REVIEW The Venice Biennale

Review /African representation + Feminism / Venice Biennale

June - August 2022

ITALY

MARGERITA PULÈ

Much has been said about the female presence in The Milk of Dreams, and about its curator, Cecilia Alemani’s feminist approach in creating the exhibition, engaging a huge number of women artists, and acknowledging female and feminist aesthetics and methods. Much has also been said about the surrealist elements which dominate many of the exhibition’s narratives, drawing on the work of Leonora Carrington whose book gate the exhibition its name. And equally, much has also been written about the show’s five capsules, the small semi-historical, semi-independent sections which explore key themes pertinent to the exhibition as a whole.

I would like to focus on another aspect of the show, which relates to all of the above elements in some way; that of the exhibition’s merging of traditional, sometimes ancient, crafting techniques, with contemporary, often futuristic practices and imaginings.

Take, for example, the lead crystal sculptures by Romanian artist Andra Ursuta that dominate a large room, alongside huge monochrome wool on canvas pieces by Rosemarie Trockel. Some of Ursuta’s figures are missing limbs, and others lack a head entirely. As if to compensate, they have been given strange, unhuman appendages, alien-like tentacles, or extremities shaped like industrial tools. The figures are hybrid beings and bring to mind deep-sea creatures, but also – strangely - domesticity. Their unsettling contortions, textural detail and subdued colours make them seem at once immediate and remote. Ursuta works with casts of her own body, fusing them with found objects, and combining traditional lost wax casting techniques with 3d scanning and printing. Anyone who has tried to work with casting glass will know that it is so difficult that it makes even bronze-casting look like child’s play; these pieces, with weird shapes and chilly lead crystal colour palette push the boundaries of a traditional craft, both conceptually and technically.

The combination of post-human worlds, speculative imaginings, and textural, tactile craft is ever-present in The Milk of Dreams exhibition, both at the Giardini, and the Arsenale. Straw and fabric works jostle with cyborg-like creatures, while animals and animalistic forms compete for space with oil-dripping technologies and futuristic images. The vast spaces are filled with equally huge textile sculptures (Tau Lewis’ animal heads), found-object pieces recalling weaving techniques (Bronwyn Katz’s salvaged bed springs and pot-scourers), alongside ceramic herds of animals (Raphaela Vogel’s giraffes), over-sized fluorescent flowers (Tetsumi Kudo’s forms), and deconstructed robotic figures (Geumhyung Jeong’s assemblage).

Alemani has said that following the covid-induced zoom calls and online existence of the exhibition’s planning phase, she instinctively moved towards more tactile and three-dimensional pieces. This she certainly did, presenting us with a vast array of materials from stoneware, ceramics, collage, and textile, as well as aluminium, iron, and synthetic materials and liquids.

The human figure – in infinite variations – is ever-present too. Later in the Giardini, we come across Mrinalini Mukherjee’s ambiguous upright forms. Made using the ancient Arab hand-knotting and weaving technique of macramé, the figures contemplate us as earnestly as we contemplate them. Their ambiguity endows them with strength, and almost gives them a menacing air; are they alien figures? Do they represent mythical sexual organs? Or are our minds playing tricks, and seeing forms where none exist? Zigzagging through the exhibition in both venues are themes of mythology, speculative ideas, a strong female presence, and a strong thread of continuity from ancient times to the future that we have created for ourselves. The hybridism and anthropomorphism that speaks to us from the past relates to how lives have changed in the 21st century, how we endeavour to have control over our bodies and our destinies, while faced with environmental and territorial challenges that we have ourselves caused.

The crafts that are present in the exhibition are not limited to ancient or hand-made skills. Also very much visible is a more contemporary craft, if one defines it as such; that of computer programming, working with modern technologies, to build (or craft) an action, algorithm or even an intelligence. Geumhyung Jeong’s DIY robots are created by the artist herself, ‘crafted’ together from DIY parts. Tishan Hsu’s work pushes this definition even further – does using innovative fabrication techniques and materials place him outside the boundary of a ‘maker’ in the craft tradition? Is the presence of the hand-made in literal terms a prerequisite for the definition of craft? Or is his work moving towards a new kind of craft, where artist and digital technology work alongside each other?

CRAFTING Fantasy

MARGERITA PULÈ is an artist, writer and curator, with a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts, and founder of Unfinished Art Space. Her practice and research are concerned with the contradictions of politics and social realities.

Back to the more familiar material of cast bronze; in the Arsenale we are confronted with Simone Lee’s towering and beautiful Brick House, majestic in its monumentality. The piece holds obvious references in its form to domed earthen homes, as well as to African American crafts, but its unseeing face and dome-like body endow it with multiple meanings; is it trying not to see, or is it seeing something not on this earth? Is it protecting us, or warning us from something that has yet to come?

Elsewhere, Myrlande Constant’s large-scale flags, are packed tight with brightly coloured glass beads, each one sewn on by hand, depicting images packed with Haitian history, vodou symbols and contemporary culture. The surfaces are lush and dense with colour and symbolism.

Many of the exhibition’s films also refer to the hand-made. The work of Thao Nguyen Phan also holds a river at its source; and the making of brise-soleil; a combination of traditional Vietnamese building technique with the modern material of concrete. Ali Cherri’s multi-channel installation brings together ancient brick-making techniques and the contemporary building of a huge hydroelectric damn to engage in a new mythology, imagining the construction of the dam as a portal to a fantastical world.

And it is impossible here to mention each work in detail, from Gabriel Chaile ‘s five adobe ‘sculpture-ovens’, to Müge Yilmaz’ installations, from Virginia Overton’s huge cement shapes, to Sandra Vásquez de la Hora’s beeswax-sealed drawings.

So much is the hand-made present in this exhibition – whether in Precious Okoyomon’s site-specific garden-like installation, or Mire Lee’s kinetic sculptures - that the whole exhibition can be seen as quietly acknowledging the symbiotic roles of the artist and the craftsperson (with a broad a definition of each as possible) each one contributing skill, knowledge, and new ideas upon which to build.

Review /Italy / Venice Biennale

June - August 2022

ITALY

CHRISTINE XUEREB SEIDU

BLACK FEMINISM AND A RISE OF AFRICAN REPRESENTATION AT THE VENICE BIENNALE

The 59th edition of the Venice Biennale comes with the main exhibition ‘The Milk of Dreams’, curated by the Italian Cecilia Alemani, which she specifies is a ‘reaction and an allegory’ against the 20th Century where pressure was imposed on the definition of identity. The change sees a feminist and anti-colonial Venice Biennale following decades of gradual development in African representation which we also notice through USA’s pavilion sculptor Simone Leigh who explores the burden of colonial histories and the promise of Black feminism. Together with Britain’s Boyce, who won a Golden Lion for best national pavilion, she really did prove her point.

Installation view of different works by Kudzanai-Violet Hwami. Image: Courtesy of Adéolá Olágúnjú for TSA Art Magazine I n this exhibition we see Alemani’s selection of 16 African artists out of the 213 artists in total, 13 of which are living and with the majority being female artists. Participating artists include Igshaan Adams, Bronwyn Katz and Simnikiwe Buhlungu from South Africa; Monira Al Qadira and Ibrahim El-Salahi from Sudan; Elias Sime and Merikokeb Berhanu from Ethiopia; Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Portia Zvavahera from Zimbabwe; Magdalene Odundo and Cosima von Bonin from Kenya; Safia Farhat from Tunisia and Sandra Mujinga from the DRC.

African representation at the Biennale’s main show was probably only larger in number under the late Nigerian Okwui Enwezor’s curatorship in 2015 and larger in percentage in 2019 when Ralph Rugoff selected 10 African artists out of the total 79 artists for ‘May We Live in Interesting Times’.

When we take a look through the history of African representation at the Venice Biennale we notice that although the fair gained international popularity in the early 20th Century, African artists only started participating in the 1920s and while the first country pavilion started with Belgium in 1907, the first African country pavilions only started appearing in 1993. The 1922 Biennale with the retrospective of Modigliani received a lot of criticism

CHRISTINE XUEREB SEIDU founded Christine X Art Gallery in 2004 after a university degree in Art History and Anthropology. She has returned to Malta after a year in Ghana where she explored African art and culture.

Process behind creating Acaye Kerunen’s work for the Ugandan National Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. Kampala, Uganda, March 2022. Courtesy of Acaye Kerunen Studio.

especially when the African sculpture exhibition was promoted by the organisers in a derogatory sense of being ‘primitive’. Things took off quicker within the last decade, first with Angola winning the Golden Lion award for national participation in 2013 and then when the late Nigerian Okwui Enwezor curated the 2015 edition by introducing 21 African artists. The last three editions also saw a rise in African pavilions with 10 countries participating in 2017, 8 in 2019 and 9 this year. Out of the 9 participating African country pavilions, only South Africa and Egypt maintain their permanent spaces at Giardini whilst Zimbabwe is now appearing for its sixth time. Others are Kenya, Ivory Coast, Ghana and for the first time, we are seeing the participation of Cameroon, Namibia, and Uganda.

It hasn’t been easy for African artists who struggle to get their governments to fund or show interest towards art and culture so it’s of no surprise that African representation is generally not very prominent and the fact that national pavilion newcomers are forced to look for locations away from the central exhibition in Gardini which itself centralised on anti-colonialism, they need to settle for this colonial arrangement. In the 2017 edition of the Venice Biennale, Kenya participated with a national pavilion despite receiving none of the funds promised by its government and in the previous editions, its pavilion stirred up controversy over its lack of Kenyan representation leaning more towards Chinese and Italian artists and curators.

This year, except for Namibia, who had to pull out at the last minute due to controversy, African pavilions were mainly represented by African artists. Ivory Coast is represented by six artists who look to stories to interpret and represent the socio-economic realities of the subject and of the collective. The feminist artist Laetitia Ky uses her body and hairstyling to vilify the modern definitions of the contemporary human condition. Kenya’s ‘Exercises in Conversation’ includes the work of 4 Kenyan artists who explore the relationships and dynamics between participants in conversation and how this relationship affects, influences and occupies the space of a story. Acaye Kerunen and Collin Sekajugo represent Uganda in its pavilion, which received a special mention at the Golden Lion awards, showing the different territories and trade and living conditions in its urban centres. Acaye Kerunen also used sustainability as a practice whilst collaborating with craftswomen from around the country.

Cameroon’s pavilion set a dialogue between 4 Cameroonian artists and 4 foreign artists on the theme of chimeras and possible utopias. In a similar way, the artists of the Ghana pavilion use the black star, the Lodestar of African freedom, whilst examining new constellations of this freedom across time, technology, and borders. Egypt’s exhibition is divided into two main complementary zones and reveals the reality of common people, unity, the power of integration, and the ensuing balance. In ‘I Did Not Leave A sign’, the 4 artists in the Zimbabwean Pavilion show the beauty of the unexpected, exploring livelihoods of being Zimbabwean while being governed by unseen threats.

South Africa was the only Pavilion to look at negative and positive impacts of the enforced covid lockdowns.

Should you like to take a glimpse of the evolving black feminism taking place at the Venice Biennale, you have until the 11th November 2022 to head over to Venice. Without a doubt, we continue to see a rise in the future of African representation at the Venice Biennale. The African Art in Venice Forum (AAVF), only set up in recent years following the necessity to compensate for the lack of African representation, seems to have made an impact.

Spotlight /Arts Council Malta

June - August 2022

ITALY

Establishing Malta’s Presence at La Biennale di Venezia

Arts Council Malta (ACM) is the commissioning body responsible for Malta’s Pavilion. Artpaper talks to Dr Romina Delia, Internationalisation Executive at ACM, about the Council’s commitment to establishing Malta’s presence at this prestigious event and her role as Project Leader of the Malta Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia.

La Biennale di Venezia was founded in 1895 by the city of Venice. It was conceived during the height of the Great Universal Exhibition, a cultural phenomenon that took continental Europe by storm after England’s Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851. Yet, despite its longevity,

Malta features very sparingly within the landscape of the Biennale’s history.

In 1958, seven Maltese artists - Antoine Camilleri, Carmenu Mangion, Frank Portelli, Emvin Cremona, Hugo Carbonaro, Josef Kalleya and Oliver Agius – featured in a special exhibition at the 29th edition of the Biennale. Malta reemerged 41-years later with a commissioned show curated by the late Adrian Bartolo. A curator at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Bartolo selected artists Vince Briffa, Norbert Attard and Ray Pitrè to showcase work reflecting the philosophical concept of time.

Dr Delia explains that in 2015, plans were set for Malta to have a more permanent presence at the Biennale. “I was asked to commission and project lead on behalf of ACM, the return of the Malta Pavilion. For the past seven years, this has formed part of my portfolio as the Internationalisation Executive at Arts Council Malta, falling within the strategy department of the Council.”

In 2015, Dr Delia set up initial meetings with the Biennale organisers to re-introduce Malta’s participation in the 57th edition in 2017. “After viewing several sites, we decided to choose the space that hosted the Tuvalu National Pavilion in 2015. After an absence of 17 years, Malta was about to proudly return to the Biennale with its National Pavilion located in a central location in the Ar-

“Without whose constant support and advice I would have never managed to get through each Biennale.”

senale.” “We had made sure the location was central as we wanted all the visitors of the Biennale to literally pass through our pavilion. Over 600,000 visitors at every edition and over 6000 international press.”

A few months later, Dr Delia coordinated an international open call for curatorial proposals, presided over by a jury composed of local and international curators. Artist-curators Bettina Hutschek (Germany) and Raphael Vella (Malta) represented Malta in 2017 with their playfully poetic Homo Melitensis: An Incomplete Inventory in 19 Chapters. The pavilion interpreted and defined the notion of “Malteseness”, cleverly weaving together an eclectic mix of Maltese artists and an array of local artefacts.

As its first foray into the Biennale in many years, Dr Delia recalls having to start from scratch: “I had no one in Malta to guide me, as the curator Adrian Bartolo and project manager Dennis Vella, who formed the team in 1999, had both passed away. So, I reached out to any entity I thought could assist.” She approached a mixture of public and private entities such as Malta Enterprise, Malta Tourism Authority, Heritage Malta, BOV, the Valletta Cultural Agency, and the Malta Presidency of the Council of the EU in 2017. Dr Delia maintains that the success of delivering such a project is thanks to the constant support of its collaborators.

The 2017 edition holds a special place in Dr Delia’s heart. As she explains: “most artists participating were relatively young to be participating at the Biennale, and having them, there was amazing. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. I was like, ‘wow- these are Malta’s future, and they are here at this international art event absorbing all!’. I had tears in my eyes.”

Yet another ambitious collaboration followed Malta’s 2017 offering. The 58th Biennale in 2019 featured Malta’s entry, Maleth / Haven / Port - Heterotopias of Evocation, a pavilion curated by historian Hesperia Iliadou (Cyprus), whose curatorial inspiration was Homer’s Odyssey. It included newly commissioned work by artists Vince Briffa (Malta), Trevor Borg (Malta) and Klitsa Antoniou (Cyprus). Their work examined Malta’s unique position in the central Mediterranean, providing a contemporary reinterpretation of our timeless need of seeking Haven, most strongly experienced in times of crisis. Like vessels within a sea, the artworks come together, inviting the audience to participate in an intuitively playful dialogue, traversing the exhibition in a curiosity-driven voyage of self-reflection

This year, Dr Delia informs us that the 2022 Malta Pavilion, Diplomazjia astuta brings several individuals together: “Each curatorial team member has a solid track record. Even though the project might have seemed like a highly ambitious one on paper, the whole team has now proven that sometimes even what appears to be an impossible project can become a reality if people put faith and trust in each other. When people do their utmost to understand each other and put all their resources together- magic happens!”

Over the years, Dr Delia has worked tirelessly to bring each pavilion to fruition: “I am with the curatorial team every step of their journey, which is quite a roller-coaster ride, I must say, especially when dealing with curators, artists and other principal actors based in different parts of the world. I feel my role is to pull all the strings together, ensuring that the project is delivered successfully.” In addition, she works hand in hand with the directors, administrators and communications team at ACM and at La Biennale di Venezia headquarters, “without whose constant support and advice I would have never managed to get through each Biennale.”

Even though the work is challenging, Dr Delia maintains it is still a process she finds fascinating and rewarding. “Exploring each other’s cultures, attitudes, traditions, politics, histories, contacts, whilst learning to trust and understand each other and building something together” is part of this exciting journey.

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Review /Italy / Venice Biennale

June - August 2022

ITALY

ERICA GIUSTA

“THE MILK OF DREAMS”, A PARADIGM SHIFT AND A WITCH’S DREAM

Review of the 59th Venice Art Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemanni

View of Simone Leigh and Belkis Ayón’s work in “The Milk of Dreams” at the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022. Image courtesy of the Venice Biennale. Photo by Roberto Marossi.

Like the centenarian prestigious organisation that it is, the Biennale sometimes struggles to be faithful to its mission of being at the forefront of research and investigation of contemporary trends. Both the art and the much younger architecture Biennale have had a couple of innocuous editions in recent years, in which relevant questions were asked but no meaningful responses were produced. The cycle has been broken by Cecilia Alemanni, wonder-woman curator of “The Milk of

Dreams”, and by the radical change in perspective that she brought about.

After years of the equivalent of a bunch of privileged middle-aged white men discussing inequalities on a tedious talk show, proved by the gender imbalance of exhibited artists in the last 100 years (between 10 - 30% women vs. 90 – 70% men), Alemanni presented a titanic effort in reversing the trend and offsetting it. She gathered a genuinely innovative collection of works, of which 90% are by women and gender non-conforming artists, in many cases unknown to the public because overlooked for decades.

Through a sequence of ‘historical capsules’, as she defines them, she created a fluid, oneiric promenade across the Arsenale, questioning how the definition of human is changing and envisioning a new ‘post-human’ condition under economic, environmental, social and technological pressures. The exhibition draws its main inspiration from Leonora Carrington’s otherworldly creatures, elected ‘companions on an imaginary journey through the metamorphosis of bodies and the definition of human’, as Alemanni wrote. This journey culminates in the Padiglione Centrale at the Giardini, where the density as well as the complexity of the relationships

ERICA GIUSTA is Director of Innovation at architecture firm AP Valletta. She read for an MA in Architecture, and has a Post-Graduate Master from the Sole24Ore Business School in Milan. She contributes regularly to academic journals and international architecture magazines such as A10 New European Architecture and Il Giornale dell’Architettura.

between works intensify, leading to a magical section titled “The Witch’s Cradle”, nestled at the core of the show - both physically, at the centre of the labyrinthic pavilion, and symbolically, as enlightening exploration of the main theme. In a pleasantly carpeted and intimate atmosphere, in fact, the works of surrealist giants like Carol Rama, Leonor Fini, Remedios Varo, Eileen Agar, Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington reveal a different side to the history of art as we know it, and enchant the visitors of this astonishingly engaging Biennale.

The main exhibition, and a few national participations too, read like an archival research re-tracing connections and re-organizing our knowledge of contemporary art, succeeding in being pioneering, poetic and ultimately relevant.

The great absence of a thorough environmentally conscious approach to the installations weakens the otherwise flawless consistency between concept and execution. For instance, Brick House, Simone Leigh’s sculpture at the entrance, works brilliantly as a powerful and evocative introduction to the show but the uprooting and transportation of its 2,700 kgs of bronze from the Highline in New York to the Venice Arsenale raise criticism. Similarly, the large amount of steel continuously melted at high-temperature as part of Diplomazja Astuta, the spectacular kinetic installation of the Malta pavilion, raised some concerns while succeeding in lyrically re-articulating Caravaggio’s seminal altarpiece The Beheading of St John the Baptist and giving great visibility to the country’s participation - one that sparked stimulating debates at both local and international level, and that will be remembered. At the next Biennale, people will certainly look out for Malta. It is also true that, in this perspective, the very nature of the Biennale should be questioned as not environmentally conscious: tons of materials and thousands of people converging to fragile Venice from all over the world represent the past and its pre-climate change and pre-pandemic structures, of which we all feel so nostalgic about. Hopefully The Milk of Dreams will contribute as a step towards the much-needed radical re-imagination of these structures too.

Overview, Arsenale, CAPSULA 5, Cyborg perspective. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.

The Witch’s Cradle, Overview. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.

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