The prestigious Venice Biennale, which was first organised 120 years ago in 1895, is holding its 56th edition this year. Exhibitions are installed at the historic Central Pavilion as well as two main locations Giardini and Arsenale. It stretches out at various sites in the city including a number of collateral events. Titled “All the World’s Futures”, the curator of this year’s exhibition is Nigerian-born writer and educator Okwui Enwezor. The underlying theme for the exhibition was inspired by the 1974 Venice Art Biennale which was dedicated to Chile as “a gesture of solidarity toward that country in the aftermath of the violent coup d’état (…) in 1973.”

“All the World’s Futures” is a gaze into the state of our world today, rife with crises of war and violence, economic uncertainty and exploitation by hegemonic forces, and human and environmental catastrophes. For the duration of this six-month long event, economist and philosopher Karl Marx’s Das Kapital would be read at the site. Written in 1867, this seminal text, critiques capitalism and political economy made possible by exploitation of labour. Another Marxist philosopher whose words were evoked by Enwezor is Walter Benjamin, a victim of the war who died while trying to flee France in World War II.

Enwezor points out, in Paul Klee’s painting, ‘Angelus Novus’, Benjamin interprets it in these words, “But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

The underlying theme of ‘All the World’s Futures’ is a gaze into the state of the world nowadays

Benjamin was sceptical of technological advancements and its unnatural consumption leading to wars and man’s eventual destruction. In this reading, which was not the actual intention of the painting, Benjamin makes another important point; the power of art to create perspectives beyond what appears on the surface. Obviously Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s painting is a result of the turmoil of his own time and life.

With such impressive curatorial intentions, one would have expected the Biennale to be more open, social and participatory. However, that would probably require a complete overhauling of the current state of the art world itself, which seems to have settled into convenient models of biennales, fairs and shows. Clearly the labour / immigrant class of Venice will not be found inside the premises of this grand show except when they are required as labourers, cleaners and workers.

In addition, on May 22, the Venetian authorities lost patience with an art installation in the form of a functioning mosque in the city centre and decided to shut it down. For the Icelandic pavilion, Swiss artist, Christoph Büchel, who is known to make hyper realistic spaces as well as controversial works, had created ‘The Mosque’ by transforming an idle Catholic church. Since there is no other mosque in Venice, a city influenced by Islamic trade and culture, hundreds of people had come to see the project or to simply pray there.

Enwezor and Biennale officials maintained their distance from the controversies surrounding this project and made no public statement of support for it. On various occasions Venetian authorities cited different reasons for the shut down; ‘The Mosque’ could be a potential security threat, the premises was originally a Catholic church (which was not in use for the last 40 years) and that the place was overcrowded during Friday prayers exceeding the limit of 90 people!

For the two weeks of its existence, ‘The Mosque’ created participation, community and a social space, and it broke social, religious and economic barriers. Like so many other sites in Italy, it would have become just another, albeit temporary, place for looking, seeing, understanding, interpreting, praying and perhaps harmony.

Closure of ‘The Mosque’ and the apparent silence of the Biennale officials, exposes the hypocrisy of the art world and the world in general that neither Karl Marx nor Walter Benjamin would have endorsed. However, one also feels that in such a scenario of intolerance and censorship, Büchel’s mosque project has been successful in highlighting the “state of things” that Enwezor had set out to explore through this Biennale.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine July 12th, 2015

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