After a one-year delay due to the pandemic, the 59th Venice International Art Biennale will take place from April 23 to November 27.
The Paper, Art Review, has learned that cecilia Alemani is the chief curator of this year's Venice Biennale. The fifth female curator in the history of the Venice Biennale, she will take the audience on a surreal journey of female artists at the heart of the scene, while contemporary art and modern works are presented together, prompting visitors to see the influence of the art streams of the past on current art.
Cecilia Alemani
Cecilia Alemani first visited the Venice Biennale in 1999, when she was 22 years old, a landmark year for the Venice Biennale. Harald Szeemann, the chief curator from Switzerland, extended the exhibition line outward, adding venues such as the armory, while incorporating national pavilions, museum exhibitions and satellite exhibitions into the concept of large-scale exhibitions under the curatorial theme of "full opening" (dAPERTutto), which is an iteration of the previous 47th Venice Biennale. "I was so young that I didn't even know if I wanted to enter the art world – the sheer number of exhibits I saw, the sheer scale, the shock and the impact on me." Alemani said.
Twenty-three years later, the 45-year-old Alemani became a centerpiece of the contemporary art scene. She is an Italian living in New York, and her husband, Massimiliano Gioni, is also an influential curator. He is the artistic director of the New Museum in New York and in 2013 became the youngest chief curator ever for the Venice Biennale at the age of 39. She is the director of the art project on New York's High Line, a 1930 railroad freight line that connects the meatpacking district to Port Hudson on Thirty-Fourth Street, which has been transformed into a sky garden corridor and sculpture park. She also organized the Frieze Projects (a non-commercial project for Frieze New York Art Show 2012-2017) and Art Basel 2018's metropolitan project in Buenos Aires.
New York High Line Art Project
Alemani is the fifth female curator in the history of the Venice Biennale. She is known for commissioning emerging artists and critically acclaimed artists who can amaze the public [since she worked on the High Line Art Project in 2011, she has collaborated with more than 350 artists, including Barbara Kruger, El Anatsui and Carol Bove]. In 2017, as curator of the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, she shook up the usually conservative Italian Pavilion and placed dramatic installations in an otherwise cavernous industrial space. One of the works was designed by Roberto Cuoghi as a series of plastic tunnels similar to those in The X-Files and used as a "sculpture workshop."
57th Venice Biennale Italian Pavilion "Il Mondo magico"
That same year, she commissioned the African-American artist Simone Leigh to build the massive bronze Brick House at the north end of The High Line Park near Hudson Yards. It is a 16-foot-tall bust of a black woman with a skirt similar to a mud house in West Africa. This year Simone Leigh is the first black female artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale.
Simone Leigh New York High Line Park Pedestal Project Brick House 2019
The 59th Venice Biennale, which was supposed to open last year, was postponed to April 23 to November 27 this year due to the pandemic, and the follow-up problems caused by the epidemic are still plaguing the organizers, and how to ensure the participation of Ukrainian artists has become a new topic.
In 2019, when Alemani received a call from Paolo Baratta, the outgoing president of the Venice Biennale, informing her that she would be appointed curator of the next Biennale, "I had a few minutes when I was ecstatic and then suddenly felt like I had almost no time. At six o'clock the next morning, I got up and started working. ”
Not having enough time is one of the many challenges faced by the main curator of the Venice Biennale. The development of the exhibition's theme was also a test of curatorial skills, and Alemani chose "The Milk of Dreams," a 1940s horror children's book by the surrealist writer Leonora Carrington. Leonora Carrington died in 2011 and is now back in the spotlight. Milk of Dreams is written about eccentric characters, including a child with winged ears, a man with two heads that feed on flies, and a robotic monster named Janzamajoria. "It's a world of mixed organisms where humans can be transformed into animals or machines; in this world, everyone can be someone else." Alemani said. The theme of "Milk of Dreams" hints at an exhibition centered on identity, ecology, technology, body and irrationality.
Painting in Milk of Dreams
As it turned out, Alemani had more time than expected to refine his ideas and adjust his plans. Two months after she began working, the coronavirus pandemic hit and the Venice Biennale was postponed for the first time since World War II. "It's a really uncertain start." Alemani said, "I think I could have more time talking to artists and understanding what they're doing." "In many exhibitions in the past, usually the curator only had to make a plan and execute it, and did not have time to do anything else." Although travel has been restricted over the past two years, Alemani has networked with hundreds of artists and learned about the progress of their work.
As she puts it, some common themes emerge in the work, "so many artists are challenging the idea of white centering since the Renaissance and enlightenment, its ambivalent relationship with technology, and its dependence on ecosystems that are doomed to destruction." ”
"This opened up the idea of this Venice Biennale featuring women and transgender artists. They try to portray a different world, a more symbiotic, more synergistic, more caring way of life. Of the 213 artists (and groups) on display, about 90 percent will be women, a record in the history of the Biennale, featuring contemporary artists from 58 countries and regions, including indigenous artists.
Alemani has taken pains to point out that she is not at the forefront of rewriting art history and acknowledging women and marginalized groups. "Art and the Feminist Revolution" (MoMA, 2007) "Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985" (Hammer Museum & Brooklyn Museum, 2017/2018) and "Wonder Woman" (Sen Art Gallery & Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt, 2020) have begun to pay attention to this in a row. "But you have to remember that this exhibition takes place in Italy, where the ideas are still quite medieval."
She added that the biennale would not "have major political overtones": "Political issues obviously exist, but the exhibition focuses more on introspection, identity and dreams." It is also a very "physical" exhibition with a large number of paintings, sculptures and installations, not many screen-based video works, no virtual or augmented reality works. Take Colombian artist Delcy Morelos, for example: she makes a labyrinth out of clay, tobacco, cocoa powder, spices and coal through which viewers can walk through. They reflect the culture and ecology of the Amazon and the Andes, and are a more sensual version of Walter De Maria's 1977 New York Earth Room.
Delcy Morelos' installation The Center of the Earth, 2018
Unexpectedly, this biennale of contemporary art presents the works of about 90 deceased artists, many of whom were from the early 20th century. Alemani says adding historical works is also one of his own curatorial approaches. In 2010, at MoMA PS1's five-yearly "Greater New York" art exhibition, she showcased four artists with close ties to the 1970s and 1980s: Jack Whitten, Sylvia Sleigh, Judith Bernstein and Leslie Thornton.
It is precisely because of the epidemic that it has made it possible for historical works to enter the Biennale of Contemporary Art, and Alemani has enough time for academic research and loan works to museums. "I doubled the volume of the loan." Alemani said. She believes that contemporary artists have close ties with Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism and the Bauhaus. The works focus on female artists such as Eileen Agar (1899-1991), Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884), Leonor Fini (1907-1996), Baya Mahieddine (1931-1998), etc.) and are presented in five "exhibitions within an exhibition". Like Carrington, several of these artists were at the center of the art movement (Carrington had associated with the Dada artist Max Ernst for many years), but all were forgotten by history.
Paya, The Woman with the Basket and the Red Rooster, 1946
"I told the contemporary artists that historical works would be exhibited at the same time, but I didn't provide them with a list of works or ask them to reply." Alemani said, "I didn't say that Leonor Fini's work is a bit like yours. Nor is it a definition of whether Christina Quarles was influenced by Ithell Colquhoun. But I hope visitors will see, as I do, 80 years later, the similarities and differences in the artist's approach to similar subjects.
Combining the contemporary with the historical is a daunting task (as the Davic Museum put it in its 2011 exhibition "Tombre and Poussin: Pastoral Painters"), and it is equally difficult to bring together more than 1,400 works of art, many of which are newly commissioned creations, in an orderly manner, making them a multicultural group of artists. Equally challenging is the Venice Biennale's historical and industrial space, while the €18 million budget, while seemingly large, is less than half of Documenta in Kassel.
It is too early to judge the merits of this year's Venice Biennale through the narration of the main curator. Okwui Enwezor, the lead curator of the 2015 Venice Biennale, presents a seemingly lengthy and tedious account, but presents a shocking exhibition; in contrast, Christine Macel, the 2017 curator, claims to bring about a magical, thought-provoking change in contemporary art, but the exhibition is at best a hippie's goodwill.
But times may be in Alemanni's favor. There have been no major, exciting international exhibitions in the last two years: art critics, curators, art lovers are eager to see new ideas. While auction houses have done a great job of selling art online, galleries struggle with not having large physical exhibitions to showcase their artists. The Venice Biennale is not only one of the most high-profile art exhibitions in the world, but also the largest marketing event for living artists.
Alemani demonstrates her vision of discovering emerging artists and her grasp of the pulse of contemporary themes. She has proven herself to commission compelling works that delight both the public and critics, and has demonstrated her ability to handle vast industrial spaces. Although, she has recently led relatively few large, multi-artist thematic exhibitions. But the art world is looking forward to her, and the upcoming Venice Biennale.
Note: This article is compiled from the April 2022 issue of Apollo Magazine