The 56th Venice Biennale, “All the World’s Futures,” has been hailed as the “political” Biennale both by its curator Okwui Enwezor and by the international art press. That designation has come in for significant criticism from some who feel that contemporary art either can not or should not address political concerns, given the commodity status of art objects within a capitalist framework. The Biennale is supported by a consortium of state, corporate, and individual interests, none of which can be assumed to represent progressive values or the rights of the disenfranchised. Rather, it functions as a bazaar in which established and emerging national interests jockey for influence, applying “soft” cultural power as well as “hard” economic power. How, then, to reconcile the Biennale’s nature with the “deeply reflective, deeply political”[1] objectives that Enwezor has laid out?

56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures, Padiglione Centrale, Giardini, Venezia, 2015. Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Alessandra Chemollo.

Enwezor declares that his exhibition, the centerpiece of an international festival presenting pavilions from eighty-seven nations,[2] addresses “the ruptures that surround and abound around every corner of the global landscape today.” He draws legitimacy for the geopolitical framework of his project from history, describing how “One hundred years after the first shots of the First World War were fired in 1914, and seventy-five years after the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, the global landscape again lies shattered and in disarray, scarred by violent turmoil, panicked by specters of economic crisis and viral pandemonium, secessionist politics, and a humanitarian catastrophe on the high seas, deserts, and borderlands, as immigrants, refugees, and desperate peoples seek refuge in seemingly calmer and prosperous lands.”[3]

Critics such as Artnet’s JJ Charlesworth have accused Enwezor of trivializing serious global crises by engaging them through the lens of art. “Underneath all the political posturing,” Charlesworth objects, “what it really represents is a bad case of disavowal–of not wanting to admit that you’re part of a system that is the problem, not the solution.”[4] Readers of this column will know that the art world’s complicity with oligarchic and hegemonic systems is a favorite subject of mine. Nonetheless, I find Charlesworth’s declaration that “the real point for all these countries and non-countries is to be part of the new machinery of the global economic world order” to be factually accurate but ethically disingenuous. This may be the motivation for government support of national pavilions, but it is not the motivation for artists who choose to engage political and historical narratives in their work.

Charlesworth dismisses the point that for those born outside the halls of influence established in the colonial era, engaging with the machinery of power remains the only way to attain visibility as a representative of the global underclass. Yet he and other art critics are themselves complicit in a system that refuses attention to artists who exist outside of it, whether by choice or by exclusion. If “the art itself changes absolutely nothing,” as Charlesworth claims, this is not because political art is inherently futile, but because postcolonial reality is one of sublimated, rather than reformed, structural oppressions. No longer can cultural or political exclusion be articulated purely in terms of race or national origin; rather, the same structures of exclusion are applied across geopolitical boundaries on the basis of class, educational access, and entrenched tribalism. This is as true in the art world as anywhere else.

Katharina Grosse. Untitled Trumpet, 2015; 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures. Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Alessandra Chemollo.

Despite the proliferation of international art festivals and fairs, the center of cultural discourse is still located in the Western hemisphere, as demonstrated by the clamor of developing nations to be included at Venice. Enwezor himself was not anointed as an elite curator through his organizing of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale in 1997, but by his appointment as curator of Documenta 11 in 2002. No doubt, his high profile has been sustained by adherence to the protocols of art-world exclusivity—obtuse academic speak, globetrotting, glitzy compadres—but to suggest that this negates his exhibition’s political engagement, particularly while lauding previous iterations such as Massimiliano Gioni’s 55th Biennale, amounts to hating the player, not the game. No curator at the level of visibility required for the appointment to curate at Venice is free of such baggage. The difference is Enwezor is black and African, and the white critical establishment is all too quick to suggest that as a representative of communities they have worked hard to exclude, he is personally responsible for correcting wrongs that cultural insiders are permitted to ignore.

GLUKLYA/Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya. Clothes for the demonstration against false election of Vladimir Putin, 2011-2015; 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures. Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Alessandra Chemollo.

What, then, of the politics at play within the exhibition? Modes of engagement run the gamut, from aesthetic gestures such as Adel Abdessemed’s bouquets of inverted knives and Melvin Edwards’ assemblages made from tools and shackles, to more prescriptive manifestations such as Gulf Labor Coalition’s enormous banner outlining labor abuses at global museum construction sites on Saadiyat Island in the UAE. The strongest works are those that negotiate between these poles, such as the collection of anti-Putin protest garments assembled by Russian artist GLUKLYA (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya), of collective Chto Delat?, which fluctuate between social operation in the sphere of protest and aesthetic function in the space of installation. Arguably the most powerful work in this massive exhibition is the film Vertigo Sea (2015) by Ghanaian–British filmmaker John Akomfrah, a meditation on the ocean’s many uses, from ecology to migration to commerce, which masterfully dances between breathtaking beauty and equally gasp-inducing horror.

Enwezor is correct when he promises that “Everywhere one turns, new crisis, uncertainty, and deepening insecurity across all regions of the world seem to leap into view.” Despite this, there is beauty expressed through sound and vision throughout the exhibition, for example in the bright color sprays of Katharina Grosse’s Untitled Trumpet (2015) and the haunting harmonies of Lili Reynaud Dewar’s My Epidemic (Small Bad Blood Opera) (2015). Rather than get hung up on Isaac Julien’s recitations of Das Kapital (which even Enwezor admits is “a book that nobody has read and yet everyone hates or quotes from,”[5]) a more engaged viewer might see these readings as part of a larger program of live performance[6] that periodically animates the installation, both in David Adjaye’s massive red “Arena” and throughout both exhibition venues, with musical compositions arranged by artists including Charles Gaines, Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, Jeremy Deller, and Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla.

For some, the only question to be answered by political art remains, does it change anything? This is not my chief concern, as I staunchly support the right of art to serve no greater purpose than to provoke discourse and thought within its viewership. However, let us consider what efficacy might be sought from projects like Vik Muniz’ Lampedusa (2015), a “paper” boat that traverses Venice’s canals adorned with headlines from Italian news coverage of a 2013 tragedy in which hundreds of Libyan migrants drowned off the coast of Italy. Will Muniz prevent another migrant tragedy through his artwork? Unlikely. Will his work promote awareness of this abysmal tragedy to an audience of oligarchs and tourists vacationing along the Canal? Questionable. Does this work, therefore, “trivialize” the incident? Only if one believes that artistic commentary is implicitly less serious than journalism or policy, both frameworks that have thus far failed to provoke sufficient outrage at the conditions that lead to recurring tragedies of this kind. The expectation that art, with far fewer resources than government[7], should accomplish a greater result or abandon social engagement altogether serves as a backhanded means of silencing artists who stray from market-friendly, upbeat narratives in their work.

Gulf Labor Coalition (GLC). Who is Building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi? 2015. 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures. Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Alessandra Chemollo.

Meanwhile, invited artists Gulf Labor Coalition made actual protest their contribution, staging an action on May 8 that shut down the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and forced the museum’s director Richard Armstrong to agree to a meeting about labor abuses at the Saadiyat Island construction site of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Given that Gulf Labor activists including Walid Raad and Ashok Sukamaran have recently been refused entry to the UAE to speak about labor issues, present their art, and document conditions under which migrant laborers live, the international territory of the Biennale becomes a fruitful alternative site for their interventions. When the attention of the world’s powerful is focused on a single location, it is not pointless or hypocritical, but in fact it is necessary to raise issues of inequality and marginalization. To reject the potential of such gestures is to justify the inaction of the status quo.

56th Venice Biennale: All the World’s Futures is on view through November 22, 2015.

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

[1] Charlotte Higgins, “Das Kapital at the Arsenale: How Okwui Enwezor Invited Marx to the Biennale,” The Guardian, May 7, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/07/das-kapital-at-venice-biennale-okwui-enwezor-karl-marx

[2] Two pavilions, Kenya and Costa Rica, were withdrawn shortly before opening, illustrating the contradictions of the Biennale’s geopolitics. Kenya withdrew following controversy over its inclusion of Italian and Chinese artists at the expense of Kenyans, while Costa Rica withdrew when artists protested its pay-to-play model. In both cases, the state’s desire to benefit from the Biennale’s visibility was shown not to be commensurate with that state’s support for its artists.

[3] Okwui Enwezor, “All the World’s Futures,” Curatorial statement for the 56th Venice Biennale, http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/exhibition/enwezor/

[4] JJ Charlesworth, “Playing Politics: JJ Charlesworth on Why Art World Hypocrisy Stars at the 56th Venice Biennale,” Artnet, May 7, 2015, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/56th-venice-biennale-politics-jj-charlesworth-295350

[5] Higgins, Op. cit.

[6] A sharper critique of the live art program would address the hierarchical and remote, theatrical nature of the performances in an era when interactivity and participation hold sway. This will be the subject of my next #Hashtags column in June.

[7] Despite the enormous sums of money at play in the art world, working artists still receive very little investment. Numerous participants in the Biennale have described to me the financial burden they personally took on to participate.

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.