Two Kiwi artists star in prestigious Venetian palace

Darryn George and Scott Eady
Personal Structures
Palazzo Bembo
Venice Biennale
Until November 24

The over-arching theme of this year's Venice Biennale is The Encyclopedic Palace, with a major curated exhibition by Massimiliano Gioni presenting artists who are seen as contributing to the idea of an imaginary museum which holds all the knowledge of the world.

Christchurch-based artist Darryn George has a work in another exhibition entitled Personal Structures at the Palazzo Bembo that fits within this notion of the artist as collector and documentalist.

With Folder Room he has created a space intended as a memorial to the victims of the Christchurch earthquakes. The room is composed of what appears to be large drawers or cupboards for the storage of documents.

The space becomes the repository for the details of lives, events, properties, insurance claims and court cases related to the quakes.

It has strong visual links with the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna by British sculptor Rachel Whiteread. This is a brutally stark inverted library – a hermetically-sealed room of books to symbolise the large numbers of victims and the untold stories of their lives.

Folder Room can also be viewed as a mausoleum or morgue with unnamed chambers, as silent  acknowledgements of the dead.

The sleek black walls, which seem to pay homage to the Stanley Kubrick black obelisk in 2001 A Space Odyssey, also dimly reflect the viewers in an endless repitition of their presence.

Scott Eady's work on the palace's ground floor has a whimsical presence, with seven big balls of gum randomly placed in the courtyard. These are bronze works painted red, yellow and orange which have Post It notes asking the viewer to "kick me" or, for the Italians, "calcni".

The gum balls took on an unintended interactive role during the opening days of the biennale as they had to be moved each evening to make way for yet another opening party and prevent anybody unintentionally stubbing their toes.

They are randomly placed through the courtyard, but there is a sense that there is some order to their location and that what we see is part of a larger installation.

They look as though they fallen from the surrounding building, like the many pieces of brick and concrete which are always falling off Venetian structures, and there are a couple of (possibly unintended) brooms in the corner just in case they have to be swept up.