Grafted Biennale

The countryside surrounds the city. It has almost always been an unequal, extractive relationship. The rural provides the urban with food, but also with people. Workers for its industries and students for its universities. As the whole world has urbanised, youth, imagination, and ambition have been drained from the country to the city. Historically, it has also provided soldiers for a nation’s wars.

From the ornate wooden summerhouse built by his grandparents, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze’s father tells a story of the post-Soviet reorganisation of Europe and the relation of the core to the periphery. The Invisible Hand of My Father (2018) – his right arm lost on a construction site in Portugal in the 2000s – serves as the concretization of the working arm – hammer in hand as a symbol of workers’ power – replaced by the invisible hand that exercises the will of the market. Fortunately, the regularization of his father’s status as a migrant worker before the accident means Portuguese social insurance can afford him his rural retirement of wine making and cigarette smoking. The invisible hand keeps working for the Gagoshidze family in Europe’s far west.

The Biennale’s twin threads of interest – the countryside and work in the broadest sense – come together here and in several other works in the main exhibition. This can allow for a rethinking of what both mean today, but there’s also a layer of nostalgia that has the potential to obstruct this. In their introductory text, the curators make a link between the rural-urban divide and contrast the people who work in the field and the factory. This is a strangely anachronistic framing. In the Central and Eastern European area, the urban working class does not work in factories, which have mostly been converted to apartments, leisure, and retail spaces. When it’s not offshored, contemporary manufacturing is exurban, positioned at the interface of the city and the country. Out of the fields grow wide, low, metal boxes, assembling and distributing consumer goods and construction materials.

There is a tension in the biennale’s themes of rural change, resistance, and resilience. A slower pace of change is a key part of rural identity, both for those who live there and those who romanticize it. Rural resistance is, then, often resistance to change, as in Pınar Öğrenci’s video and installation, Resisting Forest (2019), that recounts how rural women on the Turkish Black Sea coast fought off the development of a hydro power plant with their bodies, voices, and wooden switches. Even the most progressive rural politics, such as those of the small-scale farmers interviewed in Tomáš Uhnák’s film – The Spectre of Peasantry (2024) – emphasise a return to traditional methods of land and animal husbandry, though Uhnák and his collaborators – Asia Dér, Tomás Kaszás, Asunción Molinos Gordo – are equally interested in the possibility of international solidarity with the global peasant movement through the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants to which the Czech Republic is not a signatory. Elsewhere the politics stay in the background; Antje Schiffers’ expansive project – Collaborative Village Play – presented as three videos and a collection of props, celebrates contemporary rural culture in Germany, Hungary and Spain – from dirt track racing to bagpipe troupes - but, at least in the format presented here, isn’t able to push at the tensions within and between these rather different rural context.

At the far end of the hall is a clutch of works that make use of theatrical staging and framing: Dominika Trapp uses thick velvet drapes to house a painting, drawing, sculpture, and soundwork of readings from Olga Nagy’s oral history of rural Transylanian women; Adalita Husni-Bey uses drama therapy exercise with people who continued to work through Covid – in contemporary urban industries like healthcare, transport and retail – to encourage them to share their experiences and recount stories of the bodies of the dead used in protests, from the black death to AIDS. Kateryna Aliinyk’s paintings, thin washes on unstretched paper suspended from the ceiling, have the most emotional power. Scenes of forests scarred by war, a natural landscape where human absence is evidence of murder, are framed by red curtains and titles – The Action Doesn’t Fit the Plot (2024), We Got Front-Row Tickets (2023) – that give a painful distance to the depictions of places and events too close to be made sense of, whose meanings are not yet fixed.

The exhibition’s architecture does an excellent job of managing the difficult space, using its height to full effect so that the very full hall never feels overcrowded. Power is distributed by wooden telegraph poles, themselves a little nostalgic, and structure is provided by half-unwrapped stacks of ytong blocks, a fixture of vernacular construction in both the town and the country. An implicit pivot-point of many of the works, with all but a few of the artists from former socialist and soviet countries, it presents the legacy of socialism and the transition of the 1990s, though the best of these use it as a base for exploring the present and the future. Hungarian duo Randomroutines’s Fence-Scape I-VIII (2013-2024) elevates the folk art of decorative rebar metalwork to depict scenes that suggest escape from a failing urban society. There’s nostalgia in the visual style that’s as much ‘Corporate Memphis’ as it is a pastiche of socialist realism, but there’s also a disquieting, slightly apocalyptic absurdity. Judita Levitnerová and Kateřina Kovalinová, herself a farmworker, combine non-woven wool tapestry produced with the obsolete Art Protis technique developed in Brno in the 1960s, alongside a soundtrack of electronically distorted sound and voice spoken from the perspective of the flock. Alicija Rogalska’s videos, installed in the frame of a polytunnel, focus on Czech flower farming and arranging. Their narrative is centred on transition and the opening of markets in the 1990s, but visually it speaks of a contemporary rural industry and profession.

It’s not a surprise that a generation of artists and curators who grew up under 35 years of actually-existing capitalism would have things to say about the recent, distant past, a history that it feels like it’s only just become institutionally possible to interrogate as anything other than a misfortune to be overcome with market mechanisms and individual excellence. Elske Rosenfeld’s documented performance – Archive of Gestures: Speaking [Statements for the Future] (2019-2002) – excavates the political language of the final days of the GDR. At the opening, she brought this into dialogue with Olia Sosnovskaya, whose installed work, reflections on the 2020 attempt at revolution in Belarus, is one of the exhibition's few moments of abstraction. Together, their hour-long presentation resisted theatricality as they described the possible connections between the visual politics of protest since 1989. Deliberately unspectacular, the performance worked against nostalgia to interrogate documents of resistance that have largely failed: keeping them active to give them a chance to be useful, so that their repetition might be an act of learning rather than memorialisation or mourning.

Hannah Proctor, who read at an event during the Biennale’s opening weekend, describes a distinction between ‘moribund’ and ‘political’ nostalgia. The former is “an ideal image of past authenticity that blots out the immediate present” (p.44). Political nostalgia, on the other hand, is longing for a home that is yet to be created, for a world that is more just than this one. Nostalgia for the rural can hide what is really there; clear eyes are needed to see the conflicts, the horrors, and the life. Our images of the past are never authentic, however critical the examination, but to move beyond the past, we need to envision things not as they are or have been, but as they could be.

Kateryna Aliinyk, Zbyněk Baladrán, björnsonova, cosa.cz, kulturní družstvo / cultural cooperative (Markéta Mráčková, Barbora Šimonová) & Viktor Vejvoda, DAVRA research group (Madina Joldybek, Zumrad Mirzalieva, Saodat Ismailova), Martina Drozd Smutná, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Uladzimir Hramovich, Adelita Husni-Bey, Nikita Kadan, Kateřina Konvalinová & Judita Levitnerová, Kateryna Lysovenko, Pınar Öğrenci, Natalie Perkof, Marta Popivoda, Randomroutines (Tamás Kaszás & Krisztián Kristóf), Alicja Rogalska, Elske Rosenfeld, Zorka Ságlová, Antje Schiffers, Olia Sosnovskaya, Petr Štembera, Dominika Trapp, Tomáš Uhnák & Asia Dér / Tamás Kaszás / Asunción Molinos Gordo (Národní galerie Praha, Veletržní palác), Kateryna Aliinyk, Michael Ayrton, Yevgenia Belorusets, Arthur Degner, Yaroslav Futymsky, Hans Grundig, Nikita Kadan, Dana Kavelina & Olha Marusyn, Georgies Kotsonis, Yuri Leiderman, Kateryna Lysovenko, M. Marizza, Ján Mudroch, Tetiana Nylivna Yablonska, Margaryta Polovynko, Anton Saienko, Ilya Todurkin (Lidická galerie) / Bienále ve věci umění / kurátorstvo: Katalin Erdődi a Aleksei Borisionok / Národní galerie Praha, Lidická galerie / Praha, Lidice / 14. 6. – 29. 9. 2024

Foto: Jonáš Verešpej