Arsenale 2012, Kyiv biennale, review
My hesitations are soon put to rest. British curator David Elliot has mounted
an unprovocative but very thoughtful exhibition. On entering, one’s first
impression is that the arsenal has been beautifully restored (later this
year it will become a gallery) and with its exposed brick walls and concrete
floors, it couldn’t be riper for a contemporary art installation if this was
Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. A former director of major modern art
museums in Tokyo, Istanbul, and Stockholm, Elliot says that the building
itself was the main attraction for accepting the invitation to organise the
event. The subtly loaded irony of the former arms manufacturing depot being
a stone’s throw from the monastery, I am sure, is not lost on him.
But Kyiv’s position on the map is surely of equal importance. Europe’s second
largest country, Ukraine used to be in the middle of the Silk Road.
Interestingly, this show is more an observation of the similarities between
Eastern and Western contemporary cultures than it is a collision of the two.
Erected outside the building is an 11-metre (36 ft) wide public sculpture of
an inflatable golden lotus flower by the Korean Pop artist Choi Jeong Hwa.
This boldly iconoclastic bouncy-castle, a Jeff Koons-ian pastiche of the
Buddhist symbol, set against the grey post-Soviet cityscape is fast becoming
the symbol of the biennale.
Elliot has said he aims not to make old comparisons between Ukraine and
other parts of the Eastern Bloc, but to draw new ones between Eastern Europe
and the visual language of Maoism in China and the Cultural Revolution over
there. That is one of the successes of the show, particularly evident in the
large number of figurative realist paintings, which include a striking new
wall mural and Lesya Khomenko’s wonderful ‘Giants’ (2006), portraits of
heroic statuesque peasant grannies. In a similar fashion, native
photographer Boris Mikhailov has, for the first time, turned his lens on
architecture, in this uncharacteristically nostalgic new body of work which
looks at disused Soviet factories that litter Ukraine’s landscape.
The best room, though, is an installation called ‘Wisdom of the Poor’ by Song
Dong, the Chinese artist who currently also inhabits the Barbican’s ‘Curve’
in London. Dong is interested in the resourcefulness of China’s poorest
city-dwellers, and in this room he recreates some of the bizarre living
spaces that he has found in Beijing’s cramped slum-like courtyards called
‘hutongs’. In an attempt to try and improve their lives they “borrow” public
land and build around it, being ever careful not to actually transform
anything already there. One such family built a tiny bedroom over a shrub
and let it grown into a tree, which springs through a hole in the middle of
the bed. This image neatly mirrors the strange optimism at work in a piece
of Ukrainian logic that was explained to me by one of the biennale’s student
volunteers during a bus tour around the city. She said: “In this country the
government does not let us do whatever we want, but that can be a good
thing.” Why? I asked. “Because if you are allowed to do whatever you want
you just do it. You never have to use wit and invention to work around it.”
Until 31 July 2012