Image from “Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel.” (Protesters take part in a demonstration calling for animal liberation, Tel Aviv, Israel, August 24, 2013.) Courtesy of Shiraz Grinbaum.

It is vital to understand the terminology adopted by Activestills members and contributors. None of the participants accept the title “documentary photographer.” Photojournalists working in the documentary mode—such as Jacob Riis, Jessie Tarbox Beals, Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene Smith, and James Nachtwey—operate by long-standing procedural and ethical codes in journalism that understandably prioritize neutrality when capturing a story. While exposing events to worldwide audiences, photojournalists as a rule do not intervene in the actions that unfold before their cameras.

Beginning in the late 1970s, theorists including Susan Sontag and Martha Rosler turned their critical gaze to the effects of photojournalism and the distanced stance of its practitioners. Elucidating the relationship between liberal politics and social reform, and documentary photography as a tool of both, Rosler argued convincingly that such well-intentioned practices present subjects as victims whose salvation depends on the viewer’s response to their plight. Prioritizing the viewer’s psychological comfort establishes a dynamic in which the person or people touched by tragedy plead their case via the photographic image to those in power and hope for the best. Decades later, Activestills members realized Rosler’s call for photojournalists to engage fully in the social-justice matters they report to prevent the stories they tell from being sanitized by a viewer’s needs. Photographing events ranging from weekly protests of the separation wall that ghettoizes West Bank Palestinians to marches for LGBTQ rights, immigrant and asylum-seeker rights, and fair housing throughout the Israeli state, Activestills members stand with protesters of all stripes to make more visible the struggles that affect both Palestinians and Israelis. In doing so, the group advances the title “activist photographers” to describe its members.

Image from “Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel.” (Palestinian protester opposite an Israeli soldier during the weekly demonstration against the occupation, Nabi Saleh, West Bank, January 8, 2010.) Courtesy of Shiraz Grinbaum.

The current volume is an analog account of Activestills’ work. The format is notable because so much of the collective’s work is available online via their steadily growing archive (more than 35,000 images) and alternative media platforms, including Electronic Intifada, +972 magazine and its Hebrew counterpart Local Call, and daily updates to associated Flickr accounts. The ease of online access almost renders a book redundant, but the reading experience offers critical analyses of who and what are shown in the images. Single shots of protesters facing or physically confronting heavily armed Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) function in tandem with sequences portraying Israelis protesting state-sanctioned homophobia and visualize a range of social-justice struggles in addition to the nearly seventy-year conflict between Palestinians and Israeli Jews. In capturing this wide range of encounters, Activestills photographers tease out the small yet urgent details of life that do not receive sustained attention.

Image from “Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel.” (The Kadoori, Hamias, and Ashram families sit around an improvised Sabbath table near their demolished homes in the Giv’at Amal neighborhood, Tel Aviv, September 19, 2014.) Courtesy of Shiraz Grinbaum.

Rejecting the documentary photography mantle was perhaps the seed of Activestills’ subversive strategy, the display, dissemination, and overall effect of which is carefully analyzed in essays by the historians Ariella Azoulay, Simon Faulkner, Vered Maimon, and Meir Wigoder. Azoulay, who has long worked through notions of citizenship, photography, and “ethical spectatorship,” addresses the Activestills archive as a direct challenge to those who refuse the breadth of Palestinian human rights and work strenuously toward outright cultural erasure.[1] The online archive is updated with near-real-time frequency, rendering it “operative, and not simply contemplative,” and mirroring the violent interactions between protesters, soldiers, and settlers.[2] Access to and use of the archive thus destabilizes the dominant media construct from within and further exposes the decidedly biased reportage of these events produced by Israeli and international media outlets. Similarly, Simon Faulkner considers in depth Activestills’ exhibition strategy and how such methodology affects audiences who both support and reject what the images report. The collective settled on a presentation tactic in which unframed prints are hung outside of a formal or institutional visual-art context, favoring plein-air installations in or near locations where protests and related skirmishes erupt.

Image from “Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel.” (Solidarity protest with African asylum seekers imprisoned in Israeli prisons under the “Infiltrators Law,” Tel Aviv, December 28, 2013.) Courtesy of Shiraz Grinbaum.

The effect is striking. In Activestills exhibitions, protesters and their supporters view the actions in which they’ve been involved, an act that bolsters their participation and ongoing resistance. For those in Palestine and Israel who stand against a spectrum of state abuses, the guerilla exhibitions sanction not just their fight but also their existence. Alternately, Activestills exhibitions staged beyond the Green Line are often met with hostility. If the installations are not vandalized (marked with hate speech or torn down), parties opposed to public displays of skirmishes at the separation wall and throughout the Occupied Territories rush to provide political narratives to counter the group’s reportage.

Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel closes with interviews or brief essays by the group’s founders—Oren Ziv, Keren Manor, Yotam Ronen, and Eduardo Soteras—and various members. Responding to questions about what it means to live as an activist photographer and to find community with those who resist occupation and social disenfranchisement, the artists express decidedly somber thoughts. Ziv notes that in the heavily saturated media climate we inhabit, ignoring outright the inequities around us is untenable, if not immoral. As media consumers, we are supplied with more than ample information about the violence our world produces, be that in Palestine/Israel, or the European Union, or the United States. Countering viewers’ sympathy fatigue is not Activestills’ primary motivation; participating in and photographing human struggle is. This extraordinary volume, which is as important for understanding photography’s potential as any critical text thus written, gets to the root of how people pitted against one another will remain locked in conflict as long as the aspirations for peaceable coexistence are thwarted by state actors. Through tired eyes, we have a responsibility to look at what they produce.

Image from “Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel.” (Palestinians climb over the Israeli separation wall on their way to attend Ramadan Friday prayer in Al-Aqsa mosque, A-Ram, West Bank, July 19, 2013). Courtesy of Shiraz Grinbaum.

[1] Vered Maimon and Shiraz Grinbaum, “Introduction,” Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 33.

[2] Ibid, 34.

Khaled Jarrar. Khaled’s Ladder, 2016; made from parts of the Mexico/USA border. Courtesy of CULTURUNNERS.

As a naturalized citizen, I have crossed international borders as an immigrant and a traveler. My passport verifies my citizenship, tracks my travel, and, as an American, grants me a largely unfettered freedom of movement around the world. For many of us, economic and time constraints may prevent travel, but for others—regardless of their merit, character, or intentions—their very citizenship is an obstacle to entering some countries. While the world’s increasing interconnectedness is widely celebrated, many countries have responded with strict immigration limits, bureaucratic hurdles, or the construction of physical walls.

Palestine’s status as a partially recognized or disputed country is subject to external governments that, in addition to other powers, can regulate the flow of people within the region and further abroad. Through performance and sculpture, artist Khaled Jarrar investigates the ways that passports and borders separate, define, and limit us. Provocatively, the artist also creates ways to transgress borders, breaking them down from the larger geopolitical apparatus into individually manageable acts. Emerging out of his own experience in Palestine, Jarrar’s practice has expanded to internationally site-specific projects that address global issues of migration and our shared concerns and struggles.

Read the full article here.

Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. In The Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, 2015 (film still). Courtesy of the Artists and Lawrie Shabibi.

Abdellatif R. Abdeljawad: Do you eat yourself from the finest porcelain?

Larissa Sansour: Well, I guess the whole premise of the film is that this rebel leader narrator is setting up an elaborate operation in order for the future generations of Palestinians to obtain the basic privileges that history has so far denied them; so, it is basically a revisionist historical comment. Am I eating from the finest porcelain? Right now, maybe in my mind … but not according to the rest of the world. I want the rest of the world to see me as a person who is doing so.

This work is very much about who tells history, and how much myth and fiction are really a part of writing history. If the world does not realize that we exist, we might as well just bury some porcelain DNA for future archaeologists to find, as a stick in the wheel on currently accepted versions of history. Maybe the revisions that this porcelain will cause will tilt the balance in favor of the Palestinians at some point in the future. The film is also a commentary on how Israel uses archaeology as headline news, and how it has been instrumentalized, rather than been seen as a scientific method … Israelis wants to prove something, and therefore they dig to find evidence supporting a fiction already having taken the form of fact; they use archaeology towards their own political ends, and it is becoming a means by which to prove a continued historical presence entitling them to territories currently belonging to others.

Read the full article here.

“Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”—Hannah Arendt

“They were forced […] to condemn us without believing in our existence.”—Claude Cahun

The horrific images emerging from Gaza in the past weeks have displaced any other visual reference in my mind, artistic or otherwise. While artists have historically played a substantial role in reporting on and responding to the tragedy of war, that immediate responsibility has shifted, since the advent of photography, to photojournalists. The question of whether overt political content is well served by art and vice versa is presently an open one that I will leave to others for the time being. Even so, art has an undeniable importance in times of conflict, in that it has the capacity to humanize those whom political and military interests are better served by dehumanizing. Here are a few such projects, presented as a corrective to the systematic denial of Palestinian humanity currently being waged in American media.

Aissa Deebi. The Trial, 2013; video.

In Aissa Deebi’s film The Trial (2013), the artist deliberately invokes Kafka’s tale of bureaucratic torment while commemorating the trial of Palestinian writer and activist Daoud Turki, a leader of the nondenominational Israeli Left who was imprisoned from 1973 to 1985 on charges of treason against Israel. Deebi casts three actors to reenact Turki’s interrogation and defense in what amounts to an absurdist play committed to film. Absurdity is inevitable in a circumstance where the defendant on trial—an Israeli Arab Muslim—is himself an oxymoron according to the prosecution, a state that legally denies the possibility of his existence. Similarly, absurdity is a fact of daily life in occupied Palestine, and humor a necessity for survival but still a characteristic rarely permitted to Palestinians by the international community that tends to objectify the whole lot as either victims or terrorists.

Khaled Hourani. Picasso in Palestine, 2009-2011. Photo by Sander Buyck.

If Khaled Hourani’s Picasso in Palestine (2009–11) seems similarly absurd, this in itself demonstrates how the media portrayal of Palestinians tends to excise their humanity, in the eyes of the world and of Palestinians themselves. Hourani, an artist and director of the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah, was on a visit to the van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, when he had what seemed a crazy thought. Listening to his guide extol the many distant lands to which works in the museum’s collection had travelled, he wondered if it were even imaginable to bring a masterwork from the collection to Ramallah. Charged with selecting a work to request, Hourani’s Palestinian art students were incredulous, but ultimately selected Picasso’s Buste de Femme (1943). Even with the van Abbemuseum on board, insurance coverage was nearly impossible to obtain given that Palestine is defined extralegally, by exclusions and by Acts of God. The trajectory of the work transported across contested border zones and the paper trail created by a stifling bureaucracy that thwarts his countrymen daily became elements of Hourani’s final work, as did a drawing of the Picasso made by an imprisoned man whose isolation did not prevent him from sharing in the historic event. Despite the intimidating figures of two armed guards who frame the painting in Hourani’s video, visitors to the display were euphoric at the realization that culture and a life of the mind were concepts that could actually be available to them and relevant to their lives. Now permanently ensconced in the historical provenance of this work, Palestinians gain another small acknowledgement of their existence and their history.

Youmna Chlala and Jeanno Gaussi. Home Sweet Home–Jerusalem, 2010.

Youmna Chlala and Jeanno Gaussi’s Home Sweet Home—Jerusalem (2010) is a video, artist book, and installation created in an apartment in Jerusalem that is an archive of displacement and denial. This home is maintained by a Palestinian woman who must keep her address to preserve her right to work in Israel, while her husband is restricted to the West Bank. The site becomes a facsimile of a home in which an ongoing performance of living takes place—a necessary charade, given Palestinians’ economic dependency on Israel and the constant policing of their movements. Unwilling to suffer without either her job or her partner, this woman is a constant presence despite her absence within the home. The artist book is a record of each object within the home, while the video captures rituals of domesticity performed as a spiritual intervention that shifts the pragmatic context of the apartment to a dream space of potential reconciliation.

Sama Alshaibi. Birthright Series, 2004.

Sama Alshaibi has made numerous works about her experiences as a Palestinian born into exile. In Birthright (2004), In This Garden (2006), and My Apartheid Vacation (2005), she speaks to her privilege as one who can return to the land that her grandparents were forced to flee, and to the pain of her family’s further displacement from Iraq to the United States, an uprooting that ironically enabled her return as an American, immune to Israeli sanction. Birthright addresses the dehumanization of Palestinian mothers whose loss is determined to be less real and in which they are deemed more culpable than Israeli mothers who have also lost children in the war. My Apartheid Vacation chronicles Alshaibi’s return to Palestine, in which the class anxiety of the expatriate is magnified tenfold against the recognition of her countrymen’s suffering. In This Garden documents the incongruity of Alshaibi’s American lifestyle with her Palestinian roots. She writes, “I don’t want to be nationalistic. I don’t want to be loud. I just want to go there, and for things to be better than they are.” Even these modest hopes convey her disillusionment.

Phil Collins. They Shoot Horses, 2004. Video, 2 projections, color and sound. Courtesy of Tate Gallery, London.

As another round of brutality passes between two communities, each heavily invested in a narrative of their own victimization, it can seem impossible that the disaffection of war could ever abate and make room for joy. Phil Collins’ instant classic They Shoot Horses (2004) masterfully demonstrates that people will seek pleasure even in the worst circumstances. Collins’ film, shot using journalistic conventions, documents a dance marathon in which young Palestinians dance for eight consecutive hours. This grueling ordeal is nonetheless understood as “fun” by both participants and viewers. The emotional trajectory of the dancers from euphoria to fatigue is remarkable because it represents one of the few times when western media has depicted Palestinians as capable of a range of experiences and emotions. The exploitative nature of the project is tangible, with Collins dancing along a fine line between commenting on abuse and reinscribing it. The work is not really addressing Palestinians directly so much as the media circus that feeds on their collective trauma, a trauma that must be reenacted in order for the artist to critique its representation.

Each of these artists speaks only obliquely about the present-day crisis in Israel/Palestine. To address this specific and temporal political condition directly would be to risk preempting insight in favor of ideology. By focusing on the everyday experiences of Palestinians, these artists question the nature of normalcy itself as defined under occupation. Their intention is not to attack the state of Israel or even to question its right to exist. Rather, these works are intended to balance the inequity between the two sides in whatever small ways they can. If wars are won by dehumanization, casting opponents as the enemy, they are ended only by humanization, recognizing that your adversary is also your neighbor.

#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.