CONTEXTUALISATION - SPRING 24
VENICE ART BIENNALE TRIP - 22.04-26.04 - SELECT PICTURES- intense art watching
- aware of the different levels within art and art institutions and art exhibitioning and artists and why this art was picked and not others and politics in art, and etc...
- fetishizing of indigenous culture/global south/race & gender minorities: I don’t know what to think, I understand the argument but I choose to see it in a more positive way, that finally these artists get to show their art
- old/traditional fine art & traditional set up: again, I understand the argument. but having grown up in the ‘global south’ for some time, you are taught in school that this type of art is ‘good quality art’, the museums are mainly about fine art (artists from the Caribbean, but predominantly painting), because that’s ‘all there was’, fine art was still seen as the ‘better’ art because that’s what the colonisers defined as art. still stuck in that mindset, it’s an inheritance form colonial times that is still in the educational system: my mother’s generation and older ere taught british history, world history, Shakespeare, very little about their own history (unless it was persued at higher level). it’s the same with art. only now for the last decade or so (at least in Trinidad), has other forms of art, ‘our own art’ (carnival, wire-bending, wood sculpture, etc..), become viewed as quality. So those artists showing paintings and sculptures at the biennale, to me that’s just a curatorial comment on the art forms that were available/considered better quality for centuries.
- on the other hand, traditional craftsmanship is also an artform (in my opinion) but maybe the inferiority of craft vs art in some remaining western mentalities also fuels the critique that this Biennale is traditional/’we’ve seen it all before’.
- I thought it’s about time these older artists from the global south and racial & gender minorities got seen, the same way that Britta Marakaat-Laaba said ‘it’s about time’ she got exhibited at a national institution in Norway. AND this exhibition of older traditional art should make way for more artists from the global south to be exhibited.
PAVILLION INSPIRATION (taken from contextualisation essay)
- Some of the pavilions were inspiring because of the themes they discussed, others more so for the communication of the artworks, their presentation and storytelling. A third group encompassed both these interests. These are the Singapore Pavillion, Australia Pavillion, Brazil Pavillion, Spain Pavillion and the Slovak Pavillion.
-Starting with the Singapore Pavillion, which explores secondary forests, ‘forests or woodland areas that have regrown over land disturbed by human development (...) These threshold zones between primary forests and developed urban areas offer insights into a complex web of human and non-human coexistence’ (Singapore Pavilion, The 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2024). This said complex web harks back to the tentacular thinking, and the making kin of the Chtulucene of Haraway but also reminds of Anna Tsing’s Feral Atlas which offers a different perspective of the Anthropocene, which she calls ‘the More-Than-Human Anthropocene’ (Tsing, Deger, Keleman Saxena, Zhou, 2021). This More-than-Human Anthropocene was visualized in the Seeing Forest exhibition, through footage of nature taking over abandoned human objects around which the forest grew back (such as an abandoned metal bin that turned into a recipient that captured rain water and by extension provided drinking water for lizards, birds and other animals of the forest). I was also particularly inspired by the way the exhibition was set up, with two large screens showing footage on their respective screens that were in dialogue with each other in the larger story.
-The Slovak Pavillion and their exhibition Floating Arboretum was another one where the set up in terms of storytelling was inspiring as a way to communicate an artwork. It is particularly relevant in my current project ‘(re)learning tree-time’ which looks at trees as a conduit for us humans to learn long-term thinking again, but also speaks to my previous project ‘the guardian of the forest’. This particular exhibition created an archive of stories for trees as a way to speak to the deforestation and destruction of trees. Each tree around the Czec and Slovak Pavillion had a little QR code which linked the tree to an online story in the form of a poem or a song or prose fiction. I thought this relevant because the digitalizing platform offers a possibility for everyone to read, see and hear the stories… provided they have the QR code though. I thought I could use this technique to further expand my research and workshop results for ‘(re)learning tree-time’ into future artworks.
-The Australia Pavilion, Kith and Kin is directly linked to my current project ‘(re)learning tree-time’. It involves the artist’s family tree showing a 65,000+ year scope of time, drawn using white chalk on a black background surrounding piles of official documents related to aboriginal deaths in custody between since 1991: ‘the drawing [family tree] begins as a representation of genealogical descendancy and time in a western linear sense, but as we go back a few hundred years it resembles more of a first nations notion of kinship and time, where the present, past and future share the same space in the here and now’ (Moore, 2024). This is connected to what ‘(re)learning tree-time' speaks to, the cyclical notion of time to remind us to think long-term, and the idea that ‘everyone is in the room: the dead, the living and the unborn’ (Krznaric, 2020, p. 95). Moore’s definition of kith and kin dates back from the 1300s and to him ‘feels more like a first nations understanding of attachment to place, people and time’ (Moore, 2024). He states that kith and kin originally had the added meanings of ‘countrymen’ and also ‘one’s native land’: ‘Many indigenous Australians, especially those who grew up on country, know the land and other living things as part of their kinship systems (...) this sense of belonging involves everyone and everything’ (Moore, 2024). Britta Marakatt Laaba and Joar Nango come to mind here again. And so does Haraway, who thinks that the ‘re-defining’ of kin, so to speak, ‘are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense (...) kin is an assembling sort of word’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 103).
-The Restor(y)ing Oceania exhibition, curated by Taloi Havini as an extra event to the Biennale, also inspired me in the presentation of the research approach (like Corpus Infinitum), the communication of the artwork and the themes of identity, ecology, and time. The Indigenous artists from the Pacific, Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta, together with curator Taloi Havini bring together performance, sculpture, poetry and movement through an ancestral call-and-response method, as a way to look for solidarity and kinship in times of uncertainty. ‘When the world goes crazy, join together with others to fight it’ kind of mentality, is my thinking. In this case, the uncertainty was the climatic changes as experienced in the Pacific region, by indigenous pacific communities. This exhibition is also directly related to my current project which looks at (re)learning long-term thinking through trees as a conduit for time. It stated in its introduction: ‘Real threats to life call for the need to slow down the clock on extraction and counter this with reverence for life of the Oceans’ (Restor(y)ing Oceania, 2024).
- I was particularly inspired by a performative sound installation which invited the audience to stand on a rowing machine attached to a sound system that played sounds when the rowing started. This reminded me that I wanted to use sound and singing in my oral presentation/storytelling of my work for (re)learning tree-time. The singing was a choral work created by the artist involving chants from Tonga: ‘The significance of song to poetically record histories and to share values and knowledge in Taumoepeau’s homeland of Tonga is acknowledged through the creation of a new choral work focused on her firm resistance to deep sea mining.’ (Restor(y)ing Oceania, 2024).