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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Laurie Anderson: Notebook
See also:
-------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment