The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, runs from 23 April to 27 November 2022; it will be curated by Cecilia Alemani and organized by La Biennale di Venezia chaired by Roberto Cicutto. The Exhibition includes more than 90 countries to present the works and objects of artists from different regions throughout Venice.
The Milk of Dreams takes its title from a book by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) – Cecilia Alemani stated – in the book the artist described a magical world, where everyone can change and be transformed into something or someone else at will through the help of their imagination, and can constantly rebuild their ideal life, is a world full of freedom and possibility. This exhibition is based on many conversations with the artist over the past few years. During the conversation, the questions that keep emerging are the various levels of existential threats faced by all species in this era. The pressure of science and technology, the tension of the world situation, changes in the environment, and the outbreak of epidemics are all reminding mankind that the future direction of the world will gradually shift from Anthropocentrism in the past to symbiosis, and even include interdependence with technology.
These are some of the guiding questions for this edition of the Biennale Arte, which focuses on three thematic areas in particular: the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; the connection between bodies and the Earth.”
This time, YiCOLLECTA specially selected eight National Pavilions of the Venice Biennale: USA, British, Belgium, French, Serbian, Latvian, Hungarian and Danish.
The United States Pavilion｜Simone Leigh－Sovereignty
American artist Simone Leigh represented the United States at the exhibition. Characterized by an interest in performativity and affect, Leigh’s expansive practice parses the construction of Black femme subjectivity.
Leigh's large-scale sculpture works join forms derived from vernacular architecture and the female body, rendering them via materials and processes associated with the artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora. Different histories and narratives are also presented in the exhibition, including those related to ritual performances, early Black American material culture, and the landmark 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, addressing the concepts of individual and collective independence and autonomy from various historical perspectives. The works in the exhibition are based on Leigh's pure sculpture, with works with black bodies and cultural references. The overall exhibition hall seems to return to the most fundamental traditional art.
British Pavilion｜Sonia Boyce－Feeling Her Way
Sonia Boyce, an independent black female artist in the British pavilion, her installation brings together video works featuring five Black female musicians, who were invited to improvise, interact and play with their voices. By adding color filters to the images, they blurred their black identities and focused on their "voices". Boyce proposes, consequently, another reading of histories through the sonic.
The video works take centre stage among Boyce’s signature tessellating wallpapers and golden geometric structures, and the Pavilion’s rooms are filled with sounds – sometimes harmonious, sometimes clashing – embodying feelings of freedom, power and vulnerability. Artists reinterpret history through sonic, telling their stories as Black identity.
Belgium Pavilion｜Francis Alÿs－The Nature of the Game
The artist Francis Alÿs believes that “Playing” is something natural, something that we discover and learn instinctively in our childhood. It is an essential human need. Children’s play is to be understood as a creative relationship with the world. Since 1999, Alÿs has recorded images of children playing in public places through cameras. His films record, in an ethnographical way, both the power of cultural tradition and the autonomous attitudes of children, even in the most conflicted of situations.
French Pavilion｜Zineb Sedira－Dreams have no titles
Artist Zineb Sedira has transformed the French pavilion into a film studio, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, between personal and collective memory. The artist employs the cinematic processes such as the remake and the mise en abyme and finds inspiration in numerous film genres. In “Dreams Have No Titles”, the artist addresses a major turning point in the history of cultural, intellectual and avant-garde production of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond, in France, Italy and Algeria especially. Her film installation investigates the drive to make militant films in the 1960s and ’70s, a testament to the cultural partnerships forged in the past between the two sides of the Mediterranean.
Serbian Pavilion｜Vladimir Nikolić－Walking with Water
Artist Vladimir Nikolić runs through the entire exhibition with two works "800m" and "A Document", and installs two huge screens in the exhibition venue; the first is a 14-foot-high vertical screen, the artist carries a swimming ring at 800 meters. Filmed by a drone, the work 800m, takes the perspective of a bird’s eye view, a colonial view of creating pictures that today is extended and abstracted to our phone screen through google maps, and other devices that define our perception of time and space, while the artist’s body is constantly scrolling through the screen. The other screen is placed horizontally, showing the boundless ocean horizon. This footage of water was filmed using three cameras and features no digital manipulation.
Nikolić’s work responds to curator Biljana Ćirić’s curatorial essay on our own entanglements with the humans and non-humans who inhabit our environment.
Latvian Pavilion｜Skuja Braden (Inguna Skuja and Melissa D. Breiden)－Selling Water by the River
Artistic duo Skuja Braden represented Latvian at the exhibition, a home and a river are similarly metaphors, signifying states of consciousness that reflect different experiences. The borders between private and public space are blurred here, and questions are posed as to the possibility of living and being together in the modern world, shaken as it has been by the epidemic. In the exhibition, home and the character thereof are echoed by images in porcelain, a material which Skuja Braden has mastered superbly.
Hungarian Pavilion｜Zsófia Keresztes－After Dreams: I Dare to Defy the Damage
Artist Zsófia Keresztes' exhibition explores the various stages of a person's search for identity. The exhibition takes as its associative starting point an episode from Antal Szerb’s 1937 novel Journey by Moonlight, the artist used poetic metaphors in her works. The exhibition, in four larger units, explores both the ambivalent relationship between past/present and future, and the stages by which people map out their own identity. Liberated in each other’s reflection from the burdens of common and individual experiences, the mutually referenced body fragments.
Danish Pavilion｜Uffe Isolotto－We Walked the Earth
The Danish Pavilion is a space that is both hauntingly beautiful and unsettling. Artist Uffe Isolotto sets the Danish Pavilion as a world inhabited by a family of centaurs set in an undefined moment of the future. Set in a strange hybrid time period where elements from the historical past of Danish farm life blend with unfamiliar phenomena from the sci-fi future of a trans-human world, the drama revolves around a family of three. The audience will fall into a deep sense of uncertainty, It is up to the viewer to decide if this is a tragic or a hopeful view of the future.
On April 23, the Jury of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia this year's Golden Lion for Best National Participation, Golden Lion for the Best Participant in the International Exhibition, and Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant. The representative artist Sonia Boyce of Great Britain won the Best National Participation; the representative artist Simone Leigh of the U.S. won the Best Participant in the International Exhibition; this year's a Promising Young Participant winner is Lebanon artist Ali Cherri.
The jury said that Artist Sonia Boyce proposes, consequently, another reading of histories through the sonic. In working collaboratively with other black women, she unpacks a plenitude of silenced stories.
Artist Simone Leigh has developed over the span of two decades a poetic body of sculptures, installations, videos, and works of social practice that centre race, beauty, community, and care as they relate to Black women’s bodies and intellectual labour. Leigh won the Golden Lion for her monumental sculpture Brick House, which is in the opening gallery of the central exhibition in the Arsenale. When originally presented at the High Line in New York City in 2019, Brick House, a monumental bronze bust of a Black woman whose skirt resembles a clay house, towered, blending human structure and architecture. Alternately registering as a vessel, a dwelling, a space of comfort, and as a site of sanctuary, Brick House powerfully portrays the Black woman’s body as a site of multiplicity.
Lebanon artist Ali Cherri won the Silver Lion, in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia he exhibited his new work "Of Men and Gods and Mud" which focuses on the Merowe Dam, a hydroelectric power station in Africa. the judges praised: for an interdisciplinary and multilayered presentation that takes a meditation on earth, fire and water from a constructive perspective to a mythical dimension, reflecting The Milk of Dreams’s own opening up to other narratives that depart from the logic of progress and reason.
The German artist Katharina Fritsch and the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña are the recipients of the Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
German artist Katharina Fritsch’s realistic sculptures dissolve the edges between the ordinary and the uncanny. Her works are mostly based on ordinary animals, but they are presented in bold tones and giant proportions. Fritsch's sculptures do not have too many technical techniques. The sculptures painted with matte paint produce natural changes under the absorption and refraction of light, but also create a confusing and mysterious atmosphere. The gigantic sculptures stirring our deep-rooted dreams and nightmares while awakening childhood memories of religious tales, fables, and myths.
Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña is an art creator with multiple identities, most famously as a poet, advocate and video creator, whose exile experience has been deeply influenced by the changing circumstances of her life. During her artistic career, her works focus on issues such as ecology, human rights, and cultural homogeneity. Her creations combine poetry, performance art, and textile craftsmanship. In the mid-1960s, Vicuna began to explore "Arte Precario" , integrating trivial objects, shells, etc. into sculptural installations, exposing them to weather and tides, and naturally transforming into their final forms. The artist has explained that the word "Precario" means instability and insecurity, but it also means "prayer", but prayer is also a kind of change.
The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia - The Milk of Dreams
Date: 23 April 2022 to 27 November 2022
Venue: Giardini, Arsenale, and various places in Venice
Figure 1：Vladimir Nikolić, Walking with Water. Serbia pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition © La Biennale di Venezia
Figure 2 top left：Simone Leigh, Sentinel, 2022 U.S Pavilion © Simone Leigh
Figure 2 left bottom ：Installation view of Zsófia Keresztes. Hungarian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition © Ludwig Museum
Figure 2 top right：Uffe Isolotto, We Walked the Earth
Danish Pavilion © wewalkedtheearth Instagram
Figure 2 middle of right：Simone Leigh, Brick House, 2019 U.S Pavilion © La Biennale di Venezia
Figure 2 bottom of right：USA Pavilion © La Biennale di Venezia
