Abbas Akhavan's Entre chien et loup can be seen at the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.Francesco Barasciutti/Supplied
The first time Abbas Akhavan considered showing at the Venice Biennale, he decided he had nothing to say and asked that his name be removed from the short list of artists who might represent Canada at the prestigious international exhibition. It was an unusual decision to decline an assignment that can make an artist’s career. But Akhavan was delighted when the opportunity came again.
“Opportunities aren’t always opportunities if they don’t nourish you,” he said in an interview from the Canada Pavilion at Venice. In a previous year – he won’t say which one – he saw the dangers, either of repeating well-known work for safety’s sake or using a big budget and big platform to create something out of character. So Akhavan, who was born in Iran in 1977 and spent several years in Sweden before he arrived in Canada aged 16, decided not to let his name stand. This time, however, he felt ready.
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One side of the pavilion has been turned into a lily pond.Francesco Barasciutti/Supplied
The result is an installation that fills the small pavilion with misters and turns one side into a lily pond where water lilies under grow lights will gradually come into bloom as the six-month exhibition continues. The seeds, of the genus Victoria, named for Queen Victoria, were provided by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in Britain, and germinated in Italy at the University of Padua’s Botanical Garden. There is also a pile of bronze sticks fashioned into pickets or spikes with pointed ends, and a fur coat flung over a rock. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that water pours out of one sleeve on to the ground. The installation was curated by Kim Nguyen who suggested the title: Entre chien et loup is a French expression referring to dusk, that in-between moment when you can’t see whether that’s a dog or a wolf bearing down on you.
Portrait of Abbas Akhavan in 2024.Alex de Brabant/Supplied
Akhavan is peripatetic: He studied at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and feels Montreal is home after living in both B.C. and Ontario, but he is now teaching in Berlin.
Yet one thing he keeps returning to is water.
“Water has this quality that we have instinctual relationships with because it’s linked to our survival. Its sparkle, its glimmer helps us find water to live. I find water hypnotizing, like a mosquito, when I see it, it keeps me hovering,” he said, but he adds, “It’s a huge pain to work with. It is super feral. It wants to do its own thing. It causes me a lot of stress. It causes a lot of anxiety. It needs a lot of upkeep and maintenance. So, it really isn’t something I use out of ease.”
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Perhaps Akhavan is an artist who likes working outside his comfort zone. Filling the Canada Pavilion is sometimes considered a mixed blessing as an assignment because the space, a spiral build around a tree, is about as far from a neutral white cube as a gallery could be.
Using the unusual pavilion merely as a venue to show pre-existing art seldom works well; site-specific installations can succeed if they speak to the space, a small modernist masterpiece designed by the Italian architect Enrico Peressutti in 1956.
A fur coat is draped over a rock.Francesco Barasciutti/Supplied
“One of its problems is that it’s extremely beautiful; it offers a lot, and it’s hard to manoeuvre around that kind of richness in some ways,” Akhavan said. “The other part is that it’s like hugging a porcupine. Every angle you come at, it kind of pushes you away.”
Bringing the living water lilies into this high art space, Akhavan’s installation clearly speaks to human impact on the environment. That green shopping bag lying beside the rock is not a forgotten bit of litter, but a reference to the ubiquitous plastic bag. The water lilies are Victorian, so perhaps the fur coat is a reference to the fur trade and Canada’s colonial past in the midst of exhibition grounds where the smaller Canada Pavilion is tucked beside the larger ones owned by France and Britain. But those are just speculations: The artist’s work is neither narrative nor didactic, but rather evocative without ever letting you pin it down.
Bronze sticks are fashioned into pickets.Francesco Barasciutti/Supplied
“Colonial world history? All of these things are already understood. It’s nothing I want to teach anyone. It’s not that interesting, actually,” he said, striking a non-political tone in the midst of a Biennale that has been interrupted by political protests and is filled with art that is purposefully anti-colonial. “But, of course, I don’t deny those things being in the work.”
He makes the analogy of visiting a friend who offers you lovely homemade bread: You don’t start asking laser-focused questions about yeast and flour.
“It is this kind of aggregate of alchemy and chemistry that creates the bread,” he says, apologizing for the metaphor. And yet it is in poetic metaphors that his work finds its home.
Entre chien et loup continues in the Canada Pavilion in the Giardini at the Venice Biennale until Nov. 22.
Francesco Barasciutti/Supplied