By Mike Watson

Tuula Närhinen, Baltic Sea Plastique (2013–2014), videostill

Just one day into a recent seven day trip to Finland it was evident that my usual line of inquiry in relation to state cultural provision and its alternatives was not particularly relevant.

In Italy, where I have resided since 2008, a void left by failing state and municipal support has been filled by a strong nationwide movement of occupation widely known as the Bene Comune movement (‘Common Good’), seizing public institutions in danger of being privatized or abandoned such as Rome’s Teatro Valle. Such a model, which has gained worldwide attention for its emphasis on the common (i.e. neither state nor private) ownership of cultural institutions and the public sphere could perhaps be effectively applied elsewhere. In the UK, for example, where the coalition government has applied a slash and burn policy across social sectors, aside from student tuition fee protests, a Bene Comune type movement seems conspicuously absent, not least in the art context. In Finland, arts provision seems generous, if not luxurious in comparison – with working grants of six months to five years available to artists. That said, with a view to Finland’s upcoming general election on 19 April 2015, arts funding could be one of the casualties.

I started my research trip with a visit to the city of Oulu in northern Finland, hosted by the Finnish Cultural Foundation as an international curator for their Pohjavirta (‘Undercurrent’) project, which will fund eight outdoor works across the region of Northern Ostrobothnia (where Oulu is located), to be completed by Summer 2015. In the five days in which I stayed in Oulu I undertook studio and on-site visits with artists Eeva Kaisa Jakkila and Jussi Valtakari, Rita Porkka, Tero Mäkelä and Johanna Riepula, Jouna Karsi, and Joonas Mikola, covering a distance of 650 km.
Over that time I quickly came to see the Finnish artists I encountered as being deeply committed both to ‘nature’ and to a strong sense of community. Perhaps the work most emblematic of this tendency is that planned by husband and wife partnership Eeva Kaisa Jakkila and Jussi Valtakari as part of the Pohjavirta project. The artist duo envisage constructing a wooden bridge to reconnect a small island to the town of Taivalkoski, allowing its inhabitants to take advantage of rural wilderness largely unshaped by human hands. Whilst the public work, which will be finished by July 2015, could be seen as an instance in which the artist supplements the role of the state or council in town planning, this would not be possible if the local and national authorities in Finland were not so open to arts projects. The Finish Cultural Foundation is a private entity largely sponsored by bequeathments and other donations, yet it operates within a wider social context favorable to artistic activity.

Eeva Kaisa Jakkila, Talvi Valoa (Winter Light), 2013, watercolour

Indeed, one might ask what there could be to rally against in a country which enjoys the benefits of an education system which is the envy of the world, and where water quality, air quality, levels of employment and pay are better than in the average OECD country? The answer, it seems, is that in a country that still has a model of social welfare which others either never had or are becoming nostalgic for, the primary motivating political cause would appear to be ecology. In fact, astoundingly, in the five days I spent in the Northern Ostrobothnia region and the following three spent in Helsinki, ecological issues were cited by every single artist and arts professional with whom I spoke as a primary concern. This is more significant if one considers that the Pohjavirta project – in which the final eight projects were selected from over 100 submissions by four curators – has no specific intrinsic focus on ecology. In a country with a huge functioning state, the way in which a consideration of macro level politics and the role of the state is virtually leapfrogged in favour of a consideration of humankind’s relation with the great outdoors is impressive. However, it remains to be understood whether it isn’t precisely the state’s own role in the perceived deterioration of the relationship between nature and the individual human that needs to be taken into account.

The exhibition ‘Checkpoint Leonardo’ at OMA– Oulu’s Museum of Art – examined the relation between art and science. The fifteen artists involved focused upon physical, chemical, audio and biological phenomena and psychology. Works of note included Antti Tenetz’s Tracing (2014), a two screen video installation presenting research in which the artist used drones, underwater cameras and other means of surveillance to follow the paths of trout and wolves in Northern Finland; and Tuula Närhinen’s Baltic Sea Plastique (2013–14), a video installation with accompanying sculptures made of plastic refuse. In the video we see plastic debris take on an almost animate form as it ebbs and flows with the sea’s current, underlining what appears to be a central fear for Finnish artists: in an increasingly digitalized society there is a risk of nature becoming engulfed by manmade clutter – the detritus of industrial production – while the chatter of informational data comes to predominate people’s minds. Finland, with its sparse population (it has a population density of18 people per km² as opposed to 212 per km² in the UK) and relatively unspoiled environment has, again, everything to lose. When a century’s old balance between humankind and nature begins to falter, perhaps it is the government which needs to put capitalist production in check.

Tuula Närhinen Baltic Sea Plastique (2013–2014), videostill

With Finland’s economy having endured a number of blows in the last seven years it is liable that austerity – effectively having become a byword for the slashing of public expenditure – will be a key electoral issue, although overtures will certainly be made by the principle parties to the Green lobby. In 2014 the Green Party departed from Alexander Stubbs’s coalition government following opposition to plans to build a Nuclear power station in the municipality of Pyhäjoki. This followed the departure of the Left Alliance following opposition to welfare cuts and left the coalition government with 102 seats, one more than they need to command a majority.

With the Green and pro-Welfare lobbies perhaps being crucial to the outcome of the coming election, the voices of Finnish cultural practitioners may become relevant, even though there seems to be a relative lack of directly political statements as they are put forth in, say, Italy or Greece. This is due to firstly their preoccupation with ecology, giving visibility to issues which could affect an election outcome, and secondly because arts expenditure is often the first thing to be cut by an administration practicing ‘austerity’. It is in this light that The Finnish Arts Policy Summit was organized in November 2014, in Helsinki, bringing together 520 people.

Organized by Israeli artist Dana Yahalomi, the Baltic Circle and Checkpoint Helsinki (a new arts commissioning body in Helsinki) the conference invited current and prospective cultural policy makers to pitch their vision of Finland’s future cultural policy. Amongst the things that emerged was a strong desire to appeal to private money via, for example, tax relief for art purchasers – one sign of what could turn out to be a general neo-liberal turn in cultural funding policy. In the background of this debate looms a discussion about the projected Guggenheim Museum in Helsinki. The project – proposed by the Guggenheim Solomon R. Foundation – was rejected by the Helsinki city board in 2012, partly due to high cost and lack of public transparency. Following this, a new proposal has resulted, in 2013, in an open architectural competition, in response to a space set aside by the municipality at Eteläsatama, the southern harbour area which is a short walk from Helsinki’s central railway station and immediately visible when arriving by sea.

one of the six short-listed, anonymised architectural proposals for Guggenheim Helsinki

A shortlist of six proposals has been selected by an international jury chaired by Mark Wigley, the winner of which will be announced in June (at the current stage, though the six finalists have been named, their respective projects are kept anonymous). The private project is liable to enjoy state funding (around one million euros per year according to recent estimates), though it may arguably also generate considerable tax revenue and profit, whilst helping to place Helsinki firmly on the international art map. ‘The Next Helsinki’ is a competing competition critical of the Guggenheim plan, attempting to offer – to quote from the initiative’s website– alternatives ‘to the trends of luxury branding, mono-culturization, top-down decision-making processes and privatization of common goods’, again with an international jury chaired by Michael Sorkin, whom will announce competition results on 20 April.

Whatever the outcome of these competitions, and of the upcoming general election, it is clear that there is much at stake as one of the world’s most generous arts funding models is set to undergo changes.

By Carol Yinghua Lu

Tian Gebing's "Totally Happy" (2015). Photo: Liu Yin.

At a time when social issues seem to be conspicuously missing from artistic and curatorial practice in China, the latest work by Beijing-based theatre director Tian Gebing, “Totally Happy”, which was loaded with political content and social critique, provided a much-needed catalyst for a local art world that appears increasingly complacent and insular.

The play was promoted via an email sent by Tian himself and one of the production’s partner institutions, the Goethe Institute in Beijing. The email announced that this free event would have a two-day run at Beijing’s Inside-out Theatre, but it would be an ‘internal rehearsal’ with access by reservation only. I attended the first performance, which consisted of both the play itself and a pre-performance discussion with one of the dramaturges, Christoph Lepschy. Judging from the size of the audience that packed the entry hall of the theatre, Tian has a considerable following as one of the few theatre directors in China not employed by a state theatre company.

Photo: Liu Yin.

Tian, who has been involved in Beijing’s independent theatre activities since the late 1980s, founded the Paper Tiger Theatre Studio in 1997. Since then, the company has produced many of his highly experimental works, which often incorporate improvisational techniques and dance movements. In the last decade, with the Chinese government’s investment in the development of the creative industries, the country’s theatre scene has thrived, thanks to newly built theatres and a nationwide online network of ticket sales. Yet Tian has remained an outsider from this system, which primarily presents and promotes entertaining dramas targeted at a mass market. Many of his productions can only be seen in his own studio or in international theatre festivals outside of China.

Totally Happy was realized as a co-production between Paper Tiger Theatre Studio, Münchner Kammerspiele in Germany and Goethe-Institut China, and was first staged in the Münchner Kammerspiele last October. The fact that the production could not be performed legally and publicly in China spoke volumes about the intricate politics of obtaining the right permission for any form of public expression. To highlight the fact that these two stagings had to be dubbed ‘internal rehearsals’ in order to keep the company out of trouble, Tian opened the play by standing up from his seat in the audience and giving a short speech about his ‘rehearsal’ approach – in this case as a deliberate artistic gesture. Throughout the performance, he occasionally made brief interruptions to give instructions to the actors or to ask them to re-perform certain scenes. In doing so, he became ‘part’ of the performance. Despite their necessity, the interruptions felt somewhat strained and obstructive to the production as a whole.

Photo: Liu Yin.

The initial idea for the play was rooted in Tian’s own childhood experience of growing up, according to him, ‘during the craziest period of “mass movements” in China.’ As Tian says:

‘Everyone, without exception, was swept away by this mass torrent. Since childhood, I was told throughout my education to become a tiny little “screw” in the grand revolutionary career; only in this way could a life become meaningful. Thus, the ideas of individualism and self were synonymous with “sin” and “filth”. Under this heavy, inevitable pressure, the idea of becoming part of the mass actually came from the fear of not being accepted by it, or the times.’

A research-based play two years in the making, Totally Happy took its title from a survey conducted with a randomly chosen group of Chinese people in their 20s and early 30s who were asked to describe their memories of a formative mass experience. As part of the research process, members of Tian’s studio carried out interviews and surveys, both with artists and scholars, as well as with a large pool of other people, about their perception of communal groups and their experience of the ‘mass’. As it turned out, the unanimous answer given by the younger generation of Chinese was ‘Fei Chang Gao Xing’ – ‘totally happy’.

The play itself was a mixture of genres and methods. Comprising a Chinese and European cast and crew, the production was an unusual collage unfolding in time, bringing together different texts and statements from news reports, research interviews, fiction, and documentaries, fragments of which became words and lines articulated by the performers. Both Chinese and German were spoken on stage, with translations appearing on screens at both sides. The movement on stage – both individual and collective – and the interactions among performers were based on stories, events, images and emotions drawn from research into the histories and phenomena of masses of various cultural and historical periods, in China and beyond. Their totality, as the director wrote, aspired to ‘an accidental encyclopaedia of mass performances in performance.’

Photo: Liu Yin.

For a Chinese audience, certain references were obvious: scenes alternately recalled pollution and the public fear of it; the panic of the SARS outbreak in China in 2003; the socialist revolutionary sculptures and figures in paintings that have adorned public spaces in China since the 1950s; a square-dance that is performed by thousands of small groups of middle-aged women in public squares across the country as a form of exercise; the desperation and suicide of a seven-member family; moments of revolutions, group excitement and blindness, and so on. Equally, references to Germany’s Third Reich were symbolic but highly recognizable.

The play, full of references to both historical and contemporary moments, and to Chinese and European contexts, did not proceed linearly. Rather, it was like an unravelling string of re-enactments and portraits of mass commotion and evidence of group mentality, sometimes charged with pointed forthrightness and deafening energy, other times filled with the poison of mutual destruction and distrust. The play presented the paradox of being an individual who makes up a collective, a condition that sometimes contradicts the needs of individual existence.

Photo: Liu Yin.

Ultimately, the ‘risk’ of staging such a production in China lies in its demonstration of deep disbelief in any form of ‘mass movement’. As such, the play contradicts the government’s mandate and persistent rhetoric for creating a harmonious front in Chinese society toward the outside world, and keeping the collective in order to defuse any threats to their power. Recalling the increasing number of uniformed and plain-clothes police force that have recently appeared across Beijing – even in public buses that run through some of the most heavily guarded areas, such as Tian’anmen Square – the cost of maintaining a unified ‘totally happy’ front is running higher and higher for the government.

Thanks to the electric performance of the cast and the exceptional, minimalist set design, the two-hour performance was evenly paced and remained engaging throughout. Perhaps most memorable was the lighting, which transformed the simple stage and cast the different scenarios with subtly different emotions. There is no doubt Tian has tapped into one of the most fundamental and relevant issues in Chinese society, if not in the global community today: the potential and yet the blindness and destructive nature of any large group or mass movement.

Carol Yinghua Lu

By Chris Fite-Wassilak

Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, The Death Show (2014), Sequences VII in Reykjavik

‘Pipes over here, pipes over there – poison in the water, what are you doing here?’ I wondered the same thing myself, hearing the line delivered as a freestyle rap by the hirsute artist Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson. A small group of us gathered around him in one of the ornately decorated lobbies of the Hotel Holt, a venerated Reykjavik institution that also houses Iceland’s largest private art collection, watching his performance ‘The Death Show’ (2014).

Shifting between autobiographical guided tour, book sales pitch and forced meditation session, Guðmundsson’s surreal shaggy dog story was a meditation on mortality elicited by a leaky water boiler and old lead pipes in the artist’s house. Playing various roles, his mortal concerns were refracted through contractual legal speak, the quack hip-hop doctor encountered above, and then finally leading us up to one of the hotel rooms where, improbably, a blue-skinned embodiment of a deity seated on the bed asked us to sit down and told us: ‘Do not worry about death. We all die successfully.’ But whether a legal agreement, medical language or yoga-talk, Guðmundsson’s tour suggests that each is just a rhetorical spin on the same problem that has no solution.

The Death Show was one of the remarkable moments in this year’s Sequences, the seventh edition of Reykjavik’s ‘real time festival’ – a phrase that tries to slip around words like ‘live’, ‘performance’, ‘time-based’, ‘durational’, opting instead to just be real. And in time. (What isn’t?) Sequences began as an informal artist-led event in 2006; since 2009, it has been held biannually. This was the first time the festival looked abroad to find an artistic curator, inviting Alfredo Cramerotti, director of MOSTYN in northern Wales, who gathered 26 artists for the 10-day festival (half Icelandic and half from a mix of UK, Germany, Denmark, Italy and Estonia).

Cramerotti also evidently took ‘real time’ to mean mainly video, supported by a few performative sculptures, and a handful of actual performances. Which made Guðmundsson’s jaunt around the hotel all the more notable, in that, despite its morbid topic, it gleefully threw in dashes of sculpture, drawing and music, and felt nicely open-ended and unresolved.

Hanna Kristín Birgisdóttir, ‘Like a breath being compressed into a high pitched sound’, 2015

It was also, coincidentally, one of the few works that directly referenced Cramerotti’s curatorial theme of ‘Plumbing’. The theme sounded vaguely ridiculous, but in a country that gets all its hot water and heating from the geological fault line it straddles, and has billionaires built on bottling its natural springs, it seemed like a reasonable enough starting point to think about pipes, carriers and tubes: from oil and water pipes, blood vessels and digestive tracts to data-carrying cables. Which is to say, things that are moved, shifted and transported, in a ‘conduit to another state’ as the curator put it. (Again, what isn’t?)

‘Veinous’ is the word Carolee Schneemann used to describe her own work in an interview as part of her show at the artist-run gallery Kling & Bang, a sort of mini-retrospective of the artist’s signature works including Up to and Including Her Limits (1973–76) and the photo series ‘Eye Body’ (1963). Schneemann was this year’s honorary artist, a ‘symbolic role’ that was meant to serve as a sort of reference point or influence on the artists exhibiting throughout the festival. Alongside Schneemann in Kling & Bang, the young Icelandic artist Hanna Kristín Birgisdóttir kicked off the festival with her work Like a breath being compressed into a high pitched sound (2015), using a big machine to drill a small hole in the concrete just outside the gallery.

The theme and honorary artist, though, seemed more like MacGuffins or excuses to branch out; following this, I didn’t find myself thinking about plumbing, or Schneemann’s writhing, struggling bodies, for the rest of my visit. Cramerotti’s selection was an unusual gathering of older and younger artists presenting mostly new work, and his agenda seemed not to have any single, firework-like highlights, but more a set of even, medium-release events. Instead he highlighted Sequences’ role as one of the galvanizers and catalysts in the closely-knit and hyperactive Reykjavik art scene, where in a capital city of just over 120,000, the politics of family and friendship are always near the surface.

Helgi Þórsson, ‘Sequences Baby Doll Bar’ (2015)

Perhaps most evident of this was Helgi Þórsson’s _Sequences Baby Doll Bar _(2015), a colourful mash-up of pink linoleum, psychedelic stalagmite sculptures and Day-Glo paintings of pots set up as music venue Mengi’s working bar. It’s an installation the painter, sculptor and musican has done frequently in the past, as a fun, vibrant social structure. Þórsson, as one of the co-founders of the artist-run space Kunstschlager, was also involved in the non-stop parallel off-site program, handing out blue candy floss to children in a normally abandoned mall atrium, filled for one day with drawings, sculptures, videos and performances by over a dozen artists. Social critique it was not, but it was outward looking, and, dare I say, interactive.

The inverse representative of the scene might have been Kolbeinn Hugi Höskuldsson’s Plato’s Parable of Light Astral Pavillion 3D (2015), an installation of three projections intersecting on an opaque plastic tent at Loftsson, a concrete shell of a former supermarket and soon-to-be-hotel, and one of the festival’s main venues. At the opening, the tent held nine performers: three staring intently at computer screens, each building their own abstract worlds in the software programme SketchUp, which were simultaneously projected onto the tent. Inside were three keyboard players providing an ambient drone soundtrack, and three people simply lying on the ground, staring upwards and taking turns with a microphone. (They were speaking in Icelandic, but apparently they were attempting to describe what they saw in the projections above them).

Margrét H. Blöndal, ‘Felldur’ (Field, 2015)

The tent seemed a cool and comforting play space, with blankets and bright flashing colours, but it also seemed to flag up an undercurrent in much of Cramerotti’s selection. Alongside hermetic works like Helga Griffiths’s video Brainscape (2011), where the artist dwelt on a digital scan of her own brain, or Beatrice Pediconi’s projection 9’/Unlimited (2013) which surrounded you with morphing smoke, glitter and bubbles, the ‘plumbing’ space he envisioned seemed to be a sort of immersive crawl space, where we might retreat and revel in sensations. Many of these works asked us to look inside ourselves, to begin an inward journey. And stay there.

When this introspection turned to discovery – where it seemed that sense of an inward journey led to something that could be brought back and shared – it provided some of the deepest moments of the festival. On the top floor of Loftsson, in a curved attic room was Finboggi Pétursson’s Tesla Tune (2015), a homemade organ made from cardboard tubes of varying length suspended from the ceiling. Each tube held a transmitter playing the same 50-Hz frequency, the sequence creating a driving rhythm that was both calming and exhilarating, and primally satisfying. In Harbinger, a newly opened space in a former fish shop, Margrét H. Blöndal’s Felldur (Field, 2015) comprised five sparse sculptures that barely occupied the storefront room. Every piece sprouted from the wall, hanging down on its own weight by sticks and cord, balancing small assemblages of cloth, plastic and wood, each feeling like an unanswered question.

Finboggi Pétursson, ‘Tesla Tune’ (2015)

So what’s all this got to do with a blocked toilet? Cramerotti’s ‘Plumbing’, in relying mainly on his selection of video works, gave the sense that much of the festival had already happened, that the ‘real time’ was somewhere in the past. What gave this Sequences festival its presence was inevitably the oft-mentioned dynamism of the Reykjavik scene itself, which still will need to temper its introspective tendencies and ask itself difficult questions as it grows.

One inadvertent, perhaps subconscious, answer was provided on the outskirts of town, in the newly relocated Living Art Museum, where Margrét Helga Sesseljudóttir’s sculptural installation So a little pissypants named Itzy got all huffy with you, I see. You are a rainbow (2015) sprawled across the first floor, with all the familiar parts of a bedroom taken apart, reconfigured and remade into precarious, bizarre assemblages. Suction cups from the underside of a bathtub mat lined a pink mirror, while something that looked like tuna mixed with wax sat in a dog bowl and spread across the windowsill. The soundtrack from Jordan Baseman’s short film Little Boy (2014), a dense howl of static and wind, crossed over the installation, turning it into an eerie post-apocalyptic setting, the suggestion of what we might make of the domesticities that surround us after the fallout. Perhaps this venue stood out because between these two works it provided the festival’s one glimpse of destruction, a moment that also felt peculiarly optimistic in that it didn’t hesitate to just begin again, to built the world anew.

Chris Fite-Wassilak

By Joseph Akel

Opened in 2012, the Heydar Aliyev Center, designed by Zaha Hadid, was not without controversy when it first opened

Driving into Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, at 1:30 in the morning, a line from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice came to mind. Speeding past rows of newly-built but noticeably vacant high rises, the glowing orb of the yet-to-be completed Baku National Stadium – the main venue for the inaugural European Games which the city will host in June – and shuttered shop fronts bearing the illuminated signage of Western luxury brands, the Bard’s words seemed duly apropos. “All that glisters is not gold.”

However, in the case of Azerbaijan, a Soviet Republic until 1991, oil, takes the place of that precious metal. As far back as the turn of the 20th century, the crescent shaped harbour of Baku was dotted with decorous mansions belonging to the likes of Rothschild’s and the Nobel brothers who owned a petroleum company in the city. The arrival of the Soviet regime meant the nation’s oil production was siphoned to feed the energy needs of the USSR but, since its independence, the nation has increasingly seen its coffers awash in petro-dollars. According to the World Bank, in the last two decades, Azerbaijan has seen its GDP grow from US$5 billion dollars in 2000 to US$79 billion this past year.

All around Baku, signs of its Soviet past are never far off

Like any nation newly established after a complex, fraught history, Azerbaijan looks to have its sight set firmly on the future. And, with its vast reserves of oil-based wealth, it’s in a position to distance itself from the past at breakneck pace. Among the beneficiaries of Azerbaijan’s re-emergence onto the international stage is its arts scene, with the nation’s government pouring vast resources into the promotion of its cultural tradition as well as its burgeoning contemporary art scene.

From the Palace of the Shirvanshahs, a 15th century royal complex in Baku’s old quarter, one can view both communist-era housing blocks and newer additions to the city’s skyline

Due largely to the decades of state-mandated education in the arts and the ideological threads that have informed it, the contemporary art scene in Azerbaijan has, until recently, been relatively modest in size, with a handful of galleries clustered in and around the city’s historic quarter. Near the Palace of the Shirvanshahs, a vast 15th century royal complex of tombs and cloistered rooms, Kiçik QalArt, founded in 2009, offers a modest roster of local artists. Within walking distance, one can also find QGallery. Founded by artist Salkhab Mammadov in 1999, the gallery was, for some time, one of the few venues where contemporary artists in Baku could exhibit their work. However, in light of recent political and economic developments and the rise of an emergent wealthy class with disposable incomes, newer galleries are beginning to spring up, among them, the decidedly posher Gazelli Art House – with a satellite space on Dover Street in London – which exhibits a slim line-up of mostly non-Azeri artists.

One of three previous presidential sedans on display at the Heydar Aliyev Center

To be sure, Azerbaijan, like the former Soviet republics that border the Caspian Sea (Turkmenistan and Khazakstan), has not been without its share of political growing pains, undergoing a transition of governance from a ruling Politburo elite to a nascent democracy. The nation’s Soviet-era leader, Haydar Aliyev (a former KGB general), subsequently became the nation’s third post-Soviet president, succeeded by his son, the current president, Ilham Aliyev. With this dynastic consolidation of power, there has followed charges of systemic corruption. Freedom of speech too, has been an issue for the small nation. As recently as 2013, Amnesty International accused Ilham Aliyev of suppressing political opposition during the country’s elections which resulted in him winning his third term in office. Acknowledging this to a degree, the Azeri government has made concerted efforts to put its best foot forward in what many see as an attempt to rehabilitate the country’s tarnished image.

Faig Ahmed’s installation at the new Yarat Center, Embroidery Space, 2012

Chief among them, is a concerted campaign to promote the cultural heritage of the Azeri people. Opening in 2014 the Zaha Hadid-designed Heydar Aliyev Center, perched atop a terraced hill, is perhaps the nation’s grandest statement to-date. A vibrant white undulating structure, the centre was built to house art, artefacts and performance that celebrate Azeri cultural achievements. During my visit, exhibitions included a series of miniature replicas of the nation’s leading architectural monuments. In a moment worthy of a scene from a Spike Jonze movie, I stood before a scale model of the very same building I was in. Other museums on the Baku must-see list include the newly built National Carpet Museum (constructed in the form of a rolled-up carpet) and the Baku Museum of Modern Art, built under the initiative of Mehriban Arif qizi Aliyeva, the First Lady of Azerbaijan.

If there can be said to be a driving force behind the sudden growth of the contemporary Azeri art scene, the credit would fall to the YARAT Contemporary Art Space, a multifaceted not-for-profit institution comprising exhibition spaces, educational facilities as well as artist studios founded in 2011 by Aida Mahmudova, the niece of the First Lady. While many have been quick to make assumptions about Mahmudova’s presidential connections, the 33 year-old has structured the institution such that it relies strictly on donations from patrons and local businesses. In addition, Yay Gallery, YARAT’s commercial exhibition space in the old quarter of the capital, dedicates a portion of all sales towards the upkeep of the institution and the support of its resident artists.

Rashad Alakbarov’s sculpture, Try to Save, 2103 in Yay Gallery. Alakbarov will represent Azerbaijan at this year’s Venice Biennial

Returning to Baku from London in 2010, Mahmudova – an artist herself – recognized the need to offer material and residential support to a new generation of artists choosing to remain in Azerbaijan. Since founding YARAT in 2011 with fellow artists Faig Ahmed and Farid Resulov and several others, the last five years have seen its affiliated artists showcased in ever more high profile settings. Indeed, this will be second time in as many years that YARAT artists will represent Azerbaijan at the Venice Biennale.

During my visit, YARAT had just moved to a new, expanded space, housed in a former Soviet-era Naval warehouse. For the opening show, exiled Iranian artist, Shirin Neshat was commissioned to create a series of more than 50 large-scale black and white photographic portraits depicting Azeris both young and old. Titled The Home of My Eyes (2015) Neshat prompted her subjects to ruminate on the meaning of ‘home’, their responses transcribed by Neshat, who first translated them into Farsi before delicately transcribing them upon the surface of the respective photographs.

Plans for several new sculptural works in the studio of Farid Rasulov

While Neshat’s photographic project sought to depict a common identity amongst Azeris, the works of Ahmed and Resulov in many ways point in the opposite direction, towards the awareness of a rapidly changing national identity and the potential for dislocation to arise out of it. Resulov’s most recent sculptural works find the artist painstakingly carving intricate Islamic geometric patterns into commercial, everyday timber. For Resulov, his installations point towards the rapidity of Baku’s urban development and its effects not only upon the city’s traditional architecture, but its broader culture. Meanwhile, Ahmed’s deconstructed kilims and rugs, including Flood of Yellow Light (2012), can be understood to depict the loosening of the very threads that have, for so many centuries, come to define the Azeri cultural identity. Change, no doubt, is coming fast to Azerbaijan. The question that remains is whether the promise it offers is far more than the illusion of prosperity.

By Joseph Akel

The Heydar Aliyev Center, designed by Zaha Hadid, was not without controversy when it first opened in 2012

Driving into Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, at 1:30 in the morning, a line from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice came to mind. Speeding past rows of newly-built but noticeably vacant high rises, the glowing orb of the yet-to-be completed Baku National Stadium – the main venue for the inaugural European Games which the city will host in June – and shuttered shop fronts bearing the illuminated signage of Western luxury brands, the Bard’s words seemed duly apropos. “All that glisters is not gold.”

However, in the case of Azerbaijan, a Soviet Republic until 1991, oil, takes the place of that precious metal. As far back as the turn of the 20th century, the crescent shaped harbour of Baku was dotted with decorous mansions belonging to the likes of Rothschild’s and the Nobel brothers who owned a petroleum company in the city. The arrival of the Soviet regime meant the nation’s oil production was siphoned to feed the energy needs of the USSR but, since its independence, the nation has increasingly seen its coffers awash in petro-dollars. According to the World Bank, in the last two decades, Azerbaijan has seen its GDP grow from US$5 billion dollars in 2000 to US$79 billion this past year.

All around Baku, signs of its Soviet past are never far off

Like any nation newly established after a complex, fraught history, Azerbaijan looks to have its sight set firmly on the future. And, with its vast reserves of oil-based wealth, it’s in a position to distance itself from the past at breakneck pace. Among the beneficiaries of Azerbaijan’s re-emergence onto the international stage is its arts scene, with the nation’s government pouring vast resources into the promotion of its cultural tradition as well as its burgeoning contemporary art scene.

From the Palace of the Shirvanshahs, a 15th century royal complex in Baku’s old quarter, one can view both communist-era housing blocks and newer additions to the city’s skyline

Due largely to the decades of state-mandated education in the arts and the ideological threads that have informed it, the contemporary art scene in Azerbaijan has, until recently, been relatively modest in size, with a handful of galleries clustered in and around the city’s historic quarter. Near the Palace of the Shirvanshahs, a vast 15th century royal complex of tombs and cloistered rooms, Kiçik QalArt, founded in 2009, offers a modest roster of local artists. Within walking distance, one can also find QGallery. Founded by artist Salkhab Mammadov in 1999, the gallery was, for some time, one of the few venues where contemporary artists in Baku could exhibit their work. However, in light of recent political and economic developments and the rise of an emergent wealthy class with disposable incomes, newer galleries are beginning to spring up, among them, the decidedly posher Gazelli Art House – with a satellite space on Dover Street in London – which exhibits a slim line-up of mostly non-Azeri artists.

One of three previous presidential sedans on display at the Heydar Aliyev Center

To be sure, Azerbaijan, like the former Soviet republics that border the Caspian Sea (Turkmenistan and Khazakstan), has not been without its share of political growing pains, undergoing a transition of governance from a ruling Politburo elite to a nascent democracy. The nation’s Soviet-era leader, Haydar Aliyev (a former KGB general), subsequently became the nation’s third post-Soviet president, succeeded by his son, the current president, Ilham Aliyev. With this dynastic consolidation of power, there has followed charges of systemic corruption. Freedom of speech too, has been an issue for the small nation. As recently as 2013, Amnesty International accused Ilham Aliyev of suppressing political opposition during the country’s elections which resulted in him winning his third term in office. Acknowledging this to a degree, the Azeri government has made concerted efforts to put its best foot forward in what many see as an attempt to rehabilitate the country’s tarnished image.

Faig Ahmed’s installation at the new Yarat Center, Embroidery Space, 2012

Chief among them, is a concerted campaign to promote the cultural heritage of the Azeri people. Opening in 2014 the Zaha Hadid-designed Heydar Aliyev Center, perched atop a terraced hill, is perhaps the nation’s grandest statement to-date. A vibrant white undulating structure, the centre was built to house art, artefacts and performance that celebrate Azeri cultural achievements. During my visit, exhibitions included a series of miniature replicas of the nation’s leading architectural monuments. In a moment worthy of a scene from a Spike Jonze movie, I stood before a scale model of the very same building I was in. Other museums on the Baku must-see list include the newly built National Carpet Museum (constructed in the form of a rolled-up carpet) and the Baku Museum of Modern Art, built under the initiative of Mehriban Arif qizi Aliyeva, the First Lady of Azerbaijan.

If there can be said to be a driving force behind the sudden growth of the contemporary Azeri art scene, the credit would fall to the YARAT Contemporary Art Space, a multifaceted not-for-profit institution comprising exhibition spaces, educational facilities as well as artist studios founded in 2011 by Aida Mahmudova, the niece of the First Lady. While many have been quick to make assumptions about Mahmudova’s presidential connections, the 33 year-old has structured the institution such that it relies strictly on donations from patrons and local businesses. In addition, Yay Gallery, YARAT’s commercial exhibition space in the old quarter of the capital, dedicates a portion of all sales towards the upkeep of the institution and the support of its resident artists.

Rashad Alakbarov’s sculpture, Try to Save, 2103 in Yay Gallery. Alakbarov will represent Azerbaijan at this year’s Venice Biennial

Returning to Baku from London in 2010, Mahmudova – an artist herself – recognized the need to offer material and residential support to a new generation of artists choosing to remain in Azerbaijan. Since founding YARAT in 2011 with fellow artists Faig Ahmed and Farid Resulov and several others, the last five years have seen its affiliated artists showcased in ever more high profile settings. Indeed, this will be second time in as many years that YARAT artists will represent Azerbaijan at the Venice Biennale.

During my visit, YARAT had just moved to a new, expanded space, housed in a former Soviet-era Naval warehouse. For the opening show, exiled Iranian artist, Shirin Neshat was commissioned to create a series of more than 50 large-scale black and white photographic portraits depicting Azeris both young and old. Titled The Home of My Eyes (2015) Neshat prompted her subjects to ruminate on the meaning of ‘home’, their responses transcribed by Neshat, who first translated them into Farsi before delicately transcribing them upon the surface of the respective photographs.

Plans for several new sculptural works in the studio of Farid Rasulov

While Neshat’s photographic project sought to depict a common identity amongst Azeris, the works of Ahmed and Resulov in many ways point in the opposite direction, towards the awareness of a rapidly changing national identity and the potential for dislocation to arise out of it. Resulov’s most recent sculptural works find the artist painstakingly carving intricate Islamic geometric patterns into commercial, everyday timber. For Resulov, his installations point towards the rapidity of Baku’s urban development and its effects not only upon the city’s traditional architecture, but its broader culture. Meanwhile, Ahmed’s deconstructed kilims and rugs, including Flood of Yellow Light (2012), can be understood to depict the loosening of the very threads that have, for so many centuries, come to define the Azeri cultural identity. Change, no doubt, is coming fast to Azerbaijan. The question that remains is whether the promise it offers is far more than the illusion of prosperity.

By Dan Fox

A view of the new Whitney Museum of American Art from the Hudson River (Photo: Karin Jobst)

It may look like a state-of-the-art sanitation plant from the outside – or, with its gun-metal paint job, the bridge of a aircraft carrier – but inside, Renzo Piano’s new building for The Whitney Museum of American Art is a winner. From the light and airy lobby, surrounded by glass, to the Richard Artschwager-designed elevators and from the spacious galleries with extensive views across the Hudson River to the ‘All Gender’ bathrooms, ‘the new Whitney’, as everyone’s calling it, is a museum that works hard for the art it contains, and - fingers crossed - for the visitors who will come to see it.

The building opens to the public on 1 May, but in the final weeks of April it’s halls have seen a whirl of press viewings and fancy shindigs. Word on the museum has so far been, for the most part, overwhelmingly positive. Located at the southernmost point of the wildly popular High Line public park, and surrounded by the top-flight boutiques, hotels and restaurants of the terminally gentrified Meatpacking District, the institution has moved away from the old-money-and-museums zone of the Upper East Side to the centre of New York’s consumer tourism industry. In an era when art institutions seem to be playing out their identity crises through ever more gigantic building projects and confused programming this move might signal a number of shifts both pragmatic and symbolic (see Jerry Saltz’s recent in-depth report in New York magazine on the museums arms-race), and yet the Whitney also appears to have gone back to first principles, albeit on a grand scale, placing front and centre both the needs of its collection and the need to be flexible to what artists might want. Two entire floors are now set aside for the museum’s permanent collection, throwing into relief how cramped and inadequate the old Marcel Breuer building uptown was for this purpose. There are 5,000 square feet now dedicated to the museum’s library, archives, works on paper study centre, and conservation department. (A huge improvement on the conservation team’s tiny working space back at the Breuer building.) A 170-seat theatre, which can be opened up to dramatic views across the Hudson, now gives the Whitney a purpose-built space in which to show performance. This theatre sits next door to a dedicated education centre. A total of 18,000 square feet are given over to the museum’s special exhibition galleries – ‘the largest column-free museum gallery’ in the city, according to the Whitney’s press blurb. The museum also now has approximately 13,000 square feet of outdoor exhibition space. Whilst all this increased space to play with must be welcome for the Whitney’s curators, the museum has not gone so far as to create pointlessly vast aircraft hangars in which only gigantic Paul McCarthy inflatables and torqued steel Richard Serra sculptures can hold their own.

Anticipating more of the kind of extreme weather that flooded the west side of Manhattan during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the museum has installed a flood mitigation system to protect the building and its contents. (Running up to the inauguration of the museum, campaign groups have tried to highlight another environmental threat to the Whitney from it’s proximity to a Spectra natural gas pipeline vault, which runs adjacent to the building. Protestors have also argued that this represents a missed opportunity for the museum to address broader problems surrounding the fossil fuel industry and climate change.) At both ends of each floor of exhibition spaces are huge windows, looking over the Hudson River on the west side of the museum, and across Manhattan to the east. Not only do these bring light inside the museum, the views speak to the Whitney’s relationship to the city that nurtured so many artists in its collections, and to the ghosts of the pre-gentrification Meatpacking District and riverside piers. (The museum looks out over the old site of Pier 52, at the very end of Gansevoort Street where the Department of Sanitation now has a parking lot. It was here, 40 years ago, in 1975, that Gordon Matta-Clark made his monumental architectural intervention ‘Day’s End’.) Furthermore, the view across the river to another state, New Jersey, is a subtle reminder that, despite its command of the historical narrative, New York is not the only place in the US where art gets made.

‘America is Hard to See’, installation view, 2015. (Photo: Nic Lehoux)

For all the nostalgic laments about the Whitney vacating the brutalist Breuer building, the fact that the museum functioned for so long in that dark, heavy upper east side art cave seems a little surprising. That nostalgia will soon fade; the Breuer had been the museum’s home for almost 50 years, but people forget that it was already the institution’s third location since it began life in 1914. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open a branch there in March 2016.) Press, art professionals and visitors alike will soon stop swooning over these new premises, and the hard work of following up on the whizz-bang fun of inauguration with thoughtful programming and community-mindedness (to the local art scene, to the neighbourhood, to the city) will begin in earnest. But first-flush excitement over Piano’s Whitney makes MoMA’s current building look all the more depressing, with its overcrowded and bland halls, which have all the charm of a large international bank or airport terminal. MoMA’s own expansion plans might turn out to be, by comparison, a whole load of effort for little gain. The Guggenheim, meanwhile, seems increasingly like an eccentric aunt who has some great outfits and stories to tell, but whom you can’t always understand.

‘America is Hard to See’, installation view, 2015. (Photo: Nic Lehoux)

How the Whitney’s inhabitants will make use of their new house remains to be seen. But the inaugural show of work from the collection, poignantly titled ‘America is Hard to See’ after Robert Frost’s 1951 poem, and a documentary made in 1970 by Emile de Antonio, is impressive. Organized by the museum’s chief curator Donna De Salvo, with a team including Carter E. Foster, Dana Miller and Scott Rothkopf (and assistance from Jane Panetta, Catherine Taft and Mia Curran) ‘America is Hard to See’ features approximately 600 works by just over 400 artists, and runs the history of US art from 1900 to the present, showing the country’s art to be innovative and diverse, angry and political, at times eccentric and funny, at other moments quiet and contemplative. It certainly includes the big hitters – you name them, they’ve got one on the wall – but puts dominant historical figures in minimalism, pop and conceptual art in perspective alongside lesser known artists from across the country. Chicago’s Hairy Who artists sit near New York pop legends; collage and assemblage by Bay Area Beats hang out round the corner from paintings by famous Ab Exers. The show makes a concerted effort to address identity politics, including amongst others works by David Hammons, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Donald Moffett, Lorna Simpson, Fred Wilson and David Wojnarowicz. That said, old institutional problems die hard; the number of women artists included in the show only amounts to just over 30 percent, and as Holland Cotter observed in The New York Times, the only America this exhibition strives to see is the United States. Even in that regard, the show includes the work of just two artists of Native American descent; Jimmie Durham and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet. We do well to remember that the Whitney is a museum of art for only one country in the Americas. It is not an institution for Latin American, Caribbean, or Canadian art, and it is a pity the Whitney has not taken this new phase as a way to consider what the United States means in relation to its geographical neighbours, and histories of migration across North and South America. (A small but iconic photograph taken in the 1970s by the Los Angeles-based group Asco, for example, is one of the few nods to Latino art that I could find in the exhibition.)

Robert Henri, ‘Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’, 1916 (Courtesy: Whitney Museum, New York)

In the ground floor gallery is a small section of ‘America is Hard to See’ devoted to the origins of the Whitney in early 20th century New York. At the entrance to this room is a portrait of its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, painted in 1916 by Robert Henri. Henri was one of the foremost artists of the ‘Ashcan School’, who became famous for their pictures of ordinary life in New York, often depicting run-down and poor areas of the city. In this portrait of Whitney, his patron reclines on a chaise longue, dressed in a chic Chinese-style jacket and green silk trousers cinched at the ankle with red bows. (Her husband was reportedly outraged by the fact she was painted wearing trousers, and refused to have the painting in their home.) With economic disparity one of the most urgent crises in the US today, it felt poignant – and politically pointed – that the first work many visitors will see on entering the new Whitney is a portrait of a vastly wealthy woman, who held progressive views about the role of women in society, painted by a male artist who did not flinch from dirt and depredation in his work. Let’s hope that the new era Whitney will manage to hold within its walls the kind of contrasting, often contradictory perspectives that characterize the US.

An in-depth look at Renzo Piano’s architecture for the new Whitney Museum will appear in the summer issue of frieze.

By Tobi Müller

Lilith Stangenberg and Martin Wuttke in René Pollesch and Dirk von Lowtzow’s Von einem der auszog, weil er sich die Miete nicht mehr leisten konnte (The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth Because He Couldn’t Pay His Rent Anymore, 2015), a current opera production at Volksbühne Berlin (courtesy: LSD & Lenore Blievernicht)

Germany is experiencing its biggest theatre controversy in more than 20 years. The last major dispute erupted in 1993 when Berlin closed the Schiller Theater, as it was no longer able to fund all of the many parallel structures in the city that had been divided until 1989.

(Find the original German version of Tobi Müller’s piecehere)

In 2015, rather than the closure of a theatre shortly after the beginning of a new era, what is at stake here seems more profane: the end of Frank Castorf’s 25-year reign as manager and artistic director of Berlin’s Volksbühne, and the appointment of his successor. A month ago, on 26 March, a Berlin newspaper first published the name previously circulating only among insiders: Chris Dercon, the director of London’s Tate Modern. A Belgian curator working in the UK. Not, in other words, anyone from the usual merry-go-round of the five familiar names that starts spinning whenever a major position becomes vacant – not a German theatre thoroughbred.

Volksbühne at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin

What took place between 26 March and last Friday, 24 April – when, in Dercon’s presence, his nomination was officially announced at a press conference by the Governing Mayor of Berlin, Michael Müller – was more than just theatrical thunder. Cultural policy makers were insulted; critics and theatre people foresaw the imminent demise of German theatre culture; and Dercon became a whipping boy, the ‘neoliberal curator’ opening the door to commercialization, jeopardizing the autonomy of art and planning to turn the Volksbühne into a profane ‘event’ venue. From the outset, the dispute bore irrational traits.

In last Friday’s press conference, Dercon presented his plans, almost a whole week earlier than originally scheduled. The debate had become far too heated, and untruths were doing the rounds, including claims that the Volksbühne would be receiving additional annual funding of five million euros. Although Dercon will not be taking up his post for another two-and-a-half years, he already revealed the names of the six-strong team who will work with him. Six people born between 1932 and 1980 who stand, in this combination, for an expanded definition of theatre that has already become a reality for independent dance and theatre companies and at festivals, but which has yet to make its way to the heartland of state-subsidized German theatre. The six are: the German film/television director and writer Alexander Kluge, the French dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz, the Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen, the German theatre director Susanne Kennedy, the Franco-Iranian German filmmaker Romuald Karmakar, and Marietta Piekenbrock, a German with experience of international multi-discipline projects as former dramaturge-in-chief of the Ruhrtriennale Festival. They will head an ensemble of actors and other specialists.

Chris Dercon in 2009, in front of Munich’s Haus der Kunst

Dercon indicated that he expects a degree of continuity from Castorf’s Volksbühne, such as the cooperation with the directors Herbert Fritsch and René Pollesch whose current productions are popular with audiences. He also addressed the central bone of contention in the dispute, the notion of the ‘event’ (a loanword from English in German). In his view, an event should not be understood as a neoliberal format (whatever that might mean) but, following a definition by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, as a surprise, a sudden break with routine, a discontinuation of normality. But for the moment, not much has been discontinued. The bad blood remains.

Is it the pain of separation because people don’t want to let Castorf go, even after 25 years? Or is it ignorance of what’s going on outside their own little garden? Probably both. In the 1990s, Castorf was the most radical innovator. No other theatre responded to Germany’s hurried unity with so much wild thinking, tense bodies and loud actors, always on the basis of the experience of East Germany and its demise. Alongside techno music, Castorf’s Volksbühne in Berlin was the greatest integration machine for young East and West Germans (there were not yet so many foreigners in the city). For some people, this initiation, be it techno or Castorf, has lasted a lifetime. And yes, German theatre is a rather too homogenous but gigantic garden. The dominant model is still that of fully subsidized state and municipal theatres working with a core ensemble of tenured actors performing a mix of old and new plays. This theatre scene, which many critics view as their indisputable main focus, has spent the last month hyperventilating as if every theatre in Germany was going to be forced to stage The Lion King.

Those who read German can consult a detailed chronicle of the dispute on the website nachtkritik.de . But a mere chronicle cannot explain the intensity of the debate. There are five key points that sparked the controversy.

Firstly: With Chris Dercon, German theatre, unique in the world for its geographical density and levels of public funding, will become a little less German. It is not Dercon’s nationality that matters, at least I hope not. In recent decades there have been a handful of theatre directors (admittedly not very many) whose native tongue was audibly not German: the Italian Roberto Ciulli in Mülheim; the Polish-Austrian director Anna Badora and the Swede Staffan Valdemar Holm in Düsseldorf; or the Dutchman Johan Simons, currently completing his last season at Munich’s Kammerspiele. There is no doubt that non-German directors have enriched the German tradition with visual impulses (Ciulli) and experiences from other linguistic or dramatic traditions (Simons and the Flemish-Dutch theatre). But German theatre’s tolerance of difference is deceptive, as it leaves untouched the underlying model that calls for a text-centred approach executed by a stable company of actors with similar abilities. Dercon is now reconsidering this structure, at a single theatre. If he succeeds with the mix of profiles he will be bringing to the Volksbühne and with his expanded vision for the company, it will exert pressure on others.

Secondly: German theatres have in fact already been feeling this kind of pressure for some time. In the provinces, local politics has been acting forcefully, merging budgets and closing theatres. In the cities, the situation is similar. The reason is wage rises for unionized technical staff, increasingly covered by borrowing from artistic budgets, and the desire of many theatres to expand: more productions, more additional programmes, more venues, more niches – and that is expensive. Nevertheless in the United States, Britain or the Benelux countries, the German system is still viewed as a dream. And rightly so, as Germany is helping to fund the international avant-garde. Sheffield-based experimental theatre group Forced Entertainment without guest appearances in Germany? Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker without German co-productions and festivals? Unthinkable. This prompts many theatre people to view their structures as being totally open already, and to interpret any request for change as an outright attack. One of the biggest changes of the last decade is surely the entrusting of a theatre to a German woman with Turkish roots: as director of the Maxim Gorki Theater, Shermin Langhoff has many actors with immigrant backgrounds, and she has staged many productions dealing with intercultural Germany, including the current programme. But relatively little has changed in terms of the overall model and aesthetic. Dercon will take a different approach.

Christoph Schlingensief on 17 September 1999 in front of Volksbühne Berlin, as part of his action ‘Deutschlandsuche 99’ (Searching Germany 99)
© Schreibkraft / Wikipedia

Thirdly: With Dercon at the Volksbühne, the 1990s will come to a belated end. It is no coincidence that the ghosts haunting this controversy have their origins in this period when Berlin saw an epoch-making process of radical change. The end of the divided Germany in particular was not smoothly swallowed by the Volksbühne. In the 1990s, Castorf described himself to me, and to many others, as ‘the stake in the flesh of this new, good Germany’. But in the 2000s, this topic was more or less over for the Volksbühne, as Armin Petras at the Gorki Theater became the one dealing with the legacy of Germany’s history as two states. Now Castorf is being painted as the last historian of the theatre, the only one left who points to these ‘wounds’. For one thing, this is no longer strictly true, and for another, such claims are coloured by a sense of grievance that Berlin finally stopped devoting so much attention to itself. While the explicit link to Berlin established by instalments of the Berlin Biennale of contemporary art over the years increasingly started to feel not so much critical but rather touristy, no major theatre with its own company has yet adequately addressed the profound internationalization of Berlin since the 2000s (except, to a limited degree, the Gorki under Langhoff).

Fourthly: Many people have pre-emptively accused Dercon of wanting to turn the Volksbühne into an ‘event venue’. Claus Peymann, the 77-year-old German theatre legend and parting director of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, was the first to voice this concern. Many others have adopted his arguments. A more polite but no less alarmist tone was struck in a letter signed by three more leading directors from Munich, Hamburg and Berlin who warned cultural policy-makers against breaking up the Volksbühne. How a publicly subsidized theatre would take on the character of a commercial venue remained unclear. Initially, this crude accusation was aimed less at Dercon himself than at Berlin’s Secretary-of-State for Culture Tim Renner, who reports to Michael Müller, Berlin’s Governing Mayor and Senator for Culture. Dercon is Renner’s big coup. Until 2004, Renner was Germany’s best known music manager, signing bands including Rammstein and aiming to restructure Universal Deutschland into a complex of smaller firms. Then he resigned and founded his own label and radio station (Motor and Motor FM, now FluxFM). His move to the field of cultural politics a year ago prompted questions as to whether a player from the pop music business is qualified to run a department that spends 95 percent of its budget on theatres, opera houses and museums.

These questions were justified. But the notion that such reservations are confirmed by Dercon’s appointment, or by the figure of Dercon himself, can only be explained as a product of arrogance. Or as a product of the fear of similarity, since the much-maligned ‘eventification’ – if this means the differentiation of once central positions into a multitude of individual events – has long since taken hold of the German theatre scene. Today, a municipal theatre has up to twice as many items on its programme as it did 30 years ago; the job description of the dramaturge has shifted from being the intellectual focus of a theatre towards being an organizer. The punchline here is that no one made this shift as successfully as Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne, bringing in ambitious pop and avant-garde concerts, theoretical congresses, dance evenings, and performance groups. And this was a good thing.

Fifthly (and finally): a last argument that has gained weight among those opposed to Dercon concerns a ‘duplication’ of existing structures in the city. According to the established theatre critics, Berlin already has enough performance venues and anti-theatres. Jürgen Flimm (73), another theatre legend coming to the end of his tenure as artistic director, proclaimed that performance as an art form is dead apart from in the work of Marina Abramovic. This could be taken as a joke, if it weren’t for another article printed by a major daily newspaper in which a critic abandoned any scruples and wrote that the city doesn’t need ‘another theatre where a troupe of one-legged, transgender Albanian performers dance Germany’s crimes in the Herero Wars’. This was not greeted with outrage. Does that mean it reflects widely held views of anything that does not conform to conventional theatre? This reveals a deep rift of ignorance or pure resentment that has been glossed over by the cultural consensus for too long. It is true that a number of works by artists named by Dercon have been and still are present in Berlin. But that by no means implies a duplication of existing structures. Independent venues like Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) with its three stages rely for the majority of their productions (such as the work of the Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen) on external funding. This means that for every production, the artists and the theatre itself have to submit proposals to bodies such as the Capital Cultural Fund and the Federal Cultural Foundation. This complicates planning and continuity. HAU has no company of its own, and nor does the aptly titled annual festival Foreign Affairs. The Volksbühne under Dercon would be the very first venue in Germany capable of funding these and other projects largely out of its own budget, together with a steady artistic staff, even if they are not all actors. This alleged creation of a ‘two-fold’ structure would take its place in an institutional landscape that could be described, using the same logic, as ‘fivefold’ with regard to publicly funded five theatres in Berlin, and ‘threefold’ with regard to the city’s three opera houses. The ‘duplication’ argument is an attempt by the hegemonic model to defend itself against a comparatively minimal shift in emphasis.

The real difference between Chris Dercon and Frank Castorf is their artistic profile: Castorf is a creative genius, Dercon is a curator. After all, a theatre director does nothing other than curate: he puts together teams, suggests programmes, takes care of the repertoire or collection, and is under pressure to keep up with the times. There are many theatre managers in Germany who do not direct plays themselves. Castorf was one who did, often brilliantly, in a style that influenced more than one generation. But for many years now, the critics have stopped discussing the merits of his stagecraft, defending him instead as a rebellious role model against anything and everything else. Castorf became an abstract figure of difference that constantly emptied itself, while his theatre permitted trademark styles and, yes, events. Castorf creates his most liberated productions when he goes elsewhere, staging plays in Munich, or in Bayreuth where he made a fantastic job of Wagner’s Ring cycle two years ago. Chris Dercon is a man I believe to be capable of not covering up this empty centre with another artistic genius. When the 1990s come to an end in 2017, perhaps the 2000s will begin in Berlin. This phenomenon is known as cultural lag. Theatre is a slow art form, and it will remain that way. That is its strength.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell

By Barbara Casavecchia

Wheatfield (1982) by Agnes Denes, currently installed in Milan (photo credit: Barbara Francoli)

Milan l’è un grand Milan (Milan is a great Milan) is an old saying in Milanese dialect, simultaneously hoity-toity and self-ironic, embodying the residents’ pragmatic attitude of thinking big while being doubtful about the actual outcome. With the Expo 2015 finally opening its gates to the public yesterday on 1 May (it will run until 31 October), no other expression could feel more appropriate. The city is split in half between ‘expoptimists’ (#expottimisti) and ‘exposkepticals’ (#exposcettici), like in a saga with new daily chapters and collective bipolar leanings.

The last weeks witnessed a frenzied urban crescendo of last touches on road works, new bicycle lanes, new pedestrian areas; after a decade, the Darsena (dockyard) of the Navigli (canals) finally reopened to boats and people, with new large public areas along the water and ‘The Cube’, a temporary digital installation, spinning images of the past and the present. Five stations of the new metro line M5 opened on April 29. In the meantime, news of the Great Leap Forward to finish all the pavilions and facilities at the Expo site in Rho-Pero (on the city outskirts, reachable by train and metro) kept leaking through either expoenthusiastic or expopessimist news reports and social media.

The ExpoGate, designed by ScandurraStudio

This crescendo, however, finally lead to yesterday’s (anti-)climax of riots on the streets of Milan, with clouds of teargas and protesters angry about the obvious irony of an Expo supposedly focussing on issues of global sustainability of food production, healthy nutrition and feeding the needy while being sponsored by Mc Donald’s, Coca-Cola, and Ferrero.
April was a busy month. The first ‘pavilion’ to open its doors to the press (with the installation still in progress, on April 6) was the group show
‘Arts & Foods. Rituals since 1851’ at the Triennale, the only Expo venue officially located in the city centre, and accessible with the general fair ticket. The exhibition was preceded, last summer, by a heated wave of polemics around the extraordinary – at least for Italian parameters – curatorial/managerial fee of 750.000 euros granted to Germano Celant and his staff, out of an overall budget of over 5 millions (as declared by the Triennale’s president Claudio De Albertis), mainly provided by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, a joint-stock company 80% of whose share capital is owned by Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finances.

The investment of so much public money on a single exhibition project, in an era of severe cuts and budget starvation for most museums, brought into sharp relief the problem of distribution of resources at times of paucity, somehow evoking the infamous ‘Let them eat cake’. The show (co-curated by Chiara Spangaro) is as encyclopaedic as bulimic, ranging from 1851, the year of London’s Great Exhibition, to the early 2000s, with over 2000 works from the fields of art, design, architecture, fashion, music, and television spread over 7000 square meters (ca. 75000 square feet). The ground floor begins as a frenetic stroll in wonderland, with paintings by Claude Monet, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio De Chirico, Futurist kitchens, Murano glass vases, toys, kinetoscopes, Constructivist ceramics, Jean Prouvé’s entire Maison des Jours Meilleurs (1956), Pop Art masterpieces by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselman, science fictional furniture from the 1960s, psychedelic cookbooks, film projections, Martha Rosler’s ever genial Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), to quote but a few examples.

The broth is increasingly spoiled on the second floor though, where a series of XL-sized works from the 1990s and 2000s (Jeff Koons, Urs Fischer, Andreas Gursky, to name but a few) feels quite disconnected and lost in space among the white walls. A visit to the terrace, rewards though with the newly inaugurated Triennale restaurant (designed by OBR studio), with picture-perfect views of the park outside: sit down, eat, enjoy.

A view of the Triennale’s garden, with artworks (from left to right) by Giorgio De Chirico (permanent), Sarah Lucas and Paul McCarthy.

Angelo Morbelli, Asfissia, 1884, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin.

The allegory of abundance proposed by this show, as well as by the Expo, made me think of a classic topos of the Commedia dell’Arte: the hungrier Pulcinella gets, the bigger becomes the pile of spaghetti that he dreams of having on his plate. Originally, the Expo’s slogan ‘Feeding the Planet’ intended to respond to the world’s urgency for sustaining its growing population. Then came the mascot named ‘Foodie’ (English only) designed by Disney, the corporate sponsorships, the gourmet attractions. Now the Expo should arguably alter its slogan to a less utopic ‘(Over-)Feeding the Visitors’.

In the second week of April, the MiArt art fair coincided with the Spring Awakening program of openings involving almost all of the city’s contemporary art venues. Hangar Bicocca opened ‘Double Bind & Around’ by Juan Muñoz, a series of fifteen installations documenting the artist’s career, from 1986 to the gigantic, eponymous work created in 2001 for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, reinstalled here for the first time. In a 12 acres landfill between the Isola area and the new skyscrapers of Porta Nuova, Fondazione Trussardi, together with Confagricoltura and Fondazione Catella, recreated Agnes Denes’ famous Wheatfield, an environmental work originally planted in Battery Park, New York, in 1982. It was like the closing of an urban cycle, with a slightly cruel ironic twist: this beautifully green field borders an area once occupied by a public park and the artists-run Isola Art center, both razed in 2007, after months of conflicts, to make room for new high-rises. Furthermore, last February brought the announcement that, after its renovation and rebuilding, Milan’s entire business district Porta Nuova has been sold for an undisclosed sum (the area’s market value is estimated around 2 billions euros) to the Qatar Investment Authority.

Cory Arcangel, installation view of This is all so crazy, everybody seems so famous, GAMeC, Bergamo.

In the private galleris, the Italian scene was represented by Luisa Lambri’s photo series of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels at “Studio Guenzani“http://www.studioguenzani.it, and Pietro Roccasalva’s return to Zero gallery after almost a decade with new paintings and a new mixed media piece_ The Wooden O_ (2015), while Andrea Kvas and Nicola Martini joined forces in the project room of Kaufmann Repetto, to use the same materials, such as shellac and resin, in very different ways, resulting in expanded paintings and mirror sculptures. At Monica De Cardenas, Linda Fregni Nagler presented her latest cycle Pour commander à l’air (2014), based on archival news photos, re-photographed and enlarged, to reveal the high level of cropping, post-production and retouching on all supposedly documentary news images already in the mid 20th century, way before the mystifications of the digital era. Analogic photography took centre stage also at Massimo De Carlo with Elad Lassry, whose latest series Untitled (Swimmers) (2015) embeds silver gelatine prints, beads, and pigments within sheets of acrylic glass, and at Raffaella Cortese, where Roni Horn presented a series of irksome portraits of Jürgen Teller, appearing as a sort of two-headed god reflected in still water. Armada, a new space run by young artists and curators mostly coming from the Brera art academy, in the peripheral Bovisa area, hosted a women-only group show, ‘Venganza (i don’t want to be friends)’ curated by Gea Politi, with works by Carol Bove, Lucy Dodd, Jana Euler, Betty Tompkins, Amalia Ulman, and Julie Wachtel. At Lisson, under the ironic title of ‘Hot Topics’, Cory Arcangel displayed seven groups of anthropomorphic sculptures, from the same series he created for ‘This is all so crazy, everybody seems so famous’, his solo at Palazzo della Regione in Bergamo (organized by GAMeC’s curator Stefano Raimondi; until 28 June) – a great eye candy made to break the Internet, with an eternally sunny carpeted rainbow occupying the Palazzo’s medieval main hall.

One of the final acts of the week was the opening at PeepHole of ‘painting, painting’, with Tom Burr staging the paintings of a late studio neighbour and friend, Ull Hohn (1965-90): a box of very personal memories, especially of that time in life when killing the fathers (Gerhard Richter, in Hohn’s case) still seems a central issue. Patrick Tuttofuoco tuned into this oedipal theme with his public sculpture …MOM, DAD (2015), installed next to Brera, once his alma mater.

Patrick Tutofuocco, …MOM, DAD, 2015

No time to rest, really, and on Monday morning the Design Week’s stampede started to pour into town, to attend over one thousand scheduled events. The proper Salone del Mobile is located in the fair premises in Rho-Pero, while the FuoriSalone (off Salon) takes over the entire city, which perennially reinvents itself trough the occupation of ‘new’ districts – this year, one of the most visited was Cinque Vie (5 Streets) in the centre, with interesting experimental projects by Space Caviar and Z33 at Palazzo Clerici. Alice Rawsthorn, in her much discussed article in April’s issue of frieze, denounced the Salone as the empty indigestion of superficial consumer products, less and less oriented towards function, theory, concept – to be fair, I would add that design at large seem to have a problem in this regard. My admittedly slightly arbitrary pick is the exhibition ‘The Astounding Candy Power’ by Benjamin Loyauté at the French Institute, next to Santa Maria delle Grazie which holds Leonardo’s Last Supper (1494–99), a show that reflected on the emotional impact of objects, even at zero degree, when they are associated with personal memories: the installation was based on small, sugary pink bonbons that Loyauté recreated from a traditional Syrian shape and recipe involving rose-water – a little bite of unforgettable happiness, as described by the postcards sent to him by numerous Syrian friends and families involved in the project.

There are good public exhibitions in town: a small, refined selection of sculptures and photographs by Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) at Galleria Arte Moderna (until 30 May), the rare survey Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519 at Palazzo Reale (until 19 July), and the new instalment of Michelangelo’s last Pietà Rondanini (1564) at Castello Sforzesco, designed by architect Michele De Lucchi. All wonderful masters, but definitely Old Masters. When it comes to contemporary art production, it’s evident that the Milanese scene is driven by the private sector. The city doesn’t have a public contemporary art museum and seems to have given up on the idea of needing one. It’s a matter of distribution of resources and endowments, over and over again.
For its upcoming blockbuster on motherhood and the condition of women over the last century, La Grande Madre (The Great Mother, 25 August to 15 November), curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Fondazione Trussardi decided to team up directly with the Cultural Office of the City of Milan, so that the exhibition (sponsored by BNL Gruppo BNP Paribas) will be held at Palazzo Reale, next to the Duomo. Usually, public and private paths don’t cross much. Fondazione HangarBicocca, so far the biggest and most successful contemporary art space (thanks to a series of spectacular solo exhibitions, such as the recent ‘Light Time Tales’ by Joan Jonas, as well as thanks to its free entrance policy), has been created and is generously sponsored by Pirelli, a tyre manufacturing company. The news however that by 2019 Pirelli will move into the hands of China National Chemical Corp raises possible questions on the future of Hangar, whose program is currently announced until the end of 2015, with upcoming exhibitions by Damián Ortega and Philippe Parreno.
Private galleries are starting to super-size as well. While Giò Marconi relocated his gallery to a smaller space on Via Tadino, his father’s Fondazione Marconi has renewed and taken over the entire building formerly shared by the two, and in conjunction with the Expo, the Fondazione hosts a ‘Tribute to Lucio Fontana’, with a recreation of the monumental artist’s project Spatial Concept, Trinity(1966). Last Autumn, Christian Stein gallery organized a retrospective of Alighiero Boetti (in collaboration with Fondazione Boetti) that would have been perfectly at home in any museum, in terms of quality and epic size of the works. To accommodate the larger works, Stein opened the doors of their enormous storage, in the satellite town of Pero, right next to the Expo area.

A missed occasion of rejuvenation, on the public side, was the long-awaited opening of the MUDEC, the Museum of Cultures housing the rich ethnographic collection of the city, with over 7000 pieces in the ex-Ansaldo factory, close to Porta Genova. It has a joint governance: a public committee of experts supervises the program, which is conceived and produced by 24 Ore Cultura (a society which organizes big exhibitions across Italy, as a private contractor).

Fifteen years in the making, the museum made all the first pages for the wrong reasons: a harsh dispute with the municipality over the poor quality of the flooring installed against the expressed wishes of the architect David Chipperfield prompted him to issue a public statement forbidding the attribution to his studio of this otherwise beautiful glass building, flooded with natural light. Anyone having seen the floor will probably not consider Chipperfield’s statement an overreaction. What I’ve found more dispiriting, however, was that all the articles focused on this controversy but had little to say about the actual opening shows.

‘Mondi a Milano’ (Worlds in Milan) documents all the Expos that took place in the city from 1874 to WWII: well researched and rich in original materials, it also highlights the connections between rationalist architecture and colonialism, though more information on the horrors of Italy’s occupation of Libya and Ethiopia would have been welcome. The other exhibition, ‘Africa. Land of Spirits’ proposes such an old-fashioned vision of African art that it verges on the embarrassing. What to say of a room where wooden sculptures from different countries and periods are surrounded by gigantic portraits of the great heroes of the Western avant-garde (Picasso!), who were influenced by their ‘primitivism’? No sign of contemporary African perspectives, voices, cultures, counter-histories. Pity.

Chipperfield was not the only international starchitect engaged in a Milanese commission. SANAA are at work on the new Bocconi university campus, while Herzog & De Meuron designed the new Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, in progress at Porta Volta. The new Fondazione Prada, that opens its door to the general public on 9 May is conceived by Rem Koolhaas/OMA, who have a long partnership with the brand. Koolhaas, who was also the director of the last Architecture Biennale in Venice, knows very well that ‘Space is a marketing tool’, as he declared in the Prada book, published in 2010 to celebrate the first three decades of the company. When he first unveiled the plans for the new headquarters, back in 2008, together with Prada’s CEO Patrizio Bertelli and Germano Celant (director of the Fondazione since 1995), he described the concept for the new compound as ‘a collection of artefacts that encounters a collection of architectural typologies’. He added three new structures (a museum, a gallery tower for displaying the Prada collection, a cinema) to the existing facilities of this former distillery from 1910, in Largo Isarco, to the south of Milan, for a total of over 20.000 square meters. The most visible body is, of course, the tower, conspicuously covered in painted gold – an ageless emblem of power.

Fondazione Prada, new Milan venue. Courtesy OMA and Fondazione Prada

The opening program includes site-specific installations by Thomas Demand and Robert Gober, a thematic selection of artworks, a new documentary by Roman Polanski, a new bar designed by Wes Anderson (a year ago, Prada acquired one of Milan’s oldest pastry shops, the Pasticceria Marchesi in Corso Magenta) and a temporary exhibition, with display system by OMA on seriality, iteration and reproduction in classical art. It is divided in two sections: ‘Serial Classic’ (9 May until 24 August) takes place in Milan, and ‘Portable Classic’ (9 May – 13 September) at Fondazione Prada’s Venice outpost. Both shows are curated by Salvatore Settis, in collaboration with Anna Anguissola and Davide Gasparotto. Professor of classical archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, and a former director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Settis is also a well-known public figure, who often advocates for the defence of Italian heritage, landscape and culture as democratic common goods. A few days ago Carol Vogel wrote in the New York Times that the Fondazione Prada is ‘poised to become a major international destination for the arts’ and that it ‘has more than twice the exhibition space of the galleries at the new Whitney Museum of American Art’. She also quoted the art historian Emily Braun, who thinks that ‘potentially it will fill the role of a contemporary art museum’. In Europe, museums used to be public, but that seems to be changing quickly.

As we know, the opening of the Venice Biennale was rescheduled to early May in order to bring it closer to the Expo and to create an additional tour for the international art circuit. Interestingly, the structure of the two events – both deriving from the World Fair paradigm – is similar: hundreds of participating nations, each one with its own pavilion, installed within the exhibition complex or somewhere around the city, and a central core, represented in both cases by the Padiglione Italia. In Milan, it’s a structure covered in candid panels of ‘i.active Biodynamic’ concrete, made to capture air pollution, overlooking an artificial lake and the Avataresque Tree of Life, the symbol of the Expo diffusing fireworks and music, i.e. son et lumière (in October, the pavilion’s general manager Antonio Acerbo, was arrested for corruption and sentenced to three years of jail, after a series of investigations unveiled a ‘cupola of contracts’ involving local businessmen, developers and politicians). In Venice, Okwui Enwezor decided to install inside the ex-Padiglione Italia (now Padiglione Centrale) a new Arena, designed by David Adjaye, to host live performances and the non-stop readings of Marx’s Capital. Speaking of which: the Biennale has a 13 million euro budget, again mostly provided by private sponsors.
Last year, Salvatore Settis, published a pamphlet titled ‘Se Venezia muore’ (If Venice Dies), against the disneyfication of historical cities in Italy, the impact of tourism and the progressive privatization of public spaces. ‘By contributing to the process … of the dismantling of the state, the same institutions that should guard it, end up by betraying it, and turn from the guardians of the public good into standard bearers of private interests.’ Let’s try and think positive, ok?

By Ian Bourland

Police line from south to north, blockading North Avenue at Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, April 28, 2015 (Photograph: Nate Larson)

By U.S. standards, Baltimore is a small city, about 40 minutes from Washington D.C., and three hours from New York. It is emblematic of the country’s one-time industrial might and, alternately, an ongoing wave of millennial reclamation in blighted urban centres. Baltimore is mentioned in the same breath as Detroit or Cleveland, and is known internationally for medical research and an emergent avant-garde scene. The city is one divided by race and class, a sedimentary landscape in which its histories stir beneath the comforting surfaces of a post-industrial service and research economy.

Yet Baltimore remains a relative village in which as an art critic, I can live comfortably, within walking distance of the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), the art school where I work. A mere half mile away, the Baltimore Police Twitter feed reports near-daily shootings and the median family income hovers around $20,000. A popular story published in 2013 in New York magazine describes a clandestine economy, in which Tide laundry detergent is routinely shoplifted, as it functions as de facto currency in a place where residents have little, but recognise the value of looking one’s best. President Barack Obama, on 28 April, remarked that the neighbourhoods beyond the city’s finance and tourism-wealthy Inner Harbor do not share in the abundance of the city’s creative class: they inhabit a landscape denuded of industry, depopulated by zero-tolerance crime policy and the carceral state, and buoyed by the drug trade – one of the few remaining employers.

This is the sort of neighbourhood for which Baltimore is known, mostly thanks to popular television depictions such as The Corner and The Wire. The Gilmor Homes of the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood are an easy walk to MICA, but occupy vastly different topographies. As much of the world knows by now, this is where Freddie Gray was apprehended on 12 April after fleeing a bicycle-mounted police officer, and loaded into a personnel carrier and driven around for nearly an hour. He died in the hospital a week later on 19 April, with a severed spine and crushed larynx.

During the ensuing ten days, large groups of demonstrators – clergy, students, professionals, community leaders, and everyday Baltimoreans – turned out for near-daily gatherings downtown, or marches on main thoroughfares. By and large, these marches have echoed ongoing demonstrations throughout the U.S. in response to the deaths at the hands of police of Michael Brown (Ferguson, MO) and Eric Garner (New York, NY), and under the clarion call #BlackLivesMatter. In a sense, then, Obama was correct when he argued that ‘this is a slow-rolling crisis,’ and that the use of excessive force against black men ‘has been going on for a long time. This is not new and we shouldn’t pretend it’s new.’ One crucial difference in the Baltimore case is the prospect that in the short term, some modicum of justice will be had: as of publication, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby has determined that the six officers involved in Gray’s killing will be charged in criminal court for offences including second degree murder – a promise of serious public inquiry and judgment on the affair. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced the end of the curfew, signalling a gradual departure of state troops on 3 May.

But for all of its cosmetic similarities to those other places, and for all the solidarity shown for city and for Gray by large demonstrations in other cities (such as the 28 April rally in New York City), the Baltimore case remains unique. The city garnered international attention on the evening of 27 April, as social media covered, in real time, rioting that spread from the Mondawmin shopping centre down a west Baltimore high street where, at the intersection of North and Pennsylvania, a corporate chemist was looted and torched, and groups clashed with police. Over the next 12 hours the group dispersed and re-emerged in other parts of the city, continuing to burn or rob small businesses. By late evening, the conservative Maryland governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency, with a one week mandatory curfew to follow, and the National Guard deployed – complete with camouflage and assault weapons – near the Inner Harbor and other ‘vital infrastructure.’

National Guardsman at the student-organized Freddie Gray solidarity protest, Baltimore, Maryland, April 29, 2015 (Photograph: Nate Larson)

As Martin Luther King, Jr. once remarked, ‘a riot is the language of the unheard.’ And for many on the left, such confrontation with the police might be cheered – the inevitable bubbling over of long-standing tensions, and a show of resistance against police forces that rely on excessive force and paramilitary tactics, including the longstanding tradition of the ‘rough ride’– forcefully driving handcuffed suspects around without seat restraints in the back of a van – to which some have argued Gray was subjected before his hospitalization. What this formulation overlooks is an argument that the Baltimore riot was not solely motivated by Gray’s death, or a larger protest agenda. It was, rather, a simulated crisis, compounded by police incompetency. This is made clear in a few ways.

For one, local residents – including those motivated to protest – were not seeking a reprise of earlier violent uprisings, such as the riots that engulfed Baltimore and Washington in April of 1968, echoing similar events in the preceding years in Detroit (1965), Los Angeles (1965), and Newark (1967). Indeed, CNN correspondent Miguel Marquez broadcast the looting of Penn/North in real time, with cameras rolling. One could not but be struck by how low the stakes seemed – looters emerged from a pharmacy with junk food, toilet paper and, later, tennis shoes and alcohol. Others mugged for the camera, some holding up homemade demo CDs. At the far side of the intersection, another man played Michael Jackson hits and danced to ‘Beat It’ (1982).

The relative mayhem spread into the evening, including people turning up in cars to plunder clothing from the unguarded shopping mall where the conflict with police had started earlier in the afternoon, when police reportedly responded to a social media blast to area children to stage a ‘purge’ (after a popular 2013 satirical movie of the same name, in which anarchy is briefly permitted). Baltimore authorities preemptively placed dozens of officers in riot gear at the mall, even as the vital transit hub was shut down, marooning the teenagers in a parking lot in tight proximity to a makeshift garrison of local police.

In neither the initial standoff with area students nor the subsequent carnivalesque at Penn/North was there a concerted protest related to Gray. In fact, organised protest had been temporarily suspended after days of peaceful demonstration in observance of his memorial, held earlier that day. Police were nonetheless wary of violent demonstration and, it seems, may have inadvertently provoked one. What resulted was an unnecessary crisis that saw opportunists not motivated by a political agenda so much as an opportunity to vent long-simmering anxieties.

Tellingly, as Marquez watched the riot unfold, he interviewed neighbourhood residents, including an older woman who insisted that 2015 would not, and should not, be a rehearsal of 1968 – a year she remembered all too well. For many in Europe, 1968 epitomises a utopian optimism crystallised in public uprising, followed by a period of melancholy, as the promises of May ’68 failed to materialise, and (as David Harvey has argued) late capitalism metastasised into the current neoliberal order throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In the United States, 1968 is synonymous not with hope, but with the slaying of heroes of the left, and with vibrant cities razed.

Places like Baltimore have, in a sense, never recovered. While the reanimated spectre of its majesty re-emerged in some precincts (a neo-retro baseball park, farm-to-table restaurants,) much of the city bears the infrastructural scars – boarded up buildings, businesses that never re-opened, a homeless crises in the shadow of vacant townhouses – of those two weeks of riots in April of 1968. As much as 1968 heralded defeat for the new left in Europe, it also signalled the end of one American dream, in which a multiracial working class could thrive in its Baltimores and Detroits, even as much of the white population accelerated their exodus to the suburban periphery.

Citizen protection line from north to south, on North Avenue at Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, April 28, 2015 (Photograph: Nate Larson)

It is unsurprising, then, that as the sun rose the following day, hundreds of people turned up in looted areas to pitch in for clean-up efforts, ultimately ending up at Penn/North, where there was work to be done. The scene that I observed was incongruous: a line of state and county police created a fortification opposite scores of reporters and photographers, even as people from around Baltimore hauled rubbish and broken glass, and onlookers shared stories, played Motown from windows, and gawked at a street preacher with two bullhorns. Gang leaders – who had, during the week, called a provisional ‘truce’ at the behest of local clergy – chatted amiably, bedecked in signature blue clothing, or Chicago Bulls’ red; Nation of Islam activists turned up to make sure the gathering remained peaceful.

Throughout the day, hundreds prayed, danced, and practiced capoeira, buffered from the police by a ‘love line’ of local men and the local 300 Men March anti-violence group. One sensed that the overall goal was to change the optics of the reporting, and to occupy space that might otherwise open on to opportunities for conflict with police. It was, nonetheless, not a protest, and when national media tremulously wondered what would happen as the 10PM curfew approached, all but a handful the crowd preemptively dispersed, leaving a near farcical tension between the large gathering of reporters and the advancing riot cops, who dispersed tear gas. The cameras captured a skirmish of their own making, even as the rest of Baltimore remained quiet. On 29 April, concerted protests recommenced, including a highly organized, multiracial student initiative that culminated in the central city.

These peaceful initiatives echoed earlier mobilizations around the country during this year, reinforcing truth that Black Lives Matter. But these protests – like Occupy before them – seem to enact earlier moments of large-scale public address (namely the late 1960s) but propose little by way of concrete remedies. On 2 May, the day after Mosby announced that she would pursue murder charges against the officers involved, a so-called ‘National’ rally organized by the 
‘Black Lawyers for Justice’ group was staged in any case, not to make demands on the city per se, but to gather a weekend crowd drawn from beyond the city limits, to convene and hear the words of the controversial Malik Shabazz – a figure who has been criticised by the Southern Poverty Law Center for anti-semitic rhetoric and whom, according to the Baltimore Sun, ‘political, religious and community leaders have denounced… as a self-interested agitator.’

As to the efficacy of this and other, locally driven protests, we will never know if Mosby would have decided to prosecute in their absence. Her announcement may be cold comfort anyway, as at the heart of the demonstrations in New York, Los Angeles, Ferguson, and Baltimore is exasperation with the outcomes of larger structural shifts in American life towards disinvestment in middle income jobs and urban industry, outsourced instead to other corners of the globe. The police, for their part, are left with the intractable task of managing the containment of neoliberalism’s losers on behalf of its winners.

What the protests and the riot have accomplished is to draw sustained international attention to these forgotten corners of the American experience. The work of Baltimoreans over the past week falls more in line with what Baltimore-based journalist Benjamin Wallace-Wells identifies as the tradition of the march. He notes that ‘you protest seeking punishment for the villains, and a policy correction. You march against intractable social situations.’ And so, during the last weeks of April, we witnessed an anomalous, and unnecessary back-to-the-future moment of civil unrest in Baltimore that obscured the real story of tenacious citizens marching day-by-day, drawing attention to more abstract and elusive issues. In this way, they are aligned with those in the art world whose practices also direct attention to questions of opportunity, equality, and the outcomes of decades of neoliberal policymaking – such as LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs of her economically devastated hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania – or those that seek to actively re-invest in communities that have been largely forsaken, as in Theaster Gates’s re-direction of art market wealth into the physical and cultural development of South Chicago, an area glibly known as ‘Chi-raq’. If one draws anything from recent events in Baltimore, it should not be a confirmation of its dystopian cachet but, instead, a reminder that the project of redressing larger structural challenges is a quotidian one, and one in which media and visual culture play a critical role.

By Amy Sherlock

Glenn Ligon and Oscar Murillo, installation view at the Central Pavilion, Giardini, 2015

I generally find Venice an uplifting sort of place. When the hazy, watery sunlight bounces off the campanile in San Marco or the dome of San Giorgio, it’s hard not to feel filled with wonder that such structures – which have stood, more or less unchanged, since the 15th century – were built in a lagoon. The whole city is a testimony equally to ingenuity and folly, as well as to the benefits of international trade and the patronage of the mercantile classes. Venice is also sinking, slowly, at a rate that has, over recent decades, increased rate due to rising sea levels. This inevitability, just far off enough to be unimaginable, makes the city a particularly interesting setting for an exhibition titled ‘All the World’s Futures’. Curator Okwui Enwezor’s central exhibition for the 56th Venice Biennale considers how contemporary artists are responding to the crises and instability of the globalized present. The Biennale’s own history as a cultural event inaugurated to celebrate the recently-united Italian state and its structure – which is still informed by global power relations of the early 20th century – also make it a highly charged setting for considering what ‘all the world’ has historically meant.

A first glance at the central pavilion along one of the Giardini’s tree-lined avenues is enough to ascertain that a consideration of all the world’s futures implies a re-evaluation – and maybe re-writing – of certain narratives of the past. At the top of the pavilion’s bright white facade, a neon work by Glenn Ligon spells out blues blood bruise– unlit, but forming firm dark lines in the bright sunlight. The work overwrites the words ‘La Biennale’, in parts seeming to blur with them, the forms becoming slightly unclear where letters overlap. Below, between the neo-classical columns that lead to the entrance, hang the 20 black canvas ‘flags’ of Oscar Murillo’s signalling devices now in bastard territory (2015). Both foreboding and theatrical, they create an ominous partition. My immediate reading of them is not as flags (without poles, without states) but as tarpaulins used for transport or concealment, or even as shrouds. They look sticky, dusty, heavy. I imagine suffocating beneath one.

Glenn Ligon,‘Come Out #12 – 15’, 2015, installation view, Central Pavilion

Ligon’s piece is related to four large works on canvas that hang in their own room within the pavilion (‘Come Out #12 – 15’, 2015). Across them, the words ‘come out to show them’ are over-printed repeatedly in black – swarming and gathering to the point of being illegible in places, like thunder-cloud haze. They seem to thrum, these canvases: you can almost hear the words as they stumble into one another, an indistinguishable chorus in some parts, a clear voice in others. Both the ‘Come Out’ works and ‘blue blood bruise’ quote from the testimony on Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, six young black men sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1965 on the grounds of forced confessions taken whilst in police custody. Hamm’s description of police brutality, recorded 50 years ago, feels devastatingly relevant against a backdrop of ongoing ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray whilst in police custody – the latest in a horrible succession of injustices that reflect the strained nature of the relationship between police forces and communities – and race relations more broadly – across the United States. A future of history repeating itself is a sombre prospect, which sets the tone for the entire show.

Robert Smithson, Asphalt on Eroded Cliff, 1969, ink and coloured chalk on paper

The rest of the exhibition, however, can’t quite sustain the clout of this initial punch. It is a truism to say that an exhibition on this scale – including a whopping 136 artists – will necessarily be uneven. In this case, the breadth of the theme – to reflect all of the world’s crises and injustice – means that the variety of responses end up almost cancelling one another out. Specific horrors like the Holocaust, referenced in Fabio Mauri’s The Western Wall or the Wailing Wall (1993), a stacked wall of suitcases that is the first sculpture visitors come across in the space, and forgotten histories (such as that of the revolutionary left in Bangladesh, which is the subject of Naeem Mohaiemen’s film Last Man in Dhaka Central [The Young Man Was, Part 3], 2015) sit alongside more speculative references (the barren earth suggested by Robert Smithson’s Dead Tree 1969/2015) and works that gesture more broadly towards death or suffering (Marlene Dumas’s beautiful series of ‘Skulls’, 2013–15). The effect is overwhelming – which I’m sure is part of Enwezor’s intention – but also flattening. The result, for me at least, is a sense of helplessness and paralysis, rather than politicization or engagement.

Marlene Dumas, Skulls, 2013-15, oil on canvas

There are some powerful moments here – such as the inspired pairing of photographs from Walker Evans’s iconic images of Great Depression-era rural Americans (‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, first published in 1941) with Isa Genzken’s architectural maquettes for ‘Realized and Unrealized Outdoor Projects’. Painted ghostly white, with some proposals as simple as running Two Lines between the roofs of high-rise housing blocks to form a barely-visible umbilical connection, these are timeless potential monuments. Read against Evans’s photographs, they speak of loss, frailty and resistance – and the idea that sometimes the most quotidian of objects and gestures are the ones worth commemorating. (A pair of monumental white orchids that stand quietly on the opposite side of the Giardini, Two Orchids (2015) are Genzken’s fully materialized testimony to these ideas.) John Akomfrah’s magisterial Vertigo Sea (2015) is another highlight. Shown over three vast screens, its dense, roiling montage combines archival footage of the hunting and butchering of whales with underwater marine landscapes, aerial shots of birds flocking and dispersing like beads across the surface of the sea, and black and white photographic portraits. The work is hypnotically beautiful yet oblique enough to hold all of the multiple and contradictory significances of the ocean – as freedom and the passage to enslavement, as environmental battleground, as provider and waste dump.

Walker Evans and Isa Genzken, installation view

The show in the Arsenale is more heavy-handed and didactic from the get-go, opening with a blackened room containing neons by Bruce Nauman flashing words and phrases including Eat Death (1972) and Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain (1983) and Adel Abdessemed’s Nympheas (2015) – clusters of knives pointing up from the ground, like deadly flowers. The whole thing feels simultaneously too literal and too general to be thought provoking. Weapons recur – down the hall in a black cannon by Pino Pascali (Cannone Semovente, 1965), which detonates the forceful symbolism of Melvin Edwards’s tortured but contained ‘Lynch Fragments’ (1963–ongoing), buckled and twisted assemblages of scrap metal, hung from the wall like machinic stags’ heads. Alone these are quietly powerful works; amongst the cacophony of Terry Adkins’s aggressive music-machines and Monica Bonvicini’s black, rubber-clad chainsaws (Latent Combustion, 2015), their meaning feels overdetermined. Moments of lightness – such as Ernesto Ballesteros’s wire and balsa wood planes that float like feathers to the floor, travelling no distance at all, the distance of a breath (Indoor Flights, 2015), and Mika Rottenberg’s film installation, which takes a wonderfully weird view of bodily functions and workplace productivity – are few and far between. And the most poignant encounters are those that take you by surprise – for instance, coming across Lorna Simpson’s dreamily delineated painted figures next to Goncalo Mabunda’s The Knowledge Throne (2014), made from decommissioned machine guns.

Monica Bonvicini, Latent Combustion, 2015, chainsaws, wood axe, black polyurethane, matt finish, steel chains

The through-line that seemingly underlies the various economic, social and environmental issues that different works address is capitalism – the ceaseless drive to produce wealth through the exploitation of resources, both human and environmental. This is placed literally centre stage (in an ‘Arena’ designed by architect David Adjaye) through an epic series of readings of the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (1861, 1885, 1894) staged by Isaac Julien. Enwezor has called capital ‘the great drama of our age’ and, in so far as it determines almost every aspect of our lives, this may well be true. But Capital is not a dramatic text, but a rigorous and complex economic analysis, which gains little in either impact or understanding from being read aloud. As a reminder of the omnipresence and power of money, it is hardly necessary – far starker, unavoidable examples are to be found moored in the lagoon, flanking the route to the Giardini.

I do, however, like the idea, that the human voice will be heard throughout this exhibition. I saw performances in the arena by Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, which sample, loop and re-imagine traditional workers’ or chain-gang songs, and a capella renditions of Jeremy Deller’s collection of broadsides – songsheets sold in the streets in industrial Britain, some of which are reproduced close by. These daily performances are reminders of the social, embodied reality of labour. Work is, after all, not only a source of pain but also of pride, ambition and self-realization, and the sense of community and solidarity that these songs evoke is a necessary complement and counterpoint to Marx’s abstract theorizations.

Lorna Simpson, Nightmare?, 2015, graphite and ink on gessoed wood panel with aluminium perimeter

‘All the World’s Futures’ is an ambitious show. The breadth of ‘the world’ that is represented is laudable – artists from 53 countries are included, fifteen more than the ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’ in 2013, an overdue and important corrective to previous editions of the biennale. And many of the issues that it addresses are urgent and affect us all. However, for an exhibition whose title might suggest looking forward, much of the work is caught up in the past. The danger of including so many archival or documentary projects is that the whole show gets caught up in wider ethical questions about what it means to document: is to show alone ever enough? Can we just point to the world’s problems? What does that mean in terms of responsibility, in terms of solutions? These are enormous questions and art doesn’t have all the answers. But this show doesn’t seem to be looking for them, transfixed as it seems to be – like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, which is discussed by Enwezor in his introduction – by the rubble of the past that builds up at its feet.

One of the strongest works in the Arsenale is Chantal Akerman’s Now (2015). This five-screen projection combines roving camera footage of the desert with a composite soundtrack of shouts, engines and what sound like gunshots. It’s like speeding through an empty Western set to the soundtrack of a The Fast and the Furious getaway sequence – disorientating, dizzying, anxiety inducing. It brought to mind an only half-joking refrain that stayed with me as I walked back through the exhibition: ‘Stop the world, I want to get off.’

By Amy Sherlock

Glenn Ligon and Oscar Murillo, installation view at the Central Pavilion, Giardini, 2015

I generally find Venice an uplifting sort of place. When the hazy, watery sunlight bounces off the campanile in San Marco or the dome of San Giorgio, it’s hard not to feel filled with wonder that such structures – which have stood, more or less unchanged, since the 15th century – were built in a lagoon. The whole city is a testimony equally to ingenuity and folly, as well as to the benefits of international trade and the patronage of the mercantile classes. Venice is also sinking, slowly, at a rate that has, over recent decades, increased due to rising sea levels. This inevitability, just far off enough to be unimaginable, makes the city a particularly interesting setting for an exhibition titled ‘All the World’s Futures’. Curator Okwui Enwezor’s central exhibition for the 56th Venice Biennale considers how contemporary artists are responding to the crises and instability of the globalized present. The Biennale’s own history as a cultural event inaugurated to celebrate the recently united Italian state and its structure – which is still informed by global power relations of the early 20th century – also make it a highly charged setting for considering what ‘all the world’ has historically meant.

A first glance at the central pavilion along one of the Giardini’s tree-lined avenues is enough to ascertain that a consideration of all the world’s futures implies a re-evaluation – and maybe re-writing – of certain narratives of the past. At the top of the pavilion’s bright white facade, a neon work by Glenn Ligon spells out blues blood bruise– unlit, but forming firm dark lines in the bright sunlight. The work overwrites the words ‘La Biennale’, in parts seeming to blur with them, the forms becoming slightly unclear where letters overlap. Below, between the neo-classical columns that lead to the entrance, hang the 20 black canvas ‘flags’ of Oscar Murillo’s signalling devices now in bastard territory (2015). Both foreboding and theatrical, they create an ominous partition. My immediate reading of them is not as flags (without poles, without states) but as tarpaulins used for transport or concealment, or even as shrouds. They look sticky, dusty, heavy. I imagine suffocating beneath one.

Glenn Ligon,‘Come Out #12 – 15’, 2015, installation view, Central Pavilion

Ligon’s piece is related to four large works on canvas that hang in their own room within the pavilion (‘Come Out #12 – 15’, 2015). Across them, the words ‘come out to show them’ are over-printed repeatedly in black – swarming and gathering to the point of being illegible in places, like thunder-cloud haze. They seem to thrum, these canvases: you can almost hear the words as they stumble into one another, an indistinguishable chorus in some parts, a clear voice in others. Both the ‘Come Out’ works and ‘blue blood bruise’ quote from the testimony on Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, six young black men sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1965 on the grounds of forced confessions taken whilst in police custody. Hamm’s description of police brutality, recorded 50 years ago, feels devastatingly relevant against a backdrop of ongoing ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray whilst in police custody: the latest in a horrible succession of injustices that reflect the strained nature of the relationship between police forces and communities – and race relations more broadly – across the United States. A future of history repeating itself is a sombre prospect, which sets the tone for the entire show.

Robert Smithson, Asphalt on Eroded Cliff, 1969, ink and coloured chalk on paper

The rest of the exhibition, however, can’t quite sustain the clout of this initial punch. It is a truism to say that an exhibition on this scale – including a whopping 136 artists – will necessarily be uneven. In this case, the breadth of the theme – to reflect all of the world’s crises and injustice – means that the varied responses end up almost cancelling one another out. Specific horrors like the Holocaust, referenced in Fabio Mauri’s The Western Wall or the Wailing Wall (1993), a stacked wall of suitcases that is the first sculpture visitors come across in the space, and forgotten histories (such as that of the revolutionary left in Bangladesh, which is the subject of Naeem Mohaiemen’s film Last Man in Dhaka Central [The Young Man Was, Part 3], 2015) sit alongside more speculative references (the barren earth suggested by Robert Smithson’s Dead Tree, 1969/2015) and works that gesture more broadly towards death or suffering (Marlene Dumas’s beautiful series of ‘Skulls’, 2013–15). The effect is overwhelming – which I’m sure is part of Enwezor’s intention – but also flattening. The result, for me at least, is a sense of helplessness and paralysis, rather than politicization or engagement.

Marlene Dumas, Skulls, 2013-15, oil on canvas

There are some powerful moments here – such as the inspired pairing of photographs from Walker Evans’s iconic images of Great Depression-era rural Americans (‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, first published in 1941) with Isa Genzken’s architectural maquettes for ‘Realized and Unrealized Outdoor Projects’. Painted ghostly white, with some proposals as simple as running Two Lines between the roofs of high-rise housing blocks to form a barely visible umbilical connection, these are timeless potential monuments. Read against Evans’s photographs, they speak of loss, frailty and resistance – and the idea that sometimes the most quotidian of objects and gestures are the ones worth commemorating. (A pair of monumental white orchids that stand quietly on the opposite side of the Giardini, Two Orchids (2015) are Genzken’s fully materialized testimony to these ideas.) John Akomfrah’s magisterial Vertigo Sea (2015) is another highlight. Shown over three vast screens, its dense, roiling montage combines archival footage of the hunting and butchering of whales with underwater marine landscapes, aerial shots of birds flocking and dispersing like beads across the surface of the sea, and black and white photographic portraits. The work is hypnotically beautiful yet oblique enough to hold all of the multiple and contradictory significances of the ocean – as freedom and the passage to enslavement, as environmental battleground, as provider and waste dump.

Walker Evans and Isa Genzken, installation view

The show in the Arsenale is more heavy-handed and didactic from the get-go, opening with a blackened room containing neons by Bruce Nauman flashing words and phrases including Eat Death (1972) and Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain (1983) and Adel Abdessemed’s Nympheas (2015) – clusters of knives pointing up from the ground, like deadly flowers. The whole thing feels simultaneously too literal and too general to be thought-provoking. Weapons recur – down the hall in a black cannon by Pino Pascali (Cannone Semovente, 1965), which detonates the forceful symbolism of Melvin Edwards’s tortured but contained ‘Lynch Fragments’ (1963–ongoing), buckled and twisted assemblages of scrap metal, hung from the wall like machinic stags’ heads. Alone these are quietly powerful works; amongst the cacophony of Terry Adkins’s aggressive music-machines and Monica Bonvicini’s black, rubber-clad chainsaws (Latent Combustion, 2015), their meaning feels over-determined. Moments of lightness – such as Ernesto Ballesteros’s wire and balsa wood planes that float like feathers to the floor, travelling no distance at all, the distance of a breath (Indoor Flights, 2015), and Mika Rottenberg’s film installation, which takes a wonderfully weird view of bodily functions and workplace productivity – are few and far between. And the most poignant encounters are those that take you by surprise – for instance, coming across Lorna Simpson’s dreamily delineated painted figures next to Goncalo Mabunda’s The Knowledge Throne (2014), made from decommissioned machine guns.

Monica Bonvicini, Latent Combustion, 2015, chainsaws, wood axe, black polyurethane, matt finish, steel chains

The through-line that seemingly underlies the various economic, social and environmental issues that different works address is capitalism – the ceaseless drive to produce wealth through the exploitation of resources, both human and environmental. This is placed literally centre stage (in an ‘Arena’ designed by architect David Adjaye) through an epic series of readings of the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (1861, 1885, 1894) staged by Isaac Julien. Enwezor has called capital ‘the great drama of our age’ and, in so far as it determines almost every aspect of our lives, this may well be true. But Capital is not a dramatic text; it’s a rigorous and complex economic analysis, which gains little in either impact or understanding from being read aloud. As a reminder of the omnipresence and power of money, it is hardly necessary – far starker, unavoidable examples are to be found moored in the lagoon, flanking the route to the Giardini.

I do, however, like the idea that the human voice will be heard throughout this exhibition. I saw performances in the arena by Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, which sample, loop and re-imagine traditional workers’ or chain-gang songs, and a capella renditions of Jeremy Deller’s collection of broadsides – songsheets sold in the streets in industrial Britain, some of which are reproduced close by. These daily performances are reminders of the social, embodied reality of labour. Work is, after all, not only a source of pain but also of pride, ambition and self-realization, and the sense of community and solidarity that these songs evoke is a necessary complement and counterpoint to Marx’s abstract theorizations.

Lorna Simpson, Nightmare?, 2015, graphite and ink on gessoed wood panel with aluminium perimeter

‘All the World’s Futures’ is an ambitious show. The breadth of ‘the world’ that is represented is laudable – artists from 53 countries are included, fifteen more than the ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’ in 2013, an overdue and important corrective to previous editions of the biennale. And many of the issues that it addresses are urgent and affect us all. However, for an exhibition whose title might suggest looking forward, much of the work is caught up in the past. The danger of including so many archival or documentary projects is that the whole show gets caught up in wider ethical questions about what it means to document: is to show alone ever enough? Can we just point to the world’s problems? What does that mean in terms of responsibility, in terms of solutions? These are enormous questions and art doesn’t have all the answers. But this show doesn’t appear to be looking for them, transfixed as it seems to be – like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, which is discussed by Enwezor in his introduction – by the rubble of the past that builds up at its feet.

One of the strongest works in the Arsenale is Chantal Akerman’s Now (2015). This five-screen projection combines roving camera footage of the desert with a composite soundtrack of shouts, engines and what sound like gunshots. It’s like speeding through an empty Western film set to the soundtrack of a The Fast and the Furious getaway sequence – disorientating, dizzying, anxiety-inducing. It brought to mind an only half-joking refrain that stayed with me as I walked back through the exhibition: ‘Stop the world, I want to get off.’

By Paul Teasdale

Hito Steyerl ‘Factory of the Sun‘ (2015) film still; courtesy: the artist; photograph: Manuel Reinartz

If exit polls are to be believed (and the recent UK elections have sadly shown they should be) the main show of this year’s 56th Venice Biennale is a flop. ‘Dreadful’, ’dire’, ’depressing’ are some of the more printable adjectives I’ve heard to describe it. ‘Venice is Bad’ was the insightful email header from a supposedly serious art news source.

Call it the typical grumbles of footsore, spritz-lite art tourists but an easy show to digest ‘All the World’s Future’s’ ain’t. The Okwui Enwezor-curated exhibition is a dense, theory-crammed, historically-ridden conceptual disquisition. If you want your exhibitions with light and shade and a generous guiding hand, you won’t find it here. His title ’All the World’s Futures’ exemplifies his tendecy to invert common logic, as he sees no contradiction in taking this as free license to mine the past for his curatorial inspiration. He summons the spectre of Marx in programming the reading of all four volumes of Das Kapital– explicitly an analysis of historical and 19th century labour and market conditions that, some economists would argue (c.f. Thomas Piketty), no longer apply to today’s intrisically networked structures of global capital – and in the show’s accompanying statement, Enwezor invokes Walter Benjamin’s hallucinatory description of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a painting Benjamin owned, as justification for his historical methodology as well as the lever to illuminate ‘both the current “state of things” and the “appearance of things”’. As well as the reading of Marx throughout the Biennale’s duration in the ‘Arena’, a theatre designed by David Adjaye in the heart of the Central Pavilion, work by Fabio Mauri and Bruce Nauman open the Central Pavilion and Arsenale respectively, and ‘anthologies’ of Terry Adkins, Hans Haacke, Harun Farocki, Walker Evans and Chris Marker can also be found scattered throughout this dense show featuring works, and often groupings of works, by 136 artists.

Simon Denny, ‘Secret Power’ (2015), installation view Marco Polo International Airport, Venice. Courtesy: the artist & New Zealand Pavilion

It’s a fair gambit, learning from history to shape the future, but what the historical positions in this year’s exhibition tell us about ‘a project devoted to a fresh appraisal of the relationship of art and artists to the current state of things,’ as Enwezor describes the show in his accompanying statement, is unclear. Moreover a narrative that would guide us through the admirably diverse yet fractured groupings of artists, a way of positioning their often rewarding work into a coherent structure, was lacking. Perhaps that’s the key missing ingredient here, legibility. In its desire for fulsomeness, this show has overcompensated. (For a far more detailed and thoughtful analysis of Enwezor’s show read Amy Sherlock’s blog here and see the forthcoming Summer issues of frieze and frieze d/e for in-depth reviews on the Biennale and pavilions.)

Hito Steyerl, ‘Factory of the Sun‘ (2015), installation view, German Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale. Courtesy: the artist; photograph; Manuel Reinartz

‘We need knowledge of future-futures not past-futures’, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell. If Enwezor’s focus was on the past, two other Berlin-based artists, outside of his curatorial remit, focused on the contemporary issues which Enwezor presumably had in mind, with a charm, wit and attention to storytelling missing from Enwezor’s dense exposition.

Hito Steyerl, ‘Factory of the Sun‘ (2015), film still. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Manuel Reinartz

Hito Steyerl’s film Factory of the Sun (2015) was screened in the large dark ‘basement ‘ of the reconfigured German Pavilion – a high up mezzanine which led down to three ground-floor chambers – with grids of blue LEDs created a Tron-like environment where viewers could lounge in deckchairs. Steyerl’s fractious, digitally-buzzing film follows the creation of a spoof video game that discusses, amongst many other things, the shooting down of a Deutsche bank drone that has targeted an innocent bystander. We the viewers are supposedly implicated, by watching from the ‘studio’ the game was created in – the characters one can choose in the game, wearing lycra bodysuits, intermittently breakout and dance to techno. We hear the backstory of one of the female characters, her Russian grandparents sold all their possessions to buy a car and leave the country, only for the borders to change and find themselves back in the USSR; a disembodied bust of Stalin floats in soupy digital waters (a dig at Enwezor’s summoning of the spectre of Marx?). One scene shows our tough-looking protagonist firing a gun at a practice range. In the specification drop table that appears on screen, the gun is classed as ‘tested at Ferguson’. Chopping from video game footage, to its motion-capture making, to faux news channels lambasting a Deutsche Bank spokesperson for the company’s implication in the drone strike. (‘Super, so I’m supposed to be the German twat, right?’) It’s irreverent, silly stuff but also poignant and sadly pertinent. Implication in the systems of power to the point where the only form of resistance is complicity (the making of a video game) ultimately delivers a pessimistic payload that the humour can’t efface. But at least it speaks to a reality we recognize as today.

Simon Denny, ‘Secret Power’ (2015), installation view Bibliotheca Nazionale Marciana, Venice. Courtesy: the artist & New Zealand Pavilion

‘Is it Gameable?’ reads text on one of Simon Denny’s data farm-like installations in his show ‘Secret Power’ for the New Zealand pavilion. Housed in the opulently beautiful Bibliotheca Nazionale Marciana, this bastion of knowledge features some of the oldest surviving maps of the globe. This quote is taken from GCHQ files leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013, and the show as a whole takes as its star the former NSA Creative Director of Defence Intelligence, David Darchicourt, and his graphic designs revealed in the Snowden leaks. Starting with a 3D modelling of Darchicourt’s LinkedIn profile and ending with a Terminator 8000 skull, each terminus mimics the simplicity and legibility of information presentation that Darchicourt prized (shown somewhat ominously are reproductions of children’s games Darchicourt also designed). But Darchicourt is not the bad guy here, more an unwitting pawn to a faceless, borderless system of organizations – the overarching target is the ‘Five Eyes‘ intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Where Denny plays brilliantly is in that weird lacuna that arises in the fact that a secret service employs a designer to make their work more legible.

Simon Denny, ‘Secret Power’ (2015), installation view Marco Polo International Airport, Venice. Courtesy: the artist & New Zealand Pavilion

Are Steyerl’s and Denny’s takes too funny, too cutely ‘accurate’? Are they too implicit in the horrors they describe? ‘Give us critique not comedy!’ we might pompously demand. Now, as Snowden has shown, disruption comes from within, not from a retrograde spirit of ’68, ‘man the barricades!’ nostalgia. Fighting intelligence requires intelligence and tactics that match. Close studies of the past are important and the needed revisioning of historically skewed narratives and forgotten positions are welcome, but any depository of knowledge relies on that information’s accessibility. Speaking to the Guardian recently about the content of the Snowden leaks, Denny put it like this: ‘These images contain a lot of cultural information that we just haven’t been able to unpack. The attempt with this exhibition is to give people the tools to do that.’ It wasn’t just the water that was cloudy in Venice this year.

Hito Steyerl, ‘Factory of the Sun‘ (2015), installation view, German Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale. Courtesy: the artist; photograph; Manuel Reinartz

By Paul Teasdale

Hito Steyerl ‘Factory of the Sun‘ (2015) film still; courtesy: the artist; photograph: Manuel Reinartz

If exit polls are to be believed (and the recent UK elections have sadly shown they should be) the main show of this year’s 56th Venice Biennale is a flop. ‘Dreadful’, ‘dire’, ‘depressing’ are some of the more printable adjectives I’ve heard to describe it. ‘Venice is Bad’ was the insightful email header from a supposedly serious art news source.

Call it the typical grumbles of footsore, spritz-lite art tourists but an easy show to digest ‘All the World’s Futures’ ain’t. The Okwui Enwezor-curated exhibition is a dense, theory-crammed, historically-ridden conceptual disquisition. If you like your exhibitions with light and shade and a generous guiding hand, you won’t find it here. Enwezor’s title ‘All the World’s Futures’ exemplifies his tendecy to invert common logic, as he sees no contradiction in taking this as free license to mine the past for his curatorial inspiration. He summons the spectre of Marx in programming the reading of all four volumes of Das Kapital– explicitly an analysis of historical and 19th century labour and market conditions that, some economists would argue (c.f. Thomas Piketty), no longer apply to today’s intrisically networked structures of global capital – and in the show’s accompanying statement, Enwezor invokes Walter Benjamin’s hallucinatory description of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a painting Benjamin owned, as justification for his historical methodology as well as the lever to illuminate ‘both the current “state of things” and the “appearance of things”’. As well as the reading of Marx throughout the Biennale’s duration in the ‘Arena’, a theatre designed by David Adjaye in the heart of the Central Pavilion, work by Fabio Mauri and Bruce Nauman open the Central Pavilion and Arsenale respectively, and ‘anthologies’ of Terry Adkins, Hans Haacke, Harun Farocki, Walker Evans and Chris Marker can also be found scattered throughout this dense show featuring works, and often groupings of works, by 136 artists.

Simon Denny, ‘Secret Power’ (2015), installation view Marco Polo International Airport, Venice. Courtesy: the artist & New Zealand Pavilion

It’s a fair gambit, learning from history to shape the future, but what the historical positions in this year’s exhibition tell us about ‘a project devoted to a fresh appraisal of the relationship of art and artists to the current state of things,’ as Enwezor describes the show in his accompanying statement, is unclear. Moreover a narrative that would guide us through the admirably diverse yet fractured groupings of artists, a way of positioning their often rewarding work into a coherent structure, was lacking. Perhaps that’s the key missing ingredient here, legibility. In its desire for fulsomeness, this show has overcompensated. (For a far more detailed and thoughtful analysis of Enwezor’s show read Amy Sherlock’s blog here and see the forthcoming Summer issues of frieze and frieze d/e for in-depth reviews on the Biennale and pavilions.)

Hito Steyerl, ‘Factory of the Sun‘ (2015), installation view, German Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale. Courtesy: the artist; photograph; Manuel Reinartz

‘We need knowledge of future-futures not past-futures’, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell. If Enwezor’s focus was on the past, two Berlin-based artists outside of his curatorial remit focused on the contemporary issues which Enwezor presumably had in mind; with a charm, wit and attention to storytelling missing from Enwezor’s overwrought exposition.

Hito Steyerl, ‘Factory of the Sun‘ (2015), film still. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Manuel Reinartz

Hito Steyerl’s film Factory of the Sun (2015) was screened in the large dark ‘basement ‘ of the reconfigured German Pavilion – a high up mezzanine which led down to three ground-floor chambers – with grids of blue LEDs created a Tron-like environment where viewers could lounge in deckchairs. Steyerl’s fractious, digitally-buzzing film follows the creation of a spoof video game that discusses, amongst many other things, the shooting down of a Deutsche bank drone that has targeted an innocent bystander. We the viewers are supposedly implicated, by watching from the ‘studio’ the game was created in – the characters one can choose in the game, wearing lycra bodysuits, intermittently breakout and dance to techno. We hear the backstory of one of the female characters, her Russian grandparents sold all their possessions to buy a car and leave the country, only for the borders to change and find themselves back in the USSR; a disembodied bust of Stalin floats in soupy digital waters (a dig at Enwezor’s raising of Marx?). One scene shows our tough-looking protagonist firing a gun at a practice range. In the specification drop table that appears on screen, the gun is classed as ‘tested at Ferguson’. The visuals chop from video game footage, to its motion-capture making, to faux news channels lambasting a Deutsche Bank spokesperson for the company’s implication in the drone strike. (‘Super, so I’m supposed to be the German twat, right?’) It’s irreverent, silly stuff but also poignant and sadly pertinent. Implication in the systems of power to the point where the only form of resistance is complicity (the making of a video game) ultimately delivers a pessimistic payload that the humour can’t efface. But at least it speaks to a reality we recognize as today.

Simon Denny, ‘Secret Power’ (2015), installation view Bibliotheca Nazionale Marciana, Venice. Courtesy: the artist & New Zealand Pavilion

‘Is it Gameable?’ reads text on one of Simon Denny’s data farm-like installations in his show ‘Secret Power’ for the New Zealand pavilion. Housed in the opulently beautiful Bibliotheca Nazionale Marciana, this bastion of knowledge features some of the oldest surviving maps of the globe. This quote is taken from GCHQ files leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013, and the show as a whole takes as its star the former NSA Creative Director of Defence Intelligence, David Darchicourt, and his graphic designs revealed in the Snowden leaks. Starting with a 3D modelling of Darchicourt’s LinkedIn profile and ending with a Terminator 8000 skull, each terminus mimics the simplicity and legibility of information presentation that Darchicourt prized (shown somewhat ominously are reproductions of children’s games Darchicourt also designed). But Darchicourt is not the bad guy here, more an unwitting pawn to a faceless, borderless system of organizations – the overarching target is the ‘Five Eyes‘ intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Where Denny plays brilliantly is in that weird lacuna that arises in the fact that a secret service employs a designer to make their work more legible.

Simon Denny, ‘Secret Power’ (2015), installation view Marco Polo International Airport, Venice. Courtesy: the artist & New Zealand Pavilion

Are Steyerl and Denny’s takes too funny, too cutely ‘accurate’? Are they too implicit in the horrors they describe? ‘Give us critique not comedy!’ we might pompously demand. Now, as Snowden has shown, disruption comes from within, not from a retrograde spirit of ’68, ‘man the barricades!’ nostalgia. Fighting intelligence requires intelligence and tactics that match. Close studies of the past are important and the needed revisioning of historically-skewed narratives and forgotten positions are welcome, but any depository of knowledge relies on that information’s accessibility. Speaking to the Guardian recently about the content of the Snowden leaks and his Venice exhibition, Denny put it like this: ‘These images contain a lot of cultural information that we just haven’t been able to unpack. The attempt with this exhibition is to give people the tools to do that.’ It wasn’t just the water that was cloudy in Venice this year.

Hito Steyerl, ‘Factory of the Sun‘ (2015), installation view, German Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale. Courtesy: the artist; photograph; Manuel Reinartz

By Amy Sherlock

Glenn Ligon, 'A Small Band' (2015) and Oscar Murillo, 'signalling devices now in bastard territory' (2015), installation view at the Central Pavilion, Giardini

I generally find Venice an uplifting sort of place. When the hazy, watery sunlight bounces off the campanile in San Marco or the dome of San Giorgio, it’s hard not to feel filled with wonder that such structures – which have stood, more or less unchanged, since the 15th century – were built in a lagoon. The whole city is a testimony equally to ingenuity and folly, as well as to the benefits of international trade and the patronage of the mercantile classes. Venice is also sinking, slowly, at a rate that has, over recent decades, increased due to rising sea levels. This inevitability, just far off enough to be unimaginable, makes the city a particularly interesting setting for an exhibition titled ‘All the World’s Futures’. Curator Okwui Enwezor’s central exhibition for the 56th Venice Biennale considers how contemporary artists are responding to the crises and instability of the globalized present. The Biennale’s own history as a cultural event inaugurated to celebrate the recently united Italian state and its structure – which is still informed by global power relations of the early 20th century – also make it a highly charged setting for considering what ‘all the world’ has historically meant.

A first glance at the central pavilion along one of the Giardini’s tree-lined avenues is enough to ascertain that a consideration of all the world’s futures implies a re-evaluation – and maybe re-writing – of certain narratives of the past. At the top of the pavilion’s bright white facade, a neon work by Glenn Ligon spells out ‘blues blood bruise’ – unlit, but forming firm dark lines in the bright sunlight (A Small Band, 2015). The work overwrites the words ‘La Biennale’, in parts seeming to blur with them, the forms becoming slightly unclear where letters overlap. Below, between the neo-classical columns that lead to the entrance, hang the 20 black canvas ‘flags’ of Oscar Murillo’s signalling devices now in bastard territory (2015). Both foreboding and theatrical, they create an ominous partition. My immediate reading of them is not as flags (without poles, without states) but as tarpaulins used for transport or concealment, or even as shrouds. They look sticky, dusty, heavy. I imagine suffocating beneath one.

Glenn Ligon,‘Come Out #12 – 15’, 2015, installation view, Central Pavilion

Ligon’s piece is related to four large works on canvas that hang in their own room within the pavilion (‘Come Out #12 – 15’, 2015). Across them, the words ‘come out to show them’ are over-printed repeatedly in black – swarming and gathering to the point of being illegible in places, like thunder-cloud haze. They seem to thrum, these canvases: you can almost hear the words as they stumble into one another, an indistinguishable chorus in some parts, a clear voice in others. Both the ‘Come Out’ works and A Small Band quote from the testimony on Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, six young black men sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1965 on the grounds of forced confessions taken whilst in police custody. Hamm’s description of police brutality, recorded 50 years ago, feels devastatingly relevant against a backdrop of ongoing ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray whilst in police custody: the latest in a horrible succession of injustices that reflect the strained nature of the relationship between police forces and communities – and race relations more broadly – across the United States. A future in which history merely repeats itself is a sombre prospect indeed, a thought which sets the tone for the entire show.

Robert Smithson, Asphalt on Eroded Cliff, 1969, ink and coloured chalk on paper

The rest of the exhibition, however, can’t quite sustain the clout of this initial punch. It is a truism to say that an exhibition on this scale – including a whopping 136 artists – will necessarily be uneven. In this case, the breadth of the theme – to reflect all of the world’s crises and injustice – means that the varied responses end up almost cancelling one another out. Specific horrors like the Holocaust, referenced in Fabio Mauri’s The Western Wall or the Wailing Wall (1993), a stacked wall of suitcases that is the first sculpture visitors come across in the space, and forgotten histories (such as that of the revolutionary left in Bangladesh, which is the subject of Naeem Mohaiemen’s film Last Man in Dhaka Central [The Young Man Was, Part 3], 2015) sit alongside more speculative references (the barren earth suggested by Robert Smithson’s Dead Tree, 1969/2015) and works that gesture more broadly towards death or suffering (Marlene Dumas’s beautiful series of ‘Skulls’, 2013–15). The effect is overwhelming – which I’m sure is part of Enwezor’s intention – but also flattening. The result, for me at least, is a sense of helplessness and paralysis, rather than politicization or engagement.

Marlene Dumas, Skulls, 2013-15, oil on canvas

There are some powerful moments here – such as the inspired pairing of photographs from Walker Evans’s iconic images of Great Depression-era rural Americans (‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, first published in 1941) with Isa Genzken’s architectural maquettes for ‘Realized and Unrealized Outdoor Projects’. Painted ghostly white, with some proposals as simple as running Two Lines between the roofs of high-rise housing blocks to form a barely visible umbilical connection, these are timeless potential monuments. Read against Evans’s photographs, they speak of loss, frailty and resistance – and the idea that sometimes the most quotidian of objects and gestures are the ones worth commemorating. (A pair of monumental white orchids that stand quietly on the opposite side of the Giardini, Two Orchids (2015) are Genzken’s fully materialized testimony to these ideas.) John Akomfrah’s magisterial Vertigo Sea (2015) is another highlight. Shown over three vast screens, its dense, roiling montage combines archival footage of the hunting and butchering of whales and polar bears with underwater marine landscapes, aerial shots of birds flocking and dispersing like beads across the surface of the sea, and black and white photographic portraits that evoke the historical slave trade and, by association, a horrifyingly contemporary Mediterranean reality. The work is hypnotically beautiful yet oblique enough to hold all of the multiple and contradictory significances of the ocean – as freedom and the passage to enslavement, as environmental battleground, as provider and waste dump.

Walker Evans and Isa Genzken, installation view

The show in the Arsenale is more heavy-handed and didactic from the get-go, opening with a blackened room containing neons by Bruce Nauman flashing words and phrases including Eat Death (1972) and Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain (1983) and Adel Abdessemed’s Nympheas (2015) – clusters of knives pointing up from the ground, like deadly flowers. The whole thing feels simultaneously too literal and too general to be thought-provoking. Weapons recur – down the hall in a black cannon by Pino Pascali (Cannone Semovente, 1965), which detonates the forceful symbolism of Melvin Edwards’s tortured but contained ‘Lynch Fragments’ (1963–ongoing), buckled and twisted assemblages of scrap metal, hung from the wall like machinic stags’ heads. Alone these are eloquent, powerful works; amongst the cacophony of Terry Adkins’s aggressive music-machines and Monica Bonvicini’s black, rubber-clad chainsaws (Latent Combustion, 2015), their meaning feels over-determined. Moments of lightness – such as Ernesto Ballesteros’s wire and balsa wood planes that float like feathers to the floor, travelling no distance at all, the distance of a breath (Indoor Flights, 2015), and Mika Rottenberg’s film installation, which takes a wonderfully weird view of bodily functions and workplace productivity – are few and far between. And the most poignant encounters are those that take you by surprise – for instance, coming across Lorna Simpson’s dreamily delineated painted figures next to Goncalo Mabunda’s The Knowledge Throne (2014), made from decommissioned machine guns.

Monica Bonvicini, Latent Combustion, 2015, chainsaws, wood axe, black polyurethane, matt finish, steel chains

The through-line that seemingly underlies the various economic, social and environmental issues that different works address is capitalism – the ceaseless drive to produce wealth through the exploitation of resources, both human and environmental. This is placed literally centre stage (in an ‘Arena’ designed by architect David Adjaye) through an epic series of readings of the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (1861, 1885, 1894) staged by Isaac Julien. Enwezor has called capital ‘the great drama of our age’ and, in so far as it determines almost every aspect of our lives, this may well be true. But Capital is not a dramatic text; it’s a rigorous and complex economic analysis, which gains little in either impact or understanding from being read aloud. As a reminder of the omnipresence and power of money, it is hardly necessary – far starker, unavoidable examples are to be found moored in the lagoon, flanking the route to the Giardini.

I do, however, like the idea that the human voice will be heard throughout this exhibition. I saw performances in the arena by Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, which sample, loop and re-imagine traditional workers’ or chain-gang songs, and a capella renditions of Jeremy Deller’s collection of broadsides – songsheets sold in the streets in industrial Britain, some of which are reproduced close by. These daily performances are reminders of the social, embodied reality of labour. Work is, after all, not only a source of pain but also of pride, ambition and self-realization, and the sense of community and solidarity that these songs evoke is a necessary complement and counterpoint to Marx’s abstract theorizations.

Lorna Simpson, Nightmare?, 2015, graphite and ink on gessoed wood panel with aluminium perimeter

‘All the World’s Futures’ is an ambitious show. The breadth of ‘the world’ that is represented is laudable – artists from 53 countries are included, fifteen more than the ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’ in 2013, an overdue and important corrective to previous editions of the biennale. And many of the issues that it addresses are urgent and affect us all. However, for an exhibition whose title might suggest looking forward, much of the work is caught up in the past. The danger of including so many archival or documentary projects is that the whole show gets caught up in wider ethical questions about what it means to document: is to show alone ever enough? Can we just point to the world’s problems? What does that mean in terms of responsibility, in terms of solutions? These are enormous questions and art doesn’t have all the answers. But this show doesn’t appear to be looking for them, transfixed as it seems to be – like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, which is discussed by Enwezor in his introduction – by the rubble of the past that builds up at its feet.

One of the strongest works in the Arsenale is Chantal Akerman’s Now (2015). This five-screen projection combines roving camera footage of the desert with a composite soundtrack of shouts, engines and what sound like gunshots. It’s like speeding through an empty Western film set to the soundtrack of a The Fast and the Furious getaway sequence – disorientating, dizzying, anxiety-inducing. It brought to mind an only half-joking refrain that stayed with me as I walked back through the exhibition: ‘Stop the world, I want to get off.’

By Jonathan Griffin

Chris Burden, the Los Angeles artist, died at his home in Topanga, California, on Sunday. He was 69 years old. He had been diagnosed with a malignant melanoma 18 months ago, but had reportedly kept the news private except for family and friends.

Since the end of the 1970s, Burden has been acknowledged as one of the most important American sculptors of his generation. But it was several years earlier, in 1971, when he first became known – notorious, even – while completing his graduate studies at UC Irvine, in Orange County. For his thesis exhibition, he made Five Day Locker Piece (1971), in which he endured five days inside a school locker, with only a tank of water to sustain him. His fusing of cool conceptualism and post-minimalism with politically and psychologically fraught body art was radical.

Chris Burden, Shoot (1971). Performance documentation

That same year, he made the work for which he is perhaps still best known. The fact that few people were at F Space in Santa Ana to witness Shoot (1971) first hand, or even saw the brief and anti-climatic documentation of the event, only added to its aura. In the midst of the self-immolation protests by Buddhist monks against the Vietnam War, and of U.S. military suppression of student protests at home, Burden’s action – in which he asked a friend to shoot him in his left arm – took on fiercely antagonistic overtones.

Chris Burden, The Big Wheel (1979). Installation view

In the following years, Burden began to translate his studies of violence, scale and power (both metaphorical and physical) into sculptures and installations. The Big Wheel, made in 1979, involved a three tonne, two and a half metre flywheel that was rotated at terrifying speeds by a motorbike. After the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, Burden manufactured the oversized but minutely accurate L.A.P.D Uniforms (1993), which threateningly but absurdly dwarf the viewer.

Despite being known as a modest, quiet man, Burden’s interest in scale was paralleled in the grandeur of his ambition. His projects became increasingly massive and included The Flying Steamroller (1996), a 12-tonne vehicle on a counterbalanced rotating arm; When Robots Rule: The Two Minute Airplane Factory (1999), in which a computer was programmed to build and launch model aeroplanes at Tate Britain (unsuccessfully, for most of its exhibition); and more recently Metropolis II (2011), a giant, complexly interwoven toy car track that took four years to build and which is permanently installed at Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Chris Burden, Urban Light (2008). Installation view at the Los Angeles County Museum, USA

For many people in Los Angeles, however, Burden will forever be known not as the artist who had himself shot but the creator of the public sculpture Urban Light (2008), installed outside LACMA. The work, which consists of a neat grid of 202 antique lampposts, is illuminated at night, and is spectacularly beautiful. It is a monument to the past – and a gift to the future – of a still young city.

By Paul Teasdale

Hito Steyerl 'Factory of the Sun' (2015) film still; courtesy: the artist; photograph: Manuel Reinartz

If exit polls are to be believed (and the recent UK elections have sadly shown they should be) the main show of this year’s 56th Venice Biennale is a flop. ‘Dreadful’, ‘dire’, ‘depressing’ are some of the more printable adjectives I’ve heard to describe it. ‘Venice is Bad’ was the insightful email header from a supposedly serious art news source.

Call it the typical grumbles of footsore, spritz-lite art tourists but an easy show to digest ‘All the World’s Futures’ ain’t. The Okwui Enwezor-curated exhibition is a dense, theory-crammed, historically-ridden conceptual disquisition. If you like your exhibitions with light and shade and a generous guiding hand, you won’t find it here. Enwezor’s title ‘All the World’s Futures’ exemplifies his tendecy to invert common logic, as he sees no contradiction in taking this as free license to mine the past for his curatorial inspiration. He summons the spectre of Marx in programming the reading of all four volumes of Das Kapital– explicitly an analysis of historical and 19th century labour and market conditions that, some economists would argue (c.f. Thomas Piketty), no longer apply to today’s intrisically networked structures of global capital – and in the show’s accompanying statement, Enwezor invokes Walter Benjamin’s hallucinatory description of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a painting Benjamin owned, as justification for his historical methodology as well as the lever to illuminate ‘both the current “state of things” and the “appearance of things”’. As well as the reading of Marx throughout the Biennale’s duration in the ‘Arena’, a theatre designed by David Adjaye in the heart of the Central Pavilion, work by Fabio Mauri and Bruce Nauman open the Central Pavilion and Arsenale respectively, and ‘anthologies’ of Terry Adkins, Hans Haacke, Harun Farocki, Walker Evans and Chris Marker can also be found scattered throughout this dense show featuring works, and often groupings of works, by 136 artists.

Simon Denny, ‘Secret Power’ (2015), installation view Marco Polo International Airport, Venice. Courtesy: the artist & New Zealand Pavilion

It’s a fair gambit, learning from history to shape the future, but what the historical positions in this year’s exhibition tell us about ‘a project devoted to a fresh appraisal of the relationship of art and artists to the current state of things,’ as Enwezor describes the show in his accompanying statement, is unclear. Moreover a narrative that would guide us through the admirably diverse yet fractured groupings of artists, a way of positioning their often rewarding work into a coherent structure, was lacking. Perhaps that’s the key missing ingredient here, legibility. In its desire for fulsomeness, this show has overcompensated. (For a far more detailed and thoughtful analysis of Enwezor’s show read Amy Sherlock’s blog here and see the forthcoming Summer issues of frieze and frieze d/e for in-depth reviews on the Biennale and pavilions.)

Hito Steyerl, ‘Factory of the Sun’ (2015), installation view, German Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Manuel Reinartz

‘We need knowledge of future-futures not past-futures’, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell. If Enwezor’s focus was on the past, two Berlin-based artists outside of his curatorial remit focused on the contemporary issues which Enwezor presumably had in mind; with a charm, wit and attention to storytelling missing from Enwezor’s overwrought exposition.

Hito Steyerl, ‘Factory of the Sun’ (2015), film still. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Manuel Reinartz

Hito Steyerl’s film Factory of the Sun (2015) was screened in the large dark ‘basement’ of the reconfigured German Pavilion – a high up mezzanine which led down to three ground-floor chambers – with grids of blue LEDs created a Tron-like environment where viewers could lounge in deckchairs. Steyerl’s fractious, digitally-buzzing film follows the creation of a spoof video game that discusses, amongst many other things, the shooting down of a Deutsche bank drone that has targeted an innocent bystander. We the viewers are supposedly implicated, by watching from the ‘studio’ the game was created in – the characters one can choose in the game, wearing lycra bodysuits, intermittently breakout and dance to techno. We hear the backstory of one of the female characters, her Russian grandparents sold all their possessions to buy a car and leave the country, only for the borders to change and find themselves back in the USSR; a disembodied bust of Stalin floats in soupy digital waters (a dig at Enwezor’s raising of Marx?). One scene shows our tough-looking protagonist firing a gun at a practice range. In the specification drop table that appears on screen, the gun is classed as ‘tested at Ferguson’. The visuals chop from video game footage, to its motion-capture making, to faux news channels lambasting a Deutsche Bank spokesperson for the company’s implication in the drone strike. (‘Super, so I’m supposed to be the German twat, right?’) It’s irreverent, silly stuff but also poignant and sadly pertinent. Implication in the systems of power to the point where the only form of resistance is complicity (the making of a video game) ultimately delivers a pessimistic payload that the humour can’t efface. But at least it speaks to a reality we recognize as today.

Simon Denny, ‘Secret Power’ (2015), installation view Bibliotheca Nazionale Marciana, Venice. Courtesy: the artist & New Zealand Pavilion

‘Is it Gameable?’ reads text on one of Simon Denny’s data farm-like installations in his show ‘Secret Power’ for the New Zealand pavilion. Housed in the opulently beautiful Bibliotheca Nazionale Marciana, this bastion of knowledge features some of the oldest surviving maps of the globe. This quote is taken from GCHQ files leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013, and the show as a whole takes as its star the former NSA Creative Director of Defence Intelligence, David Darchicourt, and his graphic designs revealed in the Snowden leaks. Starting with a 3D modelling of Darchicourt’s LinkedIn profile and ending with a Terminator 8000 skull, each terminus mimics the simplicity and legibility of information presentation that Darchicourt prized (shown somewhat ominously are reproductions of children’s games Darchicourt also designed). But Darchicourt is not the bad guy here, more an unwitting pawn to a faceless, borderless system of organizations – the overarching target is the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Where Denny plays brilliantly is in that weird lacuna that arises in the fact that a secret service employs a designer to make their work more legible.

Simon Denny, ‘Secret Power’ (2015), installation view Marco Polo International Airport, Venice. Courtesy: the artist & New Zealand Pavilion

Are Steyerl and Denny’s takes too funny, too cutely ‘accurate’? Are they too implicit in the horrors they describe? ‘Give us critique not comedy!’ we might pompously demand. Now, as Snowden has shown, disruption comes from within, not from a retrograde spirit of ’68, ‘man the barricades!’ nostalgia. Fighting intelligence requires intelligence and tactics that match. Close studies of the past are important and the needed revisioning of historically-skewed narratives and forgotten positions are welcome, but any depository of knowledge relies on that information’s accessibility. Speaking to the Guardian recently about the content of the Snowden leaks and his Venice exhibition, Denny put it like this: ‘These images contain a lot of cultural information that we just haven’t been able to unpack. The attempt with this exhibition is to give people the tools to do that.’ It wasn’t just the water that was cloudy in Venice this year.

Hito Steyerl, ‘Factory of the Sun’ (2015), installation view, German Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Manuel Reinartz

By Christy Lange

The Ukrainian national pavilion at the Venice Biennale

In its tightly held, unrelenting focus on the conditions of labour in the world at large, Okwui Enwezor’s ‘All the World’s Futures’ has the perhaps unintended result of making art-making itself – and viewing art – feel like work.

Twisting through a relentless labyrinth of screens, vitrines and small, framed series, the black-and-white, text-based work makes the exhibition as a whole feel colourless. ‘All the World’s Futures’ stands in sharp contrast, perhaps even as a reaction to, Massimilano Gioni’s ‘Encyclopaedic Palace’, which evoked worlds steeped in fantasies, utopias and borne of the artist’s mind. Here we get the world as it is, in the present tense, delving readily into the past but with few hopeful glimpses toward the future.

Filmography of Harun Farocki installed in the Arsenale as part of ‘All the World’s Futures’

Without pieces to punctuate the dire urgency of the conditions the works document, I found myself becoming numb to the impact. There is no counterpoint to their point, not antitheses to their theses. To find those alternative views, one largely had to look beyond the main show, to a few of the pavilions in the Giardini and plenty of possibilities off-site.

Emeka Ogboh, ‘Song of the Germans’ (2015)

In the Giardino delle Vergini, tucked behind the Arsenale, there are a few spaces that allow room for contemplation. Here, a piece by Nigerian-born, Berlin-based Emeka Ogboh (Deutschlandlied, Song of the Germans, 2015) was unexpectedly seductive. The artist collaborated with a Berlin Afro-Gospel choir to record them singing the German nation anthem in 10 different African languages native to the choir’s members. At first the singing sounds almost hopeful, a possible sign that of reclaiming this heavily fraught anthem. But after the fourth or fifth rendition, the tune begins to sour. What starts out as a celebratory choral piece begins to feel oppressive, a turn that I felt viscerally, rather than witnessing its documentation, and that’s what gives the piece its power.

Installation by C.T. Jasper & Joanna Malinowska in the Polish Pavilion

In the Polish pavilion, what seems like a massive Fitzcaraldian undertaking in Halka/Haiti 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W by C.T. Jasper & Joanna Malinowska, turns out to be a relief because it is, at heart, one idea, well-executed. While other national pavilions strain to touch on multiple vague notions (I’m thinking of the Swiss, among others), and as a result, only did so lightly, this one relies on a single, conceptual performance. The artists staged the opera Halka in Cazale (a village populated by descendants of Polish soldiers who helped fight for Haiti’s independence) by employing members of the Poznan Opera House and musicians from the Philharmonic of Port-au-Prince. Themes of migration, transplantation and the dissolution of cultural boundaries are implied rather than exhibited, and the result feels refreshingly concise.

Off-site, the Ukranian national pavilion offered the title ‘HOPE’. But Nikita Kadan’s assemblage of burnt and rusted rubble collected during the country’s ongoing conflict and displayed in a glass vitrine was a jarring sight amidst the parade of yachts (Kadan has planted a bean plant inside the glass case, which, with luck, will grow to cover the artefacts). The other artists’ urgent responses to the dire situation in their country, are housed in the cool, modernist glass building astride the waterfront, sponsored by Victor Pinchuk. Here I felt the clash between the conditions in which these art works were made and the conditions in which they’re displayed – and all the contradictions about the ‘global’ art world it forces us to acknowledge – even far more sharply than anywhere in Enwezor’s show.

Installation view of the Martial Raysse retrospective at Palazzo Grassi

Beside the Grand Canal, the Palazzo Grassi hosted a surprisingly refreshing retrospective of the works of Martial Raysse, an artist ripe for rediscovery. After being a sensation of the French art world in the 1960s while only in his early 20s, Raysse subsequently disappeared for decades. He resurfaced in his later years making chaotic, brightly coloured, large-scale paintings. These works you can mostly gloss over, in search of the smaller, older, more delicate sculptural works in between. His large and small-scale assemblages are true revelations of ’60s pop – incorporating materials like paintbrushes, hairbrushes, plants, soap, toys and neon in unexpected ways. The patina of age around the consumer goods only serves to make them more like rare treasures recently uncovered. (Don’t miss the video of the now-79-year-old artist dancing in his studio in the café.)

Jean-Luc Moulene, ‘Rotor’ (2015) in ‘Slip of the Tongue’ at Punta della Dogana

Similarly surprising and out of character for Pinault’s usual fare, he gave over the Punta della Dogana to Danh Vo, who curated ‘Slip of the Tongue’, an elegant, understated show of little-seen minor masterpieces by Luciano Fabro, Carol Rama and Paul Thek, among several anonymous or unknown old masters. The presentation was for more varied than the usual names we’re used to seeing there, and the installation felt spare, if at times a bit too ambiguous – looking beautiful and mysterious but failing to coalesce into a large more meaningful whole.

Henri Rousseau, ‘Horse Attacked by a Jaguar’ (1910)

Two years ago, it was the Manet show ‘Manet: Return to Venice’ at the Palazzo Ducale that was the sleeper hit of the biennale. This year, it’s ‘Henri Rousseau: Archaic Candour’ at that same venue. Rousseau’s work is boldly presented together with that of his contemporaries (40 works by Rousseau paired with 60 works for comparison), showing how, against typical art historical notions, he may not have been the autodidact of lore. It illustrates his mingling with Paris intellectuals like Apollinaire and traces his inspirations from old masters. The wall texts are lucid and illuminating, and, above all, the paintings themselves still look fresh, and joyful, without being naive. Here is what an intricately and deeply researched exhibition can do for an artist’s work – an example of scholarly curating at its best.

By Amy Sherlock

Glenn Ligon, 'A Small Band' (2015) and Oscar Murillo, 'signalling devices now in bastard territory' (2015), installation view at the Central Pavilion, Giardini

I generally find Venice an uplifting sort of place. When the hazy, watery sunlight bounces off the campanile in San Marco or the dome of San Giorgio, it’s hard not to feel filled with wonder that such structures – which have stood, more or less unchanged, since the 15th century – were built in a lagoon. The whole city is a testimony equally to ingenuity and folly, as well as to the benefits of international trade and the patronage of the mercantile classes. Venice is also sinking, slowly, at a rate that has, over recent decades, increased due to rising sea levels. This inevitability, just far off enough to be unimaginable, makes the city a particularly interesting setting for an exhibition titled ‘All the World’s Futures’. Curator Okwui Enwezor’s central exhibition for the 56th Venice Biennale considers how contemporary artists are responding to the crises and instability of the globalized present. The Biennale’s own history as a cultural event inaugurated to celebrate the recently united Italian state and its structure – which is still informed by global power relations of the early 20th century – also make it a highly charged setting for considering what ‘all the world’ has historically meant.

A first glance at the central pavilion along one of the Giardini’s tree-lined avenues is enough to ascertain that a consideration of all the world’s futures implies a re-evaluation – and maybe re-writing – of certain narratives of the past. At the top of the pavilion’s bright white facade, a neon work by Glenn Ligon spells out ‘blues blood bruise’ – unlit, but forming firm dark lines in the bright sunlight (A Small Band, 2015). The work overwrites the words ‘La Biennale’, in parts seeming to blur with them, the forms becoming slightly unclear where letters overlap. Below, between the neo-classical columns that lead to the entrance, hang the 20 black canvas ‘flags’ of Oscar Murillo’s signalling devices in now bastard territory (2015). Both foreboding and theatrical, they create an ominous partition. My immediate reading of them is not as flags (without poles, without states) but as tarpaulins used for transport or concealment, or even as shrouds. They look sticky, dusty, heavy. I imagine suffocating beneath one.

Glenn Ligon,‘Come Out #12 – 15’, 2015, installation view, Central Pavilion

Ligon’s piece is related to four large works on canvas that hang in their own room within the pavilion (‘Come Out #12 – 15’, 2015). Across them, the words ‘come out to show them’ are over-printed repeatedly in black – swarming and gathering to the point of being illegible in places, like thunder-cloud haze. They seem to thrum, these canvases: you can almost hear the words as they stumble into one another, an indistinguishable chorus in some parts, a clear voice in others. Both the ‘Come Out’ works and A Small Band quote from the testimony on Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, six young black men sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1965 on the grounds of forced confessions taken whilst in police custody. Hamm’s description of police brutality, recorded 50 years ago, feels devastatingly relevant against a backdrop of ongoing ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray whilst in police custody: the latest in a horrible succession of injustices that reflect the strained nature of the relationship between police forces and communities – and race relations more broadly – across the United States. A future in which history merely repeats itself is a sombre prospect indeed, a thought which sets the tone for the entire show.

Robert Smithson, Asphalt on Eroded Cliff, 1969, ink and coloured chalk on paper

The rest of the exhibition, however, can’t quite sustain the clout of this initial punch. It is a truism to say that an exhibition on this scale – including a whopping 136 artists – will necessarily be uneven. In this case, the breadth of the theme – to reflect all of the world’s crises and injustice – means that the varied responses end up almost cancelling one another out. Specific horrors like the Holocaust, referenced in Fabio Mauri’s The Western Wall or the Wailing Wall (1993), a stacked wall of suitcases that is the first sculpture visitors come across in the space, and forgotten histories (such as that of the revolutionary left in Bangladesh, which is the subject of Naeem Mohaiemen’s film Last Man in Dhaka Central [The Young Man Was, Part 3], 2015) sit alongside more speculative references (the barren earth suggested by Robert Smithson’s Dead Tree, 1969/2015) and works that gesture more broadly towards death or suffering (Marlene Dumas’s beautiful series of ‘Skulls’, 2013–15). The effect is overwhelming – which I’m sure is part of Enwezor’s intention – but also flattening. The result, for me at least, is a sense of helplessness and paralysis, rather than politicization or engagement.

Marlene Dumas, Skulls, 2013-15, oil on canvas

There are some powerful moments here – such as the inspired pairing of photographs from Walker Evans’s iconic images of Great Depression-era rural Americans (‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, first published in 1941) with Isa Genzken’s architectural maquettes for ‘Realized and Unrealized Outdoor Projects’. Painted ghostly white, with some proposals as simple as running Two Lines between the roofs of high-rise housing blocks to form a barely visible umbilical connection, these are timeless potential monuments. Read against Evans’s photographs, they speak of loss, frailty and resistance – and the idea that sometimes the most quotidian of objects and gestures are the ones worth commemorating. (A pair of monumental white orchids that stand quietly on the opposite side of the Giardini, Two Orchids (2015) are Genzken’s fully materialized testimony to these ideas.) John Akomfrah’s magisterial Vertigo Sea (2015) is another highlight. Shown over three vast screens, its dense, roiling montage combines archival footage of the hunting and butchering of whales and polar bears with underwater marine landscapes, aerial shots of birds flocking and dispersing like beads across the surface of the sea, and black and white photographic portraits that evoke the historical slave trade and, by association, a horrifyingly contemporary Mediterranean reality. The work is hypnotically beautiful yet oblique enough to hold all of the multiple and contradictory significances of the ocean – as freedom and the passage to enslavement, as environmental battleground, as provider and waste dump.

Walker Evans and Isa Genzken, installation view

The show in the Arsenale is more heavy-handed and didactic from the get-go, opening with a blackened room containing neons by Bruce Nauman flashing words and phrases including Eat Death (1972) and Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain (1983) and Adel Abdessemed’s Nympheas (2015) – clusters of knives pointing up from the ground, like deadly flowers. The whole thing feels simultaneously too literal and too general to be thought-provoking. Weapons recur – down the hall in a black cannon by Pino Pascali (Cannone Semovente, 1965), which detonates the forceful symbolism of Melvin Edwards’s tortured but contained ‘Lynch Fragments’ (1963–ongoing), buckled and twisted assemblages of scrap metal, hung from the wall like machinic stags’ heads. Alone these are eloquent, powerful works; amongst the cacophony of Terry Adkins’s aggressive music-machines and Monica Bonvicini’s black, rubber-clad chainsaws (Latent Combustion, 2015), their meaning feels over-determined. Moments of lightness – such as Ernesto Ballesteros’s wire and balsa wood planes that float like feathers to the floor, travelling no distance at all, the distance of a breath (Indoor Flights, 2015), and Mika Rottenberg’s film installation, which takes a wonderfully weird view of bodily functions and workplace productivity – are few and far between. And the most poignant encounters are those that take you by surprise – for instance, coming across Lorna Simpson’s dreamily delineated painted figures next to Goncalo Mabunda’s The Knowledge Throne (2014), made from decommissioned machine guns.

Monica Bonvicini, Latent Combustion, 2015, chainsaws, wood axe, black polyurethane, matt finish, steel chains

The through-line that seemingly underlies the various economic, social and environmental issues that different works address is capitalism – the ceaseless drive to produce wealth through the exploitation of resources, both human and environmental. This is placed literally centre stage (in an ‘Arena’ designed by architect David Adjaye) through an epic series of readings of the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (1861, 1885, 1894) staged by Isaac Julien. Enwezor has called capital ‘the great drama of our age’ and, in so far as it determines almost every aspect of our lives, this may well be true. But Capital is not a dramatic text; it’s a rigorous and complex economic analysis, which gains little in either impact or understanding from being read aloud. As a reminder of the omnipresence and power of money, it is hardly necessary – far starker, unavoidable examples are to be found moored in the lagoon, flanking the route to the Giardini.

I do, however, like the idea that the human voice will be heard throughout this exhibition. I saw performances in the arena by Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, which sample, loop and re-imagine traditional workers’ or chain-gang songs, and a capella renditions of Jeremy Deller’s collection of broadsides – songsheets sold in the streets in industrial Britain, some of which are reproduced close by. These daily performances are reminders of the social, embodied reality of labour. Work is, after all, not only a source of pain but also of pride, ambition and self-realization, and the sense of community and solidarity that these songs evoke is a necessary complement and counterpoint to Marx’s abstract theorizations.

Lorna Simpson, Nightmare?, 2015, graphite and ink on gessoed wood panel with aluminium perimeter

‘All the World’s Futures’ is an ambitious show. The breadth of ‘the world’ that is represented is laudable – artists from 53 countries are included, fifteen more than the ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’ in 2013, an overdue and important corrective to previous editions of the biennale. And many of the issues that it addresses are urgent and affect us all. However, for an exhibition whose title might suggest looking forward, much of the work is caught up in the past. The danger of including so many archival or documentary projects is that the whole show gets caught up in wider ethical questions about what it means to document: is to show alone ever enough? Can we just point to the world’s problems? What does that mean in terms of responsibility, in terms of solutions? These are enormous questions and art doesn’t have all the answers. But this show doesn’t appear to be looking for them, transfixed as it seems to be – like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, which is discussed by Enwezor in his introduction – by the rubble of the past that builds up at its feet.

One of the strongest works in the Arsenale is Chantal Akerman’s Now (2015). This five-screen projection combines roving camera footage of the desert with a composite soundtrack of shouts, engines and what sound like gunshots. It’s like speeding through an empty Western film set to the soundtrack of a The Fast and the Furious getaway sequence – disorientating, dizzying, anxiety-inducing. It brought to mind an only half-joking refrain that stayed with me as I walked back through the exhibition: ‘Stop the world, I want to get off.’

By Amy Sherlock

Glenn Ligon, 'A Small Band' (2015) and Oscar Murillo, 'signalling devices now in bastard territory' (2015), installation view at the Central Pavilion, Giardini

I generally find Venice an uplifting sort of place. When the hazy, watery sunlight bounces off the campanile in San Marco or the dome of San Giorgio, it’s hard not to feel filled with wonder that such structures – which have stood, more or less unchanged, since the 15th century – were built in a lagoon. The whole city is a testimony equally to ingenuity and folly, as well as to the benefits of international trade and the patronage of the mercantile classes. Venice is also sinking, slowly, at a rate that has, over recent decades, increased due to rising sea levels. This inevitability, just far off enough to be unimaginable, makes the city a particularly interesting setting for an exhibition titled ‘All the World’s Futures’. Curator Okwui Enwezor’s central exhibition for the 56th Venice Biennale considers how contemporary artists are responding to the crises and instability of the globalized present. The Biennale’s own history as a cultural event inaugurated to celebrate the recently united Italian state and its structure – which is still informed by global power relations of the early 20th century – also make it a highly charged setting for considering what ‘all the world’ has historically meant.

A first glance at the central pavilion along one of the Giardini’s tree-lined avenues is enough to ascertain that a consideration of all the world’s futures implies a re-evaluation – and maybe re-writing – of certain narratives of the past. At the top of the pavilion’s bright white facade, a neon work by Glenn Ligon spells out ‘blues blood bruise’ – unlit, but forming firm dark lines in the bright sunlight (A Small Band, 2015). The work overwrites the words ‘La Biennale’, in parts seeming to blur with them, the forms becoming slightly unclear where letters overlap. Below, between the neo-classical columns that lead to the entrance, hang the 20 black canvas ‘flags’ of Oscar Murillo’s signalling devices in now bastard territory (2015). Both foreboding and theatrical, they create an ominous partition. My immediate reading of them is not as flags (without poles, without states) but as tarpaulins used for transport or concealment, or even as shrouds. They look sticky, dusty, heavy. I imagine suffocating beneath one.

Glenn Ligon,‘Come Out #12 – 15’, 2015, installation view, Central Pavilion

Ligon’s piece is related to four large works on canvas that hang in their own room within the pavilion (‘Come Out #12 – 15’, 2015). Across them, the words ‘come out to show them’ are over-printed repeatedly in black – swarming and gathering to the point of being illegible in places, like thunder-cloud haze. They seem to thrum, these canvases: you can almost hear the words as they stumble into one another, an indistinguishable chorus in some parts, a clear voice in others. Both the ‘Come Out’ works and A Small Band quote from the testimony on Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, six young black men sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1965 on the grounds of forced confessions taken whilst in police custody. Hamm’s description of police brutality, recorded 50 years ago, feels devastatingly relevant against a backdrop of ongoing ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray whilst in police custody: the latest in a horrible succession of injustices that reflect the strained nature of the relationship between police forces and communities – and race relations more broadly – across the United States. A future in which history merely repeats itself is a sombre prospect indeed, a thought which sets the tone for the entire show.

Robert Smithson, Asphalt on Eroded Cliff, 1969, ink and coloured chalk on paper

The rest of the exhibition, however, can’t quite sustain the clout of this initial punch. It is a truism to say that an exhibition on this scale – including a whopping 136 artists – will necessarily be uneven. In this case, the breadth of the theme – to reflect all of the world’s crises and injustice – means that the varied responses end up almost cancelling one another out. Specific horrors like the Holocaust, referenced in Fabio Mauri’s The Western Wall or the Wailing Wall (1993), a stacked wall of suitcases that is the first sculpture visitors come across in the space, and forgotten histories (such as that of the revolutionary left in Bangladesh, which is the subject of Naeem Mohaiemen’s film Last Man in Dhaka Central [The Young Man Was, Part 3], 2015) sit alongside more speculative references (the barren earth suggested by Robert Smithson’s Dead Tree, 1969/2015) and works that gesture more broadly towards death or suffering (Marlene Dumas’s beautiful series of ‘Skulls’, 2013–15). The effect is overwhelming – which I’m sure is part of Enwezor’s intention – but also flattening. The result, for me at least, is a sense of helplessness and paralysis, rather than politicization or engagement.

Marlene Dumas, Skulls, 2013-15, oil on canvas

There are some powerful moments here – such as the inspired pairing of photographs from Walker Evans’s iconic images of Great Depression-era rural Americans (‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, first published in 1941) with Isa Genzken’s architectural maquettes for ‘Realized and Unrealized Outdoor Projects’. Painted ghostly white, with some proposals as simple as running Two Lines between the roofs of high-rise housing blocks to form a barely visible umbilical connection, these are timeless potential monuments. Read against Evans’s photographs, they speak of loss, frailty and resistance – and the idea that sometimes the most quotidian of objects and gestures are the ones worth commemorating. (A pair of monumental white orchids that stand quietly on the opposite side of the Giardini, Two Orchids (2015) are Genzken’s fully materialized testimony to these ideas.) John Akomfrah’s magisterial Vertigo Sea (2015) is another highlight. Shown over three vast screens, its dense, roiling montage combines archival footage of the hunting and butchering of whales and polar bears with underwater marine landscapes, aerial shots of birds flocking and dispersing like beads across the surface of the sea, and black and white photographic portraits that evoke the historical slave trade and, by association, a horrifyingly contemporary Mediterranean reality. The work is hypnotically beautiful yet oblique enough to hold all of the multiple and contradictory significances of the ocean – as freedom and the passage to enslavement, as environmental battleground, as provider and waste dump.

Walker Evans and Isa Genzken, installation view

The show in the Arsenale is more heavy-handed and didactic from the get-go, opening with a blackened room containing neons by Bruce Nauman flashing words and phrases including Eat Death (1972) and Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain (1983) and Adel Abdessemed’s Nympheas (2015) – clusters of knives pointing up from the ground, like deadly flowers. The whole thing feels simultaneously too literal and too general to be thought-provoking. Weapons recur – down the hall in a black cannon by Pino Pascali (Cannone Semovente, 1965), which detonates the forceful symbolism of Melvin Edwards’s tortured but contained ‘Lynch Fragments’ (1963–ongoing), buckled and twisted assemblages of scrap metal, hung from the wall like machinic stags’ heads. Alone these are eloquent, powerful works; amongst the cacophony of Terry Adkins’s aggressive music-machines and Monica Bonvicini’s black, rubber-clad chainsaws (Latent Combustion, 2015), their meaning feels over-determined. Moments of lightness – such as Ernesto Ballesteros’s wire and balsa wood planes that float like feathers to the floor, travelling no distance at all, the distance of a breath (Indoor Flights, 2015), and Mika Rottenberg’s film installation, which takes a wonderfully weird view of bodily functions and workplace productivity – are few and far between. And the most poignant encounters are those that take you by surprise – for instance, coming across Lorna Simpson’s dreamily delineated painted figures next to Goncalo Mabunda’s The Knowledge Throne (2014), made from decommissioned machine guns.

Monica Bonvicini, Latent Combustion, 2015, chainsaws, wood axe, black polyurethane, matt finish, steel chains

The through-line that seemingly underlies the various economic, social and environmental issues that different works address is capitalism – the ceaseless drive to produce wealth through the exploitation of resources, both human and environmental. This is placed literally centre stage (in an ‘Arena’ designed by architect David Adjaye) through an epic series of readings of the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (1861, 1885, 1894) staged by Isaac Julien. Enwezor has called capital ‘the great drama of our age’ and, in so far as it determines almost every aspect of our lives, this may well be true. But Capital is not a dramatic text; it’s a rigorous and complex economic analysis, which gains little in either impact or understanding from being read aloud. As a reminder of the omnipresence and power of money, it is hardly necessary – far starker, unavoidable examples are to be found moored in the lagoon, flanking the route to the Giardini.

I do, however, like the idea that the human voice will be heard throughout this exhibition. I saw performances in the arena by Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, which sample, loop and re-imagine traditional workers’ or chain-gang songs, and a capella renditions of Jeremy Deller’s collection of broadsides – songsheets sold in the streets in industrial Britain, some of which are reproduced close by. These daily performances are reminders of the social, embodied reality of labour. Work is, after all, not only a source of pain but also of pride, ambition and self-realization, and the sense of community and solidarity that these songs evoke is a necessary complement and counterpoint to Marx’s abstract theorizations.

Lorna Simpson, Nightmare?, 2015, graphite and ink on gessoed wood panel with aluminium perimeter

‘All the World’s Futures’ is an ambitious show. The breadth of ‘the world’ that is represented is laudable – artists from 53 countries are included, fifteen more than the ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’ in 2013, an overdue and important corrective to previous editions of the biennale. And many of the issues that it addresses are urgent and affect us all. However, for an exhibition whose title might suggest looking forward, much of the work is caught up in the past. The danger of including so many archival or documentary projects is that the whole show gets caught up in wider ethical questions about what it means to document: is to show alone ever enough? Can we just point to the world’s problems? What does that mean in terms of responsibility, in terms of solutions? These are enormous questions and art doesn’t have all the answers. But this show doesn’t appear to be looking for them, transfixed as it seems to be – like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, which is discussed by Enwezor in his introduction – by the rubble of the past that builds up at its feet.

One of the strongest works in the Arsenale is Chantal Akerman’s Now (2015). This five-screen projection combines roving camera footage of the desert with a composite soundtrack of shouts, engines and what sound like gunshots. It’s like speeding through an empty Western film set to the soundtrack of a The Fast and the Furious getaway sequence – disorientating, dizzying, anxiety-inducing. It brought to mind an only half-joking refrain that stayed with me as I walked back through the exhibition: ‘Stop the world, I want to get off.’

By Alice Hattrick

Adam Christensen, 'Smell of Intuition', 2015, installation view as part of 'I'm Here But You've Gone', Fiorucci Art Trust. Courtesy: the artist and Fiorucci Art Trust; photography: Lewis Ronald.

‘I’m Here But You’ve Gone’ is the result of a ten-month collaboration between the Fiorucci Art Trust and Creative Perfumers. Eight London-based artists were commissioned to make scented installations for the Trust’s first fully-fledged exhibition at its HQ in Kensington. I hear that 400 people went to the opening but when I go to 10 Sloane Avenue with a friend it’s just us. The front entrance of smells like ‘freshly boxed products’: rubber, synthetic materials, freshly applied adhesives and newly pressed cardboard (‘Untitled’, by Magali Reus). We lie on a bed in one of the rooms at the top of the house, our faces in sheets that smell like they’ve been slept in. (Adam Christensen’s ‘Smell of Intuition’ – the result of mixing the scents of brown things together – has infused into the pocket of his Raf Simons cord jacket, which hangs in the wardrobe). The space makes us want to misbehave – it’s the domestic environment and the fact we’re unsupervised. There are directions and maps but there don’t appear to be any rules. Downstairs in the laundry room, warm and moist from the heat of the boiler, we inhale Celia Hempden’s Lupa, ‘vagina perfume’. I automatically compare it to the smell of my own and find affinity and difference: not mine.

The Fiorucci Trust’s exhibition comes at a time in which contemporary artists are increasing engaging with scent within the gallery context. As part of Anicka Yi’s ‘Divorce’ at Canal 47 last year, she showed Washing Away of Wrongs (2014): two stainless steel dryer doors that opened onto holes in the gallery wall. Inside diffusers emitted two scents designed by French perfumer Christophe Laudamiel – Traennen (fried food and soggy cardboard) and Bullfrog– that attempted to undermine the myth of domestic purity and gendered bodily self-care by implicating mess, contamination and dirt. ‘I’m Here But You’ve Gone’ is indicative of a broader turn towards the ‘chemical’ senses in contemporary art, promising to counter the insistent privileging of the eye.

Anicka Yi, Grabbing At Newer Vegetables, 2015,
Perspex, agar, female bacteria, fungus, 215 × 62 cm

For ‘You Can Call Me F’ at The Kitchen, New York, this spring, Yi filled the space with the scent of Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery – ‘the ultimate patriarchal-model network in the art world’. This mixed with the smell of another, less defined, less mobilized network: the women of the New York art world. To produce Grabbing At Newer Vegetables (2015), Yi and a synthetic biologist from MIT, Tal Danino, cultivated bacteria donated by one hundred female artists, collectors, dealers and curators on a bed of agar. The smell was bad and, unlike the smell of Gagosian, overpowering. It described the threat of a body that refuses to smell ‘clean’ and ‘pure’: to smell of nothing, like a gallery space, fresh air or clean water.

According to Hippocratic doctrine, stagnant water, decaying plant matter and corpses released miasma, or ‘bad air’, which explained why people got sick in some places and not in others. Hippocratic theory is dead but, as Yi’s work shows, ‘bad air’ is still associated with women’s bodies as sites of both contagion and intoxication. We keep them away from each other in case the infection spreads. (It was Michel de Montaigne who wrote that, ideally, a woman should smell ‘of nothing’.) As Yi says in the first episode of her Lonely Samurai podcast, a series of conversations recorded at New York’s Chapter Gallery, titled ‘What Was Collaboration?’: ‘What I observe are a lot of females that are ambitious and intelligent having to cut themselves off in order to succeed.’ By making bodily odour pervasive and visible – you could see the bacteria, the antithesis of bodily care and the sterile gallery space, growing – Grabbing At Newer Vegetables reminds us of the insistent materiality of bodies within a network.

Pamela Rosenkranz, ‘Our Product’, installation View, Photo by Marc Asekhame

Perfume, on the other hand, plays into the fantasy of losing one’s body, becoming virtual, fluid, diffuse – vapourous, even. As a mist, perfume is able to penetrate objects, escape containers and take up spaces. For the Swiss Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, Pamela Rosenkranz filled the space with a pool of lightly churning scented water the colour of a standardized central European skin tone. The artist tasked perfumers Dominique Ropion and Frédéric Malle with designing a scent that approximated the liquid monochrome. Our Product (2015) describes flesh as fluid, and the distinctions between the ‘organic’ and ‘synthetic’ as equally diffuse – perhaps they have even evaporated.

For Rosenkranz, scent provides a metaphor for identity as a synthetic construction. Perfumes are mixtures of ‘natural’ and ‘synthetic’ materials – plant extracts and molecules isolated in labs. Synthetic aromachemicals have largely replaced animalic and plant-based materials in commercial perfumery, and are often designed to replicate the effect of so-called ‘natural’ ingredients. (Famously, Albert Baur first developed nitro-musks – predominant in Chanel No. 5– during his experiments with TNT in 1888). We have incorporated these chemicals into our bodies and our sense of selves. The cyborg body, as Donna Haraway put it in her famous ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985): ‘was not born in a garden […] it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust’. The notion of bodily ‘purity’ is used to sell products that are anything but: perfume, cleaning products, cosmetics, bottled water. (Of course, flesh is used in advertising to attract us to all number of products: the more skin, the more attention an ad gets.)

Elaine Cameron–Weir, venus anadyomene 1 (detail), 2014, clam, neon, transformer, ceramic, olive oil, mica, wick, sand, incense, brass, chain, clam, 34 × 71 × 56 cm

The paradoxical fabrication of ‘natural’ beauty was also the subject of Elaine Cameron-Weir’s exhibition ‘venus anadyomene‘ at Ramekin Crucible in New York last spring. The show featured several giant clamshells (venus anadyomene 1–5, 2014) containing olive oil, sand and mica, and resins of benzoin, myrrh and frankincense heated over a flame. Their title – from the Greek ‘Venus rising from the sea’ – refers the story of Aphrodite, born whole from the sea, unsullied by the process of human birth. The shell, featured in treatments of ‘The Birth of Venus’ by Botticelli (1486) and William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1879), is a symbol both of the goddess’s divinity, her purity, and of her carnal form: simultaneously toilette and vulva.

Sean Raspet, who captured and re-created the scent profile of Gagosian Gallery for Yi’s exhibition at The Kitchen, incorporates scented products into his sculptural work. His ‘Arbitrary Embodiment’ series (2013–14) combine fragranced hair gel with polypropylene and silicone in Perspex containers on steel shelving units. Raspet negotiates functional perfumery – the practice of scenting everyday products – at the level of molecular chemistry. This is culture at its most abstract but also its most valuable: the level of the patent (his more recent work has involved manipulating Coca Cola’s chemical formula).

Sean Raspet,
Arbitrary Embodiment (IVb. [L]), 2014, APET lenticular lenses and polypropylene in hair gel [water (aqua), carbomer, hydrolyzed wheat protein, PVP, glycerin, triethanolamine, sodium hydroxymethylglycinate, polysorbate 20, tetrasodium EDTA, fragrance] with Cyclomethicone, silicone polymer and preservatives in Plexiglas [poly(methyl methacrylate)] container on steel shelving unit
Cube: 36 × 36 × 66 cm

By its nature perfume is reproducible – fragrances are patented formulas, which are nevertheless marketed as unique and personal. Sometimes, reproducibility can be part of the appeal – celebrity-endorsed perfumes, for example, sell the fantasy that a scent can re-create a lifestyle. The packaging of ‘clean living’ – of which scent, or scentlessness is an implicit part – as an advertising or corporate branding strategy is something that many artists have mimicked of late, in a form of ambiguous critique. For example the curatorial collective DIS’s contribution to this year’s New Museum Triennial (curated by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin), This Island (2015), comprises is a horizontal shower-come-kitchen unit fabricated by luxury appliance maker Dornbracht; the piece is activated by a (clothed) female performer who lies in the shower every Saturday. As with many pieces in the exhibition, the work gestures towards the absorption of technology into the human body, but it also explores the idea of cleanliness and purity as commodities that can be bought and sold. In a similar vein, Ed Fornieles’s contribution to ‘I’m Here But You’ve Gone’, Cornucopia, the unbearable lightness of being (2015), figures personal choice as predictable, even formulaic, and the ‘modern family’ as yet another marketing product. The scent is a mixture of ready-made fragrances, rather than perfume ingredients – the best-selling perfumes for mothers, fathers, daughters and sons. Emitted from a small hole in the eye of a young girl in a mock-perfume advert, the mixture is overwhelmingly sweet, familiar and somehow diluted. I have to climb on the toilet to get close enough to smell it.

DIS, The Island (KEN), 2015, mixed media installation created in collaboration with Dornbracht and co-designed by Mike Meiré. Courtesy the artists; photograph: Heji Shin

In recent years, major institutions have started to engage with perfumes as art objects. ‘The Art of Scent 1889–2012’ at the Museum of Art and Design, New York, in 2012, was former perfume critic for the New York Times, Chandler Burr’s attempt to raise modern perfumery to the level of artwork and included Aimé Guerlain’s Jicky (1889), one of the first based on synthetic molecules that heralded the beginning of modern olfaction, Oliver Cresp’s Angel for Thierry Mugler (1992), which Burr associates with surrealism, and Daniela Andrier’s ‘neo-brutalist’ fragrance Untitled (2010). Last year, Comme des Garçons, the Japanese fashion label known for its unisex ‘anti-perfumes’ that smell of things like warm metal and oxygen, produced a fragrance for the Serpentine Gallery. According to the promotional material, Serpentine is an attempt to capture the smell of ‘nature in a city’: grass, asphalt and pollution. Tracey Emin – who made her name by challenging notions of feminine cleanliness – designed the packaging.

Comme des Garcons, Serpentine, 2014. Courtesy: Serpentine Galleries; photograph: Plastiques Photography

Back at Sloane Avenue, in a top-floor bedroom, Patrizio di Massimo’s contribution to ‘I’m Here But You’ve Gone’ (Odour of Sanctity, 2015) is encountered in a ‘miraculously’ leaking urn. As the Biblical narrative has it, to be mortal is to stink of sin – Adam’s original sin. Divine bodies smell sweet and beautiful; living bodies smell of what they consume and digest. They smell of where they have been and what they have been doing. In death, they decay. The corpses of saints don’t corrupt as normal bodies do. Saint Thérèse de Lisieux’s corpse smelled of roses and Saint Demetrius’s tomb in Thessalonki still reeks of myrrh. Di Massimo’s version smells like sweated-off moisturizer, in a nice way. After all, fragrance works through disappearance and transformation: people leave their scent on their clothes, and in the spaces where they have been. Scents linger and evaporate, making meaning through dissipation, at once present and invisible, visceral and intangible.

Patrizio Di Massimo, Odor of Sanctity, 2015, urn with perfume. Courtesy: the artist and Fiorucci Art Trust; photography: Lewis Ronald.

There are several artworks downstairs – leftovers from a temporary installation by Nick Maus, Franz Wests wrapped in plastic, a Helen Marten wall piece. What, then, is ever fully gone? I think of the invisible labour it takes to scent a whole house-come-exhibition space: refilling diffusers, bottles, urns and coat pockets – a domestic kind of maintenance, or care.

When we leave Sloane Avenue, it’s all up our noses. We can smell everything on the street, everyone’s perfume, car exhausts, and food, our ‘chemical’ sense heightened. You get that when you leave the perfume floor at Liberty too.