Collateral Visions: Six Best Off-Site Exhibitions in Venice

Adriano Pedrosa's Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere (20 April–24 November 2024) has an inclusive remit. The Brazilian curator's exhibitions at both the Central Pavilion and the Arsenale privilege historically marginalised artists—whether queer, outsider, folk, Indigenous, and/or from the Global South—some of whom have never previously shown internationally and were little known outside their home countries. The most interesting off-site exhibitions similarly present works by artists that invoke a changing world order.

From Ukraine: Dare to Dream
Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Dorsoduro 874
20 April–1 August 2024

ConversationsShilpa Gupta's Dialogue of SlownessRead More

'Power Is Strength' reads the phrase that emerges letter by letter across the flapboard display of Shilpa Gupta's StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream (2021), followed by a single word: 'Not'. It's a sentiment that offers a lifeline of hope and echoes the question posed in exhibition literature by curators Björn Geldhof, Ksenia Malykh, and Oleksandra Pogrebnyak, 'Living in a world of constant fear, can we imagine tomorrow? Do we have the courage to dream?'

In the often-dark spaces and decaying grandeur of the Palazzo Contarini Polignac, 22 artists and collectives from Ukraine and beyond provide audiences with nuanced and thoughtful responses to this question in light of the ongoing Russia–Ukraine War.

Yana Kononova's Izyum Forest (2022), an epic print on paper made up of images from documentary sources, covers three walls of one of the palazzo's dimly lit rooms. It shows workers engaged in the exhumation of bodies—many, civilians who had been tortured—in the Izyum forests of Eastern Ukraine; a graveyard discovered after the de-occupation of the city in 2022. Kononova conveys the horror of the situation not through graphic imagery but by showing the faces of the workers undertaking this harrowing task.

In another room, Kurdish-Turkish artist Fatma Bucak has sown Damascus Rose seedlings from Syria in an enormous pile of earth that fills the room with both its mass and aroma (Damascus Rose, 2016–ongoing). Using seedlings that have travelled via Lebanon and Saudi Arabia to Italy, Bucak evokes the difficult path of migration for those affected by war and the sense of hope that endures for those who survive.

South West Bank—Landworks, Collective Action, and Sound
Magazzino Gallery, Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Dorsoduro 878
20 April–24 November 2024

Also showing at the Palazzo Contarini Polignac, and providing further insight into the toll of war, is SOUTH WEST BANK—Landworks, Collective Action, and Sound. Curated by Jonathan Turner, the exhibition spotlights 20 artists and collectives who have been making works in the southern area of the West Bank in Palestine over the past few years.

The relationship between land and home is foregrounded in works that portray traditional human activities—from farming and food-gathering to cultural practices such as music, dance, and storytelling. As Turner notes in the press materials, 'Our exhibition is particularly focused on collectives and a multi-faceted approach, from photographs and videos documenting aspects of daily life and resilience against a background of conflict to performance projects which find their voice as they develop.'

Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez's photographic series Anchor in the Landscape (2022) depicts gnarled old olive trees, a staple of Palestinian culture, the cultivation of which supports more than 100,000 families in the region. Yet, as Broomberg told me, 'Since 1967, at least 800,000 olive trees, many of them over 1,000 years old, have been destroyed by illegal Israeli settlers and the Israeli authorities. As far as we know, the destruction of the trees continues. At least one of the ancient ones we photographed has since been burned down.'

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behaviour
Palazzo Van Axel, Cannaregio 30121
20 April–20 October 2024

ConversationsShahzia Sikander's Parallels of InterconnectivityRead More

After graduating in miniature painting at Lahore's National College of Arts in 1991, American-Pakistani artist Shahzia Sikander became the first woman to teach in the department. The work she subsequently produced—large-scale pieces that explore what it means to be a female, Muslim, Pakistani artist—exploded the miniature tradition.

Organised and presented by the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art at the 15^th century Palazzo Van Axel, this museum-quality exhibition showcases Sikander's ability to create iconic and original views of contemporary life through the lens of traditional cultural motifs as she works across watercolour, video, mosaic, and bronze.

Throughout the gothic building, works are installed in thematic groupings that highlight three of the artist's key concerns from her 30-year practice: her engagement with and manipulation of the miniature, as seen in her ground-breaking piece The Scroll (1989–90), which pictures women going about their domestic lives; gender and body politics, depicted in A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation (1993), which features the artist's trademark headless and frayed female body; and histories of colonialism in South Asia, including partition, which have created disruptions and dislocations in the culture.

The exhibition includes several recent pieces that engage with the Venetian tradition of mosaic, and the artist is quoted in the exhibition material as saying: 'glass makes visible the states between solid and liquid, opaque and transparent, hardness and elasticity. For me, glass serves as a lens through which I shatter fixed definitions of the 'other', or the foreigner, across history, culture, and geography.'

Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War
Palazzo delle Prigioni, Castello 4209
20 April–24 November 2024

At Palazzo delle Prigioni, a former prison site with evidence of a torture chamber, the Taiwanese Pavilion shows a series of works by Yuan Goang-Ming, several of which deploy noise to jangle the nerves. For instance, his video Dwelling (2014) creates a sense of horror within the domestic setting as a shocking, ear-shattering explosion rips through a living room, destroying the occupant's peace and shelter. The footage then plays in reverse, and as the explosion is rewound, ultimately the only evidence of the explosion is the almost-imperceptible movement of the lightest objects—a shirt, a piece of paper—in the initial displacement of air that occurred with the explosion. Things seem as they were before, but are not—and perhaps can never be.

Everyday War (2024) depicts a similar scene, in which a studio flat is being randomly peppered with invisible bullets from an invisible gun (only the bullet holes are visible) while fires break out, seemingly spontaneously, threatening to set alight the goldfish bowl, the bed and the sofa. On a monitor, the online war game the now-absent occupant was playing continues streaming. These works and others—such as Everyday Maneuver (2018), which shows the surreal sight of Taipei's deserted streets during an air-raid drill—seem to hint at the lack of control individuals have over their own destiny, emphasising how, at any moment, events can occur that have the power to change lives forever.

The Spirits of Maritime Crossing
Palazzo Smith Mangilli Valmarana, Strada Nova, 4392
20 April–24 November 2024

At Palazzo Smith Mangilli Valmarana on the Grand Canal, seasoned Thai curator Apinan Poshyananda's The Spirits of Maritime Crossing explores parallels between Southeast Asia and Venice through the work of 15 artists from Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Serbia, Singapore, Thailand, The Philippines, and Vietnam that reference the environment, water, maritime trade, migration, and labour, among other themes.

ConversationsMarina Abramović: ‘Performance Is a Live-Force’Read More

The eponymous film, The Spirits of Maritime Crossing (2022)—directed by Poshyananda and starring artist Marina Abramović and dancer Pichet Klunchun—sees Klunchun dressed as the monkey king guiding Abramović's spirit through a foreign land. In a subversion of the colonial narrative of the male white explorer as leader, here a female artist is led by a powerful and mercurial mythical creature.

Finding connections between people through themes of migration and travel resonates in works such as Yee I-Lann's Budi's Song (2023), where viewers can sit on a traditional mat that has been interwoven with rubbish which has made by a community in Borneo while watching a video of those same community members carrying a similar mat, used to dry fish, along the shoreline near their village.

In a bathroom and on the ceiling in another room, Kawita Vatanajyankur's disturbing suite of videos, A Symphony Dyed Blue (2021), comment on the worldwide issue of women's unpaid labour. In these works, the artist replaces a range of utensils—including a toilet brush, a facecloth, chopsticks, and a spindle—with naked female bodies that perform the domestic acts of cleaning, washing, cooking, and sewing.

Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments
Campo della Tana, Castello 2126
20 April–24 November 2024

ConversationsTrevor YeungRead More

The exhibition Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachment brings the fish tanks of Hong Kong's seafood restaurants and markets to Venice. According to the artist, the works were inspired by childhood memories of his father's seafood restaurant and his own ambivalent attitude towards the fish, which he saw as both pet and food.

In Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours) (2024), a lab-like environment of more than 40 fish tanks glows fluorescent pink and purple, but the tanks are empty of fish. The artist wants viewers to look at what else is in the tanks: petrified sculptural pieces of wood, clay pots, and filtration devices. The ecological reading implies that we have destroyed the natural environment and marine creatures have become extinct; another interpretation might cast humans as the equivalent of fish that have been freed from their tanks.

During the press briefing, Yeung described the work as a comment on how we manage desire, 'I remember, as a child, breaking a plastic bag [in a market aquarium] to take a fish home, but, in the middle of the journey, the fish died in my hand [...] It's about how you understand what you can and cannot do.' —[O]