Venice Biennale 2022: A feminine view of the world
As the next Contemporary Art Biennale is about to open in Venice on 20 April 2024, we look back at the previous exhibition in 2022 to examine in retrospect, what impression is left of the show.
The Milk of Dreams, the title of the 2022 Venice Biennale, was puzzling at first. Milk is by nature a product of the female body, and accordingly, the milk of dreams could be interpreted as the product of the female imagination or the mind of women artists.
Not surprisingly, for the first time ever, women artists were in a majority, along with non-binary artists, out of the two hundred plus artists from 58 countries that were represented. And about 80 percent of them were never displayed in the Biennale before. A refreshing diversity.
A return to classic figuration
Through the suggestive space that is the Arsenale, the largest space of the Biennale, figuration and the human body in all its permutations dominated the view. Many images hang on walls, a telling change from the usual video art, large scale installations, or conceptual abstractions seen in contemporary art exhibitions. We were back in the realm of the intimate space.
Where there was large scale work, it was in the form of traditional figures. The opening room set the tone: a giant sculpture of a house-woman by American artist, Simone Leigh, co-winner of that year’s Golden Lion, in blind conversation with prints from late Cuban artist, Belkis Ayon. Leigh’s giant sculpture has no eyes, Ayon’s drawings have eyes but no facial features. One can speak but cannot see, the others can see but they are muted by the absence of a mouth.
As Cecilia Alemani, curator of the 59th International Art Exhibition, explained in her statement, the Milk of Dreams takes its title from a book by the late surrealist artist, Leonora Carrington, in which she describes “a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination, a world where everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else.”
Reflecting the curator’s proposition, the animal world merged with the human world. Canadian artist Tau Lewis used the old rag doll technique to make giant animal faces, while Lebanese artist, Ali cherri, created terracotta sculpture of half animal half human creatures which recalled ancient myths. Clay pots reminiscent of pre-Colombian pottery took human features.
Among the smaller works on display, I was touched by the series of drawings by Brazilian artist, Rosana Paulino, entitled Senhoras das plantas, in which women’s bodies are the roots from which branches grow, a reminder of the myth of Daphne, who transformed herself into a tree to stop the god Apollo from possessing her. A theme famously materialised by Bernini with his marble sculpture of Daphne in the gallery Borghese in Rome.
A colourful and tactile world
In many works, techniques traditionally seen as feminine, such as embroidered or stuffed textile, painted silk, stitched patchworks, and knitted wool were used. In an ironic reversal of a traditional state of affairs, women artists used the very material that symbolised their domestic alienation. Examples were the colourful knitted canvas by German artist, Rosemarie Trockel or British artist Emma Talbot’s painted silk curtain, Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going? which tackles the urgency of the climate crisis.
An overall impression of vivid colours and sensuality emerged from the show. Reds, blues, orange, and greens were juxtaposed on a diversity of supports to create images of a colourful world that refused labelling and classification. Naive, surrealist, magic realism, photographic or monochrome art merged into something else.
The same sentiment ruled in the second part of the exhibition hosted in the international Pavilion of the Giardini. Next to it, the national Pavilions financed by their national flag and often bound by the politics of the moment, also reverted to the intimate space. The French Pavilion managed to avoid political ostentation by choosing Zineb Sedira, a London-based artist of Algerian descent to represent the country. With a touch of nostalgia, she used theatre staging and film to create an ethereal atmosphere where visitors get transported between time periods and film clips.
In the same vein, the Italian pavilion recreated the setting of an industrial factory of the 1930s, to seemingly embody the growing alienation of man to machine. The aesthetics work but the feeling left was one of nostalgia more than questioning.
Reinventing tradition, in the Latvian pavilion, the collective Skuja Braden used the technique of painted porcelain to create a multi-layered and eclectic world of humans, animals and imaginary creatures. Walking in the room felt like entering an enchanting space.
There is never enough time to visit the Biennale and take in the breadth of art on display. My overall take was that a more feminine view of the world, that broke away from conceptual themes to simply question who we are and what is our place as humans in an emerging world of artificial intelligence. If our intellect is no longer fast enough to compete with a machine, how do we use our senses and unique sensibility to build a world in which we exist?
The next Biennale opening soon and entitled Foreigners Everywhere will tackle the condition of being foreign in a place and draw on migration in all its forms (economic migration, political exile, expatriation, etc…). It is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, a Brazilian national, currently director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand — MASP.
Here is the link to read my take of the 2019 Biennale
