I first visited the Venice Biennale in 2005. It was ridiculously crowded and that is the main reason that I haven’t been back since. I considered going in 2017 to see Damian Hirst’s “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable” at the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana, which was one of that year’s collateral events. In the end I didn’t go, which I now deeply regret.
And so, when I read that this year the collateral events would include retrospectives by Pierre Huyghe and Julie Mehretu and an exhibition by Berlinde de Bruyckere inside a church, I didn’t have to think twice about going. The only choice was between Spring and Autumn. I opted for Autumn, but perhaps Spring would have been the better choice, because some collateral events had already ended when I visited and it probably doesn’t make any difference for the crowds.
There was a lot to see, but very little that stopped me in my tracks. I never quite understand why biennales need to have a theme. Why not just show great contemporary art from around the world? This year the theme of the main exhibition was “Foreigners Everywhere”. And so there was a lot of bad political art and little interesting abstract or conceptual art.
The best country pavilion by a mile was the Australian pavilion. I found it profoundly moving and a welcome reprieve from the silliness at many other pavilions. I had to queue more than 15 minutes to get inside, but it was well worth the wait.
“kith and kin” by the Australian First Nations artist Archie Moore is a memorial to 65,000 years of Aboriginal Australian history. Archie Moore has covered the black walls of the pavilion with a huge family tree in white chalk lines going back thousands of years, all the way to the dawn of humanity. The chalk lines continue on to the ceiling, where they become like stars in the night sky. Large holes represent wars, epidemics and natural disasters or perhaps simply gaps in the historical record. The center of the pavilion is occupied by a reflective water basin. In the middle of the basin stands a large square table with piles of documents. These are inquests into the deaths of Aboriginals who died in police custody in the years from 1991 to today. The names of the victims have been erased.
I also liked the Danish pavilion, which had been handed to Inuuteq Storch, a photographer from Greenland, which people often forget is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Many of the photos look like, and may well be, snapshots from a family album. They show life in all its ordinariness. But the ordinary is in fact quite extraordinary. The installation shows photography’s power as a cultural, social and historical document.
The Italian pavilion was also quite interesting. It consists of three spaces, which can be entered from two sides. One room is almost empty except for a long square tube with a small sculpture of a Buddhist figure on one end. The other room has been filled with a labyrinth of scaffolding. At the center is a pool where a symmetrical wave rises and falls. I didn’t realize at first that the garden is also part of the installation. There was not much to it, except that I liked both rooms.
I had completely forgotten that Venice is actually quite nice. The only problem is that there are so many other people who think so too. So perhaps in two years I will go again, because this time around I hadn't scheduled enough time for exploring Venice itself.