Chris Ofili

At the Venice Biennale 2003

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 21, Numbers 3 & 4, 2003

Transcript

This was the ninth occasion that Audio Arts has attended the Venice Biennale in order to record ‘on the spot’ interviews, opinion, commentary and ambience at this major international art event, which took place this year during a somewhat demanding European heat wave. In most cases the recordings were made in or close to the space where there work was shown.

The 2003 Venice Biennale once again provided a platform for an increasing number of participating countries, groups and individual artists. The double CD reflects the expanding international nature of the Biennale and includes interviews with, and commentary by, individuals from some twenty countries. As part of its presence at the Biennale, Audio Arts also co-organised a series of three breakfast meetings, titled Venice Agendas 2003, during the opening days of the Biennale. Distinguished panels of speakers debated issues raised by the Biennale particularly those of national and cultural identity and questions of representation.

Many of the issues raised at the Breakfast Meetings are reflected in the interviews and commentary included on this double CD. These issues were particularly relevant at a time when the historic formulation of individual nationhood is increasingly challenged by parts of nations seeking and establishing an independent presence at the Biennale. By way of example, this year was the first year that Wales and Scotland showed work in separate dedicated spaces, in addition to the British Pavilion which hitherto had ‘represented’ artists throughout the British Isles.

William Furlong: The sense I got walking into the pavilion was that I was walking into one of your paintings; the paintings and the environment almost merged together. What made you decide to go down that road?

Chris Ofili: In a way my feelings and thoughts were just trying to extend the idea of the painting into the environment that it’s shown in. I decided that I was going to create a family of paintings that could be shown together and that I wanted to try to depict the ‘Last Supper’. So I started to think about the parallels between a room and a gallery and a chapel and about atmosphere and intimacy. It just seemed natural to try to create a room for paintings where the viewer could feel that they were part of the whole event. It just seemed like a natural progression and I was happy with it. So when I was asked to take on the Pavilion, I suppose I initially just had to exhale, because it was very close and the exhibition at Victoria Miro’s was still on. I thought maybe it’s better to strike while the iron is hot, in terms of my flow, and I still had some ideas that I wanted to continue, namely the red, black and green series, which charts the love affair of a couple that I had already begun in the ‘Freedom One Day’ exhibition, so it felt natural just to continue that. I felt it was important for me to try to do something that would be a challenge; trying to work with an environment for the paintings and trying to not separate it from the paintings. It was an attempt at making a total environment, a total experience so that the viewer looked into the world of the couple in the paintings and felt as though they were in it as well. It’s a story really and it began as quite linear, they met and they spent some time together, were kind of lovers and then it becomes more disjointed, I can’t really chart a definite path in the story.

WF: Was it a story that you’d written or conceived and then illustrated?

CO: It’s something that’s going on and it’s a picture story rather than a written story. There’s a particular one that took me by surprise that’s in the exhibition, it’s one called ‘Afro Apparition’ and it’s one where the couple are at the lower part of the painting and they’re on a journey, walking through a kind of paradise holding hands. They look up and see in the clouds an image of themselves kissing, just for a split second and then it disappears and is just a cloud again. You know sometimes you see things in clouds and I was surprised that I was able to capture that feeling in the picture.

WF: Looking at the Pavilion, you really made quite a radical intervention there with bright green walls, with red walls, with lights, with the ceiling of coloured suspended glass that completely transformed it.

CO: It was quite important really that when you came into the space you were entering into a fantasy world, and paintings are for me a fantasy world or a kind of suspended reality, like going to the cinema. Walking into that pavilion you shouldn’t really have to deal with all the other Biennales that have been before. It’s not to negate them it’s just to give a fresh start.

WF: Something that also interested me was the whole weight of history to do with an English Imperial past, having this pavilion on the hill, looking down over everyone else.

CO: Other artists may speak differently of their experience in dealing with the Pavilion but you are told how things are normally done and it’s a bit difficult, as an artist, to always be told to get back into line. For me, I just wanted to take on the Pavilion and speak of what I am and that’s all of what I am rather just to show a bit of me. It was quite a lot of effort and I had a lot of help from the people who put the thing together and my from my working relationship with David.

WF: I was gong to ask you about your collaboration with David Adjer.

CO: Well we were at the Royal College of Art together. We’ve known each other for ten years. I sit down and imagine things and try to picture things and make notes about my ideas for spaces and David’s very skilled and has a much quicker understanding of what it is that I’m trying to explain. We just talk and work things out.

WF: Had you planned all the colour and the surfaces and the glass roof well in advance?

CO: Yeah, I tend to play those things down in discussion and interviews but it was very clearly planned out because doing anything in Venice requires a lot of planning. They don’t have many raw materials so you have to bring everything over with you, plus there’s no time to make mistakes, which is very much part of my process in making paintings. Mistakes become intentions and opportunities to improvise and to learn, whereas the construction of an environment requires forward planning and precision, particularly in the case of the ceiling. The first thing I did when I was offered the Pavilion was to go to Venice and to look at the Pavilion with nothing in it and I was instantly struck by all the top lit skylights in each room and I knew that I didn’t want to work with that space. There was too much weight of history there; it wasn’t a blank canvas. We made all our changes, painted the walls; it just seemed like a perfect container for the paintings that I was making in the studio, which I didn’t see in the space until I brought them there. Every single piece, everything that you see in there was made for the Biennale, so it was quite an intense year.

WF: One of the interventions you made at the Pavilion was two flags either side of the entrance. Tell me a bit about those?

CO: Yes, there were two on the flagpoles and then there was a third, which fits on the top of the building. It’s called the Union Black. It’s a flag that describes what I am, which is of African heritage but born and raised in Britain. The Union Jack was used as a kind representation of white power and a kind of anti anything that isn’t white in Britain. Red, black and green, the colour scheme that was put together by Marcus Garvi in the twenties, red represented the blood of Africans that was spilt over green land, and black represented the skin. So the Union Black was basically a synthesis of the Union Jack flag with the red, black and green colour scheme. It signified what the Pavilion was for me with a hint of the paintings and subject matter that was going on inside. Some of the most complex and difficult subjects to speak about are easier to take on when they’re packaged in an attractive way. I’m drawing people in, right up to the surface of things, to allow them to take on some of the issues that maybe being offloaded within the grander scheme of the paintings. That’s the plan anyway.