Venice Biennale, part 2: The National Pavilions
Venice Giardini, 23 April - 27 November 2022
And the winner of the Golden Lion is . . . Sonia Boyce. Her installation in the British Pavilion, Feeling Her Way, comprises multiple screens showing four singers improvising together. Their voices reverberate through the pavillion, sometimes dissonant, sometimes sweet. It celebrates the singers, all women, showing off the impressive range, strength and control of their voices.
Apart from these musicians, there is some patterned wallpaper and a few blocks of what is supposed to look like fools' gold arranged on the floor, and that's it. Boyce hasn't developed any connection between the installation and the music. The singers are great, and the rest is not. So the music is essentially a crutch for an artist out of ideas. Say a chef cuts up an apple and puts it on a plate: it might taste good, but they don't get a Michelin star for it.
The affirmative note that Feeling Her Way strikes is completely in keeping with the general atmosphere of this year's Biennale. But it's odd to combine affirmation with competition, a bit like assessing children on how enthusiastic they can be. (Who can give the biggest thumbs up? Who has the biggest smile?) It's not a good criterion for art. A more rigorous competition would plonk Feeling Her Way somewhere in the middle of the Biennale's very uneven pack.
Boyce isn't the only artist looking to music for an easy win. Stan Douglas's work ISDN is a two-screen installation of pairs of rappers, one pair in Tottenham, one in Cairo, the screens facing each other across a dark warehouse. They take it in turns to rap to the same instrumental. There are aerial shots of their respective cities. The blurb claims that ISDN highlights parallels between the 2011 Tottenham riots and the Arab Spring, and also says something ambiguous about the 1848 revolutions. You wouldn't get any of this from the work. It's just rappers rapping. I've literally made the same work a hundred times on twoyoutubevideosandamotherfuckingcrossfader.com.
Francis Alÿs brings positivity and good vibes to the Belgian Pavilion with a little more nuance than Boyce, a bit more depth than Douglas. He installs several videos of children playing games in different parts of the world, like covid tag (don't get infected!) or catch-the-mosquito. Like listening to music, it's nice to see children playing happily together, but the dark associations of these games sound a sombre note in the playground cacophony. Then Alÿs makes an inverse gesture in a separate room, displaying several jewel-like paintings of children undergoing extreme difficulty: crossing a desert in Iraq, panning for gold in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This is an unusual reversal: attractive paintings to show the hard times, documentary footage to show the good. And it runs several risks, not least the aestheticization of suffering and the instrumentalisation of children's pleasure. I'm not sure it quite escapes them. But Alÿs's installation also asks questions about its media and challenges its audience. It incorporates tension, takes risks, and does more than sound one repetitive note of unqualified praise.
The star of the pavilions, really, is Zineb Sedira and her film and installation Dreams Have No Titles. You enter the French Pavilion and walk through a set, then sit down and watch a film about Sedira's life filmed in the same set. She plays herself in a witty, exaggerated manner, evoking the historical through the personal, in a way that is rigorous and aware of its artifice. She should have won the Golden Lion. I understand Sedira and Boyce are neighbours in Brixton. If Sonia could just pop over to Zineb's . . .