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Picture yourself a record collector: standing in front of boxes, bins and crates, sorting through them one album, cover, disk at a time. (Don’t sneeze). It’s a studious quest, driven as much by knowing what you are looking for (and, conversely, what you are not) as it is by curiosity about what you might find. It’s like all collecting really, save for a certain spin that flipping through records, like files, puts on it. This spin is pushed into full play by the artist Siemon Allen, whose installation for Desire, the three artist exhibition in the South African Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale, turns the imagery of record collecting into a lyrical form of archive building. His works take count of tracks and titles, performers and producers, labels and liner notes, scratches and grooves, design and color. And while there is a lot of information on display, we are also entreated to appreciate the structuring of the whole, as well as the readymade beauty of individual objects. Strangely, the …

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Notes from Mary Sibande: In a wide ranging conversation and series of e-mail exchanges this spring between the artist Mary Sibande and Andrea Wiarda, the artist discussed her background, the genesis of Sophie, the protagonist who appears in much of her work, and the power of imagination. The following is an account of that exchange. Mary Sibande’s contribution to the exhibition Desire at the 2011 South African Pavilion in Venice consists of two new works: …of Prosperity (2011) is a single sculpture of a black woman dressed in a blue and orange costume; the other, Lovers in Tango (2011), is an army of 26 life-size sculptures lined up in three squadrons, each two rows of four figures, with the remaining two facing each other at one end of the formation. Sibande is a young woman born in 1982 in Barberton, a gold mining town in the north-east of South Africa, raised there and, later, in Johannesburg. She has lived, for most of her life, in a ‘post-apartheid’ democratic republic. Part …

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At the first, far away sight, the object hanging from the ceiling in the South African pavilion prompts a string of associations, one emerging only to be replaced by others, equally haunting. Is it a sea monster, reminiscent of earlier work by the artist, Lyndi Sales, caught in a net and brought from South Africa as an exotic curiosity that still manages to retain its own geometric dignity? Or is it a knot in the nets themselves, empty nets that caught nothing, yet project an illusion of the thing itself – that object of our curiosity and desire, our thirst for the foreign and the unknown that in the end proves to be a mere product of our own imagination? Or is it, in yet another turn of the screw of interpretation, a discolored symbol of how impossible it is to distinguish or draw a boundary between the net and the catch, the space alien and the bugbear, Venice and South Africa? As we come closer and read the work’s …