The Biennial without Airways
The Second Riga Biennial RIBOCA2: ‘and suddenly it all blossoms’
The habit of international art lovers chasing biennials was to drop from the sky into an unknown city. Or, to find a familiar city in metamorphosis, its innards rearranged to reveal hidden treasures and renew the tarnish of neglect. However, with national isolations and grey shutters, even the carefree Venice, its feted event enduring over 58 editions, now mourns the COVID related death of past curator Germano Celant, deferring until a glimmering 2022. Regulation and caution has grounded the international art world, no more flying in and flying away.
The situation made RIBOCA2 an intimate affair. Originally intended to run for five months from May, it became a casualty of lockdown in Latvia. The organization decided it was viable to salvage the final three weeks, making the location and its audiences the mise-en-scène for a feature film to be co-directed by Dāvis Sīmanis, with a cast of artworks. Unprecedented and sounding crazy, there was little about this manifestation of the biennial that conformed to precedents. Rather than seeing calamity as a limitation; artworks that could not be delivered; deterioration of the site in the months of closure; guest speakers stranded in their homes; the ooze of sanitiser and the muffle of masks became an abstruse context, strange, in harmony with an original curatorial idea of ‘re-enchantment.’
Recovering whatever could still be used from the original plan, the event, that finally and falteringly, picked itself up from the rubble, was an improvised reconstruction of an original that never existed. Basic markings on the floor replaced walls, smashed concrete tumulus marked a route, and feral cats pissed on the outdoor works.
The unprocessed aesthetic of the setting, often discreetly sanitized in art events, was embraced without moderation. The main venue was the derelict looking ‘Port Building,’ found beyond an abraded expanse that could have been put to good use as a lorry park. One of the first works encountered was Katrin Hornek’s A Landmass to Come (2020). It was just a great mass of raw clay, ‘Latvian soil.’ This mud had been clawed and pounded into a vaguely industrial landscape by a group of teenagers. They appeared to have quit the task before the slippery mountain of material got too real, leaving it always liable to be squished up and reformed.
At the other end of the dockside, the exhibition’s main entrance was a tiny doorway under a steel lintel. Emphasizing its small scale was the monumental rainbow arc of words, spelt out in a bulbous font, Ugo Rondinone’s ‘Life Time’ (2019). Before the virus, the domestic front-door size would have fostered a friendly crush; now, the dimensions challenged proper distancing, acquiring anxious connotations — a homely welcome is so 2019. Thankfully, the effect of a theatrical change of scale maintained its impact. Inside was still a sort of outside. A hangar space open at the far end. An area, feeling about the size of a hockey pitch, marked out with boulders, was the scene of an ongoing action. In seemingly impossible feats of acrobatic balance, hunks of broken masonry were arranged, perched one on top of another. Smashed shards of tile and lumps of breezeblock on the ground were eloquent of sudden calamity, the fragile transience of the sculptures. Artist Bridget Polk occasionally renewed the toppled rock in a caressing performance. She promised to leave no trace of the work at the end of the show, reconnecting the stone and dust with other fragments strewn around the post-industrial setting.
In a similar spirit, some of the most affecting works were empty spaces — the sites of proposals. The physical manifestation could not be delivered. Artists could not travel to realise their intentions and logistics were disrupted, born from the delay. The gaps were animated by sounds, exhibition texts, or, in the case of Marguerite Humeau’s The Dead (A drifting, dying marine mammal) 2019, with a terse poetic description of the missing work delivered by a gallery attendant, accompanied by an atmospheric soundtrack. Absences in the Biennial were not abstract, like the empty rooms of Yves Klein, or voids, like The Ghost of James Lee Byars (1969). These gaps were possibilities beyond the intended originals, more like Yoko Ono’s Instructions for Paintings (1962) — Ono said, ‘In your head, a sunset can go on for days.’ The Dead, intended to be a large sculpture in the form of a whale, made of synthetic materials, was conceived to raise consciousness of magisterial marine ecosystems, distressed to the point of extinction. Its unseen occupation of the gallery was suitable for a time when an infinitesimal life-form was threatening the polluters. The audience stepped into a momentary gap, in fact, all the time occupied by the viral hazard above their influence, tangible only in its effect on their bodies.
Another unerring subtraction was Félicia Atkinson’s Pure Love (For Anna) 2020, an incomplete work commissioned for the situation. An extant sound part played in a cavernous space that was to have exhibited a textile installation. The audio was an invented conversation with Anna Apinis, an artist whose weaving activity preserved various Latvian traditional patterns. The unseen focused attention on the reticulated linguistic shifts across languages and vocal and electronic sounds. The title of the revised Biennial, ‘and suddenly it all blossoms’ correlated with the work’s effect, promoting imminent awareness of the fecundity of chance. The happenstance of absent artworks is that they occasion freed space that can be shared. Pre-pandemic, biennales had become the preeminent arenas where art with international ambition happened, shoring up models of status based on individual integrities and consistencies. In its audio mix Pure Love, weaving the past into the future, proposed the preservation of life in the plural. Collective solidarity for times where individual lives flicker and extinguish, are marginalised, stigmatised, and smothered.
In the pandemic of 2020, much culture reverted to introspection experienced on discrete screens — the verdicts of arbiters locked in their comfortable homes. Riga embraced the new order as outer space and ghostly absence. Like the magical glint of quartz or mica in powder, dust, or grit, art, passed through or traversed, was touching and untouchable, a universal potential. Inevitably the event’s moves were tentative. The surface of a permeance that appeared overnight still shifts and settles. The story of RIBOCA2 will continue in the release of the promised movie, fixed on a silver screen?
RIBOCA2: ‘and suddenly it all blossoms,’ curated by Rebecca Lemarche-Vadel was at Riga, Andrejsala from 20 August — 13 September 2020
