Exhibitions

After a year’s delay, the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture opened last week with a sprawling series of exhibits, including a central exhibition, 61 national pavilions, and more than a dozen collateral events.
And despite the difficulties of the past 18 months, the show (titled “How Will We Live Together?” and curated by Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) remains upbeat.
“At this moment, we are tired of dystopias,” Sarkis told Architectural Record. “We were looking for signs of hope and optimism, and we found a lot of it.”
Here is a round up of some of the biennale’s highlights.

Exhibits From the International Exhibition
Studio Other Spaces, “Future Assembly”
Studio Other Spaces, “Future Assembly” at Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Andrea Avezzù, courtesy of Atudio Other Spaces.
Studio Other Spaces, founded by artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Sebastian Behmann, has put together an installation with work from 50 participants in the central pavilion in the Giardini. The presentation sits atop a massive carpet woven from recycled ocean plastic, and imagines a “Future World Assembly” where legislation protects the rights of entities beyond human beings, such as trees, fungi, and even rocks.

Aerocene Foundation, “Museo Aero Solar for an Aerocene Era”
Aerocene Foundation, “Museo Aero Solar for an Aerocene Era” in the international exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images.
The Aerocene Foundation is a nonprofit founded by Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno. Its team of 200 spent the past two years stitching together the Museo Aero Solar, an inflatable floating sculpture that can fly without fossil fuels. It’s made from used plastic bags, thousands of which were collected from 30 countries around the world. The project’s hope is to usher in a new epoch free of fossil fuels to follow on the heels of the Anthropocene.

Superflux, “Refuge for Resurgence”
Superflux, “Refuge for Resurgence” at the Sylva Foundation in Didcot, Oxford, ahead of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Mark Cocksedge.
Superflex welcomes visitors to a post-Anthropocene banquet where plants and animals have a seat at the table (made a massive slab of oak), with chairs made to seat 12 different species, including humans, reptiles, farm animals, birds, insects, and even rats and wasps. It’s part of an imagined future where wildlife has reclaimed our cities.

Tomas Libertiny, “Beehive Architecture”
A visitor views “Beehive Architecture” by Tomas Libertiny at Slovakia’s pavilion, on a press day at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in Venice on May 20, 2021. Photo by Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images.
“Beehive Architecture” is an exhibition of honeycomb sculptures created by swarms of more than 60,000 honeybees that take the shape of iconic forms, like Nefertiti’s bust, as well as more abstract figures. Tomas Libertiny provided the bees with 3-D printed armatures and let the bees go to town. He calls the process “slow manufacturing,” allowing for minimal intervention to the natural process. Debuting just after World Bee Day on May 20, the works are meant to raise awareness to the threats to the species, an essential pollinator.

National Pavilions
Dutch Pavilion, “Why Is We?”
A visitor views “Why is We” by Afaina de Jong and Debra Solomon at the Dutch pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in Venice on May 19, 2021. Photo by Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images.
In response to the question posed by this year’s biennale exhibition, “How Will We Live Together?” architect Afaina de Jong and artist Debra Solomon want to know “Who Is We?” The Dutch pavilion, from the Het Nieuwe Instituut, offers a critique of architecture that is created with only a small group of mind, calling for design that is more inclusive of diverse identities.

Swiss Pavilion “oræ – Experiences on the Border”
Swiss Pavilion “oræ – Experiences on the Border” at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Keystone, Gaetan Bally.
One of the most prescient international issues addressed at the biennale is that of borders: how they are drawn, who they keep in, and who they are meant to keep out. (The title, oræ, is Latin for borders.) In completing the project, the curators of this pavilion traveled to visit those living on the Swiss border, and invited them to construct an imagined or real place. A raft of border restrictions triggered by the global health crisis prompted the organizers to revisit original interview subjects to see how their perceptions had changed.

Spanish Pavilion, “Uncertainty” More

The artist Rafael Pérez Evans, who gained notoriety for dumping 240,000 carrots (plus some potatoes) outside of Goldsmiths College, his alma mater, has just opened his first museum show—and while there’s nary a root vegetable in sight, there are several grain silos and a lake of milk.
Greeting visitors at the entrance of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds are two full-size grain silos, sourced from a manufacturer in Northern Ireland. The installation, titled Mountain, is inspired by the E.U. practice of stockpiling grain—which can send prices plummeting and threaten farmers’ livelihoods.
“Since the 1970s, [there have been] policies of stocking masses of grain, butter, powdered milk—ridiculous amounts of food. They became known as grain mountains,” Evans told Artnet News.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
“This idea of food security and food protectionism is something that shakes the whole market. When such large quantities of food are stocked, it devalues food products and farmers get very upset,” he said. “I’ve always been very interested in how these fluctuations from the central government cause deep wounds for small-hold farmers.”
Presented empty in the exhibition, “the silos become almost a metal carcass of excess,” Evans said. “It becomes a monument to that unsustainable, postindustrial way of thinking about food production.” (The silos are expected to go to a farm after the exhibition, but the artist will also entertain acquisition offers if there’s interest.)
Rafael Pérez Evans, Handful (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
A tiny pile of grain displayed inside the galleries, titled Handful, stands in stark opposition to the massive scale of both the silos and Evans’s infamous carrot pile.
“During the lockdown, it has been important for me to become aware of what fits in my mouth and my stomach and my hand,” Evans said, and to work in opposition to this monumental, monstrous scale that is the industry of food.”
Evans became an internet sensation with his contribution to Goldsmith’s annual MFA exhibition, which arrived at the school via truck and was unloaded in dramatic fashion: an orange tidal wave of 31 tons of root vegetables dumped on the school courtyard.

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The piece, titled Grounding (2020), was intended as a condemnation of global food waste, using vegetables that had been deemed unfit for human consumption. It mimicked the farmer protests of dumping produce that are common in Spain, where Evans grew up on a farm.
“It produced a lot of different conversations, and that’s a good thing,” Evans said. “That’s what protests are for, to open up conversations and dialogues about things that people don’t necessarily want to look into.”
Now, Evans has again borrowed a popular farmers’ protest action by flooding one of the Henry Moore galleries with about an inch of milk for a work titled Lake. (It’s heavily cut with water and laced with preservatives to keep it from turning sour during the show.)
Rafael Pérez Evans, Lake (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
“The farmers dump milk in roads in city centers, and it it becomes a temporary lake of this white substance,” Evans said. “Small-hold farmers have no voice. So the milk becomes the voice. The dumping becomes the scream. They use produce to disturb the city.”
The effect is somewhat different in a white cube space, where the pooling liquid “is staining the floor, making it white,” Evans added. “It becomes a meditative state.”
The artist plans to bring in farmers from nearby Yorkshire for programming related to the exhibition, allowing them to speak directly to the issues that have inspired his work. “What can we learn from soil workers, from voices outside of the city?” Evans asked.
He hopes to encourage conversations about what food production might look like in the future, such as Spanish writer Jaime Izquierdo Vallina’s notion of an “agripolitan city.”
“It is reimagining a future in which agricultural production is integral to the running of the city,” Evans said. “Having the silos outside the Henry Moore Institute is a bit of a hint toward that imagined future.”
See more photos from the exhibition below.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Lake (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Handful (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Installation view of “Rafael Pérez Evans: Handful” at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Lake (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
“Rafael Pérez Evans: Handful” is on view at the Henry Moore Institute, 74 The Headrow, Leeds LS1 3AH, May 18–August 29, 2021. 
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German artist Katharina Grosse might technically be classified as a painter, but the artist has made a career out of exploding the limitations of the medium (sometimes quite literally). Her sprawling interventions and installations call attention to the architecture in which they are installed and encourage viewers to walk around, atop, and sometimes inside them.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 filmed back in 2014, the artist describes her process as an attempt to “reset the idea of what a painting can be.” As Grosse’s works became larger, with site-specific commissions at Brooklyn’s MetroTech Plaza and Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center, she began collaborating with her brother, who works as an engineer.
Speaking about the impact of having a non-art worker as part of her team, Grosse said that she benefitted from her brother’s ability to “connect the theoretical thinking” of the engineering process to the practical aspects of building large-scale works.
Katharina Grosse, Mumbling Mud – Silk Studio (2018) at K11 Art Museum. Courtesy of Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, Austria, © 2021 Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
“My work is not idea-based, it’s really thought based,” the artist said, describing it as a fluid process that is also physically engaging. In an upcoming installation at the Helsinki Art Museum, Grosse will be on site painting while viewers wander in and out, becoming active participants in the creation process.
In the Helsinki exhibition, which opens June 8, the artist’s work will take over the main exhibition halls—which Grosse hopes will also challenge the hierarchy of media.
“Am I a painter? Am I a sculptor? I don’t know,” Grosse said in the interview. “I’m talking to the world while painting on it.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. Katharina Grosse: Chill Seeping From The Walls Gets Between Us,” opens June 8 at the Helsinki Museum. 
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org
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The Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris reopened last week with its first solo show dedicated to a contemporary African artist: Barthélémy Toguo. Displayed alongside historical African artworks, the Cameroonian multimedia artist’s exhibition addresses viruses, immigration, the lynching of African Americans, African dictators, and the shortage of water.
Titled “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo,” it is curated by Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau, director of Fondation Dapper. Launched in Amsterdam in 1983 by Michel Leveau to support African and Caribbean art, the foundation was given carte blanche for the exhibition.
Particularly pertinent is Vaincre le virus! (Beat the virus) (2016). The six-and-a-half feet tall vases depicting bats, red hands, and patterns relating to the transmission of the Ebola and HIV viruses were realized five years ago when Toguo was nominated for the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp. After carrying out research with scientists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris to glean ideas on how to convey the viruses visually, Toguo had the vases produced in Jingdezhen, China, which is renowned for ceramics.
“In 2016, I talked about the problem of viruses and how we should encourage scientists to find the viruses that are threatening the world—it was a universal message but nobody listened to me,” Toguo told Artnet News. “Then in 2020 came the worldwide problem of Covid-19 that mobilized the world of science and medicine.”
Barthélémy Toguo, Strange Fruit. Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
Nearby is the disquieting installation Strange Fruit (2017). Next to an empty noose tied to a branch are a swooping vulture, crows and aggressive dogs all in brass. Vinyl records from Billie Holiday’s 1939 record about lynchings in the American South, the sleeves painted with an open-mouthed face, are scattered among the branches. “I wanted to talk about the mistreatment of Black people and then a few years later [the murder of] George Floyd happened,” Toguo said.
Born in Cameroon in 1967, Toguo studied at the fine arts school of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, then in Grenoble and the Dusseldorf arts academy. In Dusseldorf, he was taught by the Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis and encountered Tony Cragg.
In 2015, his work featured in the Venice Biennale, eight years after he refused to participate in the African Pavilion organized by the Sindika Dokolo Foundation. “The proposal was reductive because Africa is not a country but a region and I maintain my position about that problematic ghettoization of African artists,” he said. “My stance upset the Italians.”
It was reading the French author Albert Camus’s 1957 Nobel Prize speech, about an artist’s obligation to move the largest number of people by offering an image of common suffering and joy, that instilled in Toguo his sense of mission.
“Camus’s thoughts on the role of an artist fascinated me,” Toguo recalled. “I told myself that I have a role in society to bring a message. For me, an artist is a visionary who has the capacity to look into the future, see societal problems and inform people through his production.”
Barthélémy Toguo, Water Matters (2020). Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
Some artworks evoke ideas metaphorically. Road to Exile (2008)—a wooden boat overflowing with cushions in African fabrics and surrounded by innumerable bottles of water—expresses the precariousness of young Africans trying to reach Europe in boats that might capsize. The newest work, Water Matters (2020), made for the exhibition, comprises a painting of a figure with outstretched palms in front of a table lined with glass bottles. It pertains to Toguo’s desire to redistribute water between countries that have too little and those that have too much.
Around 50 works by Toguo are presented along with historical African artworks from Fondation Dapper, the Musée du Quai Branly, and other collections that find a resonance with his pieces. The first two parts showcase works relating to the body, such as a painting of bleeding hands wounded by nails.
“I tried to identify recurring elements in Barthélémy Toguo’s work and noticed the presence in his paintings and drawings of nails, which hark back to Christ and the crucifixion, but also to objects used by people in Congo to master negative forces,” Falgayrettes-Leveau said. “Although he didn’t consciously reflect upon this aspect of African heritage, they’re unconscious references.”
Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
Toguo’s engagement as an artist extends far beyond his own practice. In 2013, he created Bandjoun Station in Cameroon, encompassing an art center, artists’ residency and coffee plantation. “There was no place to celebrate art in Cameroon and, with all my experience, I needed to give something back to Africa,” said Toguo, who divides his time between Cameroon and Paris. “All my artistic production was in western museums like Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou and MoMA.”
Vocal about the need for the African continent to acquire artworks by its artists, Toguo added: “Whereas African masks were stolen by colonizers and remained in the west, contemporary works by Romuald Hazoumè, Chéri Samba and El Anatsui have been bought by western museums who recognize their value. But there is nothing in Africa because politicians don’t know [about contemporary art]. So I’ve created a space for artistic exchanges. Kounellis gave me three drawings and artists worldwide have given me works that I’ve installed alongside African artists like Soly Cissé and Siriki Ky.”
The Musée du Quai Branly, which is restituting 26 works to Benin, has been called upon by a group of African activists to restitute more pieces to the continent. But that is a “different issue”, pointed out Toguo, who was clearly elated about his solo show: “I’m astonished and moved because this is the first time that this curatorial eye has been applied to my work.”
“Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” is on view at Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris through December 5.
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Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, and Carrie Mae Weems are among the dozen artists who will reflect on the cultural legacy of the Great Migration in an ambitious opening next year at the Mississippi Museum of Art and Baltimore Museum of Art.
The exhibition, “Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration,” which is set to open at the Mississippi Museum in April 2022, before traveling to Baltimiore in October, also includes new commissions from artists Akea Brionne Brown, Zoë Charlton, Larry W. Cook, Torkwase Dyson, Allison Janae Hamilton, Leslie Hewitt, Steffani Jemison, Robert Pruitt, and Jamea Richmond-Edwards.
“The project is grounded in a key prompt,” said Mississippi Museum chief curator Ryan Dennis and Baltimore Museum associate curator Jessica Bell Brown, who co-organized the show, in a joint statement. “‘What would happen if today’s leading artists were given the space to think about the intersections of the Great Migration in a wholistic, expansive, and dynamic way?’”
The artists, all of whom are Black, work in practices that “deal with personal and communal histories, familial ties, the Black experience, and the ramifications of land ownership and environmental shifts, among so much more, to consider how we can expand our understanding of this essential moment in American history,” the curators added.  

Seeking economic opportunities and freedom from Jim Crow laws, more than six million African Americans relocated from the post-Reconstruction South to urban areas in the West, Midwest, and Northeastern U.S. from 1916 through the 1970s. The Great Migration, as the phenomenon was called, forever changed the creative landscape of the country. 
Accompanying the show will be a two-volume publication, including newly commissioned essays by writers Kiese Laymon, Jessica Lynne, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Willie J. Wright.
“The exhibition will attend to and complicate histories of racial violence, trauma, and socio-economic exigency, while also examining the agency seized by those who fled as well as those who stayed behind,” said Dennis and Brown. “In many ways, the story of the Great Migration is neither complete in its current telling nor finished in its contemporary unfolding.”
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The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has unveiled its landmark exhibition, “Slavery” (through August 29), an unprecedented survey of 10 personal stories of those who were involved in the slave trade, either as profiteers or victims, as it made its way across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and into the Netherlands’ various colonies.
The show, which has been four years in the making, includes 140 objects from the 17th through 19th centuries, and includes two towering Rembrandt portraits of Oopjen Coppit and Marten Soolmans, who were the ultra-wealthy beneficiaries of a sugar refinery, as well as disturbing artifacts such as collars that were forced on enslaved peoples and gifts exchanged between an African monarch and a slave trader.

Among the stories told is that of Wally, an enslaved man forced to work a sugar plantation in the colony of Suriname. Along with others, Wally organized a failed revolt on the plantation and fled, a crime for which he was executed by immolation in 1707.
In an audio presentation, his history is narrated by Surinamese-Dutch former kickboxing world champion Remy Bonjasky, whose ancestors worked on the same plantation. Wally’s “blood,” Bonjasky said in the recording, “has been passed down through generations, and is one of the reasons why I was able to become a kickboxing world champion three times.”
Valika Smeulders, the head of history at the Rijksmuseum said that, through such true-to-life storytelling, the show gives “insight into how individuals dealt with legalized injustice.”

Unknown, Multiple leg cuffs for chaining enslaved people, with 6 loose shackles, ca. 1600–1800. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, schenking van de heer J.W. de Keijzer, Gouda.
“By delving into [the history of slavery], we can form a more complete picture of our history and a better understanding of today’s society,” Rijksmuseum general director Taco Dibbits said in a statement, pointing out that these stories are integral to the Dutch past. The Dutch king Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, whose descendants were profiteers of the trade, was given a first tour of the exhibition by Dibbits.
Dutch traders forcibly brought at least 600,000 Africans to North and South America. They also moved 1.1 million people across and through the Indian Ocean. Among the country’s former territories are Caribbean islands such as Aruba, Curaçao, and Saint Martin’s. One of the country’s largest colonies was modern-day Indonesia.
For now, before the show can be opened to the wider public, it will be accessible to student tour groups.
See images of the exhibition below.
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
Augustus van Bengalen Holding Hendrik Cloete’s Pipe (1788). Source: Anonymous. Courtesy Rijksmuseum.
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
Enslaved Men Digging Trenches (1850) Source: Rijksmuseum with support from the Johan Huizinga Fonds.
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum

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