Pakistan makes pavilion debut at Venice Biennale art fair

The 58th edition of Venice’s Biennale art fair began on Saturday, under the theme of “May You Live in Interesting Times”, hoping to challenge preconceived biases by suggesting other ways of contextualising modern society’s biggest issues, organisers said.

In Venice, 90 countries are making their own artistic statements but the new arrivals are already leading the pack, reports said. The world’s most prestigious exhibition is an opportunity for over half a million visitors to travel around the world of art without leaving Venice.

For the 2019 edition, which runs until November 24, the international exposition’s artistic director, American Ralph Rugoff, has invited 79 artists to Italy’s City of Canals, including for the first time three non-binary artists. The new national pavilions include those of Ghana, Madagascar and Pakistan.

It’s a contemporary exhibition: all the works have been made since 2010, and nearly half the artists are aged under 40. The artists, more of whom hail from Asia and the Americas than in previous editions, were commissioned to produce works for the Giardini—gardens created by Napoleon in the 19th century—and the Venetian Arsenal complex of former shipyards.

Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery in London, said this year’s theme refers to an [apocryphal] ancient Chinese curse that uncannily captures the world today, as the news cycle spins from crisis to crisis. In the era of “fake news” and social media echo chambers, the fair is challenging preconceived biases by suggesting other ways of contextualising issues.

“What elevates art into something special is the fact that it resists closed mentalities,” Rugoff told AFP in his introduction to the 58th Biennale. “At a moment when the digital dissemination of fake news and ‘alternative facts’ is corroding political discourse and trust... it is worth pausing whenever possible to reassess our terms of reference,” he added.

Rugoff said that art “cannot stem the rise of nationalist movements and authoritarian governments in different parts of the world... nor can it alleviate the tragic fate of displaced peoples across the globe… But in an indirect fashion, perhaps art can be a kind of guide for how to live and think in ‘interesting times’”.

 

(With additional input from wires.)