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

Photography was rich with fine examples, among them Edward Burtynsky's chromogenic images of the Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze River in China (2002) and Thomas Struth's Plexiglas-mounted pictures of Peru (2003). Struth's Nasca Lines (with J.E. Bedoya) records the ancient and strange geometries inscribed across the floor of the Peruvian desert. Vera Lutter's vast and ghostly pin-hole camera shots of the barren floors of industrial spaces seemed to mirror the infrastructure of Niemeyer's building.

Collaborating with architect Arno Brandlhuber, brave Thomas Demand, representing Germany, chose an unlovely area in the pavilion, bisected by an escalator, and created a building within the building. He paneled exterior walls with wood veneer, on one side hanging the large and leafy image Forest (2003), and on the other a life-sized, banal photo of an unlit open lightbox, both of which seem true to life. Adding to these apparently unremarkable images, Demand placed a selection of photographs of carefully crafted paper mise-en-scenes on either side of the escalator. At the far end of the allotted area, hidden within the walls, Demand designed a viewing gallery accessible by a single unmarked door, and there installed the projection of Trick (2004), a breathless, 35ram loop of plates on a table, spinning on their rims.

The coveted main vault at the building's core was dominated by the work of the Portuguese team of sculptor Rui Chafes and choreographer/dancer Vera Mantero, who created a towering structure and performance titled Comer o coracao (Eating the Heart), 2004. During the opening days of the Bienal, Mantero, ornamented with what appeared to be felt-tip tattoos, vigorously climbed into a saddlelike seat suspended high in Chafes's steel armature and assaulted the amazed audience by extending her extremities in a dramatic sequence of actions accompanied by vocalizations that recalled the screeching of a frenzied monkey. A video and monitor documented the performance for quieter moments. Next to hand, David Batchelor's adaptation of The Spectrum of Brick Lane (2002-03), a rectilinear column of shelving units, found lightboxes, acrylic sheets and fluorescent lights, served as a spine of brightly colored lights reaching up three stories through the building. A hybrid of Judd and Flavin, it was soon named by Paulistano wags for the latest Brazilian supermodel, famous for her spectacular long legs.

Seemingly afflicted with Stendhal Syndrome, Croatian photographer Zlatko Kopljar presented images of himself as an uncertain pilgrim in the midst of cultural icons, suited and respectfully kneeling before the Guggenheim Museum, the New York Stock Exchange and Manhattan's Chinatown. As though to lead weary, overstimulated visitors up and away from so much information, the young Brazilian Thiago Bortolozzo built a spiraling, makeshift ramp of poorest plywood, rising on wood scaffolding that wound around the building's columns. Finally, it narrowed and seemed to pierce the exterior glass wall to reach the trees beyond, where it ended in the embrace of their limbs and leaves, en plein air.