© Emily Jacir, stazione (2008 - 2009), Proposal for Venice Vaporetto Stops (II), Digital Photograph

Fare Mondi Making Worlds, the theme for the 53rd Venice Biennale, offers art as visions of realities and imaginings of artists, making its purview the fragments of the personal, the private and internal even as these may unfold and finally take form in the material world that is shared. The artist as the centre of this other universe of alternatives lays open the exhibition to the curiosities of the fictional and make-believe, that in a time when economic outlook seems uncertain (even if certain enough to affect all other spheres of life as it is commonly read), satisfies an escapist desire and a need to find certain refuge in a different reality.

With its first foreign pavilion built for the Belgians in 1907, the concept of the national pavilion at the Biennale itself defines each exhibition as a world unto its own. It is within this highly volatile space that the notion of the state, its desires, aspirations and fears come into play in a contestation of its notional and alleged boundaries and identity that at times rehearses the state’s own anxieties torn between assuring its own polity of its merit and performing to a larger network of nations it wishes to charm. In this biennale a few decisions made are noteworthy in this respect of rejecting its prescribed role: the German Pavilion’s choice of British artist Liam Gillick and the collaboration between the Danish Pavilion and Nordic Pavilion creating a “transnational ‘neighbourhood’” in the Giardini area. In reviewing the biennale, this text looks to a couple of works that resist the attempt of creating new worlds in the sense of seeking an alternative reality, instead choosing to complicate the one world they have to live in.

Emily Jacir’s stazione (2008 – 2009) is an unrealised intervention on the number 1 vaporetto (water bus) line, a main transport route along the Grand Canal beginning at Lido winding its way to Piazzale Roma, ferrying audiences from one Biennale exhibition to another, by inserting Arabic text supplementing the existing Italian names at vaporetti stops and thus making the route bilingual. In the artist’s explanation, the work references the numerous Arab influences and exchanges in the history of Venice, its architecture, manufacturing, shipping, and of course in the process of these activities, language – that Arabic words too have filtered into the Venetian dialect – ‘divan’, ‘damasco’, ‘gabella’, amongst others. According to the curator for the Palestine c/o Venice exhibition, Salwa Mikdadi, “Jacir’s art work recalls a golden era of Venice when the politicians, merchants and art patrons embraced all cultures and valued trade and exchange with the Arab and Islamic world. In Medieval Times Arabic calligraphy adorned the robes of bishops which is still evident on Christian relics in Venice, it is unfortunate that in the 21st century Emily Jacir’s proposal was rejected.”1

The negotiations for the production of the work was with the Vaporetto Company (VC), a commercial entity that while having given verbal assent to the work at the initial stage, changed their minds without further explanation verbal or written. Here the work by the winner of the 2007 Leone d’Oro prize appears to have been silenced without any recourse to dialogue, a dialogue as unavailable as the reasons for the sudden inability for the project to proceed. Failing to produce the intended bilingual signage along the channel, Jacir’s work is presented as a brochure map with the names of the stops in both English and Arabic, appearing perhaps a less forthright rendition of the ‘world’ Jacir was attempting to ‘make’, but one that is still no less potent. While the Biennale itself is not implicated in the exchange between the exhibition’s organisers and the transport company, considering how in his introduction to the exhibition artistic director Daniel Birnbaum is deliberately inclusive, iterating the theme’s title in Korean, Thai, Russian, Japanese, Hebrew, amongst others, the linguistic intervention proposed in the work, and its cultural reverberations, while on the one hand being elevated as poetic destination, reveals its lofty ideal as materially challenging.

Another work of note is Kristina Norman’s project After-War (2009), an installation of videos, photographs and objects guiding the visitor through the history of a bronze and a gold statue, and an event of trauma in a post August 1991 re-independent Estonia. On 27 April 2007, the Estonian government relocated a monument commonly known as the ‘Bronze Soldier’, a statue created by sculptor Enn Roos and architect Arnold Alas, from the centre of Tallinn where it had stood since 1947, a memorial to the Red Army Soldiers officially known as the ‘Liberators of Tallinn’ of WWII. Surrounding the monument with fences for the exhumation of the bodies of the twelve soldiers, the relocation of graves and statue was perceived by the Russian community as a way to whitewash the past at a site which had traditionally been a gathering place for spontaneous celebrations for the Great Patriotic War. The move provoked a two-day riot that claimed one life and extended into the streets where looting occurred. Police detentions and violence during the riots received varying treatments in the media, with the national newspapers attempting to portray the rioters as hoodlums – “no difference was made between hooligans, marauders and peaceful protesters – not to mention anybody else who dared to manifest their non-Estonian identity.”2

Kristina Norman, After-War, Action on 9th of May 2009, Tallinn, Estonia, Photo by Reimo Võsa-Tangsoo

Norman’s work is acutely sensitive to the nature of the memorial site, with 69% of the population ethnically Estonian, the ‘Bronze Soldier’ had in the past already been a cause for conflict between Estonian ultra-nationalists and Russian-speaking defenders of the Bronze Soldier. The artist being of Estonian and Russian heritage describes herself as speaking not only from her own dislocation – “I’ve never been totally accepted… For Russians I was an Estonian, and for Estonians I was a Russian,”3 but also sees herself as having a role to play in the historical discourses of the communities she belongs to, “I’ve understood that history is a verbal fiction and that it is as much invented as it is discovered.”4 In viewing the artist as the proverbial ‘insider’, this (as well as Jacir’s) work needs to be understood as informed by the artist(s)’s conditions be they social, religious, economic, geographic, linguistic and political, and the work as ultimately exploring the limitations and boundaries of these conditions – “the artist, like everyone else, is an insider. Artists’ work depicts biographically-determined social conditioning. Artists’ work does not allow discontinuities between experience and reality, and it eliminates any gap between the investigator and the object or situation investigated.”5

The Bronze Soldier was relocated 2.5km away at a military cemetery with its original grounds landscaped with low shrubs and flowers removing the trace of the previous monument from the site. Two years after, on 9 May 2009, Norman brought a full-size golden replica of the Soldier to its former location. The event documented in video and presented at the pavilion shows a small and peaceful group of Russians gathering as they have had before to commemorate Victory Day in the past, surprised, some quite pleasantly so, by the statue’s ‘return’. A few members of the public attempted varyingly to topple or plant flowers around the statue as they had in the past too, with most of them taking digital photos almost as if in expectation of its re-disappearance. Disappear once more it did, this time quickly whisked away by police, though returned to the artist a couple of weeks later. The event itself became a talking point for the community, receiving coverage in the main press as well as blogsphere. Here two readings need to be distinguished, the mechanics of the work itself as an art object, and its effect upon the community. As a work emerging from the artist’s own experiences and observations, Norman’s act and work needs to be read as an attempt at reconciling the discontinuities that the community and herself experience, and her monument as “a kind of Hitchcockian ‘McGuffin’ (referencing S. Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology) that provides an opportunity to address the re-codifying and symbolisation of existing cultural practices.”6  Simultaneously her work clearly has a public aspect to it, the community’s own responses and attempts at dialogue about the statue’s relocation and the ways in which tolerance and reconciliation of contesting cultural memories might be found, however this should not be mistaken as the work itself, only the result of. From an outsider’s point of view, it appears as a story of conflict, but from the inside, as revealed in Norman’s act, there is a trauma that is being repressed but which needs a deeper resolution than simply being put out of sight.

Besides repetition, what ties both Norman’s doppelgänger statue and Jacir’s juxtaposition of translated station names together, is the notion of invisibility. In Norman’s case, the relocation of the statue which she postulates could be intended “to make the local Russian community, whose many members are deprived of the opportunity to affect their lives politically, and who almost constitute a separate culture (with the statue of the mourning soldier at its centre), invisible for Estonians”7; and for Jacir, “Arabic has an estimated more than 246 million speakers worldwide today; it is the fifth-most spoken language in the world, and the official language of 22 countries. Yet there are never Arabic translations in any of the tourist sites and attractions… Addressing this rendered invisibility, my project aims to remind visitors and citizens of Venice not only of its deep and varied cultural origins, exchanges and influences but also of possible futures of exchange.”8 These are two sites of trauma, a trauma of disappearance and invisibility. The Biennale as a showcase of nations is likewise a stage where artistic communities jockey for ‘world’ recognition and visibility as nation states as defined by the nations that the Italian government does (can) recognise, reflected no less than in the list of collateral exhibitions – including Hong Kong, Taiwan and Palestine; not to mention the United Arab Emirates first official pavilion showing at the Arsenale this year celebrated with fanfare – this is the place where art and a larger politics get cozy. An example of disappearing acts Jack Persekian notes, is the Palestinian pavilion that in 1948 had been set up to showcase a few artists from then-Palestine (under the British Mandate), with a sign indicating so during the preparations leading up to the summer Biennale exhibition. However on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was declared and the sign which once read ‘Palestine’ was changed to ‘Israel’.9

The Venice Biennale, often seen as the ‘oldest’ biennale, acts as a centre which other biennales and international exhibitions appear as arising from. The texts which emerge from such an event likewise serve to affirm its pole position. It is on such a stage (and in art) that the ‘invisible’ then have an opportunity to claim (or reclaim) its place, where works such as Jacir’s and Norman’s attempting to rebalance a dominant worldview with their own (and shared) perspectives become significant not merely for what they have done but more importantly for what they set out to do. That the Biennale is the site for appearances and disappearances is interesting beyond a critique of centres and peripheries, as a snapshot of a broader political landscape. It is where our sights can, and in this microcosm it is made easier, be set on the things that slip between the cracks both here and back in the ‘real’ world – amidst the dreamlike dances of the nomadic Windswept Women: The Old Girls’ Troupe (2009) by Miwa Yanagi embodying both past and future, the subtle scents of forest trees and coffee grounds dispensed in Hague Yang’s installations Sallim (2009) and Series of Vulnerable Arrangements (2009), and the perception through touch in Susan MacWilliam’s Dermo Optics (2006) as well as her other explorations in psychical research. Here is where one perhaps might be able in the midst of the crowd, grandeur and clamour sense the tremors from beneath one’s feet, listen for the groundswell before it becomes a roar – before this too makes it into reality.

(JY)

Exhibition websites:

Estonia (link: http://www.cca.ee)

Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark (http://www.oca.no/press/venice_2009_2.shtml)

Germany (link: http://www.deutscher-pavillon.org)

Japan (link: http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_feature?lang=en)

Northern Ireland (link: http://www.northernirelandvenice.com)

Palestine (link: http://www.palestinecoveniceb09.org/Homepage.html)

South Korea (link: http://www.korean-pavilion.or.kr/09pavilion)