Venice Biennale: Disaster in Bunt – Tagesspiegel

17:27 clock by Nicola Kuhn

Which way leads to the knowledge of the world, one wonders at the 56th Venice Biennale? Okwui Enwezor has as curator of the major biennial exhibition ambitious goals – and presented at the Arsenale an overloaded spectacle.

The angel sees only ruins. It can not detract from the disaster change. The wind of progress drives it forward, an uncertain future. Nearly a century ago Paul Klee painted his “Angelus Novus”, who achieved not least through Walter Benjamin’s interpretation celebrity. A lucid artwork captured the present, a clear-sighted observer knew how to read.

Such a realization moment also desires Okwui Enwezor, the curator of the 56th Biennale di Venezia. What lies ahead is no less catastrophic than it was the ruins of the First World War. Today the angel would again see war, poverty, human trafficking, to the ecological disaster. In order for it to find an artistic expression, the Nigerian curator and director of the Munich Haus der Kunst has invited 136 painters, sculptors, filmmakers, performers to Venice, for 89 national pavilions – one third of them in the Giardini – and for the great exhibition at the Arsenale and the main pavilion in the Giardini. That had traveled since the beginning of the week, but no later than the opening on Saturday art people formed thereby to the parallel world: the super-rich, the networkers, the collector, the writers, the artists, the winners: The Golden Lion was awarded yesterday the Berlin-based American Adrian Piper , the award for best country performance went to Armenia – and one of the honorable mentions at the 2014 deceased German video artist Harun Farocki

Okwui Enwezor want to know.. He reaches for the Supreme, for seeing and recognizing the sense of Walter Benjamin. More bitter his failure: The major exhibition at the Arsenale slays the visitors formally – and depressed. The Overture delivers the first blow, brutal and banal at the same time. The Algerian Adel Abdessemed has assembled machetes to bouquets, spread on the floor and called the work “Nympheas”, loosely based on Monet’s Water Lilies. These flicker on the walls Bruce Nauman’s neon lights with basic concepts like “Death” and “Eat”. As with Abdessemed intertwine in beauty and violence.

The following is a visual barrage, hardly anything remains longer in the memory. Except for the interlude of Katharina Grosse, which sprays out a huge room in color, on concrete piles and spanned wipes away – the disaster in Bunt. The finale returns Georg Baselitz with eight monumental canvases, each a naked figure upside down on a black background. “If the wall is not” is the title – still exorcised Baselitz his wartime experiences as a young Man. Between the visitor makes, at best, happy discoveries about with Peter Friedl’s house, louder models of real buildings as Heidegger Schwarzwaldhütte or Ho Chi Minh’s private residence. . A social analysis of different style or he encounters Mika Rottenberg’s video when it has passed through the reconstructed shop a pearl necklace Factory:. A filmed fantasy of bubbles that waft through desolate corridors

Enwezor has over the meager resources laments for his exhibition. Had he the supposedly few better utilized, artists, visitors, curators, all have won. But as his acting cuts poorly compared to another exhibition which is currently on display at the Punta della Dogana. With the Biennale exhibition in the François Pinault’s private museum has nothing to do except for the fact that its curator, the Vietnamese artist Danh Vo, who played the Danish Pavilion at the Giardini. Pinault gave the artist carte blanche, of free choice in the collection of the French collector, was allowed to put Historical, Contemporary and own works

Danh Vos exhibition at the Punta della Dogana on the edge of the Biennale:. Better than the main -Look

In Danh Vos works to one’s destiny crosses as boat people-child with the tragic history of his homeland. The photo of five French missionaries before their departure to Indochina or the chandelier of the Paris hotel Majestic, where in 1973 the nine-point plan was signed for a lasting peace in Vietnam, are for him props an artistically-biographical narration. For this he joined icons of art history: a Bathers by Picasso, a head of Christ by Bellini, the Kartoffelhaus by Sigmar Polke, the filled eggshell kitchen cabinet of Marcel Broodthaers. And he shows works by friends as Elmgreen & amp; Dragset and Zoe Leonard and melancholy tributes to artists who have died of AIDS.

In the former customs warehouses of the Venetian Republic at the Punta della Dogana to Danh Vos selection adds to a fine, poignant exhibition on artist relationships and memories , Superstructure and explanation of the world: In the individual show there is a lot of what you will not find in the Arsenale. The fact that the Nigerian curator Enwezor presents particularly many African artists, makes the Biennale not necessarily rich, but leveled reversed their contribution.

“Das Kapital” by Karl Marx is completely read, in the Giardini of the Biennale

Of course, trying to beat Enwezor corridors through the thicket of Art, the zuwispert him answers to his big questions. Ironically, in Karl Marx’s “Capital”, the curator has brought assistance. He lets his translated into English major work for days aloud by actors. Ironically, this is not meant, even if in the opening days the luxury yachts of Russian tycoons have gone again anchored and whose surgically modeled companions vorüberflanieren to the speakers, with dangling Gucci bags.

The gravely dressed in black Marx -Rezitatoren are placed in the center of Giardini main pavilion, the second part of the great biennial exhibition. Again, there is problematic overabundance, but at least the collective of art is orchestrated here better. And in some work puts the value of an “Angelus Novus”, as Robert Smithson fallen tree, stuck two-sided mirror between its branches, as if the artist incite to look back on the disaster. Or Walker Evans photo series “Let us now praise famous men” from the years of the Great Depression in the US, a tribute to the survival of farmers in the Midwest.

heroic stories there are to tell no. The demonstrate the dismantled commander monuments of Indian art group Raqs Media Collective in the Giardini. The ghostly apparitions missing times the face, sometimes the body has slipped under the large cloak. Their legacy is the fragmentation, in the midst of an increasingly proliferating Biennale, whose growth seems not finished in 120th year. A set snapped on set of Marx, the great video Mika Rottenberg’s in the far corner of the Arsenale, the rediscovery of Egyptian painter Inji Efflatoun that surreal game arrangements by Frenchman Boris Achoir that counts. The currency in the art world is large in small coin

Biennale di Venezia, to 22 November, info:. Www.labiennale.org