The Zürich Biennial is currently taking place in the Kunsthalle in Zürich, Switzerland. Curated by Mitchell Anderson, artist and founder of Plymouth Rock, and Daniel Baumann, director of Kunsthalle Zurich, this biennial is quite unusual. Unlike other biennials such as the one in Venice it’s not spread across multiple venues in the city; and it doesn’t have a theme, or in other words: it has only one theme, art. This video provides you with a look the the exhibition, and Mitchell Anderson talks about the concept of the show and presents some highlights of the show.
The participating artists are Osama Alrayyan, Tolia Astakhishvili, James Bantone, Juan Barcia Mas & Shen He (Sexkino), Mark Barker, Sarah Benslimane, Vittorio Brodmann, Matt Browning, Centre D’Editions Melbourne, Tornike Chapodze, Anjesa Dellova, Nathalie du Pasquier, Cédric Eisenring, FitArt App, Madge Gill, Renee Gladman, Rafik Greiss, Raphael Hefti, Hardy Hill, Lonnie Holley, David Hominal, Brook Hsu, Shamiran Istifan, Lisa Jo, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Shuang Li, Lorenza Longhi, Danny McDonald, Jasper Marsalis, Alexandra Metcalf, Daniel Moldoveanu, Sveta Mordovskaya, Maurice Morel, Marianne Mueller, Jonathan Okoronkwo, Juan Antonio Olivares, Margit Palme, Cora Pongracz, Sophie Reinhold, Frode Felipe Schjelderup, Leopold Strobl, Kelly Tissot, Cassidy Toner, Ilaria Vinci, Dena Yago, and Bruno Zhu.
Zürich Biennale at Kunsthalle Zürich. Zürich (Switzerland), October 6, 2023.
The participating artists are Osama Alrayyan, Tolia Astakhishvili, James Bantone, Juan Barcia Mas & Shen He (Sexkino), Mark Barker, Sarah Benslimane, Vittorio Brodmann, Matt Browning, Centre D’Editions Melbourne, Tornike Chapodze, Anjesa Dellova, Nathalie du Pasquier, Cédric Eisenring, FitArt App, Madge Gill, Renee Gladman, Rafik Greiss, Raphael Hefti, Hardy Hill, Lonnie Holley, David Hominal, Brook Hsu, Shamiran Istifan, Lisa Jo, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Shuang Li, Lorenza Longhi, Danny McDonald, Jasper Marsalis, Alexandra Metcalf, Daniel Moldoveanu, Sveta Mordovskaya, Maurice Morel, Marianne Mueller, Jonathan Okoronkwo, Juan Antonio Olivares, Margit Palme, Cora Pongracz, Sophie Reinhold, Frode Felipe Schjelderup, Leopold Strobl, Kelly Tissot, Cassidy Toner, Ilaria Vinci, Dena Yago, and Bruno Zhu.
Zürich Biennale at Kunsthalle Zürich. Zürich (Switzerland), October 6, 2023.
Category
🦄
CreativityTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 [CHATTER]
00:07 Wedding?
00:08 [CHATTER]
00:34 It has this name because it shares all these characteristics
00:38 with the biennial.
00:39 There's 50 artists from around the world.
00:42 It's a small set of exciting work going on in the world.
00:45 But what we did differently is that instead
00:48 of spreading it throughout a city as a normal biennial,
00:50 we put it all in one room.
00:51 Instead, what if we put it all together
00:52 and they all have to talk to each other
00:54 and live in really close quarters?
00:58 So it follows all the rules of the biennial,
01:00 but also we really like the idea that structures and systems,
01:04 you can use names.
01:05 Everyone can start a biennial.
01:06 Everyone can start a Kunsthalle if they want to, too.
01:08 So it's just about doing the things.
01:11 So the funny thing was that when the artists--
01:13 when we invited them, they'd call me up and they'd be like,
01:15 is this a real biennial or is this a joke?
01:18 And I would be like, yes.
01:19 I take it very seriously as that high-level exhibition that
01:22 brings all this art into a city, an art center city like Zurich,
01:27 and shows the audience that art.
01:31 But I also think that there's some fun
01:32 in playing with those giant structures
01:34 and showing how easy they are to work with or to replicate.
01:39 Right?
01:39 Yeah.
01:40 [SIDE CONVERSATION]
01:42 I mean, there's great theme exhibitions,
02:05 but there's two real problems with the theme exhibition.
02:07 One is that art is no longer art.
02:10 It's an illustration.
02:11 So it's not-- illustration is a different cultural form, which
02:14 also has value.
02:15 But you're making art illustrate something
02:18 when artists can be really ambiguous and not
02:20 sit perfectly within things.
02:21 Mostly, the most interesting art does that.
02:24 So Daniel came.
02:26 He asked me if we wanted to do a group show together.
02:29 And he was like, maybe you have thoughts
02:30 of what that show could be.
02:32 And I came back--
02:33 this was in February.
02:34 I came back a week later, and I was like,
02:35 the theme of the show is art.
02:38 Like, we just remove it, and we just--
02:41 we start looking at quality works,
02:43 works that we want to see.
02:44 Because the other problem with group shows,
02:46 theme shows, is that the curator sometimes
02:49 will put a lesser quality work in because it perfectly
02:51 illustrates a theme.
02:52 And so what happens is that then there's no--
02:56 the art is not even--
02:57 it's not based on the quality of the art or the experience.
03:00 It's based on whether this depicts something.
03:03 And I think the audience can feel that in these shows,
03:05 that it's not all the level.
03:07 So I thought, we thought, what happens
03:10 if we just go with what we want to bring in, quality, things
03:14 that look exciting, things we've heard about,
03:16 and we put them together?
03:18 And what happened was that it made its own theme.
03:21 And that theme is kind of like life now, right?
03:24 That's all of the weirdness and ridiculousness
03:27 is representative here, of making it
03:30 through the world next to each other and maneuvering.
03:34 And so that happened on its own, which
03:36 makes sense because artists are the ones reflecting on life.
03:39 I mean, it's like, you don't really
03:41 need to get between the art.
03:43 But I'm an artist, and that's how I feel, right?
03:45 So--
03:46 [LAUGHTER]
03:49 [SIDE CONVERSATION]
03:52 So Daniel and I, we get along really well.
04:17 But we don't have--
04:19 our taste in art doesn't perfectly overlap.
04:21 And I think that's actually interesting for conversation
04:23 and things.
04:24 So when we went through the artists, if we both agreed,
04:27 then they moved on to a selection.
04:29 And then, of course, it comes down
04:30 to what can we do with the resources that we have, right?
04:33 But mostly, we did it.
04:36 So there's also this overlap between two forms of taste,
04:40 two forms of interest.
04:41 And that, now, seven months later, I also
04:44 see as a form that makes it more cohesive than it
04:48 should have been.
04:49 I thought this would be much messier, much more
04:51 like just these pieces.
04:53 But actually, the artworks, artworks at the same time,
04:56 artworks around each other, they're related.
05:00 We all live in the same world.
05:02 There's not that many differences
05:03 in the basics of things, right?
05:06 The basics of society and humanity, right?
05:08 Yeah.
05:10 We've been working on it for about nine months, maybe,
05:13 eight months.
05:13 Eight or nine months.
05:14 We would meet at least once every week at the beginning.
05:17 Before we even invited one artist or anything,
05:20 we had met for a couple of months,
05:22 just talking about what could be interesting,
05:24 what kind of show might be interesting to see in Zurich,
05:27 what kind of show isn't done right now.
05:31 And that was the basics point, was these conversations
05:34 about what could be done that was more special, more
05:38 exciting.
05:39 Yeah.
05:40 That's what the whole show is about.
05:42 That's where it's birthed from.
05:43 And then it became this colossus, right?
05:47 But that's eight months ago.
05:49 I don't think either of us could have pictured it like this.
05:52 I remember some of the ideas that we
05:53 went through for weeks at a time,
05:55 and they were very different than what happened.
05:57 We live in a society, we live in a time
05:59 right now where discussion is called arguing,
06:03 arguing is thought of as being bad.
06:06 So you should just like something or not talk about it.
06:10 There's not this room for this debate, which is also
06:13 really interesting, also really intellectually stimulating.
06:16 So I think all of this is this turn against so many societal
06:24 forces that don't want to put things together,
06:26 that want everything to be in firm boxes.
06:29 And it's really interesting to bleed between them.
06:32 I mean, life bleeds between ambiguities.
06:36 There's not good or bad or right or wrong.
06:38 These are fairy tales.
06:39 Yeah.
06:40 [INTERPOSING VOICES]
06:43 [INTERPOSING VOICES]
07:13 I mean, all the art here is so exciting in the way
07:15 that it deals with many different things,
07:17 from something like this abstractions,
07:20 where the artist who's a painter who's in his 40s,
07:25 he has a career as a painter, and his sister
07:28 has a practice as a kind of a dance choreographer artist,
07:31 and she's been doing these performances.
07:33 And these three panels spaced throughout the show,
07:37 they were the backdrop and the flooring,
07:39 the set for his sister's work.
07:42 So are they props or are they paintings?
07:45 What does that mean for abstraction?
07:47 And this is really about seeing what things are.
07:50 And other works might deal with direct issues.
07:53 Or do you mind if I walk this way?
07:56 Margit Palmer, who's in her 80s and in Austria for decades
08:06 has been making these beautiful aquatints.
08:09 And they've been dealing with femininity
08:11 in very weird ways.
08:12 They're sexualized.
08:14 The women have guns.
08:16 They're very uncomfortable.
08:17 I can't really tell you one thing about this.
08:19 And I think that's what makes them exciting as art,
08:21 is that the way that they make me feel is not settled.
08:26 They don't have a point of view which tells you what to think.
08:29 They just put a series of real life images,
08:33 like more or less, and they leave it here for the viewer
08:35 to get to decide.
08:38 One of the first things that we did with the show
08:42 is that there's a queer architecture collective that
08:45 works at the ETH called Sex Kino.
08:48 It's Juan Brachia Maff and Shen He.
08:51 And they had been doing these cool projects
08:53 for the last year or two.
08:54 They did a guerrilla installation
08:57 about bathroom cruising in the hallways of the ETH.
09:00 They took over this abandoned sex kino on Longstreet
09:04 and did an exhibition.
09:05 So we invited them to be part of the show as this insert,
09:10 to include creative practices outside of high art,
09:14 contemporary art.
09:15 I think that was also something we were interested in.
09:17 So this is exploration.
09:19 I mean, they've taken all these office doors out
09:23 of a building in Basel, and they've set it up here.
09:25 And what's so strange is that the psychosis of office work,
09:31 this redundancy of how we put people in boxes,
09:34 it maintains itself without the building.
09:38 The doors themselves can convey that.
09:39 I mean, it really is a crazy experience to be in here.
09:45 And it's doing that with just architectural structures.
09:50 And throughout the show, this was never planned.
09:52 And I don't know how it happened, but so many works
09:55 became architectural.
09:57 There's this wall by Kelly Tissot, this artist Daniel
10:00 Modivenu.
10:03 He puts his paintings on this structure coming off the wall.
10:06 There's this wall here in the back
10:08 that has Laura da Vinci's geese on it.
10:11 It's a wall, but basically it's a pedestal for her work.
10:15 Lisa Jo's painting comes flying off the wall.
10:17 It's really crazy.
10:18 I've never-- I mean, I know lots of artists.
10:20 I've never heard anyone making walls and architecture
10:25 as art at this level.
10:26 And maybe that means that we're going
10:28 to see it everywhere in the next two years.
10:30 Or maybe it means that we gave them the opportunity
10:32 now and that this was always interesting.
10:35 Miriam Leonardi's built this concrete wall out front
10:38 that poker games will be played behind.
10:40 So they all come from their own different places as artists.
10:43 But somehow this unity happened on its own and really separate
10:47 from me and Daniel.
10:48 I really-- I mean, three months ago, when all these-- when
10:51 I was looking at the list and there were just
10:53 all these structures, I was like, what
10:54 is going on in art right now?
10:56 And it makes sense, you know, these useless architectures,
11:00 these architectures that manipulate a body,
11:01 they don't really do anything.
11:03 That's a really interesting concept, right?
11:07 That's not giving shelter, that's not providing--
11:09 they're not blocking anything.
11:12 Yeah, everyone's built their own walls.
11:14 It's just the opposite of the one we always hear about.
11:17 [CHATTER]
11:21 [MUSIC PLAYING]
11:24 [CHATTER]
11:28 [MUSIC PLAYING]
11:31 [CHATTER]
11:35 [MUSIC PLAYING]
11:38 [CHATTER]
11:42 [CHATTER]
12:04 [CHATTER]
12:07 [BLANK_AUDIO]