ART CITIES:Venice-Joan Jonas
A pioneer of performance and video art, Joan Jonas works in video, installation, sculpture, and drawing, often collaborating with musicians and dancers to realize improvisational works that are equally at home in the museum gallery and on the theatrical stage. Drawing on mythic stories from various cultures, Jonas invests texts from the past with the politics of the present.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: TBA21-Academy Archive
Joan Jonas’s exhibition “Moving Off the Land II” is the inaugural project at the Ocean Space* in the revitalized Church of San Lorenzo in Venice. Jonas’s installation is the culmination of three years of intensive research in aquariums around the world as well as in the waters off the coast of Jamaica, commissioned by TBA21–Academy. Comprising new video, sculpture, drawing, and sound works, as well as a performance on May 7, 2019, the show centers on the role the oceans have played for cultures throughout history as a totemic, spiritual, and ecological touchstone. Jonas represented the United States at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. With “Moving Off the Land II”, she returns to Venice and revisits some of the themes touched upon in her US Pavilion exhibition “They Come to Us Without a Word”. the natural world and the animals inhabiting it, as well as the present danger of climate change and extinction. Her new works dive deep into the ocean water, swim with the fish inhabiting it, and weave in literature and poetry by writers who have homed in on the liquid masses that cover two thirds of the planet. Following the methodology that has gained her lauded reputation, Jonas combines poetry and prose by writers like Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville with texts by Rachel Carson and Sy Montgomery, and with moving images filmed in aquariums and in Jamaica, where algae bloom and overfishing pose urgent threats to the environment. The exhibition developed out of the performance “Moving Off the Land”, which was commissioned by TBA21–Academy in 2016. Jonas’s emphasis on process relates to the way the itinerant Academy’s journeys at sea and on land connect disciplines, people, geographies, and formats. In the last year and a half, as part of a sustained dialogue about their respective work, the marine biologist and coral reef and photosynthesis expert David Gruber has shared with Jonas his captivating underwater recordings that focus on biofluorescence. In 2018, Gruber visited Jonas at her summer home in Cape Breton, Canada, where he shot footage of her dog, Ozu, on the shoreline. In “Moving Off the Land II”, the rich imagery by Gruber and other collaborators is juxtaposed with Jonas’s own voice and that of young people she frequently collaborates with, as well as music by the celebrated composer and drummer Ikue Mori and by the acclaimed musicians María Huld Markan Sigfusdottir and Ánde Somby. In her unique visual language, Jonas has created a confluence of the poetic and the observational, of mythological folklore, contemporary narratives, and scientific studies, going beyond the ways in which the ocean is usually described, to sense this living entity. In conjunction with Jonas’ exhibition, select archival and research materials relating to the project, including interviews with the artist, will be accessible through the new digital platform Ocean Archive. Launching in complete form in September 2019, this “colaboratory” is being developed by User Group, Inc. to operate at the intersection of scientific inquiry, artistic intelligence, and environmental advocacy.
*Spearheaded by TBA21–Academy and its network of partners, including universities, NGOs, museums, government agencies, and research institutes from around the world, Ocean Space is a platform catalyzing ocean advocacy, collaboration, and exchange through installations, performances, workshops, archives, and research.
Info: Curator: Stefanie Hessler, Ocean Space, Chiesa di San Lorenzo Castello, Venice, Duration: 24/3-29/9/19, Tue-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.tba21.org
