#victorsternweiler

Victor Sternweiler on the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – titled by Koyo Kouoh. Visited and reviewed in mid May, 2026. _________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dear fellow porcile.org contributor Beniamino,

thank you for your quick recommendations for La Biennale di Venezia. I arrived with only a few opening-weekend posts as reference, and now, from Nice, with a little distance after days at the Cannes Film Festival, I am sending you my takes—or rather, what remained in my memory, as a psychoanalytic exercise.

Think of these notes as an appetizer—or a way to compare impressions once you see it yourself.

Giardini - national pavilions

I was greeted by origami steel deer by the Ukrainian Pavilion, otherwise located at the Arsenale.

At the Belgian Pavilion I saw Miet Warlop’s crew. I had recently seen her performance at HAU, One Song from 2022, which was very impressive—a hard to describe piece about the essence of theatricality, about acting, tempo, and what it means to be in sync in a collective performance. I also met her briefly there, and she told me she would stay in Venice until November and also perform herself, too. However, the HAU performance simply raised the bar too high for me.

At the Dutch Pavilion, there was an massive garage gate installed in front of the entrance. The pavilion seemed to operate according to a performance cycle every two hours or so, but I never managed to catch it properly. Once I finally did, it was postponed because somebody was sick. I am not sure whether this is the right thing to do at the Biennale: to open for five minutes every two hours, lock people in for twenty minutes, and then close again. It sounds cool, but perhaps it is a little too cool for school.

The Danish Pavilion a huge video installation by Maja Malou Lyse featured very high-profile porn stars, which was intriguing, though the installation itself felt oddly unresolved. Between the 360-degree projection and the ceiling, there was this awkward gap that looked quite ugly. The smaller second room felt like an afterthought, filled with smaller objects by the same artist. It had the strange feeling of walking from the “main exhibition” directly into the museum shop, as though one had just seen the major installation and was now being invited to buy the memorabilia. I am speaking, of course, as a collector.

The Russian Pavilion: a projection on a transparent surface covering the door, thus making the pavilion inaccessible. What a missed opportunity to create a buzz. 

The Japanese Pavilion by Ei Arakawa-Nash left me rather cold. Being there, I did not understand the fuss around the plastic babies that you are supposed to hold in your arms. The supposed emotional charge of the gesture did not quite reach me, as I grew up in a large family where there are constantly new babies to hold. I remained unimpressed.

The German Pavilion, with its temporary GDR Berlin façade by Sung Tieu, and especially Henrike Naumann’s art, was really good. Naumann’s green room is probably her magnum opus. It was everything she had done before, but brought to a more reflexive and complex level. She was no longer simply arranging objects in a room; she was dissecting them, opening them up.

I liked the Canadian Pavilion. Abbas Akhavan, whose art I tend to like, managed to work with the complicated architecture of the pavilion very well and installed a pool. It was inviting in that sense, as, like me, many people really wanted to stay around. As for the Nordic Countries Pavilion, the oversized (and perhaps disfigured?) sculptures by Tori Wrånes had an immense presence in their interplay with gravity. Most importantly, I liked the fact that the artist created dedicated clothing items that were equally original and, in my humble opinion, worthy of an haute couture show in themselves.

The Austrian Pavilion by Florentina Holzinger, on the other hand, was very impressive. During the opening weekend, from what I got from Instagram stories, the artist climbed up by rope to a bell, and the body became the gong. This time around her frequent collaborator climbed up, almost naked in the cold, performed with a physical intensity that was genuinely striking. Inside, there were further installations and machines processing feces, and other forms of theatrical gimmickry that were, as always, handled very convincingly. There was even someone performatively cleaning the space. Still, I cannot help feeling that she cannot shake off autobiographical references (Christianity, or Freud in A Year Without Summer) where similar motifs appeared. But despite all of that, the pavilion was absolutely worth seeing. The Spanish, Swiss, Czech, French, Hungarian, British (which always has excellent sound), Australian, Finish, Brazilian, Venetian, and Polish pavilions have mostly already slipped from my mind. The Greek Pavilion surprised me, though not entirely in a good way. It tried to reproduce something like an escape-room atmosphere, but it was so direct, so literal, that I could not detect much of an artistic gesture beyond the staging itself. It had potential, but it felt disappointing.

Giardini – central pavilion

Curated by Koyo Kouoh, on the right, it started with a reproduction of Duchamp’s Museum in a Box. More prominently, actually, there was Celia Vásquez Yui’s podium of fictional animals in clay, with geometrical patterns. I was also happy to see Tammy Nguyen’s art. She is one of the people behind Martha’s Quarterly, New York, which, in my opinion, is one of the hottest artist-publication collectives around. There were large-scale paintings by her, but the books felt underrepresented, to my very personal taste. I also discovered the art of Sabian Baumann, and especially liked the small clay sculptures. I saw Raed Yassin’s ‘Warhol of Arabia’.

Arsenale – main section

At the entrance to the Arsenale, the large 360-degree video installation, with its barely moving images, reminded me of the Pergamon Panorama in Berlin. It was a nice start to the tour, throwing you into darkness and making you find your way forward. I was surprised to see Nick Cave’s art, which seemed like art expensive to produce. I ran into Raed Yassin’s art again. I liked the art of the artist Nicholas Hlobo, which was a rubber-and-leather-sewn gigantic BDSM monster siren—that’s what fashion for sirens looks like. Next to it, by Rajni Perrera + Marigold Santos, there was that amazing clay sculpture of human-like, yet deformed, proportions, which had a clay mask. It was mounted on a 20 cm high platform and was surrounded by so many smaller objects. I thought it was very cool.

I was completely in love with Alfredo Jaar’s room-in-a-room. A great idea by the artist, and chapeau to the curators for making it happen. Carsten Höller (what a superstar!) you get it when you “see” it. His art can also be seen at Palazzo Diedo. Eric Baudelaire dissected his film Une fleur à la bouche from 2022, premiered at Berlinale #pirandello. I remember attending the premiere and Q&A, which was excellent. I’m still in awe of his film The Ugly One. But here he seemed simply to have broken up parts of the film into a five-channel installation of a section circling around. I thought: yes, fine, moving on.

Arsenale – Artiglierie

Among the national pavilions, I remember the Filipino Pavilion very well, with its cool silver-metal look by Jon Cuyson. The Slovenian Pavilion by Nomument Group, with its film-set-like ruins, also sticks in my mind and could be a great fit for the Architecture Biennale too. The Latvian Pavilion, by MAREUNROL'S, in dialogue with the 'Untamed Fashion Assemblies' archive of fashion designer Bruno Birmanis, gave me a very peculiar feeling: like the beforemath or aftermath of a fashion show, with hangers lying around and the sense that people had just been there. I have to admit that, for a second, I was like, “Is it art or is it the staff break room?” I think it is the quality of great art to make you, on the first encounter, doubt your senses.

Uzbekistan had a solid pavilion. I liked the eerie kinetic pieces by Hanoi-based artist Nguyen Phuong Linh. I appreciated the fact that they brought some non-diaspora artists from Asia.

The Indian Pavilion slipped my memory, although it was huge, as did the Italian and Chinese pavilions, and all the others in between, such as Ireland, Malta, etc.

Arsenale – Gaggiandre

Near the Italian Pavilion, I saw Tsai Ming-liang’s beautiful video Sand from 2018, from his Walker series, by the water. It was an outdoor projection. Next to it was the fantastic art by Alice Maher, her orange resin heads from 1996 looking out of the water—uncanny. And also the amazing sphinx-pose, pitch-black siren sculpture on a copper-colored mesh pedestal by Wangechi Mutu.

Arsenale – Sale d’armi

The Argentinian Pavilion by Matías Duville was very beautiful: ephemeral, delicate, with salt spread across the space and black elements drawn into it. The whole notion of ephemerality was strongly present. In fact, perhaps the entire Biennale should be something like that, #sustainability, considering how much is produced only to be disposed of later.

I also liked the atmosphere in the Saudi Pavilion showing Dana Awartani: perfect light, a huge about 50 cm raised floor occupying most of the room, and a spatial arrangement of floor tiles that forced you to walk around rather than through it. It had an effect (perhaps theatrical, perhaps architectural) and it worked for me.

I saw the Ukrainian Pavilion with documentation videos about the travelling deer, which also appeared near the Giardini.

I saw Aline Bouvy’s new book La Merde, also the title of the exhibition, and her video piece, which was to be viewed within a dedicated installation. Pretty much next to it was the Albanian Pavilion by Genti Korini: a three-channel installation on massive 16:9 displays, mixing moving images of archaic life with a very modern narrator who walked out of a Rick Owens catwalk. In that regard, and in combination with the Danish Pavilion, I was very happy to see a turn to more acting-oriented video installation with professional cast and videography, as opposed to the video-editing orgies of found footage of the last few years.

The Singaporean, Turkish, Mexican, and UAE pavilions really escaped my memory.

The Israeli Pavilion, relocated next to the Arsenale’s cafeteria, had this plastic waterfall installation. I wonder why the artist Belu-Simion Fainaru voiced his protest regarding the call for the exclusion of the Israeli and US pavilions; the concept did not seem prize-worthy to me.

Off-site – from the fraction that I could catch

Close to the Giardini, I saw the Estonian Pavilion by Merike Estna, which had a charming, process-based quality, where the artist was continuously painting on her canvases laid on the floor and creating a kind of tableau of about 10 x 2 panels/canvases. The idea seemed to be that the final piece would only be completed by the end of the Biennale.

On Via Garibaldi, the Cuban Pavilion by Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy was a very pleasant surprise: as if Easter Island monolithic human heads were reproduced by El Anatsui, to give you some coordinates :). The small space was completely packed with objects. Many curators would have shown half of them, or even a third, but here the density was suffocating, in a good way.

Then I went to Palazzo Marin and saw Shirin Neshat’s videos, in chapters, following her protagonist of multiple personas across different contexts and locations. Formally decent, but I didn’t see anything that one can’t anticipate with her art.

Opposite that, I saw a prominently promoted exhibition by Dale Chihuly, a Jeff Koons for Murano aficionados whom I had never heard of.

Next, at Palazzo Franchetti, which never disappoints, I catched a glimpse of a video, or two, by Saodat Ismailova. I also saw objects by the glass artist Martin Janecký, who creates faces and figures in glass, not by blowing but by shaping the hot glass from the inside. He makes busts by manipulating the material while it is still hot. This was actually very cool—another Murano star. I also saw art by Eva & Franco Mattes, which I really liked a lot, in this more domestic and thus quasi-private setting. Later I learned that the latter was co-curated by my friend Lu Haustein.

Across the bridge at the Accademia, I saw Marina Abramović’s vast exhibition. Crystals, wood, no pictures, and you are supposed to wear earplugs to experience it in silence. The execution was brilliant, but the ideas felt like something brainstormed in a café in New York: I imagine Marina saying, “Yes, we could do this, we could do that,” and everyone around her was impressed because Marina said it. Then, of course, it gets implemented and feels neat but underwhelming.

I skipped Peggy Guggenheim and went towards Punta della Dogana. Near the Basilica, there was also a Saudi mini-palazzo, promoted everywhere #maps, even at the train station. There were some nice pieces, but overall it felt like the kind of thing one does when one has infinite money. It was sad, because I actually liked the Saudi Pavilion in the Arsenale. Apparently that was not enough for them.

At Punta della Dogana, Pinault Collection, there was Lorna Simpson and Paulo Nazareth, whose art I did not know. He did videos, documentary material, participatory elements, ritualistic gestures, drawings, things to step on, things to do, a bit of Yoko Ono-style “draw your mother.” He was doing every technique that is offered at an art school. He may be the nicest person in the world, but the art was underwhelming. His work felt like protocol art before I had even read around the term.

At Punta della Dogana as a whole, you could feel the crisis of the art world. It had the atmosphere of an exhibition with low installation costs, in comparison to last time: take something from storage in Switzerland, install it quickly, no busy installation design, no extra lighting, no drama. That said, Lorna Simpson’s huge paintings were nonetheless impressive. I stood in front of them, in their scale and perfect light, and I was genuinely in awe.

Then I took the vaporetto to Fondazione Prada. I had initially been surprised by the pairing of Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, but it turned out to be a very good curatorial idea. The pieces chosen fit together much better than anticipated. It was much quieter than Christoph Büchel’s bombastic show, which I really, really liked (I know you disagree) but as a curatorial gesture, it was probably one of the best things I saw.

I also saw THE “protocol art” exhibition you suggested. Given the sophistication of the text, and what you had told me about it, I was expecting more. In reality, it felt thin: high-profile names, familiar objects, little surprise. There was nothing particularly special about it. The highlight was a “piece” by Carsten Höller and, honestly, finding a card game in the bookshop and buying it.

On my way back, I missed the other Palazzo Grassi because it closes at five. I was curious about the art of Amar Kanwar.

I ended up in the Biennale office, Ca’ Giustinian, at Canal Grande, and saw a Man Ray exhibition—a re-installation from a display in Venice in 1976. It was so beautiful: many portraits, many historical figures (I didn’t know that the famous Schönberg portrait was made by him) and some very cool pre-digital photomontages. Honestly, this was one of the highlights of the trip.

Greetings from Nice, May 20, 2026, Victor

Beniamino Foschini and Victor Sternweiler on the latest turbulence around the Venice Biennale, as of May 9, 2026. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

VS: I’ve been sharing a lot of news with you over the past few days, partly in disbelief, as the main topos of this year’s art world simply refuses to stop being news. What do you make of the most recent events?

BF: As we anticipated, the polemics surrounding the Biennale have evolved since our last conversation, with the discussion about the national pavilions and how art is framed by and in them taking center stage. The jury stated that they would “refrain from considering those countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court,” and then resigned. I thought it was a protest against the Biennale's decision to allow the Russian Federation to participate with its pavilion. In a typically Italian, populist, post-Berlusconian response to the resignations, the Biennale introduced a gimmick: Visitors could vote for their favorite artist or exhibit, as if on a reality TV show. However, we now know precisely why the jury resigned: Israeli artist Belu-Simion Fainaru threatened to sue them. In any case, who can blame the jurors? Is serving on a Biennale jury worth the thousands of euros in legal fees?

At his press conference on May 6, Biennale’s president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco said, "If the Biennale started selecting works [based on] passports, it would cease to be what it has always been: the place where the world comes together." The issue of the "passport" evokes the idea of politicization, which Buttafuoco claims would jeopardize what the Biennale "has always been." Therefore, he suggests that the Biennale must remain this way forever: linear and timeless. Any critical choice against this idea would, he claims, "undermine the stability of cultural institutions." It's Conservative Agenda 101, masked by the right wing's vulgar use of 'common sense.'

VS: Frankly, I think I’ve been naive about this. I thought the dust would settle, but now it seems to have become a race to prove who occupies the ultimate moral high ground. 

As for the Israeli artist: I agree with him that the ‘quality of art’ should not be judged by race, etc. But participating in a nation-state pavilion while asking the jury to ignore that very framework seems rather pathetic. This is exactly what we criticized before: the Biennale cannot escape the nation-state logic on which it is built.

As for the jury resignation: inconsistencies were already mounting. In their “Statement of Intention,” they acknowledged the Biennale’s “complex relationship” between art and nation-state representation (“particularly the way this relation binds artists’ work with the actions of the state they represent”), while also declaring their commitment to “the defense of human rights.” I was like: good luck with that!

As for the visitors' vote: I initially thought it might be a very interesting experiment. I was bemused to learn yesterday that another e-flux announcement had been published by participating artists who wished to withdraw from being voted on by the 'visitors’, in solidarity with the resigned jury. I keep wondering who is doing the back-office work of collecting all the signatures for these e-flux letters. :D Once again, neither curators nor artists seem to trust the wider audience’s value judgments about art; and, of course, only politicians could come up with such an idea in the first place.

As for Buttafuoco’s statements: he fantasizes that non-exclusion preserves ‘universality’—that without it, the Biennale would “cease to be what it has always been: the place where the world comes together”—as if such all-embracing openness were self-evident and unequivocally desirable. His critics’ counter-fantasy is that exclusion can purify the institution of complicity. Both attempt to reconcile contradictions that the Biennale can only stage, not resolve.

I hope jury voting is abolished once and for all. As Arthur Rubinstein said, “nothing in art can be the best”. For that matter, the awarding of prizes for ‘the best…’ is itself a classic game of nation-state doctrine: us against them, a competition over who is superior—see the Olympics, Football, or the Eurovision Song Contest. Such competition is geared toward preventing people from uniting around causes beyond the nation-state; it dictates who counts as ‘us’.

BF: I have the impression that, as you often say, all these signed letters are "preaching to the converted." I can just imagine the endless pats on the back. It's as if it's now customary for each institutional exhibition or event to incorporate its own institutional or infrastructural critique as a 'parallel event.' I found the documentation of the May 8 strike by cultural workers at the Biennale to be more impressive. It not only focused on political protest (genocide in Palestine), but also on economic and labor issues. The art world fancies itself and sells the idea of being paid for work with parties, yet the art industry is based on poorly paid jobs. 

At the other end of the spectrum, I am bewildered by Buttafuoco and his relentless call for dialogue and openness. He presents himself as the champion of pluralism against the ‘bad guys’ in the Italian and EU governments. This may seem grotesque to some, but it's relatively easy to deconstruct. Exclusion and pluralism are tricky terms, but the patterns of thought that use them are recurrent. For those unfamiliar with him, Buttafuoco is not only a public official appointed by Prime Minister Meloni, but also a writer, journalist, and pious man aligned with the right wing. Right-wing intellectuals' appeals to pluralism are not new. Not coincidentally, they never invoke it in terms of including 'minor' or 'oppressed' voices. Instead, pluralism is invoked to combat the politicization of culture and to maintain a linear narrative. Thus, pluralism serves to reproduce the structures of power and defend cultural and social order.

VS: Interesting observations. That reminds me of the culture minister of Hessen during the Bundestag hearings on 'documenta fifteen', when she more or less said to Ade Darmawan: “That is not what people want to see.” :S

Hopefully, La Biennale di Venezia has been pushed to the point where it must either dissolve or reinvent itself. We may finally be living in interesting times. :)

Beniamino Foschini and Victor Sternweiler on the reopening of the Russian pavilion, and the exhausted logic of national representation at the Venice Biennale, as of April 13, 2026. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

La Biennale di Venezia's states on March 9, 2026: "[...] La Biennale di Venezia is an open institution, as reflected in the National Participations which arise from spontaneous initiatives. Any country recognized by the Italian Republic may ask independently to participate. It can simply send a notification if it owns a Pavilion in the Giardini, or submit a letter from the competent government authority if it does not have its own permanent Pavilion. It should also be noted that countries not recognized by the Italian Republic have, over the years, found ways to participate and express themselves within the framework of the Collateral Events. In response to the communications and requests for participation from Countries, La Biennale di Venezia rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art. La Biennale, like the city of Venice, continues to be a place of dialogue, openness, and artistic freedom, encouraging connections between peoples and cultures, with enduring hope for the cessation of conflicts and suffering."

VS: What primarily irritates me is the piety with which people talk about “artistic freedom,” not just as a credo to live up to, but as a precondition for engaging in art at all—as if, without it, they would not engage in it in the first place. Art in Europe is structurally dependent on governments because so much of it depends on public money through public institutions, steered by government officials who have their own administrative goals or ideological preferences. Censorship operates not only through funding structures themselves, but through the anticipatory obedience of those who depend on them, who internalize institutional preferences in order to avoid conflict.

BF: Precisely because that dependency is not only economic but symbolic, the national pavilion cannot be understood as a neutral container for art, for which the question would not simply be whether or what artists should be allowed to exhibit. Rather, it presents a collective identity through the framework of the state. 

VS: Which is why I would say artists from the Russian Federation should certainly be present, but not under the flag of the Russian nation state. One could introduce a small pavilion at the Arsenale with a curator appointed by the Venice Biennale. Call it regional, transnational, post-national, ‘Ural’, ‘Northeast Europe’, whatever you like.

BF: Yes, the contradiction is structural, and there has been a conversation about it for a while. For example, the German pavilion has not been ‘German’ in the strict sense a few times, most notably in 2013 when it ‘exchanged’ venues with the neighboring French pavilion.

VS: Also remember Nicolaus Schafhausen’s invitation of the British artist Liam Gillick for the German pavilion, in 2009.

BF: However, the Venice Biennale still uses a nineteenth-century model of cultural representation despite speaking the language of cosmopolitan pluralism.

VS: And then we arrive at the larger embarrassment, which is that the Venice Biennale wants to have it both ways. On the one hand it tells us art must be independent from politics. On the other hand, it organizes its most visible structure through national pavilions. You cannot cluster art by nation-state and then become squeamish when people read politics into it. The politics are already built into the floor plan.

BF: To me, the Venice Biennale’s board’s decision to reopen the Russian pavilion – certainly in previous accordance with Russian officials – seems like an unintentional mockery of progressive infrastructural critique. It aims to be provocative by challenging the EU’s established position of excluding the Russian Federation in both culture and sports. Yet it unveils a hidden question about the moral discrepancies inherent in artistic and political gestures on a broader scale.

VS: To reopen it is to send a message, and it is hard to see who asked for one there—bit like Melania Trump’s Epstein disclaimer. Not because it implies ‘all is forgiven’, but because it insinuates a kind of absolution through normalization.

BF: Which is why the Venice Biennale’s board’s language of “dialogue” and “neutrality” is so inadequate. Let me pose a paradox: Even if not self-evident at first, an appeal to dialogue is usually conservative when it comes from institutions because it maintains the terms of appearance they have already granted. “Let everyone speak” sounds generous until one asks under what conditions. Dialogue is not automatically virtuous. It can also become the liturgical language through which legitimacy is laundered.

VS: Then one hears the predictable refrain: if you exclude one pavilion, where do you stop? Why not Israel, the United States, as some requested, half of Europe, everyone? Institutions say this as though they had uncovered some inconsistency in their opponents, when all they have really done is betray their own bad faith. There is, of course, always gatekeeping. There always has been. The only childish fantasy is the belief that a system of exhibition could ever function without it.

BF: The issue is not whether there is exclusion, but how exclusion is named and by whom. Now exclusion appears as curatorial judgment, administrative necessity, or ethical universalism, depending on what is most convenient. What about those states whose military industries sell weapons to those who commit war crimes? Are Germany or Italy immune from answerability? So, the real question becomes: whose gatekeeping is allowed to appear as principle, and whose is denounced as ideology?

VS: What about excluding nation states for their wrongdoings from a long time ago? It all happens in the pretext of openness but it is continuation of the same representational machinery under a more enlightened vocabulary.

BF: And perhaps also a symptom of transition. What these controversies reveal is not only moral disagreement over particular states, but a deeper exhaustion of the biennial format itself. For Venice, the pavilions system is its litmus test. The institution wants art to stand for universality while asking it to arrive stamped by nationhood.

VS: So, in the end the reopening of the Russian Pavilion is not just one bad decision among others but mainly it illuminates the whole rotten structure. The funding dependence, the national branding, the fake neutrality, the selective outrage, the managerial rhetoric of dialogue — all of it suddenly becomes visible at once.

Commented by: Victor Sternweiler – August, 2024. The PDF version can be downloaded here.

Conversants: Beniamino Foschini, Magda Wisniowska, and Victor Sternweiler [talking on Skype, in the evening of Nov 11, 2020.]

Victor: We should start our conversation about Kunstverein München’s show ‘Not Working – Artistic production and matters of class,’ [online through 2020-11-22] curated by Maurin Dietrich and Gloria Hasnay, while making clear that we were not able to attend the parallel program, consisting of tours, lectures, performances, and video screenings, which were partially screened online, and an extensive reader was published too. This will simply be a conversation about the actual show. One could claim that such a review can’t do justice to the whole project, but I claim that nobody was able to attend everything, except for the makers, so one can only have a fragmented take on it, and therefore it is legitimate to, mainly or solely, talk about the work installed in the space. 

Exhibition consisted work by Angharad Williams, Annette Wehrmann, Gili Tal, Guillaume Maraud, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Lise Soskolne, Matt Hilvers, Stephen Willats.

A film screening series selected by Nadja Abt, showing work by Adrian Paci, Agnès Varda, Ayo Akingbade, Barbara Kopple, Berwick St Collective, Laura Poitras and Linda Goode Bryant, Max Göran.

A single event screening with films selected by Simon Lässig.

Accompanying program consisting of a book presentation (Düşler Ülkesi) by Cana Bilir-Meier (in conversation with Gürsoy Doğtaş), lectures by NewFutures, Ramaya Tegegne, Tirdad Zolghadr and a publication presentation (Phasenweise nicht produktiv) from a collaboration by Carolin Meunier and Maximiliane Baumgartner.

The reader containing contributions by Annette Wehrmann, Dung Tien Thi Phuong, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Leander Scholz, Lise Soskolne, Mahan Moalemi, Marina Vishmidt and Melanie Gilligan, Steven Warwick.

Exhibition documentation: https://artviewer.org/not-working-artistic-production-and-matters-of-class/

Magda: To help, I was rereading today the booklet accompanying the exhibition, although I don’t see how the text is really going to address what we see in the actual Kunstverein space. For example, I quote, “The works on view are characterized by a consciousness of how background, socialization, education, and artistic practice are inevitably entangled. They hence allow for a consideration of these categories in relation to the actual lived realities of their producers.” Does it mean that the artists somehow reflect their own social background? Autobiographically on their own lived reality? Well, by large, they don’t. We don’t know what social background these artists are coming from.

Victor: How would you know anyhow?

Magda: Instead, the coherency of the exhibition relies on going through all the positions which were outlined in the booklet’s introduction. So, Stephen Willats investigates the historical aspect of class, Annette Wehrmann performs the interrogation of the economic model, Josef Kramhöller’s is a more personal approach to consumerism, Gili Tal tackles gentrification and cosmopolitanism, and Angharad Williams addresses the performative and fashion , and so on. And at least two of the artists are no longer alive.

Victor: In the time of Covid, where you try to make ends meet, how can you say no? What I’m trying to say is that the precariousness of their class is testified also by artists not being able to nowadays refuse to participate in an exhibition in which they potentially don’t think they fit in. They do it, plain and simple.

Beniamino Foschini: I don’t think it is due to Covid. It’s a general trend. If you're invited by the artistic director of the Venice Biennale, whatever their exhibition idea is, you participate, as an artist. It’s not anymore the time when an Alighiero Boetti could angrily refuse an invitation by Harald Szeemann.

Magda: Is that really the central problem of this exhibition? There are a lot of problematic issues, and I am now again looking at the text, especially at the end, where it states that “today the question of class is not addressed anymore.” That is completely untrue. Much of postmodernism consisted precisely of the critical inquiry into questions of class. I don’t know about you, Bensplainer, but in my time in London we had to read a lot of Bourdieu, especially his idea concerning cultural capital.

Beniamino Foschini: Jameson was my lighthouse at that time!

Magda: It was a big thing! You can’t say really the topic had been ignored since then.

The Bensplainer: Especially after the last Documenta in 2017. 

Magda: I acknowledge that the question of class is no longer about a white male perspective, defined by simple economics. But really? What does this exhibition add to this conversation? 

Beniamino Foschini: I think that the main problem here is when you set up a thematic exhibition. If you, as a curator, have some aprioristic ideas about the specific interpretations on cultural work, then you tend to apply them to your own exhibition making. Although, you tend to lose contact with the works themselves. You tend to look more at the anecdotal parts of the work and at its processes. Let’s be honest, there are no great works in the exhibition, the ones being able to question your own vision of forms and of the world in which these forms happen.

Magda: I think the older works displayed here, as Stephen Willats’ ones, from the 1980s, present some problems: they are, in fact, historical, and at that time had a certain currency, whereas they seem today …

Beniamino Foschini: … nostalgic.

Magda: And dry as well: this kind of class idea, of people living in a housing block – like he documented and interviewed – it doesn’t seem relevant anymore. The other thing is that it seems so British, so entwined in that specific culture. We know this Monty Python sketch, right? This kind of satire, for example, wouldn’t fit German society at that time, I think.

Magda: The other thing I was thinking of, while walking through the exhibition, was Pulp’s ‘Common People.’ (1995) Did anyone think of that? The song is about a girl from the upper classes, who wants to behave as being from the lower. But she never achieves that, because she always has her rich daddy in the background. I think that a potential problem this exhibition faces is of glamorizing this kind of a working-class cliché.

Victor: That song is especially ironic, as it was brought to my attention by a friend that Danae Stratou, the artist, industrialist heir and wife of Yannis Varoufakis, is the subject of that song. 

Magda: Yes, that’s why I mention it. 

Victor: I had a chat with The Bensplainer at some point and we had concerns about the installing too. It seemed, we agreed, like an art fair show display. The question is: how do you display all these works like a survey of an idea?

Magda: It is about all the artistic positions that the text referred to. As I said before.

Beniamino Foschini: If you see such an exhibition, you might consider how it fits a piece of writing, it being a master or a PhD thesis. On the other hand, it really lacks the viewer’s possibility to freely interact with the works. In other terms: how could you translate an idea for an exhibition, if the exhibition itself follows a logocentric and rational process? There is no surprise, indeed: I wanna see something, I don’t wanna learn something. 

Victor: This is a kind of philosophy made clear by the exhibition makers: what can art do and how it can utilize itself, in order to convey politics?

Beniamino Foschini: Do you mean how art can be utilitarian?

Victor: Let’s say you have a curatorial agenda, or an hypothesis: art-making as a precarious condition. And then you, as an exhibition maker, attempt to visualize that. In this sense, these works witness this very aspect, like art illustrating an intellectual point of view.

Magda: Otherwise said, either it is the work that is convincing, or the hypothesis. Right now, it doesn’t seem to be either. About the works I don’t wanna say much, but the text, its arguments can be easily dismantled. In many places, it is simply not coherent. For example, why do you state in the exhibition text that the coronavirus pandemic is what makes visible the rise of social inequalities the exhibition addresses, and then you show works from the 1980s? It makes no sense.

Beniamino Foschini: Works from the 1980s which recall works from the 1960s.

Magda: Exactly! If you were really consistent with your method, you would research the topic, then find out who’s working with it now. Not the artists who kind of work with the idea… just a little bit, so that they can fit your curatorial idea.

Victor: On the behalf of the curators: why should you do a show like that? What are their motivations?

Magda: Of course, you can do a show addressing the notion of class. There’s nothing wrong about that. Even if it were an illustration of ideas, it could work. But you need a good thesis first, while here the positions that are supposed to illustrate it, are weak. Who liked Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky’s installations?

Victor: As a person who attended some performances by Ziegler and Janitzky previous to the KM show, but not to the last one actually at KM, I would say I see their sculptures as stage props. These performances enchanted or activated their sculptures. So, I’m quite neutral about their works in the show, but at the same time I’m neutral about all the works featured. It seems to me that the show has an agenda in representing all kinds of mediums. Photography, video … like a checklist.

The Bensplainer: Maybe old-fashioned?

Magda: It is a safe agenda. If you take Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism,’ he states that museums and related institutions are safe spaces where we can make criticism of capitalism, while capitalism itself allows it.

Victor: Yeah, Roland Barthes already said that. On my part, I am totally opposed to the idea of ‘making art’ as a profession, in the capitalist sense. When paying your rent depends on the money from selling your art, then soon you’ll be under pressure to produce, and that in return, I think, ultimately leads to overproduction and junk.

Magda: Then we ought to know more about the artists and how they position themselves to the capitalist model. 

Beniamino Foschini: I think we are derailing the conversation. I mean, after 1989, there is only one religion, which is capitalism, and you hardly can escape this fact (I agree with Giorgio Agamben on this). Insisting on this leftist nostalgia is counterproductive. Art is luxury. Some artists are fighting against this mindset, but we are still in such a system.

Magda: Indeed – and yet the exhibition promotes an anti-capitalist position. For example, The Coop Fund’s aim is to provide an alternative funding, so that is very clear. Guillaume Maraud is also doing a standard institutional critique by creating an alternative fund. 

The Bensplainer: At the same time, these practices are canonized. When KM showed Andrea Fraser in 1993, the questions she raised were novel and on the point. The visuals in this present show are canonized. Stephen Willats repeats a visual language of more established artists, as Hans Haacke for instance. 

Magda: Yes, maybe the only thing Willats adds is a British perspective on the problem.

Beniamino Foschini: Victor, you said on the occasion of our NS-Dokumentationszentrum conversation [link]: „Preaching to the converted.“ Basically, we find here the same pattern. So, you can argue with a lot of reasoning about a motivation for an exhibition – in this case an anti-capitalist agenda – but what I expect is to see works and practices which change the way I see. Sorry if I repeat myself, but seeing works which repeat, without a difference, canonized visual experiences from the past gives me such a kind of déjà vu effect. What is this exhibition about? What are the politics that motivated it? From the point of view of the exhibition making, it is in itself a sort of repetition. In the last Documenta, the assumptions were similar: a lot of nostalgic Marxism and related leftist theoretical positions, which are good, but at the end of the day, the works become an illustration sketched aprioristically by the curators and the artistic director. Here lays the critical point which we really have to address. Paradoxically, if the works are repeating themselves, aren’t also the politics of exhibition making repeating themselves? 

Magda: Yes and no. My question is: why are you repeating these positions? You can repeat a practice under the change of circumstances: the pandemic has changed the parameters. 

Beniamino Foschini: I agree: the pandemic has unveiled changes which were not so clear before that. 

Magda: So, does the repetition offered in this exhibition reflect that? Does our present context require repetition? How are the works from the 1980s and 1990s relevant now?

Beniamino Foschini: Let’s be clear: I don’t consider repetition with a negative value. I remember a wonderful group show at KW, Berlin, in 2007, titled ‘History Will Repeat Itself.’ Precisely, it was interesting because it focused on repetition as a visual device, that’s to say how artists and works dealt with the notion of repetition, be it of other works or of overarching experiences. I remember this great video by Jeremy Deller, ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ (2001), directed by Mike Figgis, in which the artist reenacted the famous 1984 clash between workers and police in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, England, and interviewed some participants from both sides too. By the way, it was a ground breaking show, but if you now repeat because it is fashion, a canon, then repeating loses its critical charge. Moreover, works become simply an illustration of the curator’s idea. It seems to me so frustrating now, especially when Anton Vidokle already addressed the question in his seminal and controversial article ‘Art Without Artists?’ on e-flux already in 2010. [link]

Victor: Yeah, that’s what I find problematic with this show: in this time of existential precariousness, how can an artist be critical or be able to question the politics of an exhibition? You’re invited, you get attention and funds, you simply go along with it. The institutions are creating ideological precariousness by wagging with the money. Nonetheless, I see that an artist needs the money. I think it is an inherent issue of institutional exhibition making, but I can’t see an immediate way out of it. It is a trap. The people in the institutions are also paid to play their role, and if they refuse to, replacement will be found quickly.

Beniamino Foschini: I don’t think that it is the main point here.

Magda: I recognize that there are many artists that suffer contemporary financial precariousness, but there are equally many who do not. Let’s be honest, how many artists, or student artists, may claim that they are coming from working class families? I mean, many are playing the role, but really?

Beniamino Foschini: I have to check it again, but there is a statistic in Bavaria that states that families on the edge of or below existential and financial poverty who are able to send their kids to higher education are 6 or 7%. That’s a ridiculous percentage, especially because these underprivileged students or artists have then a structural difficulty in order to enter the so-called art system.

Magda: Mid- or upper-class people study art. They come from that comfortable background. At any given time, they may or may not have money, but they indeed have a safety net. 

Victor: People that I talked to were missing a critical view on the institution itself and how this show sits within its history and why they did the show there, since the Kunstverein was developed specifically to cultivate an image and space for the bourgeoisie, the middle class, by propagating aesthetic values from the upper class. It was the beginning of the ‘public sphere’ separate from the court, but also was the image of upward mobility and how its members today, generally upper middle class, use the space as a form of patronage and charity as an additive to their cultural capital. So, one might interpret this show as cynical, but I personally think that there is also the possibility of freeing yourself up from that tradition and subverting or bastardizing that project of that middle class of 200 years ago. However, I think that the show is too conventional and there is an opportunity missed here. 

Beniamino Foschini: Sorry if I always bring up my PhD topic about the Russian so-called Avant-Garde. If you analyze it socially, the Avant-Garde cloud was also animated by class and social warfare. Practitioners from the periphery came to the capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and they had to fight with their contemporaries belonging to the urban mid- or upper-class world. For instance, you have Malevich who needs to rent a big apartment for him and his family, in order to sub-let and make a little profit from other people. But he also has to provide meals for them and he can paint only when he has some spare time. You still have today this romantic idea of the Avant-Garde, forgetting that it was also a very hard social situation.

Magda: But, the thing is that the economic or even its symbolic model, doesn’t seem to be really relevant. Class as it was in the 1970s, 1980s or even 1990s doesn’t exist anymore. What about class and technology? You can’t apply for jobs because you don’t have easy access to the Internet, because you don’t own a laptop or a smartphone. You can’t have a flat because you don’t get the notification on time. And flexibility changed the notion of work. There are a lot of structural changes in our societies, which the show’s accompanying text acknowledges clearly, but they are not examined in the work, or at least only in the orthodox leftist way. These positions are repeated nostalgically in the art. To me, the working class today is exemplified by DHL delivery workers.

The Bensplainer: I would add this. Today's working class might also be embodied by wannabe successful TikTok accounts! You may immediately perceive the fakeness in appropriating models from the supposed upper class in order to convey a different idea about yourself.

Magda: Fake it until you make it! TikTok responds to an already established model.

Beniamino Foschini: The novel level conveyed by TikTok is that it is not about hustling or conning anymore. Everybody knows everything is fake, so everybody accepts the coded rules.

Victor: That’s the classic definition of Žižek’s ‘ideology.’

Magda: Coming back to the show, I was surprised that urgent political issues were not questioned. I mean, the rise of populism is an issue, and it is class oriented. I don’t know much about Berlusconi and his years in power, but he did address the narrative of his politics to a certain class and set up a model for the recent years, didn’t he?

Beniamino Foschini: We Italians are not recognized in such a way anymore, but we’re still at the verge of the Avant-Garde! If history repeats itself as a farce, after Berlusconi everything is a farce. He had – and to some extent still has – an appeal to the working class, in the sense that he sold a narrative through which you can change your life only by willing it. At his first election run in 1994 he won in working class’ bastions, where traditionally the former Communist Party won with ease, efficiently selling his abstract ideas on liberty through his glittering television sets. So, already then, you might perceive that categories such as the Left and the Right were structurally changing. And this historical and epochal shift, so charged with ideological questions, is totally forgotten in this exhibition. 

Magda: Thus, I could have accepted as legitimate the exhibition’s assumptions, even if illustrational, if they would have addressed the ongoing complexity of the topic of populism, digitalization, 0-hours contracts, and so on, all related to an idea of the working class. Then it would have been fair enough!

Beniamino Foschini: I would add another topic to this. If you consider the state of satire, especially from the US, comedy is way ahead of visual art. It addresses those topics in a much more effective and creative way than visual art is actually doing. Only because they’re really reaching millions of people.

Magda: Yes, John Oliver, for instance.

Beniamino Foschini: I became a huge fan of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night monologues in the last two years, because he and his authors adapted his style of comedy shifting from weird Hollywood absurdities to overall US social and political issues. So, his and his authors’ craft reached a new level of satire, and the audience’s awareness. What can visual art do, as powerful as it might be, in comparison to mainstream satire? Let’s simply think about how Kimmel dealt with the topic Obamacare and how he related to – his personal history.

Magda: This is important, as access to healthcare in the US especially, is a class issue. But then, yeah, why don’t you simply invite a comedian to KM, then? Ok, you could never afford that, but who knows?

Beniamino Foschini: It would be so wonderful! But this idea should also be declined in a weirder approach. 

Magda: For sure, a comedian in an art space could have more freedom compared to the one he could have on national television. 

Beniamino Foschini: Victor, do you remember Olof Olsson’s performance at Lothringer 13’s cafe in Munich in 2017? 

Victor: Yes.

Beniamino Foschini I found it brilliant, mixing visual and comedy devices, and very generous, because it lasted so long! This kind of transdisciplinary performance says more about social, political and economic issues, than a conventional show, like this one at KM. If I had to make a single critical statement about this show at KM is that it doesn’t move our present cultural perception to a different plane, as satire does.

Participating artists: Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana, Steffani Jemison, Ndayé Kouagou, Kengné Téguia Curated by: Cédric Fauq

Conversants: The Bensplainer and Victor Sternweiler ... sitting on a bench at ca. 11 pm, after the opening of the above mentioned exhibition.

The Bensplainer: So, I think it was a good selection.

Victor: Probably the finest show at Nir Altman’s up to date. But it’s a matter of taste.

The Bensplainer: On the other hand, the eccentricity of artists like Ndayé Kouagou and Kengné Téguia allows us to experience some weirdness. Kouagou comes from poetry, thus he’s not a trained visual artist. Nevertheless, there is something genuine about the way he visualized and acted his performance, as well as he presented his sculptures. Yeah, one cannot really say that this performance was somehow new…

Victor: What do you mean with new?

The Bensplainer: There were many 1960s references. The first name which popped into my head is Bruce Nauman, of course. Magda made a further comment, mentioning Samuel Beckett. So, this is the kind of tradition Kouagou seems to refer to, yet interpreting it freely. On a reception level—thus probably only through my eyes and experiences—I also like to see it as an unintentional criticism at analogous performances so popular in Munich: Kouagou didn’t read. He really performed.

Victor: It wasn’t this type of lecture performance.

The Bensplainer: Exactly. Like those by Tris Vonna-Michell some 15 years ago. I find Kouagou’s performance was properly theatrical.

Victor: I don’t think it was theatrical, in the stiff sense performances in the white cube are exercised nowadays, to my perception. It didn’t come as a thoroughly choreographed piece. He reacted to the audience’s reactions and comments in a natural way—call it postdramatic. He probably did it for the 20th time.

The Bensplainer: Isn’t theater ’theater,’ if you perform a piece more than once?

Victor: Even if it was, he performed it very 'leggero.' The reason why I liked it in particular is that most of the white cube performances nowadays don't seem to be informed by what has been happening in theater domain, they come along either as lecture performances or as sacred rituals in dramatic settings—these performances are oftentimes taken too seriously by their originators. The audience is supposed to be quiet and every move feels like an unwelcome interruption.

The Bensplainer: I wrote a message to Magda before, asking about her opinion on the performance, since she had to leave right after.

Magda’s text response: Ndayé was performing his blackness most strongly (or rather the moment I felt my whiteness as part of the all-white audience) was when he said (and I misquote) "I like boundaries - you stand there and I am here." I think he might have also drawn a line with his hands. I wonder whether previous audiences were so homogeneous. What about the Childish Gambino's musical video?

Victor: I don’t know the video in question, but it is funny, because it might have more to do with her general cultural sensibility apperception, than with Kouagou’s performance.

The Bensplainer: Magdalena’s point is interesting, because formally that is consistent: Kouagou was performing with top half naked, only wearing sort of lacerated beige trousers and black sneakers. Gambino’s costume is similar, as he wears some grayish trousers, which could refer to the Confederates' military uniform during the American Civil War. There’s probably a shared symbolism: this might be Magdalena’s suggestion.

Victor: I don’t really buy into that logic by linking gestures in an art performance, say not wearing a shirt, to the notion of origin or even of politics of blackness etc. I find it a very vague link. In that case we could paradoxically link it to Freddie Mercury's persona, as well. I mean, he performed most of his life topless, on stage. But let’s go to the factual description of the performance.

The Bensplainer: Well, in the first part Kouagou came into the gallery space, he carried a plastic white chair, then put it on one side of the invisible stage of the gallery.

Victor: That plastic garden chair is perhaps the most popular design object ever.

The Bensplainer: He turned on some music from his phone. He started moving quite mechanically à la Nauman, tracing a square around the chair on the floor, at first only step by step – 2 steps each side –, then framing it with tape for the audience. That task remained incomplete. Then he sat down on the chair, and stopped the music. So, the performance’s second act started, and it was about him performing his material, randomly moving his body or the chair outside and inside the taped square. He acted in a Beckett-style text.

Victor: Kouagou seemed to improvise it, talking about love, and “I don’t know what I’m doing here” alike, so back and forth. Quite an ironic commentary of him on the bourgeois type of galleries’ audience, I think. But what do you think about his objects?

The Bensplainer: You mean the sculptures, the Untitled (no dates) hanging from the ceiling? These are more problematic in my view. They were stashed between, I think, two layers of A3-sized Plexiglas. On one side there was printed some texts, which echoed what he recited within the performance. Inside the two plexiglass sheets, there were shirts crystalized with resin.

Victor: Then there was the frame jeans jacket, half folded and wrinkled.

The Bensplainer: This kind of visualization is very typical today—Seth Price’s practice comes to mind—as well as this kind of autobiographical attitude.

Victor: What was written on the objects?

The Bensplainer: Again, some statements which recalled the performance, which showed existential frailty.

Victor: Resembling his performance, so to speak.

The Bensplainer: Exactly, like a repetition with difference.

Victor: I liked the way his objects were installed, hanging from the ceiling in that space. There was no wall behind defining their aura. You can generate 360 images when looking at them—a parallax effect. I would like to see them in a real living space situation and I hope nobody installs them close to a wall.

The Bensplainer: They are theatrical in this sense.

Victor: You insist on the term theater, but then we have to talk about Micheal Fried’s rejection of theatricality. I disagree with Michael Fried here.

The Bensplainer: Me too. So, let’s talk about Téguia’s videos.

Victor: I’m really curious about what you have to say about them, because, at an opening like that, there are so many people one happens to know and to greet, so I had to skip them completely. Prior to that, let’s talk a bit about the objects that were put or installed on the floor of the gallery.

The Bensplainer: I don't know really, since those works by Steffani Jamison didn't really catch my gaze.

Victor: The two transparent Plexiglas objects [Untitled (De Appel) (2018)] with a painted gesture on them, as big as a hand. They looked like those floor caution signs 'Danger – Slippery,' but the objects were transparent. I’d love to see that, installed in a non-white cube ambient where people would bump into. There I think of that Barnett Newman quote “Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.”

The Bensplainer: As every great abstract painter, Newman has a sense for wit. At the same time Jamison's two sculptures may also be seen as a straight translation into Plexiglas of very common trestles, found in every artist's studio. The ironic element is clear to me, but not its pictorial concept though. On the other hand, Téguia's three video installations challenged me. All three were shown on cube monitors (CRT) placed on the floor and the audio got blasted through rather modest loudspeakers. The three works deal with repetition both in moving image and sound. As for the moving images–being a mysterious shadow figure in Times goes by so slowly (2015), a recut of Disney classic Snowhite in Blanche-Neige is my Bitch (2015), or a fragmented reality in Soul Sista x Kameugné (2014)—they are a reflection on Dara Birnbaum's practice, I suppose. Nevertheless, Téguia added complexity to it with the sound. It is not simply about Birnbaum's manipulation of a found object then, but about his own effort to cover some pop songs while dealing with his deafness. Not that personal narratives were here at stake as a statement: instead, the general claim–that we can understand the world logo-centrically–was questioned here. Who's speaking, and how? And who's hearing, and how? The indeterminacy of perception was accompanied by the observer's possibility to engage relationally with the work, picking up the loudspeaker and listening materially to the sound through its vibration.

Victor: Sounds cool. Can't say anything about it. What’s our next drink? …