50. Biennale Venezia

50th International Art Exhibition 2003

 

Dreams and Conflicts

The Dictatorship of the Viewer

Utopia Station
Curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Rirkrit Tiravanija
“Today the world is too dangerous for anything less than utopia,” Buckminster Fuller once wrote. Because unfortunately this remains true, we propose to travel there together as a group. We can meet at Utopia Station. The Utopia Station in Venice will be nothing more or nothing less than a way station, a place to stop, to look, to talk and refresh the route. Utopia itself an idea with a long history and many fixed ideologies, has loosened up to become a catalyst first, or the no-place it always was, a hope for the better future.

Physically the Utopia Station in Venice, projected by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick, will bring together the work of many different artists and architects who will build small structures, models and walls.

Around them other small objects and projects, including drawings, small paintings and photographs, will be set up in a free arrangement. An open call has gone out to almost 160 artists for posters, which will add another layer of activity to swarm in the space and also beyond it, scattering individually into the city of Venice. The Utopia Station’s artists come from around the world. To list every participant is not possible here. Let us say simply that it is a large, and growing, group. In alphabetical order it would begin with A12 and end with Andrea Zittel.

Throughout the summer, different speakers, writers, dancers, performers and musicians will be invited to give Utopia their ideas, radical actions and sounds. We imagine the Station filling with life. We imagine the Station defined as much by this life, i.e. by meeting, as by its things.
The Utopia Station project as a whole should be understood to be the composite of its many layers, each unfolding at different speeds in different times and places: seminars, meetings, stations, posters, performances and books are coming en route. The Utopia Station in Venice will be the first major stop. We envision a project extending over the next several years.
 

The Everyday Altered
Curated by Gabriel Orozco
I accepted the invitation of Francesco Bonami to curate this exhibition because of his genuine interest in the ongoing collaboration that has taken place among and between these artists and myself over the years. My curatorial practice here is limited to establishing rules for a game in a specific exhibition field. The rules are: no walls, no pedestals, no vitrines, no video, no photographs. The six invited players are: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Jimmie Durham, Daniel Guzman, Jean Luc Moulene, Damian Ortega and Fernando Ortega. Avoiding the medias mentioned before, these artists have accepted to participate in this dialogue using their own altered objects of knowledge. We could say that this practice of transforming the objects and situations in which we live everyday is a way of transforming the passage of time and the way we assimilate the economics and politics of the instruments of living. We could say, also, that the fact that this practice has become a recurrent tool for many contemporary artists all over the world, is a sign of its political power, as the individual can transform and communicate its own reality and, with simple means, make these altered objects the materials and tools of our revolutionary mornings. The human scale is a constant in all the works presented here. The irony of thinking, the immediate gesture, the fragility of intimacy, and the meticulous violence of transforming the familiar, makes these artists? Work relevant to understand a powerful tendency in the art practice of today (Gabriel Orozco).
 

The Structure of Survival
Curated by Carlos Basualdo
Assistant Curator: Stephanie Mauch
Installation Design: Bevk & Perovic architects
This exhibition explores a constellation of themes related to the effects of political, economic and social crises in the developing world. The show does not attempt to fully document this situation, but to explore the ways in which artists and architects have reacted and react to these set of conditions. Notions of sustainability, self-organization and the articulation of various forms of aesthetic agency as forms of resistance are recurrent in the show, as it is die powerful image of one of the most shocking and imposing evidences of these conditions in the city, the overwhelming presence of the shanty towns. The show will thus trace their presence in die cultural imaginary of the developing world, and introduce the shanty as the object of a number of recent anthropological, urban and socio-economic studies.

The Structure of Survival attempts to interrogate a number of assumptions about what constitutes a ‘crisis” and how it manifest itself both in art and society. It is based on the notion that art is a form of knowledge and as such it creates the framework that helps us both understand and react to these circumstances. In the last two decades, recurrent references to political, economic and social crisis in contemporary art have increased exponentially. This is likely related to the contradictory results of globalization and corporate capitalism, and the consequent deterioration of the living conditions of developing world populations. More and more, the rationality of the public sphere metamorphoses into ephemeral communal encounters and strategies of collective survival.

This exhibition will thus attempt to reflect this process by including the works of a number of contemporary artists from North and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia, who have been working on the subject. Among the artists included in the exhibition are: Grupo de Arte Callejero (Argentina) working in collaboration with Andreas Siekmann and Alice Creischer (Germany), Marepe (Brazil), Yona Friedman (Hungary-France), Muyiwa Osifuye (Nigeria), Rachel Harrison (USA), Antonio Ole (Angola), Juan Maidagan and Dolores Zinny (Argentina-USA), Carolina Caycedo (Colombia-UK), Fernanda Gomes (Brasil), Mikael Levin (USA-France) and Marjetica Potrc (Slovenia). The show will also include works of a selected group of historical figures like Gego (Venezuela) and Robert Smithson (USA).
 

Individual Systems
Curated by Igor Zabel
Ideas of ordered systems - in technology, knowledge, society, and culture, are an essential part of modernity. The concept of system, however, also reveals the heterogeneous and contradictory nature of modernity.

Modernity is, of course, connected to the ideas of a rational and ordered knowledge, of a well-planned and effective production, of an effective management of space and resources, of a rationally organized and balanced social structure, etc. In such a context, organized systems represent means to achieve these goals and thus, finally, a balanced world offering to everyone possibilities for a good and meaningful life. They make possible the effective functioning of the society in all its aspects, such as political system, economy, knowledge, etc. In this respect, the concept of system reflects the “positive” side of the modern world. This positive, utopian perspective on modernity, however, has its “negative” side, too. Modernity is not merely a utopia, project, and rational organization, it is also tension, struggle and conflict.

This becomes obvious through a number of oppositions, which are essential for the modern condition: individual vs. society, the particular vs. the universal, the local vs. the global, freedom vs. the institutionalized order. These oppositions, however, reflect deeper antagonisms in modern society, i.e. antagonisms based on the class differences, the (post)colonial power relations, gender, etc. Thus, the nihilistic dimension of the modern project becomes visible. Modernity can be experienced as discomfort (cf. Mladen Stilinovic, Viktor Alimpiev & Marian Zhunin). System and utopian vision tend to destroy the existing reality in the name of the future perfect world (e.g. in the communist projects). It represents oppression and threat to the individual and his desire for freedom (e.g., in totalitarian systems). It becomes an effective and ruthless tool of exploitation (e.g. in capitalist production), etc.

The concept of the system, therefore, cannot be connected merely to the (utopian) idea of a total construction of a harmonic and rationally ordered society. It reflects the contradictions and tensions that make an essential part of modernity. I believe it would be a mistake to forget this intrinsic tension by choosing either the “utopian” or the “critical” position. The realization of the contradictory nature of modernity should not lead one into forgetting and discarding the modernist idea of achieving a just and meaningful world.

Art itself is a social institution, a system that is an essential part of the interconnected social systems, yet it functions as a particular and autonomous world at the same time. (This dualism has been reflected in the opposition of the “autonomous” and the “engaged” art, which has been so essential for the discussions on modern art.) By using the paradigm of the system, an artist is able to reflect the general and essential dimensions of modernity without entering directly into social, political or anthropological analysis or without abandoning a highly personal language and approach. Discussing Luhmann’s book Art as a Soda/ System, Art & Language wrote: “This is a way that art can be integrated into everyday: by accepting, describing and re-describing its own differentiation as form.”
 

Fault Lines
Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes
Curated by Gilane Tawadros and produced by the Forum for African Arts
In geological terms, fault lines reveal themselves as fractures in the earth’s surface but they also mark a break in the continuity of the strata. Fault lines may be a sign of significant shifts, or even of impending disaster, but they also create new landscapes. Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes brings together contemporary artists from Africa and the African Diaspora whose works trace the fault lines that are shaping contemporary experience locally and globally. These fault lines have been etched into the physical fabric of our world through the effects of colonialism and post colonialism, of migration and globalization. Their reverberations echo through contemporary lived experience and in the work of these 15 artists working across a range of media from painting and sculpture through to architecture, photography and installation. Their works span five decades, four continents and three generations, resisting any notion of an authentic or one-dimensional African experience.

One of the most important artists of his generation Frank Bowling created map paintings in the late 1960s and early 1970s which combine his investigations into the formal properties of picture making with his political preoccupations. Bowling not only put the political into ‘Pop Art’ but also put postcolonial concerns into contemporary art, thereby creating a sublime tension between form and content and laying the ground for subsequent generations of artists for whom aesthetic and political concerns are never mutually exclusive. In the work of the celebrated Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, it is the negotiation between tradition and modernity within a defiantly nationalist idiom that is articulated through his vision of an ‘architecture for the poor.’ Mirroring more or less the trajectory of modern Egypt, Fathy’s architecture moves ‘from colonization to independence to development and its aftermath entangled with grand dreams of regional pre-eminence’.

By contrast, Wael Shawky’s contemporary asphalt city is a hybrid metropolis, part-rural, part-urban, constructed out of the ‘blackest, most unyielding residues of petroleum. An ironic commentary on the contradictory effects of modernization on contemporary Egyptian society, this dystopian city is the by-product of mass migration and globalization. Kader Attia’s intimate
 

 

The Biennale di Venezia presents the 50th International Art Exhibition directed by Francesco Bonami

Dreams and Conflicts
The Dictatorship of the Viewer

The Biennale di Venezia’s 50th International Art Exhibition presents itself as an “exhibition of exhibitions”, laid out in the various spaces within the Arsenale and in the Giardini della Biennale, including the national participations in the Giardini pavilions, as well as in other locations in the heart of Venice and elsewhere.
 

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The Biennale di Venezia presents the 50th International Art Exhibition directed by Francesco Bonami.  Dreams and Conflicts-The Viewer’s Dictatorship.

The Biennale di Venezia’s 50th International Art Exhibition this year presents itself as an “exhibition of exhibitions”, laid out in the various spaces within the Arsenale and in the Giardini della Biennale, including the national participations in the Giardini pavilions, as well as in other locations in the heart of Venice and elsewhere again.

Director Francesco Bonami wished his project to make the best use of the singleness of the Biennale di Venezia’s exhibition structure in order to put together a major international survey that, like a “map”, would comprise different areas (like islands in an archipelago), each with its own identity and independence.
 

The viewer-reader of this map will thus be able to explore the single artistic individualities and build up a personal itinerary through the various trends or specific realities of contemporary art. If the idea of the large international survey has always been conceived as a whole concept to be fragmented into the visions of the individuals artists, Dreams and Conflicts wants art from the autonomy of the different projects to seek in this complexity of ideas the unity that defines the language of contemporary art today.

In the contemporary society the viewers with their presence and absence controls the success of every exhibition and cultural enterprise; in Dreams and Conflicts they appear as one of the subjects that contribute to define the structure of the show, the artist, the curator, the viewer .
 

Along with the artist, the beholder is one of the poles that connecting produce the spark that activate the art work successfully in the social and cultural context.

The dream and the conflict, the total world opposed to its political and geographical fragmentation, the national aspirations in contrast with the international achievements are all elements that will contribute to the making of the Visual Arts Biennale.
 

Dreams and Conflicts will be an exhibition focused at the same time on art as a personal tool of a personal experience and conviviality. A show through which is possible to have access to the complexity of a world made by groups of individuals defined by multiple and diverse necessities.

An exhibition constructed with multiple projects to test the strength of that ideal community where  the creative process of the contemporary artist is active. Dreams and Conflicts will not be a show about political art but a reflection on the politics of art.

The experience of the viewer facing the unique vision of the artist. Two contemporary subjects divided simply by a different gaze.  
  
Francesco Bonami