I was fortunate enough to make it to Venice last week and managed to fit in the Biennale between intensive bouts of eating, drinking and the obligatory afternoon gelato. As ever I was keeping a special eye out for work that might be relevant to MAKE. I’m sure I missed loads that was going on but here are a few things that I did manage to see:
I have to begin with what was arguably the most exciting piece in the whole Biennale - Mike Nelson’s magnificent transformation of the British Pavilion into a 1:1 rendering of a labyrinthine Istanbul workshop. It felt authentic, in the sense that it made me feel I had been translated to another, real, space though I have to own up to never having been to Istanbul, let alone visited any light industry there. The rooms seemed to contain the dust of centuries. Some of their contents made sense, but there were also odd bits of unidentifiable machinery and other mysterious bric à brac. In one corner was a suitably fragrant lavatory, in another some filthy bedding. The illusion was well nigh perfect, but at the same time there were subtle reminders that the installation was also a theatre for Nelson’s imagination, and it was these that elevated the work above mere set-building. In a deftly reflexive touch, one room, apparently a photographic lab, was festooned with drying prints of Istanbul buildings of the very kind evoked by the installation. Arguably the most audacious flourish was to be found through a doorway that led into a perfectly realised exterior courtyard, which gave me the impression I was viewing the outside of the building I had just been in, thus completing the illusion. All that prevented an ascent of the external staircase to an enticing little door at first floor level was the presence of a member of gallery staff who sat, like a tourist, on the bottom step reading a book.
The Arsenale contained “Pink Wave Hunter” a large installation by Andro Wekua comprising fifteen architectural forms mounted on a continuous plinth at about table top level. The models are based on buildings from his native town of Sukhumi, Georgia that have been destroyed in conflict, and they were made by the exiled artist from memory, which accounts for their varying levels of detail and completeness. Some seem fully realised, whilst others are almost abstract forms with just an architectonic facade. It is a poignant piece, and somehow the model is a perfect analogue for the half-remembered. Still baffled by the title though.
Out in the city, beside the Accademia Bridge, was Erwin Wurm’s “Narrow House”. Another evocation of early memories, it replicates Wurm’s childhood home, except in the one respect that its lateral dimension has been reduced until the whole building is barely wide enough to enter. However, enter it I did, to find the internal contents similarly reconfigured: narrow bathroom, narrow table, narrow telephone etc. It made for an absurdist claustrophobic experience of a kind that Lewis Carroll might have dreamt up, though not quite so disturbing, as the potential for nightmare was tempered by the irrepressible playfulness of the neat little building. It was impossible not to think of it as an overgrown wendy house. 
Palazzo Zenobio contained a show themed around the Mediterranean and included work by David Casini. “L’Illogica abitudine” is a group of five architectural models, each grafted onto a piece of coral and enclosed inside an antique looking glass dome. The artist’s statement suggested that these were made as a reaction to the proliferation of unauthorised building development around the Mediterranean coast, but there was something inescapably twee about them which the deployment of the glass domes only exacerbated. The whole set-up looked as though it was intended for the sale of expensive watches. That is a pity because the juxtaposition of man-made architectural forms with the natural architecture of the coral has some potential as an idea in itself, without the ecological rhetoric.
The same show also contained a landscape piece by Gal Weinstein, “Nahalal (Partly Cloudy)”. It reminded me of aerial photographs I had seen of irrigated desert settlements, and Nahalal I later found out was the first Worker’s Cooperative Settlement in Israel. I’m not quite sure where the piece stands ideologically but I just love the little rainstorm flitting over the carpet-fields.
Finally I found a couple of artists who made extensive use of models in the making of photographic scenarios. One was Gayle Chong Kwan, showing in the Artsway New Forest Pavilion. Her installation “The Obsidian Isle” includes a series of photographic images conjuring up a landscape of ruined buildings that are based on lost buildings of Scotland. The other artist was Ma Liang in a show called “Cracked Culture” which examined the uncomfortable collision between Western and Chinese culture.