QUEERING MUSEUM. Part 1: The Sarcophagus
performed by the mediators and educators for the public at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen on August 15, 2019
Dionysus (modeled on Antinous) in Ny Carlberg Glyptotek Auditorium
This object represents the life path of Dionysus, the son of Zeus and mortal woman Semele. Dionysus is referred in ancient literature as ‘thrice-born’: as he, beyond his birth, was resurrected according to some sources two times from the dead. The image of Dionysus in mythology and especially in following it appropriations in monotheistic religions such as Christianity is a question of the hot debate. Look at the face and appearance of the Dionysus - does he remind you someone? Some hints: Dionysus was described as well-built, but effeminate in appearance young man, tender and beautiful, with long curly hair and sometimes accurate beard and mustache. In fact, the resemblance of the physical appearance of Dionysus and Jesus is striking - especially if you compare the imagery produced in the early ages of Christianity. There is strong evidence to claim that Jesus’ character is based on Dionysus: the similarities in rebirth, sacrifice and all-loving nature of the god are omnipresent. But a lot of taken away: Dionysus multidimensional character is reduced to a simplistic dogma. Dionysus referred to as a child-god, eriphos, with his mortal mother being raised to the status of divine (as was Christian Mary). Dios-nysus is ‘the son of god’.
The sarcophagus can be read as a book with different scenes being the chapters in it. It tells the queer story of difference of Dionysus from all the other gods and about him being representation of the multiplicity of life in all possible forms - as well as resistance of life to attempts of its destruction by ‘the normality’. The latter is signified in the figure of Hera, the consort and primary wife of Zeus, whose jealousy of Semele and hatred of Dionysus as being the offspring of Zeus from mortal woman brought upon Dionysus death and oblivion.
He (or rather they?) is unusual, our we could say ‘queer’ god for the Olympus for many reasons. He isn’t a purely immortal as his mother is mortal. He is distinctively polysexual and pansexual, gender-fluid, cross-dressing, connected closely to transgender transitions. It is strongly illustrated in Euripides tragedy “Bacchae”, where effeminate appearance of the god is the centre of the plot - the repulsion of king Pentheus, who doesn’t believe that a male god can be feminine, leads him to the ultimate and tragic end. The depictions of Dionysus as androgynous beauty are omnipresent in the archeological finds which are now part of the collections of National Archeological Museum in Athens and Metropolitan Museum in New York, among others.
He is a god that embraces the change over any established status quo, as opposed to the idea of everlasting stability represented in the figure of Zeus. He represents the ‘life’-side of dichotomy between ‘existence’ and ‘living’ - with the first one being the continuous production of sameness and pre-established normative structures, such as a family and a state. Dionysus shared a special relationship with Athena: both are parthenogenic (born of the one parent’s body) after Zeus’ ‘conquest’ of their mothers. Panathenaea and Dionysia, celebrated in Athens and other poleis, were among the most important festivals of the year.
The theatre of Dionysus played the political function: being ‘a moral parliament’ where the challenging normality concepts could have been addressed. ‘Creative madness’ that had been assigned to the followers of Dionysus: such as driving women ‘mad’ in the sense of inspiring them to challenge the patriarchal rule of men, the maenads living in separate communes and bringing up children on their own – in fact can be seen as his gestures towards their liberation. One of the epithets of Dionysus is “the Waker of Women”. In comparison to Apollo he is the democratic and pluralistic god: accessible in prayer to all, seeing the beauty in all the forms of life. The coming of Dionysus and his returns symbolised the return and possibility of restitution for the repressed, hope for the oppressed and future for the doomed.
“Beyond” the “Metaphysics” of “the West”: an Exercise of Critical Deconstruction
for Arts of the Working Class, issue 8 (fall 2019)
The vast multiplicity of the post-colonial criticism raises the issue of the necessity to find a way of the new framing for structuring the process of thinking about the fundamental subjects of socio-political discourse, such as justice. I would argue that without new structures of thinking and vocabulary we are hardly equipped in the quest of a search for viable alternatives to the neoliberal capitalist acceleration. The effective way to approach this tricky issue is the method of deconstruction, adopted from the philosophical (or rather essayistic?) practice of Jacques Derrida, an ‘incorruptible’ French thinker whose work still irritates analytical philosophers. I would propose to disassemble the notions within the title of this issue - “beyond”, “metaphysics” and “the west” - and strip them of preconceived imperialist and colonial notions, which go against a certain kind of supremacy in the definition of power, normality and domination.
Beyond —> Transpolitical Osmosis
Let’s start with the notion of ‘beyond’. It presupposes the presence of something “inner”, familiar, charted and enclosed and “outer” - other, unknown and probably posing danger. The separation between the known and the unknown creates the allegiances, identities and the sensation of belonging that is crucial for construction of the cultural and political imaginary in a traditional way. “Beyondness” gives a way for marking up the territory in geopolitical framing, but even more importantly - charting the borders in the mind. Not thinking beyond specific ‘red lines’ is a fixation on familiarity within the world of the possible in the imagined. Creative writing, arts and even psychedelic drugs can be described as the known passages towards transcending into “the beyond” from the familiarity of the known.
The illusion of a normative border, even as oppressive as it can be, serves the function of providing the safety in the psyche that is as important as physical safety - allowing planning, extrapolative thinking or extending the trends of the present and anticipation of the specific scenarios of the future as most probable, for example. Going “beyond” means a dangerous trip that cost one loss of the stability, home and belonging.
Cultures of the ancient world were interested in breaking through the inner-outer dichotomy, that is in the root of the suspiciousness towards the stranger. For example the protocol of theoxenia in the Ancient Mediterranean, which obliged everyone to treat strangers as if they were gods in disguise, as ‘xenos’ (etymologically ‘friend/enemy/guest’), effectively undermined the fixation of the political imaginary membranes of the poleis and kingdoms. In comparison to theoxenia, the practices of contemporary hospitality (in tourism for instance) or diplomacy (in politics) clearly highlight the distance between “the host” and “the guest” from somewhere beyond.
I propose to counter the notion of beyond with inclusive transpolitics of osmosis. Osmosis is defined biologically as the process by which “the molecules of a solvent tend to pass through the semipermeable membrane from the less concentrated solution to a more concentrated one” or culturally as “a process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas and knowledge”. Osmosis is the process which in both cases requires the concept of a border as something immaterial and penetrable, invisible and unnoticeable. Therefore communications of the molecules and bits of knowledge are transpolitical - they are not defined by the dichotomist “us and they, friend and enemy” logic but presupposes impossibility of sustaining life without the constant flow of exchange that is not governed by the changing constructs of the socio-political imaginary, installed by the power agents in order to emphasise and accumulate control in the system.
“Metaphysics” —> Anti-cavial
Now metaphysics. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave, and further into Aristotles’ introduction of the domains of philosophy and science, the fundamental boxing of the human experience includes the opposition of physics and metaphysics. Imperial adventures in Athens, Macedonia, Rome and Christendom, were simplified as a justification of conquest in the name of“enlightening” the barbarians and “lesser peoples”, were the ones to universalized science and humanism towards post-Aristotelian standard.
Metaphysics got “dumped into” anything that epistemology cannot deal with via uncompromising logic and empirical experiment, as well as cannot ‘touch’ or prove materially. The inherent inferiority of the humanities had planted unglamorous seeds, while further European-led (often with blood and fire) Enlightenment and establishment of the “cilos” in academies, effectively diverting the knowledge pathways in proximate inquiries with different methods further from one another. The allegory had become over time a dogma. Any holistic or polymathic pathways towards knowledge have been gradually referred to as charlatanisms, magical and unscientific in nature. A stark example is the current state of brain research (countering “left-right” lobes enclosed functionalities and zooming in on the all-penetrating and uniting neural networks) and a movement against organ-based medicine (the way most of the medical infrastructure, research fields and hospital buildings are built).
In order to be able to take the conversations about the holism of alternative approaches to structuring human experiences into forms of knowledge, we ought to leave the dogma of Plato’s cave. An anti-cavial approach to ideas and structuring knowledge leads to opening up critical capacities looking beyond the familiar ways of building up epistemological blocks of the self-referential pyramid of knowledge, which if they continue to build in this form will eliminate the other ways of looking at knowledge just from the perspective of transactional costs, inertia and swamping co-dependencies in mutually reaffirming references. Leaving the cave means opening up the mind towards possibility of radical alternatives in functionalization of the phenomenological experiences of the world around us.
“The West” —> Oecumene
The geopolitical idea of “The West” roots in the separation of the Eastern and Western parts of the Roman Empire by the emperor Constantin which was later in history legitimised and instilled as “natural” in the imaginary by the succeeding Romans Christendom orchestra of the European kingdoms. If we rewind the history back towards 1 millennia BCE, even the mythological origins of the word “Europa” has little to do with how it is understood currently. Europa was a Phoenician ( Lebanon) princess, that was seduced and stolen by sky-god of Cretans Zeus, to be held in captivity on the island and give him children, that metaphorically represent the tribes of the Mediterranean basin.
In this time, as we can judge from the objects of literary and material heritage, the idea of the “geopolitics” wasn’t as dogmatic as it had become centuries later with the arrival of the concept of nation and united sovereignty -Leviathan. The world was seen instead as lined-up in borders of solid rock as the Oecumene - united by customs and protocols of interaction (like the aforementioned theoxenia example) trans-geographical space, where boundaries are fluid to the extent of the establishment of the contact between peoples inhabiting the shores. If we translate Oecumene borders in contemporary geopolitical language, it spanned the whole Mediterranean, Anatolia (modern Turkey), Middle East, Near East, Egypt, Horn of Africa, Persian Gulf, the Caucasus, modern Kazakhstan (probable location of the Amazons’ state) and Afghanistan, and arguably included regions as far as contemporary Ireland, the UK (there is evidence of cultural exchange and trade of objects in Archaic period, around 8 BCE) - and probably further.
This geography spanned far beyond the established Christendom allegiances that are perceived as transhistorical and somewhat eternal and was, quite possible, the truly cosmopolitan space united by the protocols of exchange and engagement many of which we have lost. The “island mentality” of contemporary Europe is a historical consequence of “caving in” the imaginary - what also led to intolerance towards otherness and imperial ambitions of standardisation of thinking, as I referred to in the section on metaphysics.
So what can be summed up as this new state of thinking, and be defined as the start of a new vocabulary? Here it is. An anti-cavial transpolitical osmosis in Oecumene
“I am trying to bring together invisible borders”
Published in The Brussels Times Magazine (September 2019)
Diana Campbell Betancourt has chosen Brussels as her base for many reasons. “It is not really an art world center”, she highlights. But it is a meeting point in terms of flights, trains and at the same time an ideal calm place to retreat yourself from seasonally swarming places like Basel and Venice or constantly hectic Paris and London. Brussels is a place for thinking and processing.
She is convinced that art can make a difference in places beyond those familiar names, which had become the attractor points for the art world tourists. She is a chief curator and initiator of Dhaka Art Summit, “an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia”. The Summit’s core focus is on Bangladesh. It was founded in 2012 by the Samdani Art Foundation—which continues to produce the festival—in collaboration with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, People’s Republic of Bangladesh. The Summit also has the support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. DAS is hosted every two years at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy.
Denis (D): You work mostly with so-called MENASA (the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia) region - geopolitically defined area.
Diana (DI): Kind of, although the problem with ‘MENASA’ is that Islam will be the overarching header within which to frame Bangladesh. But we are much more interested in this kind of ‘global majority’ dialogue in this edition of the Summit. In the previous edition, we looked at Bangladesh as being the cross-section between South and Southeast Asia. India dominates South Asia discussion, while Singapore dominates the Southeast Asia discussion - so the two don’t meet yet. But if you look at indigenous cultures weaving South and Southeast Asia there are tonnes of connections - so it is absolutely essential that these two meet. These are the stories that are talked about in one of the shows that was commissioned for the last Summit, which was curated by Cosmin [Costinas] from Para Site [independent art space in Hong Kong] and the show traveled from us in Bangladesh to Hong Kong, from there to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and so on.
D: Is it your intention to critically redraw this geopolitical mapping?
DI: Absolutely. For instance, Bangladesh and Thailand are in fact much more connected than Bangladesh and India, for example, you can’t get a direct flight from Delhi to Dhaka, so traveling gets expensive, for Bangladeshis getting visa to India is really complicated. And there are tonnes of daily flights to Bangkok. So the perception that India and Bangladesh must be very close in the current geopolitical climate is actually wrong. Then you can look at other lines of connection - like copper trade and so on.
D: Do you plan to expand beyond Bangladesh in the spirit of “global majority”?
DI: Yes, absolutely, that’s why I just spent a month in South America, and I speak Spanish and Portuguese, so I was able to draw these connections. The whole art world is operating in English and this is the biggest critique of myself. I like the idea of the epicentre - because it can erupt anywhere, right?
D: Indeed. Speaking of the topic of the next Summit in Dhaka - “Seismic Movements” - could you name three top political seismic shifts of nowness you’d consider the most important?
DI: Personally, I would say that an agency for women is a seismic shift that needs to happen. Obviously, we’ve seen the #MeToo movement, but there are move shifts that need to happen in this direction.
Then it is the power of an assembly to instigate change. I am super impressed by what I am seeing in Hong Kong right now - it is one of the largest protests ever in the region.
Then racism is a huge problem. The way that I construct my team is diverse in terms of gender, race, class, and language. What is interesting in the context of Dhaka is that there is nothing in terms of the Western style of art structures - so I can build what I want to see, almost leading by example.
D: How do you safeguard from possible attempts of censorship or possible tensions that can arise in programming the Summit?
DI: The government is not involved at all in the contents of the Summit. Basically, the give us the building, which is a lot as without it we couldn’t do this. The thing we try to do with the summit is to keep it purposely messy. There are over 300 artists shown and it is not about being the best, excellence, etc - it is something I really try to fight against.
Dhaka Art Summit “Seismic Movements” will take place in February 7-15, which full program being an announcement in September.
The Failure of Neoliberal Hospitality
published in Obieg magazine, issue 11
Avenir Institute, Theoxenia, digital print, 2019.
The term “hospitality” has many distinctive definitions and origins. In Ancient Greece, one of the most important protocols of social life was called theoxenia. Xenos (θεός – “god”; ξένος, – “alien,”“foreign,” “strange,” “unusual,” “guest”) is an ambiguous term that had been used in Greek poetry from at least Homer onwards. The interpretation of it fluctuates from “stranger” to “guest friend” all the way to “enemy.” Further I would use “xenos” as the term referring to “newcomer” that isn’t defined from the perspective of the host’s understanding of an identity. Xenos is not a particular fixed identity such as guest, stranger, enemy, Other, visitor, partner, etc. – but it is all of them and much more at the very same time.
Theoxenia as a protocol of relating to the Other played an incremental role in the narratives that came down to us from Ancient Greek poets. In the last book of Homer’s The Iliad the king of Troy Priam comes to the camp of Achaeans to claim the body of his fallen son Hector and the Greek hero Achilles, abiding by the rules of theoxenia, allows him to stay and provides him with food, a warm bed,and entertainment despite the hostilities on the battlefield and his own personal rage over the death of Patroclus.
The respect towards an unknown Other was a subject of special importance since (s)he/them could have been a disguised god. In the first book of The Odyssey, Telemachus welcomes Athena (masked as a humble maiden) into his home and protects her from the advances of Penelope’s rude suitors. He exercises the ritual of theoxenia and earns her favor, which leads to a change of heart in the goddess towards aiding his father Odysseus, who was abandoned by Athena for stealing a sacred statue of her from Troy’s temple in order to bring victory to Achaeans in the 10-year war. The return of Athena’s favor and further aid to Odysseus was justified by his son’s respect of theoxenia.
Gerard Lairesse, Hermes Ordering Calypso to Release Odysseus, oil on canvas, circa 1670.
Let’s have a closer look at the key differences between hospitality and theoxenia. Hospitality in a neoliberal democratic Western-led world is one of the industries with key performance indicators,production, quality standards, is immediately and contractually reciprocal, and has attached to it an economy of profit.
First, theoxenia is unconditional. It is offered to anyone without imposition of the host’s moral,ethical, and political understandings as if they are universal or have prevalence in this geopolitical context. The mourning Achilles welcomed Priam into his camp without expecting reciprocity and wasn’t plotting a stratagem to use the king of Troy for the sake of some future act of revenge. He didn’t attempt to demonstrate moral or ethical superiority by being generous towards the enemy. He obeys theoxenia as if it were an answer to the equation of two plus two or following a health ritual like brushing your teeth before going to bed. In order words, his approach there is beyond selfish: it is cultural rather than opportunistic, pitiful, or predatory. Hospitality, on the other hand, is strictly reciprocal. The Cambridge dictionary defines hospitality as “the act of being friendly and welcoming to guests and visitors” or “food, drink, entertainment, etc. that an organization provides for guests or business partners.”4 Guests, visitors, and business partners are identified and sorted into the categories of newcomers. None of them are meant to stay longer than a specific period of time and are meant to recognize, as dominate, the host’s order of things, all the written and unwritten rules. The exchange and the dialogue should happen according to conditions established by the host. Conditionality of hospitality presumes that the guest, visitor, or business partner is meant to bring the value that is recognizable within the axis of the host’s understanding.Therefore, the unexpected is not expected and unwelcome. A stranger cannot be the subject of hospitality. The Other is meant to be categorized – and this is the first form of violence inflicted on him/her/they by the “hospitable” host.
Second, theoxenia protects the condition of perpetual peace and excludes psychological or any other form of violence. The contemporary political interpretation of the term hospitality is closely related to terms like integration, assimilation, and tolerance. All three of them are presuming, although not admitting, an act of violence on the subjectivity of a xenos. The agencies of integration and assimilation demand from the Other to assume traditions and norms of the society, in which her/him/them are integrating as the new fundamentals. Ultimately, they violently break the subjectivity that the Other had before the integration or assimilation process had begun. The tolerance of a host towards a guest, on the other hand, is a mental construct of the borders of acceptable freedom within the cage of subjective reality defined as the principal within the society that is tolerating a guest. Telemachus protects Athena disguised in a clothes of a poor woman from the drunk suitors thereby risking his life in order to prevent an act of rape that is not unordinary towards a woman of unknown provenance in Ithaca. He places the respect of theoxenia over “the normality” of the order, preventing the violence even as it is justified by local norms, therefore he stands up against the local habits. The industry of hospitality is violent against the cultural subjectivity of the one subjected to it. The conditions of the host are the default form of the engagement between host and him/her/they. Xenos is meant to be assimilated, pacified, educated,or being performed on another act of the psychological and often physical violence. Hospitality,therefore, is a condition of strict distinction between “the good” and “the bad,” “the useful” and “the useless” and most importantly – “the friend” and “the enemy.” Hospitality is falling into the orbit of the political relations as they were defined by Carl Schmitt who famously claims that “the specific political distinction ... is that between friend and enemy.”5 In the perpetual war of the sociopolitical imaginaries and competing world images, the genuine hospitality is meant to be provided only to those who either comply with host’s understanding of the reality or share it.
Third, theoxenia is transnational, transcultural, and universal. While contemporary hospitality is distinctly different among the people belonging to the same tribes – racially, socially, politically,ethnically, linguistically, etc. – theoxenia is equal in the face of any otherness. Trojans are foreigners to Achaeans, Achilles however treats Priam as a relative of his own. Hospitality is a multiplicity of nationalized cultural forms, where expectations of the format and particular rituals turned into mechanistic habits at best or into tradable forms of service at worst. Hospitality is compared to other fictionalized “national” things: food, dress, folklores, etc. The transcultural and cosmopolitan nature of thoxenia can be seen as the precursor of universal human rights and equality. The disguised Athena is a traveler of unknown origin, the ultimate foreigner, but she receives the protection of the prince of Ithaca. For that the latter is rewarded not in the immediate form of a tangible resource, such as payment which “closes” the deal, but with Athena’s aid to his father Odyssey who eventually makes it back home and reunites with his son and wife. Theoxenia is performed without the expectation of an immediate or, in fact any, gain. It is a principle of living a life that cannot be therefore reduced to an industrial form. Theoxenia cannot be traded and compensated in similar reciprocal transaction, while hospitality is exactly that.
Joseph Natoire, Telemachus listening to Mentor [disguised Athena] or The Story of Telemachus. Oil on canvas, circa 1725-75
The failure of hospitality is structural rather than positional. Hospitality is analyzed and looked at as a continuation of theoxenic tradition from the ancient world. It is perceived as a positive achievement of the sociopolitical and cultural progress of Europe that led to the cultural openness, wider horizons of social learning and readiness for cultural exchange. I disagree with that. I think hospitality shares the aesthetic resemblance with theoxenia, ritually, and mechanistically, but it is an entirely different behavioral phenomenon. Theoxenia’s elements however were partly incorporated by monotheistic religions that followed the decomposition of the Ancient world, including Christianity and Islam. The presence of the remnants of theoxenia in there makes cults often more attractive than neoliberal societies and the ISIS recruiters sensed it.
The trouble with hospitality is that it is perceived as an essential and exhaustive concept of interaction with the Other. It is dangerously false. In the face of planetary challenges such as climate change, the resurgence of narrow mindedness, nationalism, and imperialism it is the time to get rid of this tribal understanding of the world and explore the universal protocol of humanity within all of us.
Notes:
[1] Katrin Elger (2009) Survey Shows Alarming Lack of Integration in Germany, Spiegel Online,January 26, 2009:http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/immigration-survey-shows-alarming-lack-of-integration-in-germany-a-603588.html
[2] Thérèse De Raedt (2004) Muslims in Belgium:a case study of emerging identities, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 24:1, 9-30,https://doi.org/10.1080/1360200042000212160
[3] Anna C. Korteweg (2017). The failures of ‘immigrant integration’: The gendered racialized production of non-belonging. Migration Studies,Volume 5, Issue 3, 1 November 2017, Pages 428–444, https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnx025
[4]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hospitality
[5] The Concept of the Political. Expanded Edition (1932), trans. by G. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
May You Live in Interesting Times
The review of 58th Venice Biennale Arte for the 2019′ summer issue of The Brussels Times Magazine
Tomas Saraceno. “The Aero(s)cene”, 2019
Venice Biennale is known as a sublime contemporary carnival or the Olympic games of arts: members of the art world both love and loathe it, criticising its largesse world-making ambitions while anticipating and happily participating in it. This year the event is directed by the American London-based curator Ralph Rugoff, who chose as a title for the ancient Chinese curse “May You Live in Interesting Times”. For stability-desiring society, living in ‘interesting times’ means the permanent disturbance of the harmony - the most important value in many Eastern civilisations. The phrase comes out more like an affirmative statement assessing the current time we are living in.
The two main exhibitions of the Biennale occupy the large main exhibition halls in Giardini della Biennale and what was formerly Venetian Arsenal, just a brisk walk away from one another. Both main exhibitions are directly intertwined as they feature a work (at least one) by each of the artists that were selected by Rugoff to represent those ‘interesting times’ we are living in.
In Arsenale, Jon Rafman video room is standing out as a confusing and disturbing cinema. Rafman’s ongoing series of depicting a never-ending surreal, repulsive and seductive dream is rolling for almost 2 hours. The ‘Xanax’ girl, a main protagonist, goes through unimaginable mix of weird events that transcend understanding of physical, moral and ethical presuppositions. Is that a similar experience to flipping through the endless list of TV channels and series on multiplying streaming platforms such as Netflix and HBO?
Ed Atkins. “Bloom”, 2018
Ed Atkins multimedia installation consists of the theatre props with costumes and screens with CGI (computer-generated imagery) wearing them in the evolving narrative featuring, among other characters, the boy and the monk. Their eyes are often full of tears and the skin produces hyperreal sweat. Bridging their ‘unreal’ status with the reality of produced by them emotions, they travel from one screen into another. Presence of the costumes suggests breaking the boundary between the computer-generated fictions and reality of theatrically-generated ones that we play everyday as soon as we put on the ‘costumes’ of office workers, civil servants, service(wo)men, teachers, etc. Maybe The Wachowski’s Matrix is not that interesting as the discovery of possible conspiracy against ‘realness’ but rather is telling us about the structures we’ve created for imprisoning ourselves?
The Chinese duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu show the most impressive dynamic sculptures that make one tremble. In Giardini, there is a transparent large box with the strange robot inside. The robot is about three meters in size and has an animalistic body with the saddle, which makes it look like a post-apocalyptic horse. Instead of the head, it has a shovel. And this shovel methodically cleans the floor of the box, which is all covered in blood-like red substance. More to that, it doesn’t perform this duty unemotionally - it actually dances producing movements like ‘ass shakes’, almost twerking around the blood that it shovels around. This spectacle is so mesmerising you stand there frozen for at least some minutes (a lot of time in the current context of ever-shortening attention span when the artwork on average received 3-4 seconds of the viewers attention before being captured by smartphone, uploaded on social media to never be looked at again). In Arsenale, also trapped in the large glass box, there is a marble throne resembling the one on which Abraham Lincoln statue is sitting in the Washington memorial. Just instead of the seated leader, there is a metallic whip. First, it rests motionless but after some minutes the mechanism activates it and it starts crazily moving inside of the box whipping the walls of the box and scarring them, while producing the thrilling noise of damage. An astonishing way of portraying the political power.
Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. “Can’t Help Myself”, 2016
The winner of the Golden Lion, the ‘art Oscar’, is an American video and installation artist Arthur Jaffa who presented in Giardini his latest film on whiteness in the USA. As usual for his oeuvre, the video is comprised entirely from the found on the internet footage. The main part of the story, although ‘story’ isn’t the right word for what you are witnessing, is the ‘confession’ on the present of the race question in the US coming out through the live stream of the sort from the white American seemingly redneck, who calls the things as they are now: the racism, the intolerance, the ignorance towards the historical guilt and so on. An uncomfortable for the very many silent and latent deniers.
Argentinian, Berlin-based artist Tomas Saraceno adds up some light to the ocean of societal critique you are facing in the exhibition. His two pavilions - one devoted to spiders’ wisdom and another one to the rethinking our relations with the air - are suggesting the audience to question the very foundations of what they think and know about the currents of our world. The Spider/Web Pavilion presents arachnomancy cards, reinterpreting the Tarot readings anew and providing us the tool to rethink our relations with ecology of nature, economy and politics. The Aerocene pavilion in Arsenale shows a beautiful utopian vision of the world without fossil fuels, living in harmony with the clean skies. The tools, which Saraceno’s studio develops, are showcased as well - including the backpack that folds out into the flying balloon that can cross the national borders over the air using only the power of the sun.
British artist Jesse Darling shows in Arsenale the installation made of the chairs from the waiting room on abnormally high legs, many of which appear crippled. The chairs are painted bright pink: the association of the stuck and broken promise of the queer project of denormalisation towards a more tolerant, inclusive and not repeating the same mistakes world comes to the mind. Will we ever be there or are we doomed to turn any new movement for liberation into another exclusive club of power-dwellers?
Closer to the exit and the end of the main exhibition in Arsenale, the Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova reduces the overall tension of the exhibition with ever-growing sculptural installation representing the ordinary market that you could find in almost any area of Kiev (and many other cities in the post-Soviet space). The market, which is indistinguishable and bizarrely cosmopolitan, stands as an existential testament to people’s aesthetics or everyday, beyond white cubes and conceptualist thinking outside of the real world. The realness of the market, in which the fruits and vegetables as well as other props are made into sculptures with poor materials such as bathroom tiles, stands as the beacon of the everyday aesthetics.
Zhanna Kadyrova. “Market”, 2017-ongoing
Outside of the main project pavilions, the national cultural elites present their ‘creme de la creme’ of the last 2 years of artistic reflection on the state of the world and its possible futures, often through the prism of the past.
Belgian pavilion in Giardini (the oldest structure there by the way) is showing mechanical life-size figures of the folk ‘Belgians’ methodically performing their duties as the dolls in the ethnography museum. The irony of Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter, the artists commissioned to represent Belgium, is relevant: the re-opened Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren raised a lot of tension in relation to objectification of the African cultures, their dehumanisation and ongoing colonisation by the oppressive, unreflective European imaginary. Turning ‘Belgians’ into dehumanised mechanical toys with all their everyday cultural habits being shown as props equalises them with the approach of Leopold II towards the people who used to populate his ‘private estate’ of continental proportions.
Brazilian pavilion in Giardini stuns the audience with the bold video installation ‘Swinguerra’. It opens up to the world the evolving and beating with life culture of the resistance dance of the Brazilian North. In the context of the ‘Trump of the Tropics’ rule being established just several months ago, with the abolition of many cultural programmes and social cohesion initiatives while returning to the praise of dictatorship, the project is truly daring. Barbara Wagner and Benjamin Burca shot the reality and dreams of queer, trans and other endangered communities representatives who became more precarious after the recent political changes. In the shadows of the main event I’ve overheard people saying they are afraid the pavilion would be shut by the government after the reviews will go out to print as it might anger Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his vision of queerness as the decease that is supposed to be eradicated. The gesture of the curator and the artists with this project is both inspiring and disarming: but is it really the last bastion of resistance we have left?
The debut of Ghana in Arsenale is a definite highlight: it’s existential, light and at the same time deeply philosophical take on contemporaneity of the country in the context of changing ‘now’ is captivating. The three-channel video installation of John Akomfrah is showing the poetic force of nature, while Ibrahim Mahama’s and El Anatsui’s sculptural interventions touch upon the complex layered reality of contemporary Ghana dealing with post-colonial legacy that is persistent in the minds and setting up the new elites towards becoming the new oppressors. “Freedom”, the title of the pavilion project, is as ephemeral and unclear as it is always. However it is not the definition that is required to move ahead: but the making of a space where the right questions about futures can be asked. Without a doubt, this pavilion is a marvellous example of making this happen.
Lina Lapelyte, Vaiva Grainyte and Rugile Barzdziukaite. “Sun & See (Marina)”, 2019
The pavilion-winner of the Golden Lion is the one representing Lithuania. “Sun & Sea”, staged in the Venetian Arsenal (in the part of it which still has some connection to the former Serenissima’s military might), is an artificial beach created inside of the building with 2 floors. The second floor is meant to provide the observation platform. All of the actors playing the sunbathing crowd are actually opera singers who perform individual arias but also turn into the chorus. The happening lasts for the full opening hours of the pavilion, around 8 hours, with the singers sporadically rotating. You find yourself in an unusual opera: it is hard to make the decision to leave the installation before you spent there at least half an hour (incredible amount of time in comparison to the most of the things you see in Venice - I mentioned the attention span problem before). The libretto of the opera is mesmerisingly philosophical and mostly refers to the apocalypse coming upon us in the form of the climate change. “I cried so much when I learned that corals will be gone… I cried so much then I understood I am mortal, that my body will one day get old and wither. And I won’t see, or feel, or smell ever again…”. Apart of existential philosophy and political critique, they also sing about 3D printing, tanning, elections, fatigue, burnout, vacations and glitter. Although the project is definitely eye and ear catching, I would rather had presented the award to it in the context of the Biennale Teatro (taking place in Venice this year as well) as for the Biennale Arte we are aiming to praise the projects that are not available exclusively for the eyes of the previewing crowds or those who are privileged enough to be able to travel to Venice on specific dates when the full version of the spectacle is presented.
Together with Michal Murawski, Kasia Sobucka and Annie Jael Kwan, I myself co-curated the The Palace of Ritual in Palazzo Dona Brusa during the crazy preview days. We have presented the programme of performances, screenings and talks, where the concept of ‘the ritual’ and its function was addressed in relation of its perverting the political power potential. The academic and conceptual artist Alena Ledeneva, the author of the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, presented three sculptural installations which embody the various transcultural strategies of power-holding and the danger that comes onto those who value the perfect power above all without realising the ephemerality of their grip on it. AVENIR INSTITUTE had presented in the form of lecture-performances The Penelopiad Project and The Pythian Games of Futures, which are delving into liberating Europe from the imaginary trap of singular vision of itself and open up potentialities for different outlook on the futures of power in the this cultural context.
Alena Ledeneva, Jasmina Cibic, Denis Maksimov & Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll. "The Palace of (Soft) Power", panel talk at The Palace of Ritual, 2019
The preview days of Venice Biennale are also used by growing number of other cities that stage their own spectacle. This year, Helsinki Biennale announced its launch there for 2020 with the activation of the island in the close proximity from Helsinki for the exhibition. In close geographical proximity, Riga Biennale announced its second edition to be opened in the same year. The first edition was curated by Greek Brussels-based curator Katerina Gregos to a critical acclaim. Mark your calendars art lovers and look up the the tickets to Venice this summer: we indeed now going through quite interesting times, and this edition of the Venice Biennale didn’t fail to grasp the multiplicity of the phenomena that we are anxiously swimming through.
The Palace of Ritual
Artists: Isadorino Gore, Enam Gbewonyo, Florence Keith-Roach, Alena Ledeneva, Karolina Łebek, Lynn Lu, Nissa Nishikawa, Sabina Sallis, Zorka Wollny, Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll and Mengting Zhuo
Curated by: Annie Jael Kwan, Denis Maksimov, Michał Murawski and Kasia Sobucka
Palazzo Donà, San Polo, Venice
May 9-11 2019, 2 – 6pm
The Palace of Ritual is a programme of immersive, intimate performances, screenings and discursive workshops that aims to activate heterodox knowledges and practices of healing, sourced from myths, ritual and cosmology. Participants are invited to awake from the artificial psychological coma of the accelerating and verticalizing present, via healing rituals of care, levelling, perversion and futuring.
The programme explores why a return to ‘nature’ is an increasingly pressing need for many people today. Does our ‘post-contemporary’ (or metamodern) world, mediated as it is by unprecedented layerings of artificially intelligent technologies, paradoxically make so-called ‘traditional’ practices and rituals more desirable? What do the concepts of attachment to ritual, spirituality and nature mean today? We will revisit older, more divisive rituals, investigating what can be learned and appropriated from their obsolete and hierarchical but seductive styles, shapes and rhythms; and we will explore how rituals have been invented, reinvented and adapted today.
Ritual brings together aesthetic creation and a mythos-reinforcing re-enactment of collective histories; it caters to our primaeval need to belong; it consolidates but also – in liminal moments –perverts established social norms and hierarchies. The typology of the Palace – whether a Venetian Palazzo, a Qing dynasty summer residence looted by Lord Elgin or a socialist-era “people’s palace” – provides a grandiose and spectacular backdrop for rituals of every kind. The Palace of Ritual – and its interregional, intersectional programme – will explore some winding paths for forging new ritual bodies, ritual aesthetics and ritual politics: perverted, progressive and planetary.
The Palace of Ritual is initiated by Arts Territory and it launches its new pathway of nomadic, fluid and open agency: offering new models of arts commissioning and curating, supporting radical artistic experimentation, research and collaboration, alongside testing the new forms of curation.
The programme is devised by Arts Territory together with PASAR: Post-Asian School of Alternative Rites, is a new practice-based research project curated by Annie Jael Kwan; Perverting the Power Vertical, a research and arts initiative led by Masha Mileeva, Denis Maksimov and Michał Murawski; by the FRINGE Centre at University College London and by Avenir Institute.
The programme comprises performances; screenings; micro-symposia; and installations.
PERFORMANCE PROGRAMME
Enam Gbewonyo, Florence Keith-Roach, Lynn Lu, Karolina Łebek, and Mengting Zhuo
Enam Gbewonyo
Nude Me/ Under the Skin: The Awakening of Black Women’s Visibility one Pantyhose at a time.
(Performance of Healing that pays homage to Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P body of work.)
Enam’s work speaks to the sensuality of the female form as well as the elasticity and malleability of the human body. It represents the many forms of bondage that constrict the black woman to fit a mould that is not for her. Her movements morph into the traditional Ewe dance, Agbadza, this is the point of resistance and awakening. This dance functions as a process of healing which creates a flow of expansion and contraction linked to the body’s backbone. The piece centres around activating an artwork made from nylon tights and it includes sound and video installation. A hand knitted circular floor covering symbolising the third eye with an opening in the centre symbolising an oculus. Coupled with performance the third eye and oculus act as a portal to channel the stories of Enam’s matrilineal ancestors. The performance sees the artists as a central figure in conversation with four imaginary figures, the audiences will take position along the edges of the room. The piece includes the black women’s reclamation of self in the present achieved by channelling the pain of ancestors past and releasing it to arrive at a point of healing through accessing their (ancestors) love and acknowledging their beauty and worth.
Florence Keith-Roach
Straight Lines: reading of play excerpt with musical accompaniment.
Claire (30, British) and Kuba (33, Polish) are trapped in a never-ending queue outside a nightclub in Berlin, a famed palace of perversion whose doormen have a long-standing aversion to couples like them: square, straight, and clad in ill-fitting, borrowed, squeaking PVC outfits. They are cold, fractious, anxious and chafing. Over the course of their sojorn in this eternal, painfully straight queue, with the club and its intimidating promise of purchasable sexual ‘liberation’ looming ahead, the latent tensions that have led them to this imposing portal start to pulsate and pound to the surface.
Lynn Lu
The ocean’s refusal to stop kissing the shore
Referencing a poem by diaspora poet, Sarah Kay, PASAR presents a new performance-as-research project by Lynn Lu that recalls mythical vanished lands including Atlantis, Hyperborea, Thue, Mu, Rutas, Lemuria and Kumari Kandam, and scientifically confirmed ones such as Zealandia, Dvārakā, Sundaland, Kerguelen Plateau, Beringia , Maui Nui, Ferdinandea, Ravenser Odd, Dadu Island, Tebua Tarawa, and Abanuea. Sited at the fragile yet resilient island of Venice, slowly tilting and sinking since the 5thcentury, old and reinvented rituals memorialise the eventful reconfigurations of land pay tribute to the rising waters. At The Palace of Ritual, with an accompanying audio track of mourning chants, the artist will lead a participatory-making session in which visitors can create personalized floating offerings for the sea using flowers, incense, etc. All the offerings will be set afloat in a nocturnal ritual. At different sites around the island – the artist leads a process of live inscription
~ at dawn, using a brush and brine - of the names of submerged and submerging land masses. As the sun grows hotter and evaporates the water, these names materialize in salt crystals. As the city awakens, pedestrian footfall gradually wears away the crystalline calligraphy.
~at the water’s edge and key locations - using Blutpudre which becomes visible when wet - so that the lapping waves or the next shower simultaneously exposes and washes away the names.
Karolina Łebek
Purge – DJ set
Purge, DJ set with vocals, approx. 40 mins Drawing on ancient practises of shamanic healing, Karolina Lebek will present a new sound performance, mixing live vocals with a specially designed immersive soundscape. Through an interest in mysticism and spirituality, Lebek will create a sonic space in which weaving a tapestry of pulsating rhythms will strive to reveal hidden energies and potentialities achieved through collective listening.
Mengting Zhuo
Six Crosses
PASAR presents Six Crosses, a durational participatory performance by Mengting Zhuo that offers a one-to-one experience of ‘Six Crosses’, a Chinese divination method stated in the I-Ching. Six lines or broken lines make a hexagram, and reading them can lead us to understand ‘synchronicity’, a term coined by the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who argues that we live in a space-time continuum. Six Crosses offers participants the opportunity to delve into their subconscious and reconnect the dots between signs, symbols and reality.
SCREENING PROGRAMME
Isadorino Gore, Karolina Łebek, Nissa Nishikawa, Sabina Sallis and Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll
Isadorino Gore
The Return of the Gift
This film documents a ritual dance, enacting the receipt and return of a gift given by power, performed in July 2018 in the newly-opened Zaryadye Park in Moscow, adjacent to the Kremlin. The film documents ritual meditating on and enacting ‘democratic’ forms of spending time, an entreaty (chelobitye) and an expression of heartfelt gratitude to the Tsar. The Kremlin features in (almost) every shot, a silent participant in the ritual.
Karolina Łebek
Watra
In her work Karolina Lebek explores her Lemko heritage through the medium of traditional song and singing as one of the factors that continue to unite this now dispersed community. The artist investigates themes of migration, displacement and assimilation informed by experiences of the Lemko community - an ethnic minority forcibly removed from their ancestral homeland in the Carpathian Mountains in a series of violent deportations, culminating in Operation Vistula in 1947. Throughout the tragic history of the banished Lemkos, worship and singing have remained crucial and unifying factors in recognising and maintaining a shared sense of cultural identity, revealing unique mythologies, forgotten rituals and rites of passage. Lebek draws on the cultural, spiritual and personal accounts of violence, trauma and shame manifested through generations to create a musical, performative and visual experience in which the wounded voices of the past mould into a song in the present, striving for recognition and reparation. This work takes inspiration from the ‘watra’ - a large bonfire, built to evoke memories of things past, or to revive a sense of community.
Nissa Nishikawa
Relations of Fire
Fire is regarded as the highest active and adaptable element. One in essence, though manifests itself in three general species-celestial, subterraneous and culinary. It is the cause of all motion, consequently of all mutation or change in nature. It is the principle of all generation and the primal source of all forms. It is the nature of light. Found in the sun and the fixed stars, all light proceeds from this. The planets and comets and earth reflect it. And we, the bodies on the earth, observe this light. Turning towards the wild, this open-air performance regards dance, sound and installation and its relationship to pyromancy and husbandry, observing the lyricisms in their violent and concentrated actions.
Sabina Sallis
Thought World and the Society of Nature, 2017
These are video-thoughts- collages that were made during a residency at Labverde in the Amazon Jungle, Brazil. The videos are singular meditations upon the Amazonian landscape, its thoughts and its ‘living logic’. Drawing from diverse ideas such as Eduardo Kohn’s notion of semiotic beings and sylvan thinking, and Descola’s framework of the ‘four ontologies’- animism, totemism, naturalism and analogism. The video-thoughts employ methods of thinking and making that magnify how we relate and profoundly interact with complex ecosystems, and how mindful, humane and sustainable politics can grow out from appreciative and sensitive engagement with nature-culture.
Zorka Wollny
Slavness
The aim of the Slavness is to mark the field of the meaning of a woman’s freedom and the categories of pace, sound, movement, light, voice, gesture and hearing. The title is based on the play of words between the naming of doing something unhurriedly and the situation of subordination. “Being docile to someone” means submissiveness, submission, loss of control, immobilization. Being subordinate releases the desire to be released from bondage, the need for self-determination. The necessary revolution is not always visible, but it will sprout subcutaneously, underground, under the ice, under the crust of visible surfaces. Doing something slowly, in concentration, is also a matter of daily effort, which enables long-lasting, persistent and joint action.
Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll
Cook’s New Clothes
This film documents two processional performances – held on the grounds of palaces of British maritime imperialism, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and Queen’s House in Plymouth – commemorating 250 years since Tupaia, the Tahitian priest, navigator and translator, boarded the Endeavour with Captain James Cook in 1768. Cook’s New Clothes comprises two monumental, collaborative and subversive processions, which critically reimagine and reconfigure the aesthetics and politics of Cook’s voyages.
INSTALLATIONS
Alena Ledeneva, Zorka Wollny
Alena Ledeneva
Patterns of Informal Power
The FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity will present Patterns of Informal Politics, a new series of artworks by Professor Alena Ledeneva (University College London). Ledeneva’s piece is composed of three monumental components: Inner Circle, Scapegoat and Suspended Punishment. ‘Complex phenomena are best to communicate in a non-verbal communication mode: visual, emotional, associative. Patterns are not intended to illustrate the workings of informal politics, but to reveal the hidden patterns of power – both modern and ancient – and to provoke the audience to develop insights into power’s four dimensions.’
Zorka Wollny
Healing Song
SYMPOSIA
A programme of performative and perverted symposia, convened by Perverting the Power Vertical and the Avenir Institute.
Perverting the Power Vertical
Towards a Perverted Palatiality
What are the uses of the “Palace”, and of different types of grandiose, monumental, luxurious, vertical and patriarchal objects – and the rituals, processions and parades, which take place within and around them; how can we seize, appropriate, repurpose, undercut, trick, twist and pervert palatial forms?
With: Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Professor of Global Art, Birmingham, artist; Michał Murawski, Lecturer in Critical Area Studies, SSEES, UCL; Denis Maksimov, Avenir Institute; Maria Mileeva, UCL
The Palace of (Soft) Power
What does it mean to give a Palace as a gift? What are the aesthetics, architectures and rituals of informal economic and political practices, of bribery and subterfuge, of scapegoats and inner circles?
With:Alena Ledeneva, Professor of Politics and Society, UCL; artist; Jasmina Cibić, artist, London; Peter Zusi, UCL
LECTURE-PERFORMANCES (by AVENIR INSTITUTE)
The Pythian Games of Futures
During lecture-performance, Avenir Institute will present the results of investigation of the Delphi archaeological site as the transcultural centre of the rituals of futures-making and foresight methodologies. They will focus the speculative analysis of what is currently called Temple of Athena Pronaia and Tempe of Apollo in the past and their possible futures. The Athena Pronaia Foresight Centre and The Dionysos Thrice-Born Avenirologic Centre, the institutions referring to the truthful nature of the mentioned Delphic sites which are currently in charge of the preparation of the Pythian Games of Futures, will be presented. With Denis Maksimov and Timo Tuominen
The Penelopiad Project
During lecture-performance, Jeanne Pansard-Besson and Denis Maksimovwill readout parts from Homer’s Odyssey and Margaret Atwood The Penelopiad, enacting the dialogue of authorship across the millennia of history within the omnipresent narrative. The irony will clash with epos and the invisible props will enter the conversation with the highlighted heroes. The audience will be served figs, watered down wine and honey - as were the suitors for Penelope’s hand in Ithaca.
PROFILES OF DEVISING COLLECTIVITIES
Arts Territory is a not-for-profit arts organisation with a mission to support artists in creating new work. We work across borders and facilitate dialogue between artists, curators and communities internationally. Operating as a nomadic, fluid and open agency, Arts Territory offers a new model of arts commissioning, supporting radical artistic experimentation, research and collaboration, alongside testing new forms of curation and expanding the agency of curating.
Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East
PPV – convened by Maria Mileeva, Michał Murawski and Denis Maksimov –is an anomadic seminar, event and research platform operating from within the interstices of UCL. PPV deploys the idea of the “Power Vertical” – a term used in some parts of the Global East to refer to various styles of post-Soviet authoritarian politics – as a loose conceptual pivot. PPV seeks to understand how the power vertical works, and to map its styles, shapes and affects; but it also aims to develop tactics to ridicule, trick, twist, undercut, queer, resist and pervert it.
AVENIR INSTITUTE is a think-do tank at the intersection of epistemology, politics, technology and aesthetics with a focus on critical analysis of potentiality in futures. We produce and present transdisciplinary research and design as academic publications, lectures, foresight consulting, exhibitions, performances and festivals. The Institute was co-founded in 2015 by Denis Maksimov and Timo Tuominen and established nodes in Brussels, Berlin, London and Athens since then.
THE FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity explores the roles that complexity, ambivalence and immeasurability play in social and cultural phenomena. A cross-disciplinary initiative bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, FRINGE examines how seemingly opposed notions such as centrality and marginality, and clarity and ambiguity can shift and converge when embedded in everyday practices. FRINGE is based at UCL’s School of Slavic and East European Studies (SSEES) and Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS).
PASAR – POST-ASIAN SCHOOL OF ALTERNATIVE RITES is a new practice-based research project curated by Annie Jael Kwan that explores how artists might confront contemporary anxieties including global environmental and climate changes, coastal frontiers and the oceanic, via decolonial and feminist strategies. PASAR (translated as ‘market’) presents a diverse and bustling diasporic post-Asian world where co-existent gods, ghosts, spiritualism, magicks, predictive texts, cosmographic rites continue to persist in and pervade socio-political systems, cultural life, and in the cyclical and non-linear exchanges and transactions between generations and communities.
SUPPORTED BY
Adam Mickiewicz Institute,
The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London,
The FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity, Istituto Polacco in Rome.
The PASAR: Post-Asian School of Alternative Rites is presented in collaboration with Something Human and Asia-Art-Activism and additionally supported by Arts Council England.
Politicians always promise to build a bridge at the place where there is no river
Babi Badalov in conversation with Denis Maksimov for The Brussels Times
Babi Badalov’s latest exhibition, “ZARA Tustra” at YARAT Contemporary Art Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan is running from 2 March till 16 June. It comprises approximately 250 textiles hung in rows suspended from the gallery ceiling. The artist uses old sheets, pieces of curtains, found clothes and materials. Each textile is overlaid with Badalov’s poetic texts, that play with grammar and phonetics of the languages to which the artist was exposed to in his life.
Babi Badalov is an unconventional artist. Born in a small village in Azerbajan, he served in the armed forces in Russia in Chekhov, close to Moscow, and spent formative years in bohemian apartments in St Petersburg, then still called Leningrad. He later moved to the UK for two years until he was deported, and lived in Paris as a ‘sans-papiers’ for many years before becoming French citizen in 2018.
Badalov’s work is influenced by his own personal experiences of exclusion, and focus on geopolitics, gender and sexuality. His current solo exhibition in Baku is the first of this scale and arrives to the city in peculiar times. Openly gay, the artist doesn’t hide his queer outlook on the signs, symbols, language and iconography - which are all very present in his work.
The exhibition features fabric and various textiles as the main mediums in his multidimensional work. The installation comprises approximately 250 textiles hung in rows suspended from the gallery ceiling. The artist uses old sheets, pieces of curtains, found clothes and materials. Each textile is overlaid with Badalov’s poetic texts, that play with grammar and phonetics of the languages to which the artist was exposed to in his life. Apart from the textile works, the exhibition features drawings on paper that themselves act as the real evidence of the impurity and messiness of the used language, symbols and notions.
Denis Maksimov (DM): Do you feel your personal identity was affected by the linguistic barriers you faced post-emigration? Are there different ‘Babis’ within you - Russian, Azeri, British, French?
Babi Badalov (BB): When I just arrived to St Petersburg I actually didn’t speak proper Russian. But I was very attracted by the city. I fell in love with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writings for example. The Museum of Freud in the city had become a very special social place, where I first presented my poetry. I spoke with harsh accent, the words in the rhymes often didn’t make any sense from the perspective of ‘correct’ and ‘pure’ language, and this linguistic complexity became attractive to the people who were gathering for a saloon for those interested in Freud’s heritage.
I have also never studied art, but cherished the idea of becoming a contemporary artist since I arrived to St Petersburg. Everyone who I was interested in from the art history, for instance Robert Rauschenberg, was harshly criticised by the official Soviet academic dogma then. The life was very harsh if you were striving for something alternative and unconventional. It was especially difficult due to my sexuality. Attraction to contemporary art I guess was also a way to discover myself. It seemed as strange, non-conforming to the norms, as I felt about myself and my position in the world. Beyond linguistic juxtapositions, there was also this identity searching and issue of not being even able to dream about being accepted for who I am and call any place I found myself in ‘home’.
DM: How did you arrive to the medium of textile as a canvas for your work?
BB: It is a hard question to respond actually. I can interpret it from several perspectives. First of all, it is cheap to work on when there is nothing else available. Secondly, the clothes as a symbol is very connected to the notion of honesty for me. One of the exhibitions I recently produced was called “To make art is to take the clothes off”, and took place in Palais de Tokyo in Paris. When you are undressing, everybody sees you, you are sort of transparent. We are so full of complexes that we need to hide our true selves behind things, and clothes is one of the strongest representations of this gesture. The clothes are always with us and around us: it is our reaction, our desired image, our character. We feel we have to cover ourselves as if we are constantly feeling ashamed.
DM: Your work with text and languages suggests you’re critical to the static definitions of symbols and signs that represent political ideas. Do you see it as a way of subverting power or rather as a visual critique, meant to inspire rather than define?
BB: As a person who suffered a lot in search of a home, and being a nomad for quite some time, I’ve always had complex struggle with politics. I haven’t become Russian or Azeri, I will never be French or English. I was suffering a lot from all these visas and borders. My protest against all these borders extends to the alphabets and language, and I am convinced that these notions are very connected. The linguistic differences are as violent. All these borders, countries – they’re all so extremely oppressing. People are living through complexes and nationalisms in the prisons of minds, and the passport is like a prison identity tag.
A lot of my work is operating through differences between the visible, symbolic in languages, and their phonetic meanings; geographical and linguistic confusions, dictated by the identity-forming cultures. Trauma of migration is heavy and irreparable. For example ‘my English’ needs to be translated to some sort of common ‘English’ by one of my friends if I need to communicate with someone in the titular culture. The same goes for ‘my French’ being translated to common ‘French’ by my partner, when I need to talk with the bank for example. Those little things - wrongly pronounced words, or names for the same type of things like coffee or bread - define our otherness wherever we are, mostly in a negative way. My art is about these challenges of languages, that shape the complexity of social and political experiences in life.
DM: The ironic word-play of ‘Zara’ and ‘Zarathustra’ is peculiar: Is it coincidental irony or do you refer to a specific function that fast fashions like Zara play in the lives of people in our globalised world?
BB: It came to my mind when I arrived in Baku to plan this exhibition. I didn’t recognize the city, as so many things had changed since my last trip to Azerbaijan. Capitalism changed the landscape of the city very much. A lot of this change, as I see it, is clear barbarism. I thought it was important to emphasize the resistance to this ‘sameness’, that is introduced everywhere.
I have a tattoo of [Mikhail] Bakunin on my arm, a famous Russian anarchist and one of the fathers of the anarchist movement. I initially thought of naming my exhibition after him - to highlight the essential need for the resistance in our times. ‘ZARAtustra’ comes from mixing the name of the founder of Zoroastrianism, Zoroaster (Azerbaijan often referred to as the place where this religion was born), and high street brand Zara - one of the symbols of homogenisation through violent capitalist globalisation and introducing this ‘sameness’ everywhere. Combining them in one word I think is one of the ways to represent the ‘nowness’ of our culture.
I am not a patriot of anything political, but I have cultural identity and I do cherish it. I think this nomadic experience allows you to create critical some distance from yourself and from where you come from. There is nothing radically new in my message, but the actuality and urgency of it is very relevant. How to resist this blind capitalism which destroys livelihoods and to shift attention from what is unimportant - like all these signs of sick consumerism and tones of ready-made clothes - to things that actually matter for a good life.
DM: What is your take on the artists’ role in politics? Is it a permanent societal role or something that changes over time?
BB: I myself don’t like to associate with politics as it stands now. I wouldn’t want to be connected to the political world closely. I don’t want my struggle to be appropriated by some politician or a group in order to obtain power. I don’t think an artist should be the tool for politicians. I believe in stronger alternatives for future generations - where politics should be produced from other sources. ‘Political politics’ is dirty already and entering it leads to almost automatic disgrace and loss. Former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev once said that politicians always promise to build a bridge at the place where there is no river.
Queer as Agency in Contemporary Art
Denis Maksimov in conversation with Katarzyna Perlak for Arts Territory
‘Niolam Je Se Kochaneczke’ Video still (2016)
Katarzyna Perlak is a queer artist, filmmaker and educator, operating in the multimedia space of contemporary art and visual culture. Her work is embedded in ethos of the critical theory of social and political violence of the institutional power of normalisation, standardisation and oppression. She produces performances, video, photography, collage, textiles and is constantly experimenting with the new media of expression (www.katarzynaperlak.com).
Denis Maksimov (DM): Let’s start from your video ‘Niolam Je Se Kochaneczke’ (2016). Is it a title of a particular folk song?
Katarzyna Perlak (KP): The title is inspired by a folk song but it wasn’t the title itself, but part of the lyrics.
DM: Was it your intention to redefine the cultural heritage in the direction of queering its nature in the video?
KP: There are several layers to that. I had the idea for this film for quite a while; intentions for making it came for the most part from my lived experiences.
When I lived in Poland I participated in folk singing workshops and listened to EE folk, so I do connect to this music on a sentimental level, I always liked it. There are a lot of love songs, but they (not surprisingly) always represent heteronormative narratives. Queer love wasn’t represented, but definitely, it was present. Here came my idea of creating the archive that couldn’t be there. I wanted to reclaim these stories, if I may say so.
Secondly, it was important to have the conversation about how history and tradition is used - both in Poland and outside, in migrant communities - for nationalistic purposes. For example, images of folk craft are often used by Polish Diaspora Institutions, presenting this image of Eastern European heritage as a sort of culturally simplified entertainment with the focus on what the local public would immediately connect with. My goal is to complicate it and include multiply narratives that populate this heritage.
DM: It is the agency of ‘orientalisation’ (in Edward Said terminology) of this tradition, isn’t it? The gaze of trying to catch something unusual, sort of touristic form of catching the essence of something.
KP: I recently went for a research trip to the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, and while there I had quite a few conversations about representation of folk traditions. There is a certain, very important social class problematic to it. The traditional folk songs were at times not ‘poetic’ or ‘sophisticated’ enough (or too obscene) for the people who collected and archived them, so at times they censored or modified them. The collectors of the ethnography were mostly coming from the upper class, therefore they were appropriating this heritage in a very specific way. They were trying to change the songs as they were trying to make them more usable for upper-middle-class context.
DM: They were trying to colonise this ‘rural’ experience to something they can understand and use in their ‘oriental’ perspective on the rural life, making a product of entertainment out if it.
KP: Not sure colonised applies here but appropriated them for sure. During the Communist period, there was an operation of adaptation of what was considered ‘low’ culture to ‘high’ places like palaces of culture, where the folk songs were performed for the party nomenclature and city audience. That is brilliantly presented in recent Pawlikowski’s ‘Cold War’ movie. It is interesting for me to register how this folk tradition interpretation is moving around depending on the particular ‘government of the day’ agenda.
In the video, I worked with folk singers from various backgrounds, I wanted to add the narrative of migration there as an inherent part of the whole picture, as well as raise polemics about Eastern European identity being majorly associated with whiteness while the reality of it is becoming multi-cultural and multi-ethnical.
I want to place queer relationships in the space of Eastern European history. Because even if it is unregistered, it had definitely had been there. For that reason, I have started to create the fictional archive of the folk songs.
My migrant experience has been also an important factor here. A need to self - define, free from both Western stereotypes and Eastern nationalistic absorptions. Since I have been living in the UK it became quite urgent and necessary.
DM: Where would you prefer to see this work presented? In contemporary art or folk art museum?
KP: I have mostly presented it in galleries and film festivals (in Western Europe); I would like it to be shown in an ethnographic museum in Poland though, as a fictional museum collection. Yet I wouldn’t want to make a choice between the two, because the audience can have a different experience of work depending on the context. But the impact for a wider public would definitely be more challenging in an ethnographic museum when the audience would be taken by surprise.
DM: Would you find it problematic to show this work simultaneously in both of the institutions of contemporary art and folk art for instance?
KP: In a way, creating this fictional art museum is an operation of thinking on a specific hypothetical level. For me presenting this work in an art gallery (in Poland) is already complicated, a museum seems like almost an impossible option. So it seems that breaking those walls in any form is a definite ‘win’. The spaces where I am so far invited to show it in Eastern Europe are specifically LGBTQ+ friendly, while I would be interested in exposing the work to the wider, “unprepared” audience.
Here in the UK, this border between ‘queer-friendly’ and something else is more subtle, while in Eastern Europe the struggle for visibility is still ongoing. I wouldn’t want the work, in general, to be only shown in a special “tolerant space”. I would like to reach out into further layers of the culture, to the audiences that would be surprised to see it. It certainly doesn’t decrease the importance of showing this work in specifically LGBTQ+ contexts of course, but seeing what’s happening politically around the world I think it is important to go out wider and avoid caving in.
DM: The language and references, I think, is extremely important in a conversation like ours. There is no outside-text, as Derrida was indicating. How do you define the difference between queerness, LGBTQ+ and ’same-sex love’ in your lexicon?
KP: I tend to switch between them depending of the context. I wouldn’t like to pour or to impose an identity on anyone while making work that relates to subjects whose experiences or identities might reflect in any of those terms, so in this way, it is also the question of openness. In my films, it is mostly women presenting subjects, but I don’t want to exclude any other queer identities from there of course so ‘queer’ opens up the narratives, particularly that in all the works main subjects have their faces covered, so gender can’t be easily assumed. Looping to another project, in ‘Happily Ever After’ (2017) the performers that are walking on the streets of Wroclaw have masks on them. Although they wore dresses, it wasn’t totally defined if they are female. This ambiguity is important.
DM: It is more about the strategy of communication of the message. The words are working as a toolkit. The clearness of the message is important.
KP: Yes, we also need to take into account what is lost in translation, or not even translated. In Polish ‘queer’ as term and identity only functions in English with no translation, similarly like gay, lesbian and ‘gender’. Which adds up to the idea that queerness is not part of Eastern European identity, but something that has been imported from Western countries.
I remember seeing once a Catholic poster in Poland on which was written: “Say NO to gender!” The word “gender”, connected to feminist/queer studies was aligned with queerness so what they meant perhaps what ‘Say no to queerness’ – yet the actual message was not knowingly in support of throwing the gender binaries away, which was quite ironic.
DM: Did you have a specific goal when you developed the projects?
KP: My goal was to contribute to the conversation on the visibility of queer narratives and lives in the Eastern European context, present stories that are not being seen or talked about.
DM: By the way, returning to something you said before about your project - I don’t think your work is ‘fictionalising’ archives, as all the archives are fictional if you approach them in a critical way. It is always the gaze of the archiver that turns subjective into objective, fictional into the real. No one could say there were no songs that same-sex lovers wrote for one another, we just didn’t write them down as they were probably not considered to be worthy of being recorded. Do you think we should create nowadays new rituals, maybe inspired by the fact that we don’t have the memories of something from the past, in order to create the legitimisation for the future we want to live in?
KP: Many recognised and recorded rituals came from collective, communal experiences and efforts and in that way is interesting to think how new ones can become alive, formed and narrated through the current collective experiences. I like the idea of the invention of the rituals in everyday life, of its transformative potential.
Anyone can create them for the individual experiences and journeys we have every day, but if we talk about creating them through art practice when they go beyond our individual experience then perhaps there might be some problem with the authorship. If you make an artwork, the whole conversation about the legacy, artist-genius and so on is inevitably coming up. What would be the elements of it to call it legitimate?
DM: Can queer inclusivity counter the agony of the political? Can queer movement become the first political force to avoid ’the winner takes all’ logic and go beyond potentiality to become a new suppressor, something that the right wing are crying about as their largest fear?
KP: Well the right wing has many fears, yet they all come more or less to the fear of losing the privilege and power white patriarchal heteronormative subject have been accustomed to. No ‘inclusivity’ in conversation is going to change that and resistance is going be there to any real (or imaginary) change of the established power dynamics.
Not sure how can you really fight that – big question quite a few try to answer now - but putting the care for these feelings in centre of the movement (if that’s how we call it) would be rather counter-productive.
The notion of queerness has been always ever changing, evolving, and unsettled so in some way it makes sense that it has the potential of becoming quite abstract. Yet its roots are in very real everyday stories and experiences of violence that LGBTQ subjects have been exposed to (past and present). These need to be remembered and not forgotten in this abstraction. Queerness was and has been a tool, strategy, a part of nourishing structure helping those that others want to erase to survive, not a trending critical theory that helps one to contextualize their practice and dip in and out of it when convenient.
The queer movement has been challenging oppressive structures based on patriarchy and heteronormativity but it also included complications of race, class, gender - the politics there has definitely expanded beyond sexuality. The history of the movement is about trying to embrace more conversations and imaginations that are not yet there, bringing them into a space of social and political visibility. We have so many things we still have to open up and confront, so many other ways of living. Exposing it equally makes it more inclusive, but we have to be wary of it getting it appropriated into something else - because those acts can deprive it from political agency.
DM: Maybe we are actually not yet at that moment of political agency, but rather we need to first explore more of those differences in ways of living and then see how we can structure the conversation? Maybe we are not there yet for the comprehensive politics?
KP: I would reply here with a quote from J.E. Munoz’s Cruising Utopia: Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine the future. The future is queerness’s domain. So yes we might not be there but we have to keep on going and trying as we are.
DM: Is it possible to escape the incorporation of the struggle by the market? Can we resist it?
KP: There is no easy answer. The political struggle becomes capitalised on all the time, and while the goals are not there yet and core establishment remains the same we are witnessing ‘moving on to the next thing’ as new trending concept etc arrives. These concerns are present and circulating, once an artist I am in conversation with said that queerness has to be weaponised again, which was a great way to put it.
What it could mean? The term queer was appropriated from something that was an insult. The resistance was to wear it with pride. But now it has been in some way ‘normalised’, and in it lost some of its radical agency. People before would have been disturbed by what it was associated with. Certainly many people still are. Maybe we should bring this element back, in a sense of keeping the uncomfortable, uneasy element in – in whatever context and conversations that un-comfort is needed.
DM: What do you think about the current right-wing movements, who try to use resistance to growing acceptance of the otherness as one of their core drives?
KP: Currently we see and hear things that not long time ago were unthinkable, both in language and in actions. It is driven by fear of losing the power/privilege and resistance to ‘political correctness’. I think we should speak more of political empathy than correctness; maybe this would change the way some engage with it. It is not about saying and doing things to present yourself as politically aware/correct (or however u call it), but truly feeling for those that have been and are discriminated upon and make a real change: personal, structural and institutional. What we are witnessing now is inauthenticity of correctness in the society that lacks in real empathy, with oppressive structures still being perpetuated.
DM: Do you see other ways of achieving visibility of the queerness beyond the art bubble, those special supporting spaces we talked about before?
KP: In my own experience, there is a great potential of achieving that through personal relationships, conversations and networks that have to be continuously built. I myself come from the working class background, which doesn’t have a direct connection with art or academia. Arts and theoretical discourses don’t reach working-class communities very often - even when arts try to be inclusive, it is still a bubble constructed by many forms of inaccessibility. Perhaps one of the ways to open it up is to open the language through which arts communicate and through which that bubble is constructed.
DM: Should then queer storytelling attempt to focus on producing stories in new forms, using contemporary and maybe even aim for the future media?
KP: Good question. Art still has a communicative component in its centre, even if it is very cryptic. Maybe again it could be about looking at how you can go out of this bubble and what this medium/language would be. Some of the public realm works perhaps have been trying to break to be a reason for conversations on the streets. I use public space performances/interventions quite often in my work for this reason. Internet could be an example, providing wider access to a new political space. Maybe looking at our working processes and methodologies is one of the ways.
For example, I recently started working on an embroidery project and I estimated the work would take me many months to finish. I was thinking how it is counter-productive in a way. So if you do something very slow, against the currents of constant acceleration, it becomes in itself a mode of resistance. But the challenge here is in the necessity to co-exist within this real we have now and how can one survive if you resist in this space of totality, constantly demanding a particular form of behaviour?
Axel Vervoordt in Conversation with Denis Maksimov
interview for Ocula [link]
Axel Vervoordt. Photo: Frederik Vercruysse.
The booth of Axel Vervoordt Company at Frieze Masters 2018 in London was hard to miss. Ancient Egyptian, Roman, and Near Eastern sculptures were placed in subtle, unimposing but mind-tickling dialogue with works by Niki De Saint Phalle, Takis, and Kazuo Shiraga, among others. Such pairings are not unusual for the Company, which comprises an art and antiques business and contemporary art gallery helmed by Boris Vervoordt, son of Axel Vervoordt, who has amassed an astonishing range of ancient, antique, fine, and contemporary art objects throughout his life.
Born in the Wilrijk district of Antwerp in 1947, Axel Vervoordt founded his art and antiques business at his home in 1969. Over the years, this family business has evolved into an international company also engaged in interior design. His close contact with contemporary artists resulted in the foundation of Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Antwerp in 2011, followed by the establishment of a Hong Kong space in 2014. The gallery’s focus is contemporary, and cites its philosophy as being ‘rooted in the Gutai and Zero movements and their exploration of the void.’ Vervoordt is a rare man: post-disciplinary but self-disciplined; intuitive, but methodological; contemplative, but focused. The first item he ever collected was a Flemish iron chest 'with an incredibly complicated lock system comparable to the work of Jean Tinguely’, and his approach to collecting links fluidly with his curatorial and art dealing practice. In 1969, Vervoodt purchased a private street adorned with 16th-century houses next to the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, where he developed his antiques business. The Belgian aesthete went on to develop a number of architectural projects in Antwerp, namely Kanaal: a 19th-century industrial complex of buildings that he purchased in 1998 and which he transformed—with architecture practices Bogdan & Van Broeck, Coussée & Goris, and Stéphane Beel—into a collection of 98 apartments, 30 offices, an artisanal bakery, organic food market, and multi-use auditorium; along with the Axel Vervoordt Company offices, workshops, showrooms, and exhibition spaces. In 2000, Anish Kapoor’s monumental installation, At the Edge of the World (1998), was permanently installed in the space: a monumental fibreglass dome with a dense, red pigmented interior, whose 8-metre diameter looms from above.
In recent years, Vervoordt has developed a curatorial practice that was spearheaded in 2007, when he was invited by the Venetian Palazzo Fortuny to co-curate a decade-long series of exhibitions that addressed fundamental questions of human experience of art, science, and life in general. The sixth and final exhibition, Intuition (13 May–26 November 2017), which coincided with the 57th Venice Biennale and featured artists like André Breton, Joseph Beuys, Lucia Bru, Giorgio de Chirico, and Karel Appel, investigated how intuition has shaped art across different geographies, cultures, and generations.
Throughout the years, Vervoordt has nurtured a devout international clientele, for antiques, modern, and contemporary artworks. Vervoordt explains that his interests are motivated by a 'pursuit of universality’, a quality that pushes him to seek 'things that can ignite a new Renaissance and give body to the emptiness’, referring to the falsity of celebrity culture that reigns in the commercial contemporary art market. Under this pursuit, the dealer has shed light on a number of important art historical movements, including Gutai, the radical postwar Japanese group whose paintings and performances by members Jiro Yoshihara, Akira Kanayama, Saburo Murakami, Kazuo Shiraga, and Shozo Shimamoto signalled a turn in the creative expression of modern Japan.
In this conversation, Vervoordt discusses the key roles behind his many initiatives in the art world.
DM: You combine the roles of an art dealer, curator, collector, architect, educator, philanthropist, and urbanist, among others, in your work. How do you define yourself?
AV: People are more one-sided these days. To me all these activities come together as one pursuit: the search for universality. I love to discover the expression of universality in ancient art; it is like tracing the beginning of everything, but I am equally interested in contemporary art. I couldn’t live without abstract art, for example. My specialty is to make people happy within liveable and lovable environments, where—with the help of art and architecture—they want to live their whole lives. I make artists and the people around them happy—it all comes together eventually. That’s why most of my clients become friends for life; I make them discover things and make them discover themselves through art.
Do you still see abstract art as something new?
It is new in some sense, but it is also something that has existed already for thousands of years. Pieces of ancient Central Asian art, Egyptian art, and early Near Eastern art all look contemporary to me. They are timeless.
How did you become interested in the Zero artists?
I developed a passion for Zero a very long time ago. We became friends and this friendship remained very strong. I bought my first [Lucio] Fontana at the age of 21. Fontana often exhibited together with the German ZERO artists and can be considered as one of them. Conceptually, they are very close.
How did you discover the Gutai group?
It happened very recently, in 2005, during a trip to Japan where I met Gutai members from the first generation like Kazuo Shiraga and Sadamasa Motonaga, but also younger members like Sadaharu Horio and Yuko Nasaka. It was like a sudden, heavy, unbelievable connection. It was impossible to me that they were not known, so I did everything possible to promote their work and make them visible. In Artempo, the first exhibition we did in Venice, I showed several Gutai members to the international public.
What is it that draws you to movements initiated by artist groups such as Gutai and Zero? Do you decouple the aesthetics from their politics?
I am constantly searching. Art is a real force of philosophy, without politics and rules. It comes from genuine intuition. An artist acts as a portal of cosmic energy. It is not about the ego, nor is it about grand problems. In music, for instance, you have geniuses such as Mozart. He wrote music beyond himself, and it became divine even when he was addressing very normal, everyday aspects of life. He was activating the divine in the mundane.
Do you follow contemporary artists?
I love to discover new things—totally new things from which I can learn. But to me it is very important to know when the artist created the work in question. A lot of young artists reproduce works that have already been done in the sixties and seventies; there is too much copying around.
What does living with art mean to you?
For me it means living with teachers or friends—you wish to resemble them, and you like to be with them. Some of the works one collects might be rare objects, but if people only own rare things it becomes very boring. One needs to be surrounded by everyday, simple things to be inspired.
Do you see an explicit difference between 'the object’ and 'the thing’ in art?
I always like to look at art as if I were a child; I follow my intuition and think afterwards. I find and discover art as I would do with a living thing. I love Egyptian art, for example; for me it represents a frozen moment that is still living, it sort of makes time stop. Timelessness is very important for me in art and architecture. This universality brings everything together; it creates the feeling of oneness, which is crucial in everything I approach. Existentially, it is a universal formula.
One of the most interesting pieces of video art I’ve seen in years was featured in the exhibition Proportio (9 May–22 November 2015), which you curated at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice as part of the long-term collaboration with this institution. Atlante (2015) by Francesco Jodice features those elements of universality you’ve been talking about: the 2nd-century Roman sculpture Farnese Atlas from the Naples National Archeological Museum is the centre of a montage that bombards all the senses, but at the same time provides a feeling of harmony.
Yes, Atlante is very beautiful, moving, and heavy. In any an art piece for me, it is about a harmony in values; togetherness makes it much stronger.
What about its somewhat dystopian message? At one point, the video’s text reads, 'It’s not the end of the world but you can see it from here’.
I think things come as they come. 'The search’ is more about how to create the time that we need. For instance, sometimes I get astonished when I see the amount of plastic everywhere and the lack of respect for the nature and it really disturbs me. We have to teach people to love nature again.
In the series of exhibitions you worked on at Palazzo Fortuny—Intuition, 2017; Proportio, 2015; TAPIES. The eye of the artist, 2013; TRA. Edge of Becoming, 2011; In-finitum, 2009; Artempo—Where Time Becomes Art, 2007—you seem to approach the search of universality and harmony from multiple corners. How do you go about it?
Getting closer to understanding universality involves asking the right questions along the way. Having that approach is more important than finding answers, which is impossible anyway—one can never know. It is like going through a labyrinth. The philosophical side of these exhibitions was prepared during a full year. We involved more than eight people who worked in think tank salons with scientists, artists, and musicians. For example, in relation to the first exhibition in the series, Artempo, we posed questions like, 'What is time?’ 'What is zero?’ and 'What is the void?’. We needed to answer them to understand the art better. Preparing an exhibition of that scale takes me between two and four years; it’s a lot of work.
How did this series come about?
Before 2007, I had never curated an exhibition. I was 60 when I was first approached with the proposal to curate. I decided I would do the exhibition about our collections and the concept of time. I wanted to do it without neglecting the architecture of Palazzo Fortuny by not touching the old walls and placing the exhibition in the building alongside its history. Once a building is restored, the presence of its memory is gone. I wanted to prove it was the right approach. I hung very expensive paintings by Rauschenberg and Warhol next to a mirror I found and bought for nothing. And it all looked great.
What is the concept of value for you?
It’s like an authentic reaction that a child has. Sometimes I don’t know exactly what makes me look at an object—is it the art itself, the material it is made of, or the context of its presentation? I think intuition works in all ways. In relation to Artempo, for example, most of the classical curators wanted white gallery walls, but that wasn’t the case for me. Art for me is not about a revolution; I am interested in evolution. I have respect for everything, including the things that I don’t like. It is a learning process.
Is there a challenging project that you would like to do in future?
I would like to build on the land around our castle in Antwerp. My dream is to build an ideal village, with a river and underground parking, so you don’t see any cars. It’s going to look very poor but very nice [laughs]. It would be really quiet, like a Japanese village; very pure and monastic with beautiful gardens full of trees and a lot of respect for the surrounding nature. But now it is too expensive to make it possible to sell or rent there, so we have to find a solution to make it financially viable.
How long does it take for you to complete a project in architecture?
It very much depends on the client. People should fit the environments they want to live in; their house should be their favourite place in the whole world. I make my clients question whether it is something they really like, or only like because it fits in with current trends. Yesterday I was on site with two clients who are brothers and are building on the same piece of land; one of them wants a very fashionable and minimally designed house and the other wants a full, loaded, very cosy environment. I learn a lot from matching such contradictory views and finding solutions that make them happy.
What art institutions do you follow yourself?
I work so hard that I don’t have much time unfortunately. I do go to exhibitions, but I prefer going to artists’ studios. I learn a lot from artists. While showing at Frieze Masters in London in 2018, I went to see Lucian Freud’s studio before going to the fair; it was outstanding.
What do you think are the most pressing problems of the art world now?
I think a lot of people buy names. Celebrity culture and a lack of quality are defining features of the art world. In the 17th century, Rubens had never signed a painting because the quality was speaking for itself. Now it’s a little bit scary. That’s why I try to collect things that can ignite a new Renaissance and give body to the emptiness.
How do you see your legacy in the city of Antwerp?
I care a lot about the city. I am helping Antwerp in many ways; lately I gifted the redesign of the halls in the M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, which I hear have been a great success. We created an open space, where people can work on their computers, research, or spend time. It is crucial, especially nowadays, for people to spend more time with art collections and to learn from them.