Canada at the Venice Biennale: Artists examine history through beads, butterflies and more

At the 60th Venice Art Biennale, which opened last month, participating artists were tasked to respond to the theme "Foreigners Everywhere." The concept, by curator Adriano Pedrosa, is controversial, suggesting no one really belongs anywhere. The international exhibition covers a range of topics under this umbrella, with particular focus on the historical movement of people, goods and animals — the port city of Venice providing an apt backdrop.

Four artists representing Canada are exhibiting in the Biennale itself, while others have contributed to the slate of offsite programs hosted in various locations across the city. These include Kapwani Kiwanga's National Gallery-commissioned pavilion, which is Canada's official Biennale presentation; paintings by the late multidisciplinary artist Erica Rutherford in the Arsenale; work by Vancouver-based Iranian artist Mohammad Ehsaei in "Nucleo Storico," a section of the Giardini central pavilion on abstraction from the Global South; a video installation by the Biennale's youngest exhibiting artist, Joyce Joumaa; an exhibition by Ydessa Hendeles as one of the Biennale's 30 official Collateral Events; and a talk by previous Sobey Art Award-winner Stephanie Comilang at Ocean Space art centre.

Among the three youngest of these artists — Kiwanga, Joumaa and Comilang — a shared theme emerges, as each presents thoroughly researched projects exploring how historical trade and migration routes give shape to the present. In a range of mediums and materials, these artists showcase poetic artistic practices that engage complex social and political issues.

Kapwani Kiwanga revisits colonial currencies

For the Canadian pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale, the Hamilton-born Kiwanga created Trinket, an immersive installation using materials that made up some of the currencies of early trade routes from Europe, like beads, gold, metal, copper, glass, palm oil and Brazilian Pernambuco redwood. It is the culmination of vast amounts of research into the materials themselves, but also how they develop within structures of power. This is key to Kiwanga's practice, which regularly examines how truth and knowledge are constituted through cultural identities and the administration of people.

Thousands of strands of tiny glass beads, also known as seed beads, from the nearby glass-making island of Murano, line the interior and exterior of the pavilion. The floor and walls are inlaid with the redwood, gold leaf and metal, and covered with epoxy resin. Four simple geometric sculptures of copper and metal stand in the space with beaded sashes laid across and along their structures, while glass vessels, containing palm oil and oxygen, sit nearby. 

The seed beads were invented in Murano in the 14th century, and the glassmakers who knew how to make them were not allowed to leave the island without special permission. According to Italian historian Karin Pallaver, in an essay from the pavilion's accompanying reader, every boat that left Venice until the 17th century would contain huge amounts of seed beads to trade in Africa and the Americas for land, gold and human beings — things that ultimately built the wealth of early European economies. 

The materials being referenced are embedded within our social structures and architectures. They represent regimes of value and objects of currency. Early Venetian traders thought of the beads as mere trinkets, which is where the exhibition gets its title. As it turned out, they were a valuable commodity that was fungible, hard to reproduce, available only in limited quantities and easy to transport. The seed beads remain integrated in world material cultures to this day.

Joyce Joumaa recreates intelligence tests

In the Giardini's central pavilion for the international exhibition, Joumaa, who's a Montreal-based Lebanese artist and filmmaker, occupies the final exhibition space of the large, labyrinthine building. Selected as one of four emerging artists under 30 for the Biennale College Arte program, Joumaa uses her work in the exhibition to highlight how "foreignness" has been systemically associated with inferiority. Her video installation, Memory Contours, looks at a period of U.S. history in the early 1900s, when the eugenics movement adversely affected new immigrants especially. 

Turning her attention to "intelligence" tests, which claimed to detect mental deficiency, Joumaa replicates four drawings from case studies in the 1914 U.S. Public Health Service report "Mentality of the Arriving Immigrant." On four pole-mounted video screens, drawings from the report are interspersed with close-up shots of hands recreating the sketches, enacting a feeling of tension between the gesture of artistic expression and how it is deployed to measure one's intellectual ability.  

In relation to this year's Biennale theme, Joumaa looks to how migration is received within a political apparatus that mostly seeks to isolate itself from outsiders, unless they prove their worth. 

In keeping with her broader artistic ethos that no story is ever about just one thing, Joumaa came to this topic while researching the interior architecture of immigration stations — Ellis Island being the most studied example. The soundscape of the video installation is inspired by findings in archives about the sonic environment of Ellis Island when it served as an immigration station.

With this project, Joumaa investigates social psychology, how architecture is politically inscribed and the ways the body internalizes this tension as it moves through certain spaces. The unsteady hands next to the "grading" of shakily rendered shapes and the echoing sounds of chatter, clanging and shuffling bodies all heighten a sense of unease as it relates to the institutional rituals of migration. The experience portrayed is not only historical, but contemporary, too.  

Stephanie Comilang traces the routes of migration

As the Biennale is considered the contemporary art world's chief international event, bringing in thousands of visitors for preview week, many institutions take the opportunity to coordinate programming throughout the city. At Ocean Space art centre in Venice, an offshoot of the TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary foundation based in Madrid, Filipina Canadian artist Comilang gave a talk about her newest project, which is a two-part commission currently on view in Madrid that will continue at Sharjah Biennial 16 in the United Arab Emirates next February. 

Installed at the foundation's headquarters, Search for Life consists of two large, opposing screen projections with an installation of textile works featuring butterfly embroidery on piña fabric, which is a traditional Philippine textile made from pineapple plant leaves. In Comilang's previous work, Piña, Why Is the Sky Blue?, the artist already established the pineapple as a symbolic connector — a product of colonialism that travelled from its native South America to Europe, then to the Philippines. 

Many narratives in Comilang's works are underpinned by the movements of colonialist enterprises and their historical trade routes, such as that of the pineapple. These networks and pathways have ultimately shaped modern global economies, as well as the ways groups of people have been compelled to move around within them. In this work, her focus extends to Filipino seafarers and the borderless migration of the butterfly. Relating themes of home, family, imperialism, migration and spirituality, what interests her is how communities function under late capitalism, and how people set up and navigate certain architectures as a community. She invokes the ways in which the personal is bound to the historical by allowing people to tell their stories in their own words. 

What comes through in the work of Kiwanga, Joumaa and Comilang is a shared concern for how the present is shaped by often forgotten or marginalized histories. Each artist weaves these tales by adding a personal connection to the long arc of history, a strategy that lends itself well to subjects requiring dense historical research, which are sometimes difficult to receive. Together, these three artists show us that in order to decipher the present moment, it's fundamental to revisit history — and the role artistic expression can play in this journey is pivotal.