Three years ago, while in Eindhoven, artist Athi-Patra Ruga dreamt up the idea of a female monarch from a never-never land who always wore a balloon dress. Last year at the National Arts Festival his fictional character became a reality, with Ruga parading through the streets of Grahamstown wearing a colourful inflatable costume. Since this debut, he has tottered about in high heels and camp get-up in Jo’burg, Cape Town and, most recently, Venice, where the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale has just opened.
While less decorous than Evita Bezuidenhout, Ruga’s fictitious monarch does tend to share with the ambassador of Bapetikosweti the belief that every public appearance is a bit like the opening of Parliament. Solemnity, ritual and costume are key.
Flanked by four amateur Venetian performers, all precariously balancing on black heels, Ruga’s monarch on Sunday negotiated the flagstones outside the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. This medieval church houses an important altar painting by the 16th-century Venetian painter Titian and also features an intricate sculpted tableau prominently featuring four black slaves at its doorway. The “politics of context”, as the artist has put it, is by no means incidental to Ruga’s performance work.
From the church, Ruga moved towards Venice’s state archive, where a boat decorated with floral wreaths was moored. Here he stopped. Photo opportunity. Most of the National Arts Festival organising committee, which this year won the hastily convened bid to stage the South African Pavilion, were in attendance, as was South Africa’s new Italian ambassador, Nomatemba Tambo. Cue animated clicking of iPhones.
The pretend royal party then boarded the boat and headed off towards Venice’s Grand Canal. A stuttering recording, played at high volume, narrated the “who” and “what” of the strange pageant, in both English and Italian. Ruga’s character was named Ivy — a “versatile queen”, according to Ruga’s echoing narrative, part of a long line of female monarchs from the Kingdom of Azania.
As Ivy’s boat floated beneath the arching wooden Ponte dell’Accademia, Sunday-evening revellers at this tourist hotspot craned their necks. Snap went another set of iPhones, the diverse efflorescence and creative spill of Venice and its century-old art biennale compacted into a rectangular frame as keepsake.
Jam-packed with performance
Few of the onlookers were aware that they were watching one of a series of events inaugurating South Africa’s presence at this year’s biennale. Despite the absence of foreign press — the preview week ended two days earlier — Ruga’s work was one of the better contributions to a biennale jam-packed with performance.
Tino Sehgal, the British-born darling of the European art world, won the prestigious Golden Lion for best artist at this year’s biennale. His work involved a revolving cast of performers sitting in contorted poses and murmuring in a room filled with chalk drawings by the esoteric Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. The award seemed like a belated acknowledgement for better works staged elsewhere, notably his grope-in-the-dark contribution to last year’s Documenta in Kassel.
Far more deserving of recognition was the work of Romanian choreographers Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmu. Both residents of Bucharest, the pair have devised an elastic performance that revisits, through physical movement and spoken word, key works shown at the Venice Biennale since 1895.
Their “immaterial retrospective” includes performers laid out in a grid-like pattern as they try to recall an abstract painting by Piet Mondrian exhibited in 1948 by heiress Peggy Guggenheim. More recent works cited include Santiago Sierra’s 2005 Venice Biennale intervention in which he bricked up the entrance to the Spanish Pavilion and only admitted Spanish passport holders through a rear door. In its reimagined form, only Romanian citizens were allowed past the line of bodies blocking the entrance to the evacuated interior.
The Romanian Pavilion is located very near the Egyptian Pavilion. Opened in 1952, when a military coup overthrew the rule of King Farouk, Egypt’s pavilion is the only African exhibition space among the 29 national pavilions situated in Venice’s historic Napoleonic gardens.
In the past, other African states hoping to make a big splash at this keenly observed international event have had to rent private venues. Like 2013 biennale returnees Zimbabwe and Kenya, which have rented temporary venues on the busy tourist promenade between the gardens and St Mark’s Square, newcomer Angola has work on show in Cini Palace, a historic building hosting a collection of early Renaissance art and objects near the Accademia Bridge.
Defying the odds — and much better national pavilions elsewhere — Angola was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion for best pavilion. Curated by Paula Nascimento and Stefano Pansera, the show’s innovation lay in its awkward juxtaposition of palettes containing take-home photographic prints of doorways and discarded objects from Luanda made by Edson Chagas in wallpapered rooms filled with cordoned-off European antiquities.
Normalisation of South Africa’s presence
After more than a half-century at Venice, albeit in an on-off manner, South Africa has finally secured a permanent venue. Speaking at the launch of Imaginary Fact, curator Brenton Maart’s group exhibition in the South Africa Pavilion, Minister of Arts and Culture Paul Mashatile announced that the elevated first-floor venue in a mall near the old military arsenal had been secured for future exhibitions.
The announcement marks a normalisation of South Africa’s presence in Venice. Between 1950 and 1968, when it was formally excluded from the “Olympics of the art world”, as Mashatile neatly summarised the biennale for a crowd of 100 or so visitors at the opening, South Africa exhibited in the so-called sale straniere (foreign halls) of the Venice Biennale’s central pavilion.
Black artists were first included in the selection in 1966 and again in 1968, when sculptor Lucas Sithole had work shown together with four tapestries by Rorke’s Drift weavers.
In 1993, when South Africa returned to the biennale, 24 local artists, among them Sue Williamson and Penny Siopis, who both have work on Maart’s show, exhibited at the Levi Foundation overlooking the Grand Canal. Ruga, legs hanging off the front of the boat, passed by the venue twice as his boat wended its way along the Grand Canal, the loudspeaker repeating a fanciful story in fading evening light.
The logic of mass participation has long marked South Africa’s presence at Venice. It is reiterated rather than challenged by Maart’s curatorial plan. His exhibition includes 15 artists — that is if you count the trio of Maja Marx, Philip Miller and Gerhard Marx, who collaboratively worked on a video installation, as a single artist.
Even with three of the selected artists doing performances and James Webb offering a space-saving new sound piece, that still means there is a lot of work filling a space little bigger than a Vida e Caffè franchise. Despite its congested feel, Imaginary Fact offers a settled view of recent South African practice.
Welcome to South Africa
If dealer Monna Mokoena got to rub his hands last time round, this time it’s the turn of rival dealers Liza Essers and Michael Stevenson. More importantly, though, the back office is now (almost) sorted out, so recurrence is assured. Innovation and experimentation will (hopefully) come.
Entering the South African exhibition, the first work one encounters is Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases project, an ongoing photographic project documenting black lesbians.
The tiled presentation includes the odd blank space. Like the rectangular stones marked “unknown” on Freedom Park’s enormous Wall of Names, the absences here function as a kind of memorial. Some of the women pictured in the project have died, not infrequently by violence. Ruga’s campy dream of a country governed by a dynasty of matriarchs possesses an urgent undertone.
Wim Botha’s presentation includes his familiar portrait busts made from stacks of carved books, as well as larger new work. Produced at short notice after the department of arts and culture’s rushed call for applications in January, Botha’s sculptural tableau, Study for the Epic Mundane (2013), depicts two naked figures doing battle. Encompassing themes of fragmentation and morphing, this atomised piece demonstrates Botha’s aptitude for form and his facility as a carver.
“He’s an absolute master,” enthused Maart, who regards the work as one of the show’s highlights.
This is a moot point. Botha’s work arguably lacks the lightness of gesture and form that typifies his more recent installation works with polystyrene, wood and fluorescent tubing. But this kind of work, an example of which is on view at collector Piet Viljoen’s New Church space in Cape Town, would have demanded the whole space. So, a compromise — one that delivers mixed outcomes.
There is a back story to Botha’s work. Not too long ago, Clarke’s Bookshop in Cape Town moved premises on Long Street. Its owner, Henrietta Dax, donated most of the books that make up Botha’s new work.
At an event centrally preoccupied with visual art, the book enjoys a strategic and recurring presence.
Massimiliano Gioni, the invited artistic director of the biennale and guest curator of its main pavilion, has displayed a book as his show’s first work. The book is an illustrated manuscript by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Started in 1914 and completed 16 years later, The Red Book encapsulates Jung’s gnostic thoughts in 205 pages. Like the illustrated books created by William Blake, it synthesises art and language.
Jung’s mystical and visionary illustrations, which employ colour, pattern and cryptic symbolisms, herald themes and ideas that recur throughout Gioni’s show, and beyond.
Visual otherness
Gioni’s main exhibition includes cabinets displaying lavishly illustrated visual diaries (made by Japanese artist Shinro Ohtake) and found photo albums (owned by American photo-grapher Cindy Sherman). Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis (2009), a comic-book adaptation of the Christian tradition’s founding myth, is splayed out across a circular display. Eve appears as a stout-legged heroine.
Drawing on the title of Italian-American artist Marino Auriti’s 1955 patent for a 136-storey museum building capable of housing all worldly knowledge, Gioni has entitled his exhibition The Encyclopaedic Palace.
It could just as easily have been called The Neglected Tradition.
The 20th century, that bygone era in which modernism matured, spread, flourished and then wilted, maintained a kind of stranglehold on the imagination. Other things happened.
Gioni’s show selectively highlights some of this visual otherness. His approach is purposefully anthropological. Glass-box displays number as many as paintings on walls. “Associative thinking” is a key tool for navigating his exhibition, which offers as much space to untrained artists as professionals.
“The idea that images are living, breathing entities, endowed with magical qualities and capable of influencing, transforming and even healing, may seem like a dated concept cloaked in archaic superstitions,” writes Gioni, the youngest ever artistic director of the biennale, in his curatorial statement.
“Yet how can we deny the talismanic power of an image when we still carry pictures of our loved ones in our cellphones?”
Breaking with established convention over the past decade, Gioni has not chosen any South Africans for his main show.
Not that we don’t have artists who would have fitted the bill: draughtsman Tito Zungu, wood sculptor Willem Boshoff, or Bloemfontein collagist Arie Kuijers, whose work repurposes gay ephemera into expansive archives of longing, would have all seamlessly slotted into the display.
Instead Gioni, a director at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, has invited well-known diaspora artists Steve McQueen and Lynette Yiadom Boakye, a British-born portrait painter of Ghanaian descent, on to his show.
Like the presence of Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen, who grew up in Kenya, these “safe” choices are complemented by his decision to include three veteran African artists.
Senegal’s Papa Ibra Tall shows lurid modernist tapestries and paintings that aim to see negritude as a visual idea as much as philosophy.
Gioni also selected the figurative Ivorian draughtsman Frédéric Bruly Bouabré and Nigerian photographer JD Okhai Ojeikere, celebrated for his black-and-white portraits, surveying cosmopolitan rituals such as hair weaving.
Outside the main pavilion, curatorial sleights of hand have seen two South Africans incorporated into non-African national pavilions.
Photographer Santu Mofokeng is showing his darkly poetic black-and-white studies of sacred caves alongside Ai Weiwei and two other artists in the German national pavilion. Just to complicate things, the German Pavilion is being hosted in the French Pavilion, and vice versa.
Mofokeng attended the opening week, Ai did not. The dissident Chinese artist, who last year was held in solitary confinement for 80 days, also has a work in the Church of Sant’Antonin, six iron boxes containing dioramas recreating his prison routine, during which two stiff military personnel in green tracked his movements.
Dystopian visions
Also absent from the proceedings was Adelaide-based South African Nobel laureate and animal rights champion JM Coetzee, who is being advertised as the curator of the Belgian Pavilion. There’s an uncomplicated explanation for Coetzee’s inclusion: Flemish sculptor Berlinde de Bruyckere, who makes lifelike sculptures of disfigured animals and flesh-like residue, is an admirer of Coetzee’s novels.
De Bruyckere’s exhibition Cripplewood, which consists of a solitary and leafless fallen tree that is held together by leaking bandages, includes a text by Coetzee, who according to one source is due to visit in July.
The word cripple, the text panel reads, is no longer in polite use. It is, writes Coetzee, an unwanted word, pressed back, repressed, buried.
“Rejected as unclean, it is dismissed back to the world from which it came and to which it belongs, a world of hovels and tenements, of open drains and coal cellars and horse-drawn carts and starving dogs in the street.”
Coetzee’s vision conjures a dystopia that is synchronous with parts of his former Cape Town.
“Who wants to make art that deliberately seeks not to challenge,” says Irish photographer Richard Mosse, whose six-channel film The Enclave, on show in the Irish Pavilion, collages everyday scenes filmed in the Kivu district of the Democratic Republic of Congo — births, deaths, dancing, rehearsals for battle — with staged, impressionistic moments. The film opens with a young man walking into Lake Kivu with an assault rifle and disappearing.
Like Coetzee, Mosse impressionistically reimagines Africa’s peopled landscapes as freighted with a terrible beauty. Rather than literally describe this beauty, Mosse, who like Guy Tillim is a kind of post-photojournalist, uses infrared film.
The outcome is a gaudy and mesmerising form of anti-reportage whose central subject is conflict.
“War, in my experience, is a very imaginative space,” says Mosse, who is represented by the same New York dealer as Zwelethu Mthethwa and Anton Kannemeyer.
Not so long ago Mosse’s intentionally unreliable reportage might have provoked outrage. Ditto the abysmal selection of roadside art shuffled into the so-called Kenyan Pavilion by two Italian curators.
But with flamboyant African monarchs commanding the Grand Canal as their playground and oil-rich Angola snagging a first prize, this year’s Venice Biennale is less a place to chart neglect and ritual misrepresentation than a space of tricky but real self-actualisation for African artists.