VENICE, Italy: Fake news. Migration. Poverty. Global warming. Armed conflict.
Political issues that excite newsprint, the airwaves and social media are getting a very open airing at the 58th Venice Biennale contemporary art fair, like so much laundry hung out to dry in the lagoon breeze.
American curator Ralph Rugoff, director of London's Hayward Gallery, titled the main exhibition "May You Live in Interesting Times," which opens Saturday and runs through Nov 24.
The title is itself an exemplary piece of fake news, delivered by a British lawmaker as Europe hurled toward World War II as an ancient Chinese curse.
It was, in fact, made up. Yet, Rugoff notes, "it's had a presence in political discourse ever since."
Rugoff says contemporary art is particularly effective at unpacking the present-day spectre of never-ending crises, by revealing the complexity, ambiguity and conflicting emotions in a way more traditional media often do not.
"Where do we have space in our culture where this part of being human is given a place? It really exists in contemporary art," Rugoff said this week on a preview walk through the two-part main exhibit, split between the Biennale's two main venues, in the leafy Giardini and the former Arsenale shipyard.
Many of the 79 artists invited to participate in the main exhibition make very literal references to present-day woes.
Swiss artist Christoph Buechel transported a hulking smugglers' ship where 700 migrants perished in April 2015 to the edge of the Arsenale, exposing to viewers the gaping holes in the hull that caused it to sink in the Mediterranean.
Chinese collaborators Sun Yuan and Peng Yu constructed a robot that mechanically spreads a blood-like substance evenly around. The impact of drug violence is portrayed in Teresa Margolles' razor-wire topped concrete wall "Muro Ciudad Juarez."
Zhanna Kadyrova of Ukraine used old tiles to create pieces of laundry that are hung outside the central pavilion, which Rugoff says serves as a reminder that while inside the building "there is a lot of heavy thinking and challenging art," ordinary life continues just outside, in the narrow Venetian alleyways where everyday flapping laundry is show of its own.
By juxtaposing art in its many forms that provide comments on worldly events, Rugoff wants to create conversations, and the Giardini Central Pavilion emits a vapour suggestive in a very literal way of thought processes, which in turn casts a veil of fog over the pavilion's facade, "questioning the authority of that institution."