4. Rapport: Venice

The Milk of Dreams

A City Torn by Overtourism and Contemporary Art

Choral Contributions

Christopher Benton, artist

NiccolòAcram Cappelletto: The exhibition was first presented at last year’s edition of Abu Dhabi Art and it was reiterated in Venice. Did you change anything from the Abu Dhabi version?

Christopher Benton: There were many changes, refinements, and additions to the original presentation of the show in Venice. Most obviously, the rules of presenting a show in a purpose-built white cube is different from showing work in a 14th century Palazzo in Italy. While I wasn’t able to rig and present a palm tree in such a space, I was excited to be able to relay a powerful message about diasporas, and cultural production, and commodity circulation.

N.A.: How did you feel about exhibiting in Venice? Did you feel a new response to your work?

C.B.: Presenting in Venice was a dream and I thoroughly thank fair director Dyala Nusseibeh and the hard-working Abu Dhabi Art team for creating an international platform for UAE-based artists. In general, my work is site-specific, so the context of what and how the work presents itself is crucial. This complicates the question of remounting: how do we keep the story intact? How can we respond to presenting in a new place? And perhaps most importantly: who is the audience and what do they already know or think they know? In this way, I made adjustments to the exhibition to support an international audience who may not have the same level of regional knowledge, or have the same connection to our local narratives.

N.A.: About the Biennale Exhibition: What did you think of this year’s edition (also compared to past editions, if you have been/remember)? Anything that particularly struck you?

C.B: The headline for this year’s Venice Biennial is that the main exhibition features 90% female artists. While some may see this as a concession to our overly identitarian era, this authorial shift has made a show that is more sensitive, emphatic, contemporary, and emotive. From the spectacular to the most intimate of gestures, the exhibition is one of the best Venice Biennale showings  in recent memory, with a strong conceptual framework that ties it all together. The Guggenheim’s new surrealism show also complements the biennial well.

N.A.: Favorite pavilion?

C.B: I loved the French Pavilion, which featured the work of Zineb Sedira. It was commissioned by Till & Sam [Till Fellrath and Sam Bardaouil], who also curated Hashel [Al Lamki], Maitha [Abdalla], and I for the latest edition of Abu Dhabi Art’s Beyond Emerging Program. The show really expanded my idea of what an exhibition could do. I also appreciated Zineb’s commitment to meta-reference, mise-en-abyme and mise-en-scène.

Samuel Cimma, photographer

Sometimes an installation strikes you immediately but then they leave little in your memory. This was not the case for the Dutch Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Art Biennale entitled When the body says Yes by artist Melanie Bonajo. After going through the door of the old Chiesetta della Misericordia, the visitor enters in a soft world, as in a maternal womb made of soft lights, colored cushions, drapes hanging down the ceiling beams. Lying on the ground, you feel welcomed while the Dutch artist’s documentary is projected. The video contains recordings of collective skinships and individual personal experiences. Everything pertains to the relationship between oneself, one’s body, someone else’s body and the social body, a macro-theme within which we all have an experience more or less aware. Thus, I believe that the strength of this piece relies on its own universality that allows anyone to find a different opening into each one of us. In my case, because it is about one’s self that is talked about in front of such a work, I was struck by a single frame, which says: If this body gives you so much pleasure, why do you hate it? – this struck a bare nerve of mine, the nerve of non-acceptance of my body, that I cannot fit into the grids of social beauty standards. Yet, this single sentence triggered a spark in me: my body gives me pleasure, cuddles me, makes me enjoy, so why do I hate it, why do I always wish to have another one? Today I feel better, I no longer feel discomfort in looking at myself, and above all I don’t feel ashamed in standing in front of other people without a shirt. I accept my body, and I have also come to appreciate it, something that the myself of one year ago could not even imagine taking into consideration. My path will still be long, but thanks to Melanie Bonajo I made a big leap forward, and I don’t feel alone.   

Insun Woo, editor

As the latest addition to the Giardini’s permanent national pavilions, the Korean Pavilion, established in 1995, is relatively small in size. For this year’s Biennale, however, transdisciplinary artist and electronic music composer Yunchul Kim created a system that defies the Pavilion’s spatial boundaries, opening up an interconnected world that kindles awe and imagination. Though the exhibition title, Gyre, is intended as a “metaphor for the current swirling state of confusion the world is in as we wait for change to come,” the experience of the show is far from unsettling. As I traversed the naturally-lit space inhabited by bizarre yet spectacular structures, I was filled with wonder. The centerpiece, Chroma V (2022), hangs from the ceiling and is an imposing fifty-meter-long structure coiled into a knot. The colors of the opalescent cells swell and subside as the cells pulsate at irregular intervals. This movement is caused by another installation in the exhibition: Argos – The Swollen Suns (2022). Similarly impressive in its scale and technological feat, Argos detects muons –cosmic nanoparticles created when colliding with the Earth’s atmosphere– and sends signals to other installations in the exhibition to trigger their movements. Looking at Argos, it becomes clear how the pavilion has been conceived as a “sprawling body”; the works, like organs in a body, are connected with one another and the surrounding environment, as they receive and react to signals as small as muons and as big as the ocean (Impulse (2018), one of the installations, circulates seawater from Venice). At a time when technology is being discussed as a powerful collaborator in creating enhanced systems or as a threat to humanity, it was refreshing to see machines freed from such responsibilities and fears to just exist as beings, in tune with the “natural” environment. It is the beauty and poetry of such redefining of the relationship between the human, non-human, machine, and material happening in Gyre that made it stand out amongst the many impressive exhibitions at the Giardini.