2019 Venice Biennale: The pick of the pavilions

Puryear also follows on from painter Mark Bradford as an African-American artist engaging elliptically with some of the big issues that affect his country.

This time round, in a series of new sculptures inside a pavilion laid out by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and in a monumental installation outside, Puryear will, the organisers say, ‘meditate on liberty as an essential human theme’ while ‘representing his country both as an artist and a citizen’.

Melanie Keen, director of the International Institute of Visual Arts, believes that Wilkes will ‘present us with a fascinating reflection of what British identity might be in 2019’, while fellow selection committee member Fiona Bradley of The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh sees the pavilion as potentially offering ‘a moment of stillness and quietness’ amid the ‘visual noise’ of Venice.

What will distinguish Farronato’s pavilion is the layout: rather than being assigned separate spaces in the Arsenale warehouse of Tese delle Vergini, the three artists’ works will be intermixed along a route inspired by an Italo Calvino essay on labyrinths. The layout will, says Farronato, ‘enact the impossibility of reducing life to a series of clean, predictable trajectories’.

He is interested in the differences as much as the similarities between his three chosen artists — for example, the contrast between Moro’s ‘precise, minimalist’ work and the ‘visceral’ quality of David’s sculpture. But all three, he adds, demonstrate ‘a marriage of authenticity and autobiography’, something he believes will be amply present in a work by Chiara Fumai.

The film that Prouvost has made for the French pavilion is entitled Deep See Blue Surrounding You. It is a poetic, semi-fictional account of a road trip that begins in the grimy suburbs of Paris, moves to the region of northern France where Prouvost grew up, then proceeds via Marseille to Venice. Along the way, we meet ‘a dancer, a magician, a priest, a rapper, a retired teacher, a gymnast, a terrible flautist, my grandmother…’

It’s a kind of woozy picaresque tale, a series of encounters en route to art’s island mecca. And there is a recurrent leitmotif — one that is hard not to call surreal — in the form of an octopus. It is a limp presence in mise-en-scènes from Nanterre to Murano. What does it mean? ‘I don’t know how the octopus became so dominant,’ says Prouvost, ‘but I think the metaphor is asking: how can we connect directly? The brain of an octopus is in its tentacles; it thinks through touch. And it doesn’t have memory, so it has to think and feel without reference to what it has thought and felt before. That is something quite attractive — to be right in the moment like that.’

Titled We, Elsewhere, it is a kind of architectural installation through which visitors will move along ramps, across internal courtyards and around sharp corners. Along the way they will encounter strange noises, scraps of video, unexpected characters and objects. The effect will be baffling, disorienting, as it is clearly meant to be.

‘I am building a halfway house to cope with the world’s grave problems,’ says Eviner. And she casts the people inside this space — presumably including visitors to the pavilion — as ‘perpetrators of thought-crime, soldiers on duty, civilians and displaced persons’. In other words, the structure will function as a kind of sub-Orwellian way station, where mundane human misery collides with equally mundane man-made bureaucracy.

But this is not a museum diorama, or a pious attempt to immerse viewers in the refugee experience; it is more allusive and poetic than that. Everywhere inside the work there are glimpses of other spaces, and this feature is perhaps the ‘elsewhere’ of the title, a metaphor built into the structure of the piece. You can slip through the cracks — both in the sense of passing through a barrier to a better place, and that of becoming invisible to the bigger system.

But there is contemporary work, too, including the video installation Covering Letter  by Jitish Kallat, which projects onto a curtain of cascading fog Gandhi’s letter to Hitler, written six weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War. ‘Dear friend,’ it begins. ‘Friends have been asking me to write to you for the sake of humanity…’

As the artist says, ‘It’s a seven-line plea for the sake of humanity, something that urges the reader to rethink what he or she can conceive of to change the world or rethink the way they live their life.’

Co-funded by the Goethe-Institut, A Temporality  aims to adapt this ancient vocal art form to modern times — so performers will interact with elements of the urban, man-made world rather than the animistic, natural environment of the steppes, where throat singers often travel miles in search of the right resonance and backdrop.

And in another large-scale, immersive work downstairs, the artist and stage designer Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai draws inspiration from the Dutch Golden Age and from mechanical curiosities such as the Peacock Clock, a life-size gilded automaton of a peacock displaying its tail feathers, along with an owl and a crowing cock, made in Britain in the 1770s.

Non-verbal communication is Mesiti’s abiding theme — she has explored everything from signing to the whistle language of certain remote rural communities — and her new multiscreen installation for the Australian pavilion, curated by Juliana Engberg, will continue to mine the seam.

The fourth female artist in succession to represent Australia at the Biennale, Mesiti will, she says, use ‘polyphony, cacophony, dissonance and harmony’ in the Venice work ‘as metaphors for the range of dynamics within a democratic system’.

Mixing documentary realism and fictional tropes, the film, says curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, ‘presents a profound and empathetic panorama of contemporary Brazilian culture, at a moment of significant political and social tension’, but also invites ‘multiple readings and interpretations’.

Barreiro, who directed the 2018 São Paulo Biennial, believes Wagner and de Burca ‘are among the most promising artists in Brazil today, exploring media, representation, race and identity in a new way’.

Lorenz and Boudry are building a reputation as queer artists whose works are immersed in the history of what they term ‘the other’ in ‘official’ and underground culture.

More details of the pavilion emerged subsequently, including a video in which a rock-headed figure is seen walking in a part of northern Puglia associated with recent protests by underpaid agricultural migrant workers; and it was announced that the artist’s presentation will be supported by audio input created by six international composers and musicians.

Fielding six artists — El Anatsui, Ibrahim Mahama, Felicia Abban, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, John Akomfrah and Selasi Awusi Sosu — the pavilion intends, says curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim, to chart the artistic energies of a country ‘finally moving out of the “postcolonial” moment into one we have yet to envision’.

Video artist Hwayeon Nam unveils an installation dedicated to a controversial dancer and choreographer who died in mysterious circumstances in North Korea, while Jane Jin Kaisen debuts a film that reworks the myth of Princess Bari, a shamanic goddess held up for centuries as a model of filial self-sacrifice.

Those youthful impressions inspired Cave of Darkness — Port of No Return, one of a trio of linked pieces by different artists featured in Malta’s pavilion. Borg’s is a kind of walk-through cabinet of curiosities displaying some 400 objects, including bones, pottery, weapons and jewellery. ‘Like a huge find,’ he says. ‘And it’s all going to be painted white. Because this is a re-imagination, it’s a white lie.’

While touching on autobiography, Borg’s work connects with a larger narrative of displacement and sanctuary in the Mediterranean, a theme shared by Vince Briffa’s film installation and a sculpture and video piece by the Cypriot artist Klitsa Antoniou. Collectively they create an immersive experience.

It’s About Time  reimagines the circumstances in which La Biennale came into being, setting up new conditions from which the ‘unheard voices’ of women can emerge, while offering an alternative history of the event. The resulting sound and film installation questions the political and social mechanisms responsible for shaping the cultural spaces of the exhibition and the museum, by attending to omissions and silences.