from Artforum:

The untimely death of Christoph Schlingensief, who was chosen to represent Germany at the next Venice Biennale, has changed the German pavilion from an exhibition by the late artist into an exhibition about his work. As Austria Presse Agentur reports, curator Susanne Gaensheimer offered some clarifications at a press conference in Frankfurt last week. “I had hoped that we could realize what he planned to do,” said Gaensheimer, who is also the director of Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK). But too many questions remained unanswered in his concept. The curator never considered inviting another artist to replace Schlingensief, who died last August of lung cancer. The decision to make a show “about him instead of by him” was made in consultation with his widow Aino Laberenz, whom Gaensheimer called “a replacement for artistic authority.” Although unrealized, Schlingensief’s ideas for the pavilion may be documented in the next months on the website of the German pavilion before being presented as a book at the biennial.

PANKABESTIA: Punk Beasts of the Swimming Cities of Serenissima
Anonymous Gallery @ Collective Hardware
169 Bowery (off Delancey), New York
November 20, 2009 - January 1, 2010
curated by Spy Emerson

“Pankabestia: Punk Beasts of the Swimming Cities of Serenissima” is an exhibition about the crew members, the individual artists that supported Swoon’s “Swimming Cities” projects, and it is about my own personal experience as a crew member of the “Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea” and the “Swimming Cities of Serenissima.”

Both daunting projects were based on Swoon’s giant multimedia floating sculptures, beautiful rafts built from trash. As a group, we made these great, impossible situations happen.

A frequent critique of the Venice Biennale is its organization into national pavilions. As a legacy of the first Biennale of 1895, when nations were young, naive, and given to a prideful beating of their imperial wings, the idea of identifying particular art with a particular country and then competing for the best of show, a Golden Lion, might have once seemed appropriate. It now seems wholly anachronistic. In our current climate of globalization, of multi-national corporations and commissions funding large exhibitions in far flung territories, of curators and artists hopping from one project and one continent to another, segregation according to nationality appears somewhat fusty and quaint.