Large in scale, bigger in meaning

Installation art at Biennale Arte 2022

As an active environment, the installation art allows visitors to experience an environment differently. It’s like falling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland together with Alice. Works of this genre can be anything and combine many things, but they usually have in common a great size they occupy compared to other genres. Thanks to their power to draw visitors into another world, they are welcome “pauses” at such large exhibitions as the Biennale, a refreshing sip of another reality. In the case of the following artists, it was not only the size of their installations that caught the attention – at the 59th edition of Biennale Arte in Venice in 2022 – but rather the message behind them.

Let’s start with Delcy Morelos‘ piece. The artist from Colombia uses natural materials for her work. At the Arsenale, she presented a massive amount of soil, over waist-high blocks you could even walk into and thus find yourself immersed. This natural primal ingredient has been combined with spices and cocoa to make it even more impressive for the olfactory senses. The main idea that Morelos wanted to convey, based on the cosmology of the Andes and the Amazon, is that we do not control nature and cannot constantly modify it without respect as it suits us. Because when we decompose, we become it again. As a little reminder that no matter of technologies, our bodies will always be part of the earth.

Meanwhile, Candice Lin took us deep inside a sacred space where a crazy scientist experimented with potions. Seeing flacons of whichever extracts as white absinth or butterfly tears brought us to this conclusion. And beautiful statues of godly-looking creatures were full of them. For those, Lin used clay from the first Asian settlement in the USA, Saint Malo in Louisiana. As Lin specified, the installation Xternetsa was inspired by George Psalmanazar, an 18th-century French who declared himself the first native of Taiwan to come to Europe, the faraway land called Formosa back then. Candice Lin’s focus is presented in this beautiful installation by many hints in numerous objects linked to the question of what is the image of Asian, especially in the European imagination throughout history.

The colour palette was similar to sunrise and evoked a feeling of lightness; that was the installation by Kapwani Kiwanga. While half-transparent fabric paintings navigated the visitors through the Arsenale space, the elegant containers with sand appeared along the way in the created corridors. And they remind us that not everything is as rosy as it seems. For Kiwanga, the sand represents political material and a harmful product of the oil industry, which is one of the most negatively affecting industries towards the planet, taking a massive part in causing climate change. Transparent glass containers held the sand in unnatural forms as if they did not want to let it out to convey bad news. Although they were objects with elegant lines in the clear glass, they seemed weighty in the installation next to the beautiful colourful canvases full of air.

And suddenly, everything was shrouded in neon green light when we entered the installation by Sandra Mujinga. Superhuman-sized figures were on their way to cross the space; on the ground, in the centre, some construction looked like a dinosaur skeleton in the museum. It all felt like a future where cyborgs wouldn’t be dangerous but motionless, only protecting relics from the past. The knitted fabric created a fashion moment.

The queen of slogans, Barbara Kruger, closed the long space of Corderie in Arsenale with her site-specific installation. Starting her career as a page designer in Conde Nast, the cut-and-paste style design system of the time laid the foundations for her iconic artistic expression. Large font, simple black and white colours, occasionally with a touch of red, addressing the viewer and wallpapering whole gallery space are typical attributes of her work. This time a story about what the body wants was unfolding on the floor, while the main wall described what would be at the beginning, in the middle and at the end: first a cry, then confusion and finally silence. How to deal with such a life summarized and divided into those three parts? Find your answers in recommendations around, addressed gently with a please: laugh, care, help and admire – but please do not cry. As usual, it was intense and enjoyable and Per favore ridi.

Around the corner from the main hall of Corderie in Arsenale opened up a unique garden inhabited by plants and butterflies, with small ponds, pathways, and goddesses of nature. A poetic world of Precious Okoyomon in the installation To See the Earth before the End of the World criticised the events in the past through the selection of vegetation. Okoyomon chose kudzu and sugar cane plants for that: kudzu, of Asian origin, is a fast-growing plant that, when brought to the US in the 1930s, restored balance to the land after overproduction of cotton by getting rid of erosion in the soil. The sugarcane plant is a historical symbol of colonialism and the slave trade. The garden lived a life of its own throughout the biennale and demonstrated nature’s forever power over human vanity.

What would be the lesson from these impressive works?

Let’s not take nature for granted and not fear the future while not letting it run over us.
Ideally, enjoying the power of art and raising global consciousness about important topics through these momentary travels to different realities.