The extraterritorial zone: the 26th Sao Paulo Bienal featured an indoor sculpture garden and a curatorial concept of "image smuggling" between cultures

Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Edward Leffingwell

Two large display cabinets flanked the entrance to Dion's installation, their glass panels painted over and scratched through to reveal ratty specimens of stuffed animals. Within the principal gallery, similar cabinets revealed scientific equipment, magnifying lenses and a solitary beetle impaled on a pin. Dion compiled a list of rain-forest animals in Guyana and placed it in a marquetry cabinet filled with specimens and drawings of indigenous fauna.

Among other works evocative of a colonial place and time was Paris-based Huang Yong Ping's taxidermy representation of an event involving a hunting elephant besieged by an enraged tiger. The title identifies the hunter as King George V of England. Huang explains that in 1911 the king, while hunting in Nepal, killed four tigers in three days, a remarkable feat. One of the tigers attacked the king, and he donated this specimen to a museum in Bristol, where Huang found it. In Paris the artist located preserved animals from other treks. He attached to a wicker howdah on the elephant's back a tiger in the documented position of attack, but he replaced the royal howdah--an emblem of empire--with the sort used to protect well-heeled tourists. The tableau looks back to the approaching end of the colonial period.

Hug's concept of the image smuggler was apparent in the installation of the studio contents of veteran Brazilian artist Paulo Bruscky, who long ago corresponded with Gutai and Fluxus artists. In the spirit of Beuys's Aus Berlin, Bruscky produced a full-scale replica, The Artist's Studio in Recife (2004), including shelves overflowing with books and files, signs and assemblages, tile, beer cans, a kitchen sink, a fire extinguisher, painting materials, a kitchen clock and the work of other artists.

Matthew Ritchie's installation The Lytic Circus included an extensive mural of black geomorphic imagery applied inside and outside an octagonal drywall chamber; on six walls ink-on-vellum drawings of "The Dead"--imaginary characters from his ongoing narrative on the subject of evil--were superimposed. The Lyric Circus enclosed The Universal Cell (2004), an elaborate, laser-cut structure of powder-coated aluminum, stainless steel and gypsum accessible to one or two viewers at a time and referencing an Ecuadorean prison. The mural ended with the inscribed caveat, "No rest for the wicked" and, at eye level, "cadeia earbonica" (carbonic chain or, figuratively, carbonic prison). These notations address the labor of the work, the torments of the damned and the image of the carbon cycle that Ritchie presumes within the prison and the Cell as well as in the bosky vegetation of Ibirapuera Park, visible through a section of the mural of laser-cut vinyl that traversed the room's single glass wall.

With metaphor in mind, two more of Hug's invited artists, Artur Barrio of Brazil and Simon Starling of Scotland, positioned sailing vessels in the great halls dedicated to sculpture. Barrio, who appeared in Kynaston McShine's celebrated "Information" show at MOMA (1970) as well as Documenta 11 (2002), presented Fortaleza-Lisboa (1998/2004), an installation incorporating a seaworthy, hand-built Portuguese fisherman's sailing raft resting on wood rollers and tethered in place on a light dusting of sand by four rock anchors bound by rope to wooden cradles. Known as jangadas, these vessels are equipped with wooden tillers and soaring, graceful sails, in this case a banner of bright patchwork colors. A used, modern couch resting in a drift of sand where visitors might sit and contemplate the beached jangada, and a vitrine of scribbled drawings and notes resting directly on the floor shed scant light on Barrio's concern, perhaps an expression of nostalgia for Portugal, where he was born.