United States, Korea, Saudi Arabia and Malta

Biennale’s pavilions: USA, Korea, Saudi Arabia and Malta

From lei to big snakes, to fire rain

Venice, May 2 (askanews) – Simon Lee has won the Golden Lion Award for International Exhibition, but the African-American artist is at the Biennale Arte with the American National Pavilion. More powerful than the monumental intervention at Arsenal, the pavilion immediately presents itself as a large sculpture inspired by the aesthetics of colonialism or the representation of other cultures presented in the West. Breaking a historic mental form is immediately apparent, and expands into the rooms, where Lay’s sculptures, bronze and porcelain, analyze the construction of the black female subjectivity. The forms are compiled in non-Western traditions, but they are powerful contemporaries and have first-rate political and sexual strength. A discourse that is perfectly suited to the spirit of Cecilia Alemani’s finale and to redefine the roots of our present, but it is an art that goes beyond the simple dimension of being politically correct.

Going beyond a particular idea of ​​art is the Korea Pavilion, which represents a kind of journey into the relationship between the visible and the invisible, the universe and us, between man and the inhuman. The “Khair” project by artist Yunzul Kim puts all five works in the pavilion as echoes, creating labyrinths across multiple sites. But everything revolves around the powerful structure of the “Chroma V”, a kind of 50-meter robotic snake that revolves around itself, moving coils covered by LED screens and, that is, associated with stimuli coming from another machine. In the scene, the cosmic particle detector, Muons, creates visible motions based on the frequencies of invisible interactions between us and the universe, while at the same time creating an art that appears pure, distant and inevitable. Our destiny as an art and a race that emerges independent of humanity.

Another type of large snake dominates the space of the Saudi Arabian pavilion in Arsenal. Artist Muhannad Shono created the pneumatic installation covered with dry palm leaves. A vibrant, fragrant system that thinks about the idea of ​​the line and questions its unique interpretation and the power structures derived from it.

Work is a “learning tree”, but like a living and mysterious body, it feeds on its own ambiguity and, again, grows and changes regardless of us.

There is also a sense of transformation in the Malta Pavilion, where the Italian Archangelo Sasolino and Maltese Giuseppe Skembri, along with the composer Brian Skembri, reconsidered the beheading of the Baptist by Caravaggio, preserved in the Cathedral of Valletta. A project that will have a huge impact, a real glowing steel rain will fall into the water tanks, shut itself off, and then start. In the dark rooms, one realizes the weight of history, its rotation, and its infinite nature, and from the point of view of observers, the transformation of the metallic rain and its transformation is an act of reconciliation that opens up spiritually. A place for improvement.