Dénes Farkas, Estonian Pavilion @ Venice Biennale

With a practice defined in the press release as 'meaningful meaningless,' the premise of Dénes Farkas' contribution to the Estonian pavilion is painfully vague. A loose response to Bruce Duffy's fictionalised account of the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein in his novel The World As I Found It (1987) whereby Farkas constructs an architectural space bordering on fiction, in which we as viewers are apparently encouraged to become characters.

Imposing the interior of the Palazzo Malipiero with strict architectural interventions, Farkas presents an implied relationship between the physical, built environment and its diagrammatic counterpart existing through architectural drawings and descriptive text. Farkas' primary output is a series of large photographic prints of paper architectural maquettes which he mounts on lightboxes throughout the interior. The rooms themselves respond to vaguely domestic situations: a library filled with books and an artist's garret, wallpapered with schematic sections of annotated texts and drawings. The final room is a bare garden comprising a single rectangular container of verdant green watercress and a blue monochromatic photograph. It becomes a minimal oasis inside the otherwise bleak interior.

Despite the lingering uncertainty, Farkas makes several specific references within the work. An anecdotal nod to the relationship between Wittgenstein and the architect Adolf Loos is visualised, albeit tenuously through an apparently Loosian use of plain facades. However, at times this over-referencing manifests as mere critical placebo, theoretically bolstered through Farkas' attachment to Wittgenstein and the philosophical framework that his thought implies. The exhibition catalogue published by Sternberg Press furthers this critical 'decoration' through its barrage of commissioned essays and supporting academic texts.

Conceptually, Farkas frames the work in relation to some very murky issues; in his words, the apparent 'impossibilities of translation,' and the slipperiness of linguistic 'meaning,' thus situating himself within a seemingly Beckettian zone of obscure, if barely definable poetics. If the exhibition's apparent refusal to resolve is initially refreshing, the overarching vagueness of Farkas' delivery is ultimately frustrating.