Agenda Venezia

51st International art exhibition in Venice

From 12 June to 6 November in Venice

Essential in its two main shows organized by the Spanish directors Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez, but rich in collateral events, permeating all city’s spaces, islands included, with a sometimes exaggerate density which is nonetheless symbol of a great vitality: the 51th Biennale Art Exhibition was inaugurated on the 12th of June and will be open until 6 November.

Essential. 91 in all are the selected artists, so that it will be possible to return them the visibility that lacked during past edition, also thanks to a quick and careful design in both seats, making easier the understanding of their works.

Tradition wants that the visit begins from the gardens, the most historically connotated place and the place where the most important countries have their pavillions; outside the gardens, like a visiting card, there appears the strong sight of the 40 metres high boat, the “vertical sea” by Fabrizio Plessi.

At the Italian pavillion (the name is now an improper one, since the pavillion is not going to represent the national colours anymore), the section “the experience of art” was taken care of by de Corral. It is not an historical show in the strict meaning of the expression, even though some spaces are dedicated to contemporary masterpieces, such as the triptychs of Francis Bacon, the informal works of Antoni Tapies and Agnes Martin, who has just left us; or the installation by Bruce Nauman, a harsh denunciation against power. This is a transversal topic, uniting several artists both in the two main shows and in the pavillions, expressed in different ways and with different sensibilities.

Barbara Kruger, who will be awarded golden lion for lifetime achievement, interprets it through her electronic writing, both as an interior struggle between good and bad and as opposition between male and female.

Videos are prevailing as means of expression, a now mature and flexible means that can have classical results as we can see in William Kentridge’works, is able to accept the challenges of Francesco Vezzoli or to have the narrative trend of Eija – Liisa Ahtila, or to abandon itself to existentialist questions as in Candice Breitz.

Between the fews which are still clinging to a classical, even though updated, version, we find Thomas Schutte, golden lion, and his delicate feminine sculptures.

Feminine (or feminist) is the other half of the Biennale: it is a choice made by Rosa Martinez: in her section “Always a little further” at the Arsenale; its meaning is to be a refund, as announced in the beginning, for the secular emargination suffered by women in this field. Absolute protagonist, and not casually golden lion for artists under 35, is Regina José Galindo, that in her performances, where blood is the primary element, denounces together private violence inflicted on women and violence exercitated by power.

Feminine are also the materials used in the installations: the tampaxes (14.000) of which is made the chandelier of Joana Vasconcelos, that would make a good show in a Venetian palace; the set of saucepans, disposed with obsessive order, of Subodh Gupta; the onion skins decorating Bruna Esposito’s marmor slab.

There are other signals showing that feminine creativity is not just a (late) ideological claim by Martinez, but a real urgence: the award to young Italian art 2004 –2005 assigned to Lara Favaretto’s video, focused on party’s magic; the golden lion to the French pavillion, hosting an installation by Annette Messager, an existential metaphor inspired by the character of Pinocchio and, outside the Biennale, the Eden myth seen by Pipilotti Rist screened on the ceiling of the San Stae church or, between collateral events, the exhibition “Homespun Tales”, domestic history of Kiki Smith at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia.

What has changed in the two curators’choice is the geography of the world of art: it is no more oriented towards the Far East, in fact its centre is now Latin America and emergences in the poorer countries.

Anyway China made widely up, taking part officially for the first time to the Biennale, in one of the most striking spaces of the Arsenale and, in the new geopolitics deriving from the dissolution of the former USSR, come up for the first time Afghanistan, Central Asia, Belarus Republic; new entries are also Morocco and Albania.

As to choices: some people stake everything on celebrated names, like United States with Ed Ruschi and Great Britain with the hyperfamous and bubbly Gilbert & George, whilst in the as usual hypertechnologic Japan the artist Miyako Ishiuchi gives himself up to the elegiac memory of his mother and nostalgic elements appear even in the South Korean pavillion.

On the other hand, the technological side of modern art is represented by New Zealand, Central Asia and an unexpected Turkey.

Lidia Panzeri