The 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville: Various Venues

"HOW MIGHT ART take measure of the multiple mutinies and upheavals that currently beset global society?... How might art become integral rather than peripheral to the widespread challenge that affects not only the production of art but its reception as well, particularly in light of the deleterious effects of reactionary, conservative and fundamentalist politics on all world social formations today?" It is with these weighty and pressing questions that curator Okwui Enwezor begins his catalogue essay introducing the second Seville Biennial, titled "The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society." "The unhomely" is a literal translation of Freud's das Unheimliche, usually rendered as "the uncanny," but here the term was projected onto the field of geopolitics as a means of reflecting the oftentimes violent tensions accompanying globalization--in particular, the growing divide between the economic and political interests of multinational corporations and disenfranchised multitudes. This situation is exacerbated, Enwezor argues, by governance based increasingly on secrecy and executive privilege, as well as by the weakening of liberal traditions such as civil rights, individual liberty, and the social state. Accurate and timely as his analysis may be, the real achievement of this exhibition was, in my view, in how a broadly international assembly of artists presented visually and conceptually compelling work that both advanced and complicated the terms of Enwezor's argument. The gap between the curatorial framing and the artistic offerings was productive, as many works provocatively mingled both political and aesthetic engagements.

Given Enwezor's interests, it came as no surprise that the biennial included a number of artists who engaged directly with the political realities of war, poverty, and environmental despoilment. The Iraqi photojournalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, for example--a deserter from Saddam Hussein's army, who is now a reporter on the current debacle--presented striking images of both coalition forces and insurgents in action, suggesting an Iraq populated exclusively by militants. Also noteworthy were photographs portraying Nigerian hardship and improvised urbanism by the Lagos-based collective Depth of Field, and Simryn Gill's images of the ruined and crumbling colonial architecture of the Peninsula Malaysia (Standing Still, 2000-2003), both dramatizing their respective countries' drastic underdevelopment.

More typical of the exhibition, however, were creative mediations that exceeded the documentary mode. Alfredo Jaar created connections to an earlier art of identity politics and multi-culturalism with a redeployment of his poignant installation Geography=War, 1990/2006, which consists of a series of photograph-bearing light boxes hanging over liquid-filled oil drums; one image shows several people in hazmat protection suits investigating a Nigerian dump site, the implication being that the corporate expropriation of natural resources has ravaged the country's landscape. In another gallery, the Bay Area political collective Retort showed their installation Afflicted Powers, 2006, which includes a video in which figures from Picasso's Guernica are projected over scenes of Iraq burning. Recalling the notorious veiling of the reproduction of the painting in the United Nations building, at the behest of the Bush administration, during the run-up to the invasion, Retort here made Picasso's depictions of the anguish and destruction caused by European fascism relate directly to the war in Iraq.

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Installed in the adjacent gallery was a series of serene counterpoints to the exhibition's more disturbing representations--Gerhard Richter's silver-blue abstractions, each titled Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Picture), 1999/2000, which seemed to imply the ultimate impossibility of representing catastrophe while nevertheless expressing a relation to it. Such an interpretation was bolstered by the inclusion in the same gallery of Richter's Mustangs, 2005, a photograph based on the artist's 1964 painting of a squadron of military airplanes. As with Pamela Wilson-Ryckman's gentle watercolors of Iraq disasters and Thomas Ruff's stunning C-prints of enlarged JPEG images of war-torn landscapes downloaded from the Internet, aestheticization here became a political gesture, creating perverse visualizations that made political realities deeply unsettling through an explosive combination of pleasure and disgust.

Enwezor's conception of the "unhomely" was frequently brought out in the nuanced play between straightforward accounts of shocking experience and the processing of its psychic effects. The resulting symptomatology of transcultural projections, anxieties, and desires--the "phantom scenes" of the exhibition's subtitle--had particular purchase in relation to the concepts of intimacy, proximity, and neighborliness: the three categories of social relations Enwezor explored in some detail in his catalogue essay. As proximity to strangers has become hysterically feared, while the desire for authentic communities has grown, Enwezor argues, the values attached to these terms have shifted: Today they can also describe an invasive closeness and a controlled distance. Reflecting these sentiments, a number of works elaborated on the ever-more-specialized forms of "intimacy" being produced by architectures of containment and systems of surveillance. Liz Larner's Reversed Perspective, Reflected (Scaffolding Model, Full Scale), 2006, for example, is a brutal structure resembling a sideways pyramid, whose apex offers an authoritative viewing point into the caged space within. In a humorous take, Andreas Slominski exhibited his signature traps made for various species--e.g., "little vermin," "wood fowl," and "red deer"--which imply an obsessive desire to incarcerate life in general. And Tony Labat's vaguely sadistic Day Labor: Mapping the Outside (Fat Chance Bruce Nauman), 2006, consisted of footage from a private four-camera surveillance system directed from the window of his San Francisco studio onto migrant workers waiting curbside for employment.