For three decades, the Arsenale di Vento Biennale has been a reliable barometer of where the contemporary art world believes itself to be headed. This year, under the curator Tomás Reséndiz, the barometer has swung hard. The thirty-ninth edition, titled "Tidelines," abandons the gravitational pull of the usual capitals and reaches instead toward studios in fishing ports, river deltas and provincial mill towns. The effect, walking the halls of the old rope factory that gives the show its name, is of a map being quietly torn up and redrawn by hand.
The first room sets the terms. A single work fills it: "Ledger of Tides," a sixty-foot wall of salvaged shipping pallets by the Filipina artist Corazón Velasco, each plank inscribed with a fisherman's daily catch as recorded over a single season. It is at once a sculpture, an archive and an act of mourning for a fishery in collapse. Velasco, who left art school after a year and learned woodworking from her uncle, is exactly the kind of figure Reséndiz has placed at the center of the show — formally rigorous, biographically rooted and entirely uninterested in the conventions of the international circuit.
That choice is deliberate, and it is the argument of the whole exhibition. "The center has been mistaking itself for the world," Reséndiz writes in the catalog, a sentence that has already been quoted, approvingly and otherwise, across the season's openings. Whether the work on the walls justifies the manifesto is the question that will follow "Tidelines" for the rest of its run.
Mostly, it does. The strongest passages of the Biennale arrive when the curatorial premise gets out of the way and lets the objects speak. In a darkened side gallery, the Bolivian collective Taller Altiplano has installed "Breath of the Salt Flat," a field of hand-blown glass vessels that fog and clear in slow rhythm as visitors exhale near them — a piece about thin air and thinner futures that earns its melancholy without announcing it. Nearby, the young Senegalese painter Ousmane Diatta shows a suite of portraits rendered in indigo and crushed oyster shell, their subjects half-dissolving into the grounds that made them.
Not everything holds. The Biennale's central pavilion, given over to a sprawling installation by the German conceptualist Petra Lindqvist, strains under the weight of its own ambition; her labyrinth of suspended fishing nets and recorded testimony wants to be a cathedral and settles for being a maze. And a much-discussed video program in the upper galleries mistakes duration for depth, asking visitors to sit through nearly four hours of footage to arrive at conclusions the wall text has already supplied. These are the failures of a show willing to take risks, which is preferable to the safe coherence of recent editions, but they are failures all the same.
What lingers, after a second day in the halls, is less any single object than a shift in tone. The art here is made by people for whom the international art world was never a birthright, and that condition shows in the work — in its resourcefulness, its suspicion of spectacle, its insistence that a place is worth taking seriously on its own terms. Reséndiz has been criticized, fairly, for romanticizing the margins even as the Biennale's budget and sponsors remain firmly of the center. The contradiction is real. It is also, perhaps, the most honest thing about the show.
"Tidelines" will not settle the arguments it provokes, and it does not pretend to. But it does something rarer than resolution: it changes the questions. By the time you reach the final room — empty save for a single recording of waves against a seawall, played at the volume of a held breath — the familiar geography of contemporary art has come to feel less like a fact than a habit. Habits, the Biennale seems to insist, can be unlearned. The exhibition runs through the autumn.