With no mention of the T word At the press preview for this year?s Venice Architecture Biennale, the opening of the U.S. pavilion?s ?Dimensions of Citizenship? exhibition felt like an exercise in restraint and diplomacy.
With the exhibition largely funded by the U.S. State Department, and the opening attended by a visiting representative, the commissioners from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago?and the exhibition?s four co-curators?discussed a ?need for an urgent conversation about what it means to be a citizen.? There was no direct mention of the current U.S. presidential administration.
Visiting the pavilion later that day, I realized that far from shying away from the topic the curatorial team had in fact pulled off a masterstroke. By looking at the idea of citizenship across seven different scales, from the body to the cosmos?or the personal, via the regional and national, to the global or universal?and exploring it in all its possible permutations, they had elevated the discourse on citizenship to notions of belonging, immigration, sovereignty, and ecology. And, above all, they created an exhibition that encompassed a level of nuance that not only greatly surpasses the rhetoric of the ?presidential tweets? mentioned in the exhibition?s introductory panel, but made them almost irrelevant.
?On the one hand, this topic emerged from a certain emergency: our sense of being in a really troubling climate,? explains Ann Lui, one of...