Blog
Looking for Photography at the 54th Venice Biennale
Friday, December 9, 2011 - 10:34pm
By Alice Dixon
In November I visited Venice, Italy for the first time and was truly wowed by its beauty, despite the throngs of tourists. A trip to the Venice Biennale was at the top of my agenda, luckily it ran for six months, and I could see why given its scope and scale within the city. The director/curator of this 54th Venice Biennale was Bice Curiger, and it was she who gave the biennale its title and thematic focus: “ILLUMInations “(illumi meaning light in Italian, and nations referring to the biennale's adjunct national pavilions.) Two large-scale group exhibitions were centred around this theme—one at the Arsenale, Venice’s historical shipyards, and another in the Giardini, a kind of architectural wonder garden due to its greenery and country pavilions built-up throughout the last century. Artworks by Tintoretto (the only non-contemporary works in the show), James Turrell and other artists related to the exhibition's theme of light. While Para-Pavilions—structural artworks built by one artist to house the work of other artists—pointed to a community-based concept of the title’s “nations."
Around each of these exhibitions curated by Curiger were dozens of national and “collateral” exhibitions that represented artists by country. Many of these country pavilions addressed the social and political landscape of their homeland, as did collaborative duo Allora and Calzadilla of Puerto Rico—representing the U.S.A. with an overturned tank re-purposed as a treadmill and a pipe-organ bank machine. Even more of these types of exhibitions were scattered throughout the city of Venice in old churches, palazzos, and warehouses. In the neighbourhood where I stayed, Bangladesh and Iraq had staged really good group exhibitions, and there was an elegant collection of video works by Tim Davies of Wales at one of the three British pavilions in the biennale.
Beyond pure curiosity about what this 54-year-old colossal art event was actually like, I was interested to see what role photography played in such an international stage for contemporary art. What I discovered was in line with observations I had previously made about artistic practices today being ever more interdisciplinary as well as more immediate in their production or display—for example, Thomas Hirschhorn’s penchant for installations assembled with packing tape.
At the biennale it seemed to me that the most interesting uses of photography were cases in which it was interacting with other media, like Gerard Byrne’s Case Study: Loch Ness (Some possibilities and problems). It was an installation consisting of black-and-white photographs, 16-mm film, sound, text and archived materials, combined into what I found to be a sophisticated mixture of media following a cohesive conceptual structure.
However, photography is still undeniably useful as archive—as it was for the Moscow conceptualist group Collective Actions’ Trips out of Town, 1976–2011—and as document remains unparalleled, a fact exemplified by Taryn Simon's series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. Simon's series in the Danish pavilion—dedicated to free speech—showed us gun factories, nuclear plants, and items confiscated by customs at JFK airport, places most of us would never otherwise see.
I found video art throughout the biennale, though the most notable example was the Italo-Latin American pavilion’s exhibition, which brought together video works from throughout Latin America. In the Indian pavilion Gigi Scaria’s Elevator from the Subcontinent, 2011 was an immersive video installation that took viewers from floor to floor. While in the biennale exhibition Mohamed Bourouissa (known for making portraits of disenfranchised youth in the Paris suburbs), expanded upon his photo practice by showing a new two-channel video based around a high-stakes poker game that retained Bourouissa’s tension-filled style.
Honestly, the sheer scale and scope of the Venice Biennale was probably what made the biggest impression on a biennale beginner like me. And though it was overwhelming, by pushing through and seeing as much of the biennale as I could, I gained many perspectives on photography’s role in this international contemporary context, which I continue to ponder. One thing is sure: photography is many things to many people and that inherent versatility is an aspect of the medium that continues to fascinate me.
Alice Dixon is Gallery 44's Exhibition Coordinator. Alice maintains an independent practice as an artist, curator, editor, and writer.
