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The 56th Venice Biennale 2015

Jacqueline Millner
Eyeline 84
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Labour, relations of production, and making: some of the conspicuous rhythms in the 2015 Venice Biennale. With a title such as ‘All the World’s Futures’, one might have expected a hubristic take on contemporary practice; instead the notes sounded are more modest, if insistent. That insistence on making and making-do, where art goes beyond exploring materials, forms and issues to become an affirmation of endurance, permeates much of the work. Okwui Enzewor’s curated exhibition, naturally, makes more explicit links between ‘making’—that invokes the body of the artist in correspondence with ‘the world’—and current social, political and economic imperatives, in particular linking labour to resistance, and art practices to diverse forms of activism, without reducing one to the other. However, these links also emerge in the national pavilions.1

This focus on labour—both of the artist and of those whose expropriation is essential to capital—provides an anchor for revitalising materialist philosophies and theories of history. Karl Marx even gets his own catalogue entry here, a token to the literally central place devoted to his magnum opus, Das Kapital, which is being read aloud for the duration of the Biennale in the Arena, a large stage installed at the heart of the main pavilion in the Giardini. Adjacent to the Arena is a companion piece by the artist orchestrating this live performance, Isaac Julien’s KAPITAL, a two-screen video work depicting the artist in conversation with curators, critics and theorists, before a live audience. The star performer is American Marxist scholar David Harvey, whose The Enigma of Capital: And The Crises of Capitalism (2010) provides a lucid account of how the power of capital shapes our world, and sets out... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Chiharu Shiota, The Key in the Hand, 2015. Installation view, Japan Pavilion. The 56th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia.

Chiharu Shiota, The Key in the Hand, 2015. Installation view, Japan Pavilion. The 56th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia.

Sonia Leber & David Chesworth, Zaum Tractor, 2013. 2 channel video in HD, stereo sound, 28mins. Photograph Alessandra Chemollo. Courtesy la Biennale di Venezia

Sonia Leber & David Chesworth, Zaum Tractor, 2013. 2 channel video in HD, stereo sound, 28mins. Photograph Alessandra Chemollo. Courtesy la Biennale di Venezia