I feel bad saying this, but the Spanish Pavilion is a disaster. It claims to be revising colonial history. It claims to be inaugurating a new narrative for the oppressed. But it treats the colonization of the Americas as a rhetorical device, rather than an apocalypse. It ignores the ongoing effects of the extraction of resources that filled the coffers of the royal family; it ignores the ongoing effects of how caste and race have been (continue to be) used to deny the humanity of those Spain had subjugated for centuries.
I feel bad saying this because the pavilion is filled with work by Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, a Peruvian-Spanish artist who spends time between Lima and Madrid. It isn’t so much that I don’t think her work is inappropriate for this context, but that the context informs how the work will be read—and the context does not lend itself to the subtlety that Gamarra Heshiki is proposing. Perhaps this is a shame. But perhaps it is also a miscalculation. The work does achieve the stated aim of inverting the colonial gaze, but that inversion is not enough. Not nearly enough. The inversion of the colonial gaze only reminds of the gaze, only shifts the perspective. But it does nothing to restore the humanity to those whom the gaze has served to dehumanize.
[Altar de la naturaleza moribunda I (Dime qué custodias y te diré quién eres) / Dying Nature Altarpiece I (Tell Me What You Guard and I'll Tell You Who You Are) 2024 Photo: Joseph M. Pierce]
The description of the pavilion from the Biennale website is as follows:
Sandra Gamarra Heshiki’s extensive research is manifested in new works based on paintings that belong to the national heritage of Spanish art collections from colonial times to the Enlightenment. Each piece investigates the absence of decolonial narratives within museums, revealing the biased representations of colonisers and the colonised. Within this field of study, sociology, politics, art history, and biology intertwine to provide a reinterpretation, where too often ignored consequences of history connect to present-day racism, migration, and extractivism in relation to both the ecological and museological crises.
Now, sure, the new works draw on colonial and enlightenment era masterworks as well as more quotidian works of art. But to “investigate the absence of decolonial narratives within museums,” is not something that we really need. How do we not know this by now? I mean, do we not know that the museum is a colonial space? Do we not already, painfully know that it is filled with art that has been used to form the aesthetic and ideological policies (national, international, historical, etc.) that dehumanized and devalued Indigenous and Black lives? Do we not already know this?
Perhaps some people don’t know this. But when I walked through the pavilion and came to the final room, I saw a red and black painting with a mask at the center, a body quartered (quadrooned?) by the overlay.
[Máscaras Mestizas VIII (Cuerpo trans: mujer indígena Yuracaré / muchacho filipino) Miscegenation Masks VIII (Trans Body: Indigenous Yuracaré Woman / Young Filipino Boy) 2024. Photo: Joseph M. Pierce]
But then a quote from Paul Preciado’s lecture Can the Monster Speak? which reads “trans body is to normative heterosexuality what Palestine is to the West: a colony whose extension and form is perpetuated only through violence.” And I don’t know. I fucking can’t with this shit. The entire pavilion is dedicated to inverting the colonial gaze, and then, this quote. It reads as gestural, and not in a good way. It felt like the curator and artist knew they had to say something about Palestine, and the only thing they could come up with was to echo Preciado’s equation of transness to Palestine; normativity to the West. But the structuring of violence against Palestine is not only about form, it is not just a question of violence, but the complete annihilation of a people. The violence is not theoretical. The violence is not about establishing norms. It is about wielding the power of colonialism to enact one after another apocalypse.
Let me try to summarize how this made me feel: I thought it was tokenizing. I thought it took the history of racist colonial abuse that has been building and accumulating for centuries and reduced it to a question of perspective. This is not just about perspective. It is material. Real. It is about the bodies who are being dismembered and the justification of that dismemberment that is channeled through the military bloodlust of a thousand colonies and their acolytes. And the injection of a quote from Preciado on transness, attached to a casta painting of a young Yuracaré person, in relation to Palestine, felt disingenuous.
And let me try to summarize what I think was going on here: the project of the pavilion seems to be a critique of traditional art institutions, the museum, and yet, its only solution is an inversion of the gaze, a pointing out of what is missing. That Indigenous, and trans, and Black, and all the other “others” are missing is not something we need to be reminded of. What we need is the power to prevent more of us from being killed.