notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Aleksandar DenićExposition Coloniale
★★★☆☆The Serbian pavilion, VeniceCurated by Ksenija SamadržijaOn until 24 November 2024The theatre scenographer Denić took the Biennale’s theme literally, as though he was not in on the art world joke. Yet his Colonial Exhibition makes a joke of its own by conceptually reprising the 1931 event that infamously included a human zoo. The pavilion’s spacious interior houses a reconstruction of the commercial arteries of an Eastern European border town of the 1990s, a time when Yugoslavia which once again brands the building’s façade was choosing its economic and geopolitical future.
Denić’s 2024 cast, however, fled over the border in search of better lives. There’s an abandoned fast-food joint to cater for the absent masses where the equally unabundant grub is as garish as the interior décor. Another corner hides a spa sauna for the nouveau-riche merchant class but fails miserably in its attempt at luxury. Elsewhere, an empty bedsit room decked out in ‘70s patterns plays a Coke ad ad nausem until it is hard not to wonder why anyone would – or did – choose this aesthetic life over any other.
The European West’s betrayal of the Eastern imaginary remains an unexplored sore point. Denić’s theatrical gestures could thus be welcome or even poignant. But the artist worked with a poor script that called for cheap props and far too many visual clichés. A start or two for daring, sure, but this show won’t last more than one season.
Pakui Hardware, Maria Terese RožanskaitéInflammation
★★★☆☆The Lithuanian pavilion, VeniceCurated by Valentinas Klimašauskas, João LaiaOn until 31 October 2024Despite its bizarre anticontemporary ethos, Venice did see some novelty this year. One is the confidence of the marketing object to claim the attention of a well-made artwork. Saudi Arabia’s desert art project Wadi AlFan, for example, filled a palazzo with seductive landscapes in immersive video and a list of distinguished artists to boot. The purpose of this trade expo popup would be easy to miss were it not for Iwona Blazwick’s sales pitch voiceover.
A more worrying trope is the artwork that looks good but on reflection isn’t. Pakui Hardware’s sculptures of bodily organs and strands of the nervous system deploy a familiar, if not clichéd language or red glass and metal. Suspended on a polished steel scaffold which fills the interior of a centuries-old church, these structures overplay their strength yet fail to correspond with the chapel’s native iconography.
The same architect’s folly encases the late Rožanskaité’s paintings in more glass and steel, turning them into tributaries to the show’s vague transhumanism. The painter’s ability to abstract from the human body but remain specifically close to it far exceeds these confines. The heart-of-glass trinkets are a deceptive distraction. Seeing the exhibition at the pace of a Venice day tourist, however, might leave one believing the opposite.
Soufiane AbabriTheir mouths were full of bumblebees
★★☆☆☆The Barbican, LondonCurated by Raúl Muñoz de la VegaOn until 30 June 2024The Barbican’s architecture is an awkward setting for an exhibition. Ababri’s installation shows that part of the estate could easily be turned into an upscale gay cruise club. The space is lit dimly, plush red, and hidden by a suggestive chain link curtain hanging. Behind it, a series of homoerotic paintings marks the Curve’s walls like gloryholes at a truck stop. There is no maze and no foam party, either, but the show’s half-finished scenography and a one-off scheduled performance make an alluring promise.
One leaves this club unfulfilled. Ababri’s paintings of and for the Grindr generation are more cartoonish than they are from life. The men who occupy his frames engage in acts of narcissistic hedonism explained by phrases such as ‘bareback’ or ‘high and horny’ that litter the forms. These are the norms of Western sexual liberation that conquered this Moroccan artist’s world, too.
The gallery text suggests that Abarbi wants to resist Eurocentric queer theory, presumably to make room for some more true, local, or even Islam-friendly gay liberation. His paintings, however, do nothing of the sort. They barely offer a description of his subject’s condition that would root them in anything other than the international gay party circuit. These works are thus incapable of insight or critique and only serve as cheap titillation for the Western audiences, the sort of which the artist and his lovers hopelessly want to experience too.
Thanasis Deligiannis, Yannis MichalopoulosXirómero/Dryland
★★★★☆The Greek pavilion, VeniceCurated by Panos GiannikopoulosOn until 24 November 2024It’s Sunday in the village. Every week, the Greek state broadcaster sends a camera crew to record the harvest festivals, crochet-making displays, and wedding rituals of a rural locality. The programme has been running for decades. The nation’s hamlets anxiously wait their turn in the spotlight, knowing that the camera can turn milk maids and grocers into celebrities. Each wants to showcase their custom, more ‘diverse’ than in a contemporary art curator’s wet dream.
But it is wet and dark in Xirómero. Arriving on location in this Western Greek region, the crew found the pavilion deserted. A sound and light show synced with the movement of agricultural equipment makes for an eerie trace of past revelries which still play out on screen installations, posters, and stacks of plastic garden chairs. The famous Greek hospitality has turned into dystopia, sustained only by tricks of technology.
This display is aesthetically rich and pleasurably hard to parse. Recent Greek pavilions lamented the nation’s financial and political woes, which were in part caused by the very ideologies that now try to ‘diversity’ the OG city-state. If the Hellenic Republic tried to find the ‘foreign’ in Wester’s civilisation’s cradle as per this Biennale’s dictum, it drew a blank and missed even itself.
The premise of this ambitious but unavoidably manipulative review of Brazilian aesthetics is that art history can catch modernity in splitting from the past and thus from itself. Raven Row’s programme has long mined Britain’s 1970s for this phenomenon. Now Brazil – a timeline familiar to art historians but distant enough to do the curator’s bidding – offers its turning points as a destination.
The show’s trick is to contrast communal and ritual works with the greatest hits of Brazil’s geometric abstraction. Elisa Martins da Silveira’s carnival street scenes hang next to Lydia Pepe’s monochrome grids as though there was nothing between them. This tactic makes the chasm between the thesis ideas wide enough to swallow all nuance. The meme which rhetorically compels the lost “modern man” to “reject modernity” and “embrace tradition” might thus have been an apposite poster for this exhibition.
The project recovers, however, precisely in repetition and excess. Each turn has a standout and both the past and the future finally have their aesthetic triumphs. Looking on from the crossroads, it’s hard not to marvel at Willys de Castro’s spirit-level paintings and then not to sing with the wild birds of Madalena Santos Reinbolt’s affectedly naive tapestries. The same, crucially, is true in reverse.
Ignacy CzwartosPolonia Uncensored
★★☆☆☆Viale IV Novembre, 8, VeniceCurated by Piotr BernatowiczOn until 17 May 2024Czwartos’ pseudohistorical paintings were to be Poland’s official Biennale entry until a change of government last winter thew them on art history’s scrap heap. That they now hang in a pop-up outside the Giardini walls proves that the deposed populists care as little for art as the liberals who again control Poland’s art scene.
These images claim to tease the nation’s sore historical blind spots. Czwartos’ canvases laud Poland’s 20th-century martyrs in a bleak colour palette. Leaders of the national armed resistance who perished in the Nazi occupation and anti-communist activists killed by their own state peer from the walls like paper props in a school re-enactment.
Litigating old crimes is on point in this Biennale. Why, then, were these well-known stories disqualified from the decolonial orgy? Czwartos stepped too far by shaming the abusers in his historical diorama. Next to a named SS soldier, he painted Putin and Merkel, thus suggesting that this history is also the very present. He may not be wrong. His painting, however, proves little, and his sign-writer’s hand loses art history’s bet just for now.
Șerban SavuWhat Work Is
★★★★☆The Romanian pavilion, VeniceCurated by Ciprian MureșanOn until 24 November 2024What happens to the worker when work has no purpose? In a series of social-realist paintings so extensive that to not think of the labour which went into making them is impossible, Savu traces the as-yet imaginary terminus of Romania’s socialist utopia.
This Elysium is part panel house block, half Roman ruin. Mosaic reconstructions and faux archaeology spread from the canvas into museum-like models that the Socialist Republic of Romania would have been proud to exhibit in the same location in the 1960s. Savu’s t-shirt-clad 21st-century gentlemen explorers, however, betray his installation’s timeline.
These future young men have little to do but look ill at ease in their leisure. The reason comes clear at an offsite location where workers make artefacts for Savu’s production under the gaze of Venice’s leisurely tourists. This offshoring project, one fancies, drives these labourers envious of their future selves which in Savu’s archaeological fancy will face only themselves.
Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices
★★★☆☆Palazzo Franchetti, VeniceCurated by Matthieu OrleanOn until 24 November 2024If Venice awarded a Golden Lion for the slickest geopolitical curating, it would go this year to Qatar’s display of some forty video installations from the MENASA region. ‘Expanded cinema’ was a fad in the West maybe fifteen years past, but the kinds of budgets required to let every filmmaker claim multiple projectors only later became the norm for art in the Middle East. This colossal show more than makes up for any historical shortfall as it deploys video’s most lavish smoke and mirror techniques to frame human journeys across desert and sea.
On paper, there’s plenty to cherish here. Cherri, Neshat, or Shawky are all surely binge-worthy, and the rest of the hundred-hour programme should not be taken lightly. But this project’s ‘expansion’ leads instead to fragmentation. The multiplicity of narratives and the exhibition’s non-linearity wrap the mind around the cinematic apparatus instead of allowing it to follow the works on their own. This attempt at building pan-Arabic film aesthetics, therefore, falls prey to the art technician’s trickery and buries the expended film fad for good.
Vlatka HorvatBy the Means at Hand
★★☆☆☆The Croatian pavilion, VeniceCurated by Antonia MajačaOn until 24 November 2024The elegant simplicity of Horvat’s project should have been a breath of fresh air in the ideologically fecund edition of the Biennale. Responding to Adriano Pedrosa’s facile call to foreignness, the London-based Croatian artist solicited reflections on non-belonging from her international crowd of art world friends, thus starting a letter chain.
The pavilion is filled with cutesy poems and doodles. “Young man (35) from Sarajevo seeks a person to discuss art with” jests one, “return to Serbian poets all their books” urges another. Hundreds of these pieces and printouts of the emails which gave rise to them are on show in a sleek purpose-made archive management system which accounts for one of this review’s stars.
Art history books claim that mail art was something once. Horvat’s presentation today, however, is so banal that it puts this legacy to a test. It turns art into a record that might come in handy to an NGO worker reporting on art world networking. Entirely by design, then, this closed circulation speaks to and agrees with only itself.
Ntjam’s Biennale presentation has all the hallmarks of world-building ambition. For one, it boasts two separate locations, one dedicated solely to the work’s public programme. The main feature is housed in a giant purpose-made structure which occupies a third of an exceptionally spacious courtyard. The shiny blue surface of this installation plays here the part the monolith from Kubrick’s Odyssey and gestures at an epic inside.
The scenography and the screening room’s seating are equally lavish. The giant image, too, breeds high expectations, billed as it is as a retelling of an obscure creation myth sourced from Mali’s Dogon people and remade with AI backing for a mythleas generation.
Whatever the AI did here entirely breaks the spell. Ntjam’s animation holds the appeal of a lacklustre PC screensaver from circa 2015 and so not because of its budget but due to the artist’s lack of narrative prowess.
Sea creatures and stones drift across the screen, beating no life into each other, let alone the world. This is what transhumanism looks like when it tries to root itself in pseudoscience and half-digested tales. Ntjam’s project suffers also because her chosen subject matter, unlike the creation myths of lasting civilisations, has little application in the world it gave rise to.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
