Four artists who live and work in Sweden are invited to this year’s Venice Biennale. Meriç Algün Ringborg, Petra Bauer, Runo Lagomarsino and Carsten Höller will be included in the Biennale’s 56th incarnation, curated by Okwui Enwezor under the title All the World’s Futures. The internationally established Carsten Höller has lived in Stockholm for several years. Algün Ringborg, Bauer and Lagomarsino were all educated in Sweden and are united by a politically, sometimes poetically, charged approach to questions of history, migration, and racism. Petra Bauer points out that Enwezor’s exhibitions often focus on Europe’s colonial heritage, something important for her own practice.
– My own work always concerns various consequences of the colonial and patriarchal world order. I am specifically interested in how the photographic image, both still and moving, can relate to and challenge social and political processes, says Bauer, who will be showing a work about the socialist women’s movement in Sweden in the early 1900s.
There are 44 side projects happening parallel to the international exhibition, sanctioned by Enwezor but conducted by various international non-profit institutions. Within this frame, Lina Selander will have a solo exhibition in the Arsenale, arranged by Moderna Museet, while Magnus Bärtås will be showing his film Miraklet i Tensta (Theoria) (The Miracle in Tensta [Theoria]) in the exhibition 1st Research Pavilion at Sala del Camino/Giudecca. No artists from Norway or Denmark are participating in the international exhibition, but as Kunstkritikk has earlier reported, Danh Vo will be at the Danish pavilion, while Camille Norment will represent Norway and the Nordic pavilion.
All the World’s Futures builds on Walter Benjamin’s theses partly inspired by Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, about the angel of history with his face to the past being taken away from paradise, backwards with his back to the future. The history that is at stake is no less than the biennale’s own 120 year history and its relationship to industrial modernity, capital, urbanism and the forces of the various colonial projects – but also the mass-movements and the fight against these forces: worker and women’s movements, the anticolonial struggle and the civil rights movement. Enwezor has been inspired by 1974’s Venice Biennale, which was designed in solidarity with Chile after Pinochet’s military coup in 1973 – a «remarkable and transformative event in the biennale’s history that today is largely forgotten».
Lagomarsino, who next week will open his first major exhibition in Scandinavia at Malmö Konsthall, together with Carla Zaccagnini, has often worked with narratives tied to colonial history:
– I will be showing, among other things, a work that takes as its starting point a monument that was built to celebrate the 500 year anniversary of Columbus «discovering the New World». The monument was rejected by several American institutions and now different parts of the statue are lying on a beach in Puerto Rico, as a ruin, waiting to be assembled. Another work makes use of the sea and sun of the Mediterranean as material, Lagomarsino told Kunstkritikk.
Meriç Algün Ringborg works on issues related to her own biography as a Turkish immigrant in Sweden, for example, with the work The Concise Book of Visa Application Forms, which recently appeared in a solo exhibition at Moderna Museet. She will also show a new work in Venice.
– It is obviously an honor to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, but to be a part of Enwezor’s biennale in particular raises the meaning of my participation. I will be able to situate my practice in relation to Enwezor’s extensive work with questions that I have a strong relation to, Algün Ringborg says to Kunstkritikk.
– I will show a new installation that I have had in the back of my head for a while, but have not been able to find a way to articulate until I was invited to the Biennale. Like many of my earlier works, it is inspired by my own personal history, but aims to position itself in the universal, Algün Ringborg continued.
Of this year’s 153 participating artists, 88 will be there for the first time, but the exhibition also includes a number of older works from the critical and politically radical history of art. Rather than an overall theme, a «parliament of forms» has been promised, and an exhibition that consists of three different yet overlapping «filters»: Liveness: On Epic Duration for events and performance; Garden of Disorder that will seek to explore the current “state of things” in terms of international conflict and geopolitical disfigurations; and Capital: A Live Reading that presents a several month long recital of Marx’s four volumes of Capital with related performances of songs, seminars and presentations.
