Urging from this ludic summer hiatus, I am returning to write about the Biennale. One thing I did during my time off was take a trip out to the suburbs with my colleague Mary, who was also in Paris, to see the Mac/Val contemporary art museum. Mary and I met at the Francois Mitterrand metro station and once we figured out how to take the RER, we were off to this commune south of the city-Vitry-sur-Seine.
At the museum we met up with curator and friend of Mary's, Valerie; who gave us a very enjoyable personal tour of the current exhibitions as well as the rest of the museum.
I'm really glad Mary took me here and introduced me to Valerie, I would have never wandered so far out of the city and didn't know this place existed to be honest. Thanks to Valerie for the free catalogs.
Back to the Biennale ( I still have a few posts in me).... Highlighted above is the work of South Korean artist Haegue Yang. I came across Yang's work last year at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, and glad I was to see where her work had gone in just a few years. Her work was one of my favorite individual pieces in the keynote exhibition- a series of jacked up venitian blinds ( I lied again about there being no venitian blinds in Venice) with colored light bulbs intertwined with cables and strings, intersecting the blinds themselves- which are hanging on what appear to be clothing racks.
A host of other objects dangling from these structures created these somewhat intimate and formal compositions.
The Korean Pavilion (below) hosted her work as well. This piece resemble the pieces at the Carnegie International.
Just outside of the Arsenal towards the gardens was another of my personal favorites: Pae White. This old space was reconstructed by the addition of a drop ceiling/tapestry made of intertwined colorful strings. This caused the chandeliers (created out of raw materials and bird seed) to be displayed a lot lower and closer than they would normally be.
This created a sense of intimacy to the space that at the same time seemed to resemble a giant bird cage. Once in a while, the "gallery attendants" would go into wild bird calls, chirping away towards the heights of the space. A pretty surreal experience.
The tapestry below was unbelievable. Rays of colorful string woven into this spider-like den.
This materiality theme kept on coming. Below is yet another favorite: Moshekwa Langa's installation containing unraveling spools of colorful string creating a huge cartographic map on the floor. The model cars placed throughout was the first clue that the 3-dimensional installation was meant to be perceived as a 2-dimensional map or perhaps a model diorama.
Each of the colorful strings symbolizing roads, rivers and other dividing lines we would originally see on a map. The spools of strings could have been transformed into buildings as they unravel and spill out onto the streets. I perceived this piece to thematize the idea of travel, yet something about it seemed to say more. Maybe it was that all the model trees in the diorama were uprooted. Perhaps the other random objects placed throughout tried to guide me in another direction. Yet another paradoxical statement addressing automobiles, perhaps the industry itself?
At this point I knew I was over-thinking it, so I just continued to enjoy the piece visually and formally. This was a beautiful piece. The title of the piece was "Temporal Distance (With Criminal Intent). You Will Find Us in the Best Places." Above is a worms eye view and here below is a shot with the camera raised a little to capture the scale of the space.
One last installation along the same material theme was the work of Yona Friedman (below). It was one of the first rooms of the Arsenal; like some of the previous ones the installation also created a sort of drop ceiling in the room, which trapped a slew of cardboard structures.
The installation went up some 20 feet in the air and seemed to resemble a city, with catwalks connecting some structures to others. Falling structures, crooked buildings...Venice?
Some close-up shots looking straight up at the installation.
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