The 59e edition of the event showcases women artists and the overlooked ramifications of surrealism.
Pleasure of the senses, discoveries and reflections make 59e Venice Biennale an event as irresistible as it is relevant. Its heart is the thematic exhibition The Milk of Dreams, a title borrowed from painter and author Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) by curator Cecilia Alemani. She elected her as an inspirational figure, casting a feminist look at the legacy of the surrealist movement, this major artistic avant-garde of the last century.
Within “time capsules”, the exceptional contribution of this edition, the exhibition convinces us of its transformative, even subversive potential. At the source, it was a question of shaking “the Man of reason”, of revealing the unconscious and the powers of the imagination, of chipping away at the order and its norms which govern modern subjectivities.
As a prelude, everywhere in Venice, the visual signature of the Biennale combines the dreamlike tone of Carrington’s words with mysterious eyes, motifs drawn from the works of another, the Chilean of origin Cecilia Vicuña. She was honored with an award for her career as part of the event, which kept its competitive dimension, handing out gold and silver Lions ahead of its opening in April.
With Vicuña, on canvas, hybrid bodies become organs of political resistance while the artist bears witness to the precariousness of Venice in an anti-monumental installation composed of debris found in the lagoon. Large cruise ships may no longer have the right to approach Serenism since 2021, but it is nevertheless sinking into the waters, disturbing proof of a weakened world.
Mastered course
The surrealist vein does not encourage denial in the face of the worrying realities of our time, the event shows, moreover, in the chanted texts of Barbara Kruger or in the raw although intimate imagery of Miriam Cahn, among others. The dreamlike domestic scenes drawn by Shuvinai Ashoona — from Nunavut, a territory that the Biennale does not connect to Canada — alert us to the climate crisis, with eyes wide open.
If the oldest of the visual art biennials, also the most popular and the most worldly, constitutes the undisputed beacon of current creation, it is now expected that it engages head-on in a critical examination of its occidentalocentrism, its persistent colonialist biases . In fact, Alemani brings together several practices rooted in knowledge and traditions far from the usual canons, inviting us to review, beyond artistic criteria, our relationship to the Earth and to other living beings.
The pandemic posed a major challenge to the curator in the selection of works, by limiting her travels. The Italian based in New York, where she directs the public art program of the renowned High Line, has nevertheless shattered the statistics by bringing together just over 200 artists from 58 countries, 180 of whom have never participated in the central exhibition of the Biennale. The vast majority are female or gender nonconforming, which is the other notable fact of this edition.
Attention to these figures is eclipsed behind the well-controlled route of the exhibition, spread over the two official sites of the Biennale, in the central pavilion of the Giardini and at the Corderie de l’Arsenal, where the introduction is respectively marked by the works of Katharina Fritsch, another winner of a Golden Lion, and Simone Leigh. Their sculptures assert, triumphant, figures rich in matriarchal symbols.
Posthumanism
The representation of the body and its metamorphoses is one of the important sub-themes of the exhibition. The fluidity of identities unfolds, challenging borders, categories and their norms of race, gender and sex, as in the paintings of Christina Quarles. Always pivotal in the experience of the world, the body is elsewhere shown in fragments, dysfunctional or in the process of secreting, raising smiles and discomfort, in the works of Louise Bonnet, Sara Enrico, Paula Rego and Raphaela Vogel, among others. In his personal mythology with therapeutic virtues, Ovartaci painted and cut out slender silhouettes on the borders of the non-human.
In both sites, the conjunctions of the body with technologies are the subject of several stimulating proposals, revealing a posthuman imagination as prolific as it is remarkable. The sculptures of Marguerite Humeau and Monira Al Qadiri respond to each other in space with their futuristic connotations, the first with seaweed and plastic materials taken from the ocean, the second with its levitating 3D prints, critiques of prized petroculture in Kuwait, where she grew up.
Further on, Zhenya Machneva’s tapestries with interweaving human and machine motifs and Geumhyung Jeong’s derisory automatons promote artisanal production and the culture of “doing it yourself” where technology can alienate us. Few are the videos, which were legion in past editions. As a minimalist and judicious counterpoint, the work of the Brazilian Luiz Roque shows a vulture in flight, among the towers of a confined city. Above our heads, it is he who watches us with insistence.