Atlanta Biennial, 2016; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia. Courtesy of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Photo: Erin Jane Nelson.

The purpose of many biennials is to offer a cross-sectional view of a segment of artistic practice. Since artists often act as vanguards in analyzing contemporary culture, biennials are often a useful tool to discover and explore pressing issues within a society and how artists respond to them. While some themes in the Atlanta Biennial are obvious, like the prevalence of racial disparities in the region, the curators seem less focused on selecting artists for their investigations of these specific issues. Instead, the show presents a loose collection of a wide range of media (including book producers, collectives, and self-taught artists) and thus reads more as a salon-style overview rather than a focused inquiry into the prominent issues facing the South—ones not dissimilar to those facing the country as a whole.

Atlanta Biennial, 2016; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia. Courtesy of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Photo: Erin Jane Nelson.

A striking omission from the show is the lack of wall texts to provide any context for the vast diversity of works on display. While wall texts are not a necessity in an exhibition, they can actively help viewers gain a better understanding of the works on view, especially in the realm of contemporary art. As Ingrid Schaffner writes, wall texts are “an opportunity to transmit insights, inspire interest, and to point to the fact that choices have been made. When there is no wall text, other assumptions are being made, which also need to be read critically.”[2] With the curators’ decision to eschew all wall texts, visitors must rely on their interpretations to gain any insight into the works.

Atlanta Biennial, 2016; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia. Courtesy of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Photo: Erin Jane Nelson.

Indeed, such a lack of texts does a disservice to some works on view. For instance, two sculptures from Jillian Mayer’s Slumpies series, Slumpie 2 – Day Bed and Slumpie 3 – Q Chair (both 2016), are large, vividly textured, haphazardly painted, and seem like furniture. Aesthetically, the works invite one’s curiosity, but many viewers will regard the works as purely formal exercises and miss the context of these objects, each of which is designed to prop up a person who is staring obsessively at a phone screen. Knowing this information, viewers can see the properly placed appendages on the sculptures as apparatuses to hold up users’ arms while they look at devices—a more profound understanding of the work. With adequate context, viewers can more capably grasp the works’ connections to a specific societal condition, such as an overreliance on technology.

Atlanta Biennial, 2016; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia. Courtesy of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Photo: Erin Jane Nelson.

While an interpretation of Mayer’s works may suffer due to the lack of context, other works stand out despite this absence. Stacy Lynn Waddell’s gold-leaf-on-paper works are a visual and thematic apex of the exhibition. Installed on a royal-blue portion of the gallery’s walls, her Landscape (Chain Link Fence View for W.S.) and BLACK LIVES MATTER (Transformation) (both 2016) read as rubbings of a chain-link fence and signs from the social movement, respectively, poignantly speaking to the racial disparities still prevalent in the South. Also striking is Sharon Norwood’s series of digital prints, The Root of the Matter (2016): into images of mid-nineteenth-century prints of white bourgeoisie scenes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, Norwood inserts masses of hair-like lines as a symbol of a racial Other.

Atlanta Biennial, 2016; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia. Courtesy of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Photo: Erin Jane Nelson.

Though the exhibition excels at presenting a large number of artists who deserve greater visibility, it suffers due to the sheer number of works. Featuring multiple works by more than thirty artists, the exhibition’s walls are crowded. Larger works, such as Kalup Linzy’s touching The Queen Rose Family (2016–ongoing), can barely be seen apart from other works around them. Such proximity magnifies awkward curatorial decisions. For example, a viewer may group together one of Mayer’s sculptures, Waddell’s gold-leaf works, and a suite of video montages by Daniel Newman called Lost Flip-Flop (2016). These works, while intriguing on their own, struggle to effect any meaningful dialogue when seen together

While the exhibition is barely greater than the sum of its parts—a condition that could have been ameliorated with more contextual information—the Atlanta Biennial is a welcome addition to a region where visual arts can play a vital role in addressing societal problems. With its location and focus on collaboration, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center is a great home for a periodic exhibition, and a continuing biennial will benefit the area. The curators fulfill this iteration’s goals by showing careful attention in their inclusion of a diverse range of artists from the South.

The Atlanta Biennial is on view through December 18, 2016.

[1] The Atlanta Biennial was curated by Victoria Camblin, editor and artistic director, ART PAPERS (Atlanta); Daniel Fuller, curator, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Aaron Levi Garvey, independent curator and cofounder of Long Road Projects (Jacksonville); and Gia Hamilton, director, Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans).

[2]. Ingrid Schaffner, “Wall Text,” in What Makes a Great Exhibition?, ed. Paula Marincola, (Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2006), 156.

Los Angeles is a metropolis built on a delusion: that engineering can overcome a basic lack of sufficient resources to meet the popular need. Five years into a severe drought, one would think conservation would be on everyone’s mind, but the clean cars and green lawns all around town suggest otherwise. To increase discussion of water and its scarcity, the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs developed CURRENT LA: Water, LA’s first public-art biennial. Four LA-based curators invited thirteen local and international artists to create temporary public artworks, on view for one month in the summer at locations dispersed across the city’s fifteen council districts. Like the water from which it draws its central metaphor, CURRENT LA was an example of the tension between abundance and scarcity.

Gala Porras-Kim. Supplement to Ballona Discovery Park Informative Signs, 2016; mixed media; variable dimensions. Artwork commissioned by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) for CURRENT LA: Water. Photo by Panic Studio LA.

Water and art are both fraught with questions about equitable access to resources. DCA General Manager Danielle Brazell likened the CURRENT LA: Water concept to the flow of water: at times a trickle, at other times a gushing flow. This poetic analogy overlooks the structural inequality that determines water usage in drought. Rain may fall everywhere, but once water meets the ground, access to it is not evenly distributed. Conservation is encouraged through punitive pricing, which has the effect of enabling wealthy scofflaws while asking the poor to do more with less. LA’s aquifers, which represent the city’s water supply for future generations, have already been severely compromised by unregulated industrial activity. Once again, those who can pay are rewarded with abundance now; those who cannot have to plan for a future without resources. Discussions around revitalizing the long-suffering LA River often come up against similar concerns, as ecological renewal seems to come about only when property values reach a point of unaffordability for local communities. The fact that CURRENT LA was underwritten by Bloomberg Philanthropies, a private foundation whose Public Art Challenge seeks to “celebrate creativity, enhance urban identity, encourage public–private partnerships, and drive economic development,” only increases the anxiety around fair and equitable distribution of resources.

Some of these concerns were addressed by the artists Gala Porras-Kim, Candice Lin, and Kerry Tribe. Porras-Kim’s Supplement to Ballona Discovery Park Informative Signs (all works 2016) took the form of several didactic panels describing the destruction of historic wetlands and Tongva-Gabrileño religious sites to build the Playa Vista development and Del Rey Lagoon Park, where the work is situated. Candice Lin’s A Hard White Body deployed bacteria to subvert the traditional monumental form of a historic bust on a pedestal by literally inverting and deconstructing these forms. Kerry Tribe’s film Exquisite Corpse stitched together fifty-one minutes of footage shot along the fifty-one miles of the Los Angeles River, focusing on human activity including industry, community-building, and real-estate development, as well as conservation efforts.

Candice Lin. A Hard White Body, 2016; mixed media; variable dimensions. Artwork commissioned by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) for CURRENT LA: Water. Photo by Panic Studio LA.

CURRENT LA: Water served two main audiences: art lovers who made car trips to parts unknown, hoping to see the project in totality, and local residents, who might or might not have happened upon art in their midst. Scattered across over forty square miles, the biennial highlighted LA’s impressive range of ecologies, from the Ballona Wetlands on the West side to the banks of the LA River in Atwater Village. Art appeared along the rim of a dam in Pacoima, on the banks of an artificial lake in Echo Park, and throughout the city’s many parks and green spaces. Some projects were hyper-local, like Lucky Dragons’ ∆ (Delta) in Bee Canyon Park, intended to construct an experience for everyday users of the site to understand their daily surroundings in a new way. Others were broadly international, like Teresa Margolles’ La Sombra (The Shade), a memorial to murdered Angelenos for which the artist displaced a technique of washing the sites where murders had been committed—from violence-plagued Juarez, where the artist describes the streets as a kind of morgue, to the streets of Los Angeles, where the gang activity that drives Juarez’ high body count is largely of the past. Still others were subterranean, like Refik Anadol and Peggy Weil’s Under LA, a series of public visualizations of geologic core samples taken from the rapidly drying aquifers of East Los Angeles.

Teresa Margolles. La Sombra (The Shade), 2016; concrete veneer on wood. Artwork commissioned by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) for CURRENT LA: Water. Photo by Panic Studio LA.

Access to contemporary art, like water, is far from equitable. Few non-specialists are familiar with the formal and conceptual vocabularies of contemporary art. Community-based artists, whose work speaks directly to people on the streets, are often excluded from initiatives like CURRENT LA. Lower-income citizens, who don’t have backyards or lawns, could not fully participate in certain projects such as Mel Chin’s The TIE that BINDS: the MIRROR of the FUTURE, an artistically minded lawn-replacement program that requires a commitment of fifteen square feet of private outdoor space to realize. Still, for many locals, the challenge to access the art was often conceptual rather than physical.

Mel Chin. The TIE that BINDS: the MIRROR of the FUTURE, 2016; drought-tolerant plants; 15 x 15 ft. Artwork commissioned by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) for CURRENT LA: Water. Photo by Panic Studio LA.

Though it is a leading exporter of creativity, Los Angeles specializes in representation and narrative, two elements in short supply for CURRENT LA. An “If you build it, they will come” mindset common to many well-intentioned public art projects seemed to be in play, with the expectation that high-visibility museum curators selecting high-visibility contemporary artists would naturally produce successful public engagement. The results were mixed and depended largely on placement. Chris Kallmyer’s New Weather Station attracted mostly art crowds, while the local people who use the park stayed on the opposite side where facilities are located. Josh Callaghan and Daveed Kapoor’s Mast was situated in a high-traffic area, actively used by locals. Edgar Arceneaux’s The CENTER of the EARTH grappled with these concerns, presenting water as a reified material for spiritual contemplation and consumption, in a sculptural work that caused the park where it was sited to operate more like a museum, beyond questions of context, function, or legibility.

Edgar Arceneaux. The CENTER of the EARTH, 2016; mixed media; variable dimensions. Artwork commissioned by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) for CURRENT LA: Water. Photo by Panic Studio LA.

CURRENT LA: Water was a strong first attempt at a biennial of public art in Los Angeles, arguably one of the most important art cities at the moment, and one that has emerged without a strong international destination event. There is much to learn that will benefit future iterations of the project. For comparison, the recent Istanbul Biennial, whose theme of “saltwater” similarly organized major public-art commissions by international and local artists around a natural resource in a variety of urban sites, drew thousands of international art visitors and extensive coverage. CURRENT LA, similarly structured, was nearly invisible to visitors outside Los Angeles. The choice to schedule the biennial for the summer break from late July to early August, without targeting a tourist audience and when many artists and academics are traveling, almost definitely reduced its visibility. Those who did experience CURRENT LA at multiple locations had to drive to do so, adding to traffic congestion and consuming more scarce resources. Finally, the decision to treat CURRENT LA artworks as temporary, disappearing after one month, could be rethought in the future in light of how other public art festivals like Skulptur Projekte Münster have, over time, amassed significant collections of public artworks for their host cities.

Josh Callaghan + Daveed Kapoor. Mast, 2016; mixed media; variable dimensions. Artwork commissioned by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) for CURRENT LA: Water. Photo by Panic Studio LA.

Water is political, as evidenced by recent controversies around clean water access, most visibly in Detroit and Flint, Michigan, but also in East Los Angeles. Since the closing of CURRENT LA: Water, the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, led by members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in defense of their local water supply, have made national headlines. Industrialized water built Los Angeles, where water scarcity has always been an issue of grave concern. The biggest threats to our water supply, and the future of our existence as humans, are not from natural causes such as drought. As the Michigan and #NoDAPL movements demonstrate, industry, corruption, and good old-fashioned profit are acute threats. Until access to clean water is treated as a human right, consciousness-raising through art is unlikely to make much difference.

CURRENT LA: Water was on view from July 16 to August 14, 2016.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

The Venice Biennale is fundamentally shaped by its founders’ belief in statehood. Each nation-state secures its site, much like an embassy, and asserts its self-image through the choice of curators and artists. Four pavilions at the 2013 Biennale demonstrate how the notion of the nation-state is constructed and deconstructed in the face of contemporary global pressures. For Bangladesh, the pavilion is a platform to assert a distinct national identity and to distract from tensions prompted by multinational, neocolonial actors. For Portugal, the pavilion is an emissary transporting national essence across geographical borders. For Greece, the pavilion is a catharsis for anxieties about an unstable economic and political system. For Palestine, the pavilion is a non-site reflecting the nebulous identity of a stateless people. Art serves politics in each exhibition, whether representing patriotism, diplomacy, reckoning, or refusal.

Dhali Al Mamoon. Elimination, 2013. Installation. Bangladesh Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale. Photo by the author.

Bangladesh’s pavilion hosts a group show, Supernatural, that features eight Bangladeshi artists, two international artists, and a collaborative project by the Charupit Art School. The show is commissioned by Francesco Elisei, an Italian who is also responsible for the current and 2011 Costa Rica pavilions, and curated by another Italian, Fabio Anselmi, who curated the 2011 Syrian pavilion. The Bangladeshi artists Mokhlesur Rahman, Mahbub Zamal, A. K. M. Zahidul Mustafa, Ashok Karmaker, Lala Rukh Selim, Uttam Kumar Karmaker, Dhali Al Mamoon, and Yasmin Jahan Nupur are all members of a collective, the Chhakka Artists’ Group. They are joined by Gavin Rain of South Africa and Gianfranco Meggiato of Italy. The works are a broad mix of modernist painting and sculpture, multimedia works, installations, and folk art. Very little holds them together materially, stylistically, or thematically. Large-panel paintings by Mokhlesur Rahman sit adjacent to gleaming geometric abstractions in bronze by Gianfranco Meggiato. The paintings invoke the folk figures and rural landscapes of an idealized Bengali past, while the sculptures are quintessential mid-century European modernism of the sort that has come to be identified with corporate architecture. A mixed-media sculpture installation by Dhali Al Mamoon has a creepy vibe that doesn’t gel with the adjacent cheerful, naïve paintings from the Charupit School. Mamoon’s work is a mountain of matted black hair atop a circle of pale feet that poke out from beneath, with hands suspended from above. Ambiguous and menacing, it is among the show’s best works as it occupies a space that is neither nationalistic nor nostalgic.

Bangladesh is the poorest of the South Asian nations and the only one to field a pavilion at the 2013 Biennale. Unlike its neighbors Pakistan and India, who did not participate this year, Bangladesh does not have an established gallery scene or a crop of international art stars. As a population-dense nation with a historically high poverty rate, it would seem Bangladesh should have other priorities than to rent a costly Venetian venue to showcase its regional artists and those from other countries. However, the nation has recently seen rapid development in its urban areas and increased international interest thanks to its abundant, cheap labor supply. Its government has been criticized in the wake of industrial disasters that resulted from poor oversight of labor conditions. The Biennale pavilion is clearly intended to promote an image of Bangladesh as investment-worthy, contemporary, and international. However, it may have done the opposite. The show is a hodge-podge of two decidedly old-fashioned aesthetics: that of the nationalist modernism found in state venues in South Asia, and that of the decorative modernism found in tourist galleries in Italy. Neither approach does much to situate Bangladesh at the forefront of contemporary art discourse.

Joana Vasconcelos. Trafaria Praia, 2013.
1960 motor-driven steel passenger ferry. Dimensions variable. Portuguese Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale. Courtesy of the artist and the Transtejo – Transportes Tejo, S.A., Lisbon. Photo by the author.

The Portuguese pavilion takes a novel approach to the problem of pavilion space, which is notoriously expensive and difficult to find for countries that are not grandfathered in to the Giardini. Artist Joana Vasconcelos has created a massive installation in fabric and LED lights within the cabin of a cacilheiro commuter ferry, a ubiquitous symbol of the city of Lisbon. The boat, a modest emblem of middle-class industriousness, shares the shoreline of the Venice lagoon with multistory yachts owned by Europe’s flashiest oligarchs. Stepping into the boat becomes a border crossing into a space that is distinctly Portuguese, despite being located in Italian waters.

Joana Vasconcelos. Valkyrie Azulejo, 2013. Handmade woolen crochet, fabrics, ornaments, polyester, LEDs and electric system. Dimensions variable. Portuguese Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale. Courtesy of the artist and the Transtejo – Transportes Tejo, S.A., Lisbon. Photo by the author.

Vasconcelos’ main installation in the ship’s cabin evokes an undersea craft fair, with every surface covered in crochet and quilting. The space is dark, save for the glow of LEDs that weave throughout. The blue-lit darkness is dreamlike, comforting, morose, and distinctly feminine. It complements the fado music—similarly woman-driven, mournful, and enveloping—that plays through the ship’s onboard PA system. A stage is set up to host a series of programmed lectures and performances rooted in Portuguese culture. The boat’s exterior is lined with traditional white azulejo tiles with blue graphics that are associated with Portugal’s Baroque period architecture. (In keeping with Vasconcelos’ stated interest in examining cultural touchstones from the perspectives of gender, class, and nationality, it bears noting that this Arab-influenced tile motif is a remnant of Portugal’s Moorish past.) At scheduled intervals, the boat unmoors and ferries visitors around the lagoon, thereby making the shared seafaring history of Portugal and Venice tangible in the present.

Stefanos Tsivopoulos. History Zero, 2013. Installation and three-part film. Greek Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale. Photo by the author.

In the case of the Greeks, arguably the originators of the modern nation-state, national identity is both deeply rooted and very much in jeopardy at present. Stefanos Tsivopoulos’ installation History Zero takes up the question of what comes after economic collapse. Rather than dystopia, Tsivopoulos proposes that the decline of the Eurozone will lead to new freedoms. In the pavilion’s foyer is a series of didactic panels that describe different economies based in barter or ad hoc currencies. These include the high-tech, such as bitcoin, and the low-tech, such as cattle. (The latter, the text explains, give their name to the Indian “rupee” and the English “fee.”) The title History Zero speaks to the re-setting of expectations in the wake of the grand European currency plan’s failure in Greece. What irony to think that this nation, from whose legacy all of Western Europe claims its cultural legitimacy, could be cut out of the community of Europe. Tsivopoulos uses the international platform of the Biennale to push for a more progressive relationship to economies, one driven by people rather than the reverse.

Within the pavilion plays a three-part film that follows three archetypal characters’ relationships to money. The first shows an African immigrant collecting scrap metal in the streets of Athens. He pushes his shopping cart full of refuse through post-industrial wastelands and quiet city streets. Stopping at a garbage bin, he makes a remarkable find—a trash bag filled with money, folded neatly into piles of paper flowers. He furtively makes off with his haul, leaving the shopping cart behind. In the next film, we meet a sharp young artist who walks the city with his iPad, taking photographs. His trendy black coat and stylish haircut suggest privilege, but he seems to be drawn to mundane and neglected places. Traversing the city, he comes across the abandoned shopping cart full of scrap. He responds to the discovery of this discarded material as one who has found a hidden treasure. The third film follows an older, wealthy woman, an art collector. She is surrounded by cutting-edge contemporary art, including several figurative sculptures by Pawel Althamer (which are similar to works shown in the Arsenale exhibition). Money is clearly no object to her, so much so that she has decorated her home with bouquets of origami flowers made from Euro notes. She removes and discards a bouquet, replacing it with another, as if the paper flowers had rotted. In each sequence, our assumptions about the location of value in specific materials are called into question. Other affective and speculative valuation systems are proposed and explored through these narratives.

Bashir Makhoul. Giardini Occupato, 2013. Mixed media installation. “Otherwise Occupied,” Liceo Artistico Statale di Venezia. Photo by the author.

If the Bangladesh, Portugal, and Greece pavilions are shaped by the concerns of their respective nations, the exhibition of Palestinian artists Aissa Deebi and Bashir Makhoul is defined by the absence of a state. “Otherwise Occupied” is not an official pavilion sponsored by the Palestinian Authority, but rather a collaborative project between artists and curators at the American University in Cairo, Jerusalem-based Palestinian art space Al Hoash, and the Winchester School of Art at Southampton University, UK. The absence of a recognized nation-state may be an ongoing problem for Palestinians, but here it creates the opportunity for a transnational partnership that calls the very purpose of the state into question.

The works of the two artists further problematize the idea of the state as a relevant and meaningful construct. Israel, a nation defined by (contested) borders and (enforced) linguistic and religious hegemony, is shown to be an oppressive construct in the work of Aissa Deebi. His film The Trial is a dramatization of testimony by Palestinian Marxist Daoud Turki given to an Israeli court that convicted him of espionage. Turki’s words challenge the notion of a state as antithetical to the cross-cultural, collectivist, and worker-centric values of Marxism. He states, “I have an internationalist view, and as such, I do not see any boundaries between me and my fellow Jews.”[1] The actors in Deebi’s reenactment are repeatedly interrupted by authority figures that perform their jurisdiction in a passive-aggressive manner by loudly placing and removing a glass of water in the scene. This ostensibly compassionate gesture becomes a means to disrupt the flow of ideas and dissipate the intensity of Turki’s words. Bashir Makhoul complicates the landscape of the Giardini itself, home to the established pavilions of the dominant national actors at mid-century. In the courtyard of the Liceo Artistico Statale di Venezia, where the exhibition is housed, he invites each visitor to decorate and personalize a cardboard box, which is then placed in the Giardini Occupato as a shadow pavilion. This is the Giardini reimagined as a provisional architectural space populated by homeless, stateless entities. In both works, the assumed links between statehood and identity are questioned, not only as they relate to the Palestinian people, but as they apply to nation-states on the whole.

The Venice Biennale remains the largest and most comprehensive international gathering of contemporary art worldwide. Nonetheless, its influence is waning as smaller, more versatile biennials such as Sharjah, Istanbul, and Manifesta attract increasing international audiences to each round. These newer biennials are able to be more responsive to changing attitudes about nationality and culture in an interconnected and seemingly borderless era. Venice, a city built on seaborne international trade, will have to unshackle its Biennale from nationalist perspectives in order to keep up.

The 55th Venice Biennale is on view through November 24, 2013.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.