Patriotism and the art pavilion

Everysecond year, when the Venice Biennale comes around, the Indian art world askswhy we are not officially featured at the oldest of the world's biennales.Inaugurated in 1895 and currently in its 53rd edition, Venice has consistentlypresented global contemporary art at its stimulating best.Whileindividual Indian artists have been invited to participate (this year's edition,curated by the Swedish-born, Frankfurt-based art theorist Daniel Birnbaum,includes Anju Dodiya, Nikhil Chopra, Sheela Gowda and Sunil Gawde), India'spresence in Venice has previously been manifested through officially recognised`collateral events'. These include an exhibition mounted by the Indian Councilfor Cultural Relations (ICCR) during the 1980s, and iCon, a platform developedfor the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) by a curatorium including Peter Nagy, GordonKnox and Julie Evans, supported by the Bose Pacia gallery.Does Indiareally need a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale? I would offer acontrarian view. We should not even contemplate such a pavilion until we candemonstrate the self-critical maturity to transcend local politics and sustainit at an international level of excellence.A national pavilion inVenice would register a triumphal note of arrival both for the Indian art worldand for the Indian nation-state. It must embody the cultural accomplishments ofthe former and the soft-power ambitions of the latter. From bitter experience,we know that the Indian nation-state rarely articulates such ambitions withelegance and wisdom at high-profile international cultural venues. Similarexercises at the Frankfurt Book Fair, for instance, have ended in acrimoniousdisplays of internal discord. Let me make plain that I write, not asan observer with nothing at stake, but as a participant closely involved inthese processes at various levels: as co-curator, with Okwui Enwezor and HyunjinKim, of the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008), and as a member of the Lalit KalaAkademi's general council, addressing the revitalisation of the IndianTriennale. Not irrelevantly, also, I was the curator of the might-have-beenIndia pavilion at Venice 2009. Funding for this collateral event, planned forthe imposing Palazzo Cavalli Francetti on the Grand Canal, fell through at thelast minute in the face of last year's global financial meltdown.Thefirst hurdle that I foresee is this: Who will decide which artist or artistswill represent India? A national pavilion cannot exist without the government'simprimatur, and the government is vulnerable to demands for inclusiverepresentation: meaning regional quotas. Many non-governmental curatorialrepresentations of Indian art overseas have suffered equally from the desire toinclude artists across generations, idioms and regions, resulting in anappalling mess with no shape or direction.Unlike China, which usesevery international cultural venue to demonstrate its soft-power, India remainsindecisive and incoherent on how to deploy its soft power. Meanwhile, the logicof national pavilions has come under fire in recent years. The Venice Biennale'sembrace of this logic was understandable: in 1895, Europe's imperial nationsappeared unassailable and few could have predicted the seismic end of industrialand colonial expansion. Venice has held on to national pavilionsthrough the rise and fall of Italian Fascism, Austro-German Nazism, and otherforms of virulent nationalism. They remain convenient for reasons of tradition,as well as logistics and architectural convenience in a tightly stacked,labyrinthine, sea-menaced city.But today, artistic and curatorialproduction has become increasingly transnational. Artists, curators, critics andcollectors are constantly mobile. The studio can be as large as a 200-personworkshop, as small as a laptop, as ephemeral as a conversation recorded on aflight. Is the nation-state still a compelling unit of culturalmeasurement?Even in Venice, the logic of national pavilions has beenundermined. For this year's German pavilion, the curator, Nicolaus Schafhausen,chose the British artist Liam Gillick, who works between London and New York andcalls himself a "European socialist". Despite residual murmurs of nationalistsentiment, curators in the industrially advanced nations are free to choosetheir artists without regard to the played-out theme of nationalidentity.The tragedy is that we are demanding our right to sit atthe high table when the high table is vanishing. The real challenge is to inventour own table to sit at.