Athens Biennale 2009: Heaven
15 June – 4 October, 2009
Various Venues
Athens, Greece

By Tonya Warner

The second Athens Biennale: Heaven, situated along the coast by the Olympic Complex is comprised of 6 interlocking exhibits with over 150 international artists.  Although there were a few innovative uses of space and a good continuous flow to the galleries in the Water Plaza building, the selection of works was a bit haphazard (as can be expected on a show of this scale).  There was also a strange and unexplained predominance of conceptual art from the 1970s (which I personally find a bit trying once it is removed from its historical context).  My picks from the Biennale are united in their use of theoretical underpinnings and a reliance on deeper narratives that the viewer may or may not be privy to.

Christodoulos Panayiotou – “2008”

Panayiotou’s work tends to lean towards the political, specifically the tensions between his native Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey.  An independent republic since 1960, Cyprus joined the EU in 2004 and adopted the Euro in early 2008.  Panayiotou’s piece, “2008” is a large, multicolored mountain of finely shredded Cyprus pounds, which are now worthless.  Impressive for its shear size, this memorial speaks to well-tred issues of globalization and the loss of national identity inherent in the European Union. 

Hsuan Hsuan Wu – “Restaurant”

Wu’s video piece, “Restaurant,” is deceptively simple.  It involves the artist, dressed in a mouse costume, delicately eating a banana while seated in the middle of a carnival midway.  People walk by, some stopping to stare or gawk. But then something shifts – the crowd changes due to the magic of editing, while Wu remains sitting at the table as if nothing has happened.  She is oblivious to the people around her.  The Taiwanese artist is fascinated by the idea of “being peripheral at the center of the world.”  The idea that no matter where we are or who we are with, we are consumed with our own selves and are therefore detached.  A big theme in Wu’s work is isolation and alienation, of embodying the physical role of the “other”.  To emphasize these two intertwined ideas, she often employs superimposition techniques, visually separating the subject from its surroundings.  By using editing tricks, Wu is able to implicate deeper emotional states and universal concerns.

Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer – “The Infinite Library”

Epaminonda and Cramer are fans of Jorge Luis Borges.  In particular, his story “La Biblioteca de Babel,” which describes a universe that consists of rooms of books which together comprise every possible combination of characters.  As a result, this library contains all useful information and predictions of the future, as well as shelves and shelves of gibberish.  Epaminonda and Cramer have come up with the concept of the “infinite library,” an on-going project that is based on the idea of combining all books together to create one massive “infinite” volume, thereby breaking from thematic classification systems.  Together they have created an expanding archive of books created by recombining and rebinding multiple books together.  For this project they have also created geometrical patterns, abstracted from the books’ illustrations, that are in turn printed over the pages.  Excerpts from their series are available on their website, but none of this is known to the average viewer.  In Athens they have filled a darkened room with screens showing the pages being slowly flipped through by disembodied hands.  They have created a somewhat magical space, one that does not readily give up its secrets.

Robert Smithson – “Hotel Palenque”

 Okay, I know what I said about 1970s conceptual work, however, Smithson’s slide show presentation (a quaintly obsolete medium), first shown in 1972, remains evocative.  In 1969 he and his wife traveled to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and chose to focus the attention of his documentation not on the region’s famous Mayan ruins but the ruins-in-progess that was their hotel.  Like the building itself (one of his “non-sites”), Smithson’s presentation, offered here as a vocal recording with automated slide projector, has no clear focus or direction.  The artist’s intentionally rambling dialogue, including anecdotes that go nowhere, plays over a loop of slides whose meanings appear to shift depending upon his discussion at the time.  The looping of the snapshots emphasizes the disconnect between words and images, between Smithson’s presentation, his dialogue, and the place itself.

Zoe Beloff – “The Ideoplastic Materialization of Eva C”

Beloff is a master of melding olde timey approaches with modern technology.  In this installation, she creates a 4-channel stereoscopic recreation of séances conducted in Paris between 1910-1914.  Her subject of focus is the late-19th century medium Eva Carriere – a real historical figure – who was known for her ability to conjure spirits and ectoplasm.  Carriere performed for famous personages, such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Houdindi, who belived it was a hoax.  True or not (the historical photographs are extremely hoakey and not at all convincing), Beloff uses the case of Eva C to create an engaging performance that employs the séance as a means of exploring the cultural climate and social structures of the time.

http://www.athensbiennial.org/AB/en/heaven/EN_HVblog.htm
http://www.christodoulospanayiotou.com/index.php5
http://www.ducawu.tv/
http://www.danielgustavcramer.com/work.html
http://www.theinfinitelibrary.com/
http://www.robertsmithson.com
http://www.zoebeloff.com/eva/