Reviewed by Sonja van Kerkhoff  

The Netherlands.

Miracles of Vision, 2001     Documenta, 1997     Oerol, 1996

The Transculture exhibition organized by the Japanese Culture and Science Foundation, presented 15 artists, who were variously able to dissolve "state" borders. Joseph Grigley (U.S.A.) dissolved the border of deafness. His installation was a room full of written transcriptions; records of conversations he'd had. Some of these were scribbled on tickets, others were framed. Some lay on the floor in heaps that you could sift through, others were arranged and numbered.

The variety of conversations and his personal observations drew out the particularity of the mementos: inscriptions that exist somewhere between speech and writing. It was as if he was and wasn't deaf; was and wasn't of a particular 'group', while engaging us in an encounter where deafness was a distinctive characteristic.

Irish-born Shani Mootoo (of Indian heritage) had lined the walls of the courtyard with colourful advertising, accentuating the entrance space. Despite the brilliant colours, her 'ad wall' was dotted with icy messages about otherness. For example, the text, "It is a crime that I should have to use your language to tell you how I feel that you have taken mine from me", was separated line by line by Indian street snapshots, as if these thoughts had been extracted line by line. Otherness was part and parcel of herself as a minority.

The Brazilian, Adriana Varejao, filled a room with oval-shaped excerpts from the history of South American colonisation. What you noticed first was the sense of blood and violence, evoked by ruby red vagina-like slashes and gouges along the middle of each little folk-painted scene. The violence was dramatised by the sharp contrast between the crudeness of the gashes, which physically intruded into the seemingly inane naive 'stories' (the flat surfaces). In the foreground of "Official testing the nipple of young girl" * an official is doing just that, while behind him a Brazilian Indian woman clad in European clothing is being raped on a European bed by a European. In choosing the painting style of Brazil's first missionary painters, Varejao informs us of the complexities of telling any story of colonisation: the colonisation itself shapes the ways in which the story is told.

from any nation. In another work, Absence in the same exhibition, Mladen Stilinović, had placed enlarged photographs of skin surfaces - some were fingerprints - on music stands.
These were placed around a cot, which had its base missing, so that it was transformed into an empty cage. There was no baby; the only evidence of humanity was the skin surfaces arranged around the scene of the crime. But this crime was one of neglect: a human concern, rather than a national cry.

Both this and the Slovenian exhibitions transcended any nationalist stereotype, although both countries have been involved in a nationalism turned nasty.

image to come of overview of an installation by V.S.S.D., Slovenia.

In the church of San Stae, Christian Marclay (Switzerland) had hung six huge translucent veils from the ceiling. On each veil you could discern a snapshot of a person or group of people playing music. Moving past the veils, there was a heightened feeling of religious silence, a sense of awe as you walked among these ordinary looking people, who seemed to have been transposed, to float at the edge of existence. The images were not printed on the fabric but woven into the material, which was translucent so the interior of the church and its spaces formed part of each image.

Entering the dimly-lit installation by Carlos Capelan was like walking into a complex world. In one corner, individual spotlights lit about 40 glasses of water on the floor. From a distance, only spots of light were visible. As I made my way around the room, I encountered texts such as "The Hegemonic West is always me, we others are the other" by Thomas McEvilley, a contemporary American art critic. Here and there were cartoon-like figure drawings on the walls, sometimes with objects such as mirrors, railings, or string glued to them.

The largest pavilion was the Italian one, which was located at the Biennale gardens and was curated by Jean Clair. It was devoted to the exhibition "Identity and Alterity: imprints of body and mind". I was disappointed that most of the work presented views of the body from the sixties or earlier. Generally, the body was illustrated or presented as an object, as in Yves Klein's 1961 blue imprints of women's bodies. At the entrance, a Meret Oppenheim table (Tisch mit Vogelfussen, 1938) was placed in a corner, behind a rope that visually obstructed the work. This piece at least promised a treatment of the body transcending the form.

Its distinctiveness and gold colour made it hard to miss, and its marginal position accentuated the metaphor in the work. But Oppenheim's table was hardly representative of the exhibition. After moving through 10 or so rooms, it became clear that women were hardly represented, and most works addressed a modernist concern with form. The exceptions included five dream-like paintings by the Italian Paola Gandoli, each representing a larger-than-life woman engaged in a self-conscious act, such as covering her eyes in an act of defiance.

The Lebanese artist Mona Hatoum's 'Corps etranger' was so popular that you had to queue to see it. A panoramic video projection on the floor showed the walls of her digestive and anal tract speeding by. We were confronted with the strangeness of our own interiors, a strange exotic beauty that led us to accept this unfamiliar portrayal of herself (and of ourselves). Beauty became a bridge to the unknown: a connecting of identity and alterity.

Wintershins, an installation by Gary Hill, was also about connections and was a play on a divided self. I entered a darkened room, with a labyrinth of rods laid out on the ground and two larger-than-life but unmoving video projections of hands on opposite walls. People stood around the edge, waiting, or perhaps wondering. Then my four year old entered the labyrinth, and suddenly there was a voice and the hands were activated into gestures. It struck me that those on the perimeter remained passive viewers, while those who took the step into the work were confronted and connected with it.

As more people entered the maze, more voices were layered over the first, echoing one another, without beginning or end. The voices verbalized phrases such as: "the left hand did not know what the right hand held....what hand is left...where hands are tied.." Here there was no other, except in the sense that we might conceive of our left side as distinct from our right. This is a work that begins with a simple dualism, but shows the complex connections we have with ourselves and our environment.

by

....to be finished..... this page is under construction.

....to be finished..... this page is under construction.

Arts Dialogue, June 1996, pages 8 - 11