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An Encyclopedic Art Biennale in Venice

Antonio Marazzi
Published online: 28 Mar 2014.
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To cite this article: Antonio Marazzi (2014) An Encyclopedic Art Biennale in Venice, Visual
Anthropology: Published in cooperation with the Commission on Visual Anthropology, 27:3, 276-301,
DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2014.880036
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Visual Anthropology, 27: 276–301, 2014
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ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online
DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2014.880036
REVIEW ESSAY
An Encyclopedic Art Biennale in Venice
A MEANINGFUL PROTAGONIST
The History of Art is a long-established and glorious monument of Western
intellectual life. Since at least Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori,
scultori e architettori, published in 1550, there has been a constant dialog between
artifacts and their critical analysis, from different perspectives and under various,
often contrasting, philosophical and aesthetic influences. Following this tradition
we consider ‘‘artists’’ as the authors of works classified under the categories of
painting, sculpture and architecture, and consequently ‘‘art’’ as the produced
artifacts. Extending the term to visual arts, to these we now add installations,
performances, photography, dance and other bodily expressions.
Not surprisingly, being an integral part of culture, artists and their works, as
well as critics, curators, collectors, dealers and the public form a complex web
of interrelationships; and all are a conscious or unconscious part of that hard-to-
define Zeitgeist, in which religious, political, sociological and economic influences
all play their role.
The success and misfortunes of artists and art movements, vogues and
scandals exploded for some -ism, brilliant analyses and bitter criticisms,
exhibitions in public museums and private collections, have for centuries been
and still are a lively part of life in Western societies.
Emotional involvements triggered by artifacts have often been a powerful glue
for national identities too, as the political leaders, particularly dictators, well
know. Nothing better than adopting an art style in housing, interior decoration
and figurative representations to help build an emerging social-class self-
consciousness and create shared status symbols. The rise of the bourgeoisie in
France, England, Holland and Germany is evident as examples of that process
(as often highlighted by social historians).
Equally interesting is the present affluence of a generic public visiting art
museums and historical sites, looking for icons to become attached to, and
searching for meaning in an amorphous—both physically and symbolically—
environment.
Aesthetics not only belongs to philosophical theory but is part of social and his-
torical analysis, as the scholarship of art historians has developed: from Hauser,
Panofsky, Berenson, Venturi, Gombrich, to more recently David Freedberg and
his ‘‘power of images’’ [1989]; and many others. However, almost exclusively,
the focus of attention by Western art historians has been inward-oriented, toward
276
Review Essay 277
Europe; although with some, carefully separate, exceptions: Egypt, the

Mesopotamian region and just something more Eastward yet.
Yes, we know the story of ‘‘primitive art’’ from African colonies meeting the
West: Derain buying an African mask in a shop at Paris Bastille; Picasso walking
fascinated through the Musée de l’Homme, and the consequent transformation
of his painting Les demoiselles d’Avignon [1907]; surrealism offering a key to
understanding exotic representations of the ‘‘primitive’’ subconscious in African
sculptures and rituals. Another stimulating way of seeing other forms of
representation, a bridge for a dialog, where the key however is held in the hands
of the Western interpreter.
When the art scene, since the beginning of the last century, moved its center
from Paris to the American East and West coasts, it was always Western art.
Cultural influences from both the artists’ and the viewers’ side, and different
social and economic background influencing galleries’ and collectors’ choices,
created a situation favorable to the development of new styles and messages.
But it was art in the European sense of the term, even if it’s difficult to find a
continuity from a Renaissance Madonna to a Campbell Soup can.
But globalization is not simply an economic affair. After having experienced
the vast internal consequences of its reunification, symbolized by the fall of the
Berlin Wall, Europe has been confronted more and more with external contacts,
carried not only by migration and circulation of consumer goods but by cultural
values as well, in what we may call a migration of ideas, visions of the world and
experiences of the human condition. Art is a meaningful protagonist of this his-
toric moment, constantly inspired by and inspiring the perception of this world
and dialectically creating alternative imaginaries.
We know from his diary that Albrecht Dürer was extremely impressed by the
artistic and craft quality of the treasure of Montezuma that he had the opport-
unity to see during a visit to Brussels in 1520, after those objects had been taken
from the Aztec by Hernàn Cortès. But, as Peter Hess [2004] notes, Dürer’s aston-
ishement was not followed by a deeper impact on his own artistic work. The
Aztec were considered savages, culturally too distant to establish an intellectual
dialog with the German painter.
Five hundred years have passed since that time, and our world is now
‘‘connected.’’ The circulation of images is supported by the most sophisticated
and pervasive technical instruments and by equally diffused textual commen-
taries. But relying on ‘‘the universal language of art’’ as a taken-for-granted chan-
nel of communication may appear now, in this iconic Babel Tower, an insufficient
guideline or rather a wishful thinking. At best, a heritage of Romantic Einfühlung.
However, there may be some illuminating, intercultural meeting-points, and
Venice should be considered one of them.
Dürer was deeply influenced by his stay in Venice: the maritime city, the
Bellini paintings. John Ruskin admired so much the city’s architecture as to
publish three volumes on the Stones of Venice [1851–53]. The list of artists
attracted by Venice over the centuries would be almost endless. For more than
a thousand years, the Serenissima republic was the European door to the
Mediterranean, the Near and the Far East, the restless promoter of exchanges
of valuable goods with Turks, Mongols, Arabs and Chinese. And at home the
278 Review Essay
cradle of all the arts, music, theater and especially the visual arts: the Scole of
painting and that mixing of different architectural styles that so astonished the
Englishman Ruskin.
This historical background contributes in making Venice a privileged site for
an iconological dialog. Here nations from all over the world are invited to show
their artists’ works independently in a miniature global village for the arts, and
there be confronted with faraway imaginaries, such as the case of the visions
from Tuvalu, the Pacific island invited to participate for the first time in 2013
at the Biennale Arte.
GIARDINI
The Biennale Arte (Esposizione Internazionale d’arte) has taken place in Venice
every second year since 1895, alternating with an exhibition devoted to architec-
ture. Its prestige derives from being the world’s most ancient public exhibition of
art, as well as from the wide participation of foreign countries: eighty-eight in the
present 55th edition that was inaugurated in June 2013. The ten new entries—
Angola, Bahamas, Bahrain, Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Kuwait, Maldives, Paraguay,
Tuvalu and the Holy See (Santa Sede, otherwise the Vatican)—testify to the
breadth of this artistic panorama.
Since its beginning the exhibition has been based on separate pavilions
scattered in a broad garden, belonging to the participating nations that autono-
mously select the artists to be presented at every Biennale.
When walking along the shady alleys of the Giardini, this rapidly growing and
directly managed participation immediately raises a prime question: if not
‘‘Western’’ art, is this nonetheless art in the Western sense of the term? Did the
artists from Kuwait or the Ivory Coast, for example, adopt an aesthetic suitable
to the Western eye, thus at the same time adopting the pretended ‘‘universal
language of art"? If one has studied at Goldsmiths College in London or opened
an atelier in New York, following one’s own success in the art market, does this
show a passive assimilation or is it rather a healthy sign of pluralism? Is there
an internal dialectic that gives meaning to the otherwise abstract concept of a
universal language?
Since its first edition, the Biennale has hosted a growing number of participant
nations and each time new pavilions have had to be added, each in its own archi-
tectural style, thus giving the visitor the feeling of an international meeting-point.
Great Britain stands in a dominant position at the end of an alley, with the monu-
mental building of Germany on one side, and France on the other. Just below is
the glass pavilion of the Northern European countries, while on the other side
stands the fancy Russian pavilion, looking like a mise en scène for a Djagilev ballet.
The United States have a severe building which the creativity of its artists
succeeds, this time more than ever, to vitalize. On a small hillside stands a
Japanese-style pavilion and behind it, with a touch of geopolitics, the small
Korean stand has popped up.
Czechs and Slovaks alternately use the building of Czechoslovakia since their
separation: for the visitor, a reminder of the past as well as a sign of neighborly
co-existence. The Hungarian pavilion looks like an elaborate folkloristic tiara.
Review Essay 279
And so it goes on, with a puzzling external variety, like a promise to offer, inside,
an expression of local creativity.
In front of the main entrance to the Giardini stands the building that was once the
Italian pavilion. Renamed International Pavilion, here an appointed general curator
proposes a theme due to represent the identity of each edition of the Biennale, an
ideal guideline to follow in the galaxy of contemporary art. The selected curator for
the 2013 edition was Massimilano Gioni, from the New Museum of Contemporary
Art in New York. Gioni named his project Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, a title borrowed
from a visionary project designed in 1955 by Marino Auriti. This totally unknown
Italian-American artist imagined a museum ‘‘that was meant to house all worldly
knowledge, bringing together the greatest discoveries of the human races’’ [Gioni
2013: 23]. This choice and the title itself can help one understand what Gioni had in
mind when he built his own palazzo enciclopedico at the Biennale. Unlike Auriti,
though, Gioni could achieve his project, but like him he wanted it to be inspired
more by a utopian than by a rational vision. This led him to ignore the mainstream
of contemporary art, praised by influential critics and valued in the art market, to
give room to the often self-referential obsessions of isolated artists, to maniacal
collections of objects as expressions of a repetitive convulsion, to a variety of forms
as a sort of ‘‘maps of the mind’’ of the author.
This search into the depth of the psyche through what has emerged in external
iconic form required an abandonment of the usual reference to what is most
up-to-date. Many of the works on display follow an artist’s lifelong inspiration,
or are testimonies of artistic movements of the past. The intent has been not so
much to inform the visitor about the latest tendencies in the visual arts, as to
propose an exhibition-research, as Paolo Baratta, the president of the Biennale
Foundation, has called this 55th edition; following the path of an intellectual
curiosity more than a chronological sequence.
An explicit sign of one main source of inspiration for the selection of the dis-
parate works collected in the symbolic palazzo confronts the visitor at the
entrance: the Red Book by Carl Gustav Jung, a cult object for Jungian psycholo-
gists, for whom images are the visible surface of the deeply rooted phantasmatic
world of the individuals, and sometimes an expression of shared universal
archetypes. In the next room lies the death-mask of André Breton, thus adding
Surrealism as a guide to this journey into the mysteries of the mind: a kind of
Virgil in a human Inferno. According to the Italian writer Alberto Arbasino this
quest for inspiration is simply naı¨f Surrealism [2013: 34]. But one could interpret
the closed eyes of Breton as an invitation to look at the works of art, searching for
their deep meanings often hidden behind esoteric symbols and cryptic signs. A
warning, in a way, to avoid superficial, perceptual visual impressions, to focus
instead on the artists’ imagined internal worlds as expressed in often visionary,
non-realistic representations.
Another symbolic father lurks behind that mask, represented by some draw-
ings of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, a philosophical, ecological
and educational movement of the early years of the last century whose principles
are still taught in many schools around the globe.
Next to these symbolic fathers, one would have expected to find Aby Warburg,
the iconologist, with his fascination for Hopi cosmological drawings, a man who
280 Review Essay
once expressed a deep interest for a dialog with his audience during a conference
at the Kreuzlingen psychiatric clinic.
Warburg, like Jung and Breton, would certainly have been impressed by the
work of the Czech Eva Kotatkova, a huge table where she has assembled
hand-made and ready-made objects, photos, collages, written and printed texts,
with the collaboration of the patients of a psychiatric hospital. Kotatkova has
received one of the 2013 Biennale prizes for her installation, which in fact may
well represent the spirit underlying many of the works in the Palazzo. Here are
some of the texts collected by Kotatkova:
Conference of Body Parts
Head turns back
Knees sit on the ground

One foot leaves the room
The other foot keeps the place
Eyes open, close, and leave the room
Nose steps back
Mouth shuts
Three fingers move to the corner
Elbows hide under the table
Tongue falls out of the mouth
Neck keeps turning
Hands try to catch the rest of the body
This report from a patient in a psychiatric hospital is followed by a doctor’s com-
ment: ‘‘Some patients complain of worrying about their uncompletedness. They
are persuaded that their bodies are not held together. Something is missing or
redundant, legs and arms, and they have to find the way to transport themselves
from one place to another.’’
One cannot avoid being captured by the poetry with which a delirious state of
mind is expressed, while at the same time feeling the ambiguity and the danger
of crossing the line separating delirium from imagination.
In and out of prison and psychiatric hospitals was the Russian Friedrich
Schroeder-Sonnenstern, whose erotic drawings are shown in another room. Very
explicitly erotic are also the drawings by the Italian Carol Rama, such as Dorina,
where a long black snake jumps out of the open vagina of a sexy blonde, a dream
or better a nightmare, and an ideal subject for a Freudian analysis. Otherwise,
eroticism is almost absent as a source of inspiration, and this is rather surprising
here, in an exhibition that intends to dig into the deepest psychic impulses.
Almost puritanical are the small dolls by the American Morton Bartlett, a
photographer who made this fetishistic intimate collection for himself, as a secret
idealization of woman.
The human body has regained its role as central source of inspiration for
visual artists that it had played for centuries in the history of art, and one can find
a possible correlation with the recent trend in human sciences to study the
cultural significance of the body for self-identity, bodily communication and
decoration, the corporeal image [MacDougall 2005], and other connected forms
of expression.
Review Essay 281
The selection made at the Palazzo follows this trend, proposing works of both
well-known and marginal artists from the past decades: from the three Ariel,
looking like the Three Graces, by the photographer John De Andrea, in a
neoclassical style, and the Three Sisters by the U.S. resident Drossos P. Skyllas,
in a realistic pop-kitsch, to the hyper-realistic dressed statue Fall ‘91, by Charles
Ray, to the meticulously realistic statue Bus stop lady by Duane Hanson—all of
them Americans, with much in common in their inspiration. Comparing them
with Vlassis Caniaris’ Observer, also a dressed human statue, the peculiarity of
this work is evident. Not a realistic, somehow disquieting reproduction of reality
here, but a clear symbolic message. The body has no head and no arms and this, in
the intention of this Greek artist, represents the powerlessness of the man-in-the-
street faced with the recent, dramatic social and political events of his country.
A painting by the Austrian Maria Lassnig dramatically expresses the relation-
ship with her own body, up to the point to represent her drawing a gun on her
head. A totally different style is that of Dorothea Tanning for her own
self-portrait, where she stands in an eerie atmosphere reminding one of the paint-
ings by Füssli. Another very intense feminine representation is that of a woman
praying, by the Russian Victor Alimpiev.
Painting in the most traditional style is used by the Pakistani Imran Qureishi in
his miniatures (seen also in a previous edition of the Biennale in his country’s
pavilion) to represent what he calls ‘‘moderate enlightenments,’’ where his sub-
jects are ironically dressed in classical costumes but carry shopping bags or sport
camouflage trousers and military boots.
From India comes a series of pictorial representations of Shiva lingas, a spiritual
reference that defies any classification in terms of pictorial styles, be they figurative,
abstract or other. Apart from this, India is the most heavily felt absence from the
Biennale: no Indian artists in the Palazzo, no Indian national pavilion in the Giardini
or elsewhere in Venice, no Indian collateral events. An inexplicable absence, parti-
cularly in the present edition, that has for one of its focuses esoteric representations.
India can be seen as the cradle of esoteric symbolism, with a unique tradition of
spiritually inspired visual representations from different regions and schools of
thought, running uninterruptedly from ancient times to the present day.
A frail presence of Melanesian and Thai culture can be found in the drawings
that in the 1930s the Austrian Hugo Bernatzik asked some inhabitants of the
Solomon islands and some Semang to do, in order to represent their world
and their magic visually, for the first time on sheets of paper.
Esoteric, mystical sources of inspiration are frequent, establishing a hidden
relationship among works that are otherwise very different in their styles and
techniques; such as the gold-painted monoliths by the Zen-inspired James Lee
Byars, or the tarot cards reinterpreted by the occultist Frieda Harris.
Religious and spiritual sources of inspiration can be traced in the cosmologies
of the Swedish spiritist Hilma af Klint and in the spirit-guided graphic work of
Augustin Lesage, as well as in the hieroglyphics of the Swiss healer Emma Kunz.
But the project of the exhibition itself being the representation of an impossible
universal encyclopedia of formes and images, any attempt to make an orderly list
of themes would be contradictory. At the same time, this very impossibility is
part of the utopian nature of the project. And here the master is Jorge Luis Borges
282 Review Essay
with his babelic library. It comes then as no surprise that many works are directly
or indirectly inspired by the imaginary library described by the great Argentinian
writer, in his unending pursuit of an impossible catalog of the infinite. A direct
reference can be found in the Grande biblioteca by the Italian Gianfranco
Baruchello, and a more indirect one in the imaginary bestiary by the Greek
Christiana Soulou. The Pan-language playing cards by the astrologist and vision-
ary Xui Solar, a personal friend of Borges, are shown in a separate room.
In some other works the utopian urge to build a universal catalog, where
everything can find its place so that the world can likewise find its definite order,
is transformed into a maniacal unending collection of anything. One of the most
impressive endeavors in the pursuit of this obsession is presented in an instal-
lation by the Austrian Oliver Croy and the German Oliver Esser, which repro-
duces the 387 small scale-models of buildings that were made by an insurance
employee and found abandoned by Croy. Elswhere are the many diary sheets
with meticulous notations, a miniature zoo, by the American Levi Fisher Ames,
showing every reproduced animal in its own tiny box. And so on. A long list of
carefully classified universes, each one closed in a person’s mind and externally
reproduced, in an obsessive attempt at relief.
ARSENALE
The other, separate area hosting the Biennale is the Arsenale. Here was the heart
of the Serenissima republic of Venice where the ships were built and strictly
guarded, where the secrets of the craftsmen were kept hidden. The traditional
buildings around the pools and the harbor facing the lagoon now offer wide
spaces where the exhibition can expand.
The entrance is dominated by a scale model of the Palazzo Enciclopedico, made
in the 1950s by Marino Auriti to represent his project of a universal museum of
images: an invitation to the visitor to enter this utopian dimension.
No visitor would expect to find, immediately after this, Okhai Ojeikere’s
photos of the elaborate hairstyles and head wrappings of Nigerian women:
fanciful and trendy, but probably far from what Auriti would have liked to
put in his ideal museum.
Photos, many photos, are also at the center of the endless gallery of the
Corderie. Here Cindy Sherman, herself the curator of this section, is displaying
old pictures from her own collection, a sort of intimate personal diary where
the images are both a testimony of the past, a container of personal emotions
and a source of inspiration for the artist.
Also shown are thousands of old photos of newborn babies collected by Linda
Fregni Nagler, and family groups photographed by Norbert Ghisoland. The
whole section is a celebration to memory and the power of objects and images
to preserve it, showing various memorabilia collected by artists as a deposit of
intimate emotions and remembrances. But there is room also for the erotic
fantasies in the drawings by Hans Bellmer.
The gloomy figure of the Nosferatu pope by Miroslaw Balka introduces one
to a gallery of totems, golem statues, metallic robots, and of cyborg statues
Review Essay 283
representing Venetians (by the Polish Pawel Althamer) scattered along the
Corderie: they can be ideally linked to one of the first encounters at the Giardini,
the Movable Figure by the Italian sculptor Walter Pichler.
A theme that periodically reappears both at the Arsenale and at the Giardini
seems to be the power of images to overcome physical and psychic handicaps.
In a film by the Polish Artur Zmijewski a blind person is painting directly with
his hands [Figure 1], crawling over the surface of his canvas. Sculptures repre-
senting terrifying monsters are made by the autistic Japanese Shinichi Sawada.
A couple of Voodoo banners from Haiti represent the so-called alternate states
of consciousness, but the esoteric meanings of the drawings, difficult to be inter-
preted even by an expert, are generally missed by the viewers, and the flags end
up by being seen only as exotic curios.

The same could be said of the drawings by the Ivorian Frédéric Bruly Bouabré,
a visionary, founder of the religious Order of the Persecuted, here showing his
pictorial vision of the universe. Another visionary is the Brazilian Artur Bispo
de Rosário, whose elaborate materials shown here were made while he was in
a psychiatric hospital [Figure 2]. Nearby are also the tapestries of Papa Ibra Tall,
symbolic representations of narratives from the Senegalese oral tradition.
At the end of this journey into the most disparate visual representation of often
mysterious states of mind, the visitor leaves the Palazzo puzzled. The philosophy
of this endeavor is intellectually challenging and the research done impressive,
while at the same time rigorous and rich in surprises. While Auriti’s project,
taken as the source of inspiration, is totally unrealistic, there is more in this
exhibition than a pure intellectualist divertissement, playing wth the very impossi-
bility to contain all human expressions under any form, be it in the original tower
project or at the Biennale. But the seducing halo of a Borgesian Babel hides an
internal contradiction of the Palazzo. An exhibition open to the public acts as a
form of communication from the inside—the artists’ mind and their works—to
Figure 1 Artur Zmijewski, Blindly, 2010; a blind painter at work. (Photo # Archivio ASAC—
La Biennale di Venezia. Reproduced by permission of Archivio ASAC—La Biennale di Venezia.
Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder. Color figure available online.)
284 Review Essay
Figure 2 Artur Bispo do Rosàrio, Works exhibited at Arsenale, Biennale 2013. (Photo # Archivio
ASAC—La Biennale di Venezia. Reproduced by permission of Archivio ASAC—La Biennale di
Venezia. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder. Color figure available online.)
the outside, the world at large, in a certain historical moment and in a definite
context. The very fact of selecting, moreover, has been a realistic compromise.
These intrinsic contradictions however are precisely what makes the project
challenging, and the exhibition interesting. Philosophical abstractions and literary
imagination are trans-formed, transferred into forms, making the mental facts visible:
they may be psychologically analyzed but here they are aesthetically represented.
The source of inspiration for the works on show in the Palazzo is clearly
marked by the totemic presence of Jung and Breton that is immediately encoun-
tered by the visitor (more discreet, the presence of Roger Caillois with his collec-
tion of figurative minerals). Jungian psychology and Surrealism, therefore, and
the influences of cultural and artistic movements of the early 20th century, are
the main cultural references of the selection, indirectly marking the whole
project. Secondly, one could add some more recent trends and suggestions from
the art world. In the West.
Here lies, in my view, the basic limitation of the whole project. While focusing
on the idea that manifestations of the human mind are of such a dimension that it
is impossible to gather them all up and preserve them in a temple of human
knowledge, the outcome is not that such a building, in order to contain all human
achievements, would be too big to be realistically conceived but that the idea
behind it is too narrow. This is what makes the whole idea utopian: to think that
what one believes to be universal corresponds to the whole reality, and that all
that comes from the human mind can be traced, understood and classified as
Art using one’s own educated mind and conceptual tools. An unrealistic utopia,
an impossible building, becomes an idealistic utopia, that of an all-encompassing
idea of universality. But what about the very idea of universal, what is its content?
Review Essay 285
Over the centuries the same term has been used in many languages, while in
the meantime its referents have changed, even from the time of Auriti’s project
sixty years ago. The human knowledge has been constantly expanding. We all,
metaphorically, are seeing the physical universe with different lenses than those
used by Galileo to explore it from a tower in Padua.
Ever-changing, ever-expanding are also the lenses given to us by our culture to
see the human universe. A universality made of what we perceive with the
senses and what we can imagine as mental facts. Our mind has still so many
mysteries that we can compare it with the dimensions of the astronomical
universe. But we risk being narrow-sighted, using the wrong lenses to look at
the world in front of us.
How can we speak of universal accomplishments of the human mind, how can
we look at their manifestations and wish to collect them, if the concept we are refer-
ring to is culturally limited, in terms of both abstract meanings and visible objects?
There can be a confusing, often disturbing contamination, superimposing our
own meaning on culturally other artifacts. Referring only to the artifacts, and the
ideas behind them, that speak the language of our own culture is a self-
confinement and an isolation of the other. We know how fruitful for artists
and architects have been the contacts with styles and ideas of other cultures,
and Venice offers a good example of all that.
Too often, Western societies looked with a colonialist’s eye at artifacts from
other continents. Primitivism, Orientalism and in general any form of exotic curi-
osity have become ways to distort our approach to other forms of expression.
Even now, aesthetic values referring exclusively to our intellectual tradition
and sensibilities can act as obstacles to an open intercultural communication.
A truly universal Palace would be one in which are represented with equal sta-
tus all the human cultures with their ideas and the products of their people’s
minds: a much bigger building than Auriti’s. Or rather, it would need no room
at all, except in the people’s mind, where the concept of universality would
derive from the unity of all the different ways of thinking, and their accomplishe-
ments. A positive utopia.
Coming back to the Palazzo exhibition: leaving aside such general considera-
tions about the philosophy behind it and its sources of inspiration, and looking
at what is offered to the viewer in the exhibition, one cannot avoid being sur-
prised by the limited presence of artists from non-Western countries, which goes
against the ambition of being ‘‘encyclopedic.’’
In any written encyclopedia, from that of Diderot and D’Alembert to the
Britannica, there is one or several editors, usually sharing the same language
and cultural background; but the voices in the volumes take into account all that
is considered significant to communicate to the readers, with the widest possible
scope. The authors of the single voices are experts on those subjects, and have
often disparate cultural and intellectual identities. This is what one expects from
an encyclopedic exhibition too.
Steiner’s anthroposophy, Breton’s Surrealism and Jung’s psychology may not
be the most appropriate lenses through which to look at the contemporary
world—but the endeavor to organize such an exhibition has been gigantic, and
its interest for the intellectually curious visitor is correspondingly high. A proof
286 Review Essay
of the stimulating effect of such an accomplishment is that one would want to

have more of it. More items in that encyclopedia, more diverse cultural origins
of the authors, more communication with what is out there and still we continue
to consider as peripheral. More to know, more to learn, more surprises from what
we still ignore. A wider utopia.
The curiosity about the Other, and correspondingly about other forms of rep-
resentation, can be found in the interesting research video by the French Camille
Henrot on creation myths in different societies. The focus of attention has been,
as stated in the accompanying comment, ‘‘for internal images—for dreams,
hallucinations and visions—in an era besieged by external ones.’’ In a project
of this kind the contribution of other ways to express the invisible by referring
to culturally other contexts can be not just of a comparison or opposition, high-

lighting the bizarre, the exotic, the mysterious, but rather a way of learning to
see differently. Not a simple perception of the difference, but the awareness of
different paradigms of seeing. Through exercises of this kind, our own gaze
would change and open new channels to knowledge of ourselves as well as
others. It is in this widest sense that one can recognize an underground anthro-
pological approach in the Venice exhibition; something that has raised some
criticism from the purely aesthetically oriented side.
A truly anthropological approach to art avoids both abstract, ethnocentric
aestheticism and social determinism, focusing the attention on the artist’s
own inspiration, her=his internal world and worldview, in an idiosyncratic
dialectics with her=his culture and society, its values, techniques and ways of
communication.
There is a diffused, defensive attitude toward an anthropological approach to
artifacts and aesthetic values as cultural expressions, fearing that this would
endanger the primacy of Western tradition by accepting a comparison on equal
basis with other forms of expression. As always, prejudices do not help, and a
dialogue with other forms of expression can prove to be fruitful, out of a better
knowledge of the artifacts and their source of inspiration.
A long and lively debate opposed anthropologists in France to art historians
and curators of public museums, when the glorious Musée de l’Homme was
considered obsolete and a new post-modern building was planned, on the other
side of the Seine, to host artifacts from non-Western societies. While awaiting its
opening the Louvre opened a corner of its vast space to receive some extra-
ordinary pieces of so-called ‘‘primitive art,’’ with what was considered to be a
historical decision against artistic ethnocentrism. In the meantime the represen-
tatives of the two sides fought for primacy in running the new museum, which
still has two souls, an aesthetic and an ethnographic. A sign of that contested
identity is revealed in the fact that it has no name, only an address: Musée du
quai Branly [reviewed, 2007, in Visual Anthropology, 20(1): 75–78]. A proposed
name was ‘‘Musée des arts premiers,’’ using a euphemism to avoid the denigra-
tory adjective primitif but adopting the label of art, which pleased the curators
but raised the question of the legitimacy to give such a culturally specific
attribution to works of other societies, expressed in their own cultural terms,
of which ethnographers are the interpreters. The long debate inside and outside
the museum has been an excellent ground for a confrontation between the
Review Essay 287
‘‘artistic’’ and the ‘‘anthropological’’ parties, and for this reason it may be useful
to recall it all here.
Particularly interesting is the opinion of Anne-Christine Taylor, the director of
researches and education at the Musée du quai Branly and co-author, with
Thierry Dufrêne, of Cannibalismes disciplinaires. Quand l’histoire de l’art et l’anthro-
pologie se rencontrent [Dufrêne and Taylor 2009]. Their concerns are focused on
‘‘how can what was a specific ‘mental fact’—a work of art born of a given
culture—be brought back to life in another land’’ [ibid.: 7], and ‘‘how can it be
transplanted onto a [...] network of translations that tie together knowledge of
society and knowledge of the laws of development of artistic language’’ [idem].
A kind of ‘‘new alliance’’ between two long-established intellectual fields, one
focused on the study of aesthetic values, its history and development following
a long line of thought in the Western world, and the other on the analysis of
culturally specific expressions with their own values and traditions in a variety
of societies. The key word for this proposed alliance seems to be ‘‘translation,’’
certainly not unfamiliar to anthropologists, whose work has been defined so
many times as being one of cultural translation; but here applied to artifacts
‘‘transplanted’’ into a museum. To bring back to life the transplanted objects,
Taylor says, both knowledge of the original society and of the (universal?) artistic
language are needed.
The temporary museum of the Palazzo also is made of transplanted ‘‘mental
facts’’ that have been brought together under the common label of ‘‘art,’’ for they
are exposed at the Biennale. But here the challenge is that not all the exposed
objects follow the laws of ‘‘artistic language.’’ This opening to diverse idiosyn-
cratic ways of expression of the authors’ ‘‘mental facts’’ to bring them together
is what, in my opinion, gives to the exhibition a special interest.
By looking at the differences the visitor is indirectly invited to see differently,
with a reverse approach that is at the core of the anthropological way of seeing.
Crossing the gazes of authors working in conditions of social marginality or
confinement and sometimes being mentally disturbed or handicapped, of others
who are part of the contemporary artistic mainstream, the viewers end up by
establishing an open approach that blurs the lines separating the ones from the
others, bringing them closer to the often hidden meanings of the images.
There is more at stake therefore than a simple translation, even a transcultural one.
The participant approach developed in visual anthropology may be considered
a contribution in that direction, going beyond a mere methodology to represent
subjects, and inviting us to get closer to situations of marginality, often ones at a
cultural and geographical distance.
Sharing the existential situation of the subjects with an empathic eye is
something that can be extended to many other experiences of visual encounters.
Through this anthropological approach, the visit to the Venice Biennale can
acquire a deeper meaning. Not simply as an alternative to other more inward-
oriented perspectives, as represented by the symbolic figures of Jung, Breton and
Steiner, but rather as a way to establish an open dialog with the works that stand
in front of the visitor. While the ‘‘mental facts’’ of the authors with their often mys-
terious messages may question our own ideas and paradigms, the source of inspi-
ration can be phenomenologically traced and culturally contextualized.
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Direct reference to the real world is particularly evident in some of the national
pavilions, as is highlighted in the following selection (purposely not in alphabetic
order, to avoid an impression of completeness: one will not find there, for
instance, participants like China or Korea). But it would be reductionist to con-
sider that this is simply a direct consequence of the external situation; rather it
could be considered as the aesthetic reaction triggered by that situation, emotion-
ally felt and interpreted by the artist’s sensitivity. And thanks to the unique qual-
ity of the aesthetic approach to a specific reality that the artist shares with some
others, her=his message can acquire general, even universal value.
In general, as Paolo Baratta, the President of he Biennale Foundation, has
stated, ‘‘interest in the world referred to by the artists has [...] grown’’ [2013:
15], thus expanding the focus on the personal artist’s worldview and contextua-
lizing its very source of inspiration, in search of an interaction between the purely
mental and emotional drives and the phenomenological reality of which the artist
is also part.
This does not imply that artifacts are purely the expression of the sociopolitical
situation, in turn ruled by economic laws, in an interpretation that was
developed by social historians of art. Rather, by taking an ethnographic, field-
work approach and walking around that world of art in miniature which is in
the Giardini, one cannot avoid being impressed by the evident correlation in
many cases between the subject chosen for an artifact or an installation and the
social context where the author lives and works. This appears particularly evi-
dent where the sociopolitical situation is under special pressure, as in the Middle
Eastern regions, or where a recent historical past is still perceived as a recurrent
bad dream, as in the ex-Socialist countries. In these cases, the sensitivity of the
artist captures and then represents in a totally original way the surrounding
reality as well as her=his unique interior world, so that the two end by appearing
interconnected in the viewer’s perception.
An anthropological approach can search these evident or hidden links and the
ways in which they are expressed and communicated, in culturally related ways.
This should lead to an awareness of the creative paths taken to overcome the epi-
sodic impression of the local and global reality, proposing new ways of seeing,
new ways of thinking.
THE NATIONAL PAVILIONS1

Undoubtedly, with the presence of 88 participating countries, the Biennale offers
a unique opportunity to see a wide panorama of the visual arts the world over,
especially since the nations were totally independent in the choices of artists and
of the installations within their pavilions. But this vision of a global Art’s state-of-
the-art is frustrated by some significant absences, especially those of Iran and
India. The weight of those two nations, with their unique iconographic traditions
and lively artistic life, creates a sense of void in the whole picture and raises some
questions. India may suffer from a superficial, folkloristic, Bollywood-influenced
vision in the West and isolation from the international art market. Or maybe,
Indian public cultural policy is not interested in participating and offering their
artists this opportunity to be seen in such a wide arena.
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The problem with Iran is probably more complex and may be related to this
country’s political isolation. While several visual artists, as for instance Shirin
Neshat, are internationally known, and Iranian cinema has acquired a wide repu-
tation, even if contested at home, traditional Islamic iconophobia may also have
played a role. Thus even the absences may be interpreted culturally.
At the end of the 19th century, when the Biennale opened for the first time in
1895, the world was very different from now. The kingdom of Italy had invited
the main Western nations to build their own pavilions in the Giardini, for a ver-
sion of those Universal Exhibitions so popular elsewhere in the later 19th century.
As the years passed, new nations knocked at the door of the Biennale, and room
had to be found to host the newcomers along the alleys and beyond a canal in the
Giardini area. Following a growing demand for participation the Biennale flooded
(an appropriate metaphor in the city of the acqua alta, the high tide) the whole city,
often finding splendid temporary sites for exhibitions in historical palaces.
I describe below some of the participant countries’ exhibitions, both inside the
Biennale area and in the city of Venice. It is not a complete catalog, but rather
shows, on one side, the variety of the proposals and, on the other, the underlying
presence in many cases of a link between creativity and reality, the mental and
the perceptual, ways of seeing and ways of thinking, that I have sensed running
throughout the Biennale, ideally linking the national proposals with the central
Palazzo Enciclopedico exhibition.
Great Britain
Standing in a dominant position at the end of an alley, the British pavilion offers
a vision of that country’s complex cultural identity and long history in a narrative
of several episodes of extreme diversity running from the Lower Paleolithic to
the present day. After a display of prehistoric handaxes from the London area,
Jeremy Deller, the curator in charge of the whole pavilion, presents a mystery
story with an eagle shot to death and a member of the Royal family as protago-
nists, resurrects William Morris to criticise the presence of the huge yacht of the
Russian millionaire Abramovicz just in front of the Biennale, reports the revolt
against financial globalization from the local population in Jersey, shows us a
‘‘historical’’ David Bowie (a popular music star). And with a subtle sense of
humor, at the end of the tour the visitors are offered a cup of tea, the epitome
of Britishness, so that in a way this also becomes part of the exhibition, whose
title is English Magic. One could say that there is here an original, holistic
interpretation of the concept of site-specificity: the pavilion’s aura is so British
that the installations are variations around that theme.
France and Germany

Why these two countries together? Because, in an eccentric mood, the curators
from both sides—the buildings adjoin each other—decided to exchange their
places, so if you want to see the French installation you have to enter the German
pavilion, and vice versa.
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In a joking mood the French played with the English meaning of the word
ravel, also of course the name of a French composer, in a video divertissement
showing the hands of two pianists playing Ravel’s ‘‘Concerto for the Left Hand
in D major,’’ running out of sync, and a DJ whose role is to ‘‘unravel’’ the sound,
resetting the sync sound. The sequence is intended to modify the perception of
both time and space, but there seems to be a discrepancy between such an
ambitious task and the installation itself. An indirect value comes rather from
the very fact that here sound is the protagonist, breaking the hegemony of sight,
which is taken for granted to be the only sense to be celebrated to express and
communicate art in an exhibition, thus neglecting multisensoriality.
Time and space are also questioned in the German display, but in a different
way. Personal identities, cultural origins and national statuses of the artists are
different, and equally various are their styles and their inspiration, but ideally
they are part of a community, promoted by the hosting nation. Only one of the five
artists is a German citizen, Romuald Karnakar, while the others are the Chinese Ai
Wei-wei, the South African Santu Mofokeng, and the Indian Dayanita Singh. But
all have studied, worked or received a scholarship in Germany. A brilliant,
indirect manifesto for the global free circulation of artists and their works, having
obviously at the center the Chinese dissident Al Wei-wei. In this global world, it is
indirectly suggested, the identity of a nation is built also through the contribution
of individuals from other countries and other cultures. The pavilion proposes a
critical investigation of the significance of traditional forms of national representa-
tions that could be a stimulating guideline for the visit of the whole Biennale.
Holy See2
Worldly events are not a primary concern for Vatican City, the capital of Roman
Catholicism. For its first participation in the Biennale, three universal themes were
proposed to the invited artists, as illustrated by the curator, Cardinal Gianfranco
Ravasi: Creazione (Creation), De-Creazione (Un-Creation), Ri-Creazione (Re-Creation).
These biblical subjects are represented in the pavilion’s rooms, respectively, by the
group Studio Azzurro, Joseph Kudelka and Lawrence Carroll. The first theme,
dealing with the origins of the natural world, the animals and mankind, is
communicated through a technologically sophisticated, multisensorial installation,
where sight, sound and touch introduce us to a new dimension, perceptively
interacting with the spectator. The photos chosen by Joseph Kudelka describe
dramatically the destruction brought about by war, material consumption and
conflicts in human history, following the original sin and the separation from
God. Finally, Lawrence Carroll represents the theme of salvaged materials as a form
of symbolic transfiguration, a pacifying action by man toward the created world.
South Africa
The most explicit link with the thematic proposal of an encyclopedic exploration
can probably be found in the collective exhibition of South African artists, orga-
nized by that country’s National Arts festival. Such an approach allows them to
place the single artists’ contributions in a historical perspective, avoiding amnesia
Review Essay 291
of the events of a traumatic past but testifying also to the developments that
have taken place in the collective imaginary as interpreted by these artists and
expressed by the apparently paradoxical title of the exhibition, Imaginary Fact.
During the period of apartheid, visual arts focused on political resistance and
became a vehicle for ‘‘insurgency against human rights abuses.’’ Then, when civil
rights were conquered, the main issues were focused on personal identity, ques-
tioning race- and gender-related issues. Imaginary Fact is the expression of a recent
trend, where the need is felt to dig into the past, as an archive of memory, ques-
tioning how and why histories continue to have impact on the world today.
This archival research into the past as a repository of meaning did not result in
a museographic collection, but stimulated a critical re-interpretation and creative
re-enactment. This process is followed by Andrew Putter, one of the artists

represented, at the Arsenale, in his photographic series Native Work. Putter’s
self-definition is that of a ‘‘white,’’ gay, racist from South Africa. ‘‘Racist’’ in the
sense that he grew up in a middle-class and racially segregated suburb of Cape
Town and was thus deeply affected by the pervasive ideology of racial difference.
The original source of inspiration for his work was some photographic portraits
by Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin taken in 1904, which he saw in the University
of Cape Town African Studies Library. Duggan-Cronin, an Irishman, traveled exten-
sively in southern Africa taking about five thousand photos of local people, in the
typical ethnographic style of the day. While being aware that, in a postcolonial per-
spective, these portraits were presenting a constructed, romanticized and exoticized,
distorted image of the subjects, Putter found in the images a dignified presence over-
whelming the photographer’s gaze. He then made a series of black-and-white
photographic portraits of young men and women in fake tribal settings, and subse-
quently asked his models to dress the way they normally do, taking color pictures
of them. While emphasizing the aesthetic value of his work, Putter is trying at
the same time to re-evaluate the legacy of an otherwise forgotten past, through
the human archives portrayed, overcoming the stereotypical settings and postures.
Another interesting photographic series is presented by Zanele Muholi, with her
two hundred portraits of black lesbians. The number itself is significant, since with
her work she reacts against the absence of lesbians in photographic albums. All the
sitters look on camera, and therefore their eyes meet those of the viewer. This is
what Muholi calls ‘‘visual activism,’’ partly social engagement and partly aesthetic
research. The portraits play a central role in the process of self-representation
while the eye contact with the viewer is a further step, opening an ongoing dialog
with the public. Through time, this established a social stratification of shared
experiences that, as the author says, developed into a network that inscribes a
new archive into the prevailing canon.
Several artists in this pavilion presented works directly inspired by reminiscences
of the apartheid and immediate post-apartheid period. Gerhard Marx, Maja Marx
and Philip Miller joined up to assemble an audiovisual installation, REwind, recal-
ling the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which played a
fundamental role in the process of pacification of the opposing parties, listening to
the testimonies of both the ‘‘victims’’ and the ‘‘perpetrators.’’ As with other works
in this pavilion, there is here a search for re-enacting those past experiences to make
them shared lively experiences and not simply monuments of the past.
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Russia
The poetics behind Vadim Zakharov’s Danae installations are expressed in his
powerful words: ‘‘Time has come to confess our rudeness, lust, narcissism,
demagoguery, falsehood, banality, greed, cynicism, robbery, speculation, waste-
fullness, gluttony, seduction, envy, and stupidity’’ [quoted in Kittermann 2013:
150]. Zakharov, a leader of the Russian Conceptualist movement, has devoted
the installations that occupy all the rooms in the two-storied building to the
Greek myth of Danae, as a symbol of corrupting powers in the modern world,
first of all that of money. This is represented by the fall of golden coins from
above to women (only!) visitors receiving an umbrella before entering the room;
and by other performances and installations [Figure 3]. Rarely has a work of art
gone so directly to the point, if one thinks about present-day Russia where, after
the fall of the oppressive Socialist regime, a wild capitalism has come to power
and the social scene has been dominated by the violent upsurge of newly arisen
millionaires. Zakharov’s strong condemnation of his country’s present situation
of great social inequality and moral corruption can be seen as a site-specific work
giving a new meaning to the term, where the site in question is not the exhibi-
tion’s space, but the author’s whole country.
United States
Sarah Sze looks at the world with a sharp, scientific eye, to then re-create her own
abstract world. Minerals, water drops, winds, objects enclosed in shiny metallic
webs represent the three phases of a substance—gas, liquid and solid—that the
Figure 3 Russian Pavilion: visitors at Vanima Zakharov’s installation from Stimulation Series,
1980. (Photo # Archivio ASAC—La Biennale di Venezia. Permission to reuse must be obtained
from the rightsholder. Color figure available online.)
Review Essay 293
artist transforms to invent a new artificial environment that questions the

perception of the viewer. The Triple Point, as defined by the scientific observation
of natural elements, is subverted in order to reaffirm the artist’s creative process,
in a perennial, dynamic instability between the sensorial and the mental. While
the installations are visual representations of Sze’s mental cosmos, regulated
and de-regulated by her own invented laws, one cannot avoid relating the artist’s
inspiration to the pavilion’s nation, where science and technology, more than in
any other part of the world, are observing, modifying and re-creating nature, up
to the point that the artificial with its own laws has increasingly become part of
the environment and of human nature itself. Sze’s artifacts may then be seen as
visible forms of a dialog between scientific research, its discoveries and achieve-
ments, and creative processes: two aspects of the human mind that are variously
manifested in different situations.
These may be the reasons why Sze’s work particularly attracted the interest of
a group of students in the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Venice,
under the supervision of their instructors. It resulted in a series of projects of
‘‘virtual realities’’ in which the seeds of Sze’s installation for a reoriented percep-
tion of an environment were clearly visible. This rather unexpected outcome may
prove how even the most abstract representations of thinking may become
communicative and productive.
Latin American Pavilion
An extended geopolitical view of cultural cross-fertilization has been at the core

of this newly invented multi-national pavilion. Starting from a critical analysis of
the historical colonization of the South American continent, seen not only in its
political and military but also cultural, artistic and linguistic aspects, this original
project’s intention has been to show, through the participation of exhibitors
from many South American and some European countries, a series of promising
reciprocal influences. This series has been variously interpreted in the works,
performances and installations by artists dialoguing at a distance from both sides
of the Atlantic: from Harun Farochi (Czech Republic) and Anje Ehmann
(Germany) to Sonia Falcone (Bolivia), from Luca Vittone (Italy) to Martin Sastre
(Uruguay), from Simon Vega (El Salvador) to Susana Arwas (Venezuela), and
many others. This collective exhibition can be seen as one of the most significant
examples of the anthropological approach that pervades the Biennale.
Japan
Heavily influenced by the recent dramatic events of the earthquake, the tsunami
and nuclear contamination in the Tohoku region, Japanese have given to their
2013 Biennale edition the title ‘‘Abstract speaking—sharing uncertainty and col-
lective acts.’’ The theme is developed by Koki Tanaka in a series of videos in
which are represented groups of people performing what he has called ‘‘precari-
ous tasks,’’ such as sharing dreams with others and then making a collective story,
or where actions usually done individually become shared experiences, such as a
294 Review Essay
pottery produced by five potters at once, a piano played by five pianists, a poem
written by five people or, ironically, a haircut by nine hairdressers over the same
head: ten hands join to mould the clay, ten hands play over one keyboard. Even
more challenging is the case of the collectively created poem: something that
could recall avant garde experiments, like Futuristic ‘‘automatic poetry,’’ but here
in a different spirit, that of a kind of collective mind questioning the author as
subject. The message is to show how creativity, usually considered an intimate
experience, can profit from close collaboration. More generally, natural disasters
and human errors could be overcome by joining forces, as the hands, the words
and the actions in the videos symbolically show. Solidarity as an antidote to
the ‘‘uncertainty’’ of the human condition, recalled in the title.
Through these indirect and somehow absurd forms of representation, the per-
formances in the videos can be linked to the present situation of Japanese society
after the quake and the period of emergency, when newer questions arise, such
as: Is it possible to take on the experience of others as our own? Or: can we take
joint possession of the experience of events?
But more profound questions arise, transcending the episodes shown in the
exhibition, that can be linked to Buddhism, specifically to the Mahayana tradition
and its central principle of compassion.
If pain is a universal presence in this world (the first of the Four Noble Truths),
sharing it with others is the virtuous path to help them. But simply expressing
sympathy and empathy can result in reinforcing the line that separates us from
the one who suffers, therefore being of no help, says Tanaka. There must be other
ways to connect people, and his somehow paradoxical, ‘‘abstract’’ proposals,
expressed visually in his videos, are signs of research in this direction.
Faced with the recent events, art is questioning whether it could be a path to
reach that profound compassionate connection. But already in everyday life,
Tanaka observes, there has been in Japan a change in people’s behavior, resulting
from a different, common background: a sign of solidarity, a path of shared
compassion.
Hungary
This pavilion brings the denunciation of violence to its extreme, that of

physical destruction. Sixteen unexploded bombs are exposed in a silent warning.
Having missed their original function, the bombs acquire here a new symbolic
meaning, directed to the human condition as a whole, beyond the episodes of
conflict in which these bombs should have brought death. There has been in
human history a timeless tendency toward self-destruction, and these malfunc-
tioning objects are a reminder that in the future other bombs will successfully
hit the target. But this shocking evidence, according to Zsolt Asztalos, the author
of this installation, should raise the consciousness of the existence of other
dimensions in the human mind, opposing the disorder brought by the technical
world. A spiritual explosion?
Looking at these sinister, rusty objects, the visitor can also be brought to see
them as a more-or-less unconscious memory of a recent history of oppression,
Review Essay 295
when Hungary was a Soviet satellite; a state of mind influenced by the power of
arms as a deterrent both physical and psychological. A nightmare which took a
long time to disappear, recalling that objects similar to those exposed could at
any time bring death and destruction again.
This reminder of a dramatic story as an example of a universal human
condition can recall for us the cathartic role of art. Through a shocking represen-
tation the author raises the consciousness of the viewers in an effort to liberate
them from their dark, fantastic impulses. But on a more realistic ground the
association of these symbolic objects with a historically based social reality seems
inevitable.
Iraq
From one of the most devastated regions of the world comes a peaceful message,
expressed by the homely atmosphere of a traditionally furnished Iraqi apartment
accurately reproduced inside a palace facing the Canal Grande. Here visitors can
rest from the Biennale marathon, lying on the sofas, reading books dealing with
the Middle East, or drinking tea in the kitchen, served in small glasses, thus
becoming themselves a lively part of the installation.
But there could be an underlying message. The country, and in particular its
capital Baghdad, has a long history of destruction and rebirth, and this could give
hope for another resurrection in the present time, without forgetting, in part at
least, the local traditions. ‘‘Baghdad was often cruelly destroyed by Persian,
Arab, Mongol, Tatar, and Turkish conquerors,’’ wrote Myriam Harry [1941].
History can give a deeper perspective to the present time, and Iraqi artists
discreetly ‘‘furnishing’’ the Venetian apartment are there to show that not every-
thing is lost. A sleeping room where everything is made of corrugated cardboard,
by WAMI, can be seen as expressing the will to start again from scratch; and the
Honey Pot, by Furat al Jamil, as the determination to rebuild one’s own hive regu-
larly, like the bees do. But there is also a series of collages by Jamal Penjweny,
Saddam is Here, ironically reminding us of the recent tragic past. Just a reminder,
at the entrance.
Ireland
‘‘What does it mean to make human suffering beautiful?’’ This is one of the
‘‘disturbing questions’’ posed by The Enclave, an installation made with films
and photos by Richard Mosse, as stated by the curator Anna O’Sullivan. Mosse
has spent three years with his team among armed rebels in eastern Congo, and
filmed the horrors of war using infrared-sensitive 16 mm films. He intended to
distinguish his visual narrative clearly from the realistic style of photojournalism,
to express the author’s emotions powerfully in representing his subject. Aesthet-
ics becomes then the medium to express his involvement in these events, and at
the same time give them the universal value of a human tragedy.
The filmed events are real, but the distorted perception transforms reality into
a nightmare. Behind a natural environment that has turned a dramatic red,
296 Review Essay
camouflage-dressed and heavily armed soldiers move silently in a deadly man-

hunt. These are witnessed events, but there is no search for detached objectivity.
The author’s presence is made explicit when, in this hallucinatory atmosphere, a
soldier stops his hunt and poses for the camera. War soon becomes part of a
wider narration of everyday life, documenting the indifference of passers-by
toward dead bodies lined up along the street after their boots have been taken
for reuse; or the lively atmosphere inside refugee camps, with the participation
of women at a birth, probably the outcome of the frequently practiced sexual
violence.
Israel
In a world where ‘‘more and more barriers are created,’’ as written in this
pavilion’s presentation, the Biennale can be seen as ‘‘a utopian model of nations’
connectivity.’’ The site-specific installation Workshop, by Gilad Ratman, shows in
a video a group of people walking in the dark through caves and tunnels to rise
finally in the middle of the Israeli pavilion, where they start a sculpture work-
shop, modeling their own image in clay. One cannot avoid catching the symbolic
meanings of the story. Oppressive national borders can be overcome through
underground networks, to reach a situation in which one’s own self might be
freely expressed. Culture, and art in particular, is the medium: but the path is
not an easy nor a linear one, as shown by the reverse sequence of the videos.
The perennial instability of Israel’s political situation is obviously felt as a
psychological pressure that the artist is trying to overcome in order to set free
her=his inspiration. But, one could comment, even the Israeli pavilion is a space
closed within walls, and the Biennale’s utopia could be achieved only as a state
of mind, open to this changing world.
Otherwise Occupied
Inspired by the famous definition by Benedict Anderson of nations as ‘‘imagined

communities,’’ the curators of this event present the works of two Palestinian
artists living abroad, Bashir Makhoul, from Winchester (United Kingdom), with
his Occupied Gardens, and Aissa Deebi, from Cairo, with her Trials. Through these
artworks, as written up in their presentation, the curators intend to propose
‘‘other ways of imagining the nation outside and beyond the conflict. Art is
capable of occupying cultural spaces... offering ways of thinking otherwise.’’
Mexico
Sound is here the protagonist, in an intense dialog with the grandiose architec-
tural ruins of the church of San Lorenzo, where long ago Vivaldi used to
rehearse, and more recently Luigi Nono presented his opera Prometeo. This space
cannot be transited anymore, and multisensoriality is compulsory in order to
establish a contact at a distance, thanks also to the extraordinary acoustics of
the space. For this purpose, the Mexican artist Ariel Guzik has created Cardiox,
Review Essay 297
an electronic musical instrument diffusing in the air the sound of 180 chords,
without making use of loudspeakers or any electronic device to expand the
sound. It’s a kind of space-walk over the waves diffused by the lightly perceived
vibration of the Cardiox machine.
The installation is an interesting, creative experiment in the possible develop-
ment of sight and sound interaction, leading to an experimental fusion between
architecture, music and the visual arts, that are otherwise separated in the events
of Venice’s Biennale.
Belgium
A truncated tree lying on the ground, the roots ripped off, the strong
branches bandaged up like a limb. One can see in this installation by Berlinde
De Bruyckere, Cripplewood, occupying most of the space inside this pavilion, a
powerful metaphor of this country’s identity problems. A long and fruitful his-
tory of growth and development, and recent cracks between the two cultural
and linguistic saps arousing divisions and political instability. This interpretation
could well not have been forecast by the artist, or could have been in her uncon-
scious, but I couldn’t avoid seeing a connection between this work and its poss-
ible source of inspiration. And, after all, as the curator of the exhibition wrote,
‘‘cripplewood is not deadwood. The cripplewood tree grows out of the buried
past into our clean present, pushing its knotted fingers up through the grate=gate
behind which we have shut it.’’
Ukraine
There may be no better way than looking at these artists’ works to capture with
evidence the profound process still taking place after decades, at the cultural
level, of building a new social identity in the ex-Soviet countries. It’s like a collec-
tive elaboration of mourning, where the phantom of the deceased may reappear
unexpectedly, constantly questioning the memory of a returning past. Soviet
realism in art had the role to represent a utopia visually where all social inequal-
ities had to disappear, and the heroic process necessary to reach that goal. When
the utopia collapsed, like those monuments to past Communist leaders, there
was a sense of void that the ruins of the past could not fill. To make sense of
the present, one felt the need to reconstruct the past while looking at the future.
The idea of a Cultural Archive to reconnect the present peacefully with the past
inspired some artists in the Ukrainian pavilion. But the totemic symbol of the
monument is like a reappearing ghost in disguise, that the artists are trying to
dismantle, to veil, in order to give new meaning to an old form. Its presence is
so strong in the imaginary that the whole exhibition comes under the title of
one of these works, The Monument to a Monument.
It’s a strong reaffirmation of the importance of symbolic forms, the raw
material, so to say, of the visual artists, and of their deep meanings, rooted in
the cultural values of a society, with which the artist may enter into a dialectics
of confrontation, change and re-creation.
298 Review Essay
We can watch then, in Mykola Rydnyi’s video, the dismantling of an old Soviet
monument and the setting up of a new one. This video intends to highlight the
paradox of that action, showing the big effort with which modern salaried work-
ers are busy destroying a symbolic celebration of the heroism of labor. In Shelter,
Rydnyi reproduces the cells that were built in the past as a protection against an
atomic assault from the West—a form of collective paranoia that he still feels and
projects into the future. In other videos he shows his engagement against political
and social injustice in the present situation in his country.
Another obsession from the Soviet past is the source of inspiration for Hamlet
Zinkovskyi. He collects hundreds of passport-format photos to form a Book of
People recalling the police files but extending his criticism to the cataloging
mania, from which emerges a gloomy image of a melancholic humanity. Using

hundreds af photos in a kind of patchwork, Zinkovskyi then forms the silhouette
of a giant Anonym, a monument of sorts to a multitude of unknown people who
lost their identity during the years of collectivism.
Going to the extreme, Zhanna Kadyrova creates phantom monuments made of
what is invisible and untouchable, light and emptiness, or reverses the concept of
monumentality by using broken objects, in a nostalgic mood, in her project System
of Things. Kardirova inspired the title that was given to the whole pavilion, a title
for a monument to anyone or anything at all, a Sheer Historical Potentiality.
THE COLLATERAL EVENTS

Rhizome (Saudi Arabia)
Isolated, in a dark, ancient warehouse, this exhibition is organized by an inde-

pendent artists’ association from Saudi Arabia and presents the works of some
young visual artists, portraying the spirit of that country’s ‘‘internet generation.’’
So little is known of this surge of iconological creativity in the middle of a tra-
ditionally aniconic culture, that the title chosen seems very appropriate.
In botany, a rhizome is an underground stem producing new sprouts popping
out from the earth. Correspondingly, these young artists are still attached to
the old tradition of Islamic art of graphic, abstract decoration and calligraphy,
while growing up immersed in the present digital web of communication. The
expressive power of videos, photography, installations and even blogs has
offered totally new modalities for representation of contemporary life, its
challenges and contradictions.
An image from the video Salad Zone by Sarah Abu Abdallah is a most powerful
icon of an internal confrontation, set within domestic walls: two women in abaya,
the traditional black dress, trying to smash a TV set.
The feminine world seems to be the most reactive to the psychological conse-
quences of the contemporary cultural clashes between traditional values and a
modern individualistic world. Such is the poetics behind Eiman Elgibreen’s works:
the video Don’t look at me, look at my art, and the sculpture, Does a face make the dif-
ference?, portraying 64 Saudi women protesting against changes in their professions.
And women artists are significantly numerous in this exhibition. In her photo
gallery What She Wore, portraying Western women in abaya, Nouf Alhimiary
Review Essay 299
questions individuality and its repression through external appearance. Ahaad

Alamoudi’s Heya (She) is a comical commentary on the present-day changing
role of women in Saudi society.
Inspired by a religious poem celebrating the unity of the universe in its infinite
parts, Sarah Al Abdali’s Poem of the Atoms revisits the tradition of geometric-style
craftwork.
Basmah Felemban invites viewers to pose behind her intricate geometric
design reproducing niqab and burqah to have their photos taken. This way, she
symbolically tries to open a dialog between the tradition she is attached to and
the changing society of her generation: while already known internationally,
she is only twenty years old.
One of the main problems felt by this ‘‘generation in waiting’’ (the subtitle of
Rhizome) is the communication with the outside world made difficult by use of
the Arabic language. In the struggle between globalization and national identity,
this generation risks being Lost in Transliteration. Heba Abed shows here a series
of illustrated Western cartoon-style cards subtitled in Arabizi, a system of writing
allowing one to write in Arabic by using numerals on an alphabetic keyboard as
substitutes for the missing signs. Arabizi has become common among the young
generation, and Heba Abed proposes to teach it in elementary schools using his
cartoons. The ultimate rhyzomatic sprout in Saudi Arabian society, and another
evidence of the creative role of its artists.
Lost in Translation
The theme of intercultural translation is at the core of an exhibition organized by

the Moscow Museum of Modern Art that opened in the central building of the
University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari, under the title Lost in Translation (like Sophia
Coppola’s film). The title reveals the organizers’ concern over the difficulty to
decipher the messages in artworks produced in the Soviet Union before and
immediately after the fall of the Wall, without knowing the underground of
the artworld and the general sociopolitical context. The selection challenged this
communication problem, purposely concentrating on the works that most
needed to be contextualized and culturally ‘‘translated’’ into words.
Art needs subtitles, seems to be the imperative, if one looks at the long texts
accompanying the paintings on these walls. A network of translations, intended
to tie together knowledge of the recent historical events of society at large with
an understanding of the parallel developments of artistic styles in that critical per-
iod. This way, the title could magically change into Found in Translation. But Anto-
nio Geusa, the Italian curator of the exhibition, is cautious: ‘‘Unquestionably, art
cannot be confined into a series of encyclopedic data. Art always exceeds history.
However, even the emotional side of the way the work of art hits the viewers
depends upon codes which can be rationally explained with basic ‘encyclopedic’
information’’ [Geusa 2013]. Echoing this position, a translator’s note states that the
texts accompanying the works are not critical commentaries, but rather references
to get a clearer understanding of the Russian context.
This hermeneutic exercise has been applied to a variety of works selected as
particularly representative of that culturally critical period preceding and
300 Review Essay
following the collapse of Socialism, that deeply affected the art world in Russia
both in terms of individual creativity and in collective artistic movements.
During the period of official Socialist Realism, many underground artistic
movements flourished, going to the opposite direction, that of Conceptualism,
or otherwise taking various different turns, so that it would have been an
impossible task to represent them all in the exhibition. In many cases there
emerged a common tendency to rely on written texts within the picture, a
form of conceptualization of consciousness, or ‘‘logocentrism,’’ as opposed
to ‘‘Western visual anthropocentrism,’’ but with different sources of inspi-
ration. Romantic Conceptualism used to quote verses of banned poets; in other
cases the texts reminded one of the rules imposed by the regime. The mean-
ings exceed the linguistic transmission, to remind us of the strong emotional

context in which the words were used, by the regime as well as by its
opponents.
In Sergey Bratkov’s Slogan, the words say in the picture ‘‘Long live the bad of
today for the good of tomorrow,’’ recalling a typical bit of ideological propa-
ganda. The same theme is pushed to the extreme paradox by Vitaly Komar
and Aleksandr Melamid in their work The Perfect Slogan, where a long line of
empty letter-boxes over a red background form a long absurd poster. Another
way to express critically the ambiguity of communication is Gia Rigvava’s video
installation In Morse Code, Russia is Dangerous Still. Russia is Lovable Still, alternat-
ing black-and-white and red-and-white screens as Morse alphabetic signals, end-
ing with the final word ‘‘STILL’’ in capital letters—in English, the language of the
former enemy.
Erik Bulatov’s Entrance–No Entrance revives the obsession of infinite rules and
prohibitions. When perestroika arrived, Sergey Anufriev wrote some phrases of
Gorbachev’s First Speech over a painted shirt. The most extreme case of writing as a
source of inspiration for a visual artist is the sculpture A, the simple reproduction
of that letter, by Vladimir Nemukhin.
Such a strong need to ‘‘explain’’ the artworks with words, often even inside the
pictures, can be considered a remnant from the times when not only art but the
whole society and every action were given an official interpretation and guide-
lines to be followed. Every aspect of the world had to be seen through the lenses
of political ideology. This way, direct perceptual observation of the reality
around had to be obfuscated, to avoid individual interpretation.
A typical icon of the past, that of the War Hero, has surprisingly survived in
the post-War generation, as can be seen in the work of Boris Orlov, an aircraft
model with national symbols, that cannot have been inspired by nostalgia.
The gloomy, dark resurgence of the past still worries many artists: Yuri Shabel-
nikon remembers the KGB, the Soviet secret police; while Sergey Shokutov, in
The New Molokhovets, denounces the imprisonment of many scientists.
Three artists, born in the 1980s, introduce three crucial problems in contempor-
ary Russia: Alena Tereshko (born, 1986), in her video The Girl from the Urals,
inspired by an old folk song, refers to the legagy of tradition; Vladimir Logutov
(born, 1980) looks at recent political demonstrations; while Alesa Joffe’s (born,
1987) Etude of Christ’s Wounds symbolizes the resurgence of religion in Russia
following Communist atheism.
Review Essay 301
After the translation, one might say, comes the transition, where art and the
artists themselves enter the globalized world. Ilya Kabakov is the eminent figure
of the present trend. A visually powerful icon of that encounter is found in
the two facing sculptures by Leonid Sokov, like Kabakov a New York-based
artist: that of Lenin in front of a reproduction of L’Homme qui marche by Alberto
Giacometti.
NOTES
1. Quotations in the following sections are taken from leaflets and wall texts, except when
marked as coming fom the Biennale’s general catalog, The Encyclopedic Palace.
2. In memory of Paolo Rosa, whose last work, in collaboration with the other members of
Studio Azzurro, was Creazione, in the Holy See pavilion.
REFERENCES
Arbasino, Alberto
2013 Tiziano e Manet. Il segno di Venere nella Venezia della Biennale. La Repubblica, July 22: 34.
Baratta, Paolo
2013 An Exhibition—Research. The Encyclopedic Palace, 1: 15–16. Venice: Marsilio editori.
Dufrêne, Thierry, and Anne-Christine Taylor
2009 By Way of Introduction. In Cannibalismes disciplinaires. Quand l’histoire de l’art et
l’anthropologie se rencontrent. Matthew Carey, trans. Pp. 1–15. Paris: ENHA et Musée du Quai
Branly.
Freedberg, David
1989 The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Geusa, Antonio
2013 Found in Translation: An Overlook of Four Decades of Russian Contemporary Art. In Lost
in Translation. Moscow: Publishing Program of Moscow Museum of Modern Art.
Gioni, Massimiliano
2013 Is Everything in my Mind ? The Encyclopedic Palace, 1: 23–28. Venice: Marsilio editori.
Harry, Myriam
1941 Irak. Paris: Flammarion.
Hess, Peter
2004 Marvelous Encounters: Albrecht Dürer and Early Sixteenth-Century German Perceptions of
Aztec Culture. Daphnis – Zeitschrift für Mittlere Deutsche Literatur, 33(1–2): 161–186.
Kittermann, Udo
2013 Vadim Zakharov: Danae. The Encyclopedic Palace, 2: 150. Venice: Marsilio editori
MacDougall, David
2005 The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press.
Ruskin, John
1851–53 The Stones of Venice. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Vasari, Giorgio
1550 Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori. Firenze: Torrentino editore.
Antonio Marazzi
University of Padova
Padova, Italy
antonio.marazzi@gmail.com

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Europe; although with some, carefully separate, exceptions: Egypt, the

Knees sit on the ground

up by being seen only as exotic curios.

of the stimulating effect of such an accomplishment is that one would want to

to culturally other contexts can be not just of a comparison or opposition, high-

THE NATIONAL PAVILIONS1

France and Germany

re-enactment. This process is followed by Andrew Putter, one of the artists

artist transforms to invent a new artificial environment that questions the

Latin American Pavilion

An extended geopolitical view of cultural cross-fertilization has been at the core

This pavilion brings the denunciation of violence to its extreme, that of

camouflage-dressed and heavily armed soldiers move silently in a deadly man-

Inspired by the famous definition by Benedict Anderson of nations as ‘‘imagined

mania, from which emerges a gloomy image of a melancholic humanity. Using

THE COLLATERAL EVENTS

Isolated, in a dark, ancient warehouse, this exhibition is organized by an inde-

questions individuality and its repression through external appearance. Ahaad

The theme of intercultural translation is at the core of an exhibition organized by

ings exceed the linguistic transmission, to remind us of the strong emotional

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