Emma Gifford-Mead, curator of the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and exhibitions organiser for the British Council’s visual arts work, offers an insight into Jeremy Deller’s exhibition English Magic, on display at the British Pavilion in Venice from 1 June to 24 November 2013.
The Venice Biennale is one of the largest and most revered arts festivals in the world, and it is sometimes referred to as ‘the Olympics of the art world’, as countries host exhibitions in national pavilions and select an artist (or artists) to represent the best of contemporary art from their country.
The British Pavilion is one of the oldest pavilions in the biennale, and the British Council has been running the pavilion officially since 1938. We’ve worked with a wide range of artists in that time, from Barbara Hepworth to Gilbert and George, and this year, we are working with the artist Jeremy Deller.
Why Deller?
Deller was selected by an independent panel of arts professionals from all across the UK, but in some ways he was a natural choice for the pavilion. In the last year, Deller has presented a major retrospective exhibition, Joy in People, which showed at the Hayward Gallery in London before touring Belgium and the United States; he made an award-winning documentary about his work, Jeremy Deller: A Middle Class Hero with BBC’s ‘Culture Show’, and also curated an exhibition and directed a feature-length documentary about the artist Bruce Lacey.
His art world credentials are well established, though: in 2004 he won the Turner Prize, and his works such as The Battle of Orgreave (2001), which saw the restaging of a seminal battle between 1,000 miners and police in 1984, and Folk Archive (2005), which is a huge collection of objects, photos and films of British folk customs and alternative culture, are both regarded as seminal works looking at British life and culture.
An artist who collaborates, also with non-artists
Working with Deller has been a really eye-opening experience for me as a curator. Deller is not a traditional artist in that he often doesn’t make works himself. Rather, he collaborates with artists and other members of the community who have a skill or a story that he is interested in, and so I’ve worked with people who I might not have come across otherwise.
For the project in the British Pavilion, for example, the list of collaborators includes painters, musicians, archaeologists, a banner maker, music fans, students, car crushers, birds of prey and British ex-servicemen currently in prison.
Each of these collaborators has a specific role within the overall exhibition, but the amazing thing about Jeremy’s work is the way in which all these seemingly disparate elements of his projects combine to create an exhibition that seems unified and interconnected – often in enlightening and unexpected ways.
Culture and identity in one exhibition
The theme of the exhibition itself is broadly about British culture and national identity, and the ideas that are highlighted include popular culture, music, tax evasion, accountability, history, arts and crafts, the military, prisons and the natural world. These are all themes that Deller has explored in one way or another in his previous projects, but this is the first time that one body of work has combined them all together.
The exhibition is called English Magic, and it reflects Deller’s interest in the diverse nature of British society and its broad cultural socio-political and economic history. When you walk around the exhibition, you are greeted with some quite amazing sights – three giant mural paintings, stone-age hand axes, banners, William Morris tiles and woodblocks, drawings by prisoners, a crushed car, a film, and photographs of Ziggy Stardust. There is even a free tea bar in the back gallery, where visitors can sit and enjoy a free cup of English tea.
The exhibition is quite beautifully installed and it has a real lightness about it, which complements the architecture of the building. However, when you actually look at the works that are on display, there are some challenging and political ideas being put to visitors.
One painting features a scene of St Helier on fire following a riot by British tax payers who are protesting about Jersey’s status as a tax haven. Another room features drawings by prisoners, many of whom used to be in the military, of public figures such as Tony Blair, Dr David Kelly and Alastair Campbell, who were all part of the UK’s decision to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The exhibition is not all doom and gloom, however. A new film has been made for the exhibition, which brings together many of the ideas behind the works in the pavilion. It also features a rousing soundtrack of tracks by Ralph Vaughan Williams, A Guy Called Gerald and David Bowie, all adapted and reworked by a steel band, which creates a real toe-tapping accompaniment to the exhibition that you will find yourself humming throughout the day. You can actually listen for yourself as the film is online.