“At the moment I am standing beside the canal, and a little boat just went by – a very posh yacht, and there was a woman drinking from a silver goblet on the top of it. What the fuck?” I’m on the phone to Ella de Burca, an 27-year-old Irish artist who has caught the eye of an international curatorial power-team and somehow ended up on the banks of the Canal Grande in Venice, where she is exhibiting as part of the 55th Biennale di Venezia.
For those that aren’t au fait with the Venice Biennale, this is the biggest international contemporary art exhibition in the world. Running since 1895 and taking place every two years in the so-called Floating City, it’s comprised of some 80-or-so national pavilions, and attracts 300,000 visitors every two years. It’s de Burca’s first time here, and she’s in the final stages of installing a towering sculptural installation in the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove, home to the Emergency Pavilion this year, in which nine different artists from as many countries are showing new work around the idea of ‘Rebuilding Utopia’.
The Emergency Pavilion is one of only a handful of Biennale-approved collateral events outside of the national pavilions, which are the main draw at Venice. The Irish Pavillion this year plays home to Richard Mosse, a Kilkenny-born photographer whose reputation in the art world ignited in 2011 with a Infra, a series of infrared photographs taken in the Congo. Aiming to re-assess the approach of war and documentary photography, Infra depicts guerilla soldiers – many of them still children – wielding huge machine guns and other powerful weapons against lush green jungle backdrops.
Only here the green is not quite green: Mosse’s use of infrared, a technique originally devised to detect camouflage, washes them all in a sea of pink. The grassy verdants and mountainous climbs, all pink; the camouflage and military berets pink too. There are obvious ironies given the gender connotations of the colour pink, and especially so given the context of macho-culture and systematic rape that pervades war-torn areas like the eastern Congo. But Mosse’s infrared pink also renders his exotic landscapes kind of Martian. There’s a psychedelic surrealism that, coupled with the intensity of the colour, suspends us in this weird and alarming vision that is at once hyperreal and dreamlike – or perhaps more aptly, nightmarish.
For the Biennale, Mosse is debuting The Enclave, described as “the culmination of [his] attempt to re-think war photography”. Using much of the same visual techniques and subject matter as the Infra series, The Enclave sees Mosse shift from photography to a more immersive artform: a multi-media installation enlisting the help of cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer/sound designer Ben Frost to create a fully audio-visual experience.
In Mosse’s own worlds, the installation will combine “art’s potential to represent narratives so painful that they exist beyond language, and photography’s capacity to document specific tragedies and communicate them to the world.” Very much made in the Congo (even Frost’s haunting soundscape is comprised entirely of field recordings from the region), The Enclave is confrontational, and its subjects glare back as unblinkingly as the lens they are captured on. It is both beautiful and hugely disturbing, taking in refugee camps, caesarean sections, roads lined with mangled corpses and thick and wild natural landscapes. Unstaged and unapologetic, the work asks what it means to transform these situations of intense suffering into an aesthetic experience: “I am beginning to perceive this vicious loop of subject and object,” Mosse wrote from Goma, an eastern Congo city on the border with Rwanda, during the making of the work.
The only two Irish artists exhibiting works at the Venice Biennale, Richard Mosse and Ella de Burca have crossed paths before. Both were included in 2011’s Dublin Contemporary at Earlsfort Terrace, and it’s directly because of Dublin Contemporary that de Burca’s work is being included in the Emergency Pavilion. It’s been quite a rapid series of events that have lead her to now be standing on the banks of the Canal Grande gushing to me about how “hugely honoured” she is to have been invited by the Dublin Contemporary co-curator Jota Castro to take part.
First spotted by Castro in a group show at The Joinery in 2011, she was given her first big break when the curator decided to hang her work White Flag (Irish) in prime position in the lobby of Earlsfort Terrace. “It was my first international show, I guess,” she tells me, and Castro liked the work so much he decided to include her in the Emergency Pavilion in Venice. It made de Burca think more internationally, too: a week after Dublin Contemporary, she moved away from Dublin to pursue her newly flourishing art career, and is now based in Brussels. It must be pretty overwhelming stuff to jump from The Joinery to the Biennale so quickly, I offer. “Yes,” she replies, “it’s really, really amazing.”
She’s in good company, though. The Project Manager for the Emergency Pavilion is Aideen Darcy – also Irish, and one of a number of visual arts professionals who became part of Castro’s team after having also worked on Dublin Contemporary. “We had such a good team working on Dublin Contemporary that we decided to work on projects together again,” Darcy tells me. “We’ve got four or five artists who were in Dublin Contemporary, including Ella.”
This is the second Emergency Pavilion Castro has played host to, but the first time the Dublin Contemporary team have been on board: neither Darcy or de Burca have worked on the Venice Biennale before. Castro’s 2009 show, themed ‘The Fear Society’, aimed to explore social and political ideas based on the notion that we are becoming a society driven by fear. This year’s theme of ‘Rebuilding Utopia’ has a similarly conscientious slant. “Jota Castro was a diplomat for many years,” Darcy tells me.”So he’s very conscious of the political and social elements of the world we live in. [The show’s] not ethereal. It’s not far removed from topics that he’s interested in.”
Given that the Biennale is infamous for being a playground for the moneyed and private jetted, and – in opening week at least – notoriously overbrimming with excess, prosecco drinking and yacht-parties, I ask Darcy if Castro’s socially-charged curatorial concerns are a little at odds with, or perhaps present challenge to, the opulence of the event. “It’s certainly not any kind of backlash or criticism against the Venice Biennale itself,” she counters. “We’re all artists and we live in the art world. Artists want their work to be seen by people and viewed and considered; that’s why we make work. The exhibition looks at what happened on September 11 in 1973, the coup d’état in Chile, and the forty years since that happened.”
After all, when the champagne flutes have been cleared away, the Venice Biennale still stands as the largest platform for contemporary art in the world. Mosse urging people through his confrontational work not to ignore the humanitarian crises of the eastern Congo (it’s estimated that around 5.4 million people have died from war-related causes in the region since 1998), and Castro, Darcy, de Burca et al examining the “states of emergency” in the world right now, put problems it would be more convenient to ignore on a hugely visited and discussed intellectual and aesthetic platform, attended by a diverse and often-influential cross-section of people from all over the world.
“It’s quite an institution,” Darcy adds. “It’s a beast. A beautiful beast.” And at 118 years old and growing every year, it’s not a beast that anyone’s going to ignore any time soon.
La Biennale di Venezia runs until the 24th November. For a history of Irish art at the Biennale and more on Richard Mosse’s The Enclave, see www.irelandvenice.ie. Emergency Pavilion’s work can be seen at www.emergencypavilion.org.
