Worlds apart, both the Havanna Biennial and AREA 2000 in Iceland interrogated the politics of space
Koulla Xinisteris
The theme of the seventh Havana Biennial was “Communication and Dialogue”. An engaging response to this theme was South African artist Willem Boshoff’s fragile sand installation, Writing in the Sand, which drew much attention from artists and spectators alike.
The work cleverly inscribed words paying homage to South Africa’s indigenous tongues in the easily disturbed medium of sand, evoking the fragility and changeability of language itself. I admire Boshoff’s manipulation of language in visual form and yet it was a deliberately inaccessible work.
By perplexing the spectator with unfamiliar, baffling words, Boshoff expressly alienates one to evoke a sense of the issues of alienation, self-preservation and possible extinction that face “minority groups”.
In many of the works, some more successful than others, artists from the so-called Third World used as their subjects enslavement, identity, nationhood, education, race and multiculturalism in the post-colonial, post-independence era.
Peter Minshall’s work The Dance of the Cloth was a powerful and moving performance piece. His work comes from the satirical urban street theatre/carnival tradition in Trinidad, which has as its roots the meeting of African, Indian and European influences in the early 19th century.
We watched three black men bound in heavy steel structures with suspended sail-like cloths a reference to Christopher Columbus’s three ships, the Nina, the Santa Maria and the Pinta high above their heads. They kept the audience spellbound with their silent, slow, weighted gestures. In the ironic setting of an old Spanish colonial courtyard with a statue of Columbus looming above our heads, the final catastrophe of blood shooting on to the white sails and then splattering over the men’s dark bodies, symbolising the rape and pillage, and the ultimate devastation of colonialism.
Another Trinidadian, Chris Cozier, whom I had met when he took up a residency at Johannesburg’s Bag Factory, is concerned with exploring “the critical investigations of the construction of identity and nationhood in multi-cultural societies” while attempting a kind of “cultural autopsy”. In his installation, Attack of the Sandwich Men, Cozier questions how we often define and package our modernity.
A fleet of flagged, wrapped parcels of middle-class “wonder bread” in greaseproof paper sailed motionlessly across the cobbled floor of the El Morrow Fort in neat rows, a metaphor for the spurious promise of middle class respectability and consumerism and its shelf life.
As backdrops to this were the powerful images of the crutch, conveying “the idea of injury in the post-colonial relationship”, the blackboard, a “divider between classes of students”, and the loudspeaker, very reminiscent of William Kentridge’s use of the same image.
Viewing work by artists from post-colonial societies, I found resonances with South Africa’s legacy of Dutch and British colonialism.
Founded in 1984, the intention of the Havana Biennial was to create an independent platform for Third World art and culture, seeking to “contribute to the investigation, diffusion and recognition of the visual arts of Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and the Middle East”. The sponsorship of the seventh biennial heavily aided by funding from European organisations seems to compromise the biennial’s initial intention of non-dependence on the developed world’s art hegemony. If a developing nation must court rich international funders to help enable its cultural ambitions, like in the case of the Havana Biennial, to what extent do those who yield economic power affect the actual art? How compromised was the curators’ choice of artists, and as a result, the number of participants from Third World countries, not to speak of the countries that were left out all together?
This was starkly evident in the absence of so many artists from African countries: only 14 artists participated from the African continent in a biennial that featured more than 170 artists from more than 60 countries.
While it may be unfair to question whether there was a “by nation” process of selection as distinct from regional, conceptual or thematic issue, I could not help, as a South African, feeling the absence of a strong presence of African artists at the biennial. For instance, the Cuban curator, Magda Gonzlez-Mora, chose five South African artists for the seventh Havana Biennial: Kentridge, Jane Alexander, Boshoff, Lisa Brice and Kevin Brand.
At a biennial embracing the voice of the “othered” Third World, I was expecting to see a greater spectrum of South African talent profiled. The absence of significant black South African artists struck me as a surprising oversight. Does their exclusion indicate that a representative selection of South African art no longer needs to include the voice of artists expressing contemporary themes from township life or the black struggle and the like? Where was Kay Hassan, recent winner of the international DaimlerChrysler award? Observers from other countries worldwide also expressed this opinion at the biennial.
One walks away from the biennial with a sense that there is the possibility for the “Third World” to create its own discourse, parallel to rather than subjugated to the internationalist perspective.
South Africa can learn from this vision of our world, one which looks to the East and West, and not only North. As Corina Matamoros Tuma writes in the catalogue of the Sptima Bienal de la Habana Biennial: “This Third World, this south in which we live is left with just one alternative for survival: unity.”