Having 'done' the Giardini part of the Venice Biennale on day one, on the second day at the Biennale we went to Arsenale.
There we saw an astonishing range of works, and the theme of the Biennale began to strengthen. 'All the World's Futures' is asking how artists can bring the public to understand and make sense of the upheavals we are witnessing in our political and social lives. Artists responded more or less directly. The curatorial hand of Okwui Enwezor was directive and evident. More of that later. Here are some works I enjoyed on day 2.
The first - by Katharina Grosse... I had seen images of her work but never seen them first hand. The color in the installation was ambitious. This was one of the works that I could not see a strong link with the curatorial theme, but it was good to look at!
The second - at the other end of the scale from Grosse's flamboyant installation was a series of incredibly delicate works by Tiffany Chung from Vietnam. Her breathtakingly beautiful drawings which at first appear to be floral themes, are in fact maps of statistics relating to terrible facts such as war casualties and displaced persons applied to maps. The colors and sizes of the dots indicate the intensity of the crisis.
Ricardo Bray' work was a series of miniature worlds - installed in a series of glass cases - a cross between reliquaries an treasure troves of items including found objects, artist books and drawings.
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