In the background

After their inaugural presence at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale was distinguished with a Golden Lion for National Participation, the Kingdom of Bahrain this year presents Background, an installation which takes over a room at the Arsenale, filling it with images real and imagined.

Curated by Noura Al-Sayeh, with exhibition design by Francesco Librizzi, Matilde Cassani and Stefano Tropea, the striking and depurated installation is composed of five screens duplicating the shape and location of the room's windows and entrances. These screens act themselves as windows, opening a portal to Bahrain with five different video feeds, filmed by CCTV cameras in one single Bahraini building. Respecting the pavilion's solar orientation and coordinates, if you turn East in Venice you see the East in Bahrain, in a fascinating double layer that invades the pavilion. These windows open up to a square, a lake, a road — most of the time they seem empty or frozen, were it not for the occasional car, the foliage moving gently with the breeze, the tides that come and go, the children playing at the end of the afternoon, when temperatures cool down.

Back in Venice, the room is dotted with foldable stools, inviting visitors to sit down and enjoy the views. Around, crates filled with books and newspapers invite reading, and the two publications offered provide a sharp contrast to the room's "windows". A simple, engaging book collects images of Bahrain as it has been portrayed in the media since the 1950's, when BBC broadcast one of the first television images of the country. These are followed by oil rigs, shopping malls, state visits by Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher, and, in the last few years, demonstrations, graffiti-clad walls, the consequences of recent unrest.

"As opposed to the era leading to the 19th century, where travelers brought back mostly romanticized images of the faraway, today we mostly base our imaginary of remote and un-iconic landscapes through their appearance as a background imagery in the media," states the publication. "Sometimes accidental, at other moments intentional, promotional and neatly framed, these fragments of a landscape are nonetheless unconsciously stored, in the mysterious workings of our imagination."

This collective idea of the country is obviously fragmented and partial, and the pavilion invites the formation of a new, shared imaginary with this confrontation between what we know and what presently is. "The normally individual act of media imagery consumption becomes a collective experience," state the exhibition designers, "where background imagery of the faraway is isolated and becomes a sensorial experience." The new images with which you leave the pavilion will be your own, and you might be surprised by the juxtapositions. Vera Sacchetti (@verasacchetti)