For the first time ever, France and Germany have traded pavilions at the Venice Biennale. The works of Anri Sala, chosen to represent France, are on display in the German pavilion, curated by Christine Macel, while Germany has selected four artists, Ai Weiwei, Romuald Karmakar, Santu Mofokeng, and Dayanita Singh, to show their work in the French pavilion, curated by Susanne Gaensheimer. The idea of the pavilion exchange was actually suggested ten years ago as a sign of Franco-German harmony but is only happening now, with the agreement of the artists and with each pavilion organized independently.
Visitors to both pavilions may be surprised by what very different choices they have made: For France, the work of a single artist related to the world of music, and, for Germany, four installations on the theme of identity. Nothing connects the art shown by the two countries. So it seems that the trade has been fundamentally respectful of the wishes of each artist and committed to showing the diversity of the European art scene — or even the international art scene in the case of Germany, whose artists are from four different nations.
The German Pavilion
The German pavilion presents four striking installations on the theme of identity, and a close viewing reveals each one to be worthy of attention. However, there’s a bit of a sense of déjà vu when seeing Ai Weiwei’s installation — wooden stools linked together and piled up to the ceiling — which is reminiscent of things seen before (as in Tadashi Kawamata’s work, for example). Set up in the main room of the French pavilion, Ai’s installation serves as an almost decorative introduction to the other artists’ work. While it can be considered in terms of Chinese culture, the installation seems just to skim the surface of the theme of identity.
Santu Mofokeng lays out his artistic approach in a poetic text that treats the duality of his identity in a South African context. On the one hand there are spirits and the apparitions of the ancestors, and, on the other, the artist’s distance from these “fables.” Torn between two worlds and torn apart by the history of apartheid in South Africa, Mofokeng revisits the world of the ancestors in photographs that combine religion and popular beliefs in the Mpumalanga province in the northeast of the country, where factories were built on the exact sites that were once visited as places of worship and cemeteries but are now off-limits to the indigenous people. In this way, Mofokeng, who began his artistic career documenting apartheid in Soweto in the 1970s, has created a reflection on divided identities and the stealing of popular memory in South Africa.
In Dayanita Singh’s work, identity becomes the place for a complex process of questioning connected to sexuality. With her wonderful film of a Hindu eunuch and its accompanying series of photographs documenting various archives of Hindu birth certificates and identity papers, Singh examines the deprivation of sexual identity or the accepted androgyny of the eunuchs, asking the very contemporary question: isn’t identity above all sexual?
Finally, Romuald Karmakar’s work is less poetic and addresses politics directly in two videos. One is a video of a neo-Nazi protest in Berlin on May 8, 2005, during the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The other shows a well-known German actor, Manfred Zapatka, reciting the “Hamburg lectures,” which the Salafist Mohammed Fizazi, an associate of the September 11th terrorists, was in the habit of reciting in the city’s mosque. Karmakar thus puts these two films about two kinds of extremism on the same level in recent German history. A third video, “Anticipation,” depicts trees gently waving in the wind. It was filmed in Massachusetts in October 2012, just before Hurricane Sandy struck. This film seems to serve as a metaphor for the natural restrictions affecting human lives. We seem to be at the mercy of natural disasters in the same way that we’re at the mercy of extremist attacks.
Through the work of Mofokeng, Singh, and Karmakar, the German pavilion presents a concept of minority identity that is broken up, fragmented. It is thus impossible to establish a single image of the pavilion. These works of art can be connected only through real-life similarities between minority identities that are destroyed by nationalism in the work of Mofokeng and Singh, while Karmakar crystallizes extremist tensions. The works function completely independently and unfortunately lack any sense of connection.
The French Pavilion: Anri Sala
“Making the historic setting into a sound box” is how Christine Macel has described her curatorial approach, and this seems to be a perfect formula for introducing Anri Sala’s “Ravel Ravel Unravel” at the Biennale. The German pavilion, which was built by the Nazis in the Giardini in 1937, has been split up into three parts. Visitors enter through the small door on the left side of the building and leave by the right side. While Sala often creates temporal and narrative wholes, here the story of Maurice Ravel’s concerto in D major for the left hand seems at first glance to dissolve in this presentation, which consists of two videos of two pianists, Louis Lortie and Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, playing the concerto at different tempos, along with videos of DJ Chloé trying to synchronize the playing of the pianists on two records. The films of the pianists are shown in an anechoic chamber and the camera follows the movements of their left hands on the piano keys.
There’s nothing documentary here concerning Ravel’s concerto. The documentary aspect applies more to the DJ’s performance, as, especially in the last room of the installation, she operates the turntables in an almost surgical manner. Unlike the pianists, the DJ doesn’t interpret Ravel’s concerto. It’s almost as if via this performance she reproduces the playing of a left and a right hand. In this way, Sala’s vision brings together musical interpretation and composition, as in contemporary music. And in this double movement, the artist problematizes the concerto itself as a musical creation that now approaches jazz or repetitive music.
This seems almost like a betrayal of Ravel, who was so adamant that pianist Paul Wittgenstein play the concerto according to the composer’s intentions. Anechoic chambers were originally used for military testing, to measure and control the noise of detonations of weapons, and, in Sala’s installation, this chamber thus recalls the military context of the German pavilion. Now dedicated entirely to music and peace, the pavilion takes on an aspect of utopian architecture. Sala’s installation also evokes the violent history behind this concerto: Wittgenstein asked Ravel, who was a pacifist, to write a concerto for the left hand because his right arm had been amputated during World War I, a tragic loss that he treated with music to the extent that he could.
To see images from the French and German pavilions, click on the slideshow.