SOME/ART : 56TH LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA ''ALL THE WORLD'S FUTURES''
‘Everywhere one turns new crisis, uncertainty, and deepening insecurity across all regions of the world seem to leap into view’.
A key reference is Walter Benjamin’s reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920): you can't see a catastrophe there but a strong relationship between contemporary events and history, especially the history of progress, which is also accompanied by destruction.
All the World’s Futures - curated by Okwui Enwezor - speaks about new possibilities of articulating different types of intelligence that are not classifiable into the academic world. The exposition has a straight connection with the concept of performance and oral communication; visitors must be patient, concentrate, invited to the act of listening while surrounded by sounds.
Among some works contrasts are aplenty, a sensation of chaotic and methodical dominates the entire module, wrapped in an accurate denial full of hidden meanings. Minimalism against maximalism. Historicism against modernism. The same noticeable concept reached by Heimo Zobernig’s contribution in the Austrian Pavilion: a structure that, with its majestic visual axes on the one hand and clear rational forms and modern construction materials, on the other, moves between those two poles. An intervention, whose isometric planes recall Mies van der Rohe’s Nationalgalerie in Berlin, that constitutes an enclosed site where one can linger and meditate on art’s presentational modes and on human presence in space.
Featuring artists from 53 countries, La Biennale links the Giardini to the Arsenale through an intersection of filters, a constellation of parameters that circumscribe multiple ideas. It employs as a Filter the historical trajectory that the Biennale itself, over the course of its one hundred and twenty years existence, has run over: to reflect on both the current ‘state of things’ and the ‘appearance of things’.
To be conscious of a Fractured Present.
Photography & text by Nicolas Mazzei | S/TUDIO