An historical materialist reading of the 56th Venice Biennale as a space of public and fictional narratives

With the 56th Bienalle, Okwui Enwezor has become a milestone in the biennial concept and its relationship with the contemporary art, igniting a discussion about Walter Benjamin and his historical materialist ideas in the context of Marxist philosophy, in a post-colonial approach. It is not surprising that his work situated at the core of the contemporary artworld being altered by the urgent agenda has caused a series of ironclad arguements. The Biennale transformed under his new public space of debate that he created for this edition has become an academic institution with the help of the international artists and curators, gaining a position as a factory of knowledge production. He has given this new form of artistic knowledge by questioning the impact of the past on the present, setting us up with complicated entrapments, weaving it with a relational process as a virus penetrating into the nervous system with all its contagious power, with an ingenuity in challenging "All the World's Futures". As a personification of the Angel of History, the curator assumes all the calamity by giving us a portrait of the past he had failed to restore. He advises us to be always aware of the relentless roots of the past in a state of responsibility keen to all the possibilities of future by using pedagogical methods. Its relationship with the positions and fields of its own creation and evolving under the contemporary socio-economic and political changes are the very characteristics of the biennials that cannot be seperated from the other practices of art. Born into the modern era, they played a crucial role in designating the fashion of thought of the period from time to time. The Venice Biennale therefore is a brand for it is the very first biennial that has survived to this day with all its traditional and transmuted elements. This narrative space which brings the theoretical detached from a utopia and puts it into the center of the truth itself, has been a home to the numerous works of art.