Grenada was the first time on the la Biennale di Venezia in 2015. Through the co-operation of Ministry of Culture, Grenada has been invited to present a National Pavillion, and bring the exhibition themed “Present Nearness”. The venue for Grenada’s exhibition was in Sala Tiziano, Opera don Orione Artigianelli, Dorsoduro, Fondamenta delle Zattere ai Gesuati 919, a beautiful historic building close to the Zattare water taxi stop.
Susan Mains is the curator for this exhibition, along with her Italian counterpart, Francesco Elisei. The title of the exhibition “Present Nearness” portray the group of artists interpretations of their own interaction with the disordered world, one of the filters spoken of by Okwui Enwezor. A group of artists have been chosen to represent Grenada and they have aligned their thoughts in making the art to the theme of la biennale, “All the World’s Futures”.
Grenada’s timing has been auspicious to be part of the first truly global Biennale signalling a tectonic shift from national representation towards mondialité as conceived by Eduard Glissant. Enwezor is “an art establishment outsider” engaging with artists irrespective of the art market and beyond institutional walls that glorify collecting and displaying art objects in Modernist isolation. Visual artists, like writers and intellectuals, should have the courage “to speak truth to power”, to address violence, conflict and the most vital issues affecting their society. The 56th Venice Biennale celebrates 120 years of exhibiting the international in art by calling for an assessment of “the current state of things”. Enwezor’s curatorial agenda is a call to arms asking artists to investigate their presence through the means of their art.
Enwezor’s curatorial agenda compliments the recent expansion of national pavilions in Venice introducing younger post-colonial countries with emerging political, social and economic conditions. Art production with an historical conscious can challenge current narratives of the past by quarrying the present to develop new concepts for the “postcolonial constellation” futures. Open season has been declared on the national historical narratives ripe for deconstruction to produce work from a contemporary locale for the global art stage and this approach is evident everywhere in Venice this year.
To come to know a bit about Caribbean history requires one to confront psycho-geographical conditions that are brutally uncomfortable: Inferno in Paradise. Where “nobody in the Caribbean is native to the environment”, its history is one of violence, trauma and oppression brought about by slavery and colonialism juxtaposed with the 20th century’s touristic ‘blue-sky-turquoise-waters’ brochures that belie the actual conditions of post-colonial Caribbean culture. The work of the four Grenadian artists has been produced in dialogue with Enwezor’s curatorial call to arms and conscious of their new role in representing Grenada on Venice’s global art stage. Susan Mains and Maria McClafferty have produced monumental works addressing the state of violence and oppression inherent in society. Asher Mains has established a completely new dialogue between painting, identity and cocoa farming in Grenadian culture. Like a surgeon-painter, Oliver Benoit dissects the human mind to represent the visceral push and pull of the creative brain in action.
Grenada Speak, Art: the artistic response probes the conditions of the contemporary. The work of these four artists represents “Grenada” where within the Venice context something larger is at play between art, national identity and history.
The Curators
Cheif curator of the Biennale di Venezia is Okwui Enwezor. Susan Mains is a curator for the Grenada Pavilion.
Susan Mains
The art practise of Susan Mains has been by necessity auto-didactic. Growing up in Grenada there weren’t resources for art education, Her university, graduate and post graduate degrees were all focused in the area of education. While living in Dominica in the 1980s a relentless pursuit of art became her mission. For the past 30 years she has been primarily a painter, exploring surface, texture, intensity, and has more recently turned to video and installation to achieve a wider range of possibilities of the visual.
Mains’ curatorial practise has also been auto-didactic, again by necessity. Without strong institutional support in a small island, artist often have to take leadership. Organizing group shows form Grenada, she has taken contemporary work to the Caribbean Region, including the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo for several Caribbean Biennales. Her efforts have included exhibitions at the OAS Museum in Washington DC, and the World Expo in Shanghai China in 2010. She writes about the art of the small islands of the Eastern Caribbean, and has presented papers in academic conferences world wide. She has operated her own commercial gallery in Grenada, Art and Soul, for the past 13 years.
Francesco Elisei
Francesco Elisei independent curator was founded in 1974 and specializes in contemporary art history at the University La Sapienza of Rome, has curated exhibitions in Italy, New York, Tokyo, Osaka, Toronto. He has written numerous essays and published several catalogs national and international. In 2007 he started in the Venice Biennale in curatorial path, taking care of the Moldovan Pavilion 52th Venice Biennale in 2009 he edited the pavilion “Nature and Dreams” IILA / Costa Rica to 53 Bi-ennale of Venice, in 2011 he edited the pavilion of the Republic of Costa Rica to the 54th Venice Biennale, in 2013 the 55th Venice Biennale oversaw the pavilion of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, the Republic of Costa Rica and event collateral Back Back to the Biennial dedicated to the world of writing and street art. In 2015 the 56 th Venice Biennale has been appointed to ensure the pavilion of Grenada.
Francesco Elisei curatore indipendente nasce nel 1974 e si specializza in storia dell’arte contemporanea presso l’Università La Sapienza di Roma, ha curato mostre in Italia, New York, Tokyo, Osaka, Toronto. Ha scritto numerosi saggi e pubblicato diversi cataloghi nazionali ed internazionali. Nel 2007 ha in iniziato il percorso curatoriale in Biennale di Venezia curando il Padiglione moldavo alla 52th Biennale di Venezia, nel 2009 ha curato il padiglione «Natura e Sogni» IILA/Costa Rica alla 53 Bi-ennale di Venezia, nel 2011 ha curato il padiglione della Repubblica di Costa Rica alla 54 Biennale di Venezia, nel 2013 alla 55th Biennale di Venezia ha curato il padiglione della Repubblica Popolare del Bangladesh, della Repubblica di Costa Rica e dell’evento collaterale Back Back to Biennale dedicato al mondo del writing e della street art. Nel 2015 alla 56th Biennale di Venezia è stato incaricato di curare il padiglione di Grenada
The Artists
Artists from Grenada and Italy joined to make this pavilion a great success. The elegance of Italy and the warmth of Grenada, combined to give singular panache.
Oliver Benoit
Benoit lives and works in Grenada. He is abstractionist, with a penchant for obscuring his images. He is also a professor of sociology at St. George’s University.
On the surface, Anima 1 is an abstract painting built up layer upon layer in oil and acrylic with bold vertical elements of collage. The structure of the composition is centred on four grey and mauve-painted pieces of canvas folded and flattened like soft arterial pipes. The central “pipes” contain a closed passage of vertical activity that is darker and less articulated than the emerging forms beyond the “barriers”. The surrounding surface is buoyant with energy in a variety of marks stained, scraped and dripped built into thick impasto as the layers crystalize into fully formed orange rectangles combed or scraped like putty with a spatula. These rectangles appear to hover and flow, emerge and dissolve, enter and escape, being absorbed and “blocked” by the three-dimensional “barriers”. To describe a complex abstract painting is to dissect and to analyse a breaking down of things.
The analytical philosopher John Campbell provides a useful parallel definition when looking at Benoit’s painting:
“Philosophy is thinking in slow motion. It breaks down, describes and assesses moves we ordinarily make at great speed – to do with our natural motivations and beliefs. It then becomes evident that alternatives are possible.”
If the practice of philosophy is analogous to the practice of art, Benoit’s work proposes that the object of a painting is to slow down and analyse the ebb and flow of the creative act attending to the use of the brain for thought, vision and decision-making. The bold central structures in Anima 1 are the “barriers” – like a series of central nervous columns – through which the symbolic schemas move. Benoit is examining how the brain filters “good” and “bad” ideas, in the painting process, and how we absorb and block influences and habits conscious and unconscious. A painting is a construction and therefore scrutinizing the conditions and act of painting can reveal truths about the self. The function of the brain and thought are explored through the act of painting providing the evidence for how we might know and understand the nature of one’s identity through observing the creative human mind at work.
Benoit’s work as both a painter and academic explore the role of identity. The push and pull between our ideas and our actions while painting is a microcosm for how we live and relate to society. The role of professional artists in contemporary Caribbean society is emergent. Benoit’s interest in the (re-)construction of identity through art also challenges the cultural indifference to artists and visual arts practice in society decades after the end of colonialism.
Maria McClafferty
Maria McClafferty lives and works in Grenada. Her glass and steel constructions have been commissioned all over the world. Recently, her work in encaustic has led to a new expression.
McClafferty’s monumental triptych Disordered World is a bold, bright colourful fused glass sculpture suspended in front of the pavilion’s central Palladian window. The light behind casts the aura of an ethereal floating kimono in greens, yellow, cloudy whites and heavily textured clear glass with orange and red accents in a chapel-like space of floor-to-ceiling white curtains on either side. The lightness of installation defies the weight of these glass panels encased in a steel scaffold attached together with metal clasps and wire suspended by chains cast through hoops that ominously resemble six manacles. The pure decorative beauty of fused coloured glass on closer inspection holds a dark secret.
The panels are made by layering (“stacking”) sheets of glass, painted and fused at varying temperatures (hot burst “ramps” and longer “soaks”) in McClafferty’s kiln in Grenada. The alchemy of heat, glass and colour has produced a dense abstract texture of globule passages, air bubbles and intense sprays of colour encased in the hybrid textures produced by the stress of annealing glass. The title Disordered World for a work in glass produces a double-entendre: Glass is an amorphous solid i.e. the atoms and molecules are not organized in a definite pattern and therefore by nature are disordered to form a structure.
Details emerge on closer inspection. The metal crosses, like barbed wire, create an ominous scar across the central panel dissecting the outline of a crucified female figure. Her breasts outlined at the base of her raised arms and outstretched palms dotted with sprays of red congealing blood. A brush of hair conceals a heavy head. The symbolism of a figure on a cross has a universal meaning that is brutality echoed by the six manacles bearing the weight of the work. (This figure is echoed in her two works hanging in the cloister on aluminium streaked brilliantly by the light as you walk through the space.) Made in Grenada, Disordered World has crossed the Atlantic from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean. Its dark secret is that it contains brutal and oppressive histories: human slavery and colonialism (steel manacles) and the violence against women (the trapped female form). The historical connections between the old and new world are today a legacy of enduring violence that do not recognize ‘emancipation’. Here, McClafferty “speaks truth to power”: the human body trapped in a state of violence is naturalised by those who continue to inflict violence.
Asher Mains
Asher Mains lives and works in Grenada. He is primarily a painter, but also works in constructions and installations. His work often addresses social concerns.
This large portrait is the latest in a series entitled: “Painted Portraits for Cocoa Farmers”. On entering the Sala Tiziano, Joanne’s presence captures your gaze immediately. She is seated smiling at the viewer, relaxed and formidable in her work clothes, large rubber boots and cap, as though in conversation with us while she has taken a break to rest. She is seated outdoors, a hint of vegetation is visible next to her left hand and face and we note her machete (‘cutlass’) is at her side – also at rest in the ground for the time being. Her charismatic smile and physical strength seen from below makes her appearance even more appealing set against a decorative background of diamond-shaped constellations stencilled on unprimed canvas using Grenada’s popular ‘cocoa tea’.
The above description of a striking painted portrait belies Mains’ larger project at hand. The project started in 2014 with interviews, film and photographs of cocoa farmers based at the Crayfish Bay estate in St Mark in preparation for painting eight portraits. In January 2015, Mains held an exhibition-gathering at which he unveiled each portrait as a gift to the famers in gratitude and recognition of their work to produce cocoa. The reactions to this project caught on film are of delight and bewilderment – the portrait is immediately recognised as something special but has arrived in a completely new context for portrait painting. Mains’ project challenges the conventions inherent in his medium including the history and nature of the painter-patron relationship by transforming portraiture into a form of cultural exchange that gives these farmers a new and tangible aesthetic status through art.
Cocoa farming and the development of a fully-fledged chocolate industry is the most exciting agriculture development in Grenada since Hurricane Ivan. Grenada’s volcanic terrior and cocoa trees are of exceptional quality but cocoa was overshadowed by nutmeg during colonialism. The cocoa trade experienced a mini-revolution with the arrival of Mott Green’s “from tree to bar” Grenada Chocolate Company in 1999. This colourful brand empowered independent cocoa farmers whose beans are processed at factories like the Belmont estate (where Joanne works) and the new Diamond Company. The industry is not immune to concerns of which the average age of farmers (late 50s) reflects the fact that despite the recent enthusiasm for cocoa, agriculture continues to have difficulty attracting young people while the threat of unpredictable weather patterns grows. Nevertheless, Grenada’s cocoa industry has become a source of pride post-Ivan and Mains’ project reflects the authentic “driving force” and “sheer love of agriculture” that inspires his sitters. At the moment, Grenada is unique as it is the only cocoa growing country that also produces and markets its own brands of chocolate. The hope is that the cocoa industry in Grenada can lead as a sustainable and ethical fair trade model for other cocoa producing countries.
Francesco Bosso
Francesco Bosso lives and works in Italy. He empoys traditional photography with film and a dark room, and prints on gelatin silver paper to capture a unique light.
Giuseppe Linardi
Giuseppe Linardi is a painter and sculptor who lives and works in Italy. His “decodificazion” series has a unique, push-pull feature.
Carmine Ciccarini
Carmine Ciccarini is a painter using traditional, historic methods. His use of colour is signficant to his city-scapes, that often hi light the importance of humanity. He lives and works in Italy
Susan Mains
Susan Mains lives and works in Grenada. Her international work often is in installation, and often explores man’s inhumanity to man.
As curator and artist, Mains has produced a provocative installation on entrance to the pavilion: None Calls for Justice (2015). Echoing Enwezor’s Epilogue in the Venice Biennale catalogue on the “climate of fear” in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shootings, Mains work translates and presents for closer inspection the iconic violence contained in recent news photographs. Her installation is made of clothes prostrate like bodies, gently built up to imply a form inside and carefully strewn with flowers and illuminated candles. On arrival, this piece immediately confronts and demands our attention as we recognize these bodies from the photographs of Nigerian massacres. The candles and flowers memorialize the ghost figures drawing visitors in to become a witness and reflect on lives brutally and senselessly lost.
Mains’ original intention was to have the installation open to the elements in the cloister, however, the corner of the cloister provides a dark shelter to protect and heighten the effect of the illuminated candles. Here, the installation None Calls for Justice is transformed into a memento mori reverberating a cry out to humanity and for every human soul lost.
None Calls for Justice
The clothing represents the bodies of those killed by violence–the girls in Nigeria, the students in Kenya, those who have drowned in the Mediterranean and others around the world. All lives seem not equal.
Grenada Pavilion
The greatest area of development needed in the Caribbean now is in arts infrastructure. Grenada’s artists have used their art entrepreneurial abilities to arrive in Venice with great success but now Grenada must respond to this historic first step. The economic benefits of building an arts infrastructure has proven time and again to improve the quality of life in communities. Investing in arts (and cultural) infrastructure means developing institutions and initiatives that run public events like Biennials, develop artist residencies and educational workshops. And until there is a more buoyant international art market in Caribbean Art, artists and curators must continue to travel and exhibit internationally to market Grenadian art and bring artists together in turn to promote their home institutions.
Grenada’s Venice effect should work both ways now that a bridge has been formed with the contemporary art world. The presence of “Grenadian art” in the international art world is an opportunity for Grenada’s art institutions at home to build on this new status and identity. A Venice pavilion establishes an official national art identity that can be added to the existing political dialogues in Grenada with reference to Grenadian culture in the international ether similar to exhibiting in the CARICOM “cluster” at the Milano Expo or winning gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show. Grenada’s creative communities should be recognized where there are existing political, economic and social networks that need art entrepreneurs and artists to lead cultural and aesthetic interests of Grenada’s national identity together and across the Caribbean Community.
Grenada’s Venice debut is fortunate to coincide with Enwezor’s inclusive global art constellation. The work of the four Grenadian artists has a new status and significance that represent both Grenada’s national arts identity and heritage. Venice’s Futures are now part of Grenada’s future. Grenada is a small country compared to the Caribbean countries that have already exhibited at the Biennale and have stronger national arts identities. However, Grenada’s presence has revealed present connections that will establish the international “conversations” crucial to Grenada’s future legacies established in its first year at the Venice Biennale.
Venice Biennale 2015
The 2015 Art Biennale closes a sort of trilogy that began with the exhibition curated by Bice Curiger in 2011, Illuminations, and continued with the Encyclopedic Palace of Massimiliano Gioni (2013). With All The World’s Futures, La Biennale continues its research on useful references for making aesthetic judgments on contemporary art, a “critical” issue after the end of the avant-garde and “non-art” art.
Through the exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor, La Biennale returns to observe the relationship between art and the development of human, social and political reality, in the pressing of external forces and phenomena: the ways in which, that is, the tensions of the external world solicit the sensitivities, the vital and expressive energies of the artists, their desires, the motions of the soul (their inner song).
La Biennale di Venezia was founded in 1895. Paolo Baratta has been its President since 2008, and before that from 1998 to 2001. La Biennale, who stands at the forefront of research and promotion of new contemporary art trends, organizes exhibitions, festivals and researches in all its specific sectors: Arts (1895), Architecture (1980), Cinema (1932), Dance (1999), Music (1930), and Theatre (1934). Its activities are documented at the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC) that recently has been completely renovated.
The relationship with the local community has been strengthened through Educational activities and guided visits, with the participation of a growing number of schools from the Veneto region and beyond. This spreads the creativity on the new generation (3,000 teachers and 30,000 pupils involved in 2014). These activities have been supported by the Venice Chamber of Commerce. A cooperation with Universities and research institutes making special tours and stays at the exhibitions has also been establihed. In the three years from 2012-2014, 227 universities (79 Italian and 148 international) have joined the Biennale Sessions project.
In all sectors there have been more research and production opportunities addressed to the younger generation of artists, directly in contact with renowned teachers; this has become more systematic and continuous through the international project Biennale College, now running in the Dance, Theatre, Music, and Cinema sections.