Biennale Arcipelago Mediterraneo: ÜberMauer

Perhaps unintentionally, the Biennale kept a low profile in the city, and many projects were happened upon. A staircase in Convento della Magione, a late 12th-century Norman church incorporating aspects of a preceding mosque, led to a haunting film by Emily Jacir projected onto a floor-based screen. Tel al Zaatar (2014) is a composition of shots salvaged from old footage by Italian and Palestinian filmmakers following the August 1976 massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees in a United Nations compound in Beirut. On screen, shots of children nonchalantly posing with guns transition into scenes of markets, and survivors of the ordeal, describing the camp and its routines. Through reviving this marginalized community, Jacir suggests life over and beyond physical and psychological walls, a fitting thesis to make in Palermo, a city with a turbulent past of conquest and expulsions. 

The serene and intriguing soundscape of Zena El-Khalil’s Astarte’s Cosmic Symphony (2019), a nearby installation of plants wired to speakers, bled into the film. Metal electrodes clipped onto the leaves of each plant translated their electrical impulses into sound, which fed into a musical arrangement by the artist. This composition, based on the harmonious and purportedly transformative nine-tone Solfeggio scale, intends to facilitate a connection with the intangible rhythms of the earth, offering a harmonious view of the world as one. 

Meanwhile, a strain of optimism about universal solidarity could be discerned in Michal Rovner’s astounding video installation Cracked Wall (2019). Along the high, vaulted walls of the incomplete 16th-century Chiesa di Santa Maria Spasimo, projections of multiple chains of human figures circled the open-air ruins, their trails interrupted only by cracks sprawling across the brick surface of the structure. The slow, infinite motions of these anonymous shadow-like forms articulate Rovner’s perspective on the ongoing and cyclical nature of human experience, particularly that of human migration, which the figures evoke. Their mass and movement suggest that they belong to a historic, fraught, and ceaseless continuum, yet with linked hands they appear united and resilient. 

Shilpa Gupta’s site-specific intervention There is no border here (2019) speaks to this same trajectory of human movement. Her metal barricade covered in fluorescent yellow tape circled Palermo’s town hall. The work’s subtlety is part of its genius: the rails were so inconspicuous they appeared to be municipally installed barriers put in place to protect pedestrians from building works. A closer look reveals the English, Italian, and Arabic texts running along the tape, repeating the work’s titular phrase. This work muses on tools of exclusion, and in forming a protective border for the town hall, critically engages with and even mocks the forces that control human access. 

The absurdity of division and inequity came to the fore in Shirin Neshat’s two-channel video installation Turbulent (1998). Set in an expansive room at Chiesa di Santa Maria Spasimo, on two opposing screens, a man and a woman face off in a performance of Persian music and poetry. The woman’s delivery, evoking a wailing mourner, contrasts with the polished and assured manner of the male singer, posing an analogy for gender imbalance. Neshat’s work remains potent and relevant despite the passing of two decades since its creation, and fit well with the Biennale’s thematic aim of elucidating the many barriers, visible or not, that continue to exist today.