Miles of string,rotating trees, entire shops … the world’s past, and present and future is laid out at this year’s compendious Venice Biennale. Adrian Searle embarks on a long walk to enlightenment“Everyone is working fortunately,the sun is shining all the time. It’s totally abominable,” says the voice. We are in Venice again, or reclining on white sun-loungers in a sunless space,illuminated by a grid of blue light. Up on the screen people are dancing, joking and pretending to be killed. Hito Steyerl has plunged us into a video game motion-capture studio, and in the German pavilion at the 56th biennale. It is a world of total surveillance and artificial pleasures. “I’m not certain where the game ends and genuine life begins. It turns out you are your own enemy and you have to make your way through a motion-capture studio gulag,” the voice explains, laconically. She could be talking about the biennale, and whose keynote theme,this time, is All the World’s Futures.
While national pavilions each finish their own thing, or the main exhibition in the central pavilion,and running through the medieval dockyard buildings of the Arsenale, is curated by Okwui Enwezor. You cannot curate an entire world, or all its possible futures. That would be God’s job,but Enwezor has hubris enough to try. If his exhibition fails, it does so on a grand scale. There is too much to take in, or too many artists – 139 of them to pick up to grips with. Compendious and difficult,All the World’s Futures has everything from contemporary images of caged and ditch-digging convicts in Louisiana to the depression-era photographs of Walker Evans. Here are the gorgeous modern paintings of Chris Ofili, lush and swooning against walls of hand-painted foliage. Here are the horrible modern paintings of Georg Baselitz. (I cant understand for the life of me why he is here.)We can dip into the entire film corpus of the late Harun Farocki and play among the 108 objects in Qiu Zhijie’s magical theatre of hanging lanterns, or lighthouses and suspended birds. Sometimes,a great bell tolls.
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Source: theguardian.com