The founding of the Venice Biennale was perhaps the first cultural
regeneration project – and it is a model that continues to inspire
copycats from Sharjah to Guangzhou. Founded in 1895, taking its cue from
the Great Exhibition of 1851, it emerged from the century of upheaval
and ignominy that followed Napoleon’s crushing of the Venetian Republic
in 1797. No longer a maritime power with imperial dominions – its
strategic importance eclipsed by alternative systems of control – the
city was depressed until it was cannily rebranded as a realm devoted to
the festive business. Today it is host to countless parties, carnivals
and conferences for its demographic majority of temporary visitors, and
in recent years the all powerful biennale secretariat has expanded its
roster of events to include biennales of dance, architecture, sound and
film. With so much on offer the visitor has always missed out on
something. Is this overproduction?
The question does not apply to Venice alone. Europe’s living capital of
contemporary culture, Berlin, fares similar – and away from Aegean
glamour the issue takes on more social relevance. The city’s current
identity is, in no small part, built upon on the aspirations of a
migrant artist workforce that have been drawn towards an increasingly
untenable economic siren call. The famously cheap rent and incomparable
social benefits are gradually being eroded. You can’t go to a nightclub,
market or exhibition opening or without hearing the word gentrification
on someone’s lips. Something that looks suspiciously like a property
bubble is emerging thanks to an influx of speculators hoping to
capitalize on the city’s ‘lifestyle’ – and artists complain but continue
to pave the way, enlivening the urban fabric with their projects. The
posters announcing their contributions, on lampposts and street corners,
are testaments to their collective enthusiasm. They accumulate in
layers, like geological strata but laid down much quicker. The lampposts
in Mitte are palimpsests of self-realization and enticement, and it is
their example that constitutes Renata Kaminska’s contribution to the
Luxembourg Pavilion.
Kaminska has relocated a particular batch of layered posters from
outside her home in Berlin to the garden of the Ca’ del Duca. As a
Serbian national based in Germany her participation in the pavilion is
exceptional – the result of her being invited by the Luxembourgian
artist X. But she has made this liminal status vis a vis the context of
the ‘national’ exhibition the subject of her artwork. The resituated
German posters are like the artists who travel to the biennale or Berlin
in the hope of recognition. They also seem to stand for national
representations at the biennale in general: They have come a great
distance in order to be at the centre of something, and yet so many find
themselves eclipsed. Those who endeavour to scale the peaks of the
artworld’s attention economy all too frequently become the ground upon
which others build their edifices. Our cultural topographies are mutable
and fragile – here today, disappearing the next.