Joan Jonas has filled the American Pavilion with a rich and multilayered installation which, although apparently not specifically designed with Venice in mind, chimes on many levels with its direct surroundings. Not only do the classic motifs of this veteran pioneer of performance, installation and video art—the masks, the mirrors, the theatrically ritualistic actions—all seem utterly at home in a Venetian context, but the way in which Jonas has transformed the pavilion’s bland, institutional spaces into an opulent and uncanny environment full of strange hallucinatory reflections and fragments of ghostly stories, is also utterly appropriate to this haunted stage set of a city.
There is never one entry point to Jonas’s work and here she has pulled out all the stops. Each room is devoted to a loose theme—bees, fish, light, wind, the home— which play out through an immersive deluge of projections, drawings, sound, spoken words and sculptural props. Boundaries constantly shimmer and blur in projections and films that feature performers who are in turn drenched in projected images and hold mirrors or draw new faces on their masks in order to complicate things further. Nothing is stable or open to a single interpretation: her multiple drawings of bees are also Rorschach images that can tip into other readings, and at the centre of the pavilion one room is completely lined in rippled watery mirrors, drawing all visitors into this world of reflections and shadows.
Jonas may be best known as a performance artist, but here (apart from a brief appearance on a film in the last room, where she strides through fields with her dog and plaits some grasses) she has largely left the performing to others—most notably a group of New York children who inhabit her films like faintly sinister sprites. But although we rarely see her, Jonas’s presence pervades every element of the pavilion, from her drawings lining the walls to the vitrines filled with an eclectic array of highly personal objects accompanied by her meticulously handwritten labels. Then there is her deep, steady voice that resonates through the galleries as she reads a series of sometimes chilling fragments of Nova Scotian ghost stories, and in doing so effectively animates and haunts her own pavilion.