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more and more convinced that what is often now called the "new animism" a movement that reinterprets animism not as an outdated primitive belief in inner spirits, but as a relational way of living, points the way towards a right path.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.
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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