As we face pressing global issues, the pavilions of the Venice Biennale

While the selection of artists for Venice is a much more subjective process than the selection of athletes for the Olympics, both see each nation put forward its “best” practitioners for a once-in-a-lifetime event that is anticipated worldwide and watched by millions.

When it began in 1895, the Venice Biennale aimed to reestablish the city as a fixture on the Grand Tour by drawing visitors away from the foul-smelling canals around San Marco to the Gardens to the east of town. With the Salon exhibition in Paris becoming increasingly conservative and less fashionable by the 1890s, it was also an opportunistic moment for Venice to reclaim its artistic renown in Europe.

This year the international exhibition is curated by New York native, London-based curator and Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff and contains the work of 79 artists. However, it is the national pavilions, of which there are 92 this year, that make up the majority of the Biennale in terms of real estate, volume, and public interest.

The pavilions require each of the participating countries to assume curatorial, production, and funding responsibility for their exhibition, which typically features just one or a small number of artists’ work. In addition to its long history and colossal scale, it is this national pavilion format that distinguishes the Venice Biennale from the scores of biennales elsewhere.

The Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Felicity Fenner

In times of global conflict, the Venice Biennale, like the Olympics, offers an opportunity for nations to come together in a spirit of shared participation and dialogue. Unfortunately, however, the national pavilion model discourages cross-cultural dialogue, instead fostering a separatist mentality that inevitably results in competition between nations. (Indeed, the most sought-after prize at the Venice Biennale is the Golden Lion Award for the Best National Pavilion, won this year by Lithuania.)

A glamorous graveyard

The international art world’s glamorous graveyard to national cultural identity, the Biennale Gardens is an anomaly in our globalized 21st century. The perpetuation of this Victorian-era perspective of the world is in part due to architecture. Within the Gardens, the historic center of the exhibition, 30 nations each have a discrete gallery (“pavilion”) to house their biennial art exhibition.

The Giardini at the Venice Biennale. Felicity Fenner

When the Gardens were deemed fully occupied a generation ago, countries seeking to exhibit at the Biennale commandeered spaces in the event’s second venue, the sprawling Arsenale complex of former shipyards, or rented spaces in deconsecrated churches and palazzi across the city.

The Arsenale complex. La Biennale di Venezia

Australia was one of the last nations to be granted a plot in the Biennale Gardens in 1988. Since then, a succession of mostly one-person Australian pavilion exhibitions have demonstrated the international caliber of Australian art, or have attempted to convey a sense of Australian culture, or both.

The cultural background of this year’s representative, Angelica Mesiti, typifies that of many international contemporary artists today. She is of Italian heritage, lives in Paris, and does work across the world, most recently in Aarhus, Denmark, for her piece in last year’s Adelaide Biennial and in Rome and Canberra for her current Venice Biennale work.

Angelica Mesiti, ASSEMBLY, 2019, (production still) three-channel video installation in the architectural arena. Commissioned by the Australia Council for the Arts on the occasion of the 58th International Art Exhibition-La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Bonnie Elliott Courtesy of the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Mesiti is exhibiting an immersive video installation on the subject of democracy, a fitting subject given the state of global politics today and the promise of the Venice Biennale as a forum for open dialogue. Filmed inside the senate chambers of both countries, “Assembly” is viewed from inside a theater constructed within the pavilion. The audience looks across each of the three screens in an architectural design that, in its circularity and red palette, evokes a legislative assembly.

In deploying the pavilion as a conversation pit, Mesiti not only refers to the ties between Australia and Italy – both personal and in the setting of the Biennale – but also to the idea of a pavilion itself. Traditionally, a pavilion is a place of shelter, a temporary structure offering respite on a journey or refuge from the elements.

It implies safety and sanctuary, a meaning complicated at the Venice Biennale by the word “national,” which in current times evokes “nationalism” and its associated extremism. Mesiti has created a forum for exchange within the confines of the Australian pavilion: the challenge for the Venice Biennale is to overcome the existing disconnection between national pavilions to make the event more conducive to genuine exchange.

Greed and trauma

It was noted at a symposium in Venice last week that if all the countries in the world had a pavilion in the gardens, they would be more densely populated than Hong Kong. Given that the world’s population has more than quadrupled since the Biennale began, it makes sense to invite all the world’s countries into the Biennale Gardens. A densely populated community of shared pavilions would better reflect modern times while also offering the potential for collaboration and exchange between nations.

Like Australia’s entry, very few of the national pavilions in this year’s Biennale claim to embody the national character of their country. Venezuela is one exception: the political unrest in that country has rendered its pavilion empty, the artworks having failed to arrive.

Venezuela’s pavilion stands empty. Felicity Fenner

Another exception is Ghana, one of a handful of first-time pavilions at this year’s Biennale. Designed by London-based Ghanaian architect David Adjaye in a style that references African vernacular architecture in its sand-colored walls, this unusually expansive pavilion accommodates the work of six artists across three generations.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Just Amongst Ourselves (2019) is a series of paintings, oil on linen and canvas. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist; Corvi-Mora, London; and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo by David Levene

The outstanding work is filmmaker John Akomfrah’s sweeping visual narrative depicting violence in Africa over generations, including the mass slaughter of elephants and breathtaking footage of threatened natural land and marine environments. It is a scathing indictment of human greed and malice that has global resonance.