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)
