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)