Wall of Art

italicsBy Daniela Gross

An impressive “Western Wall” composed by the suitcases of Jewish deportees greets the visitors at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Titled “All the World Futures”, the major contemporary art exhibition, which opened last week, this year explores how artists react to the upheavals of our time. Not by chance, its curator Okwui Enwezor has chosen as a central artist in the exhibition Fabio Mauri, the author of the “Western Wall” (1993).

The work and the life of Mr. Mauri were recalled, on April 19, by Arthur Lubow on The New York Times. As he highlighted, as a teenager, Fabio Mauri “reacted with profound and paralyzing shock” to the horrible images of the concentration camp victims portrayed on the newspapers after the Second World War. This was his turning point, which, after terrible sufferance (for eight years he shuttled between psychiatric hospitals and monasteries) led him to new forms of art.

He devoted his creativity to representing how the media manipulated and shaped consciousness, and in his artistic trajectory the Shoah always had a central position. With the “Western Wall”, the Venice Biennale presents the installation “Evil Numbers”, a nonsensical mathematical formula facing an image of Goebbels at the “degenerate art” exhibition in Munich in 1937.

Another controversial performance piece is on display. Titled “Jewess”, it had its debut in 1971 and shows a nude young woman, cutting off her hair and pasting them in the shape of a Star of David onto the mirror in front of her. The scene evokes “the haircuts given to Auschwitz prisoners on the way to the gas chambers”. We see the woman essentially through the mirror, which acts as a sort of screen reflecting her shock along with ours.