The 53Rd Venice Biennale
Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker Making Worlds: The 53rd Venice Biennale Guangzhou @ Ireland @ Venice One of the most memorable events at the 53rd Venice Biennale was a seminar that took place in a sweltering, over-crowded hall in the Irish Pavilion. As Homi K. Bhabha sardonically noted at the beginning of his presentation, the narrow, interlocked chairs into which both panel and audience were uncomfortably squeezed created . an association of ideas and bodies at the same time, very much like many art practices where affect and sweat and all kinds of bodily fluids mix and blend, sexualities are questioned, nationalities become blurred, boundaries immediately become tangible. An orgiastic experience is being provided in this wonderful city [of great sexuality]. This is not going to be a sober seminar! In fact, despite the wanton grandiloquence and dazzling intellectual displays of its participants, this seminar was a deadly earnest exercise in power. Some of the Western art world’s most respected luminaries had been invited by Sarat Maharaj, co-curator of the Third Guangzhou Triennial (GZT 2008), to participate in a conversation that would “query” the Guangzhou Triennial and its call for, as the triennial’s title suggested, a farewell to postcolonialism.2 The occasion was not only the opening of the Venice Biennale, but also the launch of a special issue of the Irish journal Printed Project,3 which was intended, according to its guest curator/editor Maharaj, to add to the reflections, debates, and analysis surrounding the GZT 2008 and, above all, to address the “ongoing methodological instigations, to use Ezra Pound’s word, .
[Show full text]