Russia is not exhibiting at the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, as it did at the previous exhibition, inaugurated two months after the start of the invasion of Ukraine. But the pavilion opened in 1914 based on a design by Aleksei Shchusev, architect of the tsar and then at Stalin's court, did not remain closed, as it had been in 2022, after the curator Raimundas Malasauskas and the artists Aleksandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov had resigned in protest for “this politically and humanly intolerable war”.
The space recently restored as a “theatrical machine for contemporary art”, in the intentions of the Kasa studio (Kovaleva&Sato Architecs) which oversaw the work, was sold to Bolivia. The presence of the South American country at the Giardini della Biennale “calls, for once, into question hierarchies that seemed immutable. We are now allowed to make our voice heard alongside those nations that have always been represented on this stage”, explain the curators of the project “Qhip Nayra Uñtasis Sarnaqapxañani” (Let's move forward looking at the future past) set up for the International Art Exhibition which will be open to the public from Saturday to November 24, in the “heart” of the place where they designed and built their Pavilions include the countries that first participated in the event, the vast majority of which were Western.
“Russia that treated us as a friendly country and not as a stranger”, is underlined, with reference to the title chosen by the curator of the 60th Exhibition, Adriano Pedrosa, “Foreigners Everywhere. Stranieri Ovunque”. Bolivia's participation in this Biennial “is the perfect opportunity to celebrate our diversity, our plurinationality, in view of the bicentenary of the foundation of our State”. Many Russians were present at the inauguration.
Russia “believed in the importance, quality and content of our project”, the curators point out. But the decision was painful. Last autumn, Adnkronos learns, personalities from the art world in Russia had informally investigated, with their contacts in Italy, in an attempt to identify a possible project suited to the times with which to participate in the 60th Exhibition.
A situation of zugzwang, summed up with a chess image – a position in which any move brings a disadvantage – and a series of euphemisms by the Russian newspaper Kommersant: assigning the pavilion “to contemporary artists with an often non-contemporary position in Russia”, a dangerous option both for those responsible for the project who for the participants themselves considered the risk of “extremism” at the door of every expression, or to patriotic artists who would have multiplied criticism abroad and created fertile ground for retaliation. Because in Moscow, reading the Russian newspaper, the nightmare associated with the 1977 Biennale seems to have resurfaced, in which the art of dissent behind the Curtain was added to the national pavilions.
The Minister of Culture in Moscow informed the organizers that the country will not participate in the 60th International Art Exhibition, the Biennale then announced in a statement last February in which it was recalled “that the closure of the Russian Pavilion to 59/a Art Exhibition 2022 was decided by the Commissioner and the Curator” appointed by the same minister and that “all countries recognized by the Italian Republic can in total autonomy” request to officially participate” in the Exhibition.
The choice of the Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, according to the official term introduced with the new Constitution of 2009, which in turn opened the pavilion to artists from other South American countries, crowns significant developments in bilateral relations. President Luis Arce is expected in Moscow in the coming months. Russia has been admitted, alongside China, to exploit the enormous lithium deposits in the Andes. A research reactor supplied by Russia will be opened by next year at an altitude of more than 4 thousand meters.
With abstention on the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly of February last year, for the immediate end of the war and the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory, and on that of March 2022, for the immediate end of military operations of Moscow in Ukraine, La Paz has responded positively to Moscow's search for allies in the Global South of the world, an artificial construct, when it comes to politics, to be contrasted, in Russia's intentions, with the collective West that the Kremlin's rhetoric identifies with the enemy behind Ukraine.
Thus, Bolivia was catapulted from the Artspace4rent rented in 2022 in Cannaregio to one of the most prominent pavilions of the Gardens, with the opening onto the lagoon originally wanted by Shchusev and restored by Kasa's restoration, as well as the green of the plaster exterior in harmony with the trees surrounding the building. The theatrical machine of art worked: the multinationalism that characterized the Soviet Union in its first years of life, which came back into vogue in Putin's speech to keep the discontent of the country's ethnic periphery at bay, found in the Estado Plurinacional its solution to the impasse.
The International Art Exhibition “Stranieri Ovunque. Foreigners Everywhere” curated by Adriano Pedrosa will be open to the public from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November 2024 at the Giardini and the Arsenale.
#Biennale #Arte #Bolivia #present #question #hierarchies #immutable