The 11^th Shanghai Biennale ran from November 11^th 2016 to April 12^th 2017 and the Raqs Media Collective were its chief curators. The show was housed at the Power Station of Art and could be seen in two long days.

The 11^th Shanghai Biennale failed to live up to the show’s usual status as one of the most important Asian biennales. Its written material often did not help viewers make sense of the work, and the biennale’s most spectacular projects were often its most disappointing. In spite of these weaknesses, the show had some real strengths. The biennale often allowed viewers to see familiar subjects in new ways. It did this both by skillfully recontextualizing older works and by including works that pushed viewers to reconsider histories and subjects to which, over time, they have become inured.

The 10th Shanghai Biennale assured the show’s ranking as one of the most important Asian biennials. Memories from it and other highly ranked shows were constantly reminding viewers that the 11^th did not rate as well. These memories seemed to haunt the 11^th Shanghai Biennale. One could be in front of Liu Wei’s successful sculptural installation, Panorama and be preoccupied with the ghostlike presence of Liu’s amazing work Green land which showed at the 2016 Achi Triennial; or be watching Sohrab Hura’s perfectly decent film Sweet Life, a stunning black-and-white photographic essay that explored Hura’s relationship with his mother, and be distracted by the specter of Huang Ran’s amazingly sophisticated and imaginatively surreal film the Administration of Glory, which had occupied the same space in the Shanghai Biennale two years earlier. The 11^th Shanghai Biennale definitely had a number of important works, but when compared to the 10^th, or even some other highly ranked Asian shows, it fell short.

On its own, the 11^th Shanghai Biennale’s failure to live up to its usual status may not have been enough to create the sensation that the show was haunted by memories of earlier shows. The weakness of the biennale’s written material—its guidebook, wall text, and audio guide—contributed to this impression. The problems with the written material started with its general statements about the whole exhibition, which sought to frame it in many different ways, (reportedly in order to contextualize the show both from the perspectives of the East and West). In a chapter called Eleven Notes for Eleven Different Biennales, written in verse, the guidebook framed the show in eleven different ways. As well, the book had five sections called “infra-curatorial,” which asked small groups of the show’s artists to create independent framings for their collective works, and three different sections called “undercurrents,” which seemed to combine past artist statements and interviews by groups of the show’s artists in a process that resembled an exquisite corpse. In theory, this desire to frame the biennale in radically different ways was interesting; in practice, it frustrated attempts to make sense of the show. Indecipherable written material is less of a risk for shows of local work, where viewers can often depend on their knowledge of the context to understand the show. But biennales usually feature work from all over the world. Spectators cannot be expected to understand all of the many different contexts from which the work is drawn. Faced with weak written material, exasperated viewers find themselves looking to what comparable works meant in similar circumstances in order to make sense of the show. In practice, this often means looking to other biennales. This tended to add to the impression that the Shanghai Biennale was haunted by memories of other biennales.

This haunting was not the show’s only weakness. The biennale featured a number of works that seemed intended to dazzle viewers, but often ended up being disappointing. Sing for Her, made by Zheng Bo in cooperation with migrant worker groups, was an example of this. One of the show’s largest and most important works, it was prominently placed in front of the biennale hall, was the first project that most viewers saw, and consisted of a huge megaphone that blasted rock music with lyrics about work, in Indonesian, Tagalog and Mandarin. Its form and location suggested a call to political action. This would have been a lovely gesture for the opening work of a biennale. But translations of the lyrics showed that Sing for Her was not political. The lyrics spoke about the hardships of work and life as immutable facts, like birth and death, not as things that could be controlled, made more just, or even simply more bearable. This removed Sing for Her from the realm of political action, making it a disappointing start for the show.

Mousen+MMG’s The Great Chain of Being also seemed promising. This was because it was easy to confuse it with a number of interesting recent works that appeared to function in similar ways. These works required viewers to give up a certain amount of autonomy and follow a determined trajectory over an extended period in order to focus viewers’ attention; this allowed spectators to appreciate subtleties of different cultures or unfamiliar aesthetics. They often took the form of long scroll drawings that led viewers through a narrative, or films that insisted that spectators be there at the beginning and remain until the end (an oddity in the art world), or works that steered the audience through tunnel-like installations in one direction down a predetermined path. The Great Chain of Being was physically similar to these works. It pushed viewers through a narrow tunnel through different spaces, to the work’s conclusion. And though it was apparently a mini-exhibition that held 40 works by different artists, it functioned as a narrative, creating a singular mood. In spite of its similarity to these interesting recent works, it was clearly not intended to help viewers focus on different cultures or aesthetics. Its projections of strange landscapes, its sci-fi sculptural objects, and its claustrophobic feel seemed intended to distract viewers, reducing The Great Chain of Being to a space-themed fun park.

Along with these large scale spectacular works, there was a general class of smaller scale ones. They were also disappointing. The guidebook called these works “terminals.” It said that terminals were supposed “to push the frontier of the perceptual, they were meant to be directed to the bodily.” But the different ways these works addressed bodies were often underwhelming. Sometimes they felt like a dull ride in an amusement park. Ivana Franke’s Disorientation Station included spinning rooms and blinking lights. Sometimes these works were experienced like physical demonstrations in a science museum. Marjolijn Dijkman’s Lunar Station, a motorized pendulum, had viewers seemingly observing the effects of the earth’s gravitational fields. And sometimes the body that the work addressed was the body of the artist. This was the case with the work of Regina José Galindo. Her Estoy Viva (I’m Alive), presented the artist as a body in a world where things happen to it. Galindo stands as trenches are dug around her, sits in cars as they are disassembled and lies under a glass shell as it is beaten by angry mobs.

Galindo’s work is very popular. It appeared in Documenta this year, and in 2005 her work won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion. The work’s popularity is understandable. It seems to address political violence, and as opposed to transforming the suffering of others into a spectacle for the art world, Galindo seems to have had the laudable impulse to play the role of the spectacularized victim herself. If this were the primary reading of the work, it would be less problematic. But her role as author of the work is unavoidable. This gives the work a perverse quality, as though she is desperately trying to shift the responsibility for the dramas that she asks her body to endure onto other people, presumably the audience. Also, it is dangerous for an artist to play the role of the victim, it makes it less likely that viewers will be able to address the art work critically.

Even though the 11^th Shanghai Biennale failed to live up to its usual status, and its most spectacular works were often its most disappointing, the biennial had a number of very strong works. Lisa Tan had a very smart film called Waves. It wove together radically different threads into one engaging story. The film started with Virginia Woolf’s book The Waves, connecting the book to a Courbet painting of waves, and to Google’s use of the North Sea to cool its servers.  Together these created a compelling essay film, though it should be said that sometimes its distancing devices, writing and rewriting of the voiceover on the fly, and endless images of images, proved a little much.

Superflex also had a very strong video installation, called Exchange of Pigs and Bits. Viewers lay on pillows, and looked up at a large disk where the film was projected. The film was about the exchange of ideas between China and Europe, narrated by a pig who told of the trading of pigs between China and Denmark, and followed a Chinese pig’s travels to Europe, a foot race, and the pig’s ultimate victory. Though the film fit into the current style of images with very shallow depth, while watching it I often longed for the powerful deep images that so animates Superflex’s Kwassa Kwassa. Additionally, the English subtitles for the Chinese language voiceover went by so quickly that non-Chinese speakers were often forced to choose between reading the text or seeing the images. In spite of this, Exchange of Pigs and Bits was a beautiful, imaginative work.

The Shanghai Biennale’s most effective works were often like the show’s title: Why Not Ask Again, able to help viewers reexamine histories and subjects to which, over time they have become inured. Yang Zhenzhong’s five-screen video instillation, Disguise, and Khaled Barackeh’s series of photographs, Untitled Images were very straightforward versions of this. The videos in Yang’s installations showed factory workers going about their jobs while wearing white masks of their own faces, and Barackeh’s work cut out the dead bodies from what appeared to be news photographs of refugees. By pushing viewers to search for what was not there, these works allowed spectators to refocus on the suffering of others, to see anew subjects that over time seem to have become passé.

Many of the Shanghai Biennale’s works asked viewers to reconsider events from the past. One of the show’s best works, Hao Jingban’s wonderful film Off Takes helped viewers re-see the Cultural Revolution. Made up of footage that Hao was unable to use for her Beijing Ballroom project, Off Takes started at a birthday party that Hao had agreed to film in order to get an interview with a woman whose dancing had given her the chance to dance with Zhou Enlai (Mao’s right hand man) in the 1950s, and also led the woman, less than a decade later, during the Cultural Revolution, to be investigated for decadent and immoral behavior. The birthday party took place more than fifty years on, and was filled with the woman’s aged, bejeweled, affluent, swing-dancing friends. The group’s artificiality was disconcerting. Unable to contain himself, Hoa’s cameraman expressed his discomfort by focusing his camera on a child’s strange and manic movements, and a couple whose dance and demeanor (the man wore a sailor suit) seemed especially ridiculous. It is hard for us to connect the artificial quality of this event with the suffering that people went through in the cultural revolution. But with a keen understanding of image, control of mood, and dry sense of humor, Hao was able to help us bridge this gap, to appreciate some of the suffering that the Cultural Revolution engendered.

Talk About the Body, a wonderful little performance film by Tao Hui, was another work that reconsidered a known entity. Dressed as a Muslim girl, and surrounded by his real friends and family, the artist quietly compared his thin frame to the body of a small Muslim girl. Tao described his body in the manner of an ethnographer addressing a research subject. This clinical tone could have given the work the bureaucratic feel of Martha Rosler’s Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained; instead, it felt like a small ceremony, a coming out that connected the artist to some of China’s most oppressed minorities. Talk About the Body was a small but beautiful work.

Another way that the show helped viewers re-see familiar subjects was the intelligence it showed in recontextualizing older projects. Sammy Baloji’s wonderful series of photographs, Kolwezi, was created in 2011-2012, and originally was shown in Europe. The town of Kolwezi is an important mining center in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the series of photographs paired images from posters found in the tents of copper and cobalt miners with Baloji‘s own photographs of Kolwezi’s bleak landscape where the miners actually worked. These posters were produced in China and represented verdant landscapes that the wall text suggested depicted dreams of Africa’s future. Showing Baloji’s work in China increased its impact, not only because it pointed to the providence of the posters, but also to China’s intense engagement with resource extraction in Africa.

Robin Mondal’s King Series was another example of the show recontextualizing an older project in ways that allowed it to speak to us directly. The series came from the mid 1970s and was made to address a turbulent moment in India’s history. Including it in the 11^th Shanghai Biennale was a beautiful gesture. In spite of being produced for a different context, it spoke to our present moment, reflecting the rise of authoritarian leaders that marks our era. Mondal’s series represented a king in landscapes dominated by rigid one-point perspective. This hyper-rationalized rendering of space seemed to clash with the expressive quality of the representation of the king. Like constitutional limits on a megalomaniac, the one-point perspective seemed to detonate the strongman’s fury and paranoia. Whether venting his rage in solitary, or having his fears gentled by an attendant, the king’s private drama seemed to promise destruction for a public transfixed by this spectacle. This is a car crash that we are drawn to watch, but a crash we also may be destined to live.

The work in the 11^th Shanghai Biennale often paled in comparison to work in earlier editions of the show; its written material’s weakness prevented the biennale from developing its own identity, and the show’s spectacular projects were often a little underwhelming. In spite of this, the biennale was able to reframe a number of older works in compelling ways, and contained works which helped viewers reconsider histories and subjects to which they have become desensitized. And so, it was the sad fate of the 11^th Shanghai Biennale to sometimes be able to give life to past events and older works, without ever being able to completely shake the ghosts of earlier biennales.

©Vincent Pruden

The Taipei Biennale was a mid-size show with more than eighty artists. It was housed at the Taipei Fine Art Museum and was easily viewed in one day. The show ran from September 10, 2016 until February 2, 2017 and Corinne Diserens was curator.

 By not aspiring to be a mega-exhibition, overvaluing young “it-artists,” or running after an overwhelming amount of new work, by not spending its time inventing new worlds or imagining new futures from scratch, by shunning the shallow glitz and gimmicks of so many other biennales, the Taipei Biennale managed to be one of the most exciting shows this year. It was a quiet, serious, mid-sized biennial that was interested in the shifting meanings of landscapes. And though the biennial had its share of new works and young artists, it spent a good amount of time looking back at older works by established artists, often finding interesting ways to reconsider their work.

The biennial explored landscapes whose meanings had been transformed by particular events. Sntu Mofokeng’s photographic essay Chasing Shadows explored locations that were imbued with significance by the religious services held there. Jo Radcliff’s photographs looked at South African landscapes charged with meaning by violent events, even though few traces of the violence remained. Hsu Pin Lee’s series of photographs Disastrous Landscapes considered the banal realities of areas of the Taiwanese countryside that had been invested with spectacular meanings by media coverage of natural disasters.

Another way that the biennial explored the shifting meanings of landscapes was by examining two or more moments over which the meaning of a landscape changed. An example of this was Fei Hao Chen’s small conceptual project, Family Album. This work looked at the shift from the Japanese colonial period to Taiwan’s transition to the Republic of China; and the move from Taiwan’s official language being Japanese to Mandarin. This change shaped people’s private lives; the work explored the effect this change had on the artist’s own family. Family Album expresses Chen’s feelings of alienation from the life experiences of his grandparents, which were lived out in a different language

Tiffany Chung’s Remapping History: An Autopsy of a Battle was another example of a work that explored two different moments to track the changing meaning of the landscape. Chung not only related her father’s experience as a pilot and prisoner in the Vietnam War, she also analyzed the 1971 operation Lan Són 719, and the 1972 Easter offensive, and remapped her father’s war experiences onto contemporary Vietnam. Chung drove the runway where her father, a pilot, took off. Forty years separate her remapping from her father’s experience and the landscape has significantly changed. It is likely that many may have already seen this work elsewhere; Chung is a perennial favorite of the biennial circuit. But seeing it in the context of a show devoted to this type of reimagining comes with the advantage that one focused less on Chung’s father’s heroism and more on the remapping of the past onto the present.

Like Chung, Chen Chieh-Jen is a biennial favorite. His project Realm of Reverberations explored the different meanings of a landscape by viewing it over a number of different moments in its history. Realm of Reverberations was a powerful work. It was a four-channel video installation that explored the Losheng Sanitarium in terms of its multiple meanings, through the many stages of its existence: the sanitarium had been a Japanese prison, a Taiwanese sanitarium, and is now a maintenance depot for the Department of Rapid Transit. Viewers saw its story through the eyes of four characters, three real and one fictional, who lived through the building’s different stages. Chen’s work was linked to a protest movement that, in the name of the sanitarium’s remaining inmates, had fought its recent transformation.

The Taipei Biennial’s film series showed a number of Chen’s films, including Empire’s Borders I and The Route (click to see the films online). These films grew out of projects which included photographic series with texts. The photographs have been shown at a number of different biennials. They are quite good. But seeing the films was a real treat—they carry a lot of punch.

 A number of other works in the biennale’s excellent film series also expressed this interest in the shifting social meaning of space. Two films considered the expectation that statues will anchor our collective memory. Balman Kiarostani’s Statue of Tehran and Huang Mingchuan’s Flat Tyre both dealt with the roles that statues and monuments played in reflecting a culture’s understanding of itself. Both trace the history of monuments that in the past had social significance but were later removed. Kiarostani’s film is a documentary that traces the fate of sculptures created to celebrate the Iranian revolution that years later were replaced by kitschy apolitical decorations. Mingchuan’s was a Taiwanese fictional film that, among other things, traced how the once ubiquitous sculptures of Chiang Kai-Shek, long Taiwan’s president, were, over a short period of time, replaced with religious works.

It is interesting to consider how Kyungah Ham’s Embroidery Project fits into this show that tracked the changing meaning of landscape over time. The Embroidery Project’s meaning shifted as its location changed, transforming during the work’s production, as it was moved from South Korea to North Korea and back again. From a distance, the work looked like paint on canvas with very pronounced brushstrokes. It was easy to miss the fact that the works’ meaning was carried both by their surfaces and by the history of their production. Without reading the project’s title, one’s first impulse was to reduce the works, with what seem to be their prominent brush strokes and the pop lyrics scrawled across their surfaces, to a kitsch return to abstract expressionism. Like abstract expressionism, they seemed to insist on the individuality of the work’s creator. Closer examination revealed that the images were not made of glossy paint but very fine needlework. It was so fine, in fact, and covered so much surface, that it suggested that many hands were involved in the work’s production.

In South Korea, Ham created the designs for her works in Photoshop, and then had the designs clandestinely smuggled to North Korea, where workers created needlepoint versions of them. These finished versions were then smuggled back to South Korea. Faced with this history of production, one found oneself imagining the meaning the work must have carried in these different locations. In totalitarian North Korea, the work’s design must have spoken strongly of individuality, often seen as a key to resisting totalitarianism. Back in South Korea, the works’ needlepoint must have manifested the collective nature of the work, and pushed against the West’s version of the role of the artist as the ultimate individual. The Embroidery Project was interesting because of its ability to suggest its own meanings in different locations. Still, it ran serious risks. One of the smugglers or other North Korean workers could have ended up in prison. This would have been much too high a price to pay for a work of art.

The Taipei Biennial’s commitment to reimagining space made it unsurprising that there were two lovely projects that touch on the Situationists. The first was a film called Wild Architect (1936-2016), a film written to Vincent Meessen, and credited to Anonymous.  The film’s title comes from Guy Debord’s Preface to Ezio Gribaudo and Alberico Sala’s Jorn / Le jardin d’Albisola and follows Asger Jorn’s many phases moving from being a supporter of Le Corbusier to being an important member of the Situationists. The film explores the aesthetics that Jorn developed for his Villa in Albissola Marina. This same aesthetic also appeared in the second project, Meessen’s three-channel video installation, One, Two, Three, which looked at the Situationists through the eyes of one of its Congolese members, M’Belolo Ya M’Piku, and the protest song which he wrote for May 1968. But far from being an uncritical assessor of the Situationists, M’Belolo looked back and criticized them for not having given women enough say in the movement. In his own story, M’Belolo has to some extent tried to remedy this problem. Back in Kinshasa, in an atmosphere of civil unrest, M’Belolo ran a recording studio. He sings his protest song as an all-women band plays along. The recording studio is called One, Two, Three. It is a terrific location where clashing tiles create the aesthetics that one associates with Jorn and his Villa in Albissola Marina. One, Two, Three, is an intelligent, engaging work.

There were a number of other works in the Taipei Biennial that shared the disjunctive aesthetics of Jorn’s villa. An example of this was Lin Yi-Wei’s beautiful series of paintings. The unity of these works was constantly being undermined either by clashing elements in their compositions or inconsistencies in their illusions of depth. There were also works which were disjunctive in other ways. Reinhard Mucha’s work Coesfeld left viewers unsure whether to see it as a sculpture or as a functional object. In spite of Its formal beauty, one continually wanted to open it like a cabinet. This disrupted our habitual categories of objects, bemusing viewers in interesting ways.

Like the Taipei Biennale’s engagement with the Situationists, one of the show’s greatest strengths was its ability to engage and sometimes even reimagine the practices of important historical artists. Occasionally, the biennale simply showed the artist’s work, like the three wonderful films by Yvonne Rainer which appeared in the show’s film series or the paintings by the important Chinese/Taiwanese artist, Yeh Shih-Chiang. But more typical of the way that the show used these historical artists and works was Yeh Wei-Li ‘s project which revisited Yeh Shih-Chiang’s work by looking at a number of the spaces where Yeh Shih-Chiang worked. Yeh Wei-Li created new works out of the remnants of these old spaces. Of course, Yeh Wei-Li’s work also fit the show’s concern with the shifting meaning of location.

In Retrospective, Xavier Le Roy revisited his own work from 1994-2014. But this was not a simplistic return. His gestures were transformed into loops by other dancers, who mixed the dance with their own autobiographies. The dancers reset their actions each time a new viewer entered the space. They would focus on the viewer moving toward them in very particular ways. Then one dancer from the group would approach and explain how a particular gesture fit into the dancer’s own biography.

Two of Manon de Boer’s amazing 16mm films revisited historical artists. Her works Sequenze and Two Times 4’33” revisited the work of Luciano Berio and John Cage, respectively. These two films were interesting, but her third film, Resonating Surfaces, was amazing. It was firstly an incredibly beautiful portrait of the city of San Paulo, its images reminiscent of Bernice Abbot’s photographs of New York. It fit into the show’s emphasis on location. Second, the film was a portrait of Suely Rolnik. In the film, a voiceover which seemed to be extracted from Rolnik’s article Deleuze, Schizoanalyst (Click to see the article), gives an account of Rolnik’s suffering and imprisonment under Brazil’s military dictatorship, and how a research project proposed by Félix Guattari helped Rolnik heal. Resonating Surfaces was a beautiful and important work.

Quietness and seriousness are not qualities commonly associated with contemporary art biennials, much less the contemporary art world. But these were the qualities that made the Taipei Biennial important. Its interest in the shifting meanings of landscapes and willingness to reconsider the practices of established artists made the Taipei Biennial one of the most exciting shows this year.

©Vincent Pruden

The 2016 Singapore Biennale was the show’s 5th iteration. It was a mid-size biennale with 60 artists. Almost all of the work was split between two locations, the Singapore Art Museum’s main location and SAM at 8Q Plaza. It was possible to see the whole show in a single day if one skipped three films by two different Chinese filmmakers, Wen Pulin and Zang Honghua. But it would have been a shame to skip these films—they were the show’s most interesting works.

The Singapore Biennale’s main themes were atlases and mirrors, and though many of the works in the show were deeply engaged with the histories of colonialism, often it was unclear how these works reflected on the contemporary world. This meant that the show’s politics were mostly rather tame. Additionally, the biennale showed works that were occasionally illustrative and sometimes even a little derivative. These weaknesses revealed the Singapore Biennale’s reluctance to take risks, and also made the show a little underwhelming.

                                                                                                           

Often, as in PALA Pothupitiye’s charming work, the Other Map Series, when the show evoked contemporary politics it did so in ways that were not profound. Pothupitiye created his images by drawing directly on maps; the series was spread across three of the walls of a room in the exhibition space. The works on the first wall looked at the influence of colonial powers all over the world, the second wall at their influence in Sri Lanka. These images showed fortresses, warships, and soldiers firing guns. Where these two walls painted a detailed picture of the activities of the colonial powers, the third wall’s images depicted the ongoing civil war in Sri Lanka, reducing it to yawning tigers and lions’ mouths mostly drawn over the maps’ inlets and bays. Though these animals represented the civil war’s warring factions, it demoted them to natural elements of the landscape, causing this otherwise interesting work’s reflections on contemporary politics to be relatively superficial.

Similarly, Sharmiza Abu Hassan’s The Covenant focused on the past but was only able to address the present indirectly. It was based on a story from the Malay Annals in which a king broke his covenant with a young boy. The boy had devised a way to solve the kingdom’s flying swordfish problem, which had made parts of the kingdom uninhabitable. Fearing the boy’s ingenuity, the king had him murdered. In the show, a tangle of aluminum swordfish was bunched above viewers’ heads. The king and the boy were represented by a throne and a chair. The story was an allegory meant to criticize contemporary Malaysian citizens’ willing acquiescence to power. There is a long history of political work having to be allegorical in order to avoid political censorship. The Covenant may express the limits imposed on artworks in Malaysia; in Singapore, it seemed subdued.

Han Sai Por’s Black Forest also engaged contemporary politics, but pulled its punches. Black Forest was a large and beautiful installation of burnt wood meant to represent man’s destruction of the environment. But viewers were excluded from the burnt area. They were only able to appreciate it from the outside. Perhaps this was intended to create a critical distance between the viewer and the work, but experiencing the work all around us, under our feet, would have been powerful.

Occasionally, it was even unclear how a work contributed to our understanding of the colonial past. In spite of its desire to reveal overlooked histories, Agan Harahap’s series of photographs called the Mardijker Photo Studio was a little baffling. Harahap’s images featured the Mardijker, a community of freed slaves originally brought by the Portuguese to Indonesia. And though there are paintings of them, no photographs seem to exist. Harahap created photographs from scratch, using Photoshop to transform old photographic archives of Europeans and non-Europeans. These images were troubling because they were easily confused with real historical documents. Little alerted viewers to the fact that they were fake. Spectators who ignored the wall text saw them as real. On the other hand, if viewers understood that they were fake, it became unclear what they contributed to our understanding of the past. It is true that these images focused our attention on this overlooked history. But they also suggested facts about the Mardijker: how they looked, dressed, and comported themselves. And the project gave viewers no way to determine if these were accurate representations or the products of Harahap’s powerful imagination. The project’s overall effect seemed to be to create confusion about the past. This was very different than Harahap’s habitual works. He is well known for his Instagram images that frequently represent contemporary figures. These images are immediately recognizable as implausible fictions. For example, he has a photograph of Angelina Jolie being arrested in Jakarta. These works allow viewers to imagine a different present as opposed to muddling our understanding of the past.

There were other reasons that the Singapore Biennale’s works were disappointing: sometimes, as with Eddy Susanto’s work the Journey of Panji, it felt illustrative. Susanto was inspired by the Panji cycle. This was a series of stories that spread into a number of different languages before finally being written down. Susanto represented these different languages by having a pile of letters flowing out of a huge book. The book was a beautiful object, but the letters seemed to illustrate the work’s subject matter.

Occasionally, works in the biennial were derivative. Fyerool Darma’s The Most Mild Mannered Men was an example of this. The work consisted of two different pedestals, one holding the bust of Sir Stamford Raffles, while the other pedestal was empty except for a plaque bearing the name of Sultan Hussein Mua’zzam. The point of the piece was that Raffles was remembered in Singaporean history, where Mua’zzam, in spite of having played an important role, was not.  But this technique of showing one full pedestal and one empty one, has a past. Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, which was created at The Maryland Historical Society, had six pedestals. Three contained busts: Napoleon, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson. The other three were empty; each had a plaque, one bearing the name Harriet Tubman, another Benjamin Banneker and the third Frederick Douglass. This was Wilson’s way of pointing to important African Americans from Maryland whose busts were not included in the Museum. Using pedestals in exactly the same way as Wilson made Darma’s work seem unoriginal.

The Singapore Biennial’s flaws, the fact that its works were occasionally derivative, sometimes illustrative, and often only able to address contemporary politics superficially, are indications of the show’s unwillingness to take risks. These flaws express a desire not only to be able to predict viewers’ reactions to the work but more importantly to ensure the reaction of the powerful. Predictably, however, this tends to produce underwhelming shows.

In spite of this, the Singapore Biennale had a number of important works.  There was a nice little mini-exhibition called Witness to Paradise with Nilima Sheikh, Praneet Soi, Abeer Gupta and Sanjay Kak. But my favorite works were two films by Wen Pulin and one by Zang Honghua. These three films had their own screening room. Seeing all three required almost four hours. But they were well worth it. Wen’s China Action documented the birth of performance art in China and the role that it played as a tool of resistance. His second film, Seven Performances during the 1989 China Avant-Garde Exhibition, showed the ground-breaking China Avant-Garde exhibition and seven crucial interventions made by performance artists during the show’s opening. This exhibition took place shortly before the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and the performances were important uninvited interventions which occurred on the edge of the show. Zang’s film Ling Long Tower documents a more complex story about contemporary China, in which some artists have gained a good deal of success and position, while others continue to struggle for freedom. In a complicated landscape, viewers find themselves wondering how free these artists really are, and what it would mean for them to be free. Wen’s and Zang’s films were well worth seeing, they would have been the highlight of any show.

In spite of these three films, the Singapore Biennale was disappointing. Its interest in the colonial past did not help viewers reflect on contemporary politics. Works were sometimes illustrative and occasionally derivative. It was a show that played it safe, and playing it safe cost it dearly.

©Vincent Pruden

A mid-size show, the Jakarta Biennale could easily be seen in one day. It was held between the 15^th of November, 2015 and the 17^th of January, 2016.

The Jakarta biennale was a hard show not to like. It did well what other biennales do badly. A common flaw among biennales, a flaw that tends to limit their ability to represent local concerns, is that they are almost exclusively peopled by artists and curators foreign to their host countries. And though the Jakarta biennale did have a renowned foreign head curator, Charles Esche, and important foreign artists, including Superflex and Renzo Martin, it was largely populated by local artists and curators. Apart from Esche, all of the show’s curators were Indonesian and each was from a different province; additionally, all benefitted from the fact that the show functioned as a lab, created to develop the country’s stock of curators. Along with the majority of the curators being Indonesian, an exceptionally large number of the biennale’s artists were also Indonesian, from all over the country. Additionally, most of the non-Indonesian artists came from the region.

Another common flaw among biennales is that most are apolitical—this in spite of conceiving of themselves as highly political affairs. And even if they are political, most biennales avoid showing works whose politics might challenge local norms or élites, and often any politics that are included are tempered with a sort of cynicism. In contrast, the work in the Jakarta Biennale was extremely political, created to address local audiences, and was upbeat; so upbeat, in fact, that Renzo Martin’s brutal, often funny and deeply cynical film Enjoy Poverty, seemed completely out of place there.

History and memory were important themes at the Jakarta Biennale; they were often used by Indonesian artists to look at local history. One example of this was Bron Zelani’s Act Like A Man, a large colorful drawing in the style of a comic book. It chronologically follows the history of rockabilly in Indonesia, starting with the internationally renowned Indonesian rockabilly group the Tielman Brothers. Another example was Idrus bin Harun’s very political mural Bhaneka Tinggal Luka. Harun’s style was vaguely reminiscent of the work of Jose Clemente Orozco, and his mural documented the negative effects that oil exploitation as well as conservative religious and military leadership have had on the country. Additionally, the work’s title was a complex wordplay wherein Indonesia’s official motto “unity in diversity” was slightly modified to read as “dolls left with wounds.”

Ariani Darmawan’s film Sugiharti Halim (Click on the title to see the film online) was a third example of a local artist making work about Indonesian history. This fictional film took as its starting point an historical event, the 1966 Presidential Decree no.12/U/kep/12/1966, which forced those Indonesians with Chinese-sounding names to change them to Indonesian-sounding names. Set in contemporary Indonesia, the film shows a woman on a series of failed first dates complaining about the effect that the law has had on her and her name. This subtle, funny little film was able to tease out the political implications of the decree.

The video installation, Towards figures of dedication, and a flood, was perhaps the most important work in the show. It was created by Tom Nicholson, a non-Indonesian artist, with the help of Grace Samboh, an Indonesian curator.  The work is about Indonesian history and the construction of memory. In the video, Nicholson and Samboh interview Edhi Sunarso, an important Indonesian sculptor known for having created some of the country’s most important monuments. He was commissioned to create many of the country’s historical dioramas. The video explores the production of these dioramas, which were created to construct official memory. As opposed to seeing history as a transparent key to understanding the present, Towards figures of dedication, and a flood looks at how history is often constructed and instrumentalized by the powerful.  (Click here for an English transcript of the video).

Another important work made by a non-Indonesian artist that touched on Indonesian history was Jeremy Millar’s beautiful and meandering essay film Adbo Rinbo (Je est un Autre) (Click on the title to see the film online), which takes as its starting point the history of Arthur Rimbaud’s visit to Indonesia. The film follows some of Rimbaud’s own meanderings, but also touches on Gustave Courbet’s role in the destruction of the Vendome Column.

Oscar Muñoz had two small beautiful videos that functioned as metaphors of memory and forgetting. They were also connected to one of the biennale’s other important themes, water. In Dystopia, a video showed pages with text being dipped into a solvent which dissolved the text into individual letters; the letters rotated in different directions, clumping together into unintelligible patterns of lost meaning. In a similar fashion, Muñoz’s video Ciclope showed photographs dissolving in a whirlpool of solvent, the photographs’ detached blacks and grays pooling in amorphous bodies of an irretrievable past. Muñoz’s use of water connected his work to much of the other work in the show. Water was a perfect theme for an archipelago like Indonesia.

Another example of an artist working with water was Dea Widya, whose wonderful work, A City of Anywhere was critical of the universalist claims of modernist architecture. Widya created models of modern buildings out of dried clay, and placed the buildings in hidden pools of water. Over the course of the show, the models absorbed water, and one by one fell apart. Widya used water to stage the failure of modern architecture to adapt to the particularity of Indonesia as a site.

Many of the other works that dealt with water touched on the environment and the coming environmental crisis. Tata Salina’s playfully incisive project 1001st Island-The Most Sustainable Island in Archipelago (Click on the title to see the film online) was an example of this. Salina was doubtful about the viability of Jakarta’s land reclamation project that aims to create new manmade islands. This land reclamation project not only is likely to negatively effect fishermen, forcing them to go further out to sea to make their catch, but also does not seem to achieve its stated goal of creating new housing for the poor to offset the land lost in Jakarta as the city sinks; most of the space created by the land reclamation is reportedly set aside for luxury housing and golf courses. (Click for an article on the subject.) So, with the help of local fishermen, Salina created a new island made out of the trash that people have thrown in the water.  Salina’s work suggests that polluting is man’s most viable project. Her film ends with a beautiful aerial shot of the artist standing on the island as it floats out into the ocean. The show’s concentration on upbeat political work that addressed local audiences made the Jakarta Biennale a very enjoyable show.

©Vincent Pruden

The 6^th Marrakech Biennale ran from February 24th to the 8th of May, 2016. Its curator was Reem Fadda.

The 6^th Marrakech Biennale was a good, mid-size show featuring a number of strong works and interesting themes. Spreading the biennale throughout the city’s important tourist locations gave the show its character. However, this choice came with advantages and disadvantages. Nothing could have been better than wandering through the Medina from one of the biennale’s sites to another; many of the show’s locations were simply breathtaking. Dar Si Said and the Palais El Bahia were amazing.  But putting work in tourist locations also sent the message that the biennale was for tourists; that a biennale does not have its roots in a local audience is often seen as a flaw, since it limits the potential for exchange. The other problem was that occasionally it felt like there must be better places to show contemporary art, especially with regard to some of the works shown outside at Palais El Badii. Some works seemed overwhelmed by the vastness of the space, and the fragility of others seemed at odds with the harshness of the climate.

As opposed to creating a catalogue for all of its artists, the Marrakech Biennale’s organizers chose to create a pamphlet for each. This choice risked concealing what a well-curated show the biennale was. Its pamphlets put the emphasis on each individual artist, obscuring the ideas that connected all of their work, and thus hiding the show’s overall logic and rigor. A catalogue would have also removed the initial negative impression created by the quantity of older work. Biennales are commonly criticized for not having enough work created explicitly for them; but judging the 6^th Marrakech Biennale by this criterion misses the point. Its greatest strength was not that it was a showcase of new work, but that it seemed to create an aesthetic genealogy that placed the city of Marrakesh at the intersection of Africa and the Middle East.

The show’s curator, Reem Fadda, appears to have built the biennale on these two pillars, with the work of the Ecole des Beaux-Art de Casablanca functioning as a meeting point between the two. Fadda used their work and the poetically physical sculptures of Khalil El Ghrib to develop an aesthetic that united much of the show’s work. It connected artists from the Middle East and Africa and the African Diaspora, notably two African American artists. The beautiful hanging works of both Al Loving and Sam Gilliam not only shared the palette of the Ecole des Beaux-Art de Casablanca but much of its physicality. And Melvin Edward contributed to the show’s aesthetic, albeit indirectly, with his wonderful welded work inspired by African masks. The development of the biennial’s aesthetic led to a challenging and physical installation by Oscar Murillo and to curious and beautiful works by Jumana Manna.

Two important essay films that focused on African unity added to this commitment to transnational connections. The first was Marthia Diaware’s visually uneven but intellectually stunning film, Négritude: Un Dialogue Entre Senghor and Soyinka, which staged a discussion between Wole Soyinka and Léopold Sédar Senghor. It was created by combining historical footage of Senghor talking about the negritude movement with footage of Soyinka commenting on Senghor’s ideas. The second film was the Otolith Group’s wonderful film, In the Year of the Quiet Sun, about the year that almost led to African unity; the film’s story was told through postage stamps. These nostalgic returns to the moment of African independence and African unity seemed both to run the risk of being co-opted by neoliberal globalism but also to present the sort of transnational solidarity that may be key to resisting it.

The extremely important Senegalese filmmaker Djibul Diop Mambeth had three films in the biennale. Unfortunately, because all three films were playing at the same time in the same room, they functioned more as a nod to the historical importance of the works, as opposed to an opportunity for viewers to watch them.

The show also contained a number of wonderful conceptual works. Naeem Mohaiemen had a project which was impossible to find—it was hidden in a lower level of the Khalid Art Gallery— but was one of my favorite works. It was called Volume Eleven (flaw in the algorithm for cosmopolitanism). It told the story of Mohaiemen’s great uncle Syed Mujtabe Ali, an important Bengali journalist and scholar, who admired “Adolf Hitler as a military strategist.” He also believed that if the Germans defeated the English it would lead to the liberation of India. And Rayyane Tabet had a wonderful work about his great-grandfather’s relationship to a German spy in World War II.

Superflex had a beautiful film called Kwassa Kwassa that tells the story of Mayotte, an island off the coast of Africa, which in 2014 voted to return to the status of a French colony.  Mayotte’s becoming linked to Europe led to mass immigration from the African continent and the surrounding islands. These immigrants arrived on fiberglass boats called kwass. In the film the kwass poetically became Zeus, who in Greek mythology abducted Europa, whom the film presents as an African woman. In the same space Kader Attia had a version of his installation Reasons Oxymoron, an amazing work, but one shown at too many recent biennales.

The Marrakech Biennale was an extremely well-curated show which not only seemed to produce an aesthetic genealogy locating Marrakesh at the intersection of Africa and the Middle East, but that also contained a number of wonderful conceptual works and films, with two of the films looking at African unity and the Negritude movement. The biennale was well worth the visit; and, needless to say, so was Marrakech.

©Vincent Pruden