Venice off-season

Venice off-season is a lovely thing. There is the excitement of 'acqua alta', there are far fewer tourists, and the city is bathed in a particularly mandarin-coloured light most evenings.

 

 

Having raced through as many pavilions as possible in June at the start of the Biennial, it feels luxurious to have the time to re-visit works, or to catch opportunities missed the first time round, and to see them in my own time, in ‘slow time’. One of the most interesting exhibitions I have seen the second time round, is a selection of works by the Serbian artist Braco Dimitrijevic at Ca’ Pesaro, one of the collateral events of the Biennial.  

In 1969 Dimitrijevic wrote, ‘There are no mistakes in history, the whole of history is a mistake’. In Dimitrijevic’s conception, time and history is an arbitrary force. Most that pass through it are erased indiscriminately and those that remain in human memory may do so by sheer accident. In the 1970s, Dimitrijevic himself became inscribed in art’s future histories with a series of works in which he acted as self-appointed arbiter of those whose names and faces will remain. An emergent artist at the time, he became known with his ‘Casual Passer-by’ works, in which he photographed unkown people from London’s streets and hung the resulting large-scale portraits in public sites, such as billboards and the facades of buildings.

Some of Dimitrijevic's more recent works are installed in the foyer of Ca' Pesaro. A large framed portrait of Franz Kafka sits at an angle in a little boat crammed with a collection of old leather shoes. Together, Kafka and the shoes set sail into the backwards and forwards flowing eddies of time past and time future. 

 

  
 

In the context of the Venice Biennale, Dimitrijevic’s work serves as a reminder of how we all participate in the construction of recognition and commemoration, and raises important questions as to the systems of legitimisation implicit within the structures of large-scale biennial-style exhibitions.

Upstairs at Ca’ Pesaro is a group exhibition titled after the brilliantly ghoulish 1973 Nicolas Roeg film Don’t Look Now, set in Venice.  The curator, Milovan Farronato, of the gallery Via Farrini in Milan, has placed a selection of contemporary works in seemingly arbitrary choreographies around and within the baroque and nineteenth-century works of Ca’ Pesaro’s historical collection.

Works run into and spin off each other in what to appear to be chance or entirely subjective configurations. A projection of green and yellow lights by Nico Vascellari is refracted in a set of mirrored panels and spills out onto the surrounding walls and over nineteenth-century busts in a room-size Gesamtkunstwerk.

 

 

 

A work by Paolo Gonato consists of a collection of damaged umbrellas that limp brokenly over the gallery floor, passing the sculptures and paintings of previous centuries like the straggling remains of a small army of tired and hungry insects.

 

If confusing and at time a little garish, the overall affect of the exhibition is, certainly, like the name-sake film, one of a feeling of estrangement, dislocation and lingering menace.