Political engagement is central to the artistic dialogue at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art fair, that opened on Saturday.
From the main show, “Viva Arte Viva” curated by Christine Macel, to 87 national pavilions throughout the historic city centre, artists are contemplating the world around them and giving a voice to under-represented populations.
Ms. Macel said artists “are able to respond to this moment of complexity” even if art “should not be reduced to politics.”
The show runs till November 26. Here are some highlights:
Green light project
Berlin-based artist Olafur Eliasson’s “Green light” is an on-site workshop where 100 migrants create lamps lit by green bulbs from simple materials.
Visitors can engage with the migrants, maybe asking their stories. Mr. Eliasson says being a migrant is not an identity, but a condition. “What we see is ourselves,” Mr. Eliasson said. “The migrants [in the workshop] are a little bit like actors in a play. Fair enough. But I am doing it on the condition that they are volunteers. They are given a subjective space, they are not being objectified.”
An immigration lawyer and psychological counsellor are among the 90 volunteers participating. The project aims to help the migrants learn skills, and build self-esteem, while exploring a platform that could be repeated in other contexts.
Dutch self-image
The Dutch pavilion examines the Netherland’s self-image as progressive and tolerant, which has been put to the test during Europe’s refugee crisis.
One film explores how the Dutch self-narrative papered over the difficult assimilation of mixed-race children of Dutch and Indonesian parents after Indonesia’s independence.
Artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh discusses the issues in three short films. Because the children entered the country smoothly as Dutch citizens, vast differences in their experiences have been overlooked. Some of the children had been abandoned by their white fathers and were impoverished but even others who were wealthy and well-educated still found barriers to assimilation.
Brexit melancholy
Phyllida Barlow’s show of sculptures for the United Kingdom’s pavilion titled “folly” isn’t about overtly about politics, but that did seep into the work as the Brexit campaign raged around her.
“As I was making the work, I began in April, before the referendum, I had this sense of unease, melancholia really, about this idea of occupying the British pavilion and what it means to be British ... when it’s leaving Europe and I feel I’m European,” Ms. Barlow said.
She said the mood permeated her sculptures, which while robust “show fragility, and a sense of things being uneasy.”
For the Hungarian pavilion, artist Gyula Varnai discusses the “viability and necessity of utopias” in his show titled “Peace on Earth.” He uses many defunct communist symbols, including a reproduction of a large neon ‘Peace on Earth’’ sign from a building in Hungary, to a rainbow made of 8,000 pins bearing Cold War-era symbols.
Illegal journeys
With cinematic tableaus, photographer Tracey Moffatt recreates scenes of “journeys, secret journeys, illegal journeys,” in a series called “Passages” for the Australian pavilion.
The opening photograph features a mother grasping a child seen through a fog looking out over the sea.
“The baby is squirming. The baby will leave her. She might be giving the baby away for her passage. There are many scenarios,” Ms. Moffatt said.
