and alter the course of events or thoughts.
The concept of "undoing" at the Venice Biennale involves deconstructing traditional narratives, reversing environmental damage, and addressing social and political injustices, while also exploring themes of memory, artistic process, and cultural exchange. In the exhibition, the methods of physical deconstruction of materials, the play with ephemerality and notion of erasure are seen, for example, the creation of works that are deliberately impermanent and designed to change or decay over time. This multifaceted approach reflects the exhibition's commitment to thought-provoking narratives that rethinks societal, cultural, and political issues.”
I recently started a new project. I’ve been trying to figure out how to draw air—capture it. Make a series, or an exhibition out of it. Show it off. Show me off. “Draw the air. Visualize the invisible.” Some professors posed that challenge rather carelessly in the past and it’s been in my head rent-free since. It’s certainly provocative, and thus irresistible to intellectuals.
I like that we can’t really treat air as a discrete thing. Maybe it’s owing to the fact that gasses don't have definite volume, but it definitely feels wrong to draw it with an outline, or treat it like we do with a wall or a body of water. Like, when someone coughs near you, there’s no definitive boundary of gross and not-gross air. It’s an issue of complex gradations, which means even in our imaginations, air operates as a “field” (a la Stan Allen) rather than as an object.
We all believe air is made up of particles of nitrogen, oxygen, trace elements, dust, plastic, and vibes all floating around in relation to each other at a certain level of complexity. It seems like the perfect medium for thinking about “object to field.” It’s a nice set up. My problem is where do you go from here? Are objects bad? We seem to really like objects, so is that a reductive stance to take? Why do we tend to pull quotes from books, frames from moving images, and panels of visual art? We grasp at them like they are the only things that we can value in a work, and they seem to represent what is important incompletely yet also just good enough. I’m wondering, what is the value of the field beyond a provocation to invent new techniques for scientifically measuring or drawing air? Is it worth pursuing? That’s such a tall ask, and that is territory I don’t think I’m currently interested in heading towards.
Ironically, like air, the loftiness of this project on “air” has made it incredibly easy to get lost and float away. How do you stay grounded? Currently I’m thinking about sites—literal ground. A site constraint. Emotions, desires, and realities of the self are often viewed as a form of grounding. What about the air as a personification? A character, like say in a comic? But I’m still working this out…come ask me about it.
- Yuna Li
Yugoslavian and Nigerian coalesce: The Serbian pavilion turns its audiences’ attention to the subject of its place of choice - Lagos. The curators made the loop as a field to investigate its objects or “topics” of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, self-determination, and peaceful cohabitation. Viewers experience the cybernetic-ness of the technology that Lagos experiences, emphasizing the modernization, industrialization, and urbanization that takes place in the contested city.
Curated constellations: Objects can merely be placed on a surface without a converging force. Albeit invisible and abstract, UK’s Dancing Before the Moon lets the idea of the moon – associated with novelty, technology and the future - serve as a field. The curators have placed objects in the building to indicate rituals of innovation and new ways of thinking. It everso candidly captions and encapsulates the idea of the object as a spatial collective, casted onto the moon’s surface, which serve as a unifying element — a thematic field of objects.
Union of materials gives meaning: There is a powerful communicating value in the ‘uncomfortable’ presence of many “stuff.” The Nordic (Sweden, Norway, Finland) and German pavilions used the congregation of stuff as a characterization of a field. Accumulation was a unifying subject, where there is a field of objects. The field became innate due to the amount of objects that were presented to put forward an intent. The German pavilion’s showcase of materials presents the radical accumulation of “stuff” from last year’s Biennale installations. The accumulation itself gives a voice to the inanimate objects that it occupies space, thus giving the act of accumulation meaning.
Objects are an important accessory to the culture of rituals of a community, as shown in the Nordic pavilion’s collection of objects of the Sámi peoples’ objects – through un-archiving, and presenting them in a field that defines the objects to the culture and community themselves. The culture and rituals of the community is the field.
- Sherry Aine Chuang Te
