This exhibition was held in a building close to the Arsenale, curated by James Putnam. It was a group show made up of British artists who mostly had a humorous approach. In the blurb about the exhibition in the Biennale's short guide, the tag line is as follows:
Distortion is central to creative expression combining elements of the comic and the grotesque with deviations from the norm in scale and space.
Australia: Once Removed
This was a secondary pavillion for Australia which was located near to the Arsenale in an old church. It's curated by Felicity Fenner and, like Shaun Gladwell's work in the Giardini, all of the work exhibited here made specific reference to displacement and the effect it has on culture (specifically and logically, the predicament that Aboriginal culture faces was a central topic).
There were three separate works on show; one was a stack of 195,774 VHS tapes arranged in a solid block by Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro called 'Life Span' (the combined running time of the tapes would amount to an average life time of 66.1 years).
Ken Yonetani, a Japanese artist who immigrated to Australia 6 years ago, showed a work called 'Sweet Barrier Reef', an installation made out of sugar in the form of coral reef, arranged in a way akin to a Japanese Zen Garden. According to the catalogue,
Sweet Barrier Reef is an installation about coral bleaching...a symbol of colonisation and modernisation, sugar also represents human desire and consumption, both of which fuel the industries impacting disastrously on fragile ocean environments.
The third piece was by Vernon Ah Kee, called Cant Chant (Wegrewhere), a combination of an installation and a video piece. There were several surfboards hung from the ceiling, each covered with a tribal pattern on one side and a black and white illustrated portrait of an Aboriginal person. The video piece shows Aboriginal surfers using the boards on the beaches of Australia, usually reserved for the iconic caucasian surf culture.
Cant Chant (Wegrewhere) proposes an improbable story about Aboriginal surfers reclaiming one of Australia's most populated beaches. Interspersed with violent allusions to historical executions of indigenous people, it is a surreal, fairy-tale narrative, given that in modern Australia racial alienation is often most evident in the context of iconic cultural sites, such as the beach.
Ireland/Northern Ireland Pavillion
Work by Susan MacWilliam, Sarah Brown, Gareth Kennedy, and Kennedy Brown.
Visually rich across film, video, sculpture, and installation, this year the Ireland Pavillion offers unique Irish perspectives on identity, labor, craft, design, globalization, economics, language, architecture, beauty, money value, and being human.
Susan MacWilliam takes the paranormal as her subject and explores accounts of extraordinary sensory perception. The scope of her work is broad, encompassing research into psychic mediums, x-ray vision, and dermo-optical perception. She uses video, photography, and sculptural installation to investigate these accounts.
GLASS STRESS
This was an absolutely amazing collection of glassworks by artists such as Man Ray, Kiki Smith, Mona Hatoum, Robert Rauschenberg, and Tony Cragg to name a few. It examines the use of glass in contemporary art spanning from the first half of the 20th century up until the present day.
One of the highlights of the show would have to be Hye Rim Lee's hypnotic video piece 'Crystal City Spun'.
Arsenale
Michelangelo Pistoletti: Twenty-two less two
One of the halls in the Arsenale
Installation of Ulla von Brandenburg's work
Cildo Meireles
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