A Garden of Disorder: “Digital Unhu” from the Global South at the 2015 Venice Biennale

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the 2015 Venice Biennale titled, All the World’s Futures, an exhibition that consciously centralized nations outside of the West. In contrast to the desire to produce order in the previous Biennales of the modern era, All the World’s Futures sought to express global conditions described as a complex network of financial, cultural, and political interdependence. Through discursive and textual analysis of the cultural artifacts, articles, and interviews of participating members of the 2015 Biennale, this article identifies the characteristics of 1) a growing awareness of the changing and variable dimensions of labor and capital, 2) a central concern with perspectives informed by historical legacies rooted in Africa, the African diaspora and the Middle East and, 3) a prominence placed on the affordances of digital technologies in collaborative production and distribution. These characteristics are examined within the context of gallery exhibitions, specifically, the Venice Biennale.

KEYWORDS:

• Venice biennale
• digital technologies
• postcolonial
• immaterial labor
• Okwui Enwezor

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Caitlin McClune is a PhD graduate in media studies in the Radio Television and Film (RTF) Department at University of Texas (UT) Austin. She got her BA at the University of California Santa Cruz, and her MA at UT Austin in the RTF department. Her research focuses primarily on digital connectivity in the global south and changes in labor as a result of the rise in communication technologies.

Notes

1. “Okwui Enwezor and the Mega-Exhibition.” Accessed December 29, 2017. vickyge.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/okwui-enwezor-and-the-mega-exhibition/.

2. While “global south” is a blanket term, and has been critiqued for being to vague, in this article, it is used to refer to Enwezor’s interest in elevating creative works from the Middle East and African regions of the globe, places that have previously been largely ignored in large-scale Anglo/European art exhibitions.

3. Founded in1983 by Isaac Julien, Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Nadine Marsh-Edwards and Robert Crusz, all London-based artists, and thinkers. As an artist’s collective, Sankofa was dedicated to developing an independent black film culture in the areas of production, exhibition, and audience. The name and the logo of the collective derive from the Akan word Sankofa from Ghana. The word means “return and fetch it,” and represents a bird turning its head back towards its tail, to signify “going back into the past and discovering knowledge that will be of benefit to the people in the future.”

4. See biography of Ibrahim Mahama at https://www.artsy.net/artwork/ibrahim-mahama-out-of-bounds-installation-view-1.

5. E-flux is a publishing platform and archive, artist project, curatorial platform, and enterprise which founded in 1998. The site includes news digest, events, exhibitions, schools, journal, books, and art projects produced and disseminated by e-flux. It seeks to engage with critical discourse about contemporary art, culture, and theory internationally. Its monthly publication e-flux journal produces essays commissioned since 2008 about cultural, political, and structural paradigms that inform contemporary artistic production.

6. See “Welcome to Supercommunity & Supersonversations, Day 1—Frontpage—E-Flux Conversations.” Accessed August 13, 2016. http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/welcome-to-supercommunity-superconversations-day-1/1551.

7. See “Welcome to Supercommunity & Supersonversations, Day 1—Frontpage—E-Flux Conversations.” Accessed August 13, 2016. http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/welcome-to-supercommunity-superconversations-day-1/1551.