Your perception is not my reality: I am Venice
With identical façades surrounding the entire city, hundreds of bridges connecting tiny islands and narrow streets – full of melancholy – Venice itself stands for a surreal excursion towards the corridors of history and the human soul. It is irresistibly mysterious and charming for anyone who is interested in arts in one way or the other. Forget about gondolas, romantic dreams, San Marco or Rialto Bridge, in this huge labyrinth city, there is a “must-see” art happening: the International Art Exhibition of Venice Biennale.
Not only for viewing the refined works of contemporary art but just for going on unexpected excursions through passages of creativity. Throw the map away. You either get lost in the city or you are drifted towards the artistic genius of the Biennale; in a bit dark, complicated but definitely provocative and inevitably intriguing flow. It is worth trying both. Some way or other dead-ends in Venice reach up to canals where you can sail into the unknown. And the Biennale, mapping obscurity of Venice with curiosity about the unknown, shakes its visitors with striking confrontations. It resembles Venice simply because it is original and pleasurable. Like a proud woman who waits to be discovered behind her inciting beauty. In the Italian way of course: leisurely…
The 55th edition is running from 1 June to 24 November 2013. The Biennale, one of the most exciting experiences you can get in this marvellous Italian city, offers an overwhelming amount of paths to explore different layers of the creative mind. As for the visitors, I have a confession to make: it is impossible not to miss something. Just keep this in mind; please enjoy my appetizers.
Entering the Central Pavilion, where Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung’s Red Book is exhibited – for the first time in Italy – is enough to perceive that this will not be an easy journey. Jung’s book symbolises the “holy scripture” of his imagination. A manual, enriched with illustrations of his mystical vision, articulates the realm of explorations, self-analyses.
While the quote by Jung “what you resist persists” makes my ears ring, I walk through 387 model buildings by Peter Fritz, an insurance clerk. These small buildings were founded by Oliver Croy in a junk shop wrapped in garbage bags. Made of simple materials such as magazine paper, matchboxes or wallpaper scraps, they are an amazing proof of a human passion.
The next is a fascinating door opening into an adolescent boy’s erotic dreams: Evgenij Kozlov’s ‘Leningrad Album’. His fantastic naïve erotic imagination shows what a youngster, not yet considered a man, might dream of while he was welcomed into the female world. It is an intimate experience leaving you with a question of “how far does one go in his fantasies?”
The winner of the Golden Lion Award for best artist at this year’s Biennale, Tino Sehgal presents one of the most exciting works of the Central Pavilion. It is very sensational. Sehgal – instead of physical objects – creates choreographies that exist only in the viewer’s memory. In his “constructed situations”, he uses human voice, language, movement and interaction. In the middle of this work, a couple of people – the interpreters – sit or lie on the ground and improvise music, dialogue, and movements. All ‘happens’ there, just before your eyes, without you realising where it begins or ends. Naturally it feels more real than any paintings hanging on the walls. I took the ‘situation’ into my memory (watch this video that shows how Sehgal liberates himself conceptually).
An imaginary palace that houses all the knowledge of the universe, in the Arsenale, Marino Auriti’s Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace) welcomes viewers with its glory. Curator of the Biennale Massimiliano Gioni, who named this year’s exhibition after this work puts it this way: “Auriti’s plan was never carried out, of course, but the dream of universal, all-embracing knowledge crops up throughout the history of art and humanity, as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many other artists, writers, scientists, and self-proclaimed prophets who have tried often in vain, to fashion an image of the world that will capture its infinite variety and richness.” As Gioni states, the exhibition celebrating Auriti’s brainchild is just a puzzle around the myth of that imaginary museum.
Another must-see is paintings of Turkish artist Yüksel Arslan. Rather than using conventional paints he mixes pigments, plant extracts, bodily fluids and other substances, such as grass, blossoms, oil, coal, and ground stones. As a result of this unique formula the paintings seem like dried flowers. The flowers perfectly picked by him during his extensive readings from ancient to modern languages, history, philosophy, music and traditional cultures.
Inhabitants rarely seen on the narrow streets of the city are brought to life by Polish artist Pawel Althamer’s sculptures. The work entitled “Venetians” is a surreal look-book of locals. Each character stands in different actions, with familiar emotion and facial expression. Abstract bodies made of plastic ribbons are represented by well casted faces and hands.
Escaping into the country Pavilions, Turkish artist Ali Kazma’s work “Resistance” is my first stop. The multi-channel video installation is an abrupt way of confrontation with our perception of our own body. Especially the videos entitled Anatomy, Bodybuilding and School are challenging. A bare observation of what lies beyond the definition/description of the human body; as a living material or tool of human race.
There are many worth-seeing pavilions if you can survive, but my appetizers finish with a glimpse of Indonesia: Themed Shakti, this pavilion enlightens me with its motto: “your perception is not my reality”. It doesn’t only find a place in my text as a title but also manages to make Venice – the one I saw – heard. If I had to take the same journey from the very beginning, undoubtedly the whole experience wouldn’t be the same; just because the Biennale is mostly a personal experience and as good as Venice itself.