This time the human is the stranger. It happens at Punta della Dogana, Venice, in the spaces of the Pinault Foundation. When observing the hermit crab in an aquarium that lives like a shell in a copy of the “Sleeping Muse” by Constantin Brancusi, one’s thoughts drift to Phleba the Phoenician, the sailor protagonist of “Death by Water” by TS Eliot, “who has forgotten the the cry of seagulls and the undertow of the deep sea and profit and loss” and whose bones are stripped in whispers by sea currents. The aquarium room, a sort of bio-techno-artistic cabinet of curiosities, is part of the immersive journey created by the French artist Pierre Huyghe in the rooms rearranged in 2007 by Tadao Ando: a border itinerary towards hypotheses of worlds in which our civilization it has exploded, imploded or degraded to the stage of an unconscious shadow.
“Liminal” is the name of the main work that gives its title to the exhibition (until November 24): a floating female body, projected on a membrane in a darkened environment, an empty body – a shadow or a dark spot has swallowed much of the face. A simulacrum that seems to be inhabited by an Artificial Intelligence.
It is precisely the AI that are the protagonists of the exhibition, whether they are the golden masks equipped with receptors that react to external stimuli, including visitors to the exhibition, inventing a sort of Newspeak in electronic whispers, carried around and on the face of performers (silent by contract), a sort of new symbiotic entities called idioms; or the robot in the film “Camata”, which sifts in buzzes and attempts a not very successful burial ritual on a human skeleton calcified in the sun of the very arid South American Atacama desert. An AI continually re-edits the film, always different. We are near Eliot’s “Waste Land”, surrounded by his “hollow men”, however supplanted by other intelligences: a luminous totem, a server that seems to breathe behind a transparent wall; humans are reduced to biological remains, to authors of silent art, to vehicles such as idioms, to simulacra. Huyghe’s declared inspiration is also Samuel Beckett, the representation starts from degree zero, the AI could be the one, the digital stranger.
Liminal is a phenomenon that is located on the border of perception, a labile, moving frontier. “Liminal is a transitory state, from which what has not even been thought of can emerge,” explains the French artist. Perhaps an intentional coincidence, it is the same paradox that “AI engineers” are faced with, the cybernetic engineers who design, develop and “train” Artificial Intelligences when they arrive at results in mysterious ways to their own trainers. Anyone who finds themselves on a border is a foreigner by definition. Thus Huyghe’s exhibition-work seems to dialogue at close physical distance, yet from another Universe, with the 60th Art Biennial curated by the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa at the Arsenale and Giardini entitled “Foreigners everywhere” (until 24 November). Here the emphasis is on the human, the too human, the human marginalized and colonized by other humans, exploited, erased and seeking voice and redemption. Indigenous populations, queer painters, memories of slaves and outcasts.
Simplifying, we could say that in Venice the natives are competing against Artificial Intelligences. The point is that, at least in the artistic competition, the former risk losing. But let’s see in detail. Acting as a metaphorical ferryman between the two exhibition-visions, at the entrance to the Corderie dell’Arsenale, is the migrant astronaut by the Anglo-Nigerian Yinka Shonibare with his bright suit and a net on his shoulder loaded with suitcases, one of the few works that in the cruel Venetian spring they raise smiles beyond praise. Then one remains entangled in the well-intentioned banality of the large installation by the Mataaho collective, made up of women of Maori descent from New Zealand, winner of the Golden Lion, made of packing straps and which recalls an atmosphere of a non-place such as a 21st century.
It is echoed, visually and literally, at the other end of the Arsenale, the forest of innocent pipes transformed into an organ by Massimo Bartolini in the Italian Pavilion, which have attracted lightning attacks and lightning rods of defense from critics and professionals , lined up on opposite sides, but which do not do their duty as organ pipes: they bore, instead of making the spirit vibrate. We move between the transsexual and transhuman bodies of Agnes Questionmark towards the global landscape of nameless Chilean folk artists, from Giulia Andreani’s evocative female group portraits, in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, to a yurt on the Anatolian steppe. A great backdrop for a planetary bazaar, but the light of art rarely turns on: the construction of the exhibition is strictly monitored by political correctness which leads it to spiral into itself.
Unlike the uncertainty principle – taken from Heisenberg – which acts as a common thread in Huyghe’s possible worlds, Arsenale and Giardini appear so determined that they collapse due to a drop in voltage. There are exceptions that shine: the sculpture composed of LEDs and aluminum plates by WangShui, an American non-binary artist who plays on the continuous shift between real and fictitious identities, light and matter, Artificial and biological Intelligence; the painted forests of Rember Yahuarcani, of the Uitoto nation in the Peruvian Amazon: they dance in colors and recall the dreamlike jungles of a great self-taught European painter of the second half of the 19th century, Henri Rosseau, and “The Customs Officer”, only in those of Yahuarcani soar the voices of plants and animals like serpentine speech bubbles upward, an indigenous song of protest.
Words, whispers, shouts. Like the names of the Aboriginal (or rather, “First Nations”) and British genealogies, arranged by the artist Archie Moore in a constellation over piles of court cases lapped by the water of a tub in the Australian pavilion. Intelligent, but cold, she won the Golden Lion for national participation. Stronger and more rebellious are the sculptures of the Congolese collective CATPC, hosted in the Dutch pavilion: plantation workers who through art want to reclaim their past and the soul of the forests eaten by the monocultures of multinationals. The counterpoint of fabrics and paintings by Eduardo Cardozo at the Uruguay pavilion is more subtle, from South to North, its mosaic of rags recalls Tintoretto’s “Paradise”.
Beyond the pavilions, between banks, streets and canals, here are the hi-tech forts, like the one set up near the Gardens by the artist Josefa Ntjam, born in Metz, France, and who defines herself as Afro-futurist: it combines marine species that have evolved digital, African statuettes, Dogon cosmogony and Artificial Intelligence. Or like the Digital Reform group which chose as its location the Scoletta dell’arte del Tiraoro e Battioro, in the 18th century the seat of the artisan guild that produced gold thread and leaf, now an outpost of an interactive platform. Yes, opposites are called on the lagoon: the indeterminate and changing worlds of Pierre Huyghe reveal behind the spontaneity of the AI a well-maneuvered direction of the human author.
At Palazzo Franchetti the Pakistani artist Osman Yousefzada in “Welcome! A Palazzo for Immigrants” (until 7 October) has transformed the patrician rooms of a residence on the Grand Canal into an alcove of memories for migrants with fairy-tale touches such as the braids that end in bird’s feet and which refer to some canal of distance to the animals reinvented in a surrealist key by the famous Claude and Francois-Xavier Lalanne at Palazzo Rota Ivancich (“Planete Lalanne” until 3 November). Thus two of the epochal themes, such as the AI revolution and migratory flows, find themselves side by side in the city which was multicultural already in the Middle Ages and at the cutting edge of science. They touch each other, they touch each other, sometimes they make sparks.
“It can be risky to group artists from different cultures under the label of indigenous art,” reasons Shiva Lynn Burgos, American artist and curator, founder of the Mariwai project, an artistic collaboration project with the Kwoma people of Papua New Guinea. “Although the Pedrosa Biennial is a milestone, we are working to present a PNG pavilion for the 2026 event not as a victim of colonization, but as an artistic competitor on equal terms, even with its own specificities, for example the element spiritual which in the final work acts beyond merely aesthetic purposes”.
In Venice (which is enriched with new collections, that of the new Berggruen Foundation in two locations and a sculpture park in the Furstenberg villa in Mestre financed by Banca Ifis) artistic, scientific and social investigation play on a common field, even if not still not defined, as happened at the Serpentine Gallery in London, where Refik Anadol, the controversial AI “hallucinator”, recently exhibited, and as it will be at the Yokoama Art Summit in 2025, in Japan, where Philippe Parreno has been appointed director and that in November it will use AI in Munich as the engine of a multimedia and multisensory exhibition that will make the spaces of the Haus der Kunst “alive”.
At the end of the glances the enigma is aesthetic, symbolic, as at the beginning of humanity: will AIs open up other ways of seeing, perhaps in the ancestral myths themselves, including the neglected fragments of uncontacted tribes? Or will he still be the human at the helm, like Eliot’s missing Fleba, his face in the direction of the wind but who can drown in a storm? The answer, perhaps, is precisely in the lagoon city in two other exhibitions, collateral events at the Biennale: Berlinde de Bruyckere’s solo show “City of Refuge III” in the church and abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore by Andrea Palladio, where metal archangels and wax, wrapped in cowhide cloaks, find themselves in front of mirrors that seem to seek the reflection of fallen skies. Is art, which the Belgian de Bruyckere considers the last refuge, under threat? At Palazzo Contarini Polignac, on the Grand Canal, the Pinchuk Foundation is staging “From Ukraine: Dare to dream” (From Ukraine: dare to dream, until August 1st). The organ with pipes made of Russian bomb shells exploded by Zhanna Kadyrova sounds like a thrill and at the same time a hope and the human technology of beauty is also the recovery of instruments of death, warning and liberation; a film by David Claerbout takes us in very slow motion into the explosion that destroys a house. One of the most minimalist works is that of the Indian Shilpa Gupta, in which two old-fashioned boards, with flip-up letters, dialogue with each other, complete with errors and timid attempts to annul loneliness. One wonders if it is ChatGPT talking to its algorithmic brother. No: the poetic dialogue was written by Gupta, back and forth, mistakes and uncertainties. Without prompts or digital hallucinations. She indicates a tortuous path to rediscover the world and art, but it is certainly a path, a route into “sea change”, the Shakespearean marine transformation that seems to await us in the near future.
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In the photo, a video sculpture by the American artist WangShui made of LEDs, at the Arsenale of Venice, in the exhibition “Stranieri Ovunque” by Adriano Pedrosa
