Building bridges

Carla Bianpoen ,  Contributor ,  Prague   |  Thu, 07/02/2009 11:17 AM  |  Arts & Design

Entang Wiharso’s Desire Alive: The Story Behind Super Hero and Black Goat, dimension variable, aluminium plates.

Entering Karlin Hall, a onetime factory space, for the 4th Prague Biennale, one is struck by an atmosphere typical of Central European contemporary art juxtaposed with contemporary art from other cultural areas, including China, Korea and Southeast Asia.  

In spite of budget cuts, the biennale organisers, Flash Art editors Giancarlo Politi and Helena Kontová, have been able to put on a multi-cultural exhibition that includes Southeast Asian artists.

With 200 artists from 28 countries, many showcasing more than one work, and including the debut of the Prague Biennale Photo 1, the exhibition appears intended to build bridges to as many parts of the world as possible. The sheer extent of art works was overwhelming.

What immediately draws the attention, though, is the video installation, How Do You Want to Be Governed?, from which a pounding voice continuously and repeatedly asks the question “how do you want to be governed?” to a woman seated in a chair, enduring a hand that alternately touches her tenderly and violently.

The video was made by Sarajevo-born artist Maja Bajevi, and is displayed in the section Wo-Man Power,  which was curated by Dadja Altenburg-Kohl, the founder of Prague’s Galerie Montanelli as well as the soon-to-open Museum Montanelli in Malá Strana.  

Another strong video was Israeli artist Sigalit Landau’s Barbed Hula, which dipicts the naked artist hulahooping with barbed wire and is screened in a special room with a sand-covered floor.

A dark, heavy undertone runs through many of the works, the meaning of which can only be fully understood by those who witnessed the historical turbulences faced by Central European countries.

Czech artist Veronika Holcová’s The Pilgrimage shows a figure going over a dark landscape, while her series of Diary Records combines the real world with notes of the memories. Lado Pochkua paints The Dark Day while Jitka Mikulicová ‘s painting of The Bride and Ana Riaboshenko’s blood stained paintings of  Dogs and Rats convey a similar mood.

Such apprehensive sentiment is also found in the paintings by Chinese artist Tu Hongtao, whose works are displayed in the China Box section. Paintings like Remorseless Sky and The Alien seem to reveal a similar feeling for the situation in Chinese.

Interestingly, Phillipino artist Geraldine Javier’ morbid work Odd Sights, Strange Sounds, which features a hunter’s trophy room of taxidermied animal, with the severed heads of some animals looking down on other dead animals on a grass carpet, is well suited to this atmosphere.

For the first time presented in Central Europe, the works by Southeast Asian artists, brought here
by Milan’s Pino Marella Gallery, were in fact not very different from their European colleagues, though some localness could be detected, for instance in Nona

Garcia’s Skeleton at the Feast. Philippino atists featued in the also included Yasmin Sison-Ching, Nona Garcia, Alfredo Esquillo Jr,  Annie Cabigting, Lyra Garcellano, Wire Tuazon, Emmanuel Santos and Ronald Ventura.

From Indonesia, Entang Wiharso’s installation of cut aluminium plates titled Desire Alive: The Story behind Super Hero and Black Goat is well placed and enhanced by an existing iron structure, while Harris Purnomo’s tattood babies on canvas titled The Yellow Tail makes one shudder with apprehension and could well have joined  the barbed hula hoop video by Sigali Landau.

Other Indonesian artists featured include Gede Mahendra Yasa, who offered a dyptick titled Abandonment and Lonely White, and painter Wayan Suja’s Colorful Smile.

In the photo section, Leigh Ledare’s prints explore the psychosexual terrain with sexual images of his mother. These are daring photographs, even in our age when almost everything goes.

Barbora Bálková’s Adam to Eve, featured in the Real Unreal section on the other hand, had women transform their face into that of their ideal man. The women dressed up in men’s clothing and used their pubic hair to make beards.  She then made picturs of “wedding portraits” of the women with their ideal male partners.

— Photos by Carla Bianpoen

Prague Biennale 4

May 14 – July 26 2009
Karlin Hall, Thámova 8
Prague, Czech Republic, 18600
Phone: +420 222 315 268
Mon - Sun: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.