The Milk of Goals
The title of the 59th Venice International Art Exhibition, taken from a fairy tale written by Leonora Carrigton,1 is misleading. Just like the tales, mixing horror and marvel in a wierd timelessness, this re-creation exhibits the darkish aspect of the fable and sometimes plunges us into the shifting sands of opaque and scary worlds.
If the fairy story, typically lowered to strains of light mirrored on the partitions of an empty pavilion (Spain), can take a humorous flip (Zsófia Keresztes and his After Goals for the Hungarian pavilion or Jonathas de Andrade within the Brazilian pavilion), or even psychedelic (The Tender Machine and Her Indignant Body Elements by Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl, Austria), in lots of pavilions the dream turns right into a nightmare and exhibits us the disasters of humanity, but in addition of transhumanism.
Suicide or wandering mutants, eviscerated cyborgs, dark rooms, and swimming pools of black and viscous water… the humanist utopia seems to be nicely and really buried beneath the rubble… Thankfully, there's the earth – the omnipresent matrix peat in this edition – which calls on us to unite with it and to rework ourselves. Listed here are a couple of echoes of this posthumanist promise to “re-enchant” the world and of other extra disenchanted visions.
1Mexican artist current in one of many Biennale’s “historic capsules” devoted to surrealist ladies (Leonor Fini, Remedios Varo…)&
VENICE
Lympha
by Paolo Fantin and Oøeina
A powerful triptych set up illustrating the metamorphosis of a female body decomposing into earth earlier than reworking into a laurel branch; the work introduced by Paolo Fantin and the Ophicina group in the Venetian pavilion is as overwhelming as that displayed by Uffe Isolotto in the Danish pavilion (see Acumen n°22), whose enchanting counterpart appears to right the blackness. Leading to dying in Uffe Isolotto’s dystopian fable, in Paolo Fantin’s revisited fantasy of Daphnis and Apollo the metamorphosis is a rebirth. The degeneration of a primordial nature overcome by postmodern high-tech mutations is answered by regeneration via the matrix sap, Mother Earth. Returning to the earth, and even “turning into Earth”: this is likely one of the creeds of the posthumanist philosophy which, in line with Cecilia Alemani, curator of this 59th Biennial, “is the backbone of the complete occasion.”
ARSENAL
From the large earthen maze (Earthly Paradise) deployed in the Arsenale by Delcy Morelos (Colombia), to the titanic tree by Muhannad Shono (Saudi Arabia), from the posthuman metamorphoses proposed by the pavilion of the Republic of San Marino, to the magnificent video by the Lithuanian artist Eglè Budvytytè: Music from the compost. Mutating bodies, imploding stars; there are various methods to stage these mutations of the physique.
Special point out, within the Dutch pavilion elegantly ceded to Estonia, to Kristina Norman for the movie in her Orchidelirium trilogy, which levels a troubling catharsis of man’s intrinsic savagery via the performance of a younger lady who becomes a beast behind the bars of a zoo…
1In The Artwork Newspaper, n°40, April 2022
AUSTRALIA
Disasters
By Marco Fusinato
In widespread with Nicolas Poussin, in his Bloodbath of the Innocents (c. 1630), or Picasso, exploding cries and tears all over his canvas painted in reminiscence of the bombing of Guernica in 1937, Marco Fusinato proceeds by saturation, following Jacques Callot (The Nice Miseries of Conflict, 1633) and Francisco de Goya (The Disasters of Struggle, 1810-1815). Saturation of the “pictorial” area but in addition of the sound area to tell the Disasters of our time. With blows of the rammer. Evoking Jerome Bosh’s infernal mess, the sonic and visible chaos inflicted on guests to the Australian pavilion plunges them into Noise and Fury1: the amplified sounds from an uninterrupted reside electric guitar efficiency rain down and explode like bombs, as does the accelerated succession of macabre photographs, barely giving us time to catch a glimpse of the horror… Trashy pictures + noise: Marco Fusinato has hit it very onerous.
1Title of a novel by William Faulkner revealed in 1929.
CHINA/Arsenal
Meta-Scape
Steaming Stillness by Liu Jiayu
What boundary may be drawn immediately between the actual and virtual worlds? Has the digitalization of the world elevated or consumed our goals? Can the contemplation of actual nature still fill our eyes with the spectacular and unbelievable metamorphoses orchestrated by computer systems? Might the grandiose spectacle of the infinite areas of a chic nature once painted on canvas be the item of a new “aesthetic of the chic”? These are all questions that, in the face of the magnificent spectacle of real-fake mountains in China, staged in the Chinese pavilion by Liu Jiayu and his high-tech studio, come up brief. Close to actuality but shaking actuality, this mountainous massif deployed in 3D is the results of a virtuoso visual hybridization, merging the topographical surveys of the mountains and their metamorphic “augmentation” by way of artificial intelligence (AI), in a silky and dreamlike colorization.
www-jiayuliu-studio.translate.goog
SWITZERLAND
The Live performance
By Latifa Echakhch and Alexandre Babel
Have you ever attended an inaudible live performance, not in sound but in visual and spatial phrases? This is the unbelievable immersive experience that visible artist Latifa Echakhch and musician Alexandre Babel supply us in the Swiss pavilion. A sensory (and memorial) area to be traversed, from mild to darkness, to the rhythm of a blind, or quite aural, composition, revealing, via a luminous score, the area in its four dimensions. Decreased to flashes, the sonic imprint of the rhythms composed by the percussionist causes immense busts made from recycled wooden to emerge, like specters, based on the pulses of a glowing mild, evoking the giants dressed up in parade floats. The same ones that, on the entrance to the pavilion, lay of their ashes… A ravishing dramaturgy of area.
59th Venice Biennale&
Giardini and Arsenal
www.labiennale.org
Until 27 November
Stéphanie Dulout
Particular correspondent in Venice
L’article VENICE BIENNALE est apparu en premier sur Galerie Joseph.
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