{"id":62439,"date":"2015-08-17T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=62439"},"modified":"2015-08-13T18:08:14","modified_gmt":"2015-08-13T17:08:14","slug":"art-politics-and-social-change-at-the-venice-biennale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/08\/art-politics-and-social-change-at-the-venice-biennale\/","title":{"rendered":"Art, Politics and Social Change at the Venice Biennale"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSC_8091\"<\/a>13 Aug 2015 – <\/em>This historic city, famous for its canals and its sonorous gondoliers, its stunning museums brimming with art, where tens of thousands stroll the wide Piazza San Marco and wander its maze of narrow alleys, hosts the world\u2019s oldest and most prestigious art biennial, the Venice Biennale. Every two years, artists from around the world showcase their work in scores of venues \u2014 some national pavilions sponsored by countries from around the globe; others international or independent exhibits. High art may seem a rarified field when the world is consumed by war, climate catastrophe, mass migrations and growing economic inequality. Art may seem a luxury as people of color are gunned down by police in American streets. This year\u2019s Biennale, though, explodes these myths.<\/p>\n

Okwui Enwezor of Nigeria is the Venice Biennale\u2019s first African-born curator. Enwezor has been widely credited for bringing political art back to the 120-year-old festival. He says he was partly inspired by the 1974 Biennale, when part of the exhibits were dedicated to Chile, to protest the U.S.-backed coup of Gen. Augusto Pinochet that overthrew Chile\u2019s democratic government. Exhibits that Enwezor has brought to this Biennale include an epic live reading of Karl Marx\u2019s \u201cDas Kapital,\u201d the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz\u2019s piece, a boat covered in the front page of a Venice newspaper published the day after nearly 400 migrants drowned off the Italian island of Lampedusa in October 2013, and Iceland\u2019s controversial pavilion, where an actual mosque was created in a church that had been empty for more than 40 years. The city of Venice shut down the mosque, citing security concerns.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday\u2019s artists are doing much more than providing a mirror,\u201d Anne Pasternak of the organization Creative Time told us at one of the Biennale\u2019s main venues, the Arsenale. \u201cThey\u2019re getting into the gritty work of actual social change.\u201d Creative Time, a New York-based nonprofit that commissions and supports public art and engagement, convened a three-day summit at this year\u2019s Biennale. Hundreds of artists, activists, scholars and others gathered in the 16th-century Teatro alle Tese, part of Venice\u2019s Arsenale. The Arsenale is a vast, ancient walled complex where Venetians built the warships that powered their military dominance in the Mediterranean Sea for centuries. As far back as the 1500s, they could build a warship in one day in what is said to have been the world\u2019s first industrial assembly line.<\/p>\n

Now, the complex is given over to art, theater, music and public discussion, turning swords into plowshares. Among those presenting at the summit was Mariam Ghani, an Afghan-American artist based in Brooklyn, N.Y., who conducted from the stage a video-streamed conversation with her father, Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan. Through her art, she delves into the dark corners of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Her collaboration \u201cIndex of the Disappeared\u201d is a physical archive of post-9\/11 disappearances, including detentions, deportations and renditions.<\/p>\n

In building the archive, and a related project called \u201cThe Guantanamo Effect,\u201d Ghani explained: \u201cWe noticed that ideas, policies and personnel circulated among all the different U.S.-run prisons in the world. So, first you have U.S. corrections officers and U.S. policemen who are deployed as military police to Afghanistan when they\u2019re called up in the National Guard Reserves. They end up in Abu Ghraib, they end up in Bagram,\u201d sites of horrible prisoner abuse and torture. \u201cUltimately, the policies, the techniques and now even the military equipment circulate back into the U.S., into our domestic sphere,\u201d she continued. \u201cIt\u2019s become extremely visible with the recirculation of military surplus equipment from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into domestic police departments and even into school police departments. We saw this extremely visibly in Ferguson, Missouri.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Creative Time Summit took place as mass protests marked the first anniversary of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The Black Lives Matter movement was central to the summit\u2019s presentations, and was present in the broader Venice Biennale. \u201cAt the moment that we\u2019re dealing with Black Lives Matter and the violence against black people and brown people in the United States, Europe is a experiencing incredible deaths of black people here, too,\u201d said author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, referring to the drowning deaths of hundreds of African migrants seeking asylum in Europe. After Venice, Rhodes-Pitts will head to Lampedusa.<\/p>\n

Venice served for centuries as the crossroads of the world, a city where East met West and art flourished. This year\u2019s Venice Biennale, called \u201cAll the World\u2019s Futures,\u201d showcases a growing community of politically engaged artists, who not only reflect the beauty and brutality of the world, but might actually change it.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

Amy Goodman is the host of \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of \u201c<\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier,\u201d<\/em> recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Venice served for centuries as the crossroads of the world, a city where East met West and art flourished. This year\u2019s Venice Biennale, called \u201cAll the World\u2019s Futures,\u201d showcases a growing community of politically engaged artists, who not only reflect the beauty and brutality of the world, but might actually change it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}