Renaissance Women

The new guard: María de Corral and Rosa Martínez, curators of the 51st Venice Biennale. Photo Giorgio Zucchiatti. Courtesy Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia.

When I stepped off the boat at the 51st Venice Biennale, the pinnacle of contemporary art exhibitions, and promptly received my press pass, package of information and helpful guidance to the section of the exhibit I wanted to see first, it was clear that what had occurred was a revolution from within. Never before has the Biennale been run so smoothly. Not only had the previous edition been such an artistic mess that the Italian press referred to it as “A Death in Venice,” many of the installations weren’t even up by the time the press descended upon this city of water.

This year, however, Venice is rising. And I like to think it has something to do with the fact that for the first time in its 110-year history, women are running the show. The Biennale’s curators, Rosa Martinez and Maria de Corral, have whipped things into shape. Highly respected Spanish art curators with a wealth of collective experience, Martinez and de Corral present an overview of today’s artists that corresponds to goals they set out in a statement of intent — one that, lo and behold, can actually be read and understood by someone who doesn’t deconstruct art for a living.

There are two main sections of the Biennale. De Corral is the curator of Giardini, housed among the national pavilions (where artists are sent by their country and not chosen by Venice). She calls this section "The Experience of Art" and writes that her intent was “not to attempt to offer a false model of universality,” but to explore certain themes — nostalgia, the body, violence — through the work of artists she knows and respects.

Run from the shadows: Stan Douglas' 16 mm film installation Inconsolable Memories. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

The work of the selected artists does just that, and for the most part, does it very well. One particularly strong installation is Stan Douglas’s 40-minute film Inconsolable Memories, a remake of the 1968 film Memories of Underdevelopment, by Tomas Gutierrez Alea. Through the use of repeated sequences, chapter headings and voiceover, the Vancouver artist tells (or retells) the story of a man who stays behind in Cuba after thousands of his countrymen leave. He becomes a ghost of his former self, haunted by memories and stuck between the past and the present. It’s an expertly shot and edited story of the blocked psyche of a post-revolutionary country whose collective dreams have been dashed.

Another installation that stood out was that of German photographer Thomas Ruff, who blows up the pixels on digital pictures of landscapes. Depending on where you stand, the photo can look blurry, clear, even painted, an aesthetically beautiful metaphor for how individual perspective rearranges memory and alters perspective.

Rosa Martinez, de Corral’s younger curatorial sidekick, takes on the job of organizing the Arsinale. Usually the more dynamic section of the Biennale, it is housed in a kilometre-long string of former shipyard buildings and often features emerging artists.

This year, Martinez has given the Arsinale the theme "Always a Little Further." The title is taken from one of the Corto Maltese books — a series created by Venetian writer and comic-designer Hugo Pratt — and is meant to encapsulate the artistic spirit of risk-taking and limit-pushing. If one limit has been pushed at this year’s Biennale, it’s the historically immutable boundary that has kept many women out of contemporary art. Just how overrun the modern art world, and particularly the Biennale, has been by men’s art is in clear evidence in the Arsinale’s first exhibit, courtesy of the feminist group the Guerrilla Girls.

On the first wall of the exhibit is a huge poster featuring the Guerrilla Girls in ape costumes holding placards with interesting factoids. Here are a few:

Guerilla art: part of the Guerrilla Girls' Venice installation. Photo Filippo Monteforte. Courtesy AFP/Getty Images.

• The first female artist to have her own show in the Biennale’s U.S. pavilion was Diane Arbus, in 1972. It wasn’t until 1990 that another American woman had a solo show.
• The French pavilion has a solo show by a woman this year — the first time in 100 years.
• At the first Biennale in 1895, 2.4 per cent of the participating artists were women. A hundred years later, it was nine per cent.
• This year, 38 per cent of the artists in the curated group shows are women.

Needless to say, it makes you even more attuned to gender bias.

Even without the introductory info, however, much of the work by both male and female artists this year seems to pose a challenge to a patriarchal vision — the approach ranges from the playful to the confrontational. A video installation I found both hilarious and subtly unnerving is Viva Spagna! by Pilar Albarracin. In it, the camera follows a woman strolling through a city with an all-male marching band. At first, it appears to the woman, as well as to the viewer, that the band just happens to be proceeding in the same direction. As the woman’s pace picks up, so does the band’s. She hurries on, trying to pretend the musicians’ intrusion into her space isn’t frightening her, but the band becomes increasingly aggressive in its pursuit. There’s no overt violence, just rising tension in the woman’s attempt to feign that all’s well.

The Little Men, by the Russian group Blue Noses, is an uproariously funny installation that features a room full of cardboard boxes that emit various animal squawks and cackles. As you peer inside the boxes, each one has a different 20-second video loop projected onto the bottom. Shot from a bird’s-eye view, each loop shows naked or near-naked adults simulating sex, rolling around and riding and chasing each other. Human coupling is thus brilliantly reduced to its barnyard basics.

Putting her foot down: from Regina José Galindo's filmed 2003 performance, Quien puede borrar las huellas (Who Can Remove the Traces?). Photo Vitto. Courtesy Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia.

At the sombre end of the spectrum is the video installation Who Can Remove the Traces? by Regina José Galindo of Guatemala. In it, Galindo strips naked and shaves herself from head to toe. Then she walks through Guatemala City with a bucket of blood, pausing to wet her feet with it so she can leave footprints behind her. Her final destination is the nation’s constitutional courthouse. The piece is a powerful statement about the role of art in coping with scars left by human-rights abuses and government atrocities.

On the whole, what felt most like a departure from recent Biennales was the fact that the two curated exhibits actually appeared to have been curated. De Corral and Martinez put forth cohesive and understandable statements of intent; the works they selected were linked in theme and approach; most important, the pieces had concepts that offered something original and solid to grapple with. There had been so much gimmicky, flash-in-the-pan art to wade through in recent years that it was becoming increasingly difficult to take the Biennale seriously as a representative of the best of the best.

This year, with women at its helm, the Biennale has finally tackled its history of gender imbalance. Still, it has yet to find a way to include poor countries. A final factoid from the Guerrilla Girls exhibit: with the exception of Morocco and Egypt, no other African countries are present. When that changes, maybe the Biennale can start saying it represents the best modern art in the world — and actually mean it.

The 51st International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale opens June 12 and runs until Nov. 6.

Megan Williams is a Canadian writer living in Rome.