Consider a bamboo blind and the way it obstructs and concedes light across each corded slat; recall the coolness of a material that does not carry heat quite like concrete or brick. Placed in a climate-controlled museum, the defunct blind-turned-exhibition-banner—painted over with this year’s title, “Ten Thousand Suns”—was perhaps emblematic of the broader problems of the contemporary biennial (with its entourage of patrons and board members), which inevitably flattens in its search for visual idioms of diversity. But just as the decision to substitute exhibition directories with newsprint referenced historied technologies of communication, the blinds—and their apparently rudimentary forms—were reminders of a continuity between past and present.
Our negotiation with the life-giving and life-threatening light of the sun is historical—stretching across time, geography, and cosmologies. For theevery attempt to reveal this multiplicity, itinerancy, and resilience of images, objects, and ideas without forgetting the unevenness of their directions of travel. The gambit is that in making visible histories of subsistence, negotiation, and protest, we might locate a visual lexicon that guides us toward a hopeful future.
