If you’ve made it through Masimiliano Gioni’s 156 artist strong “Encyclopedic Palace” and still have a hankering for more, the Arsenale’s wide selection of national pavilions won’t fail to disappoint. Leaving the Eurocentrism of the Giardini behind, the Arsenale offers smaller, warehouse-like spaces that seem more like a studio setting than a white cube.
See our picks for the five best below or in the slideshow.
Turkey
More stomach churning than a listing vaporetto at high water, Ali Kazma’s Turkish pavilion show, called “Resistance,” documents those pushing the boundaries of the human body and blurring the line between human and machine. The multi-channel video projection shows puffed-up Italian body builders, extreme body modifiers, Japanese bondage, and human dissections for med students, juxtaposed with quiet disciplines like calligraphy or images of a lab with robots so advanced they’ve developed their own language. The whole thing suggests a unity of extremes.
UAE
Mohammed Kazem and curator Reem Fadda oscillate between place and placelessness in their “Walking on Water” show. The immersive installation features a 360-degree view of open ocean, the viewer bobbing along as if standing on the video camera’s vessel. It’s a disorienting space that, when walking, gives the viewer the feeling that he or she is moving along with the sea. On the floor, a screen reads out a constantly changing set of GPS coordinates, mapping out the path of the camera. However useful the coordinates may be with a proper devise with which to interpret them, in this context they’re utterly futile — laughably so — pointing to the technological crutches that leave us inept when not plugged in.
Latvia
In what’s likely the most affective statement in the Arsenale, a large tree swings upside down from the ceiling, creaking from the sheer force of movement and slowly dropping limbs to the floor. This is Kaspars Podieks and Kriss Salmanis’s pavilion, “North by North-East.” Hung on the far wall, ten large-scale black-and-white photographic portraits of residents of Latvia’s Drusti parish standing emotionless in the snow outside what are presumably their homes and workplaces. Like the tree, these individuals are presented out of context and in flux, in the process of being forcibly moved from their lands.
Argentina
Nicola Costantino presents a quartet of installations for her Argentine pavilion inspired by Eva Peron. In “Eva and Sonny,” a video work in period costume, six different figures represent various stages in Evita’s life. The pavilion as a whole serves to destabilize the way in which we form expectations around people, especially public individuals, to the extent that they inadvertently become trapped in some caricature of their reality. The most exemplary and straightforward representation of this intent is a kinetic sculpture in which Costantino has created the silhouette of one of Peron’s gowns own of steel and placed it on a constantly moving robotic platform, confined within an octagonal barrier.
Georgia
Just when you think you’ve hit the very end of the Arsenale’s art offerings, the Georgian Pavilion, curated by Joanna Warsza, looms ahead. Attached to one of the 12th-century Venetian buildings like a haphazard extension, “Kamikaze Loggia” takes its name from the unlicensed additions made to buildings during the period directly after the fall of the Soviet Union. Inside, the Bouillon Group, Thea Djordjadze, Nikoloz Lutidze, Gela Patashuri, Ei Arakawa, Sergei Tcherepnin, and Gio Sumbadze present an exhibition that responds to these exercises in informal architecture, showing how they can be viewed as a social attempt to undermine the structures of yore physically.