The numbers' game

Prizes, both real and booby. The International Cairo Biennale offers much of both, even in a single venue, writes Nigel Ryan
The Eighth International Cairo Biennale continues until the middle of next month and occupies a majority of the Ministry of Culture's flagship galleries, including the complex of exhibition spaces in the Opera House grounds, the Gezira Arts Centre and the Centre of Art in Zamalek. Which means that for more than two months every significant, publicly subsidised space in Cairo will have been given over to an event that, according to its own publicity, and the first page of the Biennale catalogue, "is now ranked second to the Venice International Biennale."
If this is a claim that is perhaps best taken with a large pinch of salt it does betray, however inadvertently, at least one important aspect of the event -- the current incarnation of the International Cairo Biennale is hopelessly besotted with numbers. It has become something of a counting game -- numbers of countries participating, numbers of artists, numbers, numbers, numbers. Get enough, and hey presto, you're the most important event in the world. Only it's not quite like that.
The ensuing dilemma comes most clearly into focus at the Palace of Arts. Until the Biennale it has not been a particularly impressive space: the conversion of the original exhibition hall into the current complex of galleries appeared too clever, a tricksy carving up of a single volume that might have been better left alone. Only now does it begin to make sense, and then only in places -- mostly those areas where the walls are not overhung and the floor is left uncluttered.
Yet the pursuit of numbers, of quantity over quality, means that several areas are clogged up with amateurish work, the kind of stuff unlikely to attract a second glance at a student show -- the kind of stuff, indeed, for which students at any respectable institution should have been expelled before ever making it to graduation. And it serves only to dilute the impact of the many pieces worthy of inclusion in an international event that are showing beneath the same roof.
The Eighth International Cairo Biennale continues until the middle of next month and occupies a majority of the Ministry of Culture's flagship galleries, including the complex of exhibition spaces in the Opera House grounds, the Gezira Arts Centre and the Centre of Art in Zamalek. Which means that for more than two months every significant, publicly subsidised space in Cairo will have been given over to an event that, according to its own publicity, and the first page of the Biennale catalogue, "is now ranked second to the Venice International Biennale."
If this is a claim that is perhaps best taken with a large pinch of salt it does betray, however inadvertently, at least one important aspect of the event -- the current incarnation of the International Cairo Biennale is hopelessly besotted with numbers. It has become something of a counting game -- numbers of countries participating, numbers of artists, numbers, numbers, numbers. Get enough, and hey presto, you're the most important event in the world. Only it's not quite like that.
The ensuing dilemma comes most clearly into focus at the Palace of Arts. Until the Biennale it has not been a particularly impressive space: the conversion of the original exhibition hall into the current complex of galleries appeared too clever, a tricksy carving up of a single volume that might have been better left alone. Only now does it begin to make sense, and then only in places -- mostly those areas where the walls are not overhung and the floor is left uncluttered.
Yet the pursuit of numbers, of quantity over quality, means that several areas are clogged up with amateurish work, the kind of stuff unlikely to attract a second glance at a student show -- the kind of stuff, indeed, for which students at any respectable institution should have been expelled before ever making it to graduation. And it serves only to dilute the impact of the many pieces worthy of inclusion in an international event that are showing beneath the same roof.
Among the latter one must count the work of Tracy Emin, recipient of a special jury award. A video opens with waves rippling across the surface of the sea and pans slowly until a wooden pier projecting into the water comes into view. On the pier crouches a figure, naked, or maybe not quite; female, or maybe not quite. And then on to the other side of the pier, across the rippling surface of the water. The sunlight is dappled, and then resolves itself into rays, into those discs of prismatic light that are strung together most commonly in religious and natural history films, or else a confabulation of the two. A scream rings across the water and then the camera returns to the wooden pier, to the same figure, crouching at a slightly different angle. Silence. If the screams come as a surprise first time round by the time the video repeats they have fallen into place, a staccato percussion punctuating the slow panning of the camera, something horrific, rhythmically embedded, and unavoidable.
A little more difficult, certainly in this situ, are the sketches and accompanying texts, scrawled in child-like hand, on the nearby wall.
A sketchily drawn woman lies in a bath, floating, maybe drowned, an Ophelia without the flowers. "And sometimes I only imagine nice things," reads the accompanying text, "like crying in the bath and masturbating again and again and again -- that's how people die."
The graphic may on occasion be displaced by whimsy -- "There's a hand and the hand has a mouth and the mouth ses (sic) I love you," in half-reversed mirror script -- but it happens very rarely. The graphic normally wins, the imagery often of the type that in more permissive societies sits cellophane wrapped on the top shelves of news agents, or which individuals down-load in the privacy of their own PC. Yet in Emin's hands it remains graffito-pornography, legs splayed sketchily wide, with a cartoon figure in deep sea divers' bubble-hooded costume commenting: "Don't talk ridiculous, it's just a bit of flesh."
It's actually quite a lot of flesh, in total, and Emin's personal excavation, this dramatisation of what are, presumably, aspects of her own sexuality, can at times be obsessively oral. Yet paradoxically it is the detail of the articulation, the explicitness of the statement, that forces a layer of unreality onto the neuroses. Thankfully, though, the forensic is sufficiently undermined by a rare side-ways, knowing glance, that might, just, force a smile.
Gaei Laurent's video installation also contains a sound-track, though this time it is Verdi putting some poor soprano through her paces. An endless, out of focus credit rolls across one screen, and the effect is eventually as hypnotic, and as disorienting, as wandering through the rows and rows of crosses that make up war cemeteries. So much anonymity, the one cloaked in a lack of focus, the other in death. On the second screen a static image of clouds, a hugely blown up detail of some painting, slowly begins to move: a figure appears among the clouds, hand held aloft, swathed in shadows, indistinct, but posed to resemble the Statue of Liberty. Not much substance here, but that is really the point.
Outside this room German artist Bruno Wank has placed a fluffy crocodile, pink hippopotamus and pig in aluminium bowls set on a tabletop. They wag their tails -- they are battery operated toys -- except that the pig's battery appears to have run flat. It does not wag its tail. Tellingly, this accident does not seem to matter.
Elsewhere are more appealing surprises: Barbara Graf's articulated fabric sculptures, pinned onto a wall, though with diagrams to show how they might transform the human figure into a curiously articulated insect: a hint of fetishism here, a touch of bondage, but all contained neatly within the ritual of dressing up.
Lone Hoyer Hanson, from Denmark, presents tangled, plasticised metal sculptures, and a tower of monster snowdrops. One of the Biennale's guests of honour, Saleh Reda, fills his space with half mechanical, half decorative-organic gilded sculptures that, uncomfortably, seem to retain a residual, human form, intended somehow to fit together or be taken apart. There appears to be little difference between the two activities.
WHAT A GREAT PLACE TO PUT A SCULPTURE IN YOUR FREEZER, YOU DON'T SEE IT ALL THE TIME AND IT WON'T STINK.
So declaims a painting by Peter Bonde, in virulent green. And with a few honourable exceptions, chief among which one must count Pietro Consagra's impossibly elegant Extremely Thin Sculpture -- five of them, standing in a row like mysterious pieces of kitchen equipment -- it might apply to much of the rest of the work in this showcase gallery, at this showcase event. Worst of all, unfortunately, are the paintings from around the Arab world included in this venue. Examples from Saudi-Arabia, Syria, Kuwait and, with one exception, from Qatar, as well as from Uruguay, clog up the remaining space to the detriment of the whole. The desire to boost numbers notwithstanding, here they are unforgivable.
Once again curatorial practice is called into question. Or perhaps it is an issue of funding. There is certainly enough in this single venue to convince any sympathetic viewer of the worthwhile nature of the event, without the ballast of dross. It is only the eighth biennale, though. Sooner or later, fingers crossed, quality will come to prevail in the numbers game. That, or painting in the region undergo some miraculous transformation.
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