Taiwan
Everday War, Yuan Goang-Ming
Palazzo delle Prigioni
Our precarious times are powerfully encapsulated in Yuan Goang-Ming's Everday War, Taiwan’s Venice presentation, a collateral event of the Venice Biennale. In Everyday Maneuver, cameras soar over an ominously empty Taipei to the sound of a siren, during one of the annually mandated, nationwide defence drills. It elicits anxious protectiveness for a free, functional place far more of us should treasure. Another film, The 561st Hour of Occupation, shows Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan chamber during and right after its occupation by the 2014 Sunflower Movement of students opposing closer trade with Mainland China. For those unaware of how Sunflower concluded, the teen protesters seem as fragile and doomed as the domestic settings devastated in Yuan’s videos Dwelling and Everyday War.
Croatia
By the Means at Hand, Vlatka Horvat
Fàbrica 33, Calle Larga dei Boteri, Cannaregio
Photo-documentation of works in transit for By the Means at Hand (2024)
There are “foreigners everywhere” says the title of this year’s international Biennale exhibition and Vlatka Horvat has enlisted some of them for her Croatian pavilion. She has invited fellow artists who are living away from their homelands to create a small-scale work and send it to her in Venice. In return they will get one of Horvat’s photo-montages of Venice—she is using the pavilion as a temporary studio during the Biennale.
The twist is that the works have to be delivered through informal means – passed on hand-to-hand by networks of strangers. This underlines the importance of improvised support networks both for people living in foreign lands and for artists everywhere. The exhibition includes an ever-changing display of the works that have come in, as well as records of how they got there. Horvat hopes the finished collection will be preserved as a whole by an institution.
Estonia
Hora Lupi, Edith Karlson
Edith Karlson’s Hora Lupi (2024) Photo: © Anu Vahtra
Estonia has one of the most remote pavilions, at the far end of Cannaregio, a relatively tourist-free part of town. It is worth the trek however, for Edith Karlson’s animalistic sculptures, handmade from clay, which have taken over the church of Santa Maria delle Penitenti. It was built as a hospice for reformed prostitutes in the early 18th century: the façade was never finished and the building now lies in dusty ruins. Spray from the canal below washes up through a gaping hole in the floor; Karlson’s ‘were-mermaids’ bask nearby. The altar is dominated by giant cave men, clubbing a wormlike creature to death. Deep inside there is a room of clay self-portraits, made by people the artist has come into contact with—a ghostly hall of masks.
Holy See
With my eyes, Maurizio Cattelan, Bintou Demélé, Simone Fattal, Claire Fontaine, Sonia Gomes, Corita Kent, Marco Perego and Zoe Saldana, Claire Tabouret
Claire Fontaine in the Holy See pavilion Photo: © Marco Cremascoli
Even by Venice standards, situating the Holy See pavilion in the Giudecca Women’s Prison is a surprising choice of location. Tours (which have to be booked in advance) are given by inmates in uniforms they made and designed themselves and many of the works in the show titled With My Eyes and curated by Chiara Parisi and Bruno Racine were also created in collaboration with the detainees. These include their poems fired in lava rock by Simone Fattal, paintings of their family photographs by Claire Tabouret and a film partly shot in the prison by Marco Perego and the actress Zoe Saldana (best known as the star of James Cameron’s Avatar films).
At the end of a walkway below a lookout post, a neon by the Palermo-based collective Claire Fontaine depicts a large eye with a line through it and in a courtyard overlooked by barred cell windows of many cells, another reads Siamo con voi nella notte (We are with you in the night). Maurizio Cattelan is not showing his sculpture of Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite, but instead has painted a large mural on the façade of the prison chapel referencing Mantegna’s Dead Christ. Probably more acceptable to Pope Francis, who is due to visit the pavilion on 28 April.
Panama
Traces: On the Body and on the Land, Giana De Dier, Cisco Merel, Brooke Alfaero, Isabel de Obaldía
Spazio Castello 2131
Isabel de Obaldía, Selva (2014) © The Art Newspaper
The sounds and sights of migration, together with the gritty earth upon which it takes place, fill Panama’s pavilion, tucked down a quiet alleyway near the Arsenale. Four artists are represented, each exploring Panama’s close ties to histories of movement. There are Giana De Dier’s photographs of women, their bodies decorated with archival materials referencing the many Afro-Caribbean workers who helped to build the Panama Canal in the early 20th century. Cisco Merel’s two abstract compositions, meanwhile, are formed out of treated soil taken from Darién Gap, a tropical jungle containing the only land route between South and Central America—through which more than 500,000 people travelled last year alone.
Opposite, Brooke Alfaero’s paintings resemble biblical scenes, the dense crowds and choppy seas reflecting the drama and trauma of many journeys taken in search of safety. And not to miss is the separate room housing Isabel de Obaldía’s installation, for which the artist has recreated the Darién Gap in a series of lush, large-scale drawings. The sound of footsteps, wind and more carries through the room, while glass torsos hang from the ceiling, some of them missing limbs. It is a memorial—and a window onto a tragic, ongoing reality.
Bulgaria
The Neighbours, Krasimira Butseva, Julian Chehirian and Lilia Topouzova
Sala Tiziano-Centro Culturale Don Orinoe Artigianelli, Fondamenta Delle Zattere Ai Gesuati 919
Krasimira Butseva, Julian Chehirian and Lilia Topouzova's The Neighbours in the Bulgarian pavilion Image: courtesy of the Bulgarian pavilion
The Bulgarian pavilion recreates a darkened apartment from the country’s Communist era to tell the stories of survivors of political violence. Different elements are activated sporadically throughout the domestic setting: a record player blares before swiftly switching off, bird song plays in the background, lights flicker ominously over a straw bed, a sewing machine suddenly whirrs into life, making visitors jump.
But it is the voices calmly retelling stories that allow us to understand what we are experiencing: one man recounts being forced to change names, of being beaten; a woman’s voice from elsewhere in the room speaks of her surprise at the silence of others in the face of evil. The voices we hear are the result of more than 40 interviews with survivors but there are also sections in the work that represent those who cannot or do not speak of these memories. These are even more chilling. It is certainly not a depressing installation though; there is a certain beauty to bearing witness to these voices finally being heard.