Wednesday, 12 August 2026

Venice Biennale 2026: Part four




Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos: 'Efforescence/The way we wake'. 

I have been thinking about the fragmented body recently and as usual there were other artists already working in a similar territory and who were exhibiting in the Biennale. Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos were two artists that had combined to make a piece entitled, 'Efforescence/The way we wake'. These artists were bringing their two diverse backgrounds together, as well as their individual art practices. 

Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos

I was interested in how they 'inhabited' the fragmented large body around which they had placed Gulliver like, small islands of activity.  Sometimes the body was cut open and landscapes were inserted into the 'wounds' and at other times things 'grew' directly out of the surface. I didn't think the image was totally resolved but as there were two artists working on the same thing, perhaps that was to be expected. 

Sometimes images of the body are imlicated ones, such as those that could inhabit the 'Disease Throwers' as Guadalupe Maravilla called his chair like installations. 




Guadalupe Maravilla 

These objects operate as both shrines and healing instruments.He combines sculpture, painting, performative acts and installation into a practice that seeks to heal both himself and society. Sometimes the work references his migration to the United States due to the Salvadoran Civil War, in this case he explores how the systemic abuse of immigrants physically manifests itself in the body, something that reflects on his own battle with cancer. This was particularly relevant to myself, as I am searching for ways to unite external environmental experiences, with internal interoceptual ones. I was interested in particular in the way that Maravilla was able to combine found objects, such as a bathroom loofah, with more constructed elements. Some of my earlier work, where I had tried to form some sort of hybrid form between furniture and human beings perhaps has more milage in it than I thought.

The figure can be brought to life in so many ways. Kaloki Nyamai is an artist from Kenya who thinks of his work as part of a ritual of rupture and repair. Part folk memory and part material language of rope, paint, sisal, canvas, newspapers, burnt rubber yarn and stitch, images of people float into and out of view, embedded into a surface into which they are stitched into place. 





Kaloki Nyamai 

Nyamai views his work as a continuation of his ancestral lineage of storytelling. He often draws upon his grandmother’s stories of the Kamba people, a Bantu ethnic group of eastern Kenya. The images he had on display at the Arsenale were huge and in their size they intimated a sense of the mythic. Their surfaces had a feeling of the archaic, dark yarn threads protruding through his figures, gave them an element of some sort of neurological quirk, a phantom hair hypersensitivity that bridges tactile awareness, body image and deep-seated grasp of a personal identity, that is itself rooted in a local history. 

Nick Cave's work was perhaps one of the outstanding contributions to Venice this year. It was to be seen both inside and outside of the Arsenale and it was able to command the space around it, whilst at the same time being able to be of interest the closer you got to its intricately cast surfaces. 






Nick Cave

Cave had had seven new works on exhibition that had been made to address the stages of grief when mourning, stages that could lead to a rebirth and a radical re-connection with life. These images were rooted in his 'Soundsuit' works, which began in 1992 as a direct response to the brutal police beating of Rodney King. The four policemen accused of his murder, were acquitted by an all white jury. One juror said that King, by being combative and ignoring the officers’ orders, brought the beating upon himself. The First Suit Cave made, was constructed out of discarded twigs gathered from a park, and was meant to be a metaphorical suit of armour. When he put his suit on and began moving, the suit made a rustling sound, hence the name "Soundsuit". The suit became his armour, as it served to completely mask his race and identity, creating an anonymous second skin that allowed him to be viewed without societal bias. The figures are now more sculptural, cast in black they fuse body and nature, sometimes having gramophone like hoods, that suggest the sucking up of everything or the 'sicking up' what has been consumed. Blooming nature, cast images of the sort of bird ornaments my parents used to have, all living in a tree cast from real branches. Conceived with curator Koyo Kouoh before her passing, Cave has created his own mythology, one that reminds me that it is again the hybrid that will lead us into an animist future and that there are sometimes events that become catalysts for change, the death of Rodney King, being something that Cave has used to create images of hope.

I have for several years been interested in the work of Klara Kristalova. She popped up again this year, as she was taking part in the 'How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?' exhibit held in the Nordic Countries Pavilion.





Klara Kristalova

Klara Kristalova's work for the Nordic pavilion was entitled “Lust for Life” and consisted of a fallen tree inhabited by enigmatic creatures. I always liked the fact that when asked about her work's meaning or gestation, she said, "I want it to contain something I cannot control and something I maybe cannot even describe, I just know if it's there after the final firing, and if it's not there the work is not good enough." Yes! She hits the nail on the head, art isn't something you control, it sort of happens and slips through your fingers as you make it. Sometimes it becomes something magical and at other times it doesn't, but you can't predict it, you just have to continue making work and keep your fingers crossed that at times you will be blessed with it coming into being, if only occasionally. 

Fréderic Bruly Bouabré is an artist I first came across back in the late1980s in the Magicians of the Earth catalogue. This was the first time I had been confronted seriously with the fact that non-Western traditional, folk and self-taught art and the artists that made it, should be not only looked at on the exact same footing as mainstream Western contemporary artists but that it could be argued that perhaps these art forms held within them qualities that recent modernist approaches had lost and which were vital to our collective wellbeing. We were wondering around just off the Via Garibaldi and saw some images through what looked like a shop window and inside were several of Bruly Bouabré's images. 




Fréderic Bruly Bouabré

He was an artist that continued making a series of images that were thought of as if they were links in a chain, or part of an ever expanding card deck, right up until his death. He had a preoccupation with the intersection between language and systems of knowledge, that was informed by the daily life of his Bété community but which he attempted to build a relationship to the broader linguistic and epistemological frameworks that surrounded him. Looking back on his work it feels as if he was reminding us that everything is connected and that he was giving us a sort of visual guide, a great encyclopaedic collection of images, that if we could shuffle them and lay them out like some form of massive tarot, we might, just might get a glimpse of his reality.


Werewere Liking

Werewere Liking has been based in Côte d’Ivoire for over forty years. Her practice spans writing; including poetry, theatre, essays and critical theory, as well as painting, sculpture, drawing and performance. Liking looks to open vibratory fields between the spiritual and the earthly. Her 'Genealogies of Lights', is a series of sculptures made of wood and of collected, recycled and re-invested objects, inscribed with memory and fable. They re-activate what was discarded to forge new cosmogonies where narrative and politics overlap. I found these sculptures whereby she also encased various angle poise lamps in paper mâché, fascinating as they lit themselves, their inner glow like some sort of life force.

Werewere Liking

In one of her images, the water transformed into a cemetery for thousands of black bodies searching for hope and a better future, what in my work I had developed as a story told by one man, she shows to be something suffered by thousands.  

Laurie Anderson 

Finally I need to remind myself of how important it was to me to come across what Laurie Anderson is now doing. She is another of those artists that have been fellow travellers for some time. I still think of O Superman, her hit single from the album 'Big Science' as being proof that a fine artist can reach huge audiences and that a fine art practice, does not mean your work cannot have popular appeal. Her black and white Notebook (2026), was a 360-degree immersive drawing, that felt as if you were immersed inside a blackboard that had been taken over from the teacher by the pupils. Even the paper covers for the lights were painted on, it had that feeling of a place graffitied during a wild last night party. Her reflections on modern life in America, mirrored many of my own thoughts, the difference being she lives there and has to endure the reality of what is happening to her culture.



Laurie Anderson: Notebook 

Over a few posts my thoughts on Venice this year have moved from having to acknowledge that a few scraps of drawn paper smuggled from a Russian prison are as powerful in their affect on my sensibilities as an internationally famous American artist, who has made a big impact on popular culture. The biennale rests on the shoulders of individual artists, each one working to visualise thoughts about their experiences of the world. The externalised materials that they leave behind, those concrete casts of artist's thoughts, are still for myself things of magic and wonder. The bringing together of such a large number of artists, into such a culturally rich environment might have all sorts of issues associated with it, such as 'the art system orchestrating neoliberal cultural hegemony', as I was reminded of by an anonymous sticker artist, but I am personally enriched by the experience and I would hope many others are too. However it is not an experience available to everyone. Those living in poverty, enduring war and having no access to any form of cultural life, are all excluded and of course there are many people who dismiss artists as being fools and charlatans, their work being of no real consequence, in a world where only mathematics, science and politics matter. Add to this the problems related to sustainability, climate change and the large carbon footprint engendered by international air travel, I personally wonder how long international art biennales will be allowed to survive. But for now they are still there and they tap into our sensibilities, reminding myself in this case, of how rich and wonderful human creativity can be, especially when it is at the service of individuals attempting to touch the world of 'beyond' the everyday, seeking to make contact with that 'other' something, with that feeling that there is something else and trying to make an alternative meaningful vision of what it is to be alive. 

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Saturday, 8 August 2026

Venice biennale 2026: Part Three

Once I was in the Giardini I found myself surrounded by work that had something to say about my own approach to art making. I have for a long time been looking for something beyond the art market as a measure of worth and here I felt were quite a few artists that were making work not just for its own sake, but for some sort of 'right thing to do' or necessity born out of their own nature. I go back to the first art theory book to impress me, I was still at school when I first read Ernst Fischer's 'The Necessity of Art', where he stated, “Art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognise and change the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it.” Fischer's view was that art could be both political and magical. I see art being political in the sense that it raises awareness and magical in the sense of its ability to animate materials. I'm becomming more and more convinced that what is often now called the "new animism" a movement that reinterprets animism not as an outdated primitive belief in inner spirits, but as a relational way of living, points the way towards a right path. It views animals, plants, minerals, forces and landscapes as actants rather than passive objects or resources. Our lives are the product of a commingling with everything else.
As you enter the main Giardini exhibition hall, you go into a curated section of the biennale, which was where I felt if anywhere, the curator Koyo Kouoh had left her mark.

Big Chief Demond Melancon.

The first thing you see are two fabulous costumes by Big Chief Demond Melancon. As part of the public program of La Biennale di Venezia, Big Chief Demond Melancon had already presented a performative work, a project that centres on the body as a site of knowledge, memory, and political agency. Through gesture, movement, and sound, the performance invited audiences to attune themselves to elemental forces—water, air, fire, and earth—while activating a shared space of resistance, healing, and joy. The performance was both ritual and procession. Rooted in over two centuries of Black Masking Culture in New Orleans, the work carries forward an ancestral practice in which the Big Chief—community leader and cultural bearer—embodies history through the ceremonial suit. Through call-and-response, recitation, and collective presence, the group would summon and honour ancestral spirits—those who have passed yet remain as guardians of the community, the audience was asked to listen, breathe, and remember. 


Big Chief Demond Melancon

I was fascinated by both the need for ritual and the hybrid nature of the culture. This was an art form that had evolved through an African American awareness of the cultures of indigenous people. The work came alive in its wearing and its place within ritualised sound and movement, something I wanted to remember as I walked through the Giardini galleries, so that I could keep in mind an awareness of the pinned butterfly effect. Something that can happen, as soon as you hang a collection of artefacts on a gallery wall.
Perhaps I ought to explain. When you go into an old museum, there will often be a section devoted to Victorian butterfly or egg collectors. Several trays of butterflies will be on display, whereby rows of related, but all slightly different butterflies are pinned with their wings fixed open, so that you can marvel at the variations of patterns that their wings display. But what do these cases of pinned down dead creatures tell us about their lives. Nothing. If you want to know anything about a butterfly, you need to watch them, see their movements and visit their life cycle. Watch caterpillars eat, look for where they go to build their protective chrysalis and above all watch out for their metamorphosis. Hold in your imagination the idea that inside the chrysalis shell, the caterpillar body liquefies into a protein-rich soup, think about those special cell groups called 'imaginal' discs, that set about rebuilding that soup into a beautiful winged insect, that we call a butterfly. When I saw Big Chief Demond Melancon's work in the Arsenale it was presented as images flat against a wall and I was sort of interested in how they were made and the imagery, but when I realised on entering the Giardini that these were costumes and that they were part of a performance and I realised I needed to take another look. 

As you passed Big Chief Demond Melancon's work in the entrance, you come across Celia Vásquez Yui's 'The Council of Mother Spirits of the Animals'. These ceramic sculptures emerge from the Shipibo culture of Peru. 




Celia Vásquez Yui

What was fascinating about this work was the related concept of 'kené'. All these creatures are covered with vibrant rhythmic patterns; more than mere decoration, these maze-like patterns represent a visual language, a cosmic map of the universe and a form of spiritual healing. Kené connects nature, music and energy pathways and I was reminded of certain Australian indigenous artwork, that again used pattern to express ideas related to the spiritual energy of the zig-zag. The coil-built ceramic process and maze-like patterns are handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. Jaguars, monkeys, armadillos, and tortoises, among other endangered species, are arranged in a kind of parliament of the animals, and they are asserting the rights of nature. I found out that Vasquez Yui is not only an artist and activist but also a healer, roles that are closely intertwined in her culture. Vasquez Yui began creating alongside her mother, an eminent ceramicist coming from an indigenous background in the Amazon that dates back thousands of years. Celia now works alongside her daughter, Diana Ruiz Vasquez, forming the next intergenerational collaboration. When this work had been exhibited previously,  it was accompanied by a recording of a special ayahuasca ceremony performed in the Peruvian Amazon by members of Asomashk, the Union of Shipibo Healers. This ceremony is not intended to treat humans, the chants act as a sensory interface between humans and nonhumans, with birdcalls, chirps, roars, hisses, snorts, and squeaks focusing attention on nature as the patient. “I am traveling on land and underwater. I’m flying over the sky and the mountains, I’m searching the riverbed to identify your sickness,” sings one of the healers, joining bodies, spirits, lands, and waters in a worldview that is about conviviality, reciprocity, and kinship. These values underscore the interconnected nature of  Shipibo art making, environmental activism, and struggle toward Indigenous sovereignty. Again I was enthused by the idea of an art-making that fused together ideas of care, of deep meaning and spiritual necessity. 

I had seen the work of Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi (known as MaSebidi) the previous day in the Arsenale. Here was a vision coming from South Africa, but yet again it was one that was locked into a community. This time the artist spoke of a "responsibility to community, the earth and the spiritual presence of the everyday." These images were invitations into a complex way of seeing that was both physiologically revealing and emotionally quite hard to confront.





Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi: T'he Walking House' 

In T'he Walking House' (1990-1991), MaSebidi builds on her grandmother’s directive to be a “walking house”, that she should carry shelter, memory, and ethical capacity while moving through the world. In her work human, animal and ancestral registers co-exist. The Sebidi family spirit animal, the fish, enters as a guide and a reminder that water holds histories and circulates connections. The apparent 'distortions' of form, are shaped by a commitment to see beyond the surface of things and were again a reminder to myself about how important the invisible inner life of the spirit was to our sensation of being in this world.

Back in the Giardini I was entranced by Wardha Shabbir's images of gardens. Shabbir was trained as a miniaturist painter in Pakistan. 





Wardha Shabbir

Her work was intriguing, she was able to compress garden imagery, into volcanic form, wombs, the goddess Kali and flowers; sometimes intertwined with satellite imagery and way-finding maps. A much more 'westernised' artist than the previous one, she has incorporated modernism and an awareness of abstraction, into a pictorial language that comes directly out of a long tradition of miniature painting. Pakistan has a famous and living tradition of miniature painting. It began with Persian and Mughal court art and in the 20th century, artists revived the craft at the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. Today, several artists use these techniques to develop detailed images that can be used to communicate issues about contemporary social and political topics. Shabbir reminding me that I too was soaked in the traditions of modernism and that whatever I was trying to achieve, I could not simply jettison something I had grown up with.

As a printmaker I was very impressed by the work of the Uruguayan artist Leonilda González. She used wood cuts believing that its replicable and accessible qualities would help her communicate with larger audiences and she co-founded a graphic arts collective as an alternative to governmental cultural organisations. I was interested to find out that she used the soft side of her knife to carefully remove layers of wood from her blocks, allowing her to achieve very subtle tonal gradients. Her 'Revolutionary Brides' whereby she combined irony, sarcasm and anger, were protesting a system that seeked to “imprison” them.



Leonilda González

Leonilda González had managed to engage with her audience using a very popular style of image making. I had been reminded of this when I showed work recently in Graz, my linocuts were well received and perhaps I ought to think a little more about why that might have been? 

The devouring eye

In particular I had made the eye image in response to someone telling me they were very shy and that they felt that people were always 'looking at them'. The devouring eye of other people, was really stopping that person being able to get on with life. Reminding me that repression can be something we bring onto ourselves, just as much as it can be something imposed on us by others. 

I'm in the middle of making work that will be installed in a churchyard in September  and I have had to consider its purpose and how it fits into the main body of work I have been developing over the last few years. I'm glad to have to engage with a community of people and to be able to test out whether or not what I do can have relevance to them. Venice was helping me to think through some of the issues related to where I thought I might be going. 

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