Africa at the Venice Biennale.

The record-breaking heat became the primary topic of conversation this past summer at the 50th International Art Exhibition in Venice. The many artists, curators, critics, and collectors who represented the international contemporary art scene had obviously never done fieldwork during the hot season in sub-Saharan Africa! Of course, in most places in Africa there are no cavernous shipyards without windows or cross ventilation like the Arsenale, the huge site at the Biennale, where miles of art were shown in raw factory spaces. Despite the oppressive weather that drained one's energies and made most of us feel like martyrs for art, this year's Biennale marks a watershed moment for artists from Africa and the African Diaspora. No longer is their inclusion isolated and sporadic, and no longer are exhibitions of their work relegated to hard-to-find off-site locations (as in the 2001 "Authentic / Ex-Centric: Africa In and Out of Africa," which, though a historic shift for African artists in Venice, was still marginalized in this way). (1) Moreover, while Salah Hassan and Olu Oguibe were, in 2001, the first African curators to participate in a Venice Biennale, this year Gilane Tawadros, the London-based Egyptian woman art historian and critic, was selected to independently curate one of the eight projects presented in the vast Arsenale, called "Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes."

This sea change in participation and location is no doubt due, in part, to the popularity of Okwui Enwezor's landmark exhibition "The Short Century" in 2001 and sprawling Documenta 11 in 2002. However one regards these weighty precedents (and the critical response to both projects was enormously varied), this year's Biennale is a breakthrough for African artists and curators. The exhibition's supervising director this year, Francesco Bonami, selected eleven curators from around the world to realize their visions as a part of the Biennale's overarching theme, "Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer." The outcome was highly variable, as one might expect, and much maligned by reviewers. The sheer number of artists shown (more than 700, if one can regard this as a final count), the mostly crowded installations, and the differing curatorial points of view made the totality of the experience a dictatorship of the curators! Add to this mix 4,500 visitors on opening day and nearly nonexistent air conditioning, and you have a recipe for disaster. Although it was a considerable challenge to really take it all in, the diversity of voices and approaches seemed an improvement on previous years, when one authoritative curator held sway. Even if the cumulative result was often bewildering, the inclusion of many curators of color was a welcome break from earlier hegemonies.

Aside from the Arsenale, the giardini, or gardens, are the primary location of the Biennale. Established in 1895 as die official exhibition site, the Giardini di Castello today houses thirty national pavilions, each showing the work of one or more artists selected by curators chosen by their respective countries. Two other large pavilions within the park are dedicated to group shows organized by the Biennale director and invited curators. Given the limited number of freestanding pavilions, more than twenty of the participating countries this year are not represented in their own spaces in the giardini (and there are more sovereign nations in the present Biennale than before); their chosen artists' work is instead distributed in officially recognized Biennale sites across the city of Venice. Egypt was one of the first non-European nations to establish a pavilion in 1897, which remains the only one in the giardini that is dedicated to an African nation. This year Ahmed Nawar is its featured artist, selected by Commissioner Mostafa Abdel-Moity. Within the Arsenale, a small area allocated to Kenya shows work by Richard Onyango and Armando Tanzini.

The American and British pavilions are represented by black artists--Fred Wilson (b. 1954, Bronx, New York; lives and works in New York) and Chris Ofili (b. 1968, Manchester, England; lives and works in London). Both artists purposefully and forcefully engage with Africa, its history and its diasporas, but their projects are radically different--one unabashedly intellectual and the other highly sensual. Wilson deals with the historical and contemporary presence of Africans in Venice. Ofili's work is about an African imaginary--a romantic paradise that for him functions as both a fictional place and a state of mind. The two artists were each selected under the auspices of official governmental agencies: Ofili, by Commissioner Andrea Rose, Director of Visual Arts at the British Council; Wilson, by eight panelists on the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions. His project was organized by Commissioner Kathleen Goncharov, Public Art Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

I was knocked out by Chris Ofili's installation Within Reach. (2) Ofili became internationally famous for his work in the much maligned "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999, and his choice as the recipient of the 1998 Turner Prize was controversial. I was prepared for work that is riotously colorful, highly decorative, masterfully painted, and with a story to tell. However, I was not prepared for the pavilion itself to be utterly transformed by rooms of fully saturated color one red, one green, and one black. No surface was left unchanged. The walls were painted, the floors carpeted, the skylights covered with matching fabric, and the central ceiling made into a dynamic starburst of tricolored panels of glass called Afro Kaleidoscope. No one could have escaped the emotional shock of the transformation, made all the more dramatic by the stifling heat. Many people may have missed the unmistakable references to the colors of the Pan-African movement. Ofili, with the help of architect David Adjaye, infused the sedate space of the neo-Palladian British Pavilion (built at the apex of its imperial power) with another reality, making it a sizzling "Africa." A Marcus Garvey-inspired flag called Union Black hung outside, signaling, to those who were paying attention, the thrust of Ofili's project.

The red-green-black color scheme also dominated the exhibited pieces--an installation of five large paintings and a series of watercolors that are part of the artist's ongoing body of work called Freedom One Day, introduced in 2002 at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London. Romantic and lyrical, the lushly colored paintings are in Ofili's words, "about old-fashioned values and old-fashioned ideas of paradise." The pictures are populated by a man and woman who kiss and embrace against a landscape that looks as if it had been painted by Henri Rousseau on drugs. The surfaces are covered with Ofili's signature brushstrokes, dots, and glitter, and they stand on balls of elephant dung, themselves elaborately ornamented. According to the press release made available by the British Council on their Web site, Ofili said this about the installation:

   It was a crazy daydream that a space or
   architectural experience could be borne
   out of the fantasy world of painting. So
   the whole ceiling comes out of a motif
   in the paintings. A drawing realised in
   glass. I also like the idea that maybe
   if one could climb into this space in
   this thin skin of paint, you would be
   surrounded only by red, black and
   green ... that maybe if you entered the Pavilion
   then your state of mind is altered
   based on the colours around you.

What I loved about this new series of paintings, and learned in reading past reviews of the Freedom One Day exhibition, is that Ofili's chief inspiration for this man and woman in a tropical paradise was an image on a hanger-cover from a dry cleaner's in Trinidad! The artist told Jonathan Jones, an arts writer for The Guardian (June 15, 2002), that it was after visiting that island nation that he saw the possibility of connecting the old-fashioned idea of paradise with "ideas of Afro love and Afro unity." Ofili is clearly enamored of his romantic Afro couple (the man with his amazing hairstyle and beard; both lovers with luscious red lips).

The visual and sensory heat of Ofili's contribution contrasts with the cool intellectualism (reinforced by functional air conditioning) seen in the United States Pavilion. Fred Wilson, an artist known for the secrets he has exposed about museum collections, their histories, and their production of cultural and political meanings, draws on similar strategies of presentation to tell a long and complex story in his Biennale installation, Speak of Me as I Am. (3) Wilson visited Venice and was struck by the images of blacks in Renaissance painting, architecture, and craft. This led him to ask, "Who were these black individuals? What was their situation? Was there a black community in Venice?" The installation seeks to answer these questions and to trace the history of blacks in the city to the time of the Moors in medieval Italy. At the same time, Wilson uses his piece to highlight the current presence of Africans, primarily Senegalese traders, in Venice. He engages with issues of race, identity, and immigration through the combination and juxtaposition of objects, photographs, text, audio, and video.

Wilson begins his installation outside the American pavilion with three provocative groups of objects: 1) a storefront display of life-sized black mannequins dressed in period costume that represent the Moors who inhabit the margins of paintings by Venetian artists like Veronese, Carpaccio, and Marziale; 2) a display of fabric handbags arranged on a cloth on the ground, reprising the image most visitors have of blacks in Venice today--the Senegalese who sell knock-off designer handbags, sometimes brazenly in front of the actual designer boutiques, like Prada; and 3) two banners of black slaves positioned so as to seem to hold up the pavilion's portico. Wilson's approach is to encourage us to pay attention to things that might be overlooked. How many visitors to Venice realize that the black traders on the street are Senegalese? How many of us have noticed that the massive Baroque tomb of Doge Giovanni Pesaro rests on "four colossal black stone statues of "straining African captives?" (4) The images of these same enslaved Africans, placed to flank the entry to the American pavilion, make a potent reference to the slavery that haunts the United States' own history.

Indeed, the role of Africans in supporting the luxurious lifestyle of the Venetian ruling class is a key theme inside the pavilion. Wilson displays glass reproductions of elaborately dressed blacks as candleholders, which function as Venetian equivalents of our Aunt Jemima tchotchkes. Other crouching Moors hold up reproductions of classical busts and heads. Wilson then takes another approach to telling the story of Africans in Venice--he gives a voice to the largely anonymous Moors who populate so many Renaissance and Baroque paintings, imagining who they were, what they may have said, and what their lives were like. Through voice recordings, the paintings literally speak. What is striking in these Renaissance representations, and in the mannequins displayed outside, is the Venetian aristocracy's preference for dressing their African servants in lavish courtly attire. Moreover, blacks in Renaissance Venice were also aristocrats and freemen. Wilson contrasts these turbanned and elegant Moors of yesteryear with today's Africans in Venice, who look like all hip global youth, in a wall of telling photographic details.

The U.S. Pavilion is a difficult building for displaying art. Its U-shape, with an entry in the middle and two flanking wings, means that visitors have to backtrack after seeing half the exhibition. Wilson makes the entry rotunda, which you pass through at least twice, a dramatic punctuation mark: it has a gorgeous chandelier made of black Murano glass. Such over-the-top glass chandeliers are a familiar sight in Venetian historical buildings (and even in contemporary reproduction), but they are usually made of white, clear, or other pastel-colored glass. Wilson reminds us that black is beautiful.

As the exhibition continues, the artist invites us to reconsider the tragedies of history. One large installation, called Drip, Drop, Plop (2001), is made of huge black Murano glass tears that "fall" down the wall and pool on the floor. This piece of Wilson's visual essay seemed a bit too obvious and not particularly successful visually. I found more moving his ambitious effort called September Dreams, a video installation that includes four different film and opera productions of Othello played backward. The legendary Moor of Venice is the subject of one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, and he utters the line that is the title of Wilson's entire installation: "Speak of me as I am." Wilson emphasizes the futility of reversing tragedy in this fascinating piece, in which Othello's triumph ends the story instead of begins it, and Desdemona comes to life. The relevance to today's world of Shakespeare's insights into human nature is suggested by the "escape pod" installed opposite the videos in a dizzying final space totally tiled in black and white called Tarbulence II. There, the artist (or anyone) can retreat to avoid not just the past but also the terrors and divisiveness of the present. Wilson's September Dreams is a reference to 9/11 and a final invitation to mourn not only this tragedy but a long history of oppression and violence.

The pavilions in the giardini give the artists who are selected a remarkable opportunity to create work that will resonate long after one has left the city. Both Ofili's and Wilson's installations make indelible impressions, and both artists have garnered praise and criticism.

Gilane Tawadros organized "Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and shifting Landscapes" under the auspices of the Forum for African Art, the same organization that sponsored the curators of "Authentic/Ex-Centric" in 2001. She is the director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), an organization in London dedicated to "creating opportunities for dialogue about contemporary visual art practice between different cultures and continents. InIVA's work is anchored in the political reality of postcolonial societies and globalisation, making it the only commissioning agency of its kind within the UK" (Web site press release). "Fault Lines" was shown with the following position statement (5):

   In geological terms, fault lines reveal
   themselves as fractures in the earth's
   surface but they also mark a break in the
   continuity of the strata. Fault lines may
   be a sign of significant shifts, or even of
   impending disaster, but they also create
   new landscapes. Fault Lines: Contemporary
   Art and Shifting Landscapes brings
   together contemporary artists from Africa
   and the African diaspora whose
   works trace the fault lines that are shaping
   contemporary experience locally
   and globally. These fault lines have been
   etched into the physical fabric of our
   world through the effects of colonialism
   and postcolonialism, or migration and
   globalisation.

Within the sprawling hodgepodge of the Arsenale, Tawadros's project has garnered praise for its tight curatorial focus. It features fifteen artists (five women) who represent five decades, four continents, and three generations of African and diasporic production. Of these artists, four are from Egypt, four from South Africa, two from Algeria, and one each from Ethiopia, Uganda, Guyana, Nigeria, and the United States. Only the four Egyptians and three South Africans live and work in Africa. The others live in Boston, London, Amsterdam, or Paris. The choice of artists surely reflects Tawadros's own curatorial predilections and previous projects; she also avoids cleaving sub-Saharan Africa from its northern neighbors. Many of the participants have shown in other international cultural platforms, and all are accomplished within their own countries and cities of residence.

Although geopolitics is critical to the curator's intent, even if one does not read the small labels that provide the artist's name, country of birth, title, and date, this exhibition demonstrates to those walking the Arsenale's hall that artists from Africa do not fall into any neat categories. Tawadros is to be congratulated for selecting work that ranges from paintings to watercolors, photography, video art, architecture, and installations. She begins her exhibition with a suite of strikingly gorgeous, large-scale R-type prints by Rotimi Fani-Kayode from his "Communion Series" of 1989. By starting with work that foregrounds the naked black body and its stereotypical associations with the erotic and the exotic, Tawadros captures the viewers' attention and prepares them for work that is not easy or even expected. Indeed, there are artists here whose work leaves a haunting memory.

Among them is Zarina Bhimji (b. 1963, Mbarara, Uganda; lives and works in Berlin and London) whose film of returning to the country of her birth after being expelled in 1972 on the orders of Idi Amin was such a highlight of last year's Documenta 11. The film was so unforgettable in its lingering images of evacuated sites of detention and destruction, and so evocative of the emotions of exile. At the Biennale, Bhimji features three large light-box transparencies from the same return visit. My favorite is called Howling Like Dogs, I Swallowed Solid Air (1998-2003), which shows a huge empty room with downed ceiling fans standing upright on the floor like so many guests at a party. The poignancy of this image, which draws beauty out of the derelict, is also a reminder of what the emptiness has erased.

There is a thread of beauty in several other artists' works that, used as an alternate strategy for representing violence and rupture, avoids the sentimental and the literal. I was struck by the amoeba-like organisms that populate the watercolors of Clifford Charles (b. 1965, Durban; lives and works in Johannesburg). Installed on the wall like a huge grid, his drawings of blurring, bleeding black shapes are interspersed with images of opaque red forms covered in glitter. Perhaps Charles is offering his vision of a new world for post-apartheid South Africa. Equally gorgeous is a selection of spare gouaches by Laylah Ali (b. 1968, New York; lives and works in Massachusetts) from her "Greenheads" series. At first these sweet cartoon-like characters seem innocent enough, but upon closer examination their postures and activities suggest violence and conflict. All uses a cartoon world to address issues of race and power. Moreover, her strategy of meticulously applying a limited palette of highly saturated color to her compositions makes their messages all the more engaging and potent. Likewise, from the exterior, the architectural installation Le Polygone et le Dedale, by Samta Benyahia (b. 1949, Constantine, Algeria; lives and works in Paris), appears to be a simple wood structure based on the shape of an eight-sided star. Inside, however, each side has a luminous stained-glass window based on a Fatima rosette pattern. On the floor in the center is a dazzling blue sequin-filled rosette. The piece is a tribute to the memory of Algerian poet Kateb Yacine, and recordings of interviews with him play inside along with Berber love songs. This small and lovely space (only three or four people can enter at a time) provides a sanctuary--even a sacred place of prayer--within the otherwise chaotic environment of the Biennale, an environment not unlike the "shifting landscape" the artist left behind in Algeria.

Several installations rely on tougher visual vocabularies to communicate their messages. Wael Shawky (b. 1971, Alexandria, Egypt; lives and works in Alexandria) has created a rough-and-tumble asphalt city that is almost overlooked in the raw concrete space of the Arsenale. Its back faces the visitor, so it is only after finding a point of entry that you encounter a circle of impenetrable building facades with windows but no doors, their surfaces covered in black asphalt, a petroleum byproduct. Within this forbidding cityscape, nine large plasma screens show alternating footage of the desert and the sea along with a sequence of men and then children spreading asphalt directly across the desert floor, covering the sand with steaming blackness, and invoking the ironies of modernization.

Another wry commentary on social progress is embedded in the multimedia installation of Moshekwa Langa (b. 1975, Bakenberg, South Africa; lives and works in Amsterdam). Using twelve video monitors and a series of large-scale drawings, his work deals dramatically with the shifting realities of life in contemporary Africa. Tawadros calls Langa's work a "story in twelve parts, a "non story' in three acts in which people are waiting to get on a bus, waiting in doorways passing time or just smoking and waiting ..." (6) Mixed-media diptychs, City People, by Saban Naim (b. 1967, Cairo, Egypt; lives and works in Cairo), emphasize the dislocation and anonymity of urban workers. The muted, disengaged presence of these figures on one side contrasts with the complex and highly decorative patterns created by the many rolled, folded, and coiled pages of newspapers that occupy the second. A video of the same name by the artist reinforces this tension between the local and the global.

There are several other powerful video works in "Fault Lines." One that stood out for me is the three-screen installation by Salem Mekuria (b. 1947, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; lives and works in Boston and Addis Ababa). Called Ruptures: A Many Sided Story, it features appalling but beautifully filmed scenes of desperate poverty--we see men and women sifting through rubbish dumps for redeemable refuse. This poverty is presented against views of Ethiopia's rich natural resources, modern cities, and complex political history. The video by Moataz Nasr (b. 1961, Alexandria, Egypt; lives and works in Cairo) likewise is a biting social and political critique about modern Egypt, but has a riveting sequence of virtuoso tablah playing.

The fifteen African and African Diaspora artists in "Fault Lines" and the two who represent the American and British pavilions this year assert themselves prominently within the landscape of international contemporary art. (The other artists in "Fault Lines" are the Algerian Kader Attia, who lives and works in France; Guyanese Frank Bowling, who lives and works in London and New York; South Africans Pitso Chinzima and Veliswa Gwintsa, who live and work in Johannesburg; and Egyptian Hassan Fathy, who died in 1989.) For better or for worse, the Biennale has been likened to the Olympics for art. With the help of organizations like the Forum for African Art, this year's Venice experience has proved successful in promoting the recognition of many African artists, whose reach and visibility will be enhanced through their inclusion in this important if sprawling global event. (7)

(1.) For a good history of the African presence in the Venice Biennale, see the preface to Authentic/Ex-Centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art, edited by Salah M. Hassan and Olu Oguibe, 2001. Forum for African Art, New York, pp. 6-8.

(2.) The British Council produced a small brochure on Chris Ofili's Within Reach with an essay by Thelma Golden, Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City.

(3.) The catalogue, Speak of Me as I Am, published in conjunction with the national presentation of the United States Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale International Exhibition, 2003, with essays by Paul H.D. Kaplan and Salah Hassan, an interview with the artist, an artist biography, and a CD-ROM. Published by the List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

(4.) Speak of Me as I Am, p. 15.

(5.) The catalogue, Fault Lines: Contemporary Art and Shifting Landscapes, is edited by Gilane Tawadros and Sarah Campbell and is published by the Institute of international Visual Arts (inIVA) in collaboration with the Forum for African Arts and the Prince Claus Fund Library. 2003. Available through inIVA.

(6.) From the press release for "Fault Lines" on the Biennale Web site (www.universes-in-universe.de/car/venezia/bien50/ fault-lines/e-press.htm).

(7.) Given the scope of the Biennale, there are certainly others from the continent and beyond whom I have missed or who are not mentioned here.

Marla C. Berns is director of the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. She has published extensively on the arts of Northeastern Nigeria and just completed a book on the late twentieth-century designer Paul Tuttle. She is also an editor of African Arts.