April 20–November 24, 2024
Venues: Giardini and La Certosa, Venice, Italy
For the German Pavilion at the 60th International Venice Biennale, the curator Çağla Ilk has invited the artists Michael Akstaller, Yael Bartana, Robert Lippok, Ersan Mondtag, Nicole L’Huillier, and Jan St. Werner to navigate the verge, the gradation, the boundary under the title of Thresholds. Proceeding from alternative readings of history and the future, the contribution extrapolates realms of experience from the liminal.
For the first time the German Pavilion’s presentation extends beyond the boundaries of the Giardini della Biennale to a further location: the neighboring island La Certosa. Yael Bartana and Ersan Mondtag present their work in the pavilion building. On La Certosa the idea of the threshold is extended in contributions by Michael Akstaller, Nicole L’Huillier, Robert Lippok, and Jan St. Werner.
In a time of global crises and wars, we asked ourselves the following question: What do places of solidarity look like? How can we leave behind the nation-state spatial constructs and ways of thinking? Change begins when we become aware of the temporary nature of our position.
In our work, Thresholds signify the awakening of a longing for the deterritorialization of the political imagination. For many people around the world, living in the threshold between nationalities and affiliations is a traumatic and violent experience. Our exhibition aims to generate, from this experience, a position of insight and to transcend these borders for a moment. Thresholds are transitional spaces. For us, the pavilion should serve as this kind of space, a space in which visitors are on the move, a space in which there is no arriving. We enter the pavilion in order to leave.
Yael Bartana’s work Light to the Nations is about nothing less than the radical question of that possibility. In an act of salvation, a spaceship, named after a passage in the Book of Isaiah, carries humans toward unknown galaxies. It is a open-ended journey, designed for collective healing, drawing on utopian and dystopian elements in equal measure. With this installation, which includes a newly choreographed video work entitled Farewell, Bartana expands her body of work, developed over decades, exploring and reimagining group ceremonies and the social movements that surround them.
Ersan Mondtag’s work Monument eines unbekannten Menschen (Monument of an Unknown Person) begins in front of the portal of the German Pavilion. The earth, which blocks off access to the single-point perspective, comes from the place where Ersan Mondtag’s grandfather Hasan Aygün set off for an uncertain future in West Berlin in 1968. The installation that Ersan Mondtag has created, based on the biography of his grandfather, inside the pavilion shows in great detail the world of a life as an abandoned house. The now is not a place where you can stay.
The German exhibition, therefore, does not stop at the walls of the German pavilion but extends to the island of La Certosa, where visitors land after a short ride by vaporetto on the threshold between cultural and natural landscape, in a perceptual space that obeys other laws: In their works, Michael Akstaller, Nicole L’Huillier, Robert Lippok, and Jan St. Werner undertake reconfigurations of space that invalidate the pavilion from a distance. What’s inside, what’s outside? On La Certosa we must adjust our tools for perception, we must set ourselves in motion and, with every step we take, the contexts of meaning change.
Louis Chude-Sokei, who accompanies the work as a chronicler, welcomes visitors with an installation of his lecture performance "Thresholds". From deep in the ground of history, Robert Lippok draws the sound of his work—the earth underneath the grass is not devoid of history, and Lippok amplifies those signals in Feld (Field). Within the fraught space between the ruin and a line dividing the island acoustically, Jan St Werner's Volumes Inverted creates a space of meaning beyond images, which changes with every step and turns us into protagonists in the work of art. In Encuentros (Encounters), Nicole L'Huillier develops a transmitter-receiver system that translates the sounds of the island into varying frequencies. And, in dialogue with the vegetation of the island, Michael Akstaller searches for the temporal in-between space, the lost ability to listen to answers.
We can only overcome the violent space of punctuation through political boundaries with a concept that is transdisciplinary and involves multiple artistic languages. When traversing these artistic positions and experiencing their superimposition, the threshold can be experienced as a walkable space.
Thresholds are the shared moments of the present that cannot be obtained as a finished concept. We cannot curate the present, but we can create transient, disparate perceptual spaces that disturb the certainties constituting our self-confidence in the present.
If it is true that our future also depends on how we tell our history, then the moment of perception on the threshold is crucial. What opens up from there is everything but a calm, static picture.
In recognition of our origins and histories, and in dialogue with these places in Venice, we created Thresholds together as a transdisciplinary work that acknowledges our own limitations. In this collaboration as a network that uses walls and leaves them behind, we are seeking something like hope in times that offer no grounds for it. Not out of the hubristic belief that we can change the world, but out of despair for the world, we attempt to be those grounds ourselves.
Commissioner: Ellen Strittmatter (ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)
Curator: Çağla Ilk
Artists
Giardini della Biennale: Yael Bartana, Ersan Mondtag
La Certosa: Michael Akstaller, Nicole L’Huillier, Robert Lippok, Jan St. Werner
Opening hours
Summer: 11am–7pm
Autumn: 10am–6pm
Mondays closed except for April 22, June 17, July 22, September 2, September 30, November 18, 2024
La Certosa is publicly accessible at any time. The installations at La Certosa run during the opening hours of the Giardini della Biennale.
