India is a no-show at the Venice Biennale — and this may be a good thing 

The nation-based format of the Biennale demands statements. Which of the myriad issues plaguing our country would we draw attention to? Or not at all?

Croatia will exhibit “nothing” at the Venice Biennale this year.

Tomo Savić-Gecan, the country’s representative artist at the Olympics of the art world, exhibits “nothing” as a rule, and has instead created an artificial intelligence that will guide five performers to move around Venice inconspicuously. Given that the 59th edition of the Biennale, which opens to the public tomorrow, takes its title ‘The Milk of Dreams’ from the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, this post-truth presentation is very much at home.

It’s not all surrealism and spectacle though. Alongside the Central Pavilion curated by Cecilia Alemani, there are 80 national pavilions set to make strong socio-political statements at what remains the contemporary art world’s most prestigious biennial event.  It was postponed last year due to the pandemic, something that has only occurred twice in the event’s 127-year history, during the two World Wars.

The global ecological crisis (Chile, Georgia, North Macedonia, Serbia) and the status of indigenous people (Canada, New Zealand, Peru) appear to be focal points this year. In the New Zealand pavilion, Yuki Kihara will be the first artist of Pacific descent to represent the country, focussing on stereotypes about people who identify as Fa’afafine, the Samoan word for the third gender. 

In her poetic curator’s statement, Alemani asks, ‘How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates plant and animal, human and non-human?’ while underlining that art can help us imagine new modes of co-existence and infinite possibilities of transformation. 

I am looking forward to two national pavilions in particular. The Nordic pavilion, which represents Norway, Finland, and Sweden, has changed its name to the Sámi pavilion in honour of the three indigenous artists who will take over the space. The Sámi are indigenous people scattered across the Nordic countries and Russia’s Kola peninsula. Living on the perilous edge of climate crisis — threatened by mining, logging, global warming and new culling laws — they will take their place as a nation for the first time. Artist Máret Anne Sara, born to a reindeer-herding family, views the animal as a close relative. “Humans, nature and animals are interdependent and equal. So destroying any part of this is like suicide from our perspective. What’s happening to the reindeer is our story as well,” she said in a recent interview in The Guardian.

Some of Sara’s most powerful art has been protest art. In 2017, in front of the Norwegian parliament building in Oslo, she made a “curtain” of 400 bullet-ridden reindeer skulls. Another artist exhibiting in the Sámi pavilion is Pauliina Feodoroff from the Finnish-Russian border. Her work is a conceptual project where she auctions rights to view pristine Arctic wilderness, and uses the proceeds to buy and protect the land.