Our Monthly Zine
This month: The 54th Venice Biennale, presenting contemporary artists from a record 89 nations. The focus here is going to be six artists from Asian nations, plus one of the 39 side events and the U.S. entry.
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Israel |
Korea |
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Sigalit Landau (b1969), Israeli
Landau transformed a modernist structure into a factory, with the ground floor like a machine room. On other floors, videos, computers and speakers present a debate about building a salt bridge between Israel and Jordan. The exhibition concerns deals with water, soil and salt as metaphores for interdependence among human beings.
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Lee Yong Baek (b1966), Korean
The artist's installation spanned video, photography, sculpture and painting. The video presents a wall of flowers that, upon closer view, is revealed to be a 'floral camouflage' for a soldier aiming a rifle. It is an illusion not unlike political and social illusions. The experience is extended with props from the video, including uniforms that carry the names of the artist's heroes: Nam June Paik, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp.
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| Japan | United Arab Emirates |
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Tabaimo (b1975), Japanese
Tabaimo created a darkened pavilion that immediately disoriented. Through multi-channel animation projection and mirrors, the viewer was transferred to a world of fleeting locations and inverted sky and ground. The title "teleco-soup" translate to "inverted soup," or the inversion of relations between water and sky, fluid and container, self and world. The artist continues to wrestle with the changing orientation that the Japanese have toward each other and the world relative to the “island“ mind-set of Japan’s geography.
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Lateefa bint Maktoum (b1962)
Maktoum was one of three UAE artists to present works reflecting the changes in their country. In a manipulated photographic work Maktoun presented a traditional draped woman looking out into a changing landscape alone and holding a suitcase. There is a palpable sense of both sadness and possibility. This was only the UAB's second appearance at the Venice Biennale. |
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| China |
Turkey |
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Song Dong (b1966), Chinese
One of four artists invited to create 'para-pavilions' at the Arsenale. Song's exhibit featured a maze-like environment of 100 salvaged architectural fragments, including doors, room dividers, pagoda panels. Real spaces within virtual spaces were incorporated to recreate Song's century-old family home and community. The artist indicated his desire for the viewer to explore both his autobiographical history and the postmodernism of contemporary china. |
Ayse Erkmen (b1949), Turkish
Sculptor Ayse Erkman's installation turned the exhibition room into a water treatment plant, showing the mechanism's internal workings. Elaborate containers and plumbing snaked through the room, drawing the viewer in the process of change, taking polluted canal water and purifying it, then redistributing it into the polluted canals. The artist explores importance of water in the world, its spiritual, financial and social aspects.
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| USA |
Side Event: "Menglong-Obscuri" |
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Jennifer Allora (b1974) & Guillermo Calzadilla (b1971)
Allora and Calzadilla inverted a 52-ton tank and a treadmill in front of the U.S. Pavillion in a political that the artists though the State Department would reject. This was one of six new pieces the artists presented at the Biennale.
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Jia Aili (b1979), Chinese
"Menglong-Obscuri" was an event outside the official Venice Biennale, organized by the Nanjing Sifang Art Museum. Jia Aili. one of three artists presented, presented oil paintings in a largely grey palette that conveyed conflict and fear, both socially and individually.
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