first I was concerned about the idea of my childhood disappearing. Then there was a second period, which dealt with collective memory. And now there is a third period in which I have returned to my own memory.
In any case my goal is always to preserve memory, but I always fail. As with the Internet, you can have thousands and thousands of documentations, but they won't add up to a real person. I think in a way what I try to do and what the Internet tries to do is to resist god, but it's impossible.


ART iT: So you compare yourself to the Internet?

CB: In a way I do, because I want to preserve and accumulate memory. For example I have made books, like Archive of the Carnegie International 1896-1991, filled only with names, and in my studio I have so many archives, including maybe 7,000 photos of dead Swiss people. In Teshima we already have something like 16,000 heartbeat recordings, but what we have is only the spirit, not the actual people. Ultimately I am unable to protect anybody. One of the motivations of my work is to show that in fact we can't protect anything. We can have a lot of information and we can continue to add to that information but we can't preserve life. And the more information you have about somebody the more you feel that person's absence. That's the problem with numbers.
When I'm in Paris or Tokyo and I look at the streets there are so many people, and each person has their own life and story, and each person would be marvelous to know, but it's impossible - there's no time. I made a piece four or five years ago, Prendre la Parole (2005), which was an installation of simple plywood constructions with clothes hung on them to resemble people. There were around 40 of them, and each one had an audio component as well. So one of them says, "I'm happy," another says, "I work a lot," or "I'm clever," each one says something different. And I think that is what interests me. Everybody looks more or less similar, but everybody is unique.
With the Internet we can take that even further. I was very happy to discover one day these websites with girls with whom you can interact through video cameras, and you know that it is indirect but there are thousands and thousands of these girls and if you pay a little more you can ask them to do things for you, although I never went that far. What interests me is that you never know where these girls actually are. Maybe in the morning they are in China and then in the evening they are in Argentina, but there is no real way to identify them. You can interact with them but at the same time know nothing about them. That was fascinating to me.
And from there I imagined somebody who might be in love with a girl, and knows that she exists somewhere, but can't find her. I imagined it to be something very beautiful to see this girl everyday and be in love with her, but with no way of reaching her. And then sometimes this lover could say, "Oh, it must be sunny where you are because I can see your window," or "It must be nighttime because it's dark." I found the idea very beautiful and wanted to make a piece about it, but in the end I couldn't find a way to realize it. This was last summer. And now I can no longer find the same girl with whom I was communicating. It's impossible, totally lost.



Installation view of the interactive multimedia work Be New in the French Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, "Chance," by Christian Boltanski.


ART iT: The volume of pornography on the Internet is also staggering. Thinking about the volume of death and the volume of pornography reminds me of your works with found images. Do you conceive of the anonymous photograph as a conceptual sculpture in the sense that it represents the surface of an unknown volume?

CB: In fact for a long time I have regarded dead bodies, photographs and clothes in the same light. They are objects that are related to subjects that are absent. When you have a photo of somebody you can pick it up - it's an object - but it's in relation to an absent subject. If you have a used coat, it's also an object in relation to an absent subject. If you have a dead body, it's also an object in relation to an absent subject.


ART iT: Then more precisely we might say it's not an unknown volume, but a negative volume?

CB: Yes. It's like the heartbeats: there was somebody. There was somebody, and now we have an object, but we can destroy it if we want, because it's only an object. And if you speak about the Holocaust, there's always this idea with the Nazis that they were dealing not with people but with objects. The Nazis always said, "Today we have 20 tons of material arriving." It was never "1,000 people," it was always "x-number of tons of material." That was the terminology. And for me it's true that this relation between object and subject is very important, as is the relation between the name and the person. I can imagine a scenario where someone says, "We're going to war but it won't be so bad, only 1,000 people will die and that's not so many." But it's not 1,000 people, it's one who loved spaghetti, one who had a girlfriend, one who loved football, it's always one plus one plus one. Democracy itself must be one plus one plus one, and if you quantify a group of people into a lump sum it becomes very dangerous. One of my major concerns is that I really believe that everybody is both very important and yet very fragile, and after two or three generations, everybody will be forgotten.
What I do with my art is to show that it's impossible to protect something completely. Now for this piece in Tasmania what I am doing is speaking about the fact that I'm dying, and accepting that fact. The collector David Walsh is like a computer in a way - and he may actually be able to calculate faster than a computer - because he believes that he cannot lose. The real idea of the piece is to say, I hope to win, but perhaps I am going to lose. It's only a question of time. If you see a baby on the street, even that baby will die some day. For me it is very important to speak about that and to not refute it.


The 54th Venice Biennale, "ILLUMInations," opens to the public June 4 and continues through November 27.

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Venice Biennale - ILLUMInations: 54th International Art Exhibition