Exhibiting at Venice Biennale over ten years ago, we never got to ride the Venice Biennale opening week as a spectator, which is much like a roller-coaster with its highs and lows and seeing everything at breakneck speed, compared to the slow reflective negotiation as an exhibiting artist. You have to arrive ready to jump in; partly organised and knowing the lie of the land, including invitations organised to show openings and pavilion parties and partly being prepared to get whisked along through serendipitous encounters. As AN bursary artists we were lucky to get coveted tickets to the Giardini via the British Council, which seemed harder to get hold of this year, via the normal application system. It’s really essential to get access, as without it you don’t get to see the ‘main’ pavilions and are missing a major part of the dialogue. AN also organised talks for us from the Scottish and Welsh pavilions which is something that is really lacking generally across the biennale; they help to ground the work in what can become a bit of an art conveyor belt. I managed to catch the one official public cross-pavilion talk that happened between three national pavilion artists on my last of three days. Amazingly it was the first time they had done it, and I found it an incredibly rich experience. The artists always seem so purposefully absent from the pavilions in quite a de-humanising way, in that sometimes the processes leading to making a pavilions artwork come across as having been more of an equation and superficial. This talk went some way to remedying this for me, presenting three artists who were all consumed by the process in very different ways but who had all really lived the experience. Understanding how they had approached making work in the context of the biennale allowed deeper contemplation of it and some work which had seemed weak and gimmicky was transformed.  It seems there are several ways to make work for a pavilion at the biennale, listen to the mantra that people only spend 30 seconds with it and you need to capture their imagination in that time (the context specific version), make what you want (the self-indulgent version), or make work which you’re most well-known for on repeat (the lazy and mostly unsuccessful version). Navigating Venice when you’re pressed for time, all the vaporettos are overflowing and you realise you need to get to an opening or party across town, well the nicest way is to walk, and I made sure I’d downloaded a GPS map onto my phone before arriving which made negotiating all the labyrinthine alleyways easy, and allowed for those lovely off piste detours that you can confidently do with the aide of technology. My main aims in going to the biennale were to network, then see art, then do some unpicking of how it all works politically. I feel that I managed to squeeze a lot into my time. I met up with and bumped into a lot of curators we had previously worked with or who have shown interest in our work and have had some good follow ups with them.  On returning and getting my head around the spectacle of the biennale in the opening week, I feel it almost necessitates another visit to relive it without the urgency and hype, where you only really ever feel you’re on the outside looking in.


0 Comments