SCREENS SCREENS SCREENS AT THE VENICE ART BIENNALE
by Cristina Chinetti
 
Video art has not been a novelty for decades and there are many artists who work through a mixture of expressive languages and the most varied technological tools, creating protean works in which poetry, music, sculpture, cinema and animation are integrated.
The 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice, as is obvious, offers in all its sections various and innovative works of video art.
If, for example, at the Giardini Biennale you arrive in the triangle drawn by the National Pavilions of France, Great Britain and Germany you are almost enveloped in it.
Precisely this aspect, that is, the intention to immerse the spectator in an all-encompassing and multisensorial experience, is the message that can be considered most significant even for those who want, or need, to imagine the movie theatre of the near future.
Among the suggestions that can be taken up by the cinema professionals, the most immediate is the expansion of the projection space that goes out of the actual screening room and conquers the external and public dimension.
An example of this is the large three-screen installation suspended onto the façade of the Great Britain building that are part of the work of the English artist and filmmaker, of Ghanaian origins, John Akomfrah (1957).
The work, entitled “Listening All Night To The Rain”, develops in the various rooms inside the pavilion, where the screens multiply infinitely, because Akomfrah's artistic intervention is based on eight interlocking and overlapping different multimedia and sound installations (or Cantos). It is no coincidence that they have water as their central motif, as can also be seen from the title. Water is a congenial element for talking about memory, migration, ecology and climate change, all themes dear to the Artist.
On the many film screens, which climb up walls of different colours, numerous images and visual and sound narratives, layered and fragmented, flow continuously and simultaneously, inducing contemplation and almost hypnotic listening.
In the central room, the screens arranged in a continuum along the walls can be seen by visitors sitting on circular benches, positioned under the screens themselves, or from a central X-shaped structure, for a total immersion in images and sounds that undermines the traditional frontal model of cinematic viewing. Even if the videos, some lasting several hours, and the audio collages are not made to be seen or listened to from beginning to end, because they are structured in an undulating and non-linear way, the impact on the visitor is nevertheless suggestive, as well as disconcerting.
Just as exciting and engaging is the first of the three scenarios that make up the “Thresholds” project in the German Pavilion, by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana, who interprets the theme of migration starting from a present perceived as catastrophic in a world on the brink of total destruction, from which humanity can only try to save itself by fleeing towards distant galaxies.
On a curved screen of enormous dimensions, images from the video “Farewell” scroll by, portraying a pagan ceremony with dancers and animal masks in a forest at night, which is in fact humanity’s farewell to the old world, before departing for the cosmos. Then follow the images of the great spaceship “Light to the Nations”, designed by the Artist herself as a set of spheres, arranged like the ten sefirot of the Jewish Kabbalah, which in a dreamy atmosphere transports the remains of the past towards a new salvation. The music, sometimes tumultuous and tribal, sometimes slow and enveloping, completes the work of enchanting the viewer.
Other fluid spaces, videos with soft animations, slow rhythms, chanting poems, sculptures of various types and musical sequences create the immersive experience in the work of the French-Caribbean artist Julien Creuzet (1986), who represents France in this Biennale.
Here too, screens dominate, starting from the large LED wall leaning against the columns of the entrance hall, on which the statues of the continents dance with slow and harmonious movements, freed from each other. Inside, the walls are entirely covered with screens, on which shapes, volumes and lines in motion intertwine, colourful encounters that form new languages and that represent, in the Artist's intention, the manifold aspects of the past and the future histories of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The public, wandering through the rooms of the pavilion, thus discovers a space crossed by fluids, open to a radical and collective imagination, populated by natural and divine presences, and perceives it as somehow connected to Venice and its waters. |
ITALIAN SCREENS IN HONG KONG
