The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in a Global Society 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
November 2006
"I am cooking the chicken of peace", I just texted my man, in an attempt to make amends. I had got home late and unannounced after a quick drink with my workmates to a torrent of angry words about how worried he was and why I hadn’t texted and how I could have been dead in a gutter somewhere … "Hi honey I’m home!"We never meant to live in an unsafe neighbourhood. When we moved in, the advertising of the new development, that had replaced the crumbling inner city houses and an old perfume factory, said new "modern luxury apartments". However, it is evolving into some kind of civic vacuum. The rule of thumb is spit, deface, let your dog pooh everywhere and dump. The visual result of dirty streets and defaced buildings lends itself to more people behaving badly. How did it happen?
An extreme case of this in Seville is the neighbourhood of Tres Mil Viviendas, a massive housing project aimed albeit naively, to give free housing to the very poorest as the Spanish Constitution states that every person has a right to a dignified home. The local government provided three thousand homes to a community who had previously lived in squats or tents and then watched as the homes were taken apart and sold piece by piece on the blackmarket to bring in the household basics or to support habits.
Developments are growing up like mushrooms it seems, all over the world, often where there was little previous community fabric or at least a very different one. Of what these community fabrics constitute and their perceived alterations or "disturbances" are some of the notions being explored in the 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (BIACS 06) under the banner of The Un-homely, Phantom Scenes in a Global Society . It is considered to be one of the "peripheral Biennials" that is taking place this year and indeed, arguing for its place internationally.
The Unhomely underscores several interrelated, contemporary arguments, those being the "arbitrary measures", "suspension of constitutional safeguards", the creeping "fundamentalist tyrannies" and weakening of "personal sovereignty" present in global governance. Ironically, on the streets of Seville, there is a mass graffiti campaign against the Biennial, arguing that the governing BIACS organisation is elitist, lacking fiscal transparency and imperialistic.
With intention or not, this protest plays into the inversion and is to my mind, a very effective act, whether the group or the Biennial itself want to acknowledge it. The Artistic Director of BIACS 06, Nigerian Okwui Enwezor, current Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute, argues that "the idea of artistic intervention in the cultural sphere increasingly appears both fragile and anachronistic. This is not just due to the accelerating commodification being generated by the art market complex but also to a certain loss of ethical clarity in contemporary art as a whole." This "outsider" act could be included in the BIACS 06 survey of what has been found to be, in recent years, a dedication to fostering new positions of affiliation, zones of intimacy and possibility in answer to this challenge. The survey constitutes a range of form (with an emphasis on sculpture, installation, photography, drawing and video), action (activism, intervention and investigation) and modular projects (spatial practices and architectural explorations).
It has to be mentioned that no oceanic voice is heard in this Biennial - a case of sphere of influence and practice. When Enwezor was approaching and inviting artists to participate, he simply never got as far as the Pacific. It must be said as self critism that this "AND WHERE ARE WE?" makes me sound frankly, a little parochial, and I prefer to focus on the richness of moving among the work of collectives and artists in dialogue about situations and experiences extremely different and yet familiar. It has strengthened and affirmed my own practice and focus as an artist.
The overall direction of the show is very clear, almost to the point of being an overload. Nevertheless, the work is powerful; Thomas Ruffs (Germany 1958) gigantic jpegs of war zones, airily beautiful and fragmented on close inspection, large installations of empty oil drums by Alfredo Jaar (Chile 1956), maps of towns drawn on trench coats (Kim Jones, San Bernardino 1944) fill the spaces. Powerful, but also (thankfully) sometimes humorous and banal like the drawings of Nedko Solakov (Bulgaria 1959) that had me smirking in an otherwise very unsettling show. What caught my attention was a table of documentation from a collective of artists and commentators based between Nigeria and Italy. Collective work is prevalent at this Biennial and their discourse through video speeches, email files and makeshift "drop in centres" has added another dimension to that new zone of intimacy and possibility.
One of the few painters in the Biennial was Gerhardt Richter (1932 Dresden, Germany), whose large grey iron-clad abstract oils on canvas were a highlight for me, being a painter myself. It was the first time I could enjoy his work "in the flesh" and I spent a good part of it with my nose literally glued to their surface. Another painter present in the show was London based Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (London 1977) who presented four beautiful portraits of personalities of her own creation. Their grotesque faces peer out at the viewer, some grinning like Cheshire cats, leaving the feeling that they were celebrities that one knew but could not pin down. These paintings and their stunning execution were an unexpected pleasure for me. Julie Mehretu (Addis Abeba, Ethiopia 1970), who has grown up in the United States also presented drawings that took my breath away. Enormous in scale, they drew from architectural structures, topography and allusive images of her own life and contemporary society.
Some large, cool but beautiful works on paper by Toba Khedoori (Sydney 1964), who works in Los Angeles, are installed in an ancient chapel that makes up part of the Cartuja Centre for Contemporary Art where part of the Biennial is held. This centre is built around an ancient Monastery which adds another dimension to the discourse and practice. The other BIACS 06 space is an historic boat house in the centre of the city that again add site specific considerations. Artist projects will also take place in and about the town in public spaces, including balconies and shop windows, which raises the issue of how the public of Seville will react and interact with the work. The discussion presented is immense and the projects challenging for a public famous for being in love with their traditions.
I couldn't help reflecting while on the bus crossing the river to the second space, on the case of Tres Mil Viviendas and that while work and notions presented in this Biennial were unsettling - adding to my own growing anxiety that we are on (to steal a well used metaphor) a high speed train racing to a crash, the tranquil surroundings of the Monastery had worked on me like a salve.
Acknowledgements: www.the-artists.org /artistsblog: Okwui Enwezor www.fundacionbiacs.com