Decolonizing romance – Newspaper Kommersant No. 192 (7393) of 10/17/2022

The key themes of the ongoing Venice Biennale are environmental and humanitarian disasters, as well as opposition to them. About how the main themes try to break the expositions in the national pavilions, tells Andrey Plakhov.

Disasters is the title of a performance by sound artist Marco Fucinato at the Australia Pavilion. Over the course of several months of the Biennale, he regularly performs a symphony of gnashing and decay on the electric guitar. In the Danish pavilion there is a shocking installation “We walked on the ground” (a warning for the especially sensitive before entering). The viewer is invited to a village walk with real hay and manure, during which, instead of horses, they will meet a family of three centaurs: the female gives birth to a dead child, and the centaur-husband hangs lifelessly in a noose. Among other interpretations, a hint of second-order death is read: not only humanity is dead, but also its mythology.

There are no centaurs in the Greek pavilion, where there is a line of people wishing to visit the VR installation Oedipus in Search of Colon. Its author, Lukia Alavanu, has received international recognition for her experimental work in virtual reality technologies. The project is curated by the German Heinz Peter Schwerfel, whose focus is on the links between cinema and contemporary art, which he has already represented at exhibitions of such eminent authors as Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Shirin Neshat and Julian Rosefeldt.

The Greek installation takes viewers on a utopian journey through time and space. According to the tragedy of Sophocles, King Oedipus, blinded and expelled from Thebes for the murder of his father and marriage to his mother, wanders around Greece with his daughter Antigone. They end up in Kolon, a village near Athens, and stop at the sacred grove of Erinyes. Here, at the end of the tragedy, Oedipus, who went against the will of the gods, finds his death. A visitor to the Greek pavilion, built in the neoclassical style, finds himself in a darkened room where about fifteen swivel chairs are installed, sits down in one of them, puts a helmet on his head and plunges into the world of ancient tragedy. But what he sees is not at all what one would expect.

Instead of the aristocratic Colon, Nea Zoi, located not far from it, the western outskirts of today’s Athens, inhabited by gypsies. Wherever the viewer turns his head in a helmet, he sometimes sees from a bird’s eye view, sometimes very close, an endless wasteland with flawed signs of human presence in the form of broken cars, squalid shacks and hungry dogs prowling around the area. The roles of ancient heroes in an exaggerated style are performed by gypsy non-professional artists, some in grotesque masks; behind the scenes, the choir comments on what is happening. Gypsies are forced to wander, often stateless and denied the right to a burial place; they struggle with their fate all their lives – and this brings them closer to the aged Oedipus.

For those who find the modern version of the Greek tragedy too depressing, it is recommended to look into the Poland pavilion located next door. There he will again meet with the mythology and culture of the gypsies, but in a more optimistic turn. For the first time in the 120-year history of the Venice Biennale, a gypsy artist is exhibiting an entire national pavilion. The project “Reincarnation of the World” by Malgorzata Mirga-Tas is an attempt to find and comprehend the place of the gypsy community in the history of European art. The artist draws inspiration from the astrological frescoes of the Scifanoia Palace in Ferrara. The signs of the zodiac, the allegories of the months, the cyclicity and migration of symbols through time and continents – between India, Persia, Asia Minor, Ancient Greece, Egypt and Europe – become visual and ideological reference points for Mirga-Tas, which inscribes them in the Polish-Gypsy folk historical an experience. The installation of twelve large-format textile canvases, corresponding to the months of the calendar, represents the culture of the Gypsies, the largest of the European national minorities. The top strip depicts the story of the mythical journey of the Gypsies to Europe, based on a series of engravings by Jacques Callot. The middle strip is an archive of gypsy stories that combines images of real women with magic and astrology. The bottom strip depicts everyday life in the artist’s hometown, Czarna Góra, and other Romani settlements in Podhale and Spiš in the Tatra Mountains.

The name of the exposition is inspired by Silvia Federici’s book Reincarnation of the World: Feminism and the Politics of Community. Its author proposes to restore the idea of ​​community and rebuild relationships with others, including non-human subjects: animals, plants, water or mountains. In this non-violent process, including decolonization, women play an important role. And the most important task is to reverse the hard fate of the world, to remove the imposed evil spells from it.

The top expositions of the biennale are dominated by female names. The artistic director of the exhibition, Cecilia Alemany, tried to find a counterbalance to depression in the female gaze. And I found it in the book “The Milk of Dreams” by the writer and surrealist artist Leonora Carrington – a collection of stories about surreal hybrid animals. Only 21 Biennale participants out of 213 are male – less than 10%: a record “gender balance”. In Alemany’s words, “We are challenging the Western vision of man and especially the supposed universal ideal of the white male ‘Man of Mind’ as the unmoving center of the universe and the measure of all things.”