Sunday morning we woke up and took the train to Venice. Finding the hostel was somewhat challenging, partly because I was looking at the wrong number on my Lonely Planet map, and partly because it was across a canal and not right on the main street, as I had thought. Venice is a pain to navigate because maps tend to be terrible. Our hostel was actually a university residence. We were in a dorm room with three beds, desks, armoires and a bookshelf. We had a roommate for the first two nights, then no one the third night and another woman the fourth night. I had just been in Venice in December, but Jess really wanted to see the Venice Biennale, a biennial art show akin to an art world’s fair. There are two principal exhibition sites: the Arsenale which is mainly a museum space, showing artists from all over the world. It has some country pavilions, but not many. The Giardini (garden) is the original biennale space. It has an expo-center which is like a museum, including many artists from all over the world. Here are the original pavilions: Japan, the US, the UK, France, Belgium, Spain, Czechoslovakia (it’s from the turn of the 20th century), and Scandinavia, among others. In addition, there are country pavilions scattered throughout the city, along with other side shows. The country pavilions are curated by each country: some chose to show a few new, young artists, while others use their space for a retrospective. Basically they take any space available and turn it into a biennale exhibition space. The Biennale has a theme. It’s always overarching so as to include as many people as possible and this year it was “Making Worlds.”
Sunday we walked to St. Mark’s Square so Jess could see it and get a little oriented with the city. Near the Doge’s Palace we stumbled upon our first Biennale show entitled Foreign Affairs: Artists from Taiwan. It included photographs about the immigrant experience in New York City as well as information about rebuilding efforts after a recent storm. One of the better pieces was a series of videos showing people trying to learn to speak Thai. The bottom subtitle was what they were trying to say, the top subtitle was what the person had actually said (the pronunciation was wrong). It was hilarious to watch and pretty poignant also. Many people don’t realize that when they’re learning a new language mispronunciation can drastically change the meaning of a sentence.
Crossing the Piazza San Marco, we found another Biennale site: Argentina. It was located on the top floor of a bookstore. Argentina had chosen to show the work of Luis Felipe Noé. He had done two, large mixed media pieces which were almost like mini-paintings or mini-works within the larger final piece. He used a lot of bright colors and we managed to get the exhibition book because it was sitting on the table in the center of the room.
Finding some of the pavilions was challenging. Luckily there some had stickers with arrows marking the path. We followed red arrows to Slovenia where the paintings dealt with modern technology and looked almost pixilated. A few of them were watercolors of street corners in London and New York. I really liked these small, black and white works. Because most of the countries are trying to get their work out into the world, they let you take as many pictures as you want.
In the same neighborhood we also visited Estonia’s pavilion. Kristina Norman had made a copy of a bronze statue in Tallinn which is a monument to the soldiers who fought in the Great Patriotic War (WWII). Estonia has moved the statue from a central site to a less visited one. She put her copy on that central site and filmed people’s reactions. She also brought the statue to Venice to display it in the pavilion. The final room of her exhibition showed a video of the people’s reaction – most people were excited to see their statue back in its original spot – and her, along with her statue, getting hauled in by the police. This was one of the more interesting exhibits because it gave us a glimpse into Estonian society and the history of the country.
Luxembourg’s pavilion was dark, so dark that it was hard to move through the rooms containing TVs and screens showing blue movies. The movies were about the weather and the shoreline of Gibraltar and Sicily. They were supposed to be about “Fortress Europe,” but I didn’t really get that from them and, as a result, did not really like the exhibit.
Some buildings contained more than one pavilion. Iran was on the second floor of a building located near Luxembourg and Estonia. Its exhibition contained some statues along with two-dimensional works: some paintings and prints. Nothing was particularly outstanding. Cyprus was upstairs. It featured work by Socratis Socratous who included real palm trees in the exhibition space. Apparently the government of Northern Cyprus had imported the trees to make the island feel more exotic. The walls of the gallery were made of lighter wooden panels (these were obviously on top of the original walls). I liked that aspect of it.
We crossed the Grand Canal in search of the US pavilion. Our country was featuring a retrospective of Bruce Nauman’s work. A lot of his pieces include neon; in this pavilion had had on that was his name, except each letter had been written three times. One of the more confusing pieces was audio-based. He had a series of panels and speakers playing a tape of the days of the week. These were spoken in Italian, but only included Wednesday through Sunday, which drove me nuts. Jess had actually see some of the Nauman pieces in museums in the US, and, being the US, we were not allowed to take pictures in this exhibit.
We figured out that an old palazzo was housing four of the side exhibitions, so we wandered towards it (which was a bit tricky and took three maps). Armenia’s work was colorful and abstract expressionistic, but only occupied two rooms. Syria occupied the entire upper floor, but had too much going on and none of it was that exciting. I really liked photographs in an exhibition called Atta Kim: ON-AIR. A Korean photographer, Atta Kim showed enormous eight-hour exposures of cities, including New York, Berlin, Prague, and Paris. In another room, there were photos of famous buildings and works of art that had been done in ice. This exhibition space also had part of Macedonia’s pavilion. In it, Goce Nanevski had done an installation of number wheels. They were arranged on bigger metal structures and looking like mini versions of the price-is-right wheel, except these were black and white and were meant to represent “chance” or “uncertainty.”
Also in this part of the city, we visited the pavilion of the Central Asia Republics. These included works from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. There was a series of photographs of bus stops, which I really enjoyed. It was an almost catalogue, but I really liked how it showed the differences and abnormalities in the variety of bus stops.
Our final stop that day was to visit three pavilions near our hostel. These were New Zeeland,
Iceland and Singapore. New Zeeland was showing an artist’s sculptures. Each was about 12-18 inches tall and depicted a naked person. They were monochromatic, but each was a different color. Iceland was probably the best exhibit of the day. In one room, five video screens showed two men playing musical instruments (usually a keyboard and something else). The five videos were shot in different locations, but synced so the song was heard in one piece. The other part of the exhibit was an artist painting his friend: apparently the guys are there from around 1 pm to 7 pm everyday. They just hang out and one paints the other. Upstairs, the Singaporean pavilion had a collection of works based on the theme of Singapore’s golden age of cinema (the 1950s and 1960s). One room had three video screens set up. All were showing the same short film, except the film speeds were off. Sometimes they would line up properly and other times there was a delay.
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