The BIENNALE D'ARTE of Venezia from my personal point of view - HI-STORY

HI-STORY 

Akram Zaatari at the Lebanese Pavilion - Letter to a Refusing Pilot – video

Weaving new footage into five decades’ worth of archival material, including photographs alongside snapshots from family albums and images Zaatari made in his youth, the installation presents a non-linear narrative that blurs the boundaries between an elusive past and the tangible present. Letter to a Refusing Pilot combines elements of civic architecture, small-town gossip, the archeology of memory, family history, the politics of fear, the grace of flight, and the punishing realities of war. As never before in a single work, Zaatari has pulled together all of the disparate interests he has been pursuing in his practice consistently but separately for the past twenty years.

Delving into the story of an Israeli fighter pilot who refused to bomb a school in South Lebanon, the installation raises a number of difficult yet trenchant questions about heroism, nationalism, and integrity in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has confounded artists in the region (and beyond) for generations. Zaatari’s great sensitivity to form and everyday poetry, combined with the uncompromising rigor of his ideas and arguments, takes Letter to a Refusing Pilot far beyond the usual polemics of what is perhaps the most intractable political impasse on earth, and gets to the heart of how one behaves when confronted with starkest of choices.

Gilad Ratman at Israeli pavillon– The Workshop – video, sound, sculpture

The Workshop is based on a fictional underground journey from Israel to Venice taken by a small community of people. Their epic voyage starts in the caves of Israel, weaves through treacherous subterranean passages before bursting through the floor of the Israeli pavilion. On arrival, the group turn the pavilion into a workshop, sculpting themselves in clay they have transported from Israel.

Gilad Ratman’s presentation reflects on the Biennale as a utopian model of nations’ connectivity. Whilst present-time political reality all over the world operates according to the “nation state” concept and a system of globalized capitalism, The Workshop presents a scenario where transit takes place across national borders in hidden underground networks – free, undetected and unidentified.

Ratman’s narrative manifests itself in a non-linear presentation of video, installation, sound and a physical intervention in the fabric of the Pavilion itself. The site-specificity of The Workshop – the videos and the sound – offer the viewer a reflection of an event that has taken place at that very location. In doing so, the work creates a fictional, yet true, history.

Francesco Arena at Italian Pavilion- Massa Sepolta – 80 cum of soil, wood, cement, metal

Towers clad in wood and braced with steel rise up from low concrete platforms in Francesco Arena's Massa Sepolta (2013). One must read the wall text to discover that the towers contain dirt-an amount that, in Arena's calculation, equals the displaced earth from mass graves in several 20th-century conflicts: from Burgos, Spain during 1930s Spanish Civil War; from Benedicta, Italy during Mussolini's dictatorship; from Batajnica, Serbia during the civil war and ethnic cleansing; and from Ivan Polje, Kosovo, during the conflict there in the 1990s. The looming towers shield the soil from view, but the knowledge of what they contain lends their presence a solemn dignity.

(moussemagazine.it and artinamericamagazine.com – pictures: taken by me)

The BIENNALE D'ARTE of Venezia from my personal point of view - HUMAN FRAME

HUMAN FR(eedom)-A(mbient)- M(ind)-E(nergy)

Waheeda Malullah- A villager's day out in Kingdom of Bahrain pavilion

This series of photographs follows a day’s outing by a young village girl, full of excitement and adventure but reverberated by apprehension through her shrouded abaya.

Maria Cristina Finucci - The garbage patch state- Ca’ Foscari University

In an effort to raise awareness of the five big patches of plastic waste forming in the centers of the ocean's gyres, UNESCO has declared them to be a new nation at the "High Seas, Our Future! Conference," held in mid April in Paris.
Floating bits of discarded plastic-bottle caps, fishing nets, bags and sundry tinier pieces-cluster together in the north and south Atlantic, the north and south Pacific and the Indian oceans. The plastic "islands" form in the dead zones in the center of the major oceanic gyres, which circulate the ocean. The currents warm Europe and bring things like hurricanes and conquistadors to the Caribbean.

The most famous garbage patch, which we dove into a few years back, (see the below) is in the North Pacific and is sometimes known as the Pacific Trash Vortex. It has been estimated that plastics account for up to 80 percent of ocean pollution and the gathering debris carries with it a cloud of chemical pollutants. The pollution varies in concentration, which is why some people say it's bigger than Texas, why some people say it's bigger than two Texases, and why at least Maria Cristina Finucci decided it should be a country: Wasteland 
http://www.garbagepatchstate.org 

Walter de Maria – Apollo’s Ecstasy

(text: artpostblog – pictures: me)

The work of Walter De Maria has been associated with Minimalism, Conceptualism and Land Art, though it has never fit comfortably in any single category. De Maria was one of the first contemporary artists to Envision large-scale land works. The works of 55° Venice Biennale is Apollo's Ecstasy (1990).
With 20 solid bronze rods arranged in diagonal rows, alludes to a dichotomy from classical mythology. Apollo embodies the principles of reason, form and classification, in opposition to the ecstatic Dionysus, a champion of debauched pleasure and the breakdown of  boundaries and categories. The work suggests a site in which opposites exist in delicate balance, with the pure, defined forms of the brass rods counterpoised against the boundlessness of an infinite Mathematical sequence.

Kaspars Podnieks and Krišs Salmanis, North by Northeast -Latvian pavilion

This work explores the artists’ energetic relationship to the natural and ever-shifting man-made world—including perceived borders and centers in Europe—and that investigate the concepts and conditions of identity, uncertainty, and the ‘in-between.

The BIENNALE D'ARTE of Venezia from my personal point of view -BODYSSEY

BODYssey

Ali Kazma- Resistance- Turkey pavilion

(pictures universes-in-universe)

A girl in bondage shaped by a man, male bodybuilders, beauty docs, tattoo artists, and other body shapers caught the eyes of the visitors at the Pavilion of Turkey. Especially the bondage video attracted many visitors.

The five-screen installation 'Resistance' by Ali Kazma display body-shaping scenes. The images of the videos are metaphors for today's body consciousness and how the body is controlled by our society with its scientific, social, and cultural tools (- and I wouldn't exclude fashion magazines from being tools). Whether the images at the installation 'Resistance' represented esthetical or sexual desires, the body seemed to be reduced to an (exchangeable) object.

Yuri Ancarani – Da Vinci - Arsenale

Italian filmmaker Yuri Ancarani’s “Da Vinci,” a film about a surgery-performing robot (controlled by a human surgeon)  bearing the name of the Renaissance artist and polymath, takes us inside the landscape of the human body

Pawel Althamer – Venetians - Arsenale

He’s a polish artist of multiple media known for his willingness to alter his own state of mind and body for the exploration of deeper realms hidden within his own psyche.

Working in collaboration with his father's plastics manufacturing company, cast the faces and hands of local venetians in plastic before attaching them to bodies composed of extruded plastic ribbons, to realize that the body is only a vehicle for the soul.'

Pierre Moliner – Arsenale

fetishistic photographs, through his photography, he obscured the line between the sexes and celebrated fetishism and his own hermaphroditic nature