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

Starling turned a sloop upside down for "The Mahogany Pavilion," Mobile Architecture no. 11 (2004). Mahogany is associated with both Brazil and the building of boats. Starling located a Clyde-built 20-foot Loch Long sailing boat made 40 years ago of mahogany that had been shipped from Brazil to Scotland. In this form he returned the wood to Brazil. The arresting presentation of the boat inverted on its mast recalled Starling's previous inversion of models for standard housing pressed against a gallery ceiling by saplings or limbs of Trinidadian mahogany.

Commanding a far more fragile bark of wood and metal, Fabiano Marquez of Brazil assumed a performative role in an oddly riveting, 36-minute video document, Mar pequeno (Small Sea), 2003. The ludicrous homemade vessel's yellow-painted planks stand out in vivid relief against the blue and green of the sky, water and forested land beyond. Marquez is repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to climb onto the boat's raft-like platform without capsizing it. He manipulates a screen of metal mesh framed with pipe--an awkward and unlikely sail. The winner of an exhausting struggle, the craft itself was installed nearby, buoyed on pontoons cobbled from broken blocks of Styrofoam.

Cai Guo-Qiang, born in China and a resident of New York, was in 2000 featured in MOMA's "Open Ends" exhibition and the Whitney Biennial as well. He is best known for spectacles involving exploding gunpowder. On site in Sao Paulo, he built and suspended a cargo-cult airplane stuffed with an array of common objects that, in a terrorized world, air travelers may not bring on board. Uneasy Bird (2004), 10 feet high and 30 feet long, is made entirely of vines, like a basket, and studded with sharp objects including scissors, knives and corkscrews. It is further outfitted with four fans blowing wide ribbons of white cloth, imparting a sense of motion and mourning. The enduring presence of terrorism and its effects was memorialized by Xu Bing's meditative installation Where Does the Dust Collect Itself? An expanse of bare concrete floor was dusted with ash from the World Trade Center's collapse. Text appears in negative, blocked out in letters that are removed after the dusting is complete; the words are part of a Zen Buddhist poem that includes the work's title. (3)

Among projections and installations, those of Fernando Sanchez Castillo, representing Spain, and Melik Ohanian, representing France, conceive possible futures for the expanding world of image technology. Their video installations (both 2004) are reminiscent of the compelling, ambiguous narratives of Matthew Barney and Pierre Huyghe. In an entry for the exhibition catalogue, Sanchez Castillo is referred to as "a smuggler of political and social memories." In a leaflet published for the exhibition, he introduces the story of a newspaper headline that provides the title for his recent video, Rich Cat Dies of Heart Attack in Chicago. The ludicrous phrase appeared on the front page of a Lisbon daily newspaper on Dec. 13, 1968. There was no notice of the big news of that day: the imposition of dictatorial rule in Brazil, a suspension of that nation's constitution and congress, wholesale arrests and the abrogation of civil rights.