The Key in the Hand – Chiharu Shiota in the Japan Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015

For the Japan Pavilion, Chiharu Shiota has created a magical grotto from every day materials: red string and old keys.  As in earlier installations, the artist transforms the rational geometric spaces of the gallery by stretching thousands of different lengths of string from the ceiling to points on the walls, floor and objects.  This repetitive weaving process builds up complex and overlapping layers, forming intimate, immersive, and cave-like spaces that invite exploration and provoke feelings of wonder and delight.  The webs of red string filter and reflect the light; making the space glow with a gentle pink like a strange underwater world. Where the layers of string are densest, the color coalesces into the strong bright red of blood emerging from a fresh cut. 

Two humble wooden boats float in the center of the room and the layers of string and suspended keys form a vortex of energy around each one.  Keys dangle everywhere and spill onto the floor – 180,000 were collected in donation boxes placed in museums in Germany (the artist lives in Berlin) as well as the United States and Japan.  Sometimes a lone key hangs from a single strand, sometimes a group of keys is clustered together. The keys are mostly antique in style and bear a dark patina of age.

This beautiful installation was one of my favorites.  Before reading the artist’s statement, my associations are from the world of fairy tales: the heavy bunch of keys that Blue Beard gives to his wives, allowing them to open the doors to every room in his fortress but one mysterious forbidden one.  Little Red Riding Hood setting off for her journey through the forest labyrinth, where layers of trees hide many secrets.  The drop of blood in the snow that prompts Snow White’s mother to wish for a daughter with lips as red as blood and skin as white as snow.  The twisting brambles that bury the castle of an enchanted princess in a dense web of vines and thorns.

Of course, the installation also evokes dark stories from history. Could these be the keys to doors in the ghost towns of Fukushima, where radioactivity caused by storm damage to a nuclear power plant has forced more than 50,000 citizens to abandon their homes?  Or the keys that belonged to any of the millions of exiles and refugees dislocated by violence, economic devastation, or environmental disaster around the globe and throughout time.  These could be the keys that belong to the victims of the Holocaust who once carried the travel-worn suitcases and trunks stacked up to form Fabio Mauri's Wailing Wall, which I wrote about in an earlier post.

In actuality, Shiota has said that she wanted to get away from these sad associations, which weigh people down, and create a piece that looks to the future and has a sense of hope.  Of course, Shiota says, the work is also about memory.  It would be close to impossible to look at keys of this sort – which have so much character – and not wonder about their absent owners.  The work’s title, “The key in the hand” recalls this intimate connection between owner and object, renewed every time the hand clasps the key to turn it in a lock.  

Shiota explained that while she was building the piece, she imagined the stories attached to each individual key, the stories of the people who once used them. And she expects that visitors will have this experience as well: “The keys are carrying a lot of messages from their owners.  When people are walking here, it is like walking around human memory, human life.”

I know it is sentimental, but I feel that “The Key in the Hand” is also about love.   Each key could be an emblem of the one who could find a way into another’s heart.  Especially these keys, enmeshed in the red color of the boudoir satin and chiffon, and hanging from strings that run like bloodlines, connecting individuals and families.

The title – “The Key in the Hand” – has another meaning for Shiota.  In a video interview on the Biennale site, Shiota explains:  “if you have a key in your hand, you have a chance.  The future is in your hands.  If you lose a key, this means you lost some way of your life.”  

Perhaps this is why Shiota created an introduction or prologue viewed on the garden terrace area that visitors go through on the way to the second floor, where the installation is sited.  In this cheerful garden area, visitors are greeted by a 4-channel video – very charming and funny -- of quite young children being interviewed about their memories of being in their mother’s womb and being born.  Their recollections are full of love and imagination, promise and spunk.  Nearby, a large photograph is displayed, of a child’s small hands holding a key.  Perhaps Shiota is suggesting that we are all born with the key we need to unlock our own future.  And if we have misplaced it, well, we can certainly find another one in her installation upstairs.

More information:
The artist's website: Chiharu Shiota
Biennale Website
Interview with Shiota on the Biennale YouTube channel 
A short review with great pictures in Design Boom

The Weeping Wall

Il Muro Occidentale o del Pianto (The Western Wall or the Wailing Wall) by Fabio Mauri

Although the title of the 2015 Venice Biennale is "All the World's Futures," most of the artwork concerns the past.  One of the first works a visitor sees in the Central Pavilion is this monumental sculpture constructed from old-fashioned suitcases, trunks, and traveling bags. Ironically positioned to welcome visitors, it speaks of departure, dislocation, abandonment and extinction.  Each scuffed and worn bag conveys a sense of individual history, of personality and character. Together they tell the story of a group -- a neighborhood, an ethnic enclave, an extended family -- huddled together, forced to move, carrying whatever they could manage, leaving much behind.

Fabio Mauri (1926-2009) created this work in 1993 as a memorial to the victims of the Nazi holocaust and to all people forced to embark on "journeys without return," as the exhibition catalog puts it.  Mauri's father was in the newspaper business; as a teenager, at the end of the war, he was exposed to reports in many different papers documenting the concentration camps, including photographs of the victims.  The event and images horrified him so much that he suffered a nervous breakdown.  By the early 1950s he had recovered and became an artist, taking the holocaust as a central theme:

"In a career that lasted half a century, Mr. Mauri, who died in 2009, produced work after work that probed the problem that had unhinged him as a boy: How could such atrocities happen under everyone’s eyes in Europe? In drawings, sculptures, performances and installations, he explored the ways in which mass media and public spectacle can mask and warp the world." Arthur Lubow, The New York Times

In the right hand corner of the sculpture there is an open trunk with a poster pinned up inside -- forming a window onto Mauri's own career.  This is a poster des "Ebrea" ("Jewess"), a film that Mauri made in 1971. The film shows a naked woman standing in front of a mirror, cutting off clumps of her hair and pasting it onto the surface of the glass to form a Jewish star obscuring her reflection. This mysterious imagery becomes painful when we think of the piles of human hair found in the camps, shaved off on the way to the gas chamber.

The exhibition curator Okwul Enwezor says about his exhibition:

"At the core of the project is the notion of the exhibition as a stage, where historical and counterhistorical projects will be explored.  These projects, works and voices, like an orchestra, will occupy the spaces of the Biennale and pre-occupy the time and thinking of the public." Okwul Enwezor, Exhibition Catalogue

It is unfortunate that it has become a cliche to say those that do not understand history are doomed to repeat it, because it is urgently true.  This exhibition seeks to help us understand history, so that we may make different choices.  

More:
Fabio Mauri Works, Fueled by Trauma, Head to the Venice Biennale, Arthur Lubow, The New York Times

2015 Venezia Arte Biennale: when beauty isn't enough

Entrance to the Arsenale

The curator of All the World's Futures, the central exhibition of the 2015 Venice Biennale, is Okwui Enwezor, a citizen of the world who has lived in Africa, the United States and Europe.  Born in Nigeria in 1963, he moved to New York in 1982 and entered New Jersey City State College in 1983 to study political science.  At the same time, Enwezor plunged into New York's art scene, which he described as having "surprising vitality....This was not about a name or an exhibition.  It was the energy accumulating when different worlds meet."

Self-taught, Enwezor launched his career by publishing a journal about contemporary African art and curating exhibitions, including one on African photography at the Guggenheim Museum.   Remarkably, without any formal training in art history or criticism, he went on to direct major exhibitions around the world:  Germany's Documenta 11, a Paris Triennial, and biennials in Johannesburg, Seville, South Korea, Mexico and Japan. Now he is the first Venice Biennale leader from Africa. And, he's a Marxist!

So, how has this extraordinary individual approached the opportunity to make a statement about the world of art, and the world itself? With an exhibition that presents an alternative to living in complacency and silence, and relentlessly alerts us to the dangers around us.  Enwezor explains:

The principal question the exhibition will pose is this:  how can artists, thinkers, writers, composers, choreographers, singers, and musicians, through images, objects, words, movements, actions, lyrics, and sounds, bring together publics in acts of looking, listening, responding, engaging, and speaking in order to make sense of the current upheaval? -- Okwul Enwezor, Exhibition Catatlogue

But it is largely directed at the mind instead of the senses and the heart.  Why are there so few works with the stop-you-in-your-tracks beauty of an El Anatsui, who was awarded the festival's Golden Lion awards on Enwezor's recommendation?  Did Enwezor feel beauty and wonder would detract from his central message, that we must look at the world around us with clear eyes and a critical understanding?

Enwezor commissioned this monumental site-specific work from Ibrahim Mahama.  It runs the length of the first building in the Arsenale complex, creating a somber corridor. Burlap bags from cacao, coffee and other exports are stitched together in manner reminiscent of the resplendent tapestries by fellow Ghanian artist, El Anatsui, who was awarded the Golden Lion for life time achievement at this Biennale.  El Anatsui created a legendary piece for the 2009 Biennale, draping a wall of Palazzo Fortuny with gold. Is Mahama's work an homage or a refutation?

A typical work by El Anatsui, woven from the metal caps of thousands of liquor bottles.

Energy Accumulates When Different Worlds Meet

Enwezor has brought together voices from around the globe -- 136 artists from 53 countries.  Many of these artists speak on behalf of the marginalized, oppressed, or endangered; they grapple with mystification, history and its omissions, memory and forgetting.  Reference to Karl Marx and revolutionary movements are woven through the exhibition spaces.

While curating one of the most established and long-standing (120 years) presentations of art in the world, Enwezor implicitly challenges the authority of the mainstream contemporary art scene by including many artists who operate outside of it and omitting work that is commercially appealing.  "'Art isn’t just made by white people in Europe with great patrons,' Enwezor told the Wall Street Journal. 'Sorry.'" (Quoted by Andrew Goldstein in ArtSpace -- reference below.)

As you make your way through the sprawling exhibition, hundreds of paintings and photos hanging on the walls (and if an artist can show one piece, why not show three, or ten, or twenty?), rooms of sculpture and installation work, the sounds floating in from video screening dens -- all clamor urgently for your attention.  Work by 136 artists from 53 countries has been shipped to Venice, harking back to the city's history as a crossroads and center of trade.  The exhibition is exhilarating and exhausting.  You do have the sense that indeed, all the world has been brought together to form a cacophonous labyrinth for visitors to explore.  You could spend months camped out, investigating. What you learn is not easy, though.

The Central Pavilion and spaces in the Arsenale are filled with urgent stories -- about violence, abuse of money and power, degradation of the environment.  There is a sustained and serious curatorial intent, not just to reveal important truths, but to honor the work of revealing truths.  The exhibition illuminates a meaningful, activist role for art that presents a difficult, but compelling, alternative to the ridiculous excesses of trophy art for the oligarchy.

Enwezor has said: "keeping art and political moods and events apart?  That wouldn't work.  An aesthetic choice is always also a political one." In fact, the exhibition makes the case that it is more urgent then ever that artists take on social critique -- exposing racism and nationalism, the exploitation of human, animal and environmental resources that accompanies global capitalism, inequities in wealth, power, and freedom of action -- precisely because "all the world's futures" are at stake.

But will it work?

In the white box of the exhibition venue, there is no context for the artwork.  With the exception of a "world poll" by Hans Haacke (where we can register opposition to our government's response to climate change) and Adrian Piper's invitation to take several vows of integrity ("I will always be too expensive to buy," "I will always mean what I say" "I will always do what I say I will do") there are few opportunities for action. Moreover, much of this art is intellectual, conceptual, and obscure -- requiring time and self-education to comprehend.  Moments of beauty and wonder are rare.  Without the emotional pull of compelling aesthetic experiences, will this exhibition achieve its hoped for effect? Will it wake up visitors, change their minds and actions, remove the layers of cultural mystification that support compliance and complacency?

But let's hope for the best, and admire this noble effort on behalf of humanity and the planet. Andrew Goldstein, writing for ArtSpace, put it well:

[All the World's Futures] could be a sleeper masterpiece, if the artists, curators, and writers who come to see the Biennale over the next half year internalize its message about an engaged artistic discourse. We need much more of that in our staggeringly venal art world, at a time when people around the world are rising up against injustice and need inspiration and direction. 

Engaged art and social activism is also alive and well in many of the national pavilions in the Giardini and Arsenale, and often with more immediate aesthetic or emotional effect.  I will write about some of these in other posts.

More about Okwei Enwezor and All the World's Futures:
How to Understand Okwei Enwezor's Venice Line-Up, Andrew M. Goldstein, ArtSpace
Observations on "All the World's Futures" at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Andrew M. Goldstein, ArtSpace
Art for the Planet's Sake at the Venice Biennale, Roberta Smith, The New York Times