Fondaco Marcello, Calle dei Garzoni, Grand Canal, Venice 56th Venice Biennale of Art
Saturday 9th May – Sunday 22nd November
For anyone who happens to be in Venice between the above dates I think I trip to the Antarctic Pavilion would be an extraordinary experience. Following the critical success of the Antarctic Pavilion’s inaugural exhibition at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, Concordia is a major installation by the celebrated Russian artist Alexander Ponomarev.
Concordia is Latin for ‘harmony’ – the personification of concord, a treaty or pact. It is also the name basis of the Costa Concordia, wrecked off the coast of Italy in 2012 after a catastrophic blunder by its captain who abandoned ship before the safe evacuation of his 3,229 passengers.
For the 56th Venice Biennale of Art, Alexander Ponomarev’s installation, curated by Nadim Samman, deploys the Costa Concordia disaster – specifically, the broken pact between Captain Schettino and his passengers – as a provocative lens through which to view the fragility of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. This agreement suspended military activity and sovereign claims on the continent’s territory, limiting human activity there to the pursuit of peaceful scientific endeavour. As the global struggle for resources intensifies, the future of this treaty is in peril.
In Ponomarev’s sculptural intervention a scale model of the grounded Concordia, tilting like a tipped iceberg (or perhaps a shift in the polar axis itself) stands as an image of terrestrial re- orientation: a new worldview.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, fire invokes a notorious act of arson by a staff doctor from the Argentinean Almirante Brown station, who burnt his base to the ground when the setting sun announced the onset of winter.
Further works are based on the artist’s recent expedition to the (Russian Orthodox) Trinity Church of Antarctica when the whole expedition party received marriage sacraments from the southern continent’s only resident monk.
In addition to its invoking of paradigmatic disasters, Concordia is a meditation on community, responsibility, security and the strength of the ties that bind us together amid shifting personal and political landscapes.
The Antarctic Pavilion is a European interface platform for The Antarctic Biennale, to be held in Antarctica in 2016 aboard international research vessels. The Antarctic Biennale is also devised and implemented by artist Alexander Ponomarev and curated by Nadim Samman both of whom were named by Foreign Policy Magazine among the ‘100 Leading Global Thinkers’ of 2014 ‘for designing a blueprint for Antarctic culture.
www.antarcticpavilion.com