For an artist to be invited to the Venice Biennale is the equivalent of an actor's first glimpse of the Oscar's or an athlete qualifying for the Olympics. I got my break after a studio visit by the Bengali-American dealer Sundaram Tagore, who invited me to take part in a remarkable show he put together called 'Frontiers Reimagined'. I was among 44 artists from across the globe selected for what Sundaram calls "the intellectual and aesthetic richness that can emerge in today's globalised art world when artists engage in intercultural dialogue".
By the time we arrived in Venice, my work was already installed in a 16th century Palazzo, flanked on one side by vast wall-sized prints by the great Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado and on the other by Bangladeshi, Tayeba Begum Lipi's installation of razor blade wheelchairs. As outstanding as the exhibit itself was the space that housed them: the fabulous Palazzo Grimani. This recently restored palace contains an extraordinary collection of art by Hieronymus Bosch, Giorgione and Giorgio Vasari, among others, and is to be the setting of our Venetian host, Francesco da Mosto's new novel set during the period of Casanova.
This year's Biennale, curated by Nigerian Okwui Enwezor, has a politicised radical agenda: Raqs Media Collective's post-colonial response to the Raj statues in Delhi's Coronation Park lines the walkways, Das Kapital is being read on a loop in one venue, and pages and pages of German and Arabic newspaper cuttings about migrant labour in another. This inspired much media debate on whether an exhibition, partly sponsored by Rolls Royce and visited by collectors in mega yachts, was an appropriate place for such a political position. Either way, for me, the most wonderful surprise was the depoliticised Japanese pavilion with its giant red string cobwebs holding thousands of keys and entrapping or being trapped by a boat—a beautiful meditation on discovery, loss and memory.
The director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York, Glenn Lowry, is a man with a double life: despite being at the centre of the American contemporary art scene, he started off like us [Fraser and her husband writer and historian William Dalrymple] in a Nizamuddin barsati (a small rooftop room) while working on a Ph.D on Humayun's Tomb. He is an old friend and we met him and his wife Susan for lunch in their favourite restaurant beside a canal near the Giardini. But with one old Venetian matriarch in the kitchen, and the place humming with art people, our delicious seafood pasta order took its time and we ended up drinking far too much prosecco. So it was in a slight haze that we followed in Glenn's wake as he whizzed through the Giardini, where the National Pavilions are, and the Arsenale—the old shipyard that houses the other half of the Biennale. Every few minutes, Glenn would introduce us to legends of the contemporary art world including Marina Abramović, who caused a sensation last year at the Serpentine Galleries in London and Joan Jonas whose multi-media work filled the US Pavilion this year. We ended up at the delicate gossamer-like garden installation by Sarah Sze who had the US pavilion during the last Biennale, and is married to our friend, the oncologist and The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee.
The Proportio exhibit at Museo Fortuny was for me the highlight of the Biennale. It is an eclectic mix of all my favourite artists' work (ancient and modern) from across the globe chosen for their uplifting investigations into proportion, sacred geometry and the aesthetics of order, chaos and ultimately, beauty. A Jain cosmic body is nestled next to a Modigliani drawing which hung beside a wonderful diptych video installation by Bill Viola called Man with His Soul (2013). I was mesmerised by the video of Marina Abramović's famous unblinking gaze but it was Anish Kapoor's Gathering Clouds, circular fibreglass installations of light-sucking grey/black pigment that left me astonished and disorientated.
The Venice Biennale is as renowned for its whirl of parties as it is for art. We stayed with old Venetian friends, Jane and Francesco da Mosto and every evening we would set off in their motor boat sailing across the Giudecca for a party held in an empty swimming pool or crashing a party at the Bauer by scaling a canal wall (trickier than it sounds). The most exciting event for me was obviously the opening of 'Frontiers Reimagined' and meeting the extraordinary group of artists I was showing with, including Salgado—easily recognisable as the only man with a baseball cap and a Nikon strung over his shoulder. Two days later came the thrilling news that The Art Newspaper had chosen us out of several hundred as one of the five highlights of the entire Biennale.
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