Zina Saro-Wiwa. The Invisible Man, 2015. Courtesy of the Artist and C&.

Artur Walther: We have known each other for over fifteen years. You have a long history as a curator, a writer, a scholar, and a teacher. You have made significant contributions to the study of modern and contemporary African art—and African photography and video art in particular. How do you conceptualize your own personal trajectory in relation to the development of these fields?

Okwui Enwezor: Often histories converge, intertwine, diverge, and move in different directions. The development of contemporary art and contemporary African art—and photography and video specifically—has similarly moved in a non-chronological, non-linear fashion. As with any field of study, new ideas emerge and new research illuminates gaps in our information, and provoke new readings, considerations, and revisions. All of this is part and parcel of why one remains engaged and interested in a set 
of ideas, as well as the underlying principles around which these ideas are formed.

Walther: How did you begin in the field? When would you say the critical mass started developing?

Enwezor: Well, let’s think about it this way—about twenty-five years ago, if one were to pursue a frame for African photography, you would have found very little that specifically relates to photography as an autonomous practice. Photography in relation to Africa was oftentimes assigned to the terrain of the ethnography, as documents providing secondary information to more primary information observed in the field. Photography was seen to be an aid to the art, not particularly a part of practice. What I believe, without making any claims of who did it first, is that in the 1990s, a generation of curators, writers, and thinkers who were Africans—and I want to underscore this—made a bid to shift completely away from this ethnographic lens, and its spotlight. We found that the way that this lens thought of Africa was completely at odds with the content.

Read the complete interview here.

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.

#nationalism #institutions #power #access #globalization #protest #labor #capital

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?

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 was 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.

Bruce Nauman. Eat/Death, 1972; neon tubing with clear glass tubing suspension frame; 7 3/8 x 25¼ x 2 1/8 in (18.7 x 64.1 x 5.3 cm). Courtesy of the Artist and la Biennale di Venezia. Photo taken by the author.

The biggest shock in this Biennale is that painting looks out of sorts. It’s not obvious at first, but it becomes evident after combing through the vast offerings. In part, this is due to painting’s long and continuing history of being the poster child for the powerful, a precedent that feels at odds with the show’s filters; but this goes deeper than that. The brutal truth is simply that painting is always first about being a painting. A painting about class struggle isn’t just about class struggle, it’s a painting about class struggle—a bit like listening to someone letting you know how smart they are while explaining the subtleties of Marx’s Various Formulæ for the Rate of Surplus-Value—by design, painting is selfish that way. The content of a painting is always subordinate to the medium, otherwise a different material would have been chosen. But what this surprisingly suggests is that there isn’t much room for painting in thematically curated shows, that is, unless those shows are about painting.

The Romanian Pavilion triggered this sweeping observation. Its installation of paintings by Adrian Ghenie called Darwin’s Room (2015) is sorely out of place in this pavilion, in stark contrast from its critically received previous offering of An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale (2013), where Manuel Pelmuș and Alexandra Pirici offered performances that encapsulated the entire history of the Biennale within a single day. Ghenie’s are not bad paintings, but there is no way that they can be properly considered. They immediately feel too self-absorbed in being painterly, too alien for the larger topic at hand. Technically, parts of the installation probably tie into the Garden of Disorder filter, but the work with Ghenie’s reoccurring theme of self-portraiture as historical figures withers in the dominate shadow of painterliness.

Marlene Dumas. Skulls, 2013-15; installation view, 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice. Courtesy of the Artist and la Biennale di Venezia. Photo taken by the author.

After the Romanian rub, I came to see everything else at the Biennale conventionally classified as a painting in the same light. Chris Ofili was an obvious choice for this curatorial effort, and under different circumstances his work would have been electrifying. But separate the historical context of the artist from the work, and it becomes harder to decipher the content from the decorative. To say that it took almost a full second to dismiss Georg Baselitz’s paintings would be generous; and Marlene Dumas’ brilliantly fun skull paintings could have single-handedly reversed the plight of painting for the entire exhibition, but by that point, it was too late. It read more of an epitaph for the medium of painting itself than a plausible warning on global excess. It’s demanding enough to take time to consider a work of art; placing a painting into a situation where it’s forced to supersede its primary function would appear to be asking too much.

Chris Ofili. Installation view, the Corderie building, 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice. Courtesy of the Artist and la Biennale di Venezia. Photo taken by the author.

For the most part, this Biennale has been overwhelmingly well received. Nevertheless, there are some that find the critiquing filters too rich for their tastes. Evidently, the show is too Marxist–which is to say that any possibility of a Marxist critique is too Marxist. So it isn’t surprising that these guardians of capitalism have found refuge in the very thing that is at odds with the exhibition. As if it wasn’t tough enough for painting, it also has to deal with an enabler reinforcing its quandary.

BGL. Canadassimo, 2015 (detail); mixed media; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artists, The National Gallery of Canada, and la Biennale di Venezia. Photo taken by the author.

To be clear, there were also plenty of non-painting works that lacked the ability to rise to the occasion, but when they failed, they did so independent of their respective medium. In the context of this exhibition, painting’s failure is a double jeopardy; its content offers a critique while simultaneously being a manifestation of the subject of that same critique. Either the content of a piece is undermined, or else the viewer is left with a lot of painterly naval gazing. (The Canadian Pavilion offered the only feasibly resolution of this point with BGL’s Canadassimo, 2015, but then it left painting deconstructed as sculptural remnants manifested from an accumulation of every Pollockian gesture ever made). Hence, viewers of this Biennale will have to decide if they can get past the paradox of critical painting’s self-defeating precondition or write it off as collateral damage of the greater critique.

All the World’s Futures is on view at the 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia through November 22, 2015.

This article is made possible by our Writers Fund, thanks to readers like you. Help us keep it going!

At the center of All the World’s Futures—The 56th Venice Biennale is the ARENA. Designed by architect David Adjaye, it is meant to serve as a platform for “live art” throughout the exhibition’s run. The space is defined by a large, low platform, flanked by risers and backed with a projection screen. Above the stage, a mezzanine provides another vantage point. The whole space is bright red, with carpeting and colorful pillows in the seating areas. According to Okwui Enwezor, “Over the course of All the World’s Futures, artists, musicians, composers, actors, intellectuals, students, and members of the public have been invited to contribute to the program of readings and performances that will flood and suffuse surrounding galleries with voices in an epic display of orality.” He intends for the activities in the ARENA to spill over into the adjacent spaces of display. Enwezor suggests that “liveness and epic duration” expand the “spatial and temporal” boundaries of the exhibition beyond that which the exhibition can fully contain or describe, and that the ARENA serves as “a dramatization of the space of the exhibition as a continuous, unfolding, and unceasing live event.”[1] Such language casts contemporary art viewing as a marathon endurance challenge rather than the experience of leisure or aesthetics that many visitors to the Biennale may be expecting.

Isaac Julien. Das Kapital Oratorio, ARENA, Padiglione Centrale, Giardini. 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures. Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Andrea Avezzù.

Manifestations of “epic duration” include Isaac Julien’s ongoing Das Kapital Oratorio, a series of staged readings of Marx’s foundational text read for thirty minutes each, at intervals, over the course of the exhibition’s seven-month run. This work has already generated widespread indignation from critics, many of whom misrepresent the reading as happening continuously, and some of whom fault Julien for taking up Marxist questions while simultaneously collaborating with Rolls-Royce on another project appearing elsewhere at the Biennale.[2] Others lament the concept as simply boring. After all, everyone or no one has read Das Kapital (depending on who you ask), and anyway, isn’t a contemporary text like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century more relevant? Julien cites the Sikh practice of the Akhand Path, a ritual reading of a holy text, as precedent. Is Das Kapital the holy text of contemporary art? Its recurring influence in art criticism and production would support this interpretation. As for being boring, the work invokes another spiritual element borrowed from South Asia, the drone, which stands in for the sound of the mechanism of the universe, and lulls us into a subconscious state.

Das Kapital Oratorio is interspersed with readings, presentations, and musical performances contributed by artists and collectives including Charles Gaines, Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, Jeremy Deller, and Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc. These performances mine historical source material centering on labor, political representation, and race, sometimes to transcendent effect. Gaines sets pivotal civil-rights speeches to music, while the Morans present work songs written by laborers, and Deller unearths archival songs from 19th-century workers’ movements. Abbonenc resurrects the oeuvre of Julius Eastman, a midcentury avant-garde composer of African American origin. As promised, the program is impossible for any visitor to experience in its totality. How these performances affect the experience of viewing art objects in the adjacent galleries is difficult to determine. During my visit, I could not hear the sounds of the ARENA program filtering through the galleries—to my relief, as sound spill tends to raise my curatorial hackles; it strikes me as unfair to allow one artist’s work to interfere with the experience of another. Other features include e-flux’s lecture series SUPERCOMMUNITY, and a series of film screenings.

Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran. Work Songs, ARENA, Padiglione Centrale, Giardini. 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures. Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Isabella Balena.

The chief limitation of Enwezor’s vision of “liveness” is that it adheres closely to traditional theater and lecture formats. Performers and speakers are onstage, and audiences are seated. Viewpoints are from the sides, diminishing eye contact between presenters and observers, or from above, creating distance. Decades of theater in-the-round, Happenings, public art, and social and relational practices seem to have escaped Enwezor’s attention. In this respect, even the nearly comatose performances staged by Tino Seghal at the 2013 Biennale did more to activate the exhibition than the ARENA does. A more contemporary approach would have situated performances throughout the gallery, or throughout the Giardini, and allowed for audience interaction either publicly or virtually. Inexplicably, Enwezor did not engage artists in his own exhibition known for compelling, participatory live performances, such as Theaster Gates, in the ARENA program. The works maintain hierarchical relationships between artists and audience, reflecting a recent trend among bigger contemporary art institutions to embrace theatrical performance presentations while moving more experimental forms into education departments, or simply setting them aside.

Christoph Büchel. The Mosque, Icelandic Pavilion. 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures. Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Isabella Balena.

This conservative approach represents a missed opportunity for Enwezor’s “liveness” to do more than lecture at audiences, however poetically. It contrasts with more experimental approaches such as that taken by the Belgian Pavilion, a meditation on Belgium’s colonial history in the Congo organized by Vincent Meessen. The pavilion features an installation by Elisabetta Benassi, activated by a live reading of Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy. Integrating “orality” into the exhibition space, Benassi’s work accomplishes what Enwezor’s ARENA does not, infiltrating the whole space of the pavilion with a human voice that thematically augments and complements the works on view. Christoph Büchel’s Icelandic Pavilion, The Mosque, takes the concept of “liveness” further by repurposing the pavilion as a gathering place for a marginalized community with historical ties to Venice dating back hundreds of years.[3] Rather than embrace Büchel’s expansion of the exhibition space into a “continuous, unfolding, and unceasing live event,” Biennale officials have been circumspect in their support of the project amid controversy stoked by the Catholic Church and local police. Projects like these disrupt the controlled site of the exhibition, opening art up for discussion and challenge. They are more closely aligned with the future of art and institutions than Enwezor’s overly cautious live program would allow.

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

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

[1] Okwui Enwezor, “All the World’s Futures” curatorial statement, http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/exhibition/enwezor/

[2] Julien’s collaboration is underwritten by Rolls-Royce and slated for donation to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London, after the exhibition. Production of the work involved sending a crew of nearly 50 people to remote Icelandic glacial caves to shoot, a feat that could likely not have been financed by any non-corporate entity, and which may well serve a greenwashing purpose for the car manufacturer. As to the question of whether accepting Rolls-Royce money while considering Marx makes Julien a hypocrite, it seems akin to the conservative claim that activists with iPhones are not true revolutionaries. An artist limited by the structures of the system in which he operates is still entitled to critique the system while participating in it.

[3] Büchel’s pavilion was closed by Venetian authorities on May 22, 2015, on the basis of the city’s claim that the pavilion constituted an illegal house of worship. Pavilion organizers are contesting the decision.

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.