61st Venice Biennale, National Pavilions

This Biennale was dominated by the untimely death of its chief curator, protests against the inclusion of Israel and Russia, and posturing critiques coupled to a near-complete denial of art market mechanisms. Against this backdrop, it was good to encounter a number of artistic-aesthetic explorations of the absence, presence, and mimicry of bodies. The German and Austrian pavilions, as well as “Taiwan in Venice,” were cases in point.1

The German Pavilion is always different, but the same: the Nazi history of the building and country indexed, deconstructed, excavated, memorialized. But Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann, in an uncannily well-played give-and-go, have dragged that premise into renewed topical urgency, dealing with reactionary nationalism and far-right terror.

Tieu has clad the monumental building in a gigantic rendition of the East Berlin Plattenbau in which she grew up. The image of the concrete facade—a graffitied ruin, its window fronts turned into cavernous black holes—is broken down into thousands of small marble squares in the style of a Byzantine mosaic that at the same time suggests a pixelated image. The work chronicles the history of segregated housing for Vietnamese contract workers, the site of racist attacks after unification (notably at Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992), and more recently failed speculation and “ruin” in the sense of bankruptcy. 

At the opening, Tieu wore those traumatic histories on her sleeve in the form of a dress printed with a collage of newspaper clips about the mob riots. It was a reminder that, instead of combating the far-right, immigrants were demonized and the right to asylum was severely restricted in 1993. A couple of weeks later, the 45th Venice Biennale opened, and Hans Haacke decorated the pavilion’s entrance with an oversized Deutschmark in place of the imperial Nazi eagle, while Nam June Paik portrayed Marco Polo as a Volkswagen Beetle with TV monitors mounted on top. All of which serves as resonant context for Naumann’s and Tieu’s reinterpretation of a political complex that continues to smolder.

While Hans Haacke broke the marble floor into a sea of fissures, and Maria Eichhorn aimed to make the pavilion disappear, Naumann has done the exact opposite. In a concept paper, she wrote that instead of “smashing up the floor slabs or trying to get rid of the whole thing—the worst form of destruction seems to be making it cozy.” So she had the windows decorated with curtains, and the walls painted in a toxic mint-green that calls to mind both nineties interior design in the west and the communal areas of Soviet barracks. In the GDR of Naumann’s childhood, youths would hang out in these abandoned military stations, and her contribution is pointedly titled “The Home Front.”

There is method to the coziness. No sprawling living room suite fills the space, as in earlier works like “2000” (2018). Instead, the domestic furnishings of a German house—with all their neoliberal signifiers and far-right entanglements—seem to have been sucked onto the surrounding walls by strong magnets. It starts with a display of oddball design fittings displayed as a grid. These “hieroglyphs,” as Naumann called them, include a bas-relief portrait of Ernst Thälmann (anti-fascist hero of the GDR); a vintage mini-diorama of a rustic living room from Erzgebirge (a stronghold of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland); and a tiny halberd. It’s a portrait of the ambivalent memory that continues to pervade Germany. At the far end of the room, the unresolved promise of “reunification” is visualized, with comical literalness, as a torn iron curtain made of chain mail.

Along the side walls, vertically halved chairs of different designs run like a frieze, as if Yoko Ono’s Half-A-Room (1967) had been taken as the blueprint for an indexical arrangement of a divided Germany manifested in its aesthetic traces. Beneath this, on the left, is an anamorphic relief of a living room; on the right, a socialist-realist mural scene of workers and farmers is brought to life as a relief in wood and textiles. The backstory is that the scene was conceived by Naumann’s own grandfather Karl Heinz Jakob, a prominent GDR painter whose original 1961 mural, in what is now Chemnitz, vanished behind drywall in 2002. As these aesthetic traces are resurrected, layers of history pile up: one battle after another.

Tieu also brings a close relative into play, in this case her mother, with whom she came to Germany in 1992. Abstracted casts of her mother’s body are distributed through the side aisles, and these glass arms and steel beam profiles conjure the dark spirit of race-obsessed pseudo-science. Seats mounted on the wall allude to the waiting room at the immigration office, while cute ladybugs (a well-known wrapped chocolate product in Germany) cluster at the top of the wall as if for diapause. The Asian ladybug (which carries more spots than its European equivalent) is often described as a “home invader,” and it’s clear what Tieu is getting at.

Naumann passed in February, and it’s hard not to interpret her use of the main space as a legacy. With their interlocking contributions, Naumann and Tieu use techniques of mirroring, splitting, and parallelization to gesture towards what is absent, on a personal and societal level. Taken together, their pavilion functions as the mass-psychological portrait of an entire nation.

Maybe Florentina Holzinger’s Austrian Pavilion is another such portrait. Ever since Günter Brus defecated while singing the Austrian anthem (1968) and Valie Export put on her “action trousers” to trigger Genitalpanik (1969), a proud tradition has been established. Holzinger has turned the pavilion into something like a sewage treatment plant filled with bodily fetish-fantasies, however much it is rhetorically (ironically?) painted as addressing turbo-tourism in the face of ecological catastrophe (while arguably contributing to it).

In the backyard, a scuba diver stood stoically in a glass tank full of purified urine supplied from porta-potties free to be used by the audience. In an aquarium room, a snaking hose spilled brown sewage, while a woman on a jet ski described wild circles in another flooded space. Across from her, two people in climbing harnesses slowly ascended a gigantic weather vane. All of these performers are women, all of them are naked.

This will be no surprise to Holzinger fans, who has been a sensation on the theater circuit for years. Her naked protagonists exhibit stoicism, composure, and at times collective ecstasy in the performance of rituals often involving urine and other fluids, while having nothing to do with the seductions of porn or night clubs. Some are tattooed, others bear scars caused by hooks. What sets this version apart, however, is that the bodies are uniformly young and fit, more closely resembling a team of elite athletes—which, I guess, they are, especially if they continue this program over the coming months.

The circling jet ski recalls a video clip by Germany’s most successful female rapper Shirin David, the naked climbing evokes early Matthew Barney, the hooks-in-skin summon Australian artist Stelarc, and Holzinger banging her body against the insides of a giant bell suggests an action by body-art veteran Wolfgang Flatz. The obvious difference is that these are all women who carry out these acts with great bravado and a kind of stoic, joyful composure that celebrates queer-lesbian fetish aesthetics.

The question lingers as to why this should be so appealing to an art crowd, such that the lines stretch for hours during the opening week. Surely it’s not simply the nakedness. Instead, it looks more like a combination of gender- and class-specific yearnings for enactments of liberation. Gender-specific because it addresses women more than men (this is not female display for the male gaze), class-specific because this form of address is (still) associated with women on motorcycles or wearing gear and is rooted in working-class candor rather than bourgeois refinement. Which is maybe why the mostly rich kids of the art world, as they feel they have to perform elegance, restraint, and unassailability, project so wildly onto it. The fact that the naked bodies are right in front of them (not just as images) seems to function as an authenticating “guarantee” that this dream of liberation from bourgeois inhibition and restraint is more than just a mirage.

After a German thesis of haunted absence and an Austrian antithesis of fleshy presence, Taiwan provides the synthesis. Don’t expect any sense of sublation though, especially not of the elevating kind. In Li-Yi Fan’s big-screen computer animation Screen Melancholy (2026), the ghost-like fleshiness of a single protagonist is multiplied, scaled up and down. A chimera puppeteered by a chimera, it spoofs the way AI models parrot speech acts and looks, even as it educates the audience in the process.

In the hour-long video, the unclad figure speaks in a zany, spoof-blasé manner and commands smaller versions of himself around a stage. Holding them by the neck, he coaxes expressions or gestures out of them before revealing his own playful role in the theater. This premise spills into the exhibition space in the form of giant gray limbs and head fragments on which visitors lounge like miniature versions of themselves. On screen, the protagonist at intervals transforms into a slapstick teacher who explains, for example, the difference between high- and low-poly models in 3D character rendering. But he is also an uncanny philosopher, a melancholy loner stuck in a hall of mirrors, a smart aleck constantly addressing the audience with cheeky meta-puns (“We don’t have time in Venice right now to explain in more detail…,” “Taiwan number one!”).

The work explains its own making: the artist-avatar manipulates another avatar in real time, allowing the playful, restless, wisecracking character to emerge. Or maybe we’re fooled again. At the peak of the narrative arc, the avatar sits at a dinner table with numerous versions of himself, each wearing an organ on their head (an eye, a lung, a liver, etc.), but they are all of course tiny versions of the bigger avatar that has put them on this miniature stage set, which starts to look increasingly like a cannibalistic torture chamber of AI-enhanced simulation.

Screen Melancholy is brimful of jokes, stabs, trickeries, cruelties, deflections, asides, and is probably too much for anyone to digest in a single sitting. It breaks the fourth wall, and then it breaks the fifth, and the sixth, which we didn’t previously know existed. While it certainly has more dimensions, it could also be read as a cunning metaphor for the role of art in the wider scheme of things: an avatar constantly shifting, multiplying itself, somewhere between loudmouthed jester and decorative doll. And that seems fitting for a Biennale that is fast becoming the puppet theater version of a much bigger mess.

This is part of a series of responses to the 61st Venice Biennale by e-flux Criticism. Further reviews, as well as appraisals of its satellite projects, will appear in the coming days and weeks.