Artes Mundi 11 review – Arrogant, staged, arrogant nonsense of the art world | art

WIsn’t it a physically divided nation? The mountainous interior that makes it so beautiful creates more distance than you might expect between south and north. I spent the first 18 years of my life in North Wales, but I never saw the capital Cardiff until I lived in London. My father used to get angry at Cardiff’s ‘crash’ who monopolized the culture.

Arts Mundi, an international art prize whose shortlist this year includes “six of the world’s most important international contemporary artists,” seems to have succumbed to this localism by moving itself around the country. At the National Museum Cardiff, the artists have small displays crammed into one long room, but to see the rest of their work you have to visit their larger shows in four other galleries spread across Wales. Who will do that? And the National Museum’s offering isn’t exactly scrumptious. I immediately fell out of love with all the artists, who don’t seem to care whether they appeal to visitors emotionally, intellectually or aesthetically. Their presumed audience is connoisseurs, collectors, and specialists—because, ultimately, those are the people who give out the awards.

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe is a painter whose work I seem to have seen before, but not by him. His paintings of Burmese/Myanmar history, based on black-and-white photographs, resonate with everyone from Warhol to Richter. But he has a surprising personal twist: his grandfather was the first president of independent Burma. Yes, this is interesting, but art is not.

There is no sound installation by Anwana Haluba, another artwork that sounds quite familiar. It’s a contemporary cliché, and its melancholy ruminations lack anything to make you share the sentiment. Sancentia Mawhinney-Simpson presents a deliberately childish (I’m sure) portrait of European plantations and sailing ships that doesn’t tell you anything specific. It is a gesture toward the history of empires rather than a detailed and meaningful analysis. Equally mysterious is its archaeological-style display of pottery vessels related to the sugar trade. You may have just written the word “colonialism” on the wall.

The best artist here has actually printed words on the wall. Kamla Janan Rasheed is a huge, stuttering display of broken sentences, repetitive phrases, and annoying punctuation. “I’m not done yet – I’m not done yet – I’m not done yet,” part of it is written in black script on the white wall. And it turns out it’s not really: this unsettling display continues on black pillars where mysterious images add to the chaos. You might say that communication is difficult. I think she deserves to win the award if any of these artists win, but her art is for the few, not the many.

Is Artes Mundi just telling the truth about art now that it has lost touch with the mainstream audience? I headed to the other end of Wales to find out. Mostyn is a modern exhibition in a not-so-modern place: Llandudno. For me as a kid, the city meant donuts, a rickety ghost train on the platform, and finding mermaid purses on the beach. Now that means watching a video of someone slowly demolishing Marcel Duchamp’s 1913 bicycle wheel. Obviously, it’s not the long-lost original, or one of the valuable replicas that museums have, but a life-sized model made by artist Antonio Pucar himself. It’s not difficult: just attach the bike wheel to a chair. In what looks like a farm yard, Paucar first buries the wheel, then piles logs around it and douses them with accelerant before setting them on fire.

This is a dry little joke that means less than you think. According to Artes Mundi, Paucar defends the indigenous culture of the Andean region, but how exactly? A performance that attacks an icon of Western art only makes sense to those who know him, and can only relate to someone familiar with Duchamp’s bicycle wheel and its place in the history of modern art—and who is arrogant enough to be titillated by the “repertoire.”

In the other hall, Jumana Emil Abboud will have her solo show. Her work is a collection of half-baked and hackneyed metaphors, from the mysticism of the cod – she is a water diviner! – for ironically awful paintings. One space is devoted to her collection of obscure knick-knacks, essentially splatters of resin, on tables or stuck to black walls with faded inscriptions and hackneyed affirmations: “No matter what you hear, trust the voice in your heart.” Yes. The voice in my heart tells me this is nonsense.

Worse still, it’s all staged and false. But the entire Artes Mundi 11 looks like this, at least as far as I can see. “Six of the most important contemporary international artists in the world”? You would almost think that the curators have tried to hide the fragility of what is on display by distributing it across Wales, and challenge you to question them, when you haven’t seen the show in Aberystwyth yet.

If only the ghost train on Llandudno Pier still existed. Now this was really fuel for the imagination.

Artes Mundi 11 is on view at the National Gallery Cardiff, Mostyn, Aberystwyth Arts Center and Glen Vivian Art Gallery until 1 March 2026.