Hospital at the Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale is a cultural Olympiad, where nations field their pre-eminent contemporary artists for judgment. Many countries have permanent pavilions in the city's public gardens. George Hadjimichalis has transformed Greece's terracotta brick pavilion into a hospital. The flags of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent fly above it, adding a timely political dimension by reminding us that the Geneva Conventions protect all hospitals.

“The hospital is a paradoxical space; it is within society and plays a very important in it, yet at the same time it is outside it,” says Hadjimichalis. “People change identity once they are admitted as patients or when they enter it as relatives or friends. As a space it is self referential rather than related with the outside world, so it is a closed circuit.” His four part, multimedia installation is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of hospitals and how lay people experience them: how they relate to the physical spaces and how they react emotionally to the more abstract concept of being hospitalised.

Inside the pavilion a stylised architectural model entitled The Building is the installation's centrepiece. It is a simple structure, constructed from seven aluminium tubes, square in section and laid at right angles across seven others to make a grid of 14 corridors. Peering in through openings at the ends of the corridors we glimpse a gleaming white interior populated by 125 tiny, cast bronze figures. Some stand alone, while others cluster together in groups. All are expressionless, like British sculptor Antony Gormley's clay figures. The solitary figures could represent the characterless, depersonalised state of being a hospital patient; the groups could be families expressing their concern or clinicians consulting about patients. It is difficult to conjecture more than this; however, it seems unlikely that nosocomial infections jeopardise patients in Hadjimichalis's spotless, antiseptic hospital.

The second part of the installation is a large canvas, The Plan of the Building, which hangs on the wall opposite the entrance. In contrast to the spatial simplicity of the model, this painted floor plan shows a labyrinthine layout familiar to anyone who has ever searched in vain for a poorly signed specialist clinic. The British artist Alison Turnbull exhibited similar paintings in her Hospital exhibition at Matt's Gallery in London in 2003. Like Turnbull, Hadjimichalis draws directly on the language of architectural plans and transforms them into abstract emblems of light and dark forms, representing the contrasts between hope and despair, and life and death, found in hospitals.

Figure 1.

MRSA free? A detail from Hadjimichalis's installation

The installation's third part, The View from the Windows, comprises two small, dark rooms. Nine black and white images are projected on to the walls, including a city street jammed with cars and a glimpse of distant sea. The slide carousels whirr and click; however, the views from the wards' windows remain unchanged, as a metaphor for patients' perceived inability to influence what happens to them within the impersonal environment of a hospital. In contrast, the fourth part of the installation, A Moment in the Mind of Mr. A.K., joyously reaffirms individual personality through a compelling sequence of visual memories from a typical life, captured by the camera of the imaginary patient's brain. The coloured and monochromatic images flicker briefly before disappearing. They remind us that patients' experiences determine who they are and that, whether they are cured and return home or die in hospital, their memories—like Ariadne's thread—enable them to find their way through the hospital labyrinth, as our memories enable us to fathom the universal labyrinth of life.

Meanwhile, stimulated by the inclusion of Red Cross and Red Crescent flags in the Hospital installation, the Greek Pavilion's staff are working with the Venetian branch of the Associazione Volontari Italiani Sangue, responsible for voluntary blood donation in Italy, to raise awareness of the need for more blood donors to satisfy the world's increasing transfusion needs by distributing information on how to become a donor.