Far-Reaching Roots at the 9th Biennale Gherdeïna

There surely cannot be many biennials with a more rugged and sublime setting. The Biennale Gherdëina is centred in the northern Italian town of Ortisei, but reaches into the mountainous landscapes of Val Gardena and the Dolomites. Presenting art within such dramatic settings can sometimes be akin to fighting a losing battle – even the most interesting and aesthetically enticing work can rarely win in a tussle of the senses against such ancient and poetic natural creations.

This ninth edition of the biennale does not try to compete with the landscape, so much as draw inspiration from it. The subtitle, The Parliament of Marmots, is extracted from a celebrated local myth, Kingdom of  Fanes, which concerns the breaking of an historic alliance between animals and humans. Curator Lorenzo Giusti takes this as one of various inter-species and inter-spatial starting points to speak to wider anthropogenic and cultural concerns.

The biennale guidebook offers its contents in four languages: Italian, German, English and Ladin. The latter is a Romance language once spoken widely across the northeast of Italy, but which over the years has seen its use decline to around 30,000 native-language speakers today. The Kingdom of Fanes is an orally-transmitted Ladin myth, but Giusti uses it less as a tool of narrowing focus upon minority or the hyper-local, and more as a vehicle towards historic and cultural connections with places further afield. The myth, he contends, speaks more to Mediterranean narratives than to a Nordic mythology that permeated the early 20th-century culture when the Ladin stories were reconstructed into the written word by the Austrian, Karl Felix Wolff. Indeed, for Giusti, even the mountains themselves speak to an ancient Mediterranean history, with their origins in giant coral reefs that emerged from the seas 250 million years ago.

Giusti invited several Middle Eastern artists to weave their ideas and stories through the biennale’s framing, many of them first encountered while he was curating the Modern section of Art Dubai last year. With far-right Italian PM Georgia Meloni overseeing a shift in who and which politics can be involved within Italian culture, Giusti adds that “of course, it’s also a political statement for us to open up.”

German-Iraqi sculptor Lin May Saeed features prominently. In late 2023, aged 50, May Saeed sadly passed away, her participation in the biennale evolving into a solo exhibition as tribute to her practice. In the Ortisei presentation, the artist’s desire to promote empathy with animals as humanity’s equals is on show through several polystyrene-carved sculptures and reliefs that speak to coexistence and a rebalancing of human-animal relationships.

Giusti commissioned 19 new biennale-responsive works from artists, mostly from emerging Italian and regional practitioners, but also casting an eye further afield. Many of the works are located around the central street of Ortisei, overlooked by snow-topped mountains. Julius von Bismarck, who grew up in Riyadh, draws visual and conceptual connection to these mountains with a new equestrian statue depicting the bark beetle – a local creature that has thrived in nearby intensively planted forests and a warming climate, leading to the loss of trees visible on the mountainside behind.

Nearby, the Tunisia-born, Berlin-based artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke also brings trees into the creative equation. Her work Mushroom fills a semi-subterranean room with roots that rupture through a concrete floor in a spatial sculpture that the artist encourages visitors to step over and walk around. It is romantic, and invites ideas of how we and our spaces of inhabitation may allow spaces of sharing with other nature. However, one wonders if flooding a room with concrete, one of the most carbon-intensive materials, symbolically aligns with ideals of delicate coexistence with the planet.

Opposite, in a small commercial vitrine, French-Moroccan Sara Ouhaddou shows small wooden sculptures depicting locally indigenous creatures, inspired by Moroccan zoomorphic pottery and the words of the Berber poet Mririda N’Ait Attik – a subtle intervention that gets somewhat lost sitting in a room of other vitrines full of objects for sale. Just down the road, Nassim Azarzar channels another Moroccan cultural idea with a punchier outcome.

Azarzar, who works between Paris and Rabat, has drawn on landscapes and the decorative practices of Moroccan transporters to create a graphic decoration for the outside of a disused hotel. Creating a cacophony of colour, shouting itself with joy into the polite street, it also acts as invitation to view the selection of artists showing within. Daniele Genadry’s series of seemingly overexposed paintings of mountains are found here, with the Lebanese-American questioning the ability to visually grasp such monumentality of form and depth of history and asking the viewer to reconsider mountains as temporary events – albeit with a different sense of time to human progression.

There are few works that spill out into the mountainscapes surrounding Ortisei, although the peaks themselves are ever present, similarly invoking a temporality of existence by repeatedly disappearing into the mists and reappearing as if to remind of their magnificence. A large number of the biennale’s projects, including the majority of the Middle-Easterners – many of whom are presenting film works – are clustered in an upstairs room of an industrial building some way out of the town centre. Considering that such effort had been made by Giusti to carefully dialogue with numerous local bodies to locate sculptures and interventions directly within the town centre, it seems a shame that so much work is located in a somewhat less-practicable location – especially as there are many interesting projects on display here that would benefit from a larger footfall than may be possible where they are.

Yesmine Ben Khelil invokes Tunisia’s colonial history through theatrical cardboard panels; Lebanese-Armenian painter Talar Aghbashian shows abstract oils that carry a dystopian, industrial trauma compressing the man-made into nature; while photographs by Georgian Andro Eradze present stuffed wild animals in museum settings, captured in a green light as if caught on nighttime infrared film. Of the many films – arguably too many in a curation with overlapping soundtracks and over two hours of footage with no seating – French-Algerian artist Katia Kameli’s stands out. The title, The Canticle of the Birds, variation, is derived from the 12th-century Persian writer Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār. The artist’s bird sculptures appear in the space and on film in a study of self and collective recognition.

There are many ideas and curatorial strands running through Biennale Gherdëina, and the inclusion of so many Middle Eastern related artists adds a real depth and international narrative to a programme that may otherwise be at risk of falling into the provincial and local and struggle to even leave the beautiful Val Gardena it sits within. The Dolomites are majestic but overwhelming, and Giusti makes an admirable effort to look beyond them in time and space to consider ideas even larger than their towering forms.

Biennale Gherdëina 9, The Parliament of Marmots, curated by Lorenzo Giusti and associate curator Marta Paini includes exhibitions, performances and installations across Ortisei and Val Gardena from 31 May – 1 September 2024. 

Biennale Gherdëina runs until 1 September