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

Sanchez Castillo's video offered a sequence of choreographed events on the subject of coup d'etat. The projection recalls the endless class struggle chronicled in Bertolucci's 1900. Here, a group of men remove a monumental, truncated bronze head from a truck and pull it up into a palace, then roll it down carpeted stairs and outside, where it is greeted by performing Alsatian dogs, then by horses trained to circle and leap in sequence and in tandem. The head is dragged behind a station wagon and abandoned in a soccer field where cars perform a ballet in its honor. Later the head washes up on a shoreline and rolls onto a beach. Hunting dogs follow its progress and one pisses on it. The head is buried in a field. Eventually a farmer comes along, inspects the object, ties it to his donkey, and drags it away. The sequence suggests cycles of tyranny.

Ohanian's new video Seven Minutes Before consists of seven large, horizontal projections of simultaneous, parallel fictions that lead to an ultimate convergence. It is a project that shocks with its manipulation of contingent events. The elements include a mountain road, a tunnel, overheard voices that are like memories, a nocturnal place of ruined stone houses, a woman and man engaged in quiet ritual, stringed instruments, trees and rocks. There is a wolf in a cage, a fire, a roadway at first light. A man walks along a road; a raptor flies toward the camera; a motorcycle collides with a speeding truck, with an ensuing explosion and fire. Despite the multiple points of view provided in the projections, Ohanian offers no way for viewer/witnesses to prevent the crash.

This edition of the Bienal was well supplied with painting and photography. Beatriz Milhazes presented four exuberantly rococo paintings with vivid, abstract floral imagery floating on the rational field of the grid. Specially conceived for the Bienal, new oil-on-canvas paintings by Luc Tuymans displayed his familiar grisaille-based palette. Their subject is an annual pre-Lenten carnival held in the Belgian city of Binche. Among its elaborately costumed revelers, Tuymans offered the turbaned figure of Gilles de Binche and the dancing figures of Mardi Gras. The bizarre painterly narratives by Neo Rauch included the oddly peopled landscape titled Abraum (2003), with an overburdened giantess in working skirt and boots slipping eggs that look like landscapes from a frying pan, her back turned to miniature workers whose conversation rises in the form of ideograms from their plates.

By contrast, Eugenio Dittborn's trademark paintings and mailing packets elaborated his familiar themes. The very title of his 27th History of the Human Race (Leija) Airmail Painting No. 158 (2004) seems freighted with the burden of its invention. Printed and stitched faces include identity composites of suspects made by the Chilean police from the testimony of eyewitnesses. On one of the sturdy envelopes, Dittborn offers a 1993 text by art historian Guy Brett describing the artist's work as pragmatic--a response to making art in a time of oppression--and polemical, "taking advantage of existing networks of energy and power."