Tavares in the North Pole Walking with Flag; 2013. Image courtesy the artist

I was getting tired of visiting national pavilions, and had a few more to go to ‘complete’ the Arsenale while my legs were getting heavy, so I was about to skip the Bahama’s first pavilion in Venice. But my Dutch due diligence made me peek inside, and I made my main discovery of this year’s Biennale: Tavares Strachan.

At first impression, the effort by the artist to plant the Bahamian flag on the North Pole might seem facetious, an all-too-easy derision of the principle of national representation. But the artist was revealing a scientific truth, namely that one cannot plant a flag on the North Pole because the ice it’s stuck into is floating at considerable speed. An installation in the middle of the room with video footage of the North Pole location including the changing GPS coordinates made this very clear.

I believe an encyclopedia’s main function is not to awe or bemuse, but to present information in a way as clear as possible. In this sense this installation did more justice to the curator’s theme than the main exhibition of this year’s Biennial.

I then read that the artist performed research into the body’s mechanisms to withstand extreme pressure shifts (as when launched into space or submerged in the ocean’s depths) at MIT and the Gagarin centre for Cosmonauts in Russia. Tavares Strachan even established the Bahamian Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center (BASEC) and devised rockets made purely from materials found in the Bahamas, such as sand and sugarcane (for the fuel). His interest in matters of pressure and how it affects organic materials also led him to study fragmentation patterns of explosions carefully; these patterns are found in several works in this show.

Adding another layer to this installation was his critical reading of the historiography of discovery of the North Pole, attributed to one explorer every American schoolchild knows about (Peary) while the involvement of other team members, notably local Inuit, was long obscured from official history. Tavares accordingly gives Inuit culture a place in this installation, oddly reaching out from the Bahamas to the North Pole through Venice.

And then: what truly struck me was the beauty of the artworks on display, in very different media: an acrylic tank filled with mineral oil through which one discerns the pyrex outline of an anatomically drawn human being (carrying a polar exploration axe) is mesmerizing, while the mixed media on plexiglass depictions of polar fauna, where centripetal forces seem to reassemble the image of the portrayed animal, are evidence of true artistic mastery; above this all hangs a sculpture of what looks like a polar explorer re-entering the atmosphere from space; the sculpture is traversed by spears, maybe indicating the pressure points felt by the body as it experiences dramatic pressure change.

From the shifting location of a geographic certainty like the North Pole, to the nationalistic construction of the history of its exploration (or appropriation), to the uncanny role an artist from an insignificant nation like the Bahamas can play to trump this historical fantasy and reveal the truth – this installation provided a lot of food for thought. I haven’t quite finished chewing on it!

Polar Bear: paper, pigment, Mylar on Plexiglas (2,43m x 2,74m), 2013

Here‘s the official website of the Bahamas Pavilion at Venice, 2013

Tavares’ Facebook Page with documentation of this project

Back to the main page of the Venice Biennale 2013 review