A Virtual Biennale

Title: Neoludica. Art is a Game 2011-1966

Artist: The event intends to promote the scientific work of GameArtGallery project, connecting the mediums of videogames, visual arts, music and cinema.

Curator: Associazione culturale E-Ludo Lab, Collateral Event

Venue: Scuola dei Laneri, Sala Laneri, Santa Croce and Centro Culturale Candiani, Mestre

Throughout the world the video game phenomenon is continually growing, but the exhibition Neoludica Art is a Game: 2011-1966 aims to highlight the great artistic qualities of video gaming that are being produced in our contemporary technological society. Though this may be evident in most of the work shown, what becomes particularly poignant is the total addiction that video gaming can hold over us, and the detrimental effect it will eventually produce. The artistic qualities in producing such high quality games are evidently clear in the array of works shown, but it is through two works, Game Arthritis by Matteo Bittanti and IOCOSE, 2011 and My Generation, by Eva and Franco Mattes, aka 0100101110101101.ORG, 2010, that the negative effects of addiction to video games is clearly stated.

The six photographic panels of Game Arthritis display the effect that the continual use of video games have on the body, leading to gruesome outcomes. My Generation on the other hand shows secret filming of teenage boys and their reactions whilst ‘gaming’, emphasising the violent and sheer animalistic traits that continual video gaming highlight in the human psyche.

The exhibition aims to promote, advertise and pursue the scientific work undertaken by the Italian institution Musea_Game Art Gallery, but one is instead left with the clear feeling that this powerful medium, though indeed artistic, will eventually be damaging to our society.

Emily Burke

1 year ago 13 notes

Title: Le Festin de Chun-te

Artist: Hsieh Chun-te

Curator: Museum of Contemporary Art of Taipei, Collateral Event

Venue: Scoletta dei Battioro e Tiraoro, Campo San Stae

Emily Burke interviews Hsieh Chun-te

Emily Burke: As the largest Biennale, and one of the world’s most important platforms for the dissemination of contemporary international artwork, do you think that the Biennale participants have a social obligation to represent their various countries in a certain way?

Hsieh Chun-te: From the aspect of astronomy, we all know how to calculate the age and the distance of the universe. The farthest planet is 15 billion light years away from the earth. However, the universe without light doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist because its light doesn’t reach the earth yet. This implies to the limitation of human beings. When we stand on the ground, we are unable to the see the world beyond horizon. In brief, what we can not see doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

Through the eyes of artists and their representations, we have multiple aspects to understand that the lives of the people from different areas. Therefore, the Venice Biennale of Art becomes the platform that we could realise what those artists from different countries have observed, and tried to say. With no doubt, I am one of them because I also expect that we could be seen and have the chance to communicate with the people around the world.

EB: How important do you feel it is to present the work of Taiwanese artists on an international stage?

HC: In order to answer this question, I would like to provide one example from the novel “The General in his Labyrinth “ by Gabriel García Márquez. When the general met the British officer who helped him constantly, he said, “Sir, although we walk side by side now, you have to know the cultural difference between us at least for two or three hundred years. In this moment, we are forced to walk together, but the cultural difference still exists.”

EB: Are there particular aspects of Taiwan culture that you feel need to be expressed through art?

HC: For many years, there was only one major political party in Taiwan, the Kuomintang (KMT). Until the day that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won the election in 2000, President Chen Shui-bian invited one famous American economist to visit Taiwan for one week. When he finished his journey, he gave ten suggestions to Taiwan government and I want to underline two of them.

Firstly, Taiwanese society should regard the creativity as the social property. Secondly, we should encourage the young generation to bravely try and fail. The value system in Taiwan has changed a lot in recently years. All the medias, educational institutions, everything is talking about how to be successful, including how to succeed in love relationships, how to have successful business, how to succeed in the stock market. Nobody teaches the young generation how to face the failures. People forget that most of the successes are based on the accumulation of frustrations and failures. This is the problem in Taiwan because our value system has been changed. That is the reason why our former president is in the prison because of the corruption sentences.

We have to solve this essential question: what is the value of human existence? In the recent twenty or thirty years, Taiwan is so called “the island of economy miracle”, or “the island of technology OEM”. I try to express what I have observed in order to provide a caution and a reflection.

EB: Do you think that artists in general have a certain social responsibility to represent their country, or in the modern culture that we live in do individual art practices take precedent over ties to our culture?

HC: My personality is to seek for those unseen, or to speak out for those unspoken. During those years when there was only one major political party (the Kuomintang, KMT) in Taiwan, I have participated in the opposition party and join the demonstrations in the street. At that time, we aimed to voice for the civilians in these activities. I hope to change the society. For an artist, I believe that he/she should express the dissatisfactions and precede the improvements for this world. Consequently, I make use of the tools that I am good at to express my opinions.

EB: How do you expect the audience at the Venice Biennale, being such a wide and diverse range of people from all areas of the world, to react to your work?

HC: The series of photos “Raw” is a project that commenced in 1987 and finished in 2011.

In the summer of 1987, I closed the workshop in Taipei city and moved to Sanchong city, which is located on the other side of Tamsui River. Most of the residents of Sanchong city are from the central or the southern part of Taiwan. Before they stepped into Taipei city, they stopped by the suburban city and waited for chances. Therefore, they had a processing factory of hardware on the first floor of their apartment. You might ask them, “Where do you come from?” Although they have lived here for around 20 years, they would still answer that they are from Changhua, Chiayi or Kaohsiung. (Note: Those are the name of the cities in central and southern Taiwan.)

I asked him, “Why don’t you say that you are the people coming from Sanchong?” They said, “Here is dirty and messy. I don’t want to be someone coming from here.”

Yes, each residence here was locked up. If you go to the streets and alleys, you would see trash everywhere.

Those residents in Sanchong city didn’t regard it as their hometown so they were not willing to devote themselves to this city. As for the place where they were born, it becomes the nostalgia in their minds. Therefore, I moved to Sanchong in order to hide the primitive desire in people’s dark inner minds so I started everything by myself.

Hopefully, I could make more people know our living circumstances in Taiwan since home is the most important thing in the world.

EB: Could you give us an insight into the work that is being presented?

HC: I would like to provide one particular point of view. About 20 years ago, there was TV news report that two policemen caught a stowaway from China. The policemen asked him the reason why to be a stowaway. He said to the camera, “I just arrived in this land later than you did!”

It is the universal problem for all the countries. The nationalism is to occupy the land first and announce their legal ownership. But, we all say that the civilians have the right to migrate. However, the fact is that you could move out, but nobody allows you to move in. So, how about the ownership of the earth? If we believe that land should not be regarded as private property, how could we tolerate the government to occupy the land from other people? How do we face this problem? At the same time, how to find an insight into my works?

If you take off the coloured glasses, I believe that you would see my works insightfully

EB: How integral is performance to your work?

HC: In the very beginning, I didn’t consider how to integrate the performance to my photography works. I believe that any art work should not be limited in any fixed space. It could be everywhere and anywhere. If so, space is supposed to be open to all kinds of art creations. Therefore, I attempted to put a performing artwork, such as my Cooking Theatre, in a still space. If you are willing to do so, the integration will come out naturally.

EB: Do you aim to bring artist and audience closer together through food?

HC: Enjoy the performance, by being part of it!

When food becomes part of the art, the dish is not the only performer, and the dining table is not the only stage. There is no differentiation between audience and performer. Everyone will join and be part of the performance, and in the end, finish the act by eating it!

All the sensations towards this performance will occur instantly, and no one can ever predict the ending of each performance. When the scene of a food banquet is concluded, it will be a calling, a touching, a journey of true art.

EB: Some of the images you are displaying are quite harrowing. What is the aim of these photographs?

HC: The aim of these photographs is certainly not to scare anyone. There are two purposes in my works. From my experiences in stage and theatre photography over the years, I have learned that when I take a picture, the photograph itself becomes dissociated from the original space and process, and transforms into a different stage of images, engaged with the stage in a dialogue.

So when I express my childhood dreamscapes and growing-up experiences as photographs, using Sanchong as the stage on which they are acted out, these photos in themselves are no longer manifestations, of either reality or imagination, but opinions on the environment in which I live.

EB: Is there a story throughout your images?

HC: It is a story about the homecoming of the prodigal son.

EB: What is the link between the images you are exhibiting in the Raw exhibition, and the live cooking performance?

HC: I plan to present one sacrifice ceremony through Cooking Theatre. I saw a documentary where Eskimos would grab some snow and melt it in their mouths and pray for when they are going to eat small seals. Also, I have even been to the boundary between Russia and China in order to interview Oronchon people who are also called the last hunters in the world. They led me to the hunt and they also repent after they shoot animals. In brief, for the natural lives which are sacrificed to become human food, the aboriginal people often treat them with the feelings of appreciation and apology.

Let’s think about your own situation. It is the same that rice, vegetable, chicken, duck, beef and lamb are scarified for human food. How about us? This is what we should think about carefully. Now we are facing the crisis of lacking water resource and food. Through Cooking Theatre, I want to express my point of view that we should return to the beginning of everything to do the serious introspection.

Through the link between the images in the Raw exhibition and the live cooking performance, I hope to “explore” these question.

The Playful Cruelty of Hsieh Chun-te

An essay by Dominique Pai ni

When I first saw Hsieh Chun‐Te’s photographs I was struck by the sense of the
imminent storm that permeated many of them. It was as if Hsieh was representing a postlapsarian world. Some of the compositions clearly indicate the performance of a violent action condemned by both propriety and the rules of human society. His works almost always contain a form of punishment; a body cast down on a symbolic field of thorns, hanged bodies, bodies abandoned by the indifference of our modern deafness, bodies drawn and quartered, sexually punished bodies, or bodies that seem to be held up to public disgrace. From Giorgione’s The Tempest to the prints of Gustave Doré, the storm is representative of divine wrath.

The artist who dares to portray such scenes of sacrifice is a visionary, haunted by the disquiet arising from the complicity between Eros and Thanatos. Never before had I come across a scene of capital execution culminating in the sexual act. In his work, Chun‐Te incorporates the sexual act into a depiction of this terrible ceremony that legally ends lives and one which is observed by a group of grim on‐lookers (The Romance on the Stele, Sanchong series). What audacity, what derision on behalf of the artist to fuse this legalised transgression that consists in coldly taking away human life with that most beautiful of all human actions! It is indeed a ceremony, here, and throughout all of Hsieh Chun‐Te’s work. I will elaborate more on this later.

In order to describe Hsieh Chun‐Te’s works more precisely one would have to view the other images that form an ensemble, like the caprichos that go beyond a single caricature to describe the disasters of the world. The allusion to Goya here is quite deliberate. These large photographic compositions make me think of the famous title that Goya gave to one of his works: The sleep of reason breeds monsters in which black and white, ugliness and beauty, purity and vice clash with each other. Hsieh offers a kind of photographic equivalent to these visions of the decline of a decadent and corrupt humanity, visions traversed by winds which threaten to sweep away the ruins of a post‐cataclysmal world.

Several aspects of Hsieh’s work also evoke the poetics of Georges Bataille. Pierre Klossowski describes the cataclysmal character of Bataille’s work that is troublingly echoed in Hsieh’s images: “[in Bataille] the ontological catastrophe of thought is merely the reverse of an apogee attained through what he calls sovereign moments: drunkenness, laughter, erotic and sacrificial outpouring, experiences that characterise expenditure without compensation, an unlimited extravagance, a meaningless, useless and purposeless waste”1 Klossowski was speaking here of “simulacra” in Bataille’s work.

A similar extravagance fascinates the viewer in Hsieh’s work. He creates a mise‐en‐scene of elements that are at once atrocious and delectable, marked by an erotic excess. Drunkenness, sacrifice and sometimes cruel humour are amongst the features that make these images so disconcerting. In Homecoming Day the pose and attitude of the three women depicted in the Shueigin street scene (Shueigin is located in the county of Kohu, in the southern part of Taiwan), obviously evoke lingshi, that mythical form of Chinese torture known as “death by a thousand cuts”. Bataille wrote about this in his Tears of Eros – “that ecstatic and intolerable pain, whose representation combines religiosity and eroticism.” Indeed, it is the photographic focus that selects and highlights what must be looked at in this derelict urban theatre. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the body parts of these three vestal virgins that block the access to the street and in particular to one of their breasts, as if this optical adjustment was itself an incision.

The iconography of Hsieh Chu‐Te reveals multiple borrowings and in turn borrows
from several periods of art. The first thing that strikes us is this anachronism.

If we nevertheless set out to contradict this loss of bearings that Hsieh very deliberately engages in, or in other words, if we go back in time, the family group (Family Portrait) taken in front of a house in the same town, Shueigin, a place that obsesses the artist, is inspired by a tradition in Chinese art, and can also be compared to certain images from the twentieth century. At the Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei there is a plaque by Huang Tu‐Shui which, in my opinion, belongs to a tradition of rural representation of Ancient China. This plaque is a kind of iconographic predecessor to Hsieh’s visions. The peaceful nature of the relationship between the children and the buffalo is expressed by Huang through the gentle relief of this gypsum plaque which can be compared the velvety black‐and‐white of Hsieh’s photographs. Hsieh has a very particular way of combining the zones of clarity and soft focus in his prints so that the contrast between the bright, sunny foreground and the shadow of the house creates a similar depth to that conveyed by the delicate low relief of Huang’s work.

However the strangeness of Hsieh’s work does not come from the unease provoked by a certain erotic cruelty. It comes rather from the great diversity of his references, his extensive visual culture.

It would be easy, and verging almost on intellectual laziness, to speak of the surreality of these images, if not their surrealism. The word is overworked and hackneyed. And yet there is a kind of obviousness in the way the entwined couple so irresistibly evoke certain Surrealist motifs such as René Magritte’s The Lovers. Still, this echo is no ordinary quotation. Is it deliberate on the part of the artist? I doubt it. The entwined lovers could also originate – that is, if we absolutely need to find the source of Hsieh’s inspiration and imagination – in Goya, as I have already suggested. Indeed, Georges Bataille used an engraving in The Tears of Eros, mentioned above, that could be considered the infernal version of this twisted fusion of bodies. Without a doubt, Hsieh Chun‐Te knew of the work of Bataille and Surrealist inspiration. I was reminded of Hans Bellmer’s photograph of a disjointed doll on a bed of straw when I saw the disturbing image of the young woman suffering with wounds and exposed to the harsh vegetation in Hsieh’s The Tears of Tamsui River. Here the vegetation is as unnatural as Bellmer’s straw bedding or Marcel Duchamp’s landscape in Etant donné (Given).

Goya’s influence reaches deep into Hsieh Chun‐Te’s visual culture. At the start of this essay I spoke of the Caprichos and the Disasters. In Goya’s latter series, the Great deeds against the dead engraving offers a model for Hsieh’s Sanchong (Bitches) series with its recurring images of tortured bodies left hanging by the feet and the head fated to be buried forever. In Hsieh Chun‐Te’s apocalyptic vision bodies are hanged. Nevertheless his images combine terror with a macabre irony.

Another element that characterises Hsieh Chun‐Te’s photographic theatre is the
scope of their mise‐en‐scene. As with Joel‐Peter Witkin, who is a few years younger than Hsieh, each photograph is the culmination of a lengthy period of preparation. The choice of location, a sizeable team of assistants, the sets, objects and furniture, complex lighting, the costumes, the attention to the poses (or the performance), liken Hsieh’s artistic procedure to the cinematic mise‐en‐scene . If I had to place this Taiwanese artist within a tradition and a culture in order to greater understand his work, I would situate him in terms of cinema, and in particular Japanese New Wave Cinema from the 1960s. This movement had an important influence on artists in the “region,” including Taiwanese artists, due to the imprint of Japanese culture on the country.

Beyond the simple yet significant title of the works presented here: Ceremony – I was greatly impressed by the distant echoes between the films of the master of modern Japanese cinema, Nagisa Oshima, and Hsieh’s mises‐en‐scene. I was reminded of the slow, tragic conclusion of Oshima’s The Ceremony (1971) when I first saw the work of this Taiwanese artist who places such an emphasis on social ritual and cruelty.

Erotic Japanese cinema was also very fashionable in the 1970s and was produced by the Nikkatsu company, responsible for the Perverse Housewives (Danchi Zuma) series. These films offered the viewer some very intense images of female submission. In a scene from one of the most famous films in the series, The Woman with Pierced Nipples by Shogoro Nishimura, the lead actress rolls around on a carpet of roses, wounding her back on their thorns.

At this time, Koji Wakamatsu was the master of pinku eiga, this specifically Japanese cinematic genre that was considered erotic but shared the aesthetic of New Japanese Cinema. Wakamatsu’s work is disconcertingly similar to Hsieh’s. I am thinking here of his remarkable film The Embryo Hunts in Secret, which despite its inoffensive title, was still given an X rating on its release in Europe in 2007. In one sequence, where a woman stands in a doorway and offers herself to a man, the light projected around her suggests a second image, an image within the image or a subliminal image of another body inscribed within this image. A parallel can be drawn with Hsieh’s photograph Flight in the Night. Furthermore, Wakamatsu’s work exhibits the body in a way that brings to mind Hsieh’s Mirror.

In other words, Hsieh’s originality resides in his varied use of several cultural
references: classical Western painting, Surrealist ecstasy and modern Japanese cinema. This assemblage may seem extravagant and incoherent to those who know nothing about Taiwan, its debate on identity and the collage of cultural components that forms the island as it is today. All of these aspects have given birth to a work whose main concern is to construct a coherent assemblage which does not exclude humour in its juxtapositions. One of the most impressive photographs is the astounding image of the hanging bodies of young women (Bitches, Sanchong series). The shocking eroticism aside, what also comes across here, in an untimely and provocative way, is Hsieh’s second passion: gastronomy. This installation inevitably brings to mind window displays of glossy Peking duck and glazed pigs, hanging by their legs in the windows of traditional Chinese restaurants, ready to be eaten. Once again, this extraordinary image refers to cinema, but this time to the Chinese cinema of Hong Kong. I have a vivid memory of a film by Fruit Chan from 2001, Hollywood Hong Kong, set in the professional world of food markets. It includes a sequence which confirms my feeling that the various effects in each of Hsieh Chu‐Te’s works offer a synthesis of cruelty and beauty, humour and tragedy: a playful cruelty.

1 year ago 1 note

Title: Venice: MARIVERTICALI

Artist: Fabrizio Plessi

Curator: Renzo Dubbini

Venue: Giardini

What are the stereotypes of Venice? Curved round the Venice Pavilion, gondolas stand vertically, reaching the ceiling. Screens run the entire length of the gondolas, illuminated by images of water. The colour blue saturates the entire pavilion, as the sound of water fills the space with its trickling. Eluding itself into what can only be described as a homage to Venice. The incredibly simple execution is harmless, and quite sweet really.

Jemma Craig

1 year ago 1 note

Title: Ancension

Artist: Anish Kapoor

Curator: Collateral Event

Venue: Basilica di San Giorgio Maggoire

Ascension is a site-specific installation by Anish Kapoor, one of the leading figures in the international field of contemporary art. The work has previously been presented in Brazil, China and Italy, yet it takes on a new meaning in the spiritual context of Venice’s Basilica di San Giorgio. Rising to the challenge of creating something no contemporary artist has done within the space, Kapoor rises to the challenge in an attempt to give form to the immaterial. Respecting the location’s spiritual and consecrated space, Ascension takes on an entirely new stance, “What interests me is the idea of immateriality becoming an object, which is exactly what happens in Ascension: the smoke becomes a column. Also, present in this work is the idea of Moses following a column of smoke, a column of light, in the desert.”

The site-specific installation is placed at the intersection between the nave and the transept. A tornado of smoke ascends from the circular base on the floor to an enormous extractor fan in the ceiling. The circular base is surrounded by 4 pillars lined with fans, these aim to direct the smoke to the extractor fan in the ceiling. Sadly, as is only natural with site-specific installations, there were some technical difficulties. Ventilation from the church’s entrances diffuses the smoke, and its dispersion of light made it just visible in the daytime. Rather disappointingly, the smoke disintegrated after only a few meters in the air.

Jemma Craig

1 year ago

Location: Iran

Artist: Morteza Darehbaghi, Mohammad Mehdi Ghanbeigy, Monir Ghanbeigy, Mohsen Rastani

Venue: Palazzo Malipiero, San Marco

Iranians have long considered light as a manifestation of the Lord Almighty, a sacred entity, so this year’s theme, ‘IllumiNATIONS’, at the Venice Biennale seems to be very apt. However, the works from Mohsen Rastani, Morteza Darehbaghi, and the married couple Mohammad-Mehdi and Monir Qanbeigi, do not obviously show the fascination that Iranians hold of light, instead focusing on the ideas and events that specifically relate to Iranian culture.

Mohammad-Mehdi and Monir Qanbeigi’s work of 12 cubic earthenware was influenced by the Kaba and the pre-historic cubic pieces discovered near Shahrud, where it was believed that Iranian people used to pray to an unseen God, using these cubic pieces as the ‘Houses of the Lord’. Mohne Rastani’s black and white photographs depict the lives of different Iranian nationals, juxtaposing mythological figures of the past with modern man and his new stories.

However, it is through ‘Illumination and Peace’ by Morteza Darehbaghi that we really do gain a sense of the cultural significance of Iran and the turmoil that has shaped their society. The work was inspired by 240,000 Iranian martyrs who laid down their lives in the war between Iran and Iraq. By printing the images of 2000 of these men, women and children onto mirrors, Darehbaghi aims to impart the feeling that any visitor could be the martyr, whilst creating a conceptually designed space where the spectator can take in the sheer number of victims.

The work at the Iranian pavilion is clear-cut and simple, but perhaps not in the way it was intended, with the exhibition steering away from the theme of ‘IllumiNATIONS’, highlighting important aspects of Iranian culture.

Emily Burke

1 year ago 7 notes

Location: Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia

Title: ZERO: The Trailer Files

Artist: Art Collective Zero - Aleksander Stankoski, Igor Toshevski, Bedi Ibahim, Zlatko Trajkovski, Sinisha Cvetkovski, Mishko Desovski, Perica Georgiev, Gorancho Gjorgjievski

Curator: Gorancho Gjorgjievski

Leap:
Artist: Žarko Bašeski
Curator: Emil Aleksiev
Venue: Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, Cannaregio

Celyn Bricker interviews Emil Aleksiev, Curator of Leap project

CB: The ‘LEAP’ installation seems to be more complicated than the project of a single artist, but rather the product of collaboration between commissioner, curator, collaborator and artist. How significant was this collaboration for the artwork?

EA: Cooperation is necessary in order to create a complex work of art. The artist who could once be seen as a craftsman and his work treated as a supreme product of human labor (G. K. Argan), migrated into the class of industrial workers who manufacture goods, and then into the class of administrators and managers who make decisions, select and use things others have produced (Boris Groys). Mental and menial elements used to be united into the person of one artist; then they were separated into those who make designs and those who carry them out; eventually there will remain only the mental element and the mechanic prosthesis or the hand of a robot.

The LEAP Project is manifold and raises the issue of who is an artist nowadays and how a work of art can be created (considering the fact that Bašeski’s sculptures require complex and expensive technology).

CB: A lot of the discussion around LEAP focuses on the conceptual inspiration of the project that is found in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Do you feel an understanding of Nietzschean philosophy or Nietzche’s concept of the Übermensch is important for a proper appreciation the project LEAP?

EA: Nietzsche himself said that his ideas would prevail two centuries later, probably having in mind the end of this commercial era. Actually, in spite of the controversial interpretations (his work is a perturbing prophetic and poetic speech), he predicted accurately the development of modern society and the future of mankind. Like all true prophets, he does not predict future directly, but tells you what to do now in order to have future. Nietzsche asks, “Man is something that has to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”

What was interesting to me was the effort for fierce, raw materialisation of an idea that would otherwise be doomed to be a lingering ghost in today’s virtual world. What attracted me to cooperate with this artist was the possibility to face horror in the immediate materialisation of the image of ourselves we don’t want to see. We have to face our epochal failure to become something more than we are. This is the story of our failure, the failure to leap beyond ourselves – the failure of the man to become Übermensch.

CB: Why was this focus chosen? Do you feel the Ubermensch or Nietzschean philosophy in general is particularly relevant to the present day?

EA: ‘Übermensch is our future! Man ought to disappear! Death of man is necessary! The future of man is overman!’ You see, front page headlines like these would stir terrible confusion. They would probably be associated with some Nazi fantasy and calling the Raubtier – the fair-haired beast (Nietzschean metaphor for a lion and not an Aryan). The world we live in today is a banal spectacle and endless fireworks of wishes projected against the grey sky of our existence. People are blinded and disoriented. We have become prisoners in a world we ourselves built. Therefore it is necessary to ask questions. People ought to face the truth about themselves. In a world reduced to visualisation, these questions should probably be images. The question we want to raise is if a man can really be something more than he is. Can a man leap beyond himself in an effort to self-improvement and self-transcending? What have we done to overcome ourselves?

The Project LEAP aimed at showing the unsuccessful attempts of mankind. The project was intended to be exhibited in a tent in Riva degli Schiavoni, in Venice, where “live sculptures” can usually be seen – people on pedestals who act out sculptures as opposed to the sculptures in the tent who act out living men. Live sculptures in Venice most often represent important historic figures or superheroes of modern mythology, while these are sculptures of an ordinary man trying to achieve something impossible and overcome himself. Thus you can draw a line through history from Gilgamesh and Ramses III, through Alexander the Great and Napoleon, to Hitler and Mussolini, but also to those on welfare, illegal workers or immigrants who can be seen in the streets of your city in their daily attempt to overcome themselves. Zarko Baseski’s sculptures are based on this very historic line of human development and social progress, or if you please, the line of perverted history. His man is a pathetic failure. He is a man of great potential, but sitting all day long in a shabby shack made of ribbed tin on the outskirts of a big city, in his shabby, greasy armchair, beer in his hand, looking blandly at the colourful images flashing on the TV set. He is someone you can see in the streets of your city – an immigrant, homeless and third class citizen like you and me. The question is if we are aware of it. Are we emigrants from a reality we don’t like? Are we homeless in our own homes? Are we third class citizens in a world we don’t understand and which is not our world?

CB: How does project LEAP relate to the other work in the Macedonian Pavilion? Were there any specific curatorial difficulties with this arrangement?

EA: Even though we had direct cooperation with the group Zero that set up The Trailer Files Installation and the two projects, we were surprised by some kind of breaking in by the collective unconscious and projecting the image of our reality (“the real reality”) and of the man today in the space of the renaissance Papafava Palace, which is our pavilion. On the one hand (not to mention the low level of realisation of the two projects), you see hopeless image of a waste land, where some carts with empty baskets of desires pull us towards the future, with a shiny NOMEN EST O-MEN neon sign above, and on the other hand, there is a pathetic, oversized representation of a man who wants to overcome himself at any price. This is a dark, frightening and upsetting scene. Both works have their own universal metaphysical dimensions, but they are also gloomy metaphors of the conditions in the Republic of Macedonia today and of our attempts to be more than we are, unwilling to change ourselves, which is an impossible feat, as impossible as the effort to leap beyond oneself, to lift oneself above the ground holding one’s own ears or to get higher by climbing onto oneself. When media spectacle and false images of the world are discarded – what remains is the muddy dregs of reality in which we are stuck.

CB: Is the project LEAP a one-off for the Biennale or will you continue to explore aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy in installations in the future?

EA: I hope I will have that possibility. Nietzsche’s message is extremely important for all of us. We had to face a lot of difficulties in the realization of this project. The whole drama around the project actually became part of it, reflecting our failure to LEAP beyond ourselves.

1 year ago 6 notes

Title: Future Pass

Artists: Over 100 artists, Asian and not, who ’ offer a panorama on the new aesthetics coming from Asia’.

Curator: Commune di Verona, Collateral Event

Venue: Abbazia di San Gregorio and Palazzo Mangilli - Valmarana

Over 100 artists, both Asian and non-, offer a kaleidoscopic panorama of a new aesthetic paradigm currently proliferating from Asia to the rest of the world. Crossing genres and disciplines as they appropriate the digital culture of the new 21st century, artists working in this eclectic new aesthetic are generating new types of relationships to the globalizing world, offering us all a possible Pass to the Future.

Future Pass explores the relationship between the creative energy of contemporary art in Asia and the rest of the world. The exhibition responds to the general themes of the 54^th International Art Exhibition in Venice, presenting not only an artistic ‘nation’ that transcends national boundaries, but also a new artistic universe centred in Asia.

Curated from an Asian perspective, this exhibition brings attention to different values that can be recognized in contemporary art. The installation of the show privileges a kaleidoscopic vision that breaks away from the typical “white box” of the museum. This all-over visual experience speaks directly to the viewing habits of our digital age, especially our relationship to the computer screen.

1 year ago

Title: Republic of Zimbabwe: Seeing ourselves: questioning our geographical landscape and the space we occupy from yesterday, today and tomorrow

Artist: Berry Bickle, Calvin Dondo, Tapfuma Gutsa, Misheck Masamvu

Curator: Raphael Chikukwa

Venue: Santa Maria della Pietà, Calle della Pietà, Castello

Four canal-hops away from the Biennale’s hub, the Church of Santa Maria della Pietà watches over a quiet feat: Zimbabwe’s first pavilion in Venice. This is the 54th Venice Biennale, and Zimbabwe has become the only country in Sub-Saharan Africa other than South Africa to have ever occupied a national space at the Exhibition.

The participants are keen to capitalise on the potential for exposure that Venice affords. “We have come, we have made our statement into the contemporary art world,” curator Raphael Chikukwa asserts. “We will wait for the response, but a number of people have come forward and commented on the visibility of Zimbabwe and African art.”[1] This zeal for Zimbabwe’s recognition on the international circuit seems to be the driving force behind much of Chikukwa’s curatorial output. In 2004, he curated an exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery, titled Visions of Zimbabwe, that would serve as the prototype for the Venice pavilion. Visions of Zimbabwe bore many of the hallmarks of Chikukwa’s subsequent work as curator of the National Galley of Zimbabwe, not least the overlap of selected artists – Calvin Dondo’s photography was featured in both Manchester and Venice, for instance – but the most salient refrain is Chikukwa’s acute awareness of his social responsibility.

African countries have always been underrepresented at the Biennale. Apart from a handful of individual countries, the only African representation at the Biennale has been in the form of two continent-wide pavilions: in 1990, Five Contemporary African Artists were selected to showcase the artistic output of the continent, and in 2007 Roger Storr inaugurated an African pavilion. Despite the progressive decision to include Africa in 2007’s Biennale, a single pavilion to represent Africa’s 54 countries leaves much to be desired. In light of this, Chikukwa’s sense of responsibility for Zimbabwe’s international recognition seems appropriate.

Undoubtedly, African art is routinely perceived as homogenous. It is vital that such cultural conflation is problematised, so the first Zimbabwe pavilion may rightly be considered a milestone. Concerned to make the art of individual African countries more prominent and visible internationally, Chikukwa’s social agenda is important. But the insidious bedfellow of Zimbabwe’s artistic acknowledgment is governmental pride. The exhibition was funded by a coalition of partners including the British Council and the Zimbabwean government, and it is not difficult to see why the latter would be firmly behind the initiative. As a statement on the Biennale’s website puts it, “To participate in Venice signifies not only recognition and respect but also global interactions and relationships.”[2]

The Zimbabwean government’s approach to art has been marked by suppression of any work critical of the regime, such as the 2010 arrest and imprisonment of artists Owen Maseko and Voti Thebe for putting on a show about the Gukurahundi atrocities. It is unsettling, then, to see such an apparently cordial alliance of artists and government. Is Chikukwa’s fervour getting perilously close to governmental ideology?

The answer must come from the exhibition itself. Titled Seeing Ourselves, the show contains the work of four artists, including painter Misheck Masamvu whose large-scale works do not deny the difficulties of living and working in Zimbabwe. “I wish to produce a body of work pregnant with optimism and hope,” he says. “Through my work, I desire to find alternative solutions to the sometimes dire circumstances we come across.”[3] Masamvu’s work looks frankly at Zimbabwe, acknowledging its charm but also the violence that has marked the country’s politics. Similarly, Calvin Dondo’s photographs of German couples who have adopted African children do not gloss over the trials of being Zimbabwean, but treat displacement with honesty and tenderness. Such curatorial decisions indicate that the title of the exhibition is a fair moniker for a show that helps Westerners to see Zimbabwe, and Zimbabweans to see themselves. In his passion for Zimbabwe’s fame, Chikukwa has not sacrificed the candour and integrity that was so costly for Maseko and Thebe last year.

Certainly, the haze of stereotypes that separates Europe from Africa has to be made clear. The Zimbabwean pavilion moves us one step closer to that. But the enduring triumph is the self-examination that the national pavilion allows. Although the work may not directly catch the conscience of the president, it holds a mirror up to its viewers, including Zimbabwean politicians, and asks them to see themselves.

Joe Townend

[1] http://ziminvenice.tumblr.com/page/2

[2] http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/exhibition/first-time/south-africa.html

[3] http://www.nationalgallery.co.zw/venice/

1 year ago 2 notes

Title: The Future of Promise

Artist: Abdelkader Benchamma, Abdulnasser Gharem, Ahmed Mater, Ahmed Alsoudani, Ayman Baalbaki, Ayman Yossri Daydban, Driss Ouadahi, Emily Jacir, Faycal Baghriche, Jananne Al-Ani, Kader Attia, Lara Baladi, Manal Al-Dowayan, Mona Hatoum, Mounir Fatmi, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Raafat Ishak, Taysir Batniji, Yazan Khalili, Yto Barrada, Ziad Abillama, Ziad Antar

Curator: Lina Lazaar, Collateral Event

Venue: Magazzino del Sale n. 5 , Zattere, Dorsoduro

The Future of a Promise is the Venice Biennale’s first pan-Arab exhibition of contemporary art, and though the artwork ranges from painting, drawing, and photography, to video, sculpture and installation, and covers a vast area between Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, the ultimate feeling of this exhibition is one of despair and entrapment for the Arab people.

As you enter the exhibition you are presented immediately with Manal Al-Dowayan’s Suspended Together, 2011, an installation that gives the impression of movement and freedom through the suspension of 200 white doves. However after closer inspection, one can see that each dove carries on its body the permission document that allows a Saudi woman to travel. The contributors range from six months to sixty years old, each of whom have contributed in some way to society. The work shows that regardless to how influential a female figure can be in society, Saudi women are still trapped, never being allowed full freedom, even in the contemporary society that they may work in. Ahmed Alsoudani’s Untitled, 2010, depicts a disfigured tableau of war and atrocity, evoking a universal experience of conflict and human suffering through the depiction of indistinguishable and bestial figures. One is further presented with the images of war and conflict in GH0809, 2010, by Taysir Batniji, a take on commercial advertising with the altered content of houses and facilities destroyed by the Israeli army during the war on Gaza in 2008-09.

The Lost Springs, 2011, by Mounir Fatmi displays the 22 flags of the Arab League states at half mast, with two brooms referring to the upheavals that led to the fall of President Ben Ali in Tunisia and President Mubarak in Egypt. The half-mast state of these flags emphasises the desperate situation the Arab League has been put in, further accentuating the despair of this exhibition. The Colour Correction series, by Yazan Khalili, 2007-10, through the simple multi-colouring of houses, emphasises the idea of losing lifestyle, mobility, freedom of choice and even the ability to dream of a brighter tomorrow. According to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, these losses lead to a permanent state of emergency, where the possibility of thinking and living in the present becomes impossible. It is this loss of freedom and free will of these pan-Arab artists that is ever so apparent in such an affluent, influential and contemporary art festival, emphasising how important contemporary exhibitions like The Future of a Promise are in bridging the gap between our differing societies.

Emily Burke

1 year ago

Slovenian Pavilion ‘Heaters for Hot Feelings’

Artist: Mirko Bratuša

Venue: Galleria A+A, Slovene Central for Visual Art, San Marco 3073

Curator: Nadja Zgonik

Sculptor Mirko Bratuša will present his project Heaters for Hot Feelings. It will be an installation of sculpture composed of eight free-standing anthropo- and biomorphic bodies linked together in a network. Hidden electrical fittings will heat, humidify and cool the fired clay sculptures. The heat generated by the cooling of the first sculptures will be used to heat the others. A network of

connections will be set up as a system of artificial bodies which indicate their mutual dependence.

The metaphorics of an artistic system constructed in this manner are universally applicable to modern society, in which everything happens in mutual relation: amassing wealth on one side of the planet leads to poverty on the other, we are worried about the vulnerability of the ecosystem, where exploiting nature is causing increasingly severe natural disasters, and connections through social

networks trigger social unrest, which changes political systems. Mirko Bratuša’s sculptures are captured in various states of emotion. They are tactile and warm, through which they awaken our senses. At the same time the conflicted mental states which they depict indicate the psychotic aspect of our everyday lives, fears and troubles. They speak of our sense of being lost in modern culture, where it seems that we can no longer affect politics and social power relations and that it is no longer possible to halt the processes of destruction of nature. Therefore, Bratuša suggests, we have to return to elementary perceptions. This is an escape, but not in the romantic sense, to remote worlds, but to the self, to the realm of lost sensibility, as if in the apparent reality of three-dimensional film projection we were to encounter a physical, tactile and warm object. Mirko Bratuša believes that sculpture with its physical presence enables us to have an inner connection with modern technology and to personalise it. He thinks that what we have lost in the process of technological development and the ascendance of globalism and capitalist progress, in which a sense of mutual alienation has prevailed everywhere, can return to culture via individual agitation through art. From: www.galerija-bj.s

Interview with Mirko Bratuša & Nadja Zgonik

Line Magazine: How long have you known each other?

Mirko & Nadja: From the time when we were many years ago both students at the University of Ljubljana, I [Nadja] at the Faculty of Arts, studying history of art and Mirko at the Academy of Fine Arts studying sculpture.

LM: What made you select Mirko?

Nadja: Last year I was fascinated with his sculpture installation in the gallery of the former Cistercian Monastery in Kostanjevica na Krki. His way of enterining into the relation with the specific, historical and religious ambiance, connected with technological approach with heated sculptures, made me enthusiastic to think about, how to promote his work widely.

LM: What aspect does religion play in your work?

Mirko: Working for the Cistercian Church, I wasn’t accessing to space through its religious identity and didn’t consider ideological aspects at the first place. Although in the final project occured many resonances with various contexts of the church space: voyeurism of the monks, blindness for everyday problems of the church as a institution, history of religious sculpture, sexual exploration. All arrived spontaneously, without intending to stress those contextual problems too much.

What I wanted to access was the spatial sensibility for the church as the space which could represent cosmic dimensions, as well as the abstract, ideological connotations of history and tradition.

LM: Do you see technology as damnation or salvation?

Mirko: I use technology as thing through which we can get back in touch with our sensory corporeal condition. Technology has alienated us from our feeling and now with warming and cooling of sculpture I want to use it to bring us back to our elemetary sensations. Sculptures are warm and as such alive, with a help of a technological “heart”. It’s the tool to bring us back to ourselves. In a practical sense, there is a reliance on technology and tricks/mechanisms to make the inanimate animated. It can make art alive and it can make us alive.

LM: You mention a mastery over materials that you wish to achive, that you do not wish to be enslaved by it. Brancusi emphasised cooperation and collaboration – why is total mastery necessary?

Mirko: I’m choosing different materials because of their various properties and I like to respect and use them in a positive way. If I can’t express certain idea in a specific material, I move onto another one. This suggests that materials have specific qualities and abilities that one cannot work beyond to their own will – they can only work with and to the materials limits.

[LM In this case, mastery is not a form of domination but a state knowledge the ‘mastery’ being in knowing what a material will and will not do for you.]

LM: A lot of the sculptures have closed eyes, why is this?

Mirko: Closed eyes focus on the senses and the sensory. There are five ways of being present, not just one – sight can blind you to your other senses.

LM: You said that your favourite sculpture is Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz by Beuys. Beuys was a great performer as well as a sculptor, but it seems the performative aspect is absent in your work which is very static and ‘finished’.

Mirko: The performative aspect is present in a specific way, in the process of making, which is kind of “performance”, with physical presence of artists - players, sculpture and material. Also the research practices, I’m using in my work, are a form of performance, the scientific experimentation that emerges through my sculptural practice.

1 year ago 1 note

Title: Portugal: Scenario

Artist: Francisco Tropa

Curator: Sergio Mah

Venue: Fondaco Marcello, Calle del Traghetto o Ca’ Garzoni, San Marco

Scenario is an exhibition which articulates sculpture, image devices and fragments of nature, where specific attention is paid to assembly and occupation of the exhibition space, to the placement of things, their nature and relationships, so they can be seen and experienced. The general ambience of the exhibition is timeless and enigmatic, in which objects and images have a heuristic quality, seeking a sensitive and subjective understanding of the nature of things and consequently of the experience of creation and the origins of art. Scenario involves the construction of a space, the indication of a space in suspension, which suggests a huge possibility: to hold our attention, to summon up the experience of creation, to urge on the imagination as a way to reach the truth of nature and consequently the origins of art making. This Scenario is definitely the space of alterity, of alteration, in which mind and body, image and object, figuration and abstraction, nature and art stop being dissociable notions. It is a space wherein imagery is taken as being a large theatre of memory – ample, involuntary, inventive and metamorphic – whose existence is regenerated in each sufficiently creative image to mobilise the viewer’s perception via an unusual pattern of routes. Vision is simultaneously suspended and freed, to stimulate the imagination and unbidden memories that renew the world, in the search for a new light, the awe of a new image about which appropriate knowledge is still lacking. These are images that shift between the recognisable and the indiscernible, between the expectation of reproducing something specific in a manner more literal or tending to the abstract, and that of representing their projective and speculative potential, the possibility of recreating appearances and inciting the generative capability of the images. What Tropa has here achieved is evidently a form of demand for observation, one where the viewer completes this cycle, but without them these objects remain indiscriminate images, never fully achieving their potential.

Emily Burke

1 year ago 1 note

Title: Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: The Black Arch

Artist: Shadia Alem and Raja Alem

Curator: Mona Khazindar, Robin Start

Venue: Arsenale

Emily Burke in conversation with Shadia and Raja Alem:

Emily Burke: How long have you been working together? How do each of your practices influence your work collaboratively and individually?

Shadia: If you mean art, we are not working together, Raja is the writer and I am the artist, but, there is always this open arch separating our working spaces, we work with our backs to each other, we never discuss our works while producing them, but when the work is done, I am her first critic and she is my first spectator.

Raja: We feed on each other’s energy, when I am tired and run out of inspiration there is Shadia always charging our imagination with her discoveries, and when I am in trance following the plot of a book Shadia connects to my energy and collects signals from that world, then she invents new projects of art.

It is like having someone always ahead of you on the road, and that keeps you going, sometimes this figure in the dark takes a sudden turn and opens you up onto a completely new sphere. We depend on our sudden shifts of imagination or destinations or missions.

Shadia: but, notice, we are a total different people - we share a similar taste, but after all each has her special personality. Our nearness doesn’t makes one disappears in the other; I am the relaxed one, and Raja is always tense, maybe because she always carries the difficult responsibilities. I owe her this, her advanced planning, and manoeuvring engineering skills always save us! Why to worry?! I let things happen, and it happens good and smooth. Numbers, mathematics, time and appointments are not on my schedule, Raja deals with them all.

Raja: She doesn’t follow directions, maps or restrictions, while I carry an inner navigation system, a mathematical organized mind, which do all the measurements and plans. That’s why we drive each other crazy

EB: As an artist and writer, individually you must see the world in two very different lights. How have you brought these different vantage points together in your work?

Raja: You can see that when we come into a place, in a flash Shadia scans it, and picks what she wants.

Shadia: While Raja perceives a wider range of surrounding directions and locations, she pays a look back, to map where from we came, and how we return safely back. As if we are walking each in a totally different scene while we are walking on the same pavement.

Raja: Therefore, when we reach a new city I just let Shadia lead, she wanders aimlessly while I switch off all my manoeuvring systems, and we inevitably get lost, and consequently discover unexpected wonders. Then when we get tired and want to go back home, I turn on my sense of direction and lead back. I am so much more interested in nature and insects and the discoveries in space, while she loves music and visual art, fashion and … shopping! She laughs at me: when we go out she says ‘Raja, no more nature idolizing, look in people’s faces…’

Shadia: And all that was channelled in the ‘Black Arch’. We were fuelled and did great research, we crossed challenging disagreements and agreements, and came out with this Black Arch,

Raja: It has the physical and metaphysical, the calculation of my mind and the wildness of Shadia’s instinct of joy and the abundance. I helped build the concept and she brought it to life physically in a concrete artwork and then she added the audio visual part which turned the work into an experience like those of the 0 art, to reflect sounds and light of mosaic images from the two cities Mecca and Venice.

Shadia: I remember the moment when this piece came to full despair, and then existence.

Raja: It was at dawn, we were working for days and nights, the spheres where there, the whole concept was there, but there was something missing,

Shadia: the X factor .. the leap ..

Raja: it was a moment where we reached a dead end. I remember turning to Shadia, and without saying, she heard it “I think it is useless, no way .” She looked at me, with large eyes, and turned to the computer,

Shadia: and suddenly, easily - as usual - all fragments came together, the puzzle pieces fell into their unique places.

Raja: the cube emerged and stands on its axle, the smaller cube cut its dark cavity within the larger one. Shadia, to finalize the plot, held up the coaster from under her cup and said: “This is the vertical sphere”. I pushed it back a couple of degrees and added: “It must stands straight, a 90 degree.”

Shadia: It was a unique moment of creation, an arrival of real inspiration, which happened in a matter of seconds.

EB: As sisters there must be a spiritual link or bond between you. How do you represent your family link in your work?

Shadia: It’s rather a spiritual link, developed through years of searching together.

Raja: I used to believe that I write to connect with my universal tribe, and this is our case in general; we believe that cultures and the creative works in general links you to those who have the same positive energy. And it happened that we came from an ancient spiritual city, Mecca, which along the ages attracted the scholars who came seeking the energy of the place. We call them neighbours of God. It is this nearness to the absolute, the centre which sucks 1/5 of the world’s population to face it and pray for it, aiming their purest energy, five times a day. Prayer is a form of focusing the human energy,

Shadia: exactly like in the act of creativity. So we are definitely moulded and shaped by growing up in this centre and watching millions filling the city every season, coming with their cultures and customs, it is not an ordinary crowd,

Raja: it is like a magma of human bodies and energies and hopes.

Shadia: so Raja in her novels and I in my artworks are always bringing to manifestation this invisible energy, these hidden links between the humans, which in the essence makes them one whole family of being.

EB: Would you say that your family’s acceptance of pilgrims into your home during the Hadj every year sparked an interest into cultures and civilisations different to your own? Does your family continue to influence your work?

Shadia: It is not the family but the mosaic of cultures. Our family itself is a mosaic, from my mother’s side coming from Bukhara, where the sun rises from earth, and from my father side coming from Morocco and Iraq, where sun sets in water, we carry this mosaic in our blood and it appears in all our forms of expressions.

Raja: In our work there are no family ties as much as the energy ties to the world. Imagine yourself growing experiencing all kind of traditional customs from East and West, getting accustomed to tastes, hearing all kind of languages and feasting on all colours, you no more feel alien anywhere, you feel the world as part of your place of birth. That’s why the concept of the 54^th Venice Biennale is not alien to us, illumination between nations, this is us, the formula of our souls and characters, this eternal exchange of illumination with the world’s cultures.

Shadia: The first figures I painted where a mixture of cultures, and my work “Djinnyat Lar ” is an embodiment of that family, they are sort of creatures in their wholeness, and Raja emphasize that with a philosophical text .

EB: How do you see the city of Venice in relation to your home city of Mecca?

Raja: Many times we visited Venice biennale, something in the architecture reminds me remotely of Mecca, but we were not really aware of the extent of that link, until the curators Mona Khazindar and Robin Start invited us among five Saudi artists to visit Venice and get inspired by the Arsenale, to produce an artwork of which to choose one or two suitable for the biennale. It was 15 November 2010, we were in the airport waiting for our delayed flight back home, when we suddenly realized it is the pilgrimage season and the millions from all over the worlds were gathered in our home city of Mecca, while we were in Venice pilgrims for art!

Shadia: Venice is like Mecca, a unique place in a way; a spot sought by thousands; pilgrims seeking spirituality and art. This incidental timing brought to focus the fact that Mecca and Venice represent the peak of human exchange, through commerce, religion and culture, they are both built on that dynamic triangle. Both are a unique pot where nations and cultures mix, and build on that mixture, they both are sort of eternal by means of that mixture.

EB: Through your involvement in the Venice Biennale, do you wish to bridge the gap between these two cosmopolitan cities? Is this what is implied by your exhibition title, The Black Arch?

Shadia: Arch or arc is the journey we take to cross to the other nations, in the present and back in time.

Raja: The Black Arch moves on 3457 spheres, each sphere represents a nation or a culture, all are actively exchanging illuminations, and all are reflected on and reflecting our first city which is Mecca.

Shadia: The audiovisual part of the work brings to visibility only two cities, both imply rich cultures of multi nations, which crossed its land and left their signs. The projection of those authentic signs brings them whole and visible to the spectators. The mosaic of St. Marco and Mecca’s people are only two spheres, while there are 3457 waiting to be released as the work moves in other cities.

Raja: All kind of cultures will appear in dialogue with our city. It is a sample of what is going on inside our heads, my head, Shadia’s head and your head, as human beings moving in the world and unconsciously absorbing cultures. Each one of us is a moving cluster of cultures eternally exchanging illumination and ceaselessly transforming us.

EB: Through your work at this year’s Venice Biennale, you wish to project the collective memory and physical representation of Black. This colour is obviously significant in your culture. How do you intend to portray this significance to an audience who perhaps see it from a stereotypical stance?

Shadia: The black is the failure of perceptions when its deluded by prohibitions and preconceptions. Whether we admit it or not, every one of us carries his archive of black, with some it’s visible and with some it is invisible.

The work itself is the statement against this failure, against these stereotypes. I wrote a quote about the black arch, which I like to bring here: “The flat is a hidden depth, the black is the condensed all; what we see and what our perceptions fail to sense. I am this black.”

Raja: On the other hand, and while working on the black arch, we discovered that we carry a built-in memory of the Black, around which our whole work was revolving. The first memory of black was the black cloth of Al-Ka’ba, or God’s home. Imagine this black silk curtain with its band of gold - embroidered calligraphy with Qur’anic texts. Imagine this rich black, which attracts the millions to touch it, when you touch it you feel those hands vibrating there, thickening the soft texture.

Shadia: I am sensitive to scents, and that black texture is loaded with whiffs of perfume, ancient Asian perfumes, which penetrates to your deepest core and senses. Your imagination is triggered to reach what is behind. You see, that black is a condensed physical medium which carries unseen sweat, smells and texture which accentuates our senses and links us to the metaphysical and the unknown, and urges us to discover and explore.

Raja: The second encounter with black came so early in our life, when our mothers used to take us to the holy mosque every Friday, and bring us to the black stone, believed to be brought by the angels from Paradise, and placed at the corner of Al-Kaaba, to mark the beginning of the circumambulation. My mother would push our heads in the stone’s cavity and urge us, “kiss it to sharpen your memory and learning abilities!” Once your lips touch it you feel the shock of the sweat of millions of lips and hands kissing it along the ages, you travel back and forth, recalling all nations touching this stone. You feel oneness with the human longings, could I say that was inspiring?

Shadia: The stereotype black is assimilated with the black cloth protecting the precious and covering the holy, it was raised there to urge you to pay extra effort to cross to it.

Raja: Black formed a nagging question mark in our head triggering our imagination. It is an invitation to explore the unknown.

Shadia: some of my work emerged from this black: Negative No More, The Black Mirror and I Am Black.

Raja: And, here, in the Black Arch we placed the black physical, huge, to face the spectators when they first come into the exhibiting space, this black is the trigger of the journey. And it is for the comer to go beyond or allow the black to block his vision and drive him out of the place.

Shadia: for me the whole work is in this black, it could stand alone as a whole work of art, or a question mark.

EB: What do you intend to portray with the second part of your installation, the mirror image?

Shadia: Its up to the viewer to portray what he feels at that moment of exchange. But for me, it is the inner self, the mind, and soul, the lagoons of one’s being, and the medium, which carries one’s arc to the other side of enlightenment and salvation.

Raja: You could say it is a vertical water, open to reflect all; the spheres plus spectators. This vertical domain reminds me of water, what gives life to Venice and what sprang in Mecca desert at that ancient time, and what invited the human imagination to build God’s home around it, as second heaven on earth, heaven is nothing but going back to the whole, the essence of all cultures.

Each of us, humans, go around in the world unaware of the eternal exchange of illumination going between him and every single sign and culture passing by. This vertical formation is to enhance the feel of the magnitude of that unconscious exchange.

EB: This will be the first time that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Surely it must be extremely important that two female artists have been chosen to represent this nation especially when, from a Western point of view, women are seen as repressed in your culture?

Raja: First it was the artwork that determined the choice. Because originally there were five artists invited to submit their artworks in a competition, for the curators to choose the most suitable to represent the concept of the54 biennale (illume-nation)+to represent Saudi Arabia’s spirit, to address the art world by mean of its culture.

Shadia: As I joined the competition I was never intimidated by the four male artists, I knew it is the work not the gender that will determine the representative to both concept and country. And I am glad to be chosen. “No one but Shadia and Raja are more qualified to be the spirit of exchanged illumination, growing in Mecca the centre which accepts all nations, not only because both born and raised on its generous values and aesthetics, but also that can be measured by our long accumulating of original art and literature.” All our work is drawn from the spirit of the Arabian Peninsula, and its mixture of cultures.

Raja: This show is the answer to the preconceptions about the Saudi females. The Black Arch came from a long history, a creation of a serious research and hard work. Nowadays, and then, we struggled to reach to be productive in this moving world. And we came to believe that there is no way to suppress an individual, suppression is an individual choice, especially now, with this technology of communication. All forms of knowledge are available. The concept of a cold iron wall no more exists, and it is for the individual efforts to break through barriers no matter what gender or where and when this individual happened to be born.

EB: Has Western female art influenced your art practice?

Shadia: It is not the gender of the artists; mainly the daring, changing work is what influences me, not the artist.

Raja: maybe Virginia Wolf is one female that influenced me among the male writers, but your question made me think of her as female for the first time, as Shadia said, it is not about gender but about the creation itself, the energy it conveys. Even in our works you cannot tell our gender from the work, for example when I submitted my first manuscript to the publisher he sent me a letter back saying: “Dear Mr. Alem, we are happy to publish your work.”

Shadia: You might be surprised to know that, it is not a female artist but a writer that somehow influenced me as a teenager, the American novelist Ayn Rand, in her novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’ 1957, which says when Atlas, the Titan giant carrying the world on his shoulders, shrugs in carelessness the world collapses, so we cannot take a careless attitude to the world. In ‘Atlas Shrugged’ leading innovators, ranging from industrialists to artists disappear led by John Galt. Galt describes the strike as “stopping the motor of the world” by withdrawing the “minds” that drive society’s growth and productivity, they refuse to be exploited by society.

Raja: we grew up considering ourselves of those “people of the mind”.

EB: In our contemporary culture, how do you go about encouraging creativity in the women of Saudi Arabia?

Raja: I think every artist and creator works as if walking in his sleep, he follows a thread that appears to him and leads to discoveries. And at the end his discoveries are destined to influence people and trigger their imaginations. And the Saudi individual male or female have access to the world creations, either by mean of travel or through the internet, and that’s the trigger, the exchange of illumination which will create more cultural phenomena, and ensure the continuity of the build up of the human creations.

Shadia: While working in a kindergarten, we found that the best way to encourage creativity is through free play. You supply children with all kind of mediums, and encourage freedom to use them, allow them to go wild, to explore and do the mess. At the same time you provide the exposure to nature and to the outer world. I think this can be applied to the adult world of creativity - we are all children and later when we want to be more serious let us get some academic learning, and find channels to exhibit and exchange.

In ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the people “of the mind” demonstrate that, a world in which individual is not free to create is doomed, that civilization cannot exist where people are slaves to society and government or rigid academic teaching.

1 year ago

A Virtual Biennale

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