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At the 2022 Venice Biennale, the artist Maria Eichhorn uncovered the foundations of the German Pavilion, lengthy the occasion’s most controversial constructing. By tearing up a stretch of the travertine flooring and elements of the wall plaster, she revealed the stays of the unique constructing earlier than it was altered in 1938 in accordance with the monumental rules of Nazi structure.
For Cagla Ilk, curator of the German Pavilion at this yr’s Venice Biennale, that daring inventive act was a form of exorcism. “When Maria Eichhorn opened the bottom, I felt that every little thing went out,” she defined. Freed of the ghosts of the constructing’s previous, she felt that her job as curator was to discover a option to fill the symbolic void left by Eichhorn’s interventions. “Now we have to put it again [together] and make it once more,” Ilk mentioned.
Toward that finish, Ilk, 47 has recruited artists from numerous backgrounds to contribute to this yr’s version of what’s arguably one of many artwork world’s most vital occasions. At the Biennale she is curating two tasks with sturdy narrative components within the German Pavilion in addition to a sequence of sound installations on La Certosa, a close-by island within the Venice lagoon.
“I wished to do one thing un-disciplinary,” mentioned Ilk, who was born in Istanbul and has lived in Germany for the previous 20 years. She skilled as an architect in Istanbul and in Berlin, and labored in theaters within the German capital earlier than being appointed co-director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in 2020.
Ilk brings an unconventional method to curating the high-profile occasion. In an interview at a restaurant within the Biennale Giardini, one of many occasion’s two principal exhibition websites, informed me she goals for the “distinctive second of encounter” solely theater can present. In addition, she favors collaborative work over the radically particular person method that always dominates the artwork world. In Venice, she has put collectively her crew the way in which one assembles a theater manufacturing. With practically 70 folks, it contains architects, actors, designers, composers and even a dramaturg.
“From theater, I collected actually the valuable elements,” Ilk mentioned, noting that the German repertory theater system permits “long-term relationships” amongst artists to flourish. “That’s how I introduced these phrases into the modern artwork,” she mentioned.
“How we take into consideration the close to previous was for me crucial,” she mentioned. One of the principle themes of Gospodinov’s novel is how our understanding of the previous permits us to make sense of our current. According to Ilk, the e-book is one thing of a tough script that guided the artists by their work.
On La Certosa, 4 artists — Robert Lippok, Nicole L’Huillier, Jan St. Werner and Michael Akstaller — are making a sequence of beguiling sound installations that work together with the island’s setting. Ilk mentioned she thought of this website a refreshing distinction to the weighty structure of the German Pavilion.
“The island has no borders,” she mentioned. “Sounds doesn’t have borders,” she added.
For the principle pavilion, Ilk invited the German stage director Ersan Mondtag and the Israeli artist and filmmaker Yael Bartana, who’ve devised two bold and wildly completely different tasks.
Mondtag, recognized for his eye-popping aesthetic in theater, has boarded up the entrance of the pavilion. “For me, it was vital to shut the principle entrance,” mentioned the Berlin-born artist whose household comes from Turkey. “It’s like one thing is damaged on this constructing and in German historical past,” he added.
Blocking the entrance of the pavilion are mounds of earth from land that Mondtag inherited from his grandfather in Anatolia, Turkey. “We could have for eternity now Turkish soil on the bottom of the German Pavilion. I name it poetic justice,” the 36-year-old artist mentioned.
During a latest go to, we entered the pavilion by a aspect entrance. It was one large development zone and the sound of saws and drills was earsplitting.
A multistory construction with a spiral staircase within the pavilion’s central room is the principle set for Mondtag’s “Monument to an Unknown Person,” an set up efficiency about his grandfather, Hasan Aygun, who got here to Germany in 1968 as a part of the visitor employee program and died of most cancers after working in an asbestos manufacturing facility. In addition to a stay efficiency for 5 actors, together with one who performs Mondtag’s grandfather, the exhibition additionally contains a video Mondtag filmed on a misty day on La Certosa. “It’s very poetic and it appears to be like like a Tarkovsky film,” he mentioned.
This can be Bartana’s second time contributing to a nationwide pavilion on the Biennale. In 2011, she represented Poland along with her video trilogy “… and Europe can be surprised.”
“My line is that I’m not representing Germany,” Bartana, 53, who lives in Amsterdam and Berlin, informed me after I spoke to her by cellphone. “Germany represents me.”
In Venice, “Light to the Nations,” (“Or LaGoyim” in Hebrew) would be the newest in Bartana’s cycle of speculative fictions that always discover Jewish themes. In the previous, they’ve included movies a few group urging the return of three.3 million Jews to Poland and a movie in regards to the development of the third Temple of Solomon in São Paulo, Brazil. Like lots of Bartana’s tasks, “Light to the Nations” is a long-term one: an earlier model was offered in Israel final yr as a digital actuality set up.
A central idea to “Light to the Nations” is tikkun olam, the Jewish crucial to restore the world. In the video set up, a era ship for Jews units off into house like a futuristic ark, leaving planet Earth to heal from the injuries that humanity has inflicted on it. In a cellphone interview, Bartana mentioned she was influenced by science fiction literature, the kabbalah or Jewish mysticism, and even Mel Brooks’s “Jews in Space.”
“Many of my works are a lot about various histories,” she mentioned, however added that on this undertaking she was “imagining a future” primarily based on our alarming current. “Within the body of an art work,” she mentioned, her exhibition “proposes a salvation machine for humanity.”
At the Biennale, “Light to the Nations” received’t be offered in digital actuality, which Bartana considers too impractical for the big crowds that the occasion attracts. Instead, the set up contained in the pavilion features a 360-degree video projected inside a dome to permit for “a extra collective expertise of the life contained in the spaceship.”
Bartana acknowledged that Ilk had gone out on a limb by inviting artists like her and Mondtag to the Biennale.
“I admire this daring, as a result of it’s an actual experimental method,” she mentioned.
“With all of the heaviness of the historical past of this Nazi constructing,” she added, “I feel it may very well be fairly a refreshing option to cope with that.”
