- Venue
- la Biennale di Venezia
- Location
- Italy
You’ll notice Nedko Solakov’s contribution to the current Venice Biennale. Like so much on display at this show the subject matter concerns political conflict. The difference with this piece, Discussion (Property), is that instead we are presented with documentation of a kind of meta-conflict: a quarrel between Russia and Bulgaria over ownership of the intellectual property rights to produce the AK47 rifle.
The artist uses what might be considered routine approaches to record, explain and make arguments relating to the not so headline-grabbing crisis but information is delivered in a deliberately shambolic manner. Solakov promises that ‘the punch lines will be bigger’ even though the writing needs to be made smaller apparently to fit everything into a stream of text scrawled onto one wall. He makes far fetched comparisons between ownership of the Glagolitic Alphabet which laid the basis for the Cyrillic Font, the micro-organism Lactobacillus Bulgaricus (used in the production of yougurt) and Russian demands regarding ownership of rights to the AK47 range design. Solakov’s half-hearted attempts at investigative journalism and to conduct interviews with key players, his somewhat blatant turn of phrase are hilarious.
The main text ends with the ironic comment ‘I feel personally satisfied that, at least in the assault rifle sector of the international arms trade, there will finally be relative peace’. Solokov’s enquiries, the content of this work, exudes messages and pertinent questions (the weapons trade is a normal business activity? intellectual property rights can be ridiculous and more) but the form and makeup of the installation are what really matter.
Hanging in the midst of, and in sharp contrast to, the seemingly messy randomly placed material inscribed on the walls is a prominent grid of twelve meticulously drawn versions of the infamous assault rifle. These charcoal and gesso images are framed behind glass. The rectangle of rectangular pictures, three high and four across, turns a corner on the wall to occupy a centre of gravity for the work as a whole. The grid is framed by everything else, which includes an actual rifle, another framed drawing and videos, as well as the texts referred to above.
In retrospect the brackets around the word Property in the title seem to hint at this object-oriented quality as well but maybe that is thinking too laterally. Solakov has managed to find poetry in war, more bizarrely, in the war industry, but not in the innocent way of early twentieth century Expressionists or dubious overly zealous Futurists. There is genuine commentary here. People don’t need to be told repeatedly what they already know but Discussion (Property) makes valid new points. That’s creativity too.
