Kimsooja: Part I
POINTS OF CONVERGENCE
By Andrew Maerkle
Still from Thread Routes - Chapter 1 (2010), 16mm film transferred to HD format, 29 min 31 sec, sound. All images: Courtesy of Kimsooja Studio.
In 1999, in Tokyo's bustling Shibuya neighborhood, Kimsooja produced the first in a series of performance videos collectively titled A Needle Woman (1999-2001). Standing still in the middle of the oncoming crowds, the artist achieved a minimal but not insignificant intervention into the rhythm of local daily life. Simultaneously confrontational and vulnerable, her action opened a window onto the collective humanity of the passersby - viewed from the advantage of hindsight, it is perhaps they who were the vulnerable ones that day. The first version of A Needle Woman eventually led Kimsooja to make similar performances in seven other international metropolises, while in 2005 she revisited the piece by traveling to an additional six zones of conflict and social tension, among them Jerusalem, N'Djamena and Patan.
A Needle Woman is part of a larger body of work investigating themes ranging from memory and form to nature and consciousness. Often invoking images related to fabric - namely, the Korean bottari cloth bundle, but also threads and needles - such works ask viewers to reconsider their bodily relations to social structures, and reflect about what it means to be both an individual and a member of a community. Realized and exhibited in cities across the world, they offer a universal perspective, but also reflect the unique conditions of specific times and places.
ART iT met with Kimsooja in Tokyo to discuss her practice to date and how she relates to issues of globalism, locality and site-specificity.
I. Other-Self-World
Kimsooja on art as a methodology of living in the age of globalization.
Video still (Tokyo, Japan) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6:33 min loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: You've done projects in cities around the world, ranging from Lagos and Delhi to New York, Paris and Tokyo. Given that experience, what does locality mean to you, and has its significance for you changed over time?
Kimsooja: First of all, I must say that I was never interested in globalism and that was not my starting point for traveling around the world doing site-specific performances and video pieces. I was mostly interested in locality. In the mid-1990s my Cities on the Move-2727km Bottari Truck (1997) performance video piece coincided with the emergence of global issues in the international art scene, and my work received exposure in the context of globalism from curators who were trying to understand the phenomenon as it relates to contemporary art. However, as an artist, I was only focused on each city and its own locality. I valued the beauty of the pure authenticity and reality of each city.
I have witnessed the development and transformation of many metropolises over the years. When I visited Lagos in 2000, the city had very tough living conditions, yet maintained authentic cultural realities. Now I hear the rough areas have been smoothed out and completely developed. For example, there was the Oshodi open-air marketplace that had been established along active railway tracks, which stretched for miles almost to the horizon. When a train arrived, people selling goods on the railway tracks would immediately clear out and then return once the train had passed. The marketplace was constantly moving and taking on different forms and dynamics. If it rained, the sellers would still stand there with their goods, even when the water reached their knees. It was the most amazing marketplace I had ever seen, and I’ve always wanted to return there to work again, but I hear now the market no longer exists as before. I understand that for the local economy it might be more productive to be modernized, but in terms of the authenticity of the local way of living and culture, I think it's a shame. With globalization, everything has become so standardized.
Video still (Shanghai, China) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: What was the impetus for you wanting to make the video pieces in different cities?
Kimsooja: The motivation began with the A Needle Woman performance I did in Tokyo in 1999 for a commission by CCA Kitakyushu. I was thinking of doing a walking performance piece, but didn't have a definite idea, so I walked around the city waiting to find the right moment and energy in the right place. After walking for several hours I arrived at Shibuya. When I saw the hundreds and thousands of people coming and going, I was so overwhelmed that I couldn't walk any further and had to stop there immediately, hearing my own silent inner scream right at that moment. Once I stopped, I also realized the meaning of walking.
I asked the videographer to film me from behind. At the beginning of the performance it was very difficult to stand in the middle of a crowded street with all the people's energy coming toward me. I was determined to stand still; at the same time, I was in a vulnerable situation. I was totally exposed, but as time passed, I found my own center. I became very focused and entered a meditative state. As I stood there, I felt myself begin to mentally embrace and wrap the people who were passing me. I entered a state of mind of total concentration and peace, which allowed me to experience a certain kind of enlightenment. When I looked at the horizon of the waves of oncoming people, I could see a bright light coming from beyond them, and I found myself looking at the entire humanity of the world.
From this special experience, I determined to continue making A Needle Woman performances around the world in order to meet, possibly, every single person in the world. That was the starting point. For the first version of A Needle Woman (1999-2001), I was interested in major metropolises where I could meet many people on the street. In addition to Tokyo, I made performances in Shanghai, New Delhi, Mexico City, Lagos, Cairo, London and New York.
Video still (New Delhi, India) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: You've spoken about the needle as a hermaphroditic tool that is both aggressive and passive. To stand in the middle of the crowd is both a vulnerable and a confrontational action, all the more so in a city where you're not a local. Is the confrontation an important part of the work?
Kimsooja: Every performance is a confrontation, both with one's self and the other. In this performance, the confrontation moved from the people on the street to myself and then slowly extended to the whole world, until ultimately I achieved a level of compassion whereby self and other became one. During the performances, these transformations were happening in my mind rather than in my body.
Of course, there were many different physical reactions from the different cities. Tokyo was the most critical experience I had - people in Tokyo were aware of others next to them, but they pretended not to see them. When you see the video from Tokyo, my body is there, but it seems as if I myself am not there. I am totally ignored or isolated from the crowd, as they don't pay attention to me or acknowledge my presence. I'm an invisible person, yet this is one of the most crowded streets in the world. The time-based video makes apparent this phenomenon. It's as if I am a ghost, or my body becomes increasingly transparent. It's also interesting how my state of mind changed during the course of the performance, because the more I embraced the people into my mind, the more I was also liberated from them, and could empty myself. The visual and physical processed and the psychological, spiritual process were moving in opposite directions.
Your comment on confrontation interests me not only in regard to my performance pieces but also in regard to earlier sewing pieces and installations. These were also very much related to a confrontation with "the other," through the medium of the canvas.
Video still (New York, USA) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: How did the experience change from city to city? Did you see different things about yourself in different cities?
Kimsooja: Yes. It depended on the location and the energy of the place. In New Delhi, people found an Asian woman standing in the middle of the street to be very odd and mysterious, perhaps because of their associations with religious imagery in Indian culture. They would stop and look at me for a few minutes, trying to find out who I was and what I was doing. Some people would ask the camera crew whether I was a Buddha or a sculpture.
During the performances, I never engaged anybody in a direct gaze. I would focus on a single, vanishing point. This helped to keep myself stable, although I knew what was happening and how people looked at me. In New Delhi, the inner gazes shared between my mind and their minds were very intense. In Shanghai, people were only half-interested and would quickly return to their own business after glancing at me. In Cairo, people were playful and curious. Some people would stand in front of me, mirroring my position for a few minutes. There was also a man who brought a bottle of cologne and sprayed it in front of me to get my attention, and a woman who grabbed my ponytail and move it around my body. The reactions tended to be direct and very provocative.
In New York, people were always interested in looking all around, searching for new information on the street, so their heads were constantly moving - eating, walking, talking, laughing, sometimes mimicking me. In London, where there is a similar multinational population, they were more turned in on themselves, and their gazes tended to be directed downwards at a 45-degree angle, rather than looking up. So these performances gave me insight into the mentality of the people in each city and different cultures in various geographies.
Video still (Mexico City, Mexico) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: Have you ever done A Needle Woman or a similar kind of performance in Korea?
Kimsooja: No. I didn't want to position myself in the same place where I’ve lived for over 40 years. I wanted to have a degree of separation from and objectivity to the cities where I performed. Had I done it in Korea, everything would have been too familiar, with less tension. It would have been difficult to create a distinction between my body and the others - even if there were a visible distinction - because mentally and historically we share so much together. This was a piece that had to be examined outside of my own context.
Video still (Cairo, Egypt) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: But you have done other projects and of course exhibitions in Korea, such as the Earth - Water - Fire - Air (2010) installation of videos along the breakwater of the Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant. What is your relationship - through your creative process - with Korea?
Kimsooja: Passions and troubles can feed creativity. All my problems are good resources. My private life, my family, my friends, my country - cultural, political and social relationships can all be material for me to work with. The more I know my own culture, the more I actually feel estranged from it because I know where it comes from and yet I know that I'm not fully part of it. It was interesting for me to have grown up in a society that was undergoing economic and political turbulence. But then I thought that living in the same homeland for about 40 years is more than enough to learn what you can from one place. I thought that if I continued to live there I would just repeat myself, and I needed another vital ground. Another factor in leaving Korea was that even until the late 1990s it was difficult for female artists to receive recognition or support in the male-dominated social hierarchy.
Video still (Lagos, Nigeria) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec min loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: Did this idea that you were moving away from your homeland at all affect the dynamic of doing projects in other cities and countries? For example, what keeps your practice from acting out a kind of artistic globalization?
Kimsooja: I think of globalization as being related to things like the profusion of a few brands across the world, or a process in which everything becomes standardized and preexisting cultures or ways of thinking and living are slowly eradicated. My intention with A Needle Woman was more about inner experience rather than expressing myself or showing off. For me, the performance inevitably became a kind of ontological question about living in the world, and the world in which I am living became my canvas - a backdrop, rather than a market. I’ve always been interested in experiencing the wakefulness of being in the world, rather than necessarily transforming my experience for the audience. Simply, the latter came naturally as a result of my being an artist.
If there is a certain global aspect in my work, it's perhaps more in that I present the performances together in multi-channel video installations so that viewers can simultaneously see the different momentums of each city around the world. But I don't know if I recreate the standardized format of globalization. I am the same person and I am doing the same performance, but my inner transformation has always been there.
Is it possible for me to become a global item? I don't know. It could be interesting if that were so. Obviously, in the current era artists can take on brand-name value. I never thought of that in my own practice because for me it's not about the product or a work of art but the artist as a being. Art is a methodology of living for me.
Video still (London, England) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: Maybe it's no coincidence, though, that in the age of globalization we have seen a rise in site-specific commissions asking artists to fly some place, do research and produce a project in that context. Sometimes this approach can produce powerful works, but it can also become an empty gesture towards an idealized notion of locality.
Kimsooja: Yes, it is true, and depending on the practices such commissions can take shape in different ways. Performance can be very different from installation, sculpture or even painting, which normally has less site-specificity in terms of interaction and can travel anywhere. A space-oriented site-specificity will be different from a time-oriented specificity, and a politically-oriented specificity will also be different from the other two. It varies so much with each project that it's very difficult to generalize.
Part II. Mirror-Void-Other
Kimsooja on the performance of non-action.
Kimsooja: Points of Convergence
By Andrew Maerkle
Still from Thread Routes - Chapter 1 (2010), 16mm film transferred to HD format, 29 min 31 sec, sound. All images: Courtesy of Kimsooja Studio.
In 1999, in Tokyo's bustling Shibuya neighborhood, Kimsooja produced the first in a series of performance videos collectively titled A Needle Woman (1999-2001). Standing still in the middle of the oncoming crowds, the artist achieved a minimal but not insignificant intervention into the rhythm of local daily life. Simultaneously confrontational and vulnerable, her action opened a window onto the collective humanity of the passersby - viewed from the advantage of hindsight, it is perhaps they who were the vulnerable ones that day. The first version of A Needle Woman eventually led Kimsooja to make similar performances in seven other international metropolises, while in 2005 she revisited the piece by traveling to an additional six zones of conflict and social tension, among them Jerusalem, N'Djamena and Patan.
A Needle Woman is part of a larger body of work investigating themes ranging from memory and form to nature and consciousness. Often invoking images related to fabric - namely, the Korean bottari cloth bundle, but also threads and needles - such works ask viewers to reconsider their bodily relations to social structures, and reflect about what it means to be both an individual and a member of a community. Realized and exhibited in cities across the world, they offer a universal perspective, but also reflect the unique conditions of specific times and places.
ART iT met with Kimsooja in Tokyo to discuss her practice to date and how she relates to issues of globalism, locality and site-specificity.
I. Other-Self-World
Kimsooja on art as a methodology of living in the age of globalization.
Video still (Tokyo, Japan) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6:33 min loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: You've done projects in cities around the world, ranging from Lagos and Delhi to New York, Paris and Tokyo. Given that experience, what does locality mean to you, and has its significance for you changed over time?
Kimsooja: First of all, I must say that I was never interested in globalism and that was not my starting point for traveling around the world doing site-specific performances and video pieces. I was mostly interested in locality. In the mid-1990s my Cities on the Move-2727km Bottari Truck (1997) performance video piece coincided with the emergence of global issues in the international art scene, and my work received exposure in the context of globalism from curators who were trying to understand the phenomenon as it relates to contemporary art. However, as an artist, I was only focused on each city and its own locality. I valued the beauty of the pure authenticity and reality of each city.
I have witnessed the development and transformation of many metropolises over the years. When I visited Lagos in 2000, the city had very tough living conditions, yet maintained authentic cultural realities. Now I hear the rough areas have been smoothed out and completely developed. For example, there was the Oshodi open-air marketplace that had been established along active railway tracks, which stretched for miles almost to the horizon. When a train arrived, people selling goods on the railway tracks would immediately clear out and then return once the train had passed. The marketplace was constantly moving and taking on different forms and dynamics. If it rained, the sellers would still stand there with their goods, even when the water reached their knees. It was the most amazing marketplace I had ever seen, and I’ve always wanted to return there to work again, but I hear now the market no longer exists as before. I understand that for the local economy it might be more productive to be modernized, but in terms of the authenticity of the local way of living and culture, I think it's a shame. With globalization, everything has become so standardized.
Video still (Shanghai, China) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: What was the impetus for you wanting to make the video pieces in different cities?
Kimsooja: The motivation began with the A Needle Woman performance I did in Tokyo in 1999 for a commission by CCA Kitakyushu. I was thinking of doing a walking performance piece, but didn't have a definite idea, so I walked around the city waiting to find the right moment and energy in the right place. After walking for several hours I arrived at Shibuya. When I saw the hundreds and thousands of people coming and going, I was so overwhelmed that I couldn't walk any further and had to stop there immediately, hearing my own silent inner scream right at that moment. Once I stopped, I also realized the meaning of walking.
I asked the videographer to film me from behind. At the beginning of the performance it was very difficult to stand in the middle of a crowded street with all the people's energy coming toward me. I was determined to stand still; at the same time, I was in a vulnerable situation. I was totally exposed, but as time passed, I found my own center. I became very focused and entered a meditative state. As I stood there, I felt myself begin to mentally embrace and wrap the people who were passing me. I entered a state of mind of total concentration and peace, which allowed me to experience a certain kind of enlightenment. When I looked at the horizon of the waves of oncoming people, I could see a bright light coming from beyond them, and I found myself looking at the entire humanity of the world.
From this special experience, I determined to continue making A Needle Woman performances around the world in order to meet, possibly, every single person in the world. That was the starting point. For the first version of A Needle Woman (1999-2001), I was interested in major metropolises where I could meet many people on the street. In addition to Tokyo, I made performances in Shanghai, New Delhi, Mexico City, Lagos, Cairo, London and New York.
Video still (New Delhi, India) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: You've spoken about the needle as a hermaphroditic tool that is both aggressive and passive. To stand in the middle of the crowd is both a vulnerable and a confrontational action, all the more so in a city where you're not a local. Is the confrontation an important part of the work?
Kimsooja: Every performance is a confrontation, both with one's self and the other. In this performance, the confrontation moved from the people on the street to myself and then slowly extended to the whole world, until ultimately I achieved a level of compassion whereby self and other became one. During the performances, these transformations were happening in my mind rather than in my body.
Of course, there were many different physical reactions from the different cities. Tokyo was the most critical experience I had - people in Tokyo were aware of others next to them, but they pretended not to see them. When you see the video from Tokyo, my body is there, but it seems as if I myself am not there. I am totally ignored or isolated from the crowd, as they don't pay attention to me or acknowledge my presence. I'm an invisible person, yet this is one of the most crowded streets in the world. The time-based video makes apparent this phenomenon. It's as if I am a ghost, or my body becomes increasingly transparent. It's also interesting how my state of mind changed during the course of the performance, because the more I embraced the people into my mind, the more I was also liberated from them, and could empty myself. The visual and physical processed and the psychological, spiritual process were moving in opposite directions.
Your comment on confrontation interests me not only in regard to my performance pieces but also in regard to earlier sewing pieces and installations. These were also very much related to a confrontation with "the other," through the medium of the canvas.
Video still (New York, USA) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: How did the experience change from city to city? Did you see different things about yourself in different cities?
Kimsooja: Yes. It depended on the location and the energy of the place. In New Delhi, people found an Asian woman standing in the middle of the street to be very odd and mysterious, perhaps because of their associations with religious imagery in Indian culture. They would stop and look at me for a few minutes, trying to find out who I was and what I was doing. Some people would ask the camera crew whether I was a Buddha or a sculpture.
During the performances, I never engaged anybody in a direct gaze. I would focus on a single, vanishing point. This helped to keep myself stable, although I knew what was happening and how people looked at me. In New Delhi, the inner gazes shared between my mind and their minds were very intense. In Shanghai, people were only half-interested and would quickly return to their own business after glancing at me. In Cairo, people were playful and curious. Some people would stand in front of me, mirroring my position for a few minutes. There was also a man who brought a bottle of cologne and sprayed it in front of me to get my attention, and a woman who grabbed my ponytail and move it around my body. The reactions tended to be direct and very provocative.
In New York, people were always interested in looking all around, searching for new information on the street, so their heads were constantly moving - eating, walking, talking, laughing, sometimes mimicking me. In London, where there is a similar multinational population, they were more turned in on themselves, and their gazes tended to be directed downwards at a 45-degree angle, rather than looking up. So these performances gave me insight into the mentality of the people in each city and different cultures in various geographies.
Video still (Mexico City, Mexico) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: Have you ever done A Needle Woman or a similar kind of performance in Korea?
Kimsooja: No. I didn't want to position myself in the same place where I’ve lived for over 40 years. I wanted to have a degree of separation from and objectivity to the cities where I performed. Had I done it in Korea, everything would have been too familiar, with less tension. It would have been difficult to create a distinction between my body and the others - even if there were a visible distinction - because mentally and historically we share so much together. This was a piece that had to be examined outside of my own context.
Video still (Cairo, Egypt) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: But you have done other projects and of course exhibitions in Korea, such as the Earth - Water - Fire - Air (2010) installation of videos along the breakwater of the Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant. What is your relationship - through your creative process - with Korea?
Kimsooja: Passions and troubles can feed creativity. All my problems are good resources. My private life, my family, my friends, my country - cultural, political and social relationships can all be material for me to work with. The more I know my own culture, the more I actually feel estranged from it because I know where it comes from and yet I know that I'm not fully part of it. It was interesting for me to have grown up in a society that was undergoing economic and political turbulence. But then I thought that living in the same homeland for about 40 years is more than enough to learn what you can from one place. I thought that if I continued to live there I would just repeat myself, and I needed another vital ground. Another factor in leaving Korea was that even until the late 1990s it was difficult for female artists to receive recognition or support in the male-dominated social hierarchy.
Video still (Lagos, Nigeria) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec min loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: Did this idea that you were moving away from your homeland at all affect the dynamic of doing projects in other cities and countries? For example, what keeps your practice from acting out a kind of artistic globalization?
Kimsooja: I think of globalization as being related to things like the profusion of a few brands across the world, or a process in which everything becomes standardized and preexisting cultures or ways of thinking and living are slowly eradicated. My intention with A Needle Woman was more about inner experience rather than expressing myself or showing off. For me, the performance inevitably became a kind of ontological question about living in the world, and the world in which I am living became my canvas - a backdrop, rather than a market. I’ve always been interested in experiencing the wakefulness of being in the world, rather than necessarily transforming my experience for the audience. Simply, the latter came naturally as a result of my being an artist.
If there is a certain global aspect in my work, it's perhaps more in that I present the performances together in multi-channel video installations so that viewers can simultaneously see the different momentums of each city around the world. But I don't know if I recreate the standardized format of globalization. I am the same person and I am doing the same performance, but my inner transformation has always been there.
Is it possible for me to become a global item? I don't know. It could be interesting if that were so. Obviously, in the current era artists can take on brand-name value. I never thought of that in my own practice because for me it's not about the product or a work of art but the artist as a being. Art is a methodology of living for me.
Video still (London, England) from A Needle Woman (1999-2001), 8-channel video projection, 6 min 33 sec loop, silent. Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.
ART iT: Maybe it's no coincidence, though, that in the age of globalization we have seen a rise in site-specific commissions asking artists to fly some place, do research and produce a project in that context. Sometimes this approach can produce powerful works, but it can also become an empty gesture towards an idealized notion of locality.
Kimsooja: Yes, it is true, and depending on the practices such commissions can take shape in different ways. Performance can be very different from installation, sculpture or even painting, which normally has less site-specificity in terms of interaction and can travel anywhere. A space-oriented site-specificity will be different from a time-oriented specificity, and a politically-oriented specificity will also be different from the other two. It varies so much with each project that it's very difficult to generalize.
Part II. Mirror-Void-Other
Kimsooja on the performance of non-action.
Kimsooja: Points of Convergence
Martha Rosler
THE GARDEN SPEAKS FOR ITSELF
By Andrew Maerkle and Natsuko Odate
Proposed Helsinki Garden at the Singapore Biennale (2011), site-specific community project commissioned by the Singapore Biennale 2011 . Photo Mae Ee Wong. All images: Courtesy Martha Rosler.
In March 2011 Martha Rosler was in Singapore to participate in the opening of the 3rd Singapore Biennale, "Open House," where she initiated a unique project to work with local artists and communities to transform a site at the Old Kallang Airport into a multi-faceted garden. Entitled Proposed Helsinki Garden at the Singapore Biennale (2011), this project developed from a preexisting proposal by the artist to produce a public garden as part of a commission by the Helsinki Business Campus in Finland. Partly due to concerns over whether the Helsinki proposal would be an artwork or a park, and whether Helsinki Business Campus or the city would be responsible for its administration, the garden was never realized. Although the Singapore garden does not particularly resemble the Helsinki proposal, in its referencing of this incident in an entirely new context it comments on the circulation of international art, and the local and global contingencies that define that circulation. And in its realization not by Rosler herself but rather by local agents, it also stages a canny reflexive critique of the artist's complicity in that circulation, and the eagerness of events like the Singapore Biennale to control and capitalize on the mystique of the artist, even at the expense of their own constituencies.
Only allusively apparent in the Singapore garden, which could ultimately still be enjoyed for what it is - a communal green space - these themes were expanded further by Rosler in the Biennale's March 12 keynote lecture at the Singapore Art Museum. Drawing upon broad swathes of intellectual and social histories, the lecture considered art's agency in an age of unprecedented internationalization.
ART iT met with Rosler following her lecture to discuss her understanding of the relations between local practice and global visibility in greater depth.
Interview:
ART iT: In your keynote lecture for the 3rd Singapore Biennale, you discussed the contradictions of international biennale exhibitions, and how they inevitably suppress the local in a performance of the global. In your role as an internationally active artist mediating between the local and the global, do you feel any complicity in these contradictions?
MR: Yes. I'm not exempt from these contradictions. That's the way it is. One tries to acknowledge them, but also to see what can be planted, if you will, going in both directions. Ultimately, Proposed Helsinki Garden at the Singapore Biennale is not my project; it's a local project. I provided the framework, opened the door and met with people, and they can carry it forward. But it's also a demonstration project, in that it's a real garden and a metaphoric series of interventions in the concepts of circulation and locality, as well as the idea of society as a garden, which is specifically relevant here in Singapore.
ART iT: How involved were you in working with the local artists on this project?
MR: I produced papers, little dossiers, on what a community garden might be, including its metaphorical aspects. I gave the curator, Russell Storer, an idea of likely types of participants, and he provided me with excellent contacts and referrals. I wrote letters of invitation, mostly to women. The initial contacts were with Amanda Heng, Susie Lingham, Sylvia Lim and Hazel Lim. Further contacts came from them, in an expanding network. I noted all the exchanges: who offered me advice, who offered help, who said yes, and what their preliminary proposals were. I made a set of little cards, with one for each person, so that when I arrived, I could call and set up meetings. In effect, I became an administrator, a facilitator.
I laid out a site plan; I wanted paths so visitors would know the project entailed the whole site, and then we worked out the final proposals, budgets and requirements, and we sent them in to the Biennale office. Susie Lingham, a professor at the National Institute of Education, works with art teachers who also work with students. Susie brought her students and they brought their students, and thus the project became a nice way to promote art in schools. Lucy Davis, at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, also brought her students; working with Shawn Lum, head of the Nature Society, the interlocking groups accomplished several projects. Sha Najak, an artist who works with migrants, brought in a group of domestic workers, who designed and planted an herb garden centered on a sculpture. Some people volunteered to work on organizational matters, which is quite wonderful because this is a project that has to be sustained after I leave.
This is not my normal way of setting up a project, and I am really gratified about the response in Singapore. The people involved have been amazing, particularly the women; they understood immediately what I had in mind, and that I really wanted it to be a local project. The people I contacted could easily have said, "Why should we do this? It's our labor, and your name," but they understood that the garden was theirs to make, and they could propose anything. Obviously if a proposal went beyond the grounds of feasibility or budget, we wouldn't be able to manage to institute it, but that did not happen. People made very diverse proposals, and we started planting and building.
From Proposed Helsinki Garden at the Singapore Biennale (2011). Top: Planning meeting at Old Kallang Airport. Bottom: Yap Von Bing and Shawn Lum of the Nature Society (left) and "Pioneer Landscape Development Project" by Lucy Davis and Shawn Lum (right). Both: Photo Lucy Davis.
ART iT: At the Biennale preview it was difficult to see how the garden would take shape, because everything was still being planted. Once the garden is completed will its overall appearance necessarily have any significance?
MR: As a complete entity, it represents communal labor, although you can't look at it and say "I see communal labor." But that's what it is. It's not a landscape project. It's a project of thinking - together and separately - asking, what can I do that I want to do here? But visually it will be a green oasis with spots for contemplation, recreation, regeneration and edification, since the projects vary from scientific to poetic to edible. There is a purple medicinal garden, a circular grass mandala surrounded by shaded benches and a large map of Singapore, with the places named for trees, planted with saplings.
ART iT: What are the origins of this kind of approach? For example, when did you start trying to deal with the contradictions involved in the international circulation of contemporary art?
MR: Since the 1970s, I've been asking, what does it mean to be invited as an artist somewhere - what do I bring that's more than just a "message" from far away? I try to be mindful of context, and that applies to projects in the US as well. I try to make works that have some relationship to what's locally important. Occasionally I've even been censored because of that.
ART iT: In 1989 you organized the "If You Lived Here…" project at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. Would you say that the organization for Dia provided a model for Singapore?
MR: Yes, in some ways "If You Lived Here…" was a similar project, but on urban housing and homelessness. In that project also, I invited individuals and groups to participate. Dia offered a certain amount of financial support for the projects, and we had meeting after meeting in setting up the shows. It was much harder to organize, maybe because in New York the cold weather makes things more difficult, and because the non-artist participants were busy, or uncertain. I invited activists and advocacy groups that had to take time out from their work schedules to collaborate, but it worked out just fine. For Singapore, I didn't realize I was going to wind up repeating myself methodologically, but a group project just seemed like an obvious thing to do, especially once I saw the title of the exhibition was to be "Open House." I wanted to focus on something that was both domestic and public, which is why I tried to pitch the project especially to women, who rarely are afforded a collective public space in Singapore.
From SkulpturProjekte Münster '07. Top: Luftwaffe Eagle replica at the Principal Markt (left) and two replica cages at the City Library (right). Bottom: Replica bamboo maze on the Lambertikirche plaza. All: Photo Martha Rosler.
ART iT: In contrast, your project in 2007 for Skulptur Projekte Münster, Unsettling the Fragments, seemed to be a more definitively sculptural, as opposed to communal, work.
MR: Yes, that's true; most of my work is not collaborative. I have periodically worked with garden materials, but in that case it was my own work, and not a project by local people. But did you realize there was also a garden as part of that project? My contribution was in four parts: three sculptural elements, plus a visual display on the City Library windows. There was the eagle [a Luftwaffe standard on a pole], there were the cages [used to display the bodies of the Anabaptists who were executed following the 1535 Münster Rebellion], and there was a bamboo maze [as in the Botanical Garden] on the main church plaza.
ART iT: Is the difference in working methods related to the location of Singapore?
MR: Partly. I signed all my letters of invitation Artist, Brooklyn, New York. One artist wrote to me, not necessarily in an unfriendly fashion: "What does an artist from Brooklyn have to bring to Singapore for gardening?" I replied, "The garden." It's your garden, but that's what I bring.
As to Münster, I made many visits there and I wanted to do something about local history. I met with a few local representatives and developed my idea of quoting architectural and other fragments. In the same year, I did a garden project for Documenta 12, Kassel Gardens (from the Perspective of the Mole), but I didn't produce a garden; instead I used photos of the gardens of Kassel as a way of exploring its history. There was no collaborative element there, either, though in both cases my engagement was with the local.
But I did a collaborative work with my students at the Venice Biennale in 2003. It involved 30 people in different places, and I set up the parameters of the work, but the projects were theirs. I was teaching in three different schools in three different countries at the time and there was also participation by an online group of former students, so it was a pedagogical project in a sense, but really it was just about, "let's all do this together." But that was the least locally focused of the works we've been discussing. The show we were in was called "Utopia Station," and our plans centered on an imaginary state.
Top: Meeting conducted by Homeward Bound Community Services at the exhibition "Homeless: The Street and Other Venues," part of the cycle "If You Lived Here..." at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1989. Bottom: Hut constructed by the Mad Housers and other projects at the exhibition "Homeless: The Street and Other Venues," part of the cycle "If You Lived Here...: at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1989. Both: Photo Martha Rosler.
ART iT: What led you in 1989 to taking that first step forward with "If You Lived Here…"?
MR: I don't know. It happened gradually. I was invited to do a solo show at Dia. The problem of homelessness had suddenly become quite urgently visible in New York and many other cities in the Western industrial countries, and I proposed a show about homelessness, not really expecting Dia to accept, but they did. But I began to realize that everywhere but New York, artists had done initiatives about homelessness, so why not just invite them to participate? And then I thought, why leave it to artists only? Why not invite community groups and homeless people? I made a lot of contacts over the course of a year, and asked, what should we do, and, do you want to have some presence in the exhibition space? If you want to do a project, we'll help you. I'm a shy person, but I had to call people I didn't know. These were organizers working with homeless people, and community and tenant organizers: "Hello, I'd like to ask if you are willing to participate in…an art project!" Perhaps today this would not be so unusual, but back then it was. But actually everything worked really well, and I had an excellent assistant, Dan Wiley, who was well versed in grass-roots urban issues.
And I also moved the show away from what might be called a liberal pity project, asking the audience to feel sorry for other people. I wanted to take a more comprehensive look at questions of housing and urban planning. I decided to make it a project of three shows; I realized that if we held only one six-month show, even if the contents changed over that period, people wouldn't make repeat visits because they'd think they'd seen the show already. The progression of shows was that the first one was centered on tenant struggles ["Home Front"]; the middle show was devoted to homelessness ["Homeless: The Street and Other Venues"]; and the third was about architectural- and urban-planning schemes and utopian fantasies ["City: Visions and Revisions"], on successes and failures, and some satirical schemes. There were also four public forums in the course of the project, and film screenings and poetry readings. It turned out to be a complicated undertaking.
ART iT: In your lecture you also addressed the artist as subject and how art has been coopted by urban regeneration schemes, complicating the idea that an artist can speak on behalf of others. Was this something that you considered when you were planning for Dia?
MR: I wrote an essay in 1981, "In, around and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)," which specifically addresses the problem of speaking for others. I've long been uncomfortable about that common pitfall, because there's little gain for the subjects compared to a large gain for the photographer or artist. The people for whom you're speaking are "mistranslated," while you're left standing there with the focus on you alone. That's why I read the list of participants in the Singapore garden project before giving the lecture: to make sure the audience understood that the works on view are those of specific people and groups. The participants are also listed on the show label.
I ran into this problem in Venice also. The Biennale wouldn't let me list the work as the collaboration of the 30 or so participants, even though we had decided on two group names - Oleanna and the Fleas. The participants were listed in the catalogue, but under my name, so we painted their names on the side of our project building. Dia did a similar thing, demoting the participants: at the back of the book we produced after the shows, the names of the artists and groups were listed in a tiny font, and I had to fight just to make the text slightly less tiny.
Even with these collective projects, they always use the same phrase, "You are the invited artist." In Singapore, I had to figure out how to make the names present and how to add names as more people came on board, because once again this is a project by "Martha Rosler." If it could be credited as a project by "anonymous" with local participation, I'd be happier. But the perspective of the organizers remains: you are the artist. I've been really surprised about how hard it is to make headway on this. But it does allow more people access to working in high-profile venues.
Night scene with molehills, toward the Orangerie in the Karlsaue, from Kassel Gardens (from the Perspective of the Mole) (2007), commissioned by Documenta 12, 2007.
ART iT: The question of speaking for others arises even with events that touch a broad number of people. Seeing the results of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I can imagine that many artists will want to respond to that in some way, but any such expression also has to come with a degree of sensitivity or restraint as well. Where does the credibility come from?
MR: I thought it was important to mention the earthquake, so I brought it up at the start of the lecture. But I share your concern about how to introduce such events into a conversation. You have to decide how to listen to and help give voice to those caught up in them, and those involved in activism and self-organization, since the government's statements usually do not inspire trust. A certain characteristic arrogance is on display in relation to the current revolutions in the Maghreb, where media commentators are claiming that Twitter is somehow responsible for sparking them, but social media are just another tool - it's like saying conversation is a tool. It was people who organized the revolutions, of course, and they've evidently been organizing for years. People communicate however they can, and it's important to understand that you don't own the right to be the interpretive voice or to claim that it's some technological device that created a social movement. It's people's agency.
Proposed Helsinki Garden at the Singapore Biennale Credits
Susie Lingham and National Institute of Education art education students: Lim Hui Chi & Yashini d/o Reganathan; Nuraniza Binte Jalil; Lee Shi Hua Candice & Noor Faiezah Mohd Jalal; Ng Jingge Jeanne and Huda; Suvitha Prakass & Diana Ghazali; Shi Sarah & Tiayan Sim; Nur Shahidah Binte Mohd Diah; Rachel Subramaniam; Umamageswari; Sheaha Zualzmi; and their students; Shawn Lum with Lucy Davis (School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University), (Migrant Voices) with members of Indonesia Family Network (IFN) and Filipino Family Network (FFN): Davy Animas, Rhemz Capanas, Sarialam Daulay, Nurida, Eulenia Prudente, Ria, Tukinah Rogildionti, Parmini Sunardi, Turiyah, Ummairoh; Lucy Davis, Shawn Lum and students at Nanyang Technological University's Art in Nature & Visual Culture class.
Student Artist Team: Ximena Aristizabal, Sophie Anne Cameron, Chong Kai Fen Bernadette, Han Shengyi, Ong Fang Zheng, Frankie Tee, Teh Shi Wei, Hera; with the collaboration of Tan Shu An Lauren, Wong See Hua, Tan Jing Ting, Gan Li Juan, Clara, Lee Jia Yan Candice, Lio Shi Qi Joanne; and volunteers Erica Denison and Kate Antonich.
With the assistance of Mohamad Azmi Shahbudin at the National Parks Board and Lay Hun Chen and the workforce of Prince's.
Special thanks to Amanda Heng, Deborah Kelly, Dana Lam, Chen Shian Lim (Archaeology Society), Hazel Lim, Sylvia Lim, Felicia Low, Margaret Tan, Tan Qian Hui, Suzann Victor, May Ee Wong and Stephen Squibb.
Work by Martha Rosler is currently on view in the solo exhibition "In Public" at Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan, through July 30, as well as in group exhibitions including "Horario Triple A," through June 30 at Casa del Lago, Mexico City; "That's the Way We Do It," through July 3 at Kunsthaus Bregenz; and "Serious Games: War - Media - Art," through July 24 at Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt. Her work will also be included in the 12th Istanbul Biennial, on view September 17 through November 13. The Singapore Biennale was held at multiple venues in Singapore from March 13 to May 15, 2011.
Martha Rosler: The Garden Speaks for Itself
By Andrew Maerkle and Natsuko Odate
Proposed Helsinki Garden at the Singapore Biennale (2011), site-specific community project commissioned by the Singapore Biennale 2011 . Photo Mae Ee Wong. All images: Courtesy Martha Rosler.
In March 2011 Martha Rosler was in Singapore to participate in the opening of the 3rd Singapore Biennale, "Open House," where she initiated a unique project to work with local artists and communities to transform a site at the Old Kallang Airport into a multi-faceted garden. Entitled Proposed Helsinki Garden at the Singapore Biennale (2011), this project developed from a preexisting proposal by the artist to produce a public garden as part of a commission by the Helsinki Business Campus in Finland. Partly due to concerns over whether the Helsinki proposal would be an artwork or a park, and whether Helsinki Business Campus or the city would be responsible for its administration, the garden was never realized. Although the Singapore garden does not particularly resemble the Helsinki proposal, in its referencing of this incident in an entirely new context it comments on the circulation of international art, and the local and global contingencies that define that circulation. And in its realization not by Rosler herself but rather by local agents, it also stages a canny reflexive critique of the artist's complicity in that circulation, and the eagerness of events like the Singapore Biennale to control and capitalize on the mystique of the artist, even at the expense of their own constituencies.
Only allusively apparent in the Singapore garden, which could ultimately still be enjoyed for what it is - a communal green space - these themes were expanded further by Rosler in the Biennale's March 12 keynote lecture at the Singapore Art Museum. Drawing upon broad swathes of intellectual and social histories, the lecture considered art's agency in an age of unprecedented internationalization.
ART iT met with Rosler following her lecture to discuss her understanding of the relations between local practice and global visibility in greater depth.
Interview:
ART iT: In your keynote lecture for the 3rd Singapore Biennale, you discussed the contradictions of international biennale exhibitions, and how they inevitably suppress the local in a performance of the global. In your role as an internationally active artist mediating between the local and the global, do you feel any complicity in these contradictions?
MR: Yes. I'm not exempt from these contradictions. That's the way it is. One tries to acknowledge them, but also to see what can be planted, if you will, going in both directions. Ultimately, Proposed Helsinki Garden at the Singapore Biennale is not my project; it's a local project. I provided the framework, opened the door and met with people, and they can carry it forward. But it's also a demonstration project, in that it's a real garden and a metaphoric series of interventions in the concepts of circulation and locality, as well as the idea of society as a garden, which is specifically relevant here in Singapore.
ART iT: How involved were you in working with the local artists on this project?
MR: I produced papers, little dossiers, on what a community garden might be, including its metaphorical aspects. I gave the curator, Russell Storer, an idea of likely types of participants, and he provided me with excellent contacts and referrals. I wrote letters of invitation, mostly to women. The initial contacts were with Amanda Heng, Susie Lingham, Sylvia Lim and Hazel Lim. Further contacts came from them, in an expanding network. I noted all the exchanges: who offered me advice, who offered help, who said yes, and what their preliminary proposals were. I made a set of little cards, with one for each person, so that when I arrived, I could call and set up meetings. In effect, I became an administrator, a facilitator.
I laid out a site plan; I wanted paths so visitors would know the project entailed the whole site, and then we worked out the final proposals, budgets and requirements, and we sent them in to the Biennale office. Susie Lingham, a professor at the National Institute of Education, works with art teachers who also work with students. Susie brought her students and they brought their students, and thus the project became a nice way to promote art in schools. Lucy Davis, at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, also brought her students; working with Shawn Lum, head of the Nature Society, the interlocking groups accomplished several projects. Sha Najak, an artist who works with migrants, brought in a group of domestic workers, who designed and planted an herb garden centered on a sculpture. Some people volunteered to work on organizational matters, which is quite wonderful because this is a project that has to be sustained after I leave.
This is not my normal way of setting up a project, and I am really gratified about the response in Singapore. The people involved have been amazing, particularly the women; they understood immediately what I had in mind, and that I really wanted it to be a local project. The people I contacted could easily have said, "Why should we do this? It's our labor, and your name," but they understood that the garden was theirs to make, and they could propose anything. Obviously if a proposal went beyond the grounds of feasibility or budget, we wouldn't be able to manage to institute it, but that did not happen. People made very diverse proposals, and we started planting and building.
From Proposed Helsinki Garden at the Singapore Biennale (2011). Top: Planning meeting at Old Kallang Airport. Bottom: Yap Von Bing and Shawn Lum of the Nature Society (left) and "Pioneer Landscape Development Project" by Lucy Davis and Shawn Lum (right). Both: Photo Lucy Davis.
ART iT: At the Biennale preview it was difficult to see how the garden would take shape, because everything was still being planted. Once the garden is completed will its overall appearance necessarily have any significance?
MR: As a complete entity, it represents communal labor, although you can't look at it and say "I see communal labor." But that's what it is. It's not a landscape project. It's a project of thinking - together and separately - asking, what can I do that I want to do here? But visually it will be a green oasis with spots for contemplation, recreation, regeneration and edification, since the projects vary from scientific to poetic to edible. There is a purple medicinal garden, a circular grass mandala surrounded by shaded benches and a large map of Singapore, with the places named for trees, planted with saplings.
ART iT: What are the origins of this kind of approach? For example, when did you start trying to deal with the contradictions involved in the international circulation of contemporary art?
MR: Since the 1970s, I've been asking, what does it mean to be invited as an artist somewhere - what do I bring that's more than just a "message" from far away? I try to be mindful of context, and that applies to projects in the US as well. I try to make works that have some relationship to what's locally important. Occasionally I've even been censored because of that.
ART iT: In 1989 you organized the "If You Lived Here…" project at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. Would you say that the organization for Dia provided a model for Singapore?
MR: Yes, in some ways "If You Lived Here…" was a similar project, but on urban housing and homelessness. In that project also, I invited individuals and groups to participate. Dia offered a certain amount of financial support for the projects, and we had meeting after meeting in setting up the shows. It was much harder to organize, maybe because in New York the cold weather makes things more difficult, and because the non-artist participants were busy, or uncertain. I invited activists and advocacy groups that had to take time out from their work schedules to collaborate, but it worked out just fine. For Singapore, I didn't realize I was going to wind up repeating myself methodologically, but a group project just seemed like an obvious thing to do, especially once I saw the title of the exhibition was to be "Open House." I wanted to focus on something that was both domestic and public, which is why I tried to pitch the project especially to women, who rarely are afforded a collective public space in Singapore.
From SkulpturProjekte Münster '07. Top: Luftwaffe Eagle replica at the Principal Markt (left) and two replica cages at the City Library (right). Bottom: Replica bamboo maze on the Lambertikirche plaza. All: Photo Martha Rosler.
ART iT: In contrast, your project in 2007 for Skulptur Projekte Münster, Unsettling the Fragments, seemed to be a more definitively sculptural, as opposed to communal, work.
MR: Yes, that's true; most of my work is not collaborative. I have periodically worked with garden materials, but in that case it was my own work, and not a project by local people. But did you realize there was also a garden as part of that project? My contribution was in four parts: three sculptural elements, plus a visual display on the City Library windows. There was the eagle [a Luftwaffe standard on a pole], there were the cages [used to display the bodies of the Anabaptists who were executed following the 1535 Münster Rebellion], and there was a bamboo maze [as in the Botanical Garden] on the main church plaza.
ART iT: Is the difference in working methods related to the location of Singapore?
MR: Partly. I signed all my letters of invitation Artist, Brooklyn, New York. One artist wrote to me, not necessarily in an unfriendly fashion: "What does an artist from Brooklyn have to bring to Singapore for gardening?" I replied, "The garden." It's your garden, but that's what I bring.
As to Münster, I made many visits there and I wanted to do something about local history. I met with a few local representatives and developed my idea of quoting architectural and other fragments. In the same year, I did a garden project for Documenta 12, Kassel Gardens (from the Perspective of the Mole), but I didn't produce a garden; instead I used photos of the gardens of Kassel as a way of exploring its history. There was no collaborative element there, either, though in both cases my engagement was with the local.
But I did a collaborative work with my students at the Venice Biennale in 2003. It involved 30 people in different places, and I set up the parameters of the work, but the projects were theirs. I was teaching in three different schools in three different countries at the time and there was also participation by an online group of former students, so it was a pedagogical project in a sense, but really it was just about, "let's all do this together." But that was the least locally focused of the works we've been discussing. The show we were in was called "Utopia Station," and our plans centered on an imaginary state.
Top: Meeting conducted by Homeward Bound Community Services at the exhibition "Homeless: The Street and Other Venues," part of the cycle "If You Lived Here..." at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1989. Bottom: Hut constructed by the Mad Housers and other projects at the exhibition "Homeless: The Street and Other Venues," part of the cycle "If You Lived Here...: at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1989. Both: Photo Martha Rosler.
ART iT: What led you in 1989 to taking that first step forward with "If You Lived Here…"?
MR: I don't know. It happened gradually. I was invited to do a solo show at Dia. The problem of homelessness had suddenly become quite urgently visible in New York and many other cities in the Western industrial countries, and I proposed a show about homelessness, not really expecting Dia to accept, but they did. But I began to realize that everywhere but New York, artists had done initiatives about homelessness, so why not just invite them to participate? And then I thought, why leave it to artists only? Why not invite community groups and homeless people? I made a lot of contacts over the course of a year, and asked, what should we do, and, do you want to have some presence in the exhibition space? If you want to do a project, we'll help you. I'm a shy person, but I had to call people I didn't know. These were organizers working with homeless people, and community and tenant organizers: "Hello, I'd like to ask if you are willing to participate in…an art project!" Perhaps today this would not be so unusual, but back then it was. But actually everything worked really well, and I had an excellent assistant, Dan Wiley, who was well versed in grass-roots urban issues.
And I also moved the show away from what might be called a liberal pity project, asking the audience to feel sorry for other people. I wanted to take a more comprehensive look at questions of housing and urban planning. I decided to make it a project of three shows; I realized that if we held only one six-month show, even if the contents changed over that period, people wouldn't make repeat visits because they'd think they'd seen the show already. The progression of shows was that the first one was centered on tenant struggles ["Home Front"]; the middle show was devoted to homelessness ["Homeless: The Street and Other Venues"]; and the third was about architectural- and urban-planning schemes and utopian fantasies ["City: Visions and Revisions"], on successes and failures, and some satirical schemes. There were also four public forums in the course of the project, and film screenings and poetry readings. It turned out to be a complicated undertaking.
ART iT: In your lecture you also addressed the artist as subject and how art has been coopted by urban regeneration schemes, complicating the idea that an artist can speak on behalf of others. Was this something that you considered when you were planning for Dia?
MR: I wrote an essay in 1981, "In, around and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)," which specifically addresses the problem of speaking for others. I've long been uncomfortable about that common pitfall, because there's little gain for the subjects compared to a large gain for the photographer or artist. The people for whom you're speaking are "mistranslated," while you're left standing there with the focus on you alone. That's why I read the list of participants in the Singapore garden project before giving the lecture: to make sure the audience understood that the works on view are those of specific people and groups. The participants are also listed on the show label.
I ran into this problem in Venice also. The Biennale wouldn't let me list the work as the collaboration of the 30 or so participants, even though we had decided on two group names - Oleanna and the Fleas. The participants were listed in the catalogue, but under my name, so we painted their names on the side of our project building. Dia did a similar thing, demoting the participants: at the back of the book we produced after the shows, the names of the artists and groups were listed in a tiny font, and I had to fight just to make the text slightly less tiny.
Even with these collective projects, they always use the same phrase, "You are the invited artist." In Singapore, I had to figure out how to make the names present and how to add names as more people came on board, because once again this is a project by "Martha Rosler." If it could be credited as a project by "anonymous" with local participation, I'd be happier. But the perspective of the organizers remains: you are the artist. I've been really surprised about how hard it is to make headway on this. But it does allow more people access to working in high-profile venues.
Night scene with molehills, toward the Orangerie in the Karlsaue, from Kassel Gardens (from the Perspective of the Mole) (2007), commissioned by Documenta 12, 2007.
ART iT: The question of speaking for others arises even with events that touch a broad number of people. Seeing the results of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I can imagine that many artists will want to respond to that in some way, but any such expression also has to come with a degree of sensitivity or restraint as well. Where does the credibility come from?
MR: I thought it was important to mention the earthquake, so I brought it up at the start of the lecture. But I share your concern about how to introduce such events into a conversation. You have to decide how to listen to and help give voice to those caught up in them, and those involved in activism and self-organization, since the government's statements usually do not inspire trust. A certain characteristic arrogance is on display in relation to the current revolutions in the Maghreb, where media commentators are claiming that Twitter is somehow responsible for sparking them, but social media are just another tool - it's like saying conversation is a tool. It was people who organized the revolutions, of course, and they've evidently been organizing for years. People communicate however they can, and it's important to understand that you don't own the right to be the interpretive voice or to claim that it's some technological device that created a social movement. It's people's agency.
Proposed Helsinki Garden at the Singapore Biennale Credits
Susie Lingham and National Institute of Education art education students: Lim Hui Chi & Yashini d/o Reganathan; Nuraniza Binte Jalil; Lee Shi Hua Candice & Noor Faiezah Mohd Jalal; Ng Jingge Jeanne and Huda; Suvitha Prakass & Diana Ghazali; Shi Sarah & Tiayan Sim; Nur Shahidah Binte Mohd Diah; Rachel Subramaniam; Umamageswari; Sheaha Zualzmi; and their students; Shawn Lum with Lucy Davis (School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University), (Migrant Voices) with members of Indonesia Family Network (IFN) and Filipino Family Network (FFN): Davy Animas, Rhemz Capanas, Sarialam Daulay, Nurida, Eulenia Prudente, Ria, Tukinah Rogildionti, Parmini Sunardi, Turiyah, Ummairoh; Lucy Davis, Shawn Lum and students at Nanyang Technological University's Art in Nature & Visual Culture class.
Student Artist Team: Ximena Aristizabal, Sophie Anne Cameron, Chong Kai Fen Bernadette, Han Shengyi, Ong Fang Zheng, Frankie Tee, Teh Shi Wei, Hera; with the collaboration of Tan Shu An Lauren, Wong See Hua, Tan Jing Ting, Gan Li Juan, Clara, Lee Jia Yan Candice, Lio Shi Qi Joanne; and volunteers Erica Denison and Kate Antonich.
With the assistance of Mohamad Azmi Shahbudin at the National Parks Board and Lay Hun Chen and the workforce of Prince's.
Special thanks to Amanda Heng, Deborah Kelly, Dana Lam, Chen Shian Lim (Archaeology Society), Hazel Lim, Sylvia Lim, Felicia Low, Margaret Tan, Tan Qian Hui, Suzann Victor, May Ee Wong and Stephen Squibb.
Work by Martha Rosler is currently on view in the solo exhibition "In Public" at Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan, through July 30, as well as in group exhibitions including "Horario Triple A," through June 30 at Casa del Lago, Mexico City; "That's the Way We Do It," through July 3 at Kunsthaus Bregenz; and "Serious Games: War - Media - Art," through July 24 at Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt. Her work will also be included in the 12th Istanbul Biennial, on view September 17 through November 13. The Singapore Biennale was held at multiple venues in Singapore from March 13 to May 15, 2011.
Martha Rosler: The Garden Speaks for Itself
54th Venice Biennale: Index
Pipilotti Rist - Non voglio tornare indietro (Ospedale) (2011), video projection on veduta oil painting "Anonymous Venetian Master (Apollonio Domenichini?): Veduta with Canal Grande with Santa Maria di Nazareth, Santa Lucia and Scuola dei Nobili," Museum Langmatt, Stiftung Langmatt Sidney and Jenny Brown, Baden/Switzerland (detail). Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York.
Deliberately referencing its century-long tradition of national representations (beginning with the establishment of the Belgian Pavilion in 1907), this year's artistic director of the Venice Biennale, Bice Curiger, has selected the theme "ILLUMInations" for the venerable exhibition's 54th edition. At a time when this format is increasingly chided for its perceived anachronism, Curiger is taking the criticism head-on, telling ART iT that, "the national pavilions are what make the Venice Biennale so unique." She sees the pavilions in a historical context as representing the desire of different countries to participate in international exchange, and hopes to underscore through her direction the Biennale's potential to realize a "borderless map." Yet that doesn't mean the Biennale model is immune to reconsideration or innovation. Amid the rise of conservative populist movements in Europe and beyond, as well as the upheaval of the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East, this year issues of nationality and nationalism will be right at the fore of the pavilion exhibitions. These range in tone from Dora García's playful investigation of her "inadequacy" to represent Spain and US representatives Allora & Calzadilla's circus-like appropriation of the iconography of corporate America (business-class recliner seats, ATMs and sunbeds) to Israeli artist Yael Bartana's shocking proposal to invite three million Jews to return to Poland, "...and Europe will be stunned" (on view in the Polish Pavilion).
Seeking to better understand the critical tensions that define the Biennale and its tenuous balance between local contexts and international consumption, in the months leading up to its June 4 opening the editors of ART iT have corresponded with Curiger and numerous participating artists to probe deeper into the questions of what Venice means to contemporary art today, and what it means to exhibit at Venice. We include these dialogues here, alongside articles previewing selected aspects of the artistic director's exhibition and the national representations.
- The Editors
ILLUMInations:
Artistic Director - Bice Curiger
Participating Artist - Shannon Ebner: Photography as Thinking
Participating Artist - Birdhead
NATIONAL REPRESENTATIONS:
In Country - Selected National Representations
France - Christian Boltanski: Chance
India - Zarina Hashmi from Everyone Agrees: It's About to Explode
Poland - Yael Bartana: ...and Europe will be stunned.
Spain - Dora García: The Inadequate
Thailand - Navin Rawanchaikul: Paradiso di Navin
United Arab Emirates - Curated by Vasif Kortun: Second Time Around
United States - Allora & Calzadilla: Gloria
54th Venice Biennale: Selected Representations
Combing through press releases, mining contacts and reviewing advance publications, the editors of ART iT have sought out the most promising national representations planned for the 54th Venice Biennale. This is a year for bold, ambitious projects that equally combine muscular spectacle with critical rigor. Below are 10 pavilions you won't want to miss, whether you see them in person or not.
- The Editors
IN COUNTRY: SELECTED NATIONAL REPRESENTATIONS
France - Christian Boltanski: Chance
In 2005, Annette Messager won a Golden Lion at the 51st Venice Biennale for her installation reinterpreting the fairy-tale Pinocchio for contemporary times, "The Messengers." In 2011, Messager's partner Christian Boltanski is an early frontrunner for taking home this year's Golden Lion. For "Chance," he has turned the French Pavilion into environment that is in constant flux, underscored by the room-sized exhibition centerpiece, The Wheel of Fortune, made out of scaffolding and a whizzing conveyor belt of infants' photographs. Further evoking life's lottery, the photo-montage multimedia work Be New randomly shuffles the features of different adult and infant faces. With the press of a button, visitors can pause the shifting faces to form a composite whole; like a slot machine, those who manage to line-up all the features of the same face will win the work itself (the game also extends to the Internet through a dedicated website). While the concept for "Chance" parallels in some ways Boltanski's longtime fascination with disappearance and memory, it also maintains a more positive outlook than previous works: two digital counters on site tally up in realtime the number of births and deaths each day, but the births always outnumber the deaths. Read ART iT's interview with the artist here.
Curator: Jean-Hubert Martin. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini; Online component: boltanski-chance.com; Image credit: Detail of The Wheel of Fortune from Christian Boltanski's "Chance" for the French Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale; Photo Didier Plowy.
Israel - Sigalit Landau: One Man's Floor is Another Man's Feelings
Even in a year with numerous larger-than-life proposals, Sigalit Landau's project for the Israeli Pavilion stands out as among the most ambitious of the 54th Venice Biennale. Radically reworking its airy, Modernist structure - designed in the International Style by architect Zeev Rechter and completed in the 1950s - Landau has turned the Pavilion into an allegorical space that is part industrial processing plant, part mock-up of the human and social bodies. Visitors entering the Pavilion through a newly installed heavy iron door will encounter an extensive, ad-hoc system of pipes through which flows water from the canal that borders the site. Further within awaits a suite of video works that obliquely address issues of loss, aggression, control and negotiation: a pair of salt-coated shoes sinking into the icy waters of a frozen lake near Gdańsk, Poland; a group of functionaries debating at a conference table as a young girl hidden underneath surreptitiously binds their shoe laces; young men dividing up territory on a beach in a game of strategy. As co-commissioner Ilan Wizgan writes in the catalogue for Landau, "Without being overtly political, the exhibition deals with the political in life and in art, and inherent in it is a criticism of nationalism and national ego, which always undermine rationalism and the positive potential inherent in cooperation and a just distribution of resources and wealth."
Commissioners: Jean de Loisy and Ilan Wizgan. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Image credit: Still from Salt Crystal Shoes on a Frozen Lake (2011), video with sound, 12 min; © Sigalit Landau, courtesy the artist; kamel mennour, Paris; and Givon Gallery, Tel Aviv.
Japan - TABAIMO: teleco-soup
The multimedia artist Tabaimo is known for her installations analyzing contemporary Japan through surreal, hand-drawn animations that resemble ukiyo-e woodblock prints sprung to delirious life. She has previously targeted the kitchen, the bathhouse and even the public restroom as sites for exploring the tensions between community and self. In Venice, she will expand this project to encompass the life-cycle of an entire society, from formless cell to unique individual and nationwide collective. The title of her exhibition, "teleco-soup," translates roughly to "inverted soup." Coined by the artist, this phrase in turn riffs on a proverb attributed to the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, "A frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean," as well as an addendum to the Japanese version of the same, "But it knows the height of the sky." Employing the unique characteristics of the building, which was designed by architect Takamasa Yoshizaka so that it floats above the ground on pilotis, Tabaimo has turned the interior of the Pavilion into a well and the open space beneath it into the sky. Lined with mirror panels that reflect images projected from multiple sources, this immersive environment destabilizes orientations between up and down, broad and narrow, communal and individual, prompting visitors to question their own relations to society and the world.
Commissioner: Yuka Uematsu. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Image credit: teleco-soup (2011), video installation, 5 min 27 sec loop; © Tabaimo, courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo, and James Cohan Gallery, New York.
Norway - The State of Things /
Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about AIDS
Jacques Rancière
The most memorable national representation at Venice this year may not be a pavilion at all - at least not in the traditional sense - and rather the series of public lectures that the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) has organized over the course of the Biennale exhibition period. Titled "The State of Things," the lecture series assesses issues related to contemporary life through a broad range of themes. Jacques Rancière kicks off proceedings June 1 by responding to the question, "In What Time Do We Live?" Also of note are Fawaz A Gerges' "A Perfect Storm: An Arab Revolution in the Making" (June 4), on the prospects for the democratization of the Arab world; Eyal Weizman's "Forensic Aesthetics" (June 30), on trauma, forensics, and new interpretations of objectivity and subjectivity; and Judith Butler's "The Politics of the Street and New Forms of Alliance" (September 7). Amid increasing nationalism and conservatism in Europe and beyond, TJ Clark's closing lecture, "The Experience of Defeat" (November 17) addresses the ongoing marginalization of the Left in the politics of advanced capitalist societies, asking, "Is a Left with no future a contradiction in terms?" Also part of the Norway representation is the project "Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about AIDS," carried out by artist Bjarne Melgaard with graduate students at the Faculty of Design and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia, with an exhibition on view at Palazzo Contarini Corfù until June 31. For complete scheduling information for "The State of Things," see here.
Commissioner: Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Venue: Multiple Venues. Image credit: Courtesy Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA).
Poland - Yael Bartana: ...and Europe will be stunned
Although it's still relatively rare, there is a precedent at the Venice Biennale for national representations exhibiting non-national artists. Occasionally such gestures stir contention; increasingly, they elicit hardly any comment at all. Yet the selection of Israeli artist Yael Bartana to represent Poland at this year's Biennale is not merely an attempt to rethink the borders of Polish contemporary art. It is the culmination of a multi-year project through which Bartana has attempted to rethink Poland itself, and the unsettled legacy of the country's role in the Holocaust, as well as to rethink the founding myths that have led to Israel's alienation from its Arab neighbors. Once completed, "...and Europe will be stunned" will comprise a trilogy of films following the activities of a quasi-fictive organization, the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland: Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) (2007), in which a young Polish activist gives a speech inviting three million Jews to return to their homeland; Mur i Wieźa (Wall and Tower) (2009), which follows a group of returned Jews erecting a kibbutz-like settlement near a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; and a new work, Zamach (Assassination) (2011), in which members of the Jewish Renaissance Movement mourn the assassination of their leader. Modeled on Zionist and other early 20th-century propaganda films, these works are highly ambivalent, withholding from viewers any clear sympathy for either the artist behind the camera or the subjects within its lens. And perhaps this is exactly the point. In the sheer audacity of their collective vision, Bartana's films push viewers to reflect on their own relations to nationality, and the complacency with which they regard the systems by which they are governed. Read ART iT's interview with the artist here.
Commissioner: Hana Wróblewska. Curators: Sebastian Cichocki, Galit Eilat. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Image credit: Production photo from Mur i wieża (Wall and Tower) (2009); Photo Magda Wunsche & Samsel, courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.
Spain - Dora García: The Inadequate
Based in Brussels, Dora García says that her first reaction when told of her selection to represent Spain at Venice was, "embarrassment, malaise; I felt as if something was not quite fitting." Reflecting on the contradictions of an event like the Biennale - its anachronism, and the absurdity of exhibiting art at such a massive scale - she has turned those initial presentiments into a nebulous performance project that includes over 70 participants, among them the theatre group Accademia della Follia and the late filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Entitled "The Inadequate," García's exhibition continues a trajectory of past works exploring the psychology of performance. In "Inserts in Real Time," for example, she choreographed situations that blurred the lines between performance, acts of madness, socialized behavior and spectatorship. Similarly, for Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007, García hired an actor to reinterpret in public spaces across the city the role of the beggar Filch from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) and its 1928 adaptation by Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera. Visitors to Venice should prepare to find themselves in the middle of "The Inadequate" before they even know it. Those who are unable to see the Biennale in person can follow all the action on a dedicated website, another hallmark of García's genre-bending investigation into modes of interactivity. Read ART iT's interview with the artist here.
Curator: Katya García-Antón. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Online component: theinadequate.net. Image credit: Still from 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.
Switzerland - Thomas Hirschhorn: Crystal of Resistance /
Andrea Thal: Chewing the Scenery
Thomas Hirschhorn has previously said that he is interested in the "too much," a term that refers both to the material and informational over-saturation of contemporary consumer culture and also the special rawness through which art - or specifically, the artist - communicates with the world. Embodying this aesthetic, Hirschhorn's Swiss Pavilion will constitute a sensory tour de force. As visualized in sketches and work-in-progress photos, the installation does not respond to the pavilion architecture so much as it envelopes it, transforming the interior into a giant, foil-covered cavern pierced through by makeshift crystal formations to suggest the appearance of a Sci-Fi B-movie set or a deranged crystal meth lab. Other elements include a column of TV sets, mannequins, smashed car windshields, foil-covered exercise equipment and plastic chairs infested by grids of junked mobilephone handsets. If this approach expresses a necessary degree of machismo, it also obliterates the labored contextualization - in terms of both national posturing and critical irony - that has historically defined the Biennale. As Hirschhorn writes in an artist statement, "I want to create a place that is so strange, so entirely from myself - only from myself - and so distinct that it becomes universal." Organized by curator Andrea Thal, Switzerland's other representation at Venice this year is a multi-part project involving a film installation, an "installative dramatization," live events and an evolving publication. See details online here.
Thomas Hirschhorn - Commissioner: Urs Staub. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Online component: crystalofresistance.com. Image credit: Sketch for "Crystal of Resistance" (2011). / Chewing the Scenery - Commissioner: Andreas Münch. Venue: Teatro Fondamenta Nuove.
Turkey - Ayşe Erkmen: Plan B
Alongside maximalist, immersive installations, water seems to be a trending theme at this year's Venice Biennale. For the Turkish Pavilion, Ayşe Erkmen will convert a room inside the Arsenale into a functioning, yet ultimately futile water purification unit: all the potable water it produces will be released back into the Venetian canals. Erkmen is best known for minimalist sculptural interventions that can produce dramatic results, as with Busy Colors (2005) at New York's SculptureCenter, where she fixed bright red and blue fabrics to an automated gantry crane that swept back-and-forth across the exhibition space. "Plan B" is necessarily somewhat more concrete, with Erkmen connecting each component of her sculptural purification unit through a winding network of pipes in order to underscore the complex processes of transformation at play. In turning industry into art and subverting the typical efficiency of pragmatic design, the work establishes a metaphoric relationship between the flow of water through the purification unit and the flow of blood through the body or the flow of capital through markets and across international borders, as well as to the contingencies that give concrete form to idealized concepts.
Curator: Fulya Erdemci; Deputy Curator: Danae Mossman; Venue: Pavilion at Arsenale; Image credit: From "Plan B" (2011); Photo Serdar Tanyeli.
UK - Mike Nelson
The most secretive entry at this year's Venice Biennale is Mike Nelson's British Pavilion. Famed for making architecture-scale environments that transform the viewer's progress through space into a narrative or even psychedelic experience, Nelson has been working on site in the Giardini since March, yet as of this writing no title for his project and barely any details of what it entails have been released. The artist typically draws upon a wide array of references in constructing his environments, from the writers HP Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges to cultural signifiers such as oriental carpets and classic American Jetstream trailers. Assembled from the detritus of everyday life, works such as The Pumpkin Palace (2003) - a vintage Red Crescent bus that was converted into a multi-room opium den - create haunted fields in which each diverse component projects its own history and psychic resonance into a heterogenous shared space. Whether Nelson chooses to address the host city's history as a gateway between Europe and Asia, British nationality or any other topic, his will surely be one of the most impressive exhibitions at Venice, and well worth anticipating.
Commissioner: Andrea Rose. Curator: Richard Riley. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Image credit To the Memory of HP Lovecraft 3 (London, 2008); Photo Steve White, courtesy Matt's Gallery, London; Franco Noero, Turin; and 303 Gallery, New York.
US - Allora & Calzadilla: Gloria
As soon as they announced their plans for the US Pavilion, the artist duo Allora & Calzadilla invited a summer full of commentary on their appropriation of the Venice Biennale's unofficial moniker, the "artworld Olympics." They are producing a group of new sculptural works that serve as platforms for performances by athletes associated with USA Gymnastics and USA Track & Field, the national governing bodies for their respective disciplines. However, it would seem that the consistently poetic and inventive artists are interested not so much in drawing comparisons between art and sport as they are in using sport to exquisitely satire the testosterone-fueled hubris of Corporate America. Full-scale, carved wooden replicas of business-class airplane seats, Body in Flight (Delta) and Body in Flight (American) (all works 2011) will serve as the rough equivalents to the balance beam and pommel horse used for gymnastic routines. Placed outdoors in front of the US Pavilion, Track and Field adapts an overturned military tank into a repurposed, functioning treadmill. Also on display will be a custom-made pipe organ that houses a functioning ATM machine (with each cash withdrawal, the ATM triggers a new musical score played back through the organ), as well as a bronze replica of the Statue of Freedom - hoisted by slave labor to its home atop the US Capitol building in 1863 - reclining in a Solaris 442 sunbed. Read Dan Cameron's essay profiling Allora & Calzadilla for ART iT here.
Commissioner: Lisa D Freiman. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Image credit: Installation view of Armed Freedom Lying in a Sunbed in the US Pavilion at the Giardini, Venice, 2011; Photo ART iT.
ALSO OF NOTE
Egypt - Ahmed Basiony: 30 Days of Running in the Space
In recent years Egypt's exhibitions at Venice have tended towards underwhelming presentations of Orientalist pastiche. That will change with "30 Days of Running in the Space," a multimedia installation honoring artist and musician Ahmed Basiony (1978-2011), who was killed January 28 while shooting video in Tahrir Square of the initial protests that led to the overthrow of the Hosni Mubarak regime.
Commissioner: Shady El Noshokaty. Curator: Aida Eltorie. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini.
India - Everyone Agrees: It's About to Explode
India's first official participation at Venice after several privately initiated presentations, this exhibition curated by Ranjit Hoskote will reconsider nationality, territory and identity through the work of four artists and groups based both within India and beyond. Read ART iT's interview with participating artist Zarina Hashmi here.
Commissioner: Ranjit Hoskote. Venue: Pavilion at Arsenale.
Russia - Andrei Monastyrski and the Collective Actions Group: Empty Zones
Curated by Boris Groys, the Russian Pavilion is one of the more theory-driven entries to this year's Venice Bienale. Already, Groys has convened a symposium in Moscow on Russia's relationship to the legacy of conceptual art, featuring international speakers including Terry Smith, Chus Martinez and Jörg Heiser. Focusing on the pioneering participatory art group Collective Actions, the exhibition itself will attempt to articulate "the concept of life as a unique kind of artwork."
Commissioner: Stella Kesaeva. Curator: Boris Groys. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini.
Thailand - Navin Rawanchaikul: Paradiso di Navin
Navin Rawanchaikul was born in Thailand to parents with Hindu-Punjabi roots and is now a permanent resident of Japan. Building on this personal narrative, through "Paradiso di Navin" he plans to deconstruct the system of national representations that defines the Venice Biennale. Read ART iT's interview with the artist here.
Commissioner: Prisna Pongtadsirikul. Curators: Pandit Chanrochanakit, Steven Pettifor. Venue: Paradiso Gallerie, Giardini della Biennale.
UAE - Second Time Around
In 2009, the UAE's first official representation at Venice turned a reflexive gaze on the use of culture in the Emirates' ongoing nation-building project. This year's follow-up presentation curated by Vasif Kortun shifts the focus squarely on art itself, with a group show of works in disparate media and approaches by Reem Al Ghaith, Abdullah Al Saadi and Lateefa Bint Maktoum. Read ART iT's interview with Vasif Kortun here.
Commissioner: Hamdan Lamees. Curator: Vasif Kortun. Venue: Pavilion at Arsenale.
Return to story index
Venice Biennale - ILLUMInations: 54th International Art Exhibition
- The Editors
IN COUNTRY: SELECTED NATIONAL REPRESENTATIONS
France - Christian Boltanski: Chance
In 2005, Annette Messager won a Golden Lion at the 51st Venice Biennale for her installation reinterpreting the fairy-tale Pinocchio for contemporary times, "The Messengers." In 2011, Messager's partner Christian Boltanski is an early frontrunner for taking home this year's Golden Lion. For "Chance," he has turned the French Pavilion into environment that is in constant flux, underscored by the room-sized exhibition centerpiece, The Wheel of Fortune, made out of scaffolding and a whizzing conveyor belt of infants' photographs. Further evoking life's lottery, the photo-montage multimedia work Be New randomly shuffles the features of different adult and infant faces. With the press of a button, visitors can pause the shifting faces to form a composite whole; like a slot machine, those who manage to line-up all the features of the same face will win the work itself (the game also extends to the Internet through a dedicated website). While the concept for "Chance" parallels in some ways Boltanski's longtime fascination with disappearance and memory, it also maintains a more positive outlook than previous works: two digital counters on site tally up in realtime the number of births and deaths each day, but the births always outnumber the deaths. Read ART iT's interview with the artist here.
Curator: Jean-Hubert Martin. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini; Online component: boltanski-chance.com; Image credit: Detail of The Wheel of Fortune from Christian Boltanski's "Chance" for the French Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale; Photo Didier Plowy.
Israel - Sigalit Landau: One Man's Floor is Another Man's Feelings
Even in a year with numerous larger-than-life proposals, Sigalit Landau's project for the Israeli Pavilion stands out as among the most ambitious of the 54th Venice Biennale. Radically reworking its airy, Modernist structure - designed in the International Style by architect Zeev Rechter and completed in the 1950s - Landau has turned the Pavilion into an allegorical space that is part industrial processing plant, part mock-up of the human and social bodies. Visitors entering the Pavilion through a newly installed heavy iron door will encounter an extensive, ad-hoc system of pipes through which flows water from the canal that borders the site. Further within awaits a suite of video works that obliquely address issues of loss, aggression, control and negotiation: a pair of salt-coated shoes sinking into the icy waters of a frozen lake near Gdańsk, Poland; a group of functionaries debating at a conference table as a young girl hidden underneath surreptitiously binds their shoe laces; young men dividing up territory on a beach in a game of strategy. As co-commissioner Ilan Wizgan writes in the catalogue for Landau, "Without being overtly political, the exhibition deals with the political in life and in art, and inherent in it is a criticism of nationalism and national ego, which always undermine rationalism and the positive potential inherent in cooperation and a just distribution of resources and wealth."
Commissioners: Jean de Loisy and Ilan Wizgan. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Image credit: Still from Salt Crystal Shoes on a Frozen Lake (2011), video with sound, 12 min; © Sigalit Landau, courtesy the artist; kamel mennour, Paris; and Givon Gallery, Tel Aviv.
Japan - TABAIMO: teleco-soup
The multimedia artist Tabaimo is known for her installations analyzing contemporary Japan through surreal, hand-drawn animations that resemble ukiyo-e woodblock prints sprung to delirious life. She has previously targeted the kitchen, the bathhouse and even the public restroom as sites for exploring the tensions between community and self. In Venice, she will expand this project to encompass the life-cycle of an entire society, from formless cell to unique individual and nationwide collective. The title of her exhibition, "teleco-soup," translates roughly to "inverted soup." Coined by the artist, this phrase in turn riffs on a proverb attributed to the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, "A frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean," as well as an addendum to the Japanese version of the same, "But it knows the height of the sky." Employing the unique characteristics of the building, which was designed by architect Takamasa Yoshizaka so that it floats above the ground on pilotis, Tabaimo has turned the interior of the Pavilion into a well and the open space beneath it into the sky. Lined with mirror panels that reflect images projected from multiple sources, this immersive environment destabilizes orientations between up and down, broad and narrow, communal and individual, prompting visitors to question their own relations to society and the world.
Commissioner: Yuka Uematsu. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Image credit: teleco-soup (2011), video installation, 5 min 27 sec loop; © Tabaimo, courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo, and James Cohan Gallery, New York.
Norway - The State of Things /
Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about AIDS
Jacques Rancière
The most memorable national representation at Venice this year may not be a pavilion at all - at least not in the traditional sense - and rather the series of public lectures that the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) has organized over the course of the Biennale exhibition period. Titled "The State of Things," the lecture series assesses issues related to contemporary life through a broad range of themes. Jacques Rancière kicks off proceedings June 1 by responding to the question, "In What Time Do We Live?" Also of note are Fawaz A Gerges' "A Perfect Storm: An Arab Revolution in the Making" (June 4), on the prospects for the democratization of the Arab world; Eyal Weizman's "Forensic Aesthetics" (June 30), on trauma, forensics, and new interpretations of objectivity and subjectivity; and Judith Butler's "The Politics of the Street and New Forms of Alliance" (September 7). Amid increasing nationalism and conservatism in Europe and beyond, TJ Clark's closing lecture, "The Experience of Defeat" (November 17) addresses the ongoing marginalization of the Left in the politics of advanced capitalist societies, asking, "Is a Left with no future a contradiction in terms?" Also part of the Norway representation is the project "Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about AIDS," carried out by artist Bjarne Melgaard with graduate students at the Faculty of Design and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia, with an exhibition on view at Palazzo Contarini Corfù until June 31. For complete scheduling information for "The State of Things," see here.
Commissioner: Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Venue: Multiple Venues. Image credit: Courtesy Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA).
Poland - Yael Bartana: ...and Europe will be stunned
Although it's still relatively rare, there is a precedent at the Venice Biennale for national representations exhibiting non-national artists. Occasionally such gestures stir contention; increasingly, they elicit hardly any comment at all. Yet the selection of Israeli artist Yael Bartana to represent Poland at this year's Biennale is not merely an attempt to rethink the borders of Polish contemporary art. It is the culmination of a multi-year project through which Bartana has attempted to rethink Poland itself, and the unsettled legacy of the country's role in the Holocaust, as well as to rethink the founding myths that have led to Israel's alienation from its Arab neighbors. Once completed, "...and Europe will be stunned" will comprise a trilogy of films following the activities of a quasi-fictive organization, the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland: Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) (2007), in which a young Polish activist gives a speech inviting three million Jews to return to their homeland; Mur i Wieźa (Wall and Tower) (2009), which follows a group of returned Jews erecting a kibbutz-like settlement near a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; and a new work, Zamach (Assassination) (2011), in which members of the Jewish Renaissance Movement mourn the assassination of their leader. Modeled on Zionist and other early 20th-century propaganda films, these works are highly ambivalent, withholding from viewers any clear sympathy for either the artist behind the camera or the subjects within its lens. And perhaps this is exactly the point. In the sheer audacity of their collective vision, Bartana's films push viewers to reflect on their own relations to nationality, and the complacency with which they regard the systems by which they are governed. Read ART iT's interview with the artist here.
Commissioner: Hana Wróblewska. Curators: Sebastian Cichocki, Galit Eilat. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Image credit: Production photo from Mur i wieża (Wall and Tower) (2009); Photo Magda Wunsche & Samsel, courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.
Spain - Dora García: The Inadequate
Based in Brussels, Dora García says that her first reaction when told of her selection to represent Spain at Venice was, "embarrassment, malaise; I felt as if something was not quite fitting." Reflecting on the contradictions of an event like the Biennale - its anachronism, and the absurdity of exhibiting art at such a massive scale - she has turned those initial presentiments into a nebulous performance project that includes over 70 participants, among them the theatre group Accademia della Follia and the late filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Entitled "The Inadequate," García's exhibition continues a trajectory of past works exploring the psychology of performance. In "Inserts in Real Time," for example, she choreographed situations that blurred the lines between performance, acts of madness, socialized behavior and spectatorship. Similarly, for Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007, García hired an actor to reinterpret in public spaces across the city the role of the beggar Filch from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) and its 1928 adaptation by Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera. Visitors to Venice should prepare to find themselves in the middle of "The Inadequate" before they even know it. Those who are unable to see the Biennale in person can follow all the action on a dedicated website, another hallmark of García's genre-bending investigation into modes of interactivity. Read ART iT's interview with the artist here.
Curator: Katya García-Antón. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Online component: theinadequate.net. Image credit: Still from 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.
Switzerland - Thomas Hirschhorn: Crystal of Resistance /
Andrea Thal: Chewing the Scenery
Thomas Hirschhorn has previously said that he is interested in the "too much," a term that refers both to the material and informational over-saturation of contemporary consumer culture and also the special rawness through which art - or specifically, the artist - communicates with the world. Embodying this aesthetic, Hirschhorn's Swiss Pavilion will constitute a sensory tour de force. As visualized in sketches and work-in-progress photos, the installation does not respond to the pavilion architecture so much as it envelopes it, transforming the interior into a giant, foil-covered cavern pierced through by makeshift crystal formations to suggest the appearance of a Sci-Fi B-movie set or a deranged crystal meth lab. Other elements include a column of TV sets, mannequins, smashed car windshields, foil-covered exercise equipment and plastic chairs infested by grids of junked mobilephone handsets. If this approach expresses a necessary degree of machismo, it also obliterates the labored contextualization - in terms of both national posturing and critical irony - that has historically defined the Biennale. As Hirschhorn writes in an artist statement, "I want to create a place that is so strange, so entirely from myself - only from myself - and so distinct that it becomes universal." Organized by curator Andrea Thal, Switzerland's other representation at Venice this year is a multi-part project involving a film installation, an "installative dramatization," live events and an evolving publication. See details online here.
Thomas Hirschhorn - Commissioner: Urs Staub. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Online component: crystalofresistance.com. Image credit: Sketch for "Crystal of Resistance" (2011). / Chewing the Scenery - Commissioner: Andreas Münch. Venue: Teatro Fondamenta Nuove.
Turkey - Ayşe Erkmen: Plan B
Alongside maximalist, immersive installations, water seems to be a trending theme at this year's Venice Biennale. For the Turkish Pavilion, Ayşe Erkmen will convert a room inside the Arsenale into a functioning, yet ultimately futile water purification unit: all the potable water it produces will be released back into the Venetian canals. Erkmen is best known for minimalist sculptural interventions that can produce dramatic results, as with Busy Colors (2005) at New York's SculptureCenter, where she fixed bright red and blue fabrics to an automated gantry crane that swept back-and-forth across the exhibition space. "Plan B" is necessarily somewhat more concrete, with Erkmen connecting each component of her sculptural purification unit through a winding network of pipes in order to underscore the complex processes of transformation at play. In turning industry into art and subverting the typical efficiency of pragmatic design, the work establishes a metaphoric relationship between the flow of water through the purification unit and the flow of blood through the body or the flow of capital through markets and across international borders, as well as to the contingencies that give concrete form to idealized concepts.
Curator: Fulya Erdemci; Deputy Curator: Danae Mossman; Venue: Pavilion at Arsenale; Image credit: From "Plan B" (2011); Photo Serdar Tanyeli.
UK - Mike Nelson
The most secretive entry at this year's Venice Biennale is Mike Nelson's British Pavilion. Famed for making architecture-scale environments that transform the viewer's progress through space into a narrative or even psychedelic experience, Nelson has been working on site in the Giardini since March, yet as of this writing no title for his project and barely any details of what it entails have been released. The artist typically draws upon a wide array of references in constructing his environments, from the writers HP Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges to cultural signifiers such as oriental carpets and classic American Jetstream trailers. Assembled from the detritus of everyday life, works such as The Pumpkin Palace (2003) - a vintage Red Crescent bus that was converted into a multi-room opium den - create haunted fields in which each diverse component projects its own history and psychic resonance into a heterogenous shared space. Whether Nelson chooses to address the host city's history as a gateway between Europe and Asia, British nationality or any other topic, his will surely be one of the most impressive exhibitions at Venice, and well worth anticipating.
Commissioner: Andrea Rose. Curator: Richard Riley. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Image credit To the Memory of HP Lovecraft 3 (London, 2008); Photo Steve White, courtesy Matt's Gallery, London; Franco Noero, Turin; and 303 Gallery, New York.
US - Allora & Calzadilla: Gloria
As soon as they announced their plans for the US Pavilion, the artist duo Allora & Calzadilla invited a summer full of commentary on their appropriation of the Venice Biennale's unofficial moniker, the "artworld Olympics." They are producing a group of new sculptural works that serve as platforms for performances by athletes associated with USA Gymnastics and USA Track & Field, the national governing bodies for their respective disciplines. However, it would seem that the consistently poetic and inventive artists are interested not so much in drawing comparisons between art and sport as they are in using sport to exquisitely satire the testosterone-fueled hubris of Corporate America. Full-scale, carved wooden replicas of business-class airplane seats, Body in Flight (Delta) and Body in Flight (American) (all works 2011) will serve as the rough equivalents to the balance beam and pommel horse used for gymnastic routines. Placed outdoors in front of the US Pavilion, Track and Field adapts an overturned military tank into a repurposed, functioning treadmill. Also on display will be a custom-made pipe organ that houses a functioning ATM machine (with each cash withdrawal, the ATM triggers a new musical score played back through the organ), as well as a bronze replica of the Statue of Freedom - hoisted by slave labor to its home atop the US Capitol building in 1863 - reclining in a Solaris 442 sunbed. Read Dan Cameron's essay profiling Allora & Calzadilla for ART iT here.
Commissioner: Lisa D Freiman. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini. Image credit: Installation view of Armed Freedom Lying in a Sunbed in the US Pavilion at the Giardini, Venice, 2011; Photo ART iT.
ALSO OF NOTE
Egypt - Ahmed Basiony: 30 Days of Running in the Space
In recent years Egypt's exhibitions at Venice have tended towards underwhelming presentations of Orientalist pastiche. That will change with "30 Days of Running in the Space," a multimedia installation honoring artist and musician Ahmed Basiony (1978-2011), who was killed January 28 while shooting video in Tahrir Square of the initial protests that led to the overthrow of the Hosni Mubarak regime.
Commissioner: Shady El Noshokaty. Curator: Aida Eltorie. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini.
India - Everyone Agrees: It's About to Explode
India's first official participation at Venice after several privately initiated presentations, this exhibition curated by Ranjit Hoskote will reconsider nationality, territory and identity through the work of four artists and groups based both within India and beyond. Read ART iT's interview with participating artist Zarina Hashmi here.
Commissioner: Ranjit Hoskote. Venue: Pavilion at Arsenale.
Russia - Andrei Monastyrski and the Collective Actions Group: Empty Zones
Curated by Boris Groys, the Russian Pavilion is one of the more theory-driven entries to this year's Venice Bienale. Already, Groys has convened a symposium in Moscow on Russia's relationship to the legacy of conceptual art, featuring international speakers including Terry Smith, Chus Martinez and Jörg Heiser. Focusing on the pioneering participatory art group Collective Actions, the exhibition itself will attempt to articulate "the concept of life as a unique kind of artwork."
Commissioner: Stella Kesaeva. Curator: Boris Groys. Venue: Pavilion at Giardini.
Thailand - Navin Rawanchaikul: Paradiso di Navin
Navin Rawanchaikul was born in Thailand to parents with Hindu-Punjabi roots and is now a permanent resident of Japan. Building on this personal narrative, through "Paradiso di Navin" he plans to deconstruct the system of national representations that defines the Venice Biennale. Read ART iT's interview with the artist here.
Commissioner: Prisna Pongtadsirikul. Curators: Pandit Chanrochanakit, Steven Pettifor. Venue: Paradiso Gallerie, Giardini della Biennale.
UAE - Second Time Around
In 2009, the UAE's first official representation at Venice turned a reflexive gaze on the use of culture in the Emirates' ongoing nation-building project. This year's follow-up presentation curated by Vasif Kortun shifts the focus squarely on art itself, with a group show of works in disparate media and approaches by Reem Al Ghaith, Abdullah Al Saadi and Lateefa Bint Maktoum. Read ART iT's interview with Vasif Kortun here.
Commissioner: Hamdan Lamees. Curator: Vasif Kortun. Venue: Pavilion at Arsenale.
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Venice Biennale - ILLUMInations: 54th International Art Exhibition
54th Venice Biennale: Zarina Hashmi (India)
Installation view of Home is a Foreign Place (1999) in "Everybody Agrees: It's About to Explode," Indian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, Arsenale, Venice, 2011. Portfolio of 36 woodcuts with Urdu text printed in black on Kozo paper, mounted on Somerset paper, ed 25, approx 45 x 37.5 cm each, framed. Photo ART iT.
Zarina Hashmi was born in 1937 in Aligarh, British India, and is currently based in New York. Distinguished by their evocative sense of materiality, her works in paper and sculpture often combine minimalist, schematic elements with references of deep personal significance. She has been selected as one of four artists and artist groups to represent India in its first official representation at the Venice Biennale, in the exhibition "Everyone Agrees: It's About to Explode," curated by Ranjit Hoskote. ART iT corresponded with Zarina to discuss what it means for her to represent India at Venice and her unique perspective on issues of nationality and belonging.
Interview:
ART iT: You lived through the Partition of India but have also spent much of your adulthood in countries ranging from France, Thailand and Japan to the US. How do you feel about being one of the artists selected for India's first official representation at Venice?
ZH: Neither my family nor I suffered physical harm as a result of the Partition. However, when the country was divided, many families on both sides of the border were separated in the shuffle. The pain we collectively suffered from this dislocation had to do with losing our sense of belonging to India. At this stage of my life, one more group show is of little interest. However, on an emotional level to represent India is finally an acknowledgment of being a member of the nation, after following a kind of "middle passage" for most of my adult life.
ART iT: Entitled "Everyone Agrees: It's about to Explode," the India Pavilion will address themes including the idea of the nation-state as something unitary or territorial. What works will you be showing in Venice, and how do you see them relating to the overall concept of the Pavilion?
ZH: Of my works, Ranjit Hoskote has selected: Home is a Foreign Place (1999); Noor (2008); and Blinding Light (2010). The exhibition is an attempt to address the issues of migration and displacement. So far few of the Indian shows have included artists of the Indian diaspora, and it goes to Ranjit's credit that he has chosen artists who are part of a larger global dialogue.
ART iT: Have you ever considered works such as Home is a Foreign Place, Dividing Line, or Letters from Home to be conscientious reflections on the ideas - ideologies, even - of nations and borders?
ZH: My work was never a conscious reflection on any ideology - it was just a reflection, or narrative, of my own life and the life of many others like me, for whom home has become a foreign place. This is a predicament of the modern age: crossing borders to live in foreign lands and communicating through scraps of papers with quickly jotted notes.
Left: Blinding Light (2010), 22-carat gold leaf on Okawara paper, 185.42 x 100.33 cm. Courtesy Zarina Hashmi and Luhring Augustine, New York. Right: Noor (Divine Light) (2008), maple wood with formulated gold leaf and leather cord, 13 sets of 3 units each (39 units total), each approx 10.8 x 6.35 cm. Courtesy Zarina Hashmi and Gallery Espace, New Delhi.
ART iT: You often return to the themes of maps and homes (or in the case of the latter, their architectural plans). These are both schematic, but at a human scale maps are necessarily abstract, while even as abstracted diagrams homes can be intensely personal. Can you explain what draws you to these two themes, and two modes of depiction?
ZH: Maps and the memory of homes hold an inextricable significance in the life of a traveler. With a map, I can revisit the city I knew by tracing the streets and rivers. Home is always an interior reality, which, with a floor plan, I can walk through again and again in my imagination.
ART iT: The word "pavilion" itself suggests a temporary or movable structure - the French root means "tent." Do you feel at home in a place or at an event like Venice, or is the idea of bringing bits and pieces of the world to one spot anathema to the way you have lived so far? What is your relationship to locality?
ZH: You are asking the wrong person this question. I haven't felt at home in any place for over 50 years. I find the idea of a tent very attractive, especially its aspect of temporariness. Art is about commerce, you bring what you make to the marketplace. I don't think locality plays any big role in it, although tourism certainly does.
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
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