Nauru – KUNSTFORUM International

Kauw Tsitsi, CPS (Khaled Ramadan, Alfredo Cramerotti), Patricia Jacomella-Bonola, Tedo Rekhviashvili, Sylvia Grace Borda, Ron Laboray, Dorian Batycka, Khaled Hafez, Iv Toshain, Stefano Cagol

AIM Inundated: Imagining Life After Land

Commissioner: Isabella Dageago M.P., deputy minister in the Government of Nauru Curator: Khaled Ramadan Venue: Spazio Castello 3683

This presentation marks the Republic of Nauru’s first participation in the biennale. The island nation in the south-western Pacific, within the Micronesia region, is just six kilometres long and five kilometres wide. Some 12,500 people live here, and there is no official capital. Almost 90 per cent of the island has been largely destroyed by phosphate mining and is uninhabitable – an extreme example of environmental destruction caused by resource extraction. Australia operates – heavily criticized – offshore asylum centres here. It is a place where global power structures, from colonialism and the exploitation of raw materials to collapse, converge as if under a magnifying glass.

The artists brought together by curator Khaled Ramadan (born in Lebanon) and co-curator Stefano Cagol (Italy) come from various countries; only Kauw Tsitsi is from Nauru. The musician and poet explores the history of his island as a ‘breathing body’. Cagol travelled to Greenland and, in We are all Nauru, combines drone footage of himself climbing and hiking in the desolate icy landscape with videos of his activities near the refineries in Texas. His work has long focused heavily on global crises, from the environment to politics. ‘I am like a little devil dancing on…