The 59th Venice Biennale is on display in Venice, Italy these days. Titled The Milk of Dreams, the exhibition explores posthuman, metamorphosis, ecology and other issues.
Walking between the exhibition halls, all kinds of needlework, weaving, knotting, tapestry running through it, this biennale allows female artists to occupy the center of the art stage, and will also be recorded in history as a women's biennale. In addition, affected by the war, Ukrainian artists had to bravely fend for themselves in the Biennale.
This is the most important biennale in people's memory. I've never seen anything like this. Due to the war, although the Russian Pavilion has been closed, the Borscht-colored "superyacht" inside was also expelled as scheduled. But the biennale has nothing to do with war. The biennale is also unrelated to the year-long delay caused by the pandemic, which is not reflected in the artists themselves and in thousands of works.
Rather, the Biennale is an epoch-making shift in consciousness. From the Giardini in Venice to the Arsenale pavilion, and especially in the thematic exhibitions in both galleries, for the first time, women artists outnumbered men. A group of actors who had waited too long behind the scenes were now on stage. The 59th Biennale will go down in history as a women's biennale.
Zineb Sedira, A living enchantment': Dreams Have No Titles
In the French Pavilion in the Greentown Garden, the work of Algerian-born artist Zineb Sedira comes alive and captivating. You'll enter a seductive scene: a couple in evening gowns dancing to the intoxicating accordion in a Parisian bar. This bar looks like a scene from a period movie. In fact, along with the other sets surrounding the work, Algiers in the 50s, Paris in the 60s and London living rooms in the 80s, all of these elements reappear on the screens of the old-fashioned art theaters behind the pavilion.
Here, Cedilla weaves her family story into postcolonial history and presents it in the most captivating cinematic way. Aside from the mysterious scenes, which don't know who the actors playing the characters are, you seem to be watching footage of Gillow Pentecvo's 1966 black-and-white masterpiece The Battle of Algiers. Sedilla put her hand into the scene and rearranged the exhibition hall. She told the story before she was born, when she "came" among algerians in France in the 50s, where she had friends and family. She uses the seamlessness of film to question what is real and what is fiction, as is the case with history and cinema. In this scene, like Cedilla herself, all the dances are so complex and elegant.
Sonia Boyce, "Feeling Her Way"
One of the characters Cedilla portrays is none other than Sonia Boyce. Sonia was the first black female artist to represent Britain in the pavilion next door. Sonia Boyce's work is more collaborative, with five singers, including Tanita Tikaram and Jacqui Dankworth, improvising music on different screens. From blues to folk, from pop to jazz, from humming to hymns, from low to throaty, from high pitched to trembling, somehow they are all moving in the same direction. They can't see each other the way we do, but the sounds they create are intertwined and coordinated. While Sonia Boyce's golden 3D sculpture became the seat of the listener, the entire installation was like an impromptu performance of a dream band in black history.
Simone Leigh, Sovereignty
Simone Leigh, Cupboard (2022)
Like Sonia Boyce, Simone Leigh was the first black woman to represent the U.S. Pavilion, whose thatch-covered pavilion looks like a traditional West African building. In front of the pavilion is a female statue, made of black bronze, 24 feet high, with a concave disc at the head. She expressed this view in oversized sculptures in black and white: a white woman in a ceramic petticoat was easily broken; a black slave crouched on the laundry table with immortal bronze cast on her body. And her best works, such as Brick House, are like a ringing monument that shocks the viewer with pure material power.
Curated by curator Cecilia Alemani, this year's Biennale features the short story "The Milk of Dreams" by British-born Mexican surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, which explores posthuman, metamorphosis, ecology and more. The Guggenheim Foundation Collection and the Barberini Museum bring to the audience the co-curated exhibition project "Surrealism and Magic: Fascinating Modernity". The exhibition hall is filled with historical, even academic, works, from outsider art to robots and mannequins, many of which seem to have become surreal.
Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) 《The Pleasures of Dagober》t, 1945
This time, of the 213 participating artists, only 21 were men, which represented a complete reversal of the situation. Even more surprising is walking in half a mile of art, with little spectacle in sight of a work that expresses the male body. The victory is widely believed to be a gorgeous display of Paula Rego's paintings. The altarpieces she created on old cupboards are filled with out-of-favor literature and folklore of women. In the painting, some of the figures have grown up but are still wearing the uniforms of the abandoned baby hospital, and one of them is still holding his own abandoned child. Society will never let them get rid of the past.
Painting by Paula Rego
From the exquisite hanging gardens of the highly respected Chilean artist Cecilia Vicu a, to the dazzling Opp art carpets in the Kosovo Pavilion, a variety of needles and threads, weaving, knotting and tapestry run through the biennale. Among them, the most amazing is the huge tapestry that surrounds the Polish Pavilion. The work was produced by a young Romanian-Polish artist, Ma Gorzata Mirga-Tas, along with three of her colleagues.
Tapestry work by Ma gorzata Mirga-Tas
Based on the Murala Renaissance frescoes, Margaret Mega Tass's work takes the form of a three-tier narrative: the history of Poland at the top depicts golden sheep and twinkling crabs, as well as images of Polish heroines; the lower layer depicts a series of scenes of everyday life: women meet each other, sing, drink coffee, pick potatoes in the fields, depicting their journey from birth to old age to death. Through ingenious aesthetics, these figures are cleverly depicted wearing cloth in their lives. It is a generous and humorous sight, with gently falling leaves and fragments of cloth expressing deep sadness. Think about it, four Polish women who created it all from scratch in just five months, while the German Pavilion next door didn't create anything. The German Pavilion is empty and the brick walls are exposed, and the project of artist Maria Eichhorn focuses on the history of the German Pavilion and its architectural transformation. Built in 1909, this Bavarian building was renamed the German Pavilion in 1912 and renamed in 1938 to reflect the fascist aesthetic. It was a new surface, with a raised ceiling that made the pavilion look intimidating. Despite post-war modifications, the building still embodies the formal language of fascism. It is almost impossible to ignore geopolitical analogies.
Pavlo Makov, The Fountain of Depletion
Of course, these pavilions were built before the war, and art is much more than a tool to express this. But the wonder of Venice is that Ukraine bravely defended itself. The artists and curators of the Russian Pavilion resigned at the beginning of the war, so that the biennale would not have to make a moral decision to close it. Two weeks ago, the Biennale finally provided Ukraine with a small lawn as a temporary pavilion, where artists built a monument with sandbags, and artistic creation will take place spontaneously until November.
Ukraine's official pavilion is nothing more than a wall in the armory, between the Kosovo pavilion and the Turkish pavilion. But even in such a narrow environment, Pavlo Makov's Fountain of Depletion still has a deep and melancholy beauty. The work, consisting of 78 bronze funnels, shows the gradual diminishing of water in the fountain, eventually turning into a small number of water droplets. The piece was originally conceived in 1995, but now, those who see it may not think that Ukrainians in Mariupol are dying of dehydration.
Lesia Khomenko, Max Is in the Army, 2022
Off the pitch in Venice's Cannaregio district, Ukrainian giant Victor Pinchuk is backed. In this Renaissance building there is a painting by Lesia Khomenko in which commoners dressed in ordinary clothes, holding guns in one hand and saluting people with the other. Max in the Army is the title of this series. Max in the painting is also an artist and the husband of Homanko.
Francis Al s, Children's Games
The New Zealand Pavilion pays tribute to more works of Gao
Looking at the Biennale, it's full of power and comfort: Malta pays homage to Caravaggio, where marvelous rain of flames illuminate the darkness; the first pavilion of the Cameroon Pavilion showcases photographs of women from monochromatic to full-color; and in the lively New Zealand Pavilion, a Polynesian artist pays tribute to Gauguin on a TV talk show. In addition, there is also a wonderful film by Francis Als at the Belgian Pavilion. Titled Children's Games, Alis pays homage to his compatriot Bruegel, who competes in snail racing, hide-and-seek, and competitive jump rope on a pebbled beach. All of this, all this rising joy, this ecstatic improvisation, is constantly playing out in the ruins of poverty and war all over the world.
The 59th Venice Biennale will run from 23 April to 27 November 2022.
(This article is compiled from The Guardian by Laura Cumming)