Biennale Arte 2022 - The Milk of Dreams - Short Guide by La Biennale di Venezia

SHORT GUIDE

GIARDINI C E N T R A L PAV I L I O N

17 13

15 11

22, 23, 24

43 5

41 19

39 4

III

25 34

48 33

35 30

37 S

EDU

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Katharina Fritsch (p.55) Andra Ursuţa (p.56) Rosemarie Trockel (p.57) Cecilia Vicuña (p.94) Mrinalini Mukherjee (p.95) Merikokeb Berhanu (p.96) Akosua Adoma Owusu (p.97) Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (p.98) Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (p.99) Simone Fattal (p.100) Chiara Enzo (p.123) Ovartaci (p.124) Nan Goldin (p.125) Sheree Hovsepian (p.126) Amy Sillman (p.127) Bronwyn Katz (p.128) Alexandra Pirici (p.129) Louise Lawler (p.130) Jadé Fadojutimi (p.131) Shuvinai Ashoona (p.132) Jana Euler (p.133) Paula Rego (p.134, 135) Claude Cahun and Lise Deharme (p.136) Leonora Carrington (p.137) Christina Quarles (p.138) Hannah Levy (p.139) Kaari Upson (p.140) Miriam Cahn (p.141) Julia Phillips (p.142) Charline von Heyl (p.143) Jacqueline Humphries (p.144) Carla Accardi (p.145) Sonia Delaunay (p.146) Vera Molnár (p.147) Sara Enrico (p.148) Sable Elyse Smith (p.149) Ambra Castagnetti (p.150) P. Staff (p.151) Lillian Schwartz (p.160) Agnes Denes (p.161) Ulla Wiggen (p.162) Charlotte Johannesson (p.163) Lenora de Barros (p.164) Sidsel Meineche Hansen (p.165)

48 49 50 51 52

Elle Pérez (p.166) Shuang Li (p.167) Aneta Grzeszykowska (p.168) June Crespo (p.169) Elaine Cameron-Weir (p.170) Birgit Jürgenssen (p.171) Cosima von Bonin (p.172) Müge Yilmaz (p.173)

The Witch’s Cradle (p.58)

45 46 47

Eileen Agar (p.60) Gertrud Arndt (p.61) Josephine Baker (p.62) Benedetta (p.63) Claude Cahun (p.64) Leonora Carrington (p.65) Ithell Colquhoun (p.66) Valentine de Saint-Point (p.67) Lise Deharme (p.68) Maya Deren (p.69) Leonor Fini (p.70) Jane Graverol (p.71) Florence Henri (p.72) Loïs Mailou Jones (p.73) Ida Kar (p.74) Antoinette Lubaki (p.75) Baya Mahieddine (p.76) Nadja (p.77) Amy Nimr (p.78) Meret Oppenheim (p.79) Valentine Penrose (p.80) Rachilde (p.68) Alice Rahon (p.81) Carol Rama (p.82) Edith Rimmington (p.83) Enif Robert (p.84) Rosa Rosà (p.85) Augusta Savage (p.86) Dorothea Tanning (p.87) Toyen (p.88) Remedios Varo (p.90) Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (p.91) Laura Wheeler Waring (p.92) Mary Wigman (p.93)

Corps Orbite (p.102) Djuna Barnes (p.104) Mirella Bentivoglio in collaboration with Annalisa Alloatti (p.105) Tomaso Binga (p.106) Milly Canavero (p.107) Minnie Evans (p.108) Ilse Garnier (p.109) Linda Gazzera (p.110) Georgiana Houghton (p.111) Mina Loy (p.112) Joyce Mansour (p.113) Sister Gertrude Morgan (p.114) Eusapia Palladino (p.115) Gisèle Prassinos (p.116) Alice Rahon (p.117) Giovanna Sandri (p.118) Hélène Smith (p.119) Mary Ellen Solt (p.120) Josefa Tolrà (p.121) Unica Zürn (p.122)

III

Technologies of Enchantment (p.152) Marina Apollonio (p.154) Dadamaino (p.155) Lucia Di Luciano (p.156) Laura Grisi (p.157) Grazia Varisco (p.158) Nanda Vigo (p.159)

Biennale Library–ASAC Biennale Educational Biennale Sessions Bookshop First Aid AED

GIARDINI

B EG P.VE

BR S

EDU

RO HU

UY BE

P.N. DK

GB CH VE

Playground

ACTV Stop Giardini

ACTV Stop Giardini Biennale

JP CA KR

PA R T I C I PAT I N G COUNTRIES AU Australia AT Austria BE Belgium BR Brazil CA Canada DK Denmark EG Egypt EE Estonia FI Finland FR France DE Germany GB Great Britain GR Greece HU Hungary IL Israel JP Japan KR Republic of Korea P.N. Nordic Countries

(Norway, Finland, Sweden) PL Poland RO Romania RU Russia RS Serbia ES Spain CH Switzerland US United States of America UY Uruguay VE Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela P.VE Venice Pavillion

Biennale Library – ASAC Stirling Pavilion – Book Pavilion Biennale Educational Biennale Sessions Swatch Faces 2022 Navin Rawanchaikul The Description of the World Access Courtesy stroller Courtesy wheelchair Infopoint / Ticket Office Bookshop First Aid AED

THE MILK OF DREAMS 51 52

Cosima von Bonin (p.172) Müge Yilmaz (p.173)

ARSENALE CORDERIE, ARTIGLIERIE Simone Leigh (p.192) Belkis Ayón (p.193) Portia Zvavahera (p.194) Gabriel Chaile (p.195) Ficre Ghebreyesus (p.196) Rosana Paulino (p.197) Britta Marakatt-Labba (p.198) Thao Nguyen Phan (p.199) Eglė Budvytytė in collaboration with Marija Olšauskaitė and Julija Steponaitytė (p.200) 10 Niki de Saint Phalle (p.201) 11 Célestin Faustin (p.213) 12 Frantz Zéphirin (p.214) 13 Myrlande Constant (p.215) 14 Felipe Baeza (p.216) 15 Pinaree Sanpitak (p.217) 16 Luiz Roque (p.218) 17 Magdalene Odundo (p.219) 18 Safia Farhat (p.220) 19 Roberto Gil de Montes (p.221) 20 Saodat Ismailova (p.222) 21 Violeta Parra (p.223) 22 Delcy Morelos (p.224) 23 Jaider Esbell (p.225) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Emma Talbot (p.226) Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (p.227) Firelei Báez (p.228) Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (p.229) Noah Davis (p.230) Candice Lin (p.231) Aage Gaup (p.232) Zheng Bo (p.233) Solange Pessoa (p.234) Prabhakar Pachpute (p.235) Igshaan Adams (p.236) Tau Lewis (p.237) Ibrahim El-Salahi (p.238) Jessie Homer French (p.239) Ali Cherri (p.240) Kapwani Kiwanga (p.262) Noor Abuarafeh (p.263) Elias Sime (p.264) Liv Bugge (p.265) Tatsuo Ikeda (p.266) Dora Budor (p.267) Teresa Solar (p.268) Allison Katz (p.269) Özlem Altın (p.270)

Jamian Juliano-Villani (p.271) Tetsumi Kudo (p.272) Joanna Piotrowska (p.273) Louise Bonnet (p.274) Marianna Simnett (p.275) Carolyn Lazard (p.276) Raphaela Vogel (p.277) Jes Fan (p.278) Mire Lee (p.279) Kerstin Brätsch (p.280) Sandra Mujinga (p.281) Marguerite Humeau (p.282) LuYang (p.283) Zhenya Machneva (p.284) Sondra Perry (p.285) Monira Al Qadiri (p.286) Elisa Giardina Papa (p.287) Geumhyung Jeong (p.288) Tishan Hsu (p.289) Janis Rafa (p.290) Lynn Hershman Leeson (p.291) 69 Barbara Kruger (p.292) 70 Diego Marcon (p.293) 71 Robert Grosvenor (p.294) 72 Precious Okoyomon (p.295) 73 Giulia Cenci (p.296) 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

73 2 3 1

8 6

15 10

21 20

EDU

12 13 11 IV

17 16 19

18 22

24 29

30 33 38 32

A Leaf a Gourd a Shell a Net a Bag a Sling a Sack a Bottle a Pot a Box a Container (p.202)

Access Biennale Educational Family Area Courtesy stroller Courtesy wheelchair Infopoint / Ticket Office Bookshop First Aid AED

Seduction of the Cyborg (p.242)

Marianne Brandt (p.244) Regina Cassolo Bracchi

Ruth Asawa (p.204) Maria Bartuszová (p.205) Aletta Jacobs (p.206) Maruja Mallo (p.207) Maria Sibylla Merian (p.208) Sophie Taeuber-Arp (p.209) Toshiko Takaezu (p.210) Bridget Tichenor (p.211) Tecla Tofano (p.212)

(p.245)

Giannina Censi (p.246) Anna Coleman Ladd (p.247) Alexandra Exter (p.249) Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (p.250) Karla Grosch (p.251) Florence Henri (p.252) Hannah Höch (p.253) Rebecca Horn (p.254) Kiki Kogelnik (p.255) Liliane Lijn (p.256) Louise Nevelson (p.257) Anu Põder (p.258) Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt (p.259) Sophie Taeuber-Arp (p.260) Marie Vassilieff (p.261)

L’ESPOSIZIONE CONTINUA / EXHIBITION CONTINUES

39 42

50 45

52 53

58 54

55 57

61 62

ARSENALE GAG G I A N D R E , G I A R D I N O D E L L E V E RG I N I PA R T I C I PAT I N G COUNTRIES

OM PE PH SA SG SI ZA TR UA AE UZ

AL Albania AR Argentina CL Chile CN People’s Republic

of China GH Ghana IS Iceland IE Ireland ITALIA Italy KS Republic of Kosovo LV Latvia LB Lebanon LU Grand Duchy MT MX NZ

Sultanate of Oman Peru Philippines Saudi Arabia Singapore Republic of Slovenia Republic of South Africa Turkey Ukraine United Arab Emirates Republic of Uzbekistan

S P E C I A L P RO J E C T

Biennale Educational Biennale Sessions Biennale College Swatch Faces 2022 The Swatch Art Peace Hotel Access Info Point / Ticket Office Family Area Courtesy stroller Courtesy wheelchair Bookshop First Aid AED

Pavilion of Applied Arts La Biennale di Venezia with Victoria and Albert Museum (p.304)

of Luxembourg Malta Mexico New Zealand

EDU

ACTVStop Boat Stop Giardini Arsenale

Via Garibaldi

THE MILK OF DREAMS 73 74 75 76 32 16 77 78 79 80

Giulia Cenci (p.296) Virginia Overton (p.297) Wu Tsang (p.298) Tourmaline (p.299) Solange Pessoa (p.234) Luiz Roque (p.218) Andro Eradze (p.300) Simnikiwe Buhlungu (p.301) Aki Sasamoto (p.302) Marianne Vitale (p.303)

Arsenale Nord

75 74

Giardino delle Vergini

EDU

CN 32

CN UZ

ITALIA 78

S C

SG TR

UA KS

CL IE

OM LB MT IS MX

LV SA AR

PAA

EDU

GIARDINI

NZ AL PH

79 80

ACTV Stop Forte Marghera

FORT E MA RG H ERA

PROGETTO SPECIALE / SPECIAL PROJECT Elisa Giardina Papa (p.341)

FERROVIA / TRAIN STATION

V E N EZ I A

P.LE ROMA CM b

28 BG MK

5 22 BD

CM a 3

UG 8

GE GT

G IUDECCA

VENICE

19 NL 11 20 BO

Murano

Isola della Certosa

SM KE

ACTV Stop Bacini R I A LTO

ARSENALE

17 29

13 4

SA N M ARCO Ca’ Giustinian

ACTV Stop Arsenale

1 GD

HR 25

ACTV Stop Giardini

GIARDINI

ACTV Stop Giardini Biennale

Isola di San Servolo SY CU

PA R T I C I PAT I N G C O U N T R I E S I N T H E C I T Y

AM Armenia

Castello 2125 Campo Della Tana

CU Cuba

Isola di San Servolo

LT Lithuania

Castello 3200 and 3206 Campo de le Gate

GE Georgia AZ Republic of Azerbaijan

Procuratie Vecchie San Marco 139 and 153/A

Spazio Punch Giudecca 800/O Fondamenta San Biagio

MK Republic of North

Macedonia Scuola Dei Laneri Santa Croce 113/A

BD People’s Republic

of Bangladesh Palazzo Pisani-Revedin San Marco 4013 BO Bolivia

Artspace4rent Cannaregio 4120 BG Bulgaria

Spazio Ravà San Polo 1100 CM Republic of Cameroon a Liceo Artistico

Guggenheim Dorsoduro 2613 Palazzo Ca’ Bernardo San Polo 2186

CA Canada

Magazzino del Sale n. 5 Dorsoduro 262 HR Croatia

Castello 1513 Via Garibaldi

GD Grenada

Il Giardino Bianco Art Space Castello 1814 Via Garibaldi GT Guatemala

SPUMA Space For The Arts Giudecca 800/R Fondamenta San Biagio

MN Mongolia

Castello 2131 ME Montenegro

Palazzo Malipiero San Marco 3078-3079/A Ramo Malipiero NA Namibia

Isola Della Certosa NP Nepal

Castello 994 KZ Republic of Kazakhstan

Spazio Arco Dorsoduro 1485 KE Kenya

Fabrica 33 Cannaregio 5063

NL The Netherlands

Chiesetta della Misericordia of Art Events Cannaregio PT Portugal

KG Kyrgyz Republic

Hydro Space Giudecca Art Center Giudecca 211/C CI Ivory Coast

Magazzino del Sale n. 3 Dorsoduro 264

Palazzo Franchetti San Marco 2847 RO Romania

Istituto Romeno di Cultura e Ricerca Umanistica Palazzo Correr Cannaregio 2214 Campo Santa Fosca

SM Republic of San Marino

Palazzo Donà dalle Rose Cannaregio 5038 Fondamenta Nove SY Syrian Arab Republic

Isola di San Servolo UG Uganda

Palazzo Palumbo Fossati San Marco 2597 ZW Republic of Zimbabwe

Santa Maria della Pietà Calle della Pietà

Ca’ Giustinian La Biennale di Venezia Headquarter San Marco 1364/A Offices Bookshop Caffetteria Exhibitions

C O L L AT E R A L E V E N T S

1 Alberta Whittle:

Deep Dive (pause) Uncoiling Memory Docks Cantieri Cucchini San Pietro di Castello 40 2 Angela Su: Arise, Hong

Kong in Venice Arsenale Castello 2126 Campo della Tana 3

ngels Listening A Centro Studi e Documentazione della Cultura Armena Loggia del Temanza Dorsoduro 1602

ugen Raportoru: E The Abduction from the Seraglio Roma Women: Performative Strategies of Resistance Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti San Marco 2945 Campo Santo Stefano 8

ita Albuquerque: L Liquid Light Olivolo San Pietro di Castello 65/A

ouise Nevelson. L Persistence Procuratie Vecchie Piazza San Marco 1218/B ucio Fontana L / Antony Gormley Negozio Olivetti Piazza San Marco 101

wa Kuryluk E I, White Kangaroo Palazzo Querini Dorsoduro 2691

rom Palestine With Art F Palazzo Mora, Room 8 Cannaregio 3659

19 Pera + Flora + Fauna

The Story of Indigenousness and the Ownership of History Archivi della Misericordia Cannaregio 3548-3549

4 Apollo, Apollo

Katharina Grosse Spazio Louis Vuitton San Marco 1353 Calle del Ridotto

uture Generation Art F Prize @ Venice 2022 Scuola Grande della Misericordia Cannaregio 3599/A

a Chong-Hyun H Palazzetto Tito Dorsoduro 2826

oad of Faith R Palazzo Zen Cannaregio 4924

ony Plesl: Trees Grow R from the Sky Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione Fondamenta Zattere ai Gesuati

tanley Whitney: S the Italian Paintings Palazzo Tiepolo Passi San Polo 2774

ake Your Time T Salone Verde Santa Croce 2258 Calle della Regina

5 Bosco Sodi at Palazzo

Vendramin Grimani. What Goes Around Comes Around Palazzo Vendramin Grimani San Polo 2033 6

13 Heinz Mack –

Vibration of Light Sale Monumentali della Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Piazza San Marco 7

atalonia in Venice_Llim C Docks Cantieri Cucchini Castello 40 Ramo del Zoccolo 14

I mpossible Dreams Palazzo delle Prigioni Castello 4209

ehinde Wiley: K An Archaeology of Silence Fondazione Giorgio Cini Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore

7 Claire Tabouret: I am

spacious, singing flesh Palazzo Cavanis Dorsoduro 920

imes Reimagined: T Chun Kwang Young Palazzo Contarini Polignac Dorsoduro 874

ue Greenfort: T Medusa Alga Laguna Castello 1228 Ca’ Sarasina

26 Uncombed, Unforeseen,

Unconstrained Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello San Marco 2810 27

era Molnár: Icône 2020 V Atelier Muranese New Murano Gallery Calle Alvise Vivarini 6 Murano

ith Hands Signs Grow W Palazzo Donà Brusa San Polo 2177

ithout Women W Spiazzi Castello 3856

YiiMa” Art Group: “ Allegory of Dreams Arsenale Castello 2126/A Campo della Tana

LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA President

Roberto Cicutto Board

Luigi Brugnaro Vice President Claudia Ferrazzi Luca Zaia Auditors’ Committee

Jair Lorenco President Stefania Bortoletti Anna Maria Como Director General

Andrea Del Mercato Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Department

Cecilia Alemani

O R G A N I S AT I O N A L S T RU C T U R E

C E N T RA L S E RV I C E S

Director General

LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL A F FA I R S , H U M A N R E S O U RC E S AND DEPUTY

Andrea Del Mercato Curator of the 59th International Art Exhibition

Cecilia Alemani Artistic Organiser

Marta Papini Assistant to the Curator and Managing Editor

Manuela Hansen Assistant to the Curator and Artistic Research

Ian Wallace Research and Texts

Stefano Mudu Staff of the Curator

Liv Cuniberti Exhibition Design

Formafantasma Graphic Identity

A Practice for Everyday Life, London Artistic Advisors

Ellen Greig Ranjit Hoskote Venus Lau Alvin Jianhuan Li Júlia Maia Rebouças Guslagie Malanda Camila Marambio Nontobeko Ntombela Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh Marie Hélène Pereira Nora Razian Marina Reyes Franco María Isabel Rueda Joanna Warsza María Wills

Director

Debora Rossi Legal and Institutional Affairs

Martina Ballarin Francesca Oddi Lucrezia Stocco Human Resources

Graziano Carrer Luca Carta Giovanni Drudi Antonella Sfriso Alessia Viviani Rossella Zulian A D M I N I S T R AT I O N , FINANCE, M A NAG E M E N T S U P E RV I S I O N A N D S P O N S O R S H I P, P RO M O T I O N Director

Valentina Borsato Administration, Finance, Management Supervision

Bruna Gabbiato Elia Canal Marco Caruso Martina Fiori Gregorio Granati Elisa Meggiato Manuela Pellicciolli Cristina Sartorel Sara Vianello Sponsorship

Paola Pavan Promotion

Caterina Castellani Lucia De Manincor Elisabetta Fiorese Stefania Guglielmo Emanuela Padoan Marta Plevani

Secretariats General Secretariat

Caterina Boniollo Maria Cristina Cinti Elisabetta Mistri Chiara Rossi Protocol Office

Francesca Boglietti Lara De Bellis Biennale College Secretariat

Claudia Capodiferro Giacinta Maria Dalla Pietà P U RC H A S I N G, P RO C U R E M E N T AND ASSETS Director

Fabio Pacifico Purchasing and Procurement

Silvia Gatto Silvia Bruni Annamaria Colonna Cristiana Scavone Hospitality

Linda Baldan Jasna Zoranovic Donato Zotta Assets

Maurizio Celoni Antonio Fantinelli INSTITUTIONAL AND CINEMA PRESS OFFICE Head

Paolo Lughi Francesca Buccaro Michela Lazzarin Fiorella Tagliapietra

EDITORIAL AC T I V I T I E S A N D W E B Head

Flavia Fossa Margutti Giovanni Alberti Roberta Fontanin Giuliana Fusco Silvia Levorato Nicola Monaco Maddalena Pietragnoli T E C HN I C A L A N D L O GI S T I C A L S E RV I C E S Director

Cristiano Frizzele Exhibition Design, Events and Live Performance

Massimiliano Bigarello Cinzia Bernardi Alessandra Durand de la Penne Jessica Giassi Valentina Malossi Sandra Montagner Facility Management

Giulio Cantagalli Piero Novello Maurizio Urso Information Tecnology

Andrea Bonaldo Michele Schiavon Leonardo Viale Jacopo Zanchi S P E C I A L P RO J E C T S, P RO M O T I O N OF VENUES Director

Arianna Laurenzi Special Projects

Valentina Baldessari Davide Ferrante Elisabetta Parmesan Promotion of Venues

Nicola Bon Cristina Graziussi Alessia Rosada

VISUAL ARTS – A RC H I T E C T U R E D E PA R T M E N T

CINEMA D E PA R T M E N T

DA N C E , T H E AT R E , M U S I C D E PA R T M E N T

HISTORICAL A RC H I V E S O F CONTEMPORARY ARTS

Executive / Head of Organisation

Director General

Andrea Del Mercato

Executive / Head of Organisation

Secretariat

Francesca Benvenuti

Debora Rossi

Mariachiara Manci Alessandro Mezzalira

Secretariat

Historical Archives

Veronica Mozzetti Monterumici

Maria Elena Cazzaro Giovanna Bottaro Michela Campagnolo Marica Gallina Helga Greggio Michele Mangione Adriana Rosaria Scalise Alice Scandiuzzi

Joern Rudolf Brandmeyer Marina Bertaggia Emilia Bonomi Raffaele Cinotti Stefania Fabris Stefania Guerra Francesca Aloisia Montorio Luigi Ricciari Micol Saleri Ilaria Zanella VISUAL ARTS – A RC H I T E C T U R E PRESS OFFICE Head

Maria Cristiana Costanzo Claudia Gioia C O L L A B O R AT O R S FOR 59TH I N T E R N AT I O N A L ART EXHIBITION

Anna Albano Andrea Avezzù Valentina Campana Antonella Campisi Riccardo Cavallaro Gerardo Ernesto Cejas Marzia Cervellin Allison Grimaldi Donahue Francesco di Cesare Francesca Dolzani Lia Durante Andrea Ferialdi Fabrizia Ferragina Giulia Gasparato Nicola Giacobbo Matteo Giannasi Ornella Mogno Camilla Mozzato Daniele Paolo Mulas Luca Racchini Valeria Romagnini Elisa Santoro Marco Tosato Lucia Toso Francesco Zanon

Venice International Film Festival Programming

Office

Piera Benedetti Silvia Menegazzi Daniela Persi Industry/Cinema Accreditation

Flavia Lo Mastro Biennale College Cinema

Valentina Bellomo

Programming and Production

Michela Mason Federica Colella Maya Romanelli DA N C E , T H E AT R E , MUSIC PRESS OFFICE Head

Emanuela Caldirola Ilaria Grando

Library

Valentina Da Tos Erica De Luigi Valentina Greggio Manuela Momentè Elena Oselladore

Thanks to

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP

INSTITUT FRANÇAIS LOGO CARTOUCHE R1 25/07/16

RÉFÉRENCE COULEUR PANTONE PROCESS BLUE C

We would like to thank the following donors for their generosity in supporting our Exhibition

Main Donor Teiger Foundation

Christian Dior Couture Ford Foundation Ammodo LUMA Foundation Elisa Nuyten Sue & Beau Wrigley James Howell Foundation Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Emilie Pastor and Sibylle Rochat, Founders of Concrete Projects Antonella Rodriguez Boccanelli Charlotte Feng Ford Komal Shah & Gaurav Garg Beatrice Bulgari, Founder Fondazione In Between Art Film Phileas – A Fund for Contemporary Art VIVE Arts Carlo Bronzini Vender Michelangelo Foundation Margherita Stabiumi Nicoletta Fiorucci Russo, OSI Stavros Niarchos Foundation Luigi Maramotti Unfinished Rennie Collection, Vancouver Henry Moore Foundation Suzanne Syz

List updated to 16 March 2022

G O L D E N L I O N FO R L I F E T I M E AC H I E V E M E N T

K AT H A R I N A F R I T S C H

1956, Essen, Germany Lives in Wuppertal and Düsseldorf, Germany

The first time I saw one of Katharina Fritsch’s works in person was actually in Venice, at the first Biennale I ever attended, the 1999 edition curated by Harald Szeemann. The massive piece filling the main room at the Central Pavilion was titled Rattenkönig, the Rat King, a disquieting sculpture in which a group of giant rodents is crouched in a circle with their tails knotted together, like some strange magic ritual. Every time I’ve encountered one of Fritsch’s sculptures in the years since, I’ve felt the same sense of awe and dizzying attraction. Fritsch’s contribution to the field of contemporary art, especially sculpture, has been incomparable. She creates figurative works that are both hyperrealistic and fanciful: copies of objects, animals, and people, faithfully rendered in every detail, but transformed into uncanny apparitions. Fritsch often alters the scale of her subjects, shrinking them down or vastly enlarging them, and coating them in disorienting solid colours: it feels like one is looking at monuments from an alien civilisation, or artefacts on display in a strange posthuman museum. Fritsch has a long history at the Biennale: she represented Germany in 1995, showed Rattenkönig in 1999, and most recently presented a series of sculptures in the Giardino delle Vergini at the Biennale Arte 2011 curated by Bice Curiger. More than twenty-five years after her work was first exhibited in Venice, Fritsch is back with Elefant / Elephant, the sculpture that opens The Milk of Dreams in the Central Pavilion’s sumptuous Sala Chini, amid 19th-century frescos and mirrors. One of the artist’s first major hyper-realistic pieces, made in 1987, it is a replica – both meticulous and surreal – of a taxidermied elephant, its skin tinted a shade of dark green, as if to suggest bronze or some odd colour mutation. It is a vision both apocalyptic and dreamlike, evoking the disappearance of nature in an increasingly artificial and synthetic world, but also prompting reflection on the role of museums and exhibitions, and their capacity to preserve and tell the story of humanity. And how can one help but note that, among elephants, the leaders of the herd are always female?

Cecilia Alemani

CECILIA VICUÑA

1948, Santiago, Chile Lives in New York City, USA

One of the greatest privileges of being a curator is that you get to visit artists’ studios. I still have an extremely vivid memory of my first visit to Cecilia Vicuña’s Tribeca loft: as soon as she opened the door, I knew we would become good friends. Born in Chile, Vicuña left her country after the Pinochet coup and moved to New York, where she has lived since the 1970s. She became a poet, and devoted years of invaluable effort to preserving the work of many Latin American writers, translating and editing anthologies of poetry that might otherwise have been lost. Vicuña is also an activist who has long fought for the rights of Indigenous peoples in Chile and the rest of Latin America. In the visual arts, her work has ranged from painting, to performance, all the way to complex assemblages. Her artistic language is built around a deep fascination with Indigenous traditions and non-Western epistemologies. For decades, Vicuña has travelled her own path, doggedly, humbly, and meticulously, anticipating many recent ecological and feminist debates and envisioning new personal and collective mythologies. The Milk of Dreams includes a series of Vicuña’s paintings and a new site-specific work titled NAUfraga (2022): an assemblage of rope and found objects inspired by the precarious ecosystem of the Venetian lagoon, which the artist sees as a close-knit web of natural and artificial, human and non-human elements. Vicuña is a master at turning the most unassuming objects into hubs of tension and energy. Many of her installations are made with found objects or scrap materials, woven into delicate compositions where microscopic and monumental seem to find a fragile equilibrium: a precarious art that is both intimate and powerful.

Cecilia Alemani

AWA R D S

The International Jury awards the prizes: GOLDEN LION

for Best National Participation GOLDEN LION

for Best Participant in the International Exhibition The Milk of Dreams S I LV E R L I O N

for a Promising Young Participant in the International Exhibition The Milk of Dreams

T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L J U RY

A D R I E N N E E D WA R D S is Engell Speyer Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs

at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Co-Curator of the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Previously, she served as Curator of Performa in New York City and as Curator-at-Large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In addition to interdisciplinary performance commissions and curatorial projects, Edwards has taught Art History and Visual Studies at New York University and The New School, and writes extensively for a broad range of publications. L O R E N Z O G I U S T I is Director of GAMeC Bergamo. An art historian and curator, from 2012 to 2017 he served as Director of the MAN Museum in Nuoro. He has staged exhibitions and edited books dedicated to leading figures from 20th-century art as well as contemporary international artists, collaborating with numerous institutions in Italy and abroad. He is President of AMACI – the Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums. J U L I E TA G O N Z Á L E Z is the Artistic Director at Instituto Inhotim in Brazil.

She is a curator and researcher who works at the intersection of anthropology, cybernetics, architecture, ecology, the built environment and the visual arts. She has held curatorial positions at institutions such as Tate Modern, Museo Tamayo, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), The Bronx Museum, Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, among others. She has organised and co-organised over sixty exhibitions and has published numerous essays in exhibition catalogues and periodical publications. B O N AV E N T U R E S O H B E J E N G N D I KU N G is an independent curator, author and

biotechnologist. He is founder and Artistic Director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and is the Artistic Director of sonsbeek 20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He is professor in the Spatial Strategies MA programme at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin. From 2023 he will take on the role of Director at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. S U S A N N E P F E F F E R is the Director of the MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST. She served as Director of Fridericianum (2013–2017); Chief Curator of KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2007–2012); Curator and Advisor to the MoMA PS1; and Artistic Director of the Künstlerhaus Bremen (2004–2006). Pfeffer curated the Swiss Pavilion at Biennale Arte 2015. At Biennale Arte 2017, her presentation of Anne Imhof at the German Pavilion was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

R O B E R T O C I C U T T O, I N T R O D U C T I O N

CECILIA ALEMANI, THE MILK OF DREAMS

GIARDINI 53

EXHIBITION

58 152

The Witch’s Cradle Corps Orbite Technologies of Enchantment

174

PA R T I C I PAT I N G C O U N T R I E S

HISTORICAL CAPSULES 102

ARSENALE 191

EXHIBITION HISTORICAL CAPSULES

202 A Leaf a Gourd a Shell a Net a Bag a Sling a Sack 242

a Bottle a Pot a Box a Container Seduction of the Cyborg

304

PAV I L I O N O F A P P L I E D A R T S

306

BIENNALE COLLEGE ARTE

308

PA R T I C I PAT I N G C O U N T R I E S

IN THE CITY 324

PA R T I C I PAT I N G C O U N T R I E S

340

FO RT E M A RG H E RA

342

C O L L AT E R A L E V E N T S

358

MEETINGS ON ART

362 L I S T O F PA R T I C I PAT I N G C O U N T R I E S

A N D C O L L AT E R A L E V E N T S 374

V I S I T O R I N F O R M AT I O N

376

AC C E S S I B I L I T Y

ARTISTS – THE MILK OF DREAMS

263

Noor Abuarafeh

200

Eglė Budvytytė with Marija Olšauskaitė and Julija Steponaitytė

145

Carla Accardi

236

Igshaan Adams

Eileen Agar

265

Liv Bugge

286

Monira Al Qadiri

301

Simnikiwe Buhlungu

319

Sophia Al-Maria

141

Miriam Cahn

270

Özlem Altın

64; 136

Claude Cahun

154

Marina Apollonio

170

Elaine Cameron-Weir

Gertrud Arndt

107

Milly Canavero

204

Ruth Asawa

65; 137

Leonora Carrington

132

Shuvinai Ashoona

245

Regina Cassolo Bracchi

193

Belkis Ayón

150

Ambra Castagnetti

228

Firelei Báez

296

Giulia Cenci

216

Felipe Baeza

246

Giannina Censi

Josephine Baker

195

Gabriel Chaile

104

Djuna Barnes

240

Ali Cherri

205

Maria Bartuszová

247

Anna Coleman Ladd

Benedetta

Ithell Colquhoun

105

Mirella Bentivoglio and Annalisa Alloatti

215

Myrlande Constant

169

June Crespo

Merikokeb Berhanu

155

Dadamaino

106

Tomaso Binga

230

Noah Davis

172

Cosima von Bonin

164

Lenora de Barros

274

Louise Bonnet

Valentine de Saint-Point

244

Marianne Brandt

68; 136

Lise Deharme

280

Kerstin Brätsch

146

Sonia Delaunay

267

Dora Budor

161

Agnes Denes

Maya Deren

156

Lucia Di Luciano

294

Robert Grosvenor

238

Ibrahim El-Salahi

168

Aneta Grzeszykowska

148

Sara Enrico

227

Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe

123

Chiara Enzo

72; 252

Florence Henri

300

Andro Eradze

291

Lynn Hershman Leeson

225

Jaider Esbell

143

Charline von Heyl

133

Jana Euler

253

Hannah Höch

108

Minnie Evans

239

Jessie Homer French

249

Alexandra Exter

254

Rebecca Horn

131

Jadé Fadojutimi

111

Georgiana Houghton

278

Jes Fan

126

Sheree Hovsepian

220

Safia Farhat

289

Tishan Hsu

100

Simone Fattal

282

Marguerite Humeau

213

Célestin Faustin

144

Jacqueline Humphries

Leonor Fini

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami

250

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

266

Tatsuo Ikeda

Katharina Fritsch

222

Saodat Ismailova

109

Ilse Garnier

206

Aletta Jacobs

232

Aage Gaup

288

Geumhyung Jeong

110

Linda Gazzera

163

Charlotte Johannesson

196

Ficre Ghebreyesus

Loïs Mailou Jones

287; 341 Elisa Giardina Papa

271

Jamian Juliano-Villani

221

Roberto Gil de Montes

171

Birgit Jürgenssen

125

Nan Goldin

Ida Kar

Jane Graverol

269

Allison Katz

157

Laura Grisi

128

Bronwyn Katz

251

Karla Grosch

262

Kapwani Kiwanga

255

Kiki Kogelnik

257

Louise Nevelson

292

Barbara Kruger

Amy Nimr

272

Tetsumi Kudo

219

Magdalene Odundo

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

295

Precious Okoyomon

130

Louise Lawler

Meret Oppenheim

276

Carolyn Lazard

124

Ovartaci

279

Mire Lee

297

Virginia Overton

192

Simone Leigh

Akosua Adoma Owusu

139

Hannah Levy

235

Prabhakar Pachpute

237

Tau Lewis

115

Eusapia Palladino

167

Shuang Li

223

Violeta Parra

256

Liliane Lijn

197

Rosana Paulino

231

Candice Lin

Valentine Penrose

112

Mina Loy

166

Elle Pérez

283

LuYang

285

Sondra Perry

Antoinette Lubaki

234

Solange Pessoa

284

Zhenya Machneva

199

Thao Nguyen Phan

Baya Mahieddine

142

Julia Phillips

207

Maruja Mallo

273

Joanna Piotrowska

113

Joyce Mansour

129

Alexandra Pirici

198

Britta Marakatt-Labba

258

Anu Põder

293

Diego Marcon

116

Gisèle Prassinos

165

Sidsel Meineche Hansen

138

Christina Quarles

208

Maria Sibylla Merian

Rachilde

147

Vera Molnár

290

Janis Rafa

224

Delcy Morelos

81 ; 117

Alice Rahon

114

Sister Gertrude Morgan

Carol Rama

281

Sandra Mujinga

134; 135 Paula Rego

Mrinalini Mukherjee

Edith Rimmington

Nadja

Enif Robert

218

Luiz Roque

Andra Ursuţa

Rosa Rosà

158

Grazia Varisco

201

Niki de Saint Phalle

Remedios Varo

118

Giovanna Sandri

229

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

217

Pinaree Sanpitak

261

Marie Vassilieff

302

Aki Sasamoto

Cecilia Vicuña

Augusta Savage

159

Nanda Vigo

259

Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt

303

Marianne Vitale

277

Raphaela Vogel

160

Lillian Schwartz

127

Amy Sillman

264

Elias Sime

275

Marianna Simnett

119

Hélène Smith

149

Sable Elyse Smith

268

Teresa Solar

120

Mary Ellen Solt

151

P. Staff

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

Laura Wheeler Waring

162

Ulla Wiggen

Mary Wigman

173

Müge Yilmaz

214

Frantz Zéphirin

233

Zheng Bo

122

Unica Zürn

194

Portia Zvavahera

209; 260 Sophie Taeuber-Arp 210

Toshiko Takaezu

226

Emma Talbot

Dorothea Tanning

211

Bridget Tichenor

212

Tecla Tofano

121

Josefa Tolrà

299

Tourmaline

Toyen

Rosemarie Trockel

298

Wu Tsang

140

Kaari Upson

D E C L A R AT I O N O N T H E C U R R E N T I N VA S I O N O F U K R A I N E

La Biennale di Venezia, an institution where peoples meet through arts and culture, wishes to express its firm condemnation of the unacceptable invasion of Ukraine by the Russian government, which occurred a few days before this publication went to print. La Biennale di Venezia also wants to reaffirm its commitment to collaborating in every way possible with the National Participation of Ukraine in the 59th International Art Exhibition, ensuring the presence of the artist, his team, and his work. La Biennale di Venezia will always be close to those who defend freedom of expression and particularly the artists and authors, many of whom have participated in the Biennale’s exhibitions and festivals, who are opposed to all acts of aggression against peoples, communities, and individuals. La Biennale di Venezia is following the events in Ukraine with great apprehension, with the hope that international diplomacy will quickly put an end to the grief and suffering of the Ukrainian people and restore full freedom and peace. Roberto Cicutto President La Biennale di Venezia Cecilia Alemani Curator 59th International Art Exhibition 9 M A RC H 2 022

I N T RO D U C T I ON

Roberto Cicutto President of La Biennale di Venezia

I try to put myself in the shoes of Cecilia Alemani, Curator of La Biennale’s 59th International Art Exhibition. For almost two years we met virtually, framed by a computer screen, and it is through that same screen that Cecilia has visited hundreds of artists’ workshops and studios around the world, poring over paintings, sculptures, videos, installations and examples of performance art that must have given her a very different view from the one she would have experienced in the flesh. Whether all this has greatly influenced the spirit of her exhibition, I cannot say. But observing so many imaginary worlds from the porthole of her spaceship/computer, with the aim of physically bringing them to Venice to display them to the world, was most certainly an exceptional and unique experience. As curators often do – and as they specifically do at the Biennale – Cecilia Alemani begins her (re)search by asking various questions. Of these, one in particular seems to me to summarise them all: “How is the definition of human changing?” Her work begins with the identification of an inspiration, Leonora Carrington, from whose art she develops strands and themes that are represented by artists who relate “the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; the connection between bodies and the Earth.” The works in the exhibition mirror some of their “ancestors” in dedicated spaces, telling us where today’s artists have drawn their inspiration from.

A way of bringing together the different contemporaneities that the Biennale Arte has related over its 127-year existence, which was already present in the exhibition Le muse inquiete (The Disquieted Muses). When La Biennale di Venezia Meets History, created by the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC) in the Central Pavilion at the Giardini, curated by all the Directors of the six Artistic Departments of La Biennale (Architecture, Art, Cinema, Dance, Music, and Theatre), and coordinated by Cecilia Alemani herself in 2020, the year without an International Architecture Exhibition due to the pandemic. A journey, as we were saying, seen from inside a spaceship. An image that recalls sci-fi films, full of special effects and populated by hybrid creatures that almost always tell the story of the eternal struggle between good and evil. Cecilia Alemani’s Exhibition, on the other hand, imagines new harmonies, hitherto unthinkable cohabitations and surprising solutions, precisely because they distance themselves from anthropocentrism. A journey at the end of which there are no losers, but where new alliances are brought forth, generated by a dialogue between different beings (some perhaps even produced by machines) with all the natural elements that our planet (and perhaps others as well) presents to us. The travelling companions (the artists) who accompany the Curator all come from very different worlds. Cecilia tells us that there is a majority of female artists and non-binary subjects, a choice I endorse because it reflects the richness of the creative force of our time. My wish for La Biennale di Venezia’s 59th International Art Exhibition is that we can all immerse ourselves in the “re-enchantment of the world” that Cecilia evokes in her introduction. Perhaps this is a dream, which is another of the constituent elements of this Exhibition. Many works are new productions created specifically for this edition. This is an important sign and proof of the great attention bestowed on the new generations of artists. It is no coincidence that the Curator has agreed to create the first College Arte in the Biennale’s history, which now flanks those dedicated to Cinema, Dance, Theatre, and Music. The past few years of the Colleges under the direct responsibility of their Artistic Directors, aided by tutors, have been very positive.

The Colleges, attended by young women and men who have already realised and decided that their lives are going to be dedicated to some form of art, are challenging laboratories that over the years have become a unique tool for perfecting their training. The end result of the Colleges’ activities is the recognition on the stages and screens of the Biennale of the value of those who participate, often rewarded by stable job opportunities. It seemed difficult to achieve this also for the Biennale Arte. But three female artists and one male artist, chosen from among the many candidates from all over the world, see their works exhibited out of competition in the International Exhibition, with equal pride of place as their already established colleagues who have been selected by the Curator. This is an important step for La Biennale di Venezia which, through the activities of its ASAC and the establishment of an International Centre for Research on the Contemporary Arts, is becoming an increasingly important instrument of growth for artists, further enhancing its historical role of producing exhibitions and festivals. We would like to thank all Participating Countries and new National Participations. We thank Ministero della Cultura, the local institutions that support La Biennale in various ways, the City of Venice, the Veneto Region, the Soprintendenza Archeologia, belle arti e paesaggio per il Comune di Venezia e Laguna, and the Italian Navy. Our thanks go to our Partner Swatch, to our Main Sponsor illycaffè and to the Sponsors Bloomberg Philanthropies, kvadrat, Vela-Venezia Unica, and to our Media Partner Rai Cultura. We thank the important international Donors, organisations and institutions who have contributed to the success of the Biennale Arte 2022. Our warmest thanks go to Cecilia Alemani and her entire team. Finally, we would also like to thank everyone at La Biennale for the great professionalism and dedication they have demonstrated in the realisation and administration of the Exhibition.

THE MILK OF DREAMS

Cecilia Alemani

title and themes

The Milk of Dreams takes its title from a book by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) in which the Surrealist artist describes a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination. It is a world where everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else; a world set free, brimming with possibilities. But it is also the allegory of a century that imposed intolerable pressure on the definition of the self, forcing Carrington into a life of exile: locked up in mental hospitals, an eternal object of fascination and desire, yet also a figure of startling power and mystery, always fleeing the strictures of a fixed, coherent identity. When asked about her birth, Carrington would say she was the product of her mother’s encounter with a machine, suggesting the same bizarre union of human, animal, and mechanical that marks much of her work. The exhibition The Milk of Dreams takes Leonora Carrington’s otherworldly creatures, along with other figures of transformation, as companions on an imaginary journey through the metamorphoses of bodies and definitions of the human. This exhibition is grounded in many conversations with artists over the last few years. The questions that kept emerging from these dialogues seem to capture this moment in history when the survival of the species is threatened, but also to sum up many other inquiries that pervade the sciences, arts, and myths of our time. How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what

differentiates plant and animal, human and non-human? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and other life forms? And what would life look like without us? 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. Or, to borrow the terms used by philosopher Rosi Braidotti, whose writings on the posthuman have been essential for this exhibition, the end of the centrality of man, becoming-machine and becoming-earth. Many contemporary artists and thinkers are envisioning a new “posthuman” condition, which Braidotti defines as “a convergence phenomenon between post-humanism and post-anthropocentrism, that is to say, the critique of the universal ideal of the Man of reason on the one hand and the reject of species supremacy on the other.” 1 They challenge the Enlightenment notion of the human being – especially the white European male – as motionless hub of the universe and measure of all things. In its place, they propose new alliances among species and worlds inhabited by porous, hybrid, manifold beings that are not unlike Carrington’s extraordinary creatures. Under the increasingly pervasive pressure of technology, the boundaries between bodies and objects have been utterly transformed, bringing about profound mutations that remap subjectivities, hierarchies, and anatomies. Today, the world seems dramatically split between technological optimism − which promises that the human body can be endlessly perfected through science − and the dread of a complete takeover by machines via automation and artificial intelligence. This rift has widened during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has forced us even further apart and caged much of human interaction behind the screens of electronic devices. In these past two years, the fragility of the human body has become tragically clear, but at the same time the body has been kept at a distance, filtered by technology, disincarnated, rendered almost intangible.

The pressure of technology, the heightening of social tensions, the outbreak of the pandemic, and the looming threat of environmental disaster remind us every day that as mortal bodies, we are neither invincible nor self-sufficient, but rather part of a symbiotic web of interdependencies that bind us to each other, to other species, and to the planet as a whole. In this climate, many artists envision the end of anthropocentrism, celebrating a new communion with the non-human, with the animal world, and with the Earth; they cultivate a sense of kinship between species and between the organic and inorganic, the animate and inanimate. Still others, drawing from indigenous traditions, practice what feminist theorist and activist Silvia Federici calls the “re-enchantment of the world,” trying “to reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and with our bodies, enabling us not only to escape the gravitational pull of capitalism but to regain a sense of wholeness in our lives.” 2 e x h i b i t i o n s t ru c t u r e a n d t i m e c a ps u l e s

The exhibition unfolds in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, and in the Corderie, Artiglierie, and the outdoor spaces of the Gaggiandre and Giardino delle Vergini at the Arsenale complex. The Milk of Dreams includes over two hundred artists from 58 countries. More than 180 of these artists have never had their work in the International Art Exhibition until now. For the first time in its 127-year history, the Biennale will include a majority of women and gender non-conforming artists, a choice that reflects an international art scene full of creative ferment and a deliberate rethinking of men’s centrality in the history of art and contemporary culture. The exhibition features contemporary works and new projects conceived specifically for the Biennale Arte, presented in dialogue with historic works from the 19th century on. As visitors move through the exhibition in the Central Pavilion and the Corderie, they encounter five smaller, historical sections: miniature constellations of artworks, found objects, and documents, clustered together to explore certain key themes. Conceived like time capsules, these shows within the show provide additional

tools of investigation and introspection, weaving a web of references and echoes that link artworks of the past – including major museum loans and unconventional selections – to the pieces by contemporary artists in the surrounding space. This wide-ranging, transhistorical approach traces kinships and affinities between artistic methods and practices, even across generations, to create new layers of meaning and bridge present and past. What emerges is a historical narrative that is not built around systems of direct inheritance or conflict, but around forms of symbiosis, solidarity, and sisterhood. With a specific choreography of architectural spaces developed in collaboration with the designers Formafantasma, these “cabinets” also prompt reflection on how the history of art is constructed around museum and exhibition practices that establish hierarchies of taste and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Many of the stories told in these capsules have not yet been absorbed into the official canon and have been for too long considered minor and obscure. These sections thus participate in the complex process of rewriting and rereading history that has marked the last few years, when it has become clearer than ever that no historical narrative can ever be considered final. the artists in the exhibition

The fulcrum of The Milk of Dreams is a gallery on the lower level of the Central Pavilion where the first of the five capsules, titled The Witch’s Cradle, features a collection of artworks by women artists of the historical avant-garde movements, including, among others, Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington, Claude Cahun, Leonor Fini, Ithell Colquhoun, Loïs Mailou Jones, Carol Rama, Augusta Savage, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo. The works of these and other women artists of the early 20th century – shown in an ensemble inspired by Surrealist exhibitions – summon up a domain of the marvellous where anatomies and identities can shift and change, following the desire for transformation and emancipation. Many of the same lines of thought return in the work of contemporary artists on view in the other galleries of the Central Pavilion: the posthuman, hybrid and disobedient bodies depicted

by Aneta Grzeszykowska, Julia Phillips, Ovartaci, Christina Quarles, Shuvinai Ashoona, Sara Enrico, Birgit Jürgenssen, and Andra Ursuţa suggest new mergers of the organic and the artificial, whether as a means of self-reinvention or as a disquieting foretaste of an increasingly dehumanised future. The ties between human being and machine are analysed in many of the works on view, as in those by Agnes Denes, Lillian Schwartz, and Ulla Wiggen, for instance, or in the screen-like surfaces by Dadamaino, Laura Grisi, and Grazia Varisco, which are collected in Technologies of Enchantment, a second historical presentation that explores Programmed Art and kinetic abstraction in the 1960s. The bonds between body and language are at the heart of Corps Orbite, another capsule inspired by Materializzazione del linguaggio, a showcase of Visual and Concrete Poetry at Biennale Arte 1978 that was one of the first openly feminist exhibitions in the institution’s history. Visual and concrete poems by Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Ilse Garnier, Giovanna Sandri, and Mary Ellen Solt are juxtaposed here with experiments in automatic writing and mediumistic communication by Eusapia Palladino, Georgiana Houghton, and Josefa Tolrà, and other forms of “feminine writing” that range from Gisèle Prassinos’ tapestries to Unica Zürn’s micrographies. Signs, symbols, and private languages also crop up in the work of contemporary artists such as Bronwyn Katz, Sable Elyse Smith, Amy Sillman, and Charline von Heyl, while Jacqueline Humphries’ typographic paintings are juxtaposed with Carla Accardi’s graphemes and with the machine code that informs the art of Charlotte Johannesson, Vera Molnár, and Rosemarie Trockel. In contrast with these hypertechnological scenarios, the paintings and assemblages by Paula Rego and Cecilia Vicuña envision new forms of symbiosis between animals and human beings, while Merikokeb Berhanu, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Simone Fattal, and Alexandra Pirici craft narratives that interweave environmental concerns with ancient chthonic deities, yielding innovative ecofeminist mythologies.

The exhibition at the Arsenale opens with the work of Belkis Ayón, an artist whose work re-reads Afro-Cuban traditions to dream up a matriarchal society. The rediscovery of art’s myth-making potential can also be seen in Ficre Ghebreyesus’ large-scale paintings and Portia Zvavahera’s hallucinatory visions, as well as in the allegorical compositions by Frantz Zéphirin and Thao Nguyen Phan that blend histories, dreams, and religions. Drawing on indigenous morphologies, oral histories, and subverting colonialist stereotypes, Argentine artist Gabriel Chaile presents a new series of monumental sculptures, made from unfired clay, which tower like the idols of an imagined Mesoamerican culture. Many artists in the exhibition imagine complex new relationships with the planet and with nature, suggesting unprecedented ways to coexist with other species and with the environment. Eglė Budvytytė’s video tells the story of a group of young people lost in the forests of Lithuania, while the characters in a new video by Zheng Bo live in total – even sexual – communion with nature. A similar sense of wonder can be found in the snowy scenes embroidered by Sámi artist Britta Marakatt-Labba, and ancient traditions also overlap with new forms of ecological activism in works by Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe and in Jaider Esbell’s dreamlike compositions. The Corderie starts off with another time capsule, in this case inspired by sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin and her theory of fiction, which links the birth of civilisation not to the invention of weapons, but to tools used for providing sustenance and care: bags, sacks, and vessels. As we are told by Le Guin, stories and technologies are neither Promethean nor apocalyptic, but rather containers that open spaces for the expression of life. Presenting an iconology of vessels in various forms, in this section, titled A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container, ovoid carapaces by Surrealist artist Bridget Tichenor are juxtaposed with Maria Bartuszová’s delicate plaster works, Ruth Asawa’s hanging sculptures, and Tecla Tofano’s hybrid creatures. These works from the past live side-by-side with Magdalene Odundo’s anthropomorphic vases and Pinaree Sanpitak’s concave forms, while video artist Saodat Ismailova surveys underground isolation cells that serve as places of refuge and meditation.

Colombian artist Delcy Morelos, whose works are inspired by Andean cosmologies and the cultures of the Amazon, presents a large-scale installation featuring a maze built out of earth. Many other artists in the show combine political and social approaches with an investigation of local traditions, as in Prabhakar Pachpute’s large-scale paintings of the environmental devastation caused by the mining industry in India, or Ali Cherri’s video about the dams of the Nile. Igshaan Adams grounds his abstract textile compositions in themes ranging from apartheid to gender conditions in South Africa, whereas Ibrahim El-Salahi conveys his experience of illness and his relationship with the pharmaceutical world through a meditative practice of meticulous daily drawings. The final section at the Corderie is introduced by the fifth and last time capsule revolving around the figure of the cyborg. As Donna Haraway puts it, the cyborg brings together “the human and non-human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom and structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diversity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and culture in unexpected ways.” 3 This presentation includes artists working over the course of the 20th century who imagined new fusions of the human and the artificial, as harbingers of a posthuman, postgender future. Seduction of the Cyborg presents artworks, artefacts, and documents from early 20th-century artists such as the Dadaist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Bauhaus artists Marianne Brandt and Karla Grosch, and Futurists Alexandra Exter, Giannina Censi, and Regina. Here, Anu Põder’s delicate sculptures portray fragmented bodies that stand in contrast with Louise Nevelson’s monoliths, Liliane Lijn’s totems, Rebecca Horn’s machines, and Kiki Kogelnik’s robots. At the very end of the Corderie, after moving through a vast, diaphanous installation by Kapwani Kiwanga, the exhibition takes on colder, more artificial tones and the human figure becomes increasingly evanescent, replaced by animals and hybrid or robotic creatures. Marguerite Humeau’s biomorphic sculptures resemble cryogenic beings, juxtaposed with Teresa Solar’s monumental exoskeletons. Raphaela Vogel describes a world where animals have won out over humans, while Jes Fan’s sculptures use organic materials to create a new kind of bacterial culture.

Apocalyptic scenarios of cells run wild and nuclear nightmares also turn up in drawings by Tatsuo Ikeda and in Mire Lee’s installations, agitated by the twitching of machineries that resemble the digestive system of some animal. A new video by posthumanist pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson celebrates the birth of artificial organisms, while Korean artist Geumhyung Jeong plays with bodies that have become completely robotic and can be reassembled at whim. Other works hover between obsolete technology and mirage-like visions of the future. Zhenya Machneva’s abandoned factories and decrepit industrial mechanisms seem brought back to life in the installations by Monira Al Qadiri and Dora Budor, which whir and spin like bachelor machines. Capping off this series of devices gone haywire, a large installation by Barbara Kruger conceived specifically for the Corderie combines slogans, poetry, and word-objects in a crescendo of hypercommunication. In contrast, Robert Grosvenor’s silent sculptures reveal a world that seems devoid of all human presence. And beyond this motionless universe grows Precious Okoyomon’s vast entropic garden, swarming with new life. Winding up the exhibition in the outdoor spaces at the Arsenale are major projects by Giulia Cenci, Virginia Overton, Solange Pessoa, Aki Sasamoto, Wu Tsang, and Marianne Vitale, which guide viewers to the Giardino delle Vergini along a path that leads through animal beings, organic sculptures, industrial ruins, and disorienting landscapes. The Milk of Dreams was conceived and organised in a period of enormous instability and uncertainty, since its development coincided with the outbreak and spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. La Biennale di Venezia was forced to postpone this edition by one year, an event that had only occurred during the two World Wars since 1895. So the very fact that this exhibition can open is somewhat extraordinary: its inauguration is not exactly the symbol of a return to normal life, but rather the outcome of a collective effort that seems almost miraculous. For the first time, except perhaps in the postwar period, the Artistic Director was not able to view many of the artworks first-hand, or meet in person with most of the participating artists. During these endless months in front of the screen, I have pondered the question

of what role the International Art Exhibition should play at this historical juncture, and the simplest, most sincere answer I could find is that the Biennale sums up all the things we have so sorely missed in the last two years: the freedom to meet people from all over the world, the possibility of travel, the joy of spending time together, the practice of difference, translation, incomprehension, and communion. The Milk of Dreams is not an exhibition about the pandemic, but it inevitably registers the upheavals of our era. In times like this, as the history of La Biennale di Venezia clearly shows, art and artists can help us imagine new modes of coexistence and infinite new possibilities of transformation.

1 Rosi Braidotti, “Preface: The Posthuman as Exuberant Excess,” in Francesca Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), XI. 2 Silvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018). 3 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 4.

EX H I

T BI

I ON

NTR AL CE PA VILION R GIA DINI

K AT H A R I N A F R I T S C H

1956, Essen, Germany Lives in Wuppertal and Düsseldorf, Germany

Katharina Fritsch’s realistic sculptures dissolve the edges between the ordinary and the uncanny, stirring our deep-rooted dreams and nightmares while awakening childhood memories of religious tales, fables, and myths. Her works – which appear as boldly hued large-scale public projects, strangely scaled sculptures, intimate sound pieces, and multiples – project a confidence that can be interpreted as variably protective or threatening. Cast in dark green polyester from the mould of a stuffed elephant, Elefant / Elephant (1987) reproduces the textures and folds of the mammal’s body with startling exactitude, and its size, clarity of anatomical detail, and colour profile take on a supernatural effect. Here, a profound eeriness arises not only from her twisting of the everyday, but also from her technique. Frequently moulded by hand, cast in polyester, and finished with a matte paint, her sculptures maintain a formal naturalism made strange by the paint’s absorption of light, which gives the surface a mystifying quality. Elefant / Elephant takes on the vestiges of fables of grandeur, intellect, captivity, and matriarchal societies – the core of elephant family structures. Even in Venice, the iconography of elephants looms large: in the 1890s, right before the beginning of the Biennale’s history, an elephant named “Toni” lived on the parkland grounds and was known as “the prisoner in the Giardini.” – MW

Katharina Fritsch, Elefant / Elephant, 1987. Polyester, wood, paint, 420 × 160 × 380 cm. Photo Thomas Ruff. Courtesy the Artist; Matthew Marks Gallery. © Katharina Fritsch / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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A ANDRA URSUT

1979, Salonta, Romania Lives in New York City, USA

Andra Ursuţa’s seductive and unsettling sculptures – often made from casts of her own body – are radical hybrid beings. Recalling both American science fiction action horror films including Predator and the Alien franchise, and visionary artworks of women from previous generations including the Polish and Estonian sculptors Alina Szapocznikow and Anu Põder, Ursuţa’s work emphasises the vulnerability of the human form and the complexity of desire. In recent years, Ursuţa has begun fusing direct casts of her body with everyday objects, salvaged trash, and props, combining traditional lost wax casting with 3D scanning and printing. Encapsulated in colourful crystal contours, the swirled patterns and textured surfaces shaped by her process reveal a collision of organic and inorganic forms. The lounging woman in Predators ’R Us (2020) is both missing limbs and growing unusual appendages, such as a pair of tentacled slippers inspired by the alien from Predator. The alien physique depicted in Impersonal Growth (2021) was likewise inspired by the Alien films’ monstrous “Xenomorphs.” In Ursuţa’s newest sculptures, including the rippling purple-white-green Phantom Mass or the acid green Terminal Figure (both 2021), the body is increasingly constrained in its pose. Components like spiky corsets, buckles, and bones progressively evolve into the technical components of an ever-changing cyborg body. – MW Andra Ursuţa, Predators ’R Us, 2020. Lead crystal, 73.7 × 68.6 × 132.1 cm. Courtesy the Artist; David Zwirner; Ramiken, New York. © Andra Ursuţa

RO S E M A R I E T RO C K E L

1952, Schwerte, Germany Lives in Berlin, Germany

Rosemarie Trockel’s polyvalent art practice emerged in the 1980s as a part of a new, radically inventive artistic scene in Cologne. Her films and videos, “knitting pictures,” ceramics, drawings, collages, and projects for children are celebrated for their biting critique. Like other artists of her generation such as Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Jenny Holzer, Trockel relays a subversive engagement with feminist discourse in her earliest works, calling into question the essentialisms of 1970s feminism through the use of industrial fabrication and commercial design. In the early 1980s, Trockel began making her wool “knitted pictures,” patterned skeins of yarns generated by a computerised knitting machine and then stretched over canvas like paintings. These large-scale pieces express the artist’s sharp engagement with questions of “women’s work” and the devalued status of craft in the context of an increasingly mechanised society. Including repeating geometric motifs, logos, political symbols, and references to German history, these “knitting pictures” superficially ape the forms of Abstract paintings, while underscoring the clichéd connotations of gendered labour behind them. For The Milk of Dreams, Trockel presents a selection of existing and previously unseen wool works. Subtle variations in the wool works’ stitching – each knitted by Trockel’s long-time collaborator Helga Szentpétery – signal their hand-made quality and present a wry assessment of the subjectivity of visual representation and of art’s commodification. – MW Rosemarie Trockel, The Same Different, 2013 and Study for The Same Different, 2013. Yellow wool on canvas, wood, 296 × 296 cm and 100 × 100 cm. Photo Mareike Tocha. Courtesy Sprüth Magers. © Rosemarie Trockel / VG Bild Kunst, Bonn

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WITCH’S

E I L E E N AGA R G E RT RU D A R N D T J O S E P H I N E BA K E R B E N E D E T TA C L AU D E C A H U N L E O N O RA C A R R I N GT O N ITHELL COLQUHOUN VA L E N T I N E D E SA I N T- P O I N T LISE DEHARME M AYA D E R E N LEONOR FINI JA N E G RAV E RO L FLORENCE HENRI LOÏS MAILOU JONES I DA KA R A N T O I N E T T E LU BA K I BAYA M A H I E D D I N E

ADLE

NA D JA AMY NIMR MERET OPPENHEIM VA L E N T I N E P E N RO S E RAC H I L D E A L I C E RA H O N C A RO L RA M A E D I T H R I M M I N GT O N E N I F RO B E RT RO SA RO SÀ AU G U S TA SAVAG E D O RO T H E A TA N N I N G T OY E N R E M E D I O S VA RO M E TA VAUX WA R R I C K F U L L E R L AU RA W H E E L E R WA R I N G M A RY W I G M A N

In the first half of the 20th century, the Enlightenment concept of the self as a contained, unitary body was blown wide open by the emergence of technologies that blurred the distinction between human and machine, by psychoanalytic models that illuminated the influence of the unconscious, and by the feminist ideal of the independent and autonomous Neue Frau (New Woman). This shift undermined longstanding and pervasive dualisms between human and nature, the animate and the inanimate, mind and body, and female and male in favour of fluctuating hybridity and relationality. The artists, dancers, writers, and cultural figures grouped here adopt themes of metamorphosis, ambiguity, and fragmentation to contrast the myth of the Cartesian unitary – and de facto male – self, rebuﬃng the idea of Man as the centre of the world and the measure of all things. Hailing from different parts of the world, including Europe, Africa, and the Americas, these artists were close to the dominant avant-garde movements of their time – particularly Surrealism’s exploration of the body from within, Futurism’s and the Bauhaus’ technophilic meldings of human and machine, and the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude movements’ revaluation of cultural identity – while maintaining a great degree of independence from them. Often marginalised in the history of art, these artists share a refusal of the patriarchal and the heteronormative vision of gender and identity, exercising control over their own bodies with a complexity and ambiguity, and occasionally even irony, often absent from the work of their male peers. The mannequins and automata, dolls, puppets, and masks that populate their paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, and illustrations subvert the sexist tropes of the femme fatale or femme enfant; metamorphosis becomes a political, erotic, and poetic tool to craft new, multifold visions of subjectivity. Whether parodying the image of the eroticised woman – as in Gertrud Arndt, Leonor Fini, Josephine Baker, and Rosa Rosà – or employing androgyny to achieve the emancipation and autodetermination of the feminine self – as in the work of Claude Cahun and Florence Henri – each of these artists, in their own individual ways, turn traditional conceptions of gendered subjectivity into materials for fabulation. Some of these artists – Jane Graverol, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Laura Wheeler Waring, and Mary Wigman – reinterpret ancient myths of enchantment through archetypical figures such as the sphynx, the femme arbre, or the witch, portraying women as healers and hybrid beings that merge human, animal, machine, and monster. Others – like Baya Mahieddine, Toyen, Loïs Mailou Jones, and Antoinette Lubaki – use nature as a metaphor for female reality, evoking mother goddesses, anthropomorphic deities, and fablelike scenes and anticipating ecofeminist preoccupations. Meanwhile, abstraction becomes a means to craft the shape or abilities of new bodies in works by Alice Rahon and Valentine de Saint-Point. Whether by evoking nature, escaping into fantasy, or by using their own bodies to model new possibilities, each of these artists employs self-metamorphosis as an answer to the male-dominated constructions governing identity.

Claude Cahun, Hands and Table (untitled), 1936. Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections

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E I L E E N AGA R

1899, Buenos Aires, Argentina 1991, London, UK

Eileen Agar, an independent artist whose dreamlike work was often associated with Surrealism, took the black-and-white photograph Bum and Thumb Rock in the summer of 1936 in Ploumanac’h, a village on the French side of the Channel. By suggesting that the curves of a boulder resemble the shape of a human behind, it adds a shade of humour that soon became a hallmark of Agar’s artistic language. In 1936, as if to demonstrate that whimsicality, Agar made and wore a strange Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse: a sculptural headpiece crafted from cork, painted blue and yellow and richly ornamented with shells, fabric cuttings, plastic flowers, and pieces of bark. Anchored to it like molluscs to a rock, this strange array of natural and artificial objects evokes the traditional French soup in the title. The distinctly sculptural quality of the layers and impasto in Agar’s paintings from the 1930s onward echo the unusual rock formations of Ploumanac’h. As in Wisdom Tooth (c. 1960s), they suggest a landscape invaded by organic and inorganic incrustations. Amid patches of darkness, ultramarine blue backgrounds, geometric patterns and outlines of lime-green flowers, a tooth stands out as the only human component of the painting, at the heart of a dreamlike symbolism that is at first glance incomprehensible. – SM

Eileen Agar, Wisdom Tooth, c. 1960s. Acrylic on board, 58 × 69 cm. Photo Alex Fox (Roy Fox Fine Art Photography). Courtesy The Redfern Gallery, London. © The Estate of Eileen Agar

The Witch’s Cradle

G E RT RU D A R N D T

1903, Ratibor (Racibórz), German Empire (present-day Poland) – 2000, Darmstadt, Germany

In 1929, a few years after she finished studying applied arts at the Bauhaus, Gertrud Arndt returned to the school’s Dessau location with her husband, who had become an instructor. There, she embarked on the one major photographic project of her career: Maskenselbstbildnis (1930). These forty-three black-and-white pictures show the artist, dressed up in eccentric costumes, impersonating different kinds of women, including young girls, grieving widows, crying geisha, and bejewelled ladies in flowery, feathered hats. In Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 13, Arndt is wearing lipstick, with her short hair hidden under a cloche and a sheer, embroidered organza veil covering her face and shoulders: she represents the ideal woman of the Weimar Republic, the prototypical Neue Frau (New Woman), with the proud gaze of someone who has a role in society and uses fashion to show it. Though the Maskenselbstbildnis series uses crude sets and printing techniques, it achieves extraordinary results, blending the strangeness of Surrealism with the lucid gaze of the photography movement known as Neue Sehen (New Vision). Gertrud Arndt is one of the most independent female artists to have worked within the Bauhaus community; moving beyond its formal restrictions, she explores the many different facets of her identity, theatrically putting herself at the service of each. – SM

Gertrud Arndt, Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 16 and Nr. 13, 1930. From portfolio Maskenselbstbildnisse (reprinted 1996), 24.1 × 19.3 cm. Museum Folkwang, Essen. Photo © Jens Nober

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JOSEPHINE BAKER

1906, Saint Louis, USA – 1975, Paris, France

Costumes so skimpy as to hardly be there, brazenly sensual movements, a short, slick hairdo: these were recurring elements in the performances of Josephine Baker, the American-born singer and dancer who rose to international fame in the 1930s as a symbol of Black talent and pride. After growing up extremely poor in the hostile, segregated southern Midwest, and getting her theatrical start with mediocre vaudeville troupes, Baker moved to Paris in 1925; there, at nineteen, she debuted at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in her first cabaret show, Revue nègre. The set, costume, and props were a compendium of clichés about African culture: whirling banana skirts, palm trees, masks, garishly coloured fruit, and even a cheetah named Chiquita. In silent footage of Baker dancing at the famous Parisian music hall Folies Bergère, she performs an exuberant Charleston: bare-breasted, dripping jewellery, and dressed in an eccentric plumed costume, Baker’s sensuality and eroticism are offset by the clowning facial expressions that remained her hallmark up until the 1950s. After World War II, Baker memorably refused to perform for a segregated audience, responded publicly to threats from the KKK, and spoke at the 1963 March on Washington alongside Dr. Martin Luther King. – SM

Josephine Baker, Dans Revue des Folies Bergère, danse avec plumes... (still), 1925. Film, 56 sec. Courtesy GP archives. Collection Gaumont Actualité

The Witch’s Cradle

B E N E D E T TA

1897, Rome, Italy – 1977, Venice, Italy

In 1924, when Benedetta Cappa published her first book Le forze umane: romanzo astratto con sintesi grafiche, Futurism was undergoing a radical reinvention that softened its previous ideological impetus. Like other representatives of “Second Futurism” – including her husband, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti – Benedetta gradually made this transition, trying to capture the occult, cosmological side of the phenomena traditionally glorified by the movement. Her literary works, which become verbal-visual in parolibere (liberated words) compositions accompanied by graphic syntheses, describe seemingly ordinary characters who have extraordinary, mythic experiences. In Le forze umane, autobiographical realism alternates with abstract chapters in pseudo-scientific language, accompanied by nineteen ink illustrations: a few sinuous lines sum up the forces of the female body; a tangle of broken ones suggests a powerful male physicality; or, in the “graphic synthesis” Contatto di due nuclei potenti (femminile e maschile), a strange mixture of the two evokes the sparks that fly from their relationship. This drawing encapsulates ideas the artist must have absorbed from her Waldensian and Steinerian upbringing. Dreams and reality, rationality and spirituality, and the conscious and subconscious mind are also fundamental themes in her later novels, and in an oeuvre that places humanity at the centre of a new, cosmological Futurism. – SM

Benedetta, Le forze umane. Romanzo astratto con sintesi grafiche (cover illustration). Franco Campitelli, Editore – Foligno, 1924. Courtesy Biblioteca comunale Augusta di Perugia

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CLAUDE CAHUN

1894, Nantes, France 1954, Saint Helier, Jersey, UK

Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob, known as Claude Cahun, is renowned for her performative, often gender-bending self-portraits, frequently made collaboratively with her stepsister and lover Marcel Moore. Cahun and Moore adopted androgynous pseudonyms and self-presentations in both art and life. Keepsake (1932) depicts Cahun’s head in a chain of four bell jars, the glass casings used in the 19th century to observe and analyse objects. The staging and cropping of Cahun’s head evoke the Surrealist trope of the dissected female body; yet, her eyes are not passive but directly confronting the viewer’s gaze or actively scanning the surroundings. In Self portrait (in robe with masks attached) (1928), Cahun dresses as a life-sized doll with the mask of a powdered face and tinted lips, a heart painted on her cheek. The overt artifice of the masks obliterates the self – the extinction of one subject for panoply of others. The façades mediate a veil between Cahun and the representation of her personas; the artist refuses to be grasped as the object of the male gaze. – LC

Claude Cahun, Self portrait (in robe with masks attached), 1928. Monochrome negative, 12 × 9.4 cm. Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections

The Witch’s Cradle

LEONORA CARRINGTON

1917, Clayton-le-Woods, UK 2011, Mexico City, Mexico

In her teens, Leonora Carrington began constructing her own mythological universe influenced by Celtic legends told by her Irish mother. After moving to Paris in 1936, Carrington honed this imagery and began exploring magical, alchemical, astrological, and cabalistic literature, channelling its essence into her early paintings and drawings. In 1942, after the outbreak of World War II, she moved to Mexico City and joined a famous community of women artists who had fled Europe. This is where her artistic language reached its dramatic maturity; drawing on local myths, it became crowded with monstrous female figures in thrall to spiritual forces. Portrait of the Late Mrs Partridge (1947) depicts a woman with a long neck and electrified hair, dressed in a crimson robe and caressing a large blue bird. Carrington portrays her like some hallowed medieval icon, even capable of shaping the stormy moods of her natural surroundings. In Portrait of Madame Dupin (1949), the titular figure clutches an even stranger creature to her chest: probably her child, it has a knobby, root-like body. This human-plant hybrid – like its insectile mother and most of the characters that populate Carrington’s paintings, drawings and stories – seems like an obvious product of the half-real, half-fancied world the artist believed in from childhood. – SM

Leonora Carrington, Portrait of the Late Mrs Partridge, 1947. Oil on board, 100.3 × 69.9 cm. Photo Nathan Keay, image courtesy MCA Chicago. Private Collection, Chicago. © Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

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ITHELL COLQUHOUN

1906, Shillong, India – 1988, Lamorna, UK

Born in India to a family of British civil servants, Ithell Colquhoun moved to England at a young age. She was committed to the arcane throughout her entire life, practicing esoteric activities in search of divine female spirituality and studying the unconscious and Surrealist artistic techniques. Colquhoun joined the group in 1939 only to leave a year later, refusing to renounce her involvement with occult groups. Her paintings are populated by forms that amalgamate images evoking the sensual shapes of genitalia with landscapes, with a particular exploration of women’s spiritual relationships with the Earth’s magnetic currents, often demonstrating women’s defiance and the power of female sexuality. Gorgon (1948), for instance – a work made with decalcomania technique and named after the monstrous feminine figure of the Greek mythology – shows an ambiguous silhouette that displays a yellow-orange landscape under its curved feathered wings. It is a scenario that is real and hallucinatory at the same time: maybe a cave hunted by occult forces, a close-up on a rotten fruit or, likely, a fantastic womb. Gorgon’s hair is like serpents that top this entity as if they would like to own or fertilise it. Alluding to disembodied phalluses and ancestral references, the painting presents a deployment of Freudian tropes and symbolism related to gender and sex. – LC & SM

Ithell Colquhoun, Gorgon, 1946. Oil on cardboard, 58.42 × 58.42 cm. Photo Richard Shillitoe. Courtesy Dr & Mrs Richard Shillitoe

The Witch’s Cradle

VA L E N T I N E D E S A I N T- P O I N T

1875, Lyon, France – 1953, Cairo, Egypt

For the opening of a 1912 exhibition of Futurist paintings at Galerie Georges Giroux in Brussels, Valentine de Saint-Point recited her Manifeste de la Femme futuriste, a response to Futurism’s well-known misogyny: her statement adopted a tone of fierce invective towards the feminism of the time, attacking all women –scornfully termed “females” – who failed to adopt a virile, violent, heartless attitude that would make them intellectually independent. In keeping with the principles of this declaration, which would later be repeated in her Manifeste futuriste de la luxure (1913), de Saint-Point herself seems to have led a very restless life, as a woman who liked to provoke but was equally intent on pursuing a versatile artistic career. In 1914 she turned all her attention to dance, presenting a new kind of performance that she called Métachorie – from the Greek for “beyond the chorus” – alternating movement with the recital of poems alongside projected images and perfumes, which were captured in a series of etchings on a black ground, with quickly scratched marks that convey the mystic ambience of the set. Having drawn heavy criticism from her former Futurist allies, she moved to Egypt, converted to Sufism, and died in Cairo in 1953, alone and forgotten. – SM

Valentine de Saint-Point, Metachoric Gestures (Gestes Métachoriques), 1914–1923. Original woodcut, limited edition on Lafuma Pur Fil paper, 19 × 14 cm. Adrien Sina Collection, Feminine Futures

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LISE DEHARME A N D RAC H I L D E

1898, Paris, France – 1980, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France 1860, Cros, France – 1953, Paris, France

The Decadentist novel Monsieur Vénus (1884) by Rachilde (the pen name of Marguerite Eymery) and the Surrealist novel Oh! Violette, ou La Politesse des végétaux (1969) by Lise Deharme each sparked a scandal upon publication, which their authors stubbornly faced down. Both tell the story of women bursting with volatile sensuality, drawing curious parallels between their amorous adventures and the metamorphic nature of the plant kingdom. The first in order of publication, Monsieur Vénus, tells the story of Raoule de Vénérande, a mannish French noblewoman who falls in love with the ephebic young florist Jacques Silvert, dragging him into an ambiguous game of psychological and physical domination. The gender fluidity found even in its title is also a guiding theme in the oneiric, erotic adventures of the young protagonist in Oh! Violette, ou La Politesse des végétaux – who at one point mentions reading a rare copy of Monsieur Vénus, and is almost always naked and surrounded by flowers as she enjoys her admirers’ attentions. As a further demonstration of their strange kinship, both novels feature a set of images by the artist Leonor Fini, where the female characters’ bodies are often nude and androgynous, surrounded by plants, and drawn in a sinuous, seductive style. – SM

Lise Deharme with illustrations by Leonor Fini, Oh! Violette, ou La Politesse des végétaux. Eric Losefeld, Paris, 1969. Courtesy The Estate of Leonor Fini

The Witch’s Cradle

M AYA D E R E N

1917, Kyiv, Ukraine – 1961, New York City, USA

“The beginning is the end,” written on a woman’s forehead, wraps around a pentacle – an occult, star-shaped symbol conjuring magical phenomena. The line can be read in a loop; a mantra, perhaps, for experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, who cast actress Pajorita Matta to wander from one ritual to the next in her short film The Witch’s Cradle (1943). This is one of Deren’s lesser-known works, made just before Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), which is regarded as one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema history. Avoiding standard narrative arcs and comprehensible place and time, the connective thread in this unusual story weaves its way from one covert hand to a dark room, snaking up a blazer’s collar and back into open hands. From a close-up of Matta’s nose and lips the film quickly jump-cuts to a man, played by Marcel Duchamp, with string entangling his fingers; then to a beating heart – a lingering shot – making the audience suddenly aware of their own internal rhythm. An integral member of the Greenwich Village bohemian scene, Deren made works that are unflinchingly feminist, anti-establishment, spiritual, and curious and which traversed film, dance, poetry, photography, and theory. Deren died at age 44, but her work left a permanent mark for generations of artists and cinephiles to come. – IA

Maya Deren, The Witch’s Cradle (still), 1943. Film, 12 mins 40 sec. Courtesy The New American Cinema Group, Inc./The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

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LEONOR FINI

1907, Buenos Aires, Argentina 1996, Paris, France

Born in Argentina to Italian parents, at the age of two Leonor Fini fled with her mother to the Italian city of Trieste, escaping her oppressive father. Over the years he would try to bring her back to Argentina, forcing Fini to disguise herself as a boy, sowing the seeds of her masquerades and gender reversals. In the 1930s she met artist Giorgio de Chirico, who would advise her to move to Paris and introduce her to the Surrealists; yet, disavowing André Breton’s traditional view of women, she rejected the invitation to officially join the group. Fini illustrated several famous books, worked for Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and designed costumes for ballet, theatre, and film. The artist was interested in the macabre, a pursuit that is translated into a sensual encounter with the momentarily still body of Nico Papatakis in L’Alcôve (1941). Fini, perched on the side of the bed, admires the body of the androgynous curved male nude chastely lounging in a boudoir framed by voluptuous textured drapery. Exchanging roles, the artist destabilises social mores as the figure refuses traditional male characteristics: power, virility, and stoicism. Exploring dominance and submission, Femme assise sur un homme nu (1942) conveys Fini dressed in bold velvet clothing sitting on a sleeping naked man as she towers over the landscape in the background. Advocating for a greater balance between the male and the female, she sought to depict the Neue Frau (New Woman) that in numerous paintings would be represented through the image of the empowered mythological figure of the hybrid sphinx: part woman, part feline. – LC

Leonor Fini, L’Alcôve, 1941. Oil on canvas, 73 × 97 cm. Photo Nicholas Pishvanov. Collection Rowland Weinstein. Courtesy Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco. © Estate of Leonor Fini

The Witch’s Cradle

J A N E G R AV E R O L

1905, Ixelles, Belgium 1984, Fontainebleau, France

Like the rest of the Belgian Surrealist group that formed around the well-known painter René Magritte, Jane Graverol constructed dreamlike, conceptual images. In a striking departure from her male colleagues’ work, her compositions primarily centre on a proud, determined female figure. Whereas Surrealists tended to show women in the passive role of idealised muse, Graverol instead depicted an erotic female body whose bestial traits blend fairytale with grotesquerie. Angels, phoenixes, dragons, and other winged creatures turn up in her paintings from the very start, but became recurring elements in the 1960s, when the artist began to experiment with collage. The sphinx in L’École de la vanité (1967) exemplifies this approach; taking the ambiguity of the mythological to an extreme, she conveys a femininity that is monstrous, yet aware of its own sensuality. Though her insides are a tangle of machinery, her face is as delicate and seductive as the flower held in her paws. Refusing to consider this vanity a flaw, Graverol presents it as an essential tool for the modern woman, and sees this interweaving of mythology and technology as the way to emancipation. This metamorphosis into a hybrid yields the image of a female figure who can mould her own destiny by turning the parts of her body into weapons of social empowerment. – SM

Jane Graverol, L’École de la Vanité, 1967. Oil and collage on cardboard, 70.5 × 106.5 × 5 cm. Photo Renaud Schrobiltgen. Collection Anne Boschmans. Image courtesy Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

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FLORENCE HENRI

1893, New York City, USA 1982, Compiègne, France

Born in America and raised in Rome, Florence Henri moved to Berlin when she was just twenty. Fascinated by the feminist model of the Neue Frau (New Woman), she depicts the complex, hybrid femininity that was widespread after the war. Like many female artists of her generation, she played with her features to create a fluid identity: in her photographs, the body becomes a collection of signs that, like the abstract compositions of her early paintings, can be dismantled, reassembled, revealed, and concealed. Yet these black-and-white photos seem less linked to the historical avant-gardes than to the Neue Sehen (New Vision) movement. Founded in about 1927 by László Moholy-Nagy, around the time Henri attended the Bauhaus summer school, it favoured a photographic gaze with strong composition and a Surrealist slant. Even when they are not self-portraits or striking images of women’s bodies, Henri’s works create a spatial or compositional ambiguity, employing reflective props like mirrors and techniques like multiple exposure or photomontage to forge an ongoing dialogue between reality and fiction. Whether they show fragments of a Greek statue in front of the sea or objects in the mirror, these photographs present the tension between opposites. Alluding to categories like male and female, nature and artifice, life and death, they try to capture some point of equilibrium. – SM

Florence Henri, Portrait Composition. Petro (Nelly) van Doesburg, c. 1930 / c. 2014. Gelatin silver print, 40.5 × 30 cm. Courtesy Archives Florence Henri; Galleria Martini & Ronchetti Genoa. © Martini & Ronchetti

The Witch’s Cradle

LOÏS MAILOU JONES

1905, Boston, USA 1998, Washington, D.C., USA

For nearly seven decades, Loïs Mailou Jones forged an eclectic artistic path, the profound influence of which linked generations of African American artists across the 20th century, from the Harlem Renaissance through AfriCOBRA. Throughout her career, Jones maintained an enduring engagement with African ceremonial motifs and aesthetics, including patterned textiles and striated Songye kifwebe masks from Central Africa and shiny Dan masks from Ivory Coast and Liberia. During the 1930s and 1940s, artists, writers, and thinkers associated with the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude movements positioned traditional African plastic art forms, especially masks and textiles, in a forward vision of modernity. This searching spirit is exhibited in Africa, a 1935 painting depicting three women – Jones’ most common subject – with chiselled features, gash-like closed eyes, and elaborate gold jewellery, who are surrounded by lush foliage. The trio’s elongated features and flat expressions evoke those often found on African masks, a subject she would also explore in celebrated works like Les Fétiches (1938). In this painting, Jones pays tribute to the foundational role of Africa in the cultural imagination of African American artists at the time, especially for women artists of the diaspora, whose identities were multiple. – MW

Loïs Mailou Jones, Africa, 1935. Oil on canvas on board, 61 × 51 cm. The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina

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I DA KA R

1908, Tambov, Russia 1974, London, UK

One of Ida Kar’s most iconic photographs shows a cast of two female hands, perfectly detailed, emerging from a dark background. The palms are cupped to form a hollow, framed by a rim of unpolished material. This small sculpture bears every resemblance to a religious relic or precious archaeological artefact, but the photograph’s title, Surreal Study (1947), suspends all definitive interpretation. In keeping with the Surrealist notion of dépaysement (defamiliarisation), we might see this sacred gesture as a symbol of motherhood, or as the trace of a magical metamorphosis. Both in Egypt, where Kar had been an active member of the Surrealist group Art et Liberté, and during her years in Paris, she built a photographic practice aimed at overturning all semantic hierarchies. In the 1930s and 1940s, the artist took a series of photographs that depict more or less ordinary objects, yet suggest an alternative – often emotional – interpretation of their features. L’Étreinte (1940), for instance, shows two animal bones still joined by shreds of flesh and standing next to each other like, as the title suggests, two embracing figures. Kar’s photographic eye has plucked these white remains from their original context and infused them with the dramatic, introspective narrative pathos that became her stylistic hallmark. – SM

Ida Kar, Surreal Study, 1947 / c. 2016. Photograph, modern bromide print, 25.4 × 20.6 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London. © National Portrait Gallery, London

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ANTOINET TE LUBAKI

1895, Bukama, Congo Free State (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo) – n.d.

Antoinette Lubaki was born in the village of Bukama at a time when the bloody dictatorship of Leopold II of Belgium was ravaging the Congo Free State and enslaving millions of inhabitants. Although her colourful drawings bear no specific trace of those atrocities, Lubaki’s story was deeply shaped by the exotic allure that Europeans saw in her art and by the ethnographic gaze levelled on all artists from the colonies. In 1926, Belgian administrator and art collector Georges Thiry came across the murals that Lubaki and her husband Albert had painted on huts in Bukama; sensing the interest that they might spark in Belgium, he supplied the materials needed to reproduce them on paper. In the years that followed, Lubaki made drawing after drawing of scenes inspired by Congolese stories, proverbs, and dreams. The vivid silhouettes that inhabit them are arranged in frames that delimit the narrative space and are filled in with a few quick strokes of natural pigment (primarily clay, charcoal, and kaolin). When detractors claimed her drawings were the work of a European impostor, Lubaki’s fame rapidly faded. But even today, these works show a sensibility unparalleled in the world of modern art. – SM

Antoinette Lubaki, Untitled (three characters under a tree), c. 1929. Watercolour on paper, 52 × 66 cm. Photo Fabrice Jousset. Private Collection, Paris. Courtesy MAGNIN-A Gallery, Paris; Cornette de Saint Cyr, Paris. © Antoinette Lubaki

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B AYA M A H I E D D I N E

1931, Fort de l’Eau (present-day Bordj El Kiffan), Algeria – 1998, Blida, Algeria

The first solo exhibition by Baya Mahieddine, born Fatima Haddad, was held at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in the autumn of 1947, when she was barely sixteen. After a childhood in Algeria, she had come to Europe with French intellectual and archivist Marguerite Caminat Benhoura, who adopted her and encouraged her creativity. The talented Baya was immediately embraced by the Parisian avant-garde, earning enthusiastic praise from leading figures on the international scene – starting with André Breton, who wrote the introduction to her first show. Her paintings on cardboard show lush natural landscapes inhabited by richly dressed women adorned with classic Maghrebi motifs. The luminous yellow dress worn by the woman in Femme robe jaune cheveux bleus (1947) emerges from a twilit background as she is attacked by four peacocks and a butterfly; Femme robe à chevrons (1947) shares an eye with the strange bird she appears to be mating with; and the straight and undulating lines running through Femme au panier et coq rouge (1947) bind the plumage of a giant rooster to the dress of the woman beside it. Amid images of wild, flourishing nature, these fairytales reveal a female figure as determined and independent as the young Baya herself. – SM

Baya Mahieddine, Femme au panier et coq rouge, 1947. Gouache on board, 73 × 91.5 cm. Collection Adrien Maeght, Saint Paul. © Photo Galerie Maeght, Paris

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NADJA

1902, Saint-André-lez-Lille, France 1941, Bailleul, France

In 1926, when she first met André Breton in Paris, Léona Delcourt was twenty-four and had decided to call herself Nadja – the beginning of the Russian word nadezhda, hope. In the autobiographical novel Nadja, published in 1928, Breton describes Nadja as hovering between the height of creativity and the depths of madness. In the year following their first encounter, before she entered a psychiatric hospital in 1927, Nadja sent Breton twenty-seven letters that are a flow of memories, loving words, reproaches, doodles, and drawings, signed with the imprint of a kiss in red lipstick. Though they may seem like chaotic ramblings, these messages are the verbal-visual trace of a sensibility perfectly attuned to Surrealism, and appear to combine the psychic automatism embraced by the movement with a personal symbolism difficult to decipher. Among these signs there is a flower that is magical like the entire composition: Nadja calls it “la fleur des amants” and draws its petals like coupled eyes, including it in many drawings as a seal of her love. In one letter to Breton, for instance, the flower is in the jaws of a snake; accompanied by the words “l’enchantment de Nadja,” it shows that the occult forces from which it blooms go far beyond the madness that the modern world attributes to its author. – SM

Nadja, C’est moi, c’est encore moi, 1926. Lipstick and pencil on paper, 9.2 × 11.6 cm. Collection Chancellerie des universités de Paris, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris

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AMY NIMR

1898, Cairo, Egypt 1974, Paris, France

In the early 1930s, when Amy Nimr returned to Egypt after studying painting in England and exhibiting alongside British and French Surrealists, she found Cairo caught up in a new wave of artistic ferment that led to the foundation of the Art et Liberté group in 1938. Her cosmopolitan background and many contacts with European artists gave her a key role in spreading the Surrealist approach among the members of the Egyptian avant-garde. In keeping with the movement’s confrontational 1938 manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art, her works portray an unsettling universe. Untitled (Fish and Skeletons) (1936) and Untitled (Underwater Skeleton) (1942) show human skeletons blurring into the bluish shadows of the underwater world, as sinister-looking fish and plants seem to feed on the scraps of flesh that still cling to their bones. All of the natural elements are depicted with extreme precision, as if in a bestiary or herbarium. In 1943, after a landmine killed Nimr’s eight-year-old son and the Suez Crisis of 1956 forced her to leave Egypt for Paris, she sought refuge in an introspective imaginary that grew even cruder and more visceral; a cathartic tool for easing the burdens of her tragic life and attaining the freedom that the Egyptian Surrealists valued so deeply. – SM

Amy Nimr, Untitled (Underwater Skeleton), 1942. Gouache on wood, 63 × 54.5 × 5 cm. Collection Sheikh Hassan M. A. Al-Thani

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MERET OPPENHEIM

1913, Berlin, Germany 1985, Basel, Switzerland

Meret Oppenheim forged ties to Surrealism when she moved from Switzerland to Paris in 1932 while still in her teens. Though she was one of the few women artists to be immediately welcomed by the movement, Oppenheim thought of Surrealism as ideologically permeable and pursued many avenues of experimentation, exploring dreams, humour, death, womanhood, and nature. In 1936, Oppenheim opened her first solo exhibition at Galerie Marguerite Schulthess in Basel, where she presented Ma gouvernante (1936): two white high-heeled shoes, trussed like a roast chicken and placed bottom-up on a platter. This small sculpture – which like the fur-covered teacup Déjeuner en fourrure (1936), is one of the artist’s earliest and best-known works –, was a perfect indication of the path Oppenheim would follow. The print Der Spiegel der Genoveva (1967), for example, shows the strange metamorphosis of a full-lipped, clearly female figure who seems to be changing into an animal, perhaps a cow. This effect is obtained by combining the woman’s face with a long, hairy leg that serves as a neck, but ends in a hoof. The work hinges on a disquieting image and shows how any material, when taken out of its original context, can acquire a new symbolic status. – SM

Meret Oppenheim, Der Spiegel der Genoveva, 1967. Print, 25 × 17 cm. Private Collection

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VA L E N T I N E P E N R O S E

1898, Mont-de-Marsan, France 1978, Chiddingly, UK

In 1951 the writer and artist Valentine Penrose published Dons des féminines, the story of two upper-middle-class European women on a trip to the East. The “gifts” in the title are the freedom and autonomy claimed by the protagonists, Maria Elona and Rubia, who travel alone, dress like men, and live out their lesbian love story without inhibitions. The intimate relationship between the two women – perhaps inspired by Penrose’s affection for the artist Alice Rahon, with whom she embarked on a similar trip to India in 1936–1937 – is borne out by the wildly eccentric collages that combine images from science and fashion magazines to create magical landscapes where plants, animals, and monsters backdrop the two women’s personal and psychological path of discovery. Predating Dons des féminines by about twenty years, the hallucinatory collages shown here seem crafted from the same dreams. The two women in Ariane (1934) stand in a natural landscape, their bodies framing a city in the distance. This scene is interrupted by a strange golden insect with two human legs, a bizarre creature that affects the composition in the same way as the statue/sideboard that floats over the mountainous landscape in La Stratégie militaire (1934). Both bric-à-brac figures suggest the unexpected impact of the unconscious on even the most familiar aspects of reality. – SM

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ALICE RAHON

1904, Chenecey-Buillon, France 1987, Mexico City, Mexico

Alice Rahon was an integral member of the Surrealist group that lived and worked in Mexico City in the late 1930s. Displaced by World War II, Rahon and her husband, painter Wolfgang Paalen, fled France in 1939, joining André Breton, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo as well as local Mexican artists Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Rahon and her peers found community in exile, and their artwork was informed by the landscape, Indigenous history, and artistic legacies of Mexico. Rahon took a Surrealist approach to all of her work, marrying poetry and myth in an array of media. In Thunderbird (1946), she invokes the aesthetics of prehistoric cave painting, with gestural brushstrokes and contour lines that connect a web of symbolic figures on floating backgrounds. In 1946, a year after the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she created a ballet inspired by the ancient Mayans’ expertise in astronomy. In the ballet, five characters – first imagined through gouache paintings, and then configured as three-dimensional marionettes made of wire – including The Juggler (a magician) and Androgyne (a non-binary gender being), ponder the beginning of life following the destruction of the planet. Rahon was able to channel the spiritual energy of ancestral cultures and did so through a plethora of artistic expressions. – IA

Alice Rahon, The Juggler, 1946. Wire marionette, 58 × 38 × 12 cm. Collection Francisco Magaña Moheno and Carlos Santos

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C A RO L RA M A

1918 – 2015, Turin, Italy

Born into a solidly middle-class family in Turin, Olga Carolina Rama – better known as Carol Rama – taught herself to draw, and in the late 1930s and early 1940s began making watercolours that served as a tool for processing the many traumas of her life. Her father’s suicide in 1942, the political tensions and economic crisis leading up to the war, the bombings, evacuation, and her mother’s committal to a psychiatric hospital were all transformed into powerful visions painted in a charged, anarchic style, where the female body becomes the epicentre of deep mental and physical tensions. In Nonna Carolina (1936) she portrays the title character with a pained expression and a neck full of leeches, while in Appassionata (1941) she depicts the identity crisis of the mental patients that her mother lived among. Although most of these women seem disoriented and are clearly disabled, Rama shows their bodies gripped by a sexual desire too overwhelming to be controlled, even when they are in restraints. Completely naked – except for high-heeled shoes – they are explicitly engaged in self-pleasure or in coupling with other patients, as lush vegetation blooms from their hair. With their brazen yet naive shamelessness, these women are the heroines of Rama’s universe. – SM

Carol Rama, Appassionata, 1941. Watercolour on paper, 33 × 23 cm. Photo Sebastiano Pellion. Private Collection

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EDITH RIMMINGTON

1902, Leicester, UK – 1986, Bexhill-on-Sea, UK

Only when Surrealist artists scattered abroad between the two world wars did the style spread to other countries and become a touchstone for younger generations. Edith Rimmington came in contact with it in 1936 at the first international exhibition of Surrealists at the New Burlington Galleries in London; she joined the movement the following year. Rimmington drew on oneiric imagery and Freudian theories: her paintings and collages turn dreams, imagination, and exuberance into tools for redeeming even the harshest reality. Her anthropomorphic or fragmented figures inhabit crumbling or derelict structures, but have special talents, like interpreting dreams (The Oneiroscopist, 1947); they represent the possibility of granting a different meaning to any traumatic experience. The Decoy (1948) shows a flayed hand dangling down from the upper edge, surrounded by a myriad of colourful butterflies. Like the caterpillars and cocoons that have colonised its insides, they seem to ease its decomposition. The bright hues and scientific accuracy in depicting the species – which are all native to Great Britain – hint at the rebirth of the flesh, putting an optimistic slant on the horror of putrefaction. The metamorphosis Rimmington alludes to is that of nature: spectacular, resilient, decadent, and entrancing, it can blossom from the deepest human fears and repair the damage they have caused. – SM

Edith Rimmington, The Decoy, 1948. Oil on canvas, 35.5 × 30.5 cm. National Galleries of Scotland. Purchased by the Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland 2002

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E N I F RO B E RT

1886, Prato, Italy – 1974, Bologna, Italy

In the experimental novel Un ventre di donna. Romanzo chirurgico (1919), the Tuscan actor and writer Enif Robert tells the story of a woman who has her uterus removed following an inflammatory disease. The story describes the protagonist’s suffering during her recovery, and – interspersed with parolibere (liberated words) and letters that her friend Marinetti sent her from the front – describes the surgery as her own private, feminist war. Defying her gynaecologist, who objected to the idea of making her sterile, Robert emphasises the advantages of her hysterectomy; she declares herself free of the volubility that society associated with women, and thus finally capable of true, Futurist creativity. The cover illustration by Lucio Venna for the book’s first reprint perfectly sums up the author’s intentions: portraying a slim, fashionable female figure, it shows Robert as a woman reinvigorated by her battle against the doctor sitting behind her. In her contributions to the Florentine journal L’Italia futurista (1916–1918) – and above all her parolibere compositions of 1917 Malattia+infezione and Sensazioni chirurgiche – Robert had already suggested a link between bodily health and the mind. But while those works were meant to rouse the political conscience of a nation at war, Un ventre di donna emphasises the need to consider the female body invested with a new independence, and points to the possibility of changing one’s destiny, even through invasive bodily transformations. – SM

Enif Robert, Malattia + infezione, 1917. Article published in L’Italia futurista (Milan), 19, 1917, p. 3

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RO SA RO SÀ

1884, Vienna, Austria – 1978, Rome, Italy

Rosa Rosà is the Futurist pseudonym that artist Edith von Haynau adopted around 1908, when she came to Italy from Vienna and became a feminist contributor to L’Italia futurista. She published articles and parolibere (liberated words) compositions that defied the notorious misogyny of the Futurist movement, championing a proud, emancipated female identity. One of her bolder pieces, Le donne del posdomani (1917), praises women’s heroic courage in bearing the burdens of war, inviting them to preserve the same mettle when their husbands return from the front. In an updated version, Rosà even calls for a revolution in gender norms, urging the “women of the day after tomorrow” to take a metaphorically more virile attitude to avoid being crushed by the overwhelming experience of motherhood. Her arguments are accompanied by an abstract illustration: the title Conflagrazione geometrica, in block letters down the right side, lets the drawing be interpreted as a conflict between opposing forces, with black-and-white geometric shapes representing the tumultuous social, physical, and psychological metamorphoses faced by the Futurist woman. Like other women in the Florentine group, which was known as the Pattuglia Azzurra, Rosà approached the movement with positions far removed from the bombast of her male colleagues. – SM

Rosa Rosà, Una donna con tre anime. Romanzo futurista (illustration). Edizioni delle donne, Milan, 1981 (originally published in 1918)

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A U G U S TA S AVA G E

1892, Green Cove Springs, USA 1962, New York City, USA

Augusta Savage is regarded as one of the great artist-educator-activists of the Harlem Renaissance, throughout which she forged a pioneering career as a sculptor. Many of Savage’s touchstone works are expressive portrait busts of Black leaders, but her biggest and best-known piece is one that no longer exists. In 1937, Savage received a commission from the New York World’s Fair to create a sculpture for the international exposition. Inspired by the song Lift Every Voice and Sing by civil rights activist and poet James Weldon Johnson, Savage transformed his hymn into a monumental sculpture, retitled by fair organisers as The Harp. At nearly five metres tall, the mammoth plaster-cast object was finished to look like black basalt, from which a group of singers in neatly pleated robes arose like columns in graduated heights. Meant to symbolise the strings of a harp – and the liberatory message of Johnson’s work – the soundboard takes the form of an arm while a man donning everyday pants and shoes kneels. When the work debuted in 1939 at the World’s Fair’s, no funds were available to cast it in bronze or store it. It was destroyed after the fair ended; left behind are only preparatory models, including the bronze presented in Venice, to record the colossal power of this essential work of the Harlem Renaissance. – MW

Augusta Savage, Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp), 1939. Bronze, 27.3 × 24.1 × 10.2 cm. Photo Ryan Fairbrother. Courtesy Thomas G. Carpenter Library, Special Collections and University Archives, Jacksonville, FL: University of North Florida

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D O R O T H E A TA N N I N G

1910, Galesburg, USA 2012, New York City, USA

Painter, sculptor, and writer Dorothea Tanning was first drawn to Surrealism after visiting the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–1937) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She began acquainting herself with its members, driven from Europe during War World II in the early 1940s. Tanning engaged in the Surrealist exploration of dreams as the manifestation of repressed, unconscious thoughts in paintings that combine the familiar with the unfamiliar to explore parallel realms, fears, desires, and sexuality. In contrast to the roles forced upon women within Surrealist discourse, Tanning’s female figures refute fixed identities. Endowed with agency, they are charged with the representation of perpetual kinetic states of becoming. Avatar (1947) depicts a young girl with eyes shut as she swings on a circus trapeze, a dress or shell shaped by the absence of a body dangling behind her, across the ceiling of a Victorian bedroom decorated with flower wallpaper. Unknown forces of the unconscious imagination intrude upon the domestic space. Conflating fantasy and reality, Deirdre (1940) depicts the portrait of a woman with evergreen locks of hair and a pearly complexion dressed in knotted red drapery. With the figure’s hair metamorphosing into a plant, Tanning points towards the potential of the transformative power of nature. – LC

Dorothea Tanning, Avatar, 1947. Oil on canvas, 35.6 × 27.9 cm. Private Collection, Chicago. Courtesy The Dorothea Tanning Foundation

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T OY E N

1902, Prague, Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Czech Republic) – 1980, Paris, France

In 1925, when she moved to the epicentre of international Surrealism in Paris, Marie Čermínová was just twenty years old and a member of the Czech avant-garde movement Devětsil. A few years before this, she had also adopted the pseudonym Toyen: inspired by the French word citoyen (citizen), it avoided strong connotations of gender (she also used first-person masculine constructions in Czech). Toyen switched between male and female clothing, proclaimed attraction to women, and expressed – above all through art – a sexuality freed of all curbs and constraints.1 From the smallest illustration to the largest oil painting, almost all of Toyen’s works are highly erotic. The many women in these images by turns seem strong and vulnerable: always on the point of becoming fearsome predators or shattered porcelain dolls. In keeping with the ambiguous title – which might refer to military training –, each of the twelve drawings in the portfolio The Shooting Gallery (Střelnice) (1939–1940) shows a different postwar scene; amid fragments of buildings and corpses of animals, the only survivors that emerge are faceless girls or huge broken toys. In quintessentially Surrealist fashion, they lend themselves to many different interpretations. – SM 1 The gender fluidity central to Toyen’s persona and the themes addressed by her work have led many to suggest that this artist could have been non-binary or trans. Since there is no clear answer to the question and to avoid the risk of rewriting the past, we have chosen to use female pronouns here. This choice is not meant to deny the validity of other views.

Toyen, The Shooting Gallery (Střelnice), 1939–1940. Portfolio of 12 photo-lithographs, 32 × 44 cm each. Originally published by Fr. Borový, Prague, 1946

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T RO P I QU E S

1941 – 1945, Fort-de-France, Martinique

In the 1920s, an invigorating new sense of identity swept through the international communities of the African diaspora. Paris, in particular, attracted a growing number of Black intellectuals, especially from Africa and the Caribbean, many of whom founded sleek literary and art journals that became arenas of heated ideological debate. In one of these, L’Etudiant noir (1935), Martinican poet Aimé Césaire discussed the disastrous cultural effects of French colonial policies and declared that Black youth were ready to celebrate their Négritude in art and literature. Césaire’s words inspired enormous optimism; reaching the colonies, they sparked the first Pan-African intellectual movement in the Francophone world. In 1941 Césaire returned to Martinique, where he founded the magazine Tropiques, along with his wife Suzanne Césaire and his friend René Ménil. For four years the journal published poetry, essays, and stories by leading Black international authors, presenting its own unique approach to Surrealism. While French Surrealists tended to flee from reality into the imagination, the editorial board of Tropiques seemed to have their eyes set on poetically militant goals. Because – even according to Suzanne Césaire – dream and metaphor are the only tools that can move beyond the dreary contrasts between Black and white, European and African. – SM

Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil (eds.), Tropiques, 2, July 1941 (magazine cover). Gift of Friends of the Thomas J. Watson Library (PQ3940.A47 no.2 [July 1941]). New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. © 2022. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Firenze

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R E M E D I O S VA R O

1908, Anglès, Spain 1963, Mexico City, Mexico

Born in Anglès in 1908, Remedios Varo moved to Paris in 1937 with her second husband, the French poet Benjamin Péret who would introduce her to the Surrealist circle. In Paris, Varo departed from academic painting, drawn to the study of the occult and alchemical mysticism as well as fairy tales, anthropology, astronomy, and Freudian psychoanalysis. Distinct to the artist’s painting technique was the use of inlays of mother-of-pearl, a material she claimed paved the path towards enlightenment. Having fled Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, she was again forced to flee from Paris during the Nazi occupation, immigrating to Mexico City in 1941. There, Varo forged close relationships with fellow European Surrealists, especially British painter Leonora Carrington and Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. Sharing a proclivity for witchcraft, alchemy, and the occult, together they would be known as the “three witches.” In Simpatía (La rabia del gato) (1955), human and animal appear as celestial projections tethered to a constellation that pricks the walls of an empty interior. Armonía (Autorretrato sugerente) (1956) shows a woman placing crystals onto a physicalised musical stave, aided by anthropomorphic figures that emerge from a nave-like studio’s peeling walls. These enigmatic paintings are example of Varo’s deployment of uncanny juxtapositions that serve to conjure ethereal atmospheres. – LC

Remedios Varo, Armonía (Autorretrato sugerente), 1956. Oil on masonite, 75 × 92.7 cm. Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires

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M E TA VA U X WA R R I C K F U L L E R

1877, Philadelphia, USA 1968, Framingham, USA

Frequently cited as an important predecessor to the Harlem Renaissance, the sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller is most famous for her allegorical works that examine diasporic identity and engage with Pan-Africanist visual motifs, at a time when themes addressing the experience of the African American community were frequently suppressed in mainstream culture. She did this when Black women were too rarely given the opportunity to seek formal artistic training. During her time in Paris, she met political theorist and editor of The Crisis W.E.B. Du Bois, who would later provide her with major sculptural commissions, including for her famous 1921 work Ethiopia Awakening. Commissioned to make an allegorical piece about the nation of Ethiopia, Fuller produced the 35 cm polychrome plaster maquette presented in Venice as a study for a larger bronze sculpture, which was later included in the 1921 America’s Making Exposition. The sculpture, which portrays a lithe Black woman unwrapping herself from an ancient Egyptian funerary dress, her right hand holding up the end of the white fabric upon her chest, reflects an attitude also popularised in the early days of the Harlem Renaissance by Du Bois in the pages of The Crisis: an intense interest in an imagined “Africa” – especially Ancient Egypt and Ethiopia – as a new articulation of African American culture identity. – MW

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, maquette for Ethiopia Awakening, 1921. Painted plaster, 35.3 × 8.25 × 12.7 cm. Photo Will Howcroft. Danforth Art Museum at Framingham State University. Gift of the Meta V. W. Fuller Trust. Courtesy the Meta V. W. Fuller Trust

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L A U R A W H E E L E R WA R I N G

1887, Hartford, USA 1948, Philadelphia, USA

Laura Wheeler Waring was an African American painter, illustrator, and educator, known for her vibrant portraits made throughout the 1920s and 1930s, which often portrayed Harlem Renaissance luminaries. A civil rights advocate, Waring frequently contributed illustrations to the magazine The Crisis – a literary and political publication of vital significance to intellectual life throughout the Harlem Renaissance, aimed to strengthen solidarity between members of the African diaspora. Under W.E.B. Du Bois’ editorship, Waring provided graceful line drawings of women and children, which appeared on the cover and inside the magazine at least twenty times between 1917 and 1932, including many covers for the annual Christmas issue. Illustrations on the April 1923 and September 1924 covers, marked by Waring’s signature delicate Art Deco and Arts and Crafts-inspired decorative style, express a coming together of the contemporary moment and an imagined African continental history, which was frequently envisioned by Pan-Africanists through idealised visions of Ancient Egypt. On the September 1924 cover, figures don Ancient Egyptian dress but the story the image tells seems hardly from ancient times and opens to a new era: in it, a male attendant waits on the central female figure as she takes a lion for a walk. – MW

Laura Wheeler Waring, The Crisis, September 1924 (cover illustration). Courtesy Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library

The Witch’s Cradle

M A RY W I G M A N

1886, Hanover, Germany 1973, Berlin, Germany

Mary Wigman was the leading figure in Ausdruckstanz, an expressionist style of German choreography that revolutionised dance at the turn of the 20th century, dismantling ballet’s technical perfection and idealised stories. Wigman’s approach, honed over years of working alongside the famous teacher and theorist Rudolf Laban, constructed a vocabulary of movement capable of conveying the dancer’s emotional impulses. Starting with her debut piece Hexentanz (1914), she strove for a sense of pure austerity: the stage is often bare, inhabited only by a barefooted dancer in a simple costume. In the only footage that remains from a 1930 performance of her iconic dance, Wigman seems to be in a trance; a witch focused on mustering her deep-rooted powers. Moving to the rhythm of intermittent percussion music, she is sitting on the ground, hands gripping something invisible. Her face is covered by a mask, and the curves of her body by a long brocade tunic. In addition to celebrating the body’s potential, Wigman’s performances became tools for addressing urgent issues of modern life, such as the social role of women or the policies of German nationalism. Like many dancers of her generation, Wigman told stories centred on an independent female figure who is aware of her own unsettling power. – SM

Mary Wigman, Mary Wigman tanzt (still), 1932. Film, c. 10 mins. Collection Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin. Film: K164573-1. © Mary Wigman Stiftung / Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln

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CECILIA VICUÑA

1948, Santiago, Chile Lives in New York City, USA

First produced during the artist’s exile following the violent CIA-supported and Pinochet-led military coup against Salvador Allende in early 1970s Chile, Cecilia Vicuña’s work is marked by a distinct feeling of transience, often expressed through abstract, ephemeral works made with found materials. In 1966, she began her still-ongoing project of anti-monumental constructions known as precarios. Often these sculptures are left untouched, exposed to the forces of weather and tides. In new precarios such as NAUfraga (2022), composed of ropes and debris found around Venice, the power of Vicuña’s oppositional politics remains potent: taken from the Latin words navis (ship) and frangere (to break), NAUfraga suggests the exploitation of the Earth, which has caused Venice to slowly sink into the sea. Vicuña’s paintings evidence her indebtedness to Indigenous ways of thinking. Leoparda de Ojitos (1977) and La Comegente (1971) take inspiration from 16th century paintings by Incan artists in Cuzco, Peru, who were forced to convert to Catholicism and both paint and worship Spanish religious icons. In the fantastical Leoparda de Ojitos, the titular leopard stands between a pink and green tree in a coat of fur spotted with eyeballs, openly displaying her genitals. Expressive of a decolonial method of portraiture, Vicuña’s paintings rebel against the form by putting an Indigenous woman’s imagination at the centre. – MW Cecilia Vicuña, Leoparda de Ojitos, 1977. Oil on canvas, 140 × 89.5 cm. Collection Beth Rudin DeWoody. Courtesy the Artist; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, London. © 2022, Cecilia Vicuña

MRINALINI MUKHERJEE

1949, Bombay (present-day Mumbai), India 2015, New Delhi, India

Born to artist parents in post-partition Bombay and raised in Santiniketan, a utopian community in West Bengal, Mrinalini Mukherjee worked intensively with fibre – and later, bronze and ceramic – for most of her four-decade career, creating an extensive body of work that fused abstraction and figuration with influences from nature, ancient Indian sculpture, modern design, and local craft and textile tradition. In her earliest works, botanic-inspired wall hangings prepared from natural rope made in the early 1970s, Mukherjee experimented intuitively with the ancient Arabic hand-knotting weaving technique of macramé, which she used throughout her life, creating increasingly daring and monumental soft sculptures, which stand tall like divinities. As Mukherjee streamlined her material methodology throughout the 1970s – a handwrought process that involved acquiring and sorting through heavy bundles of rope purchased from New Delhi markets – she conceptualised an increasingly organic approach to her forms. Sometimes suspended from the ceiling, at other times freestanding or positioned against a wall, Mukherjee’s massive sculptures take on characteristics of the living: hued in vegetal oranges, yellows, and purples, voluptuous works like Rudra, Devi (both 1982) and Vanshree (1994), project human sensuality, with folds and bulges closely resembling sexual organs. – MW

Exhibition view, Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Breuer, 2019, New York City, 2019. © Photo Scala Firenze / © 2022. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Firenze

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M E R I KO K E B B E R H A N U

1977, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Lives in Silver Spring, USA

Brimming with abstract forms, at the blink of an eye Merikokeb Berhanu’s canvases become recognisable cosmologies and topographies, bearing with them evocations of nature and its universal rhythms. Berhanu’s series Cellular Universe pays homage to the cellular composition and reproductive bodies shared by many species: the rings of trees, embryos, orange seed pods, the brain, Fallopian tubes, and other such familiar forms. The artist, who hails from Addis Ababa, has inherited much from the legacies of Ethiopian Modernism. Her works feature depthless space, with figures and swaths of single-tone geometric shapes floating overlaid and intermingling with one another. In her most recent works, Berhanu has deepened her exploration of human design with the increased inclusion of technological objects, such as circuit boards and microchips. In Untitled LXX (2021), a cow floats inside an elliptical womb. Another looks over it from outside, perhaps a mother cow watching over her child. A green-wired motherboard hovers under the calf, like a dystopian, digital amniotic fluid. Berhanu incorporates technology into natural landscapes and organisms to convey a sense of urgency, speaking at once to the experience of rapid urbanisation that is taking hold in the country and continent of her birth, and also to the rampant consumerism of Western society. – IA

Merikokeb Berhanu, Untitled LIX, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 152.4 × 122 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Addis Fine Art. © Merikokeb Berhanu

A KO S UA A D O M A OW U S U

1984, Alexandria, USA Lives in New York City and Cambridge, USA

Akosua Adoma Owusu’s surreal and subversive films are poetic hybrids that incorporate folklore, archival and found footage, Black pop culture icons, scenes of daily life, oral histories, and semi-autobiographical experiences. Owusu, who is first-generation Ghanaian American, addresses vexing issues of cultural memory and processes of assimilation for members of the African diaspora, including those like herself who were born in the US. Owusu appends scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness – the concept of the “warring” and irreconcilable ideals within African American identities – to encompass a “triple consciousness” or “third cinematic space,” contending with the conflicts and difficulties for African immigrants, women, or queer people existing between variable consciousnesses. Owusu’s 2013 short film Kwaku Ananse establishes her theoretical perspective, bringing together the mischievous folktale hero Ananse with a semi-autobiographical tale about a young woman grappling with family, existential crisis, the death of her estranged father – and her double life in the US. In Owusu’s interpretation, the young woman, who seeks the advice of Ananse, is shown preserving folkloric traditions, while also grappling with the truth that every individual has multiple conflicting aspects to their identity. – MW

Akosua Adoma Owusu, Kwaku Ananse (still), 2013. Video, 26 mins. Photo Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio. Courtesy the Artist; Obibini Pictures. © Akosua Adoma Owusu

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K U D Z A N A I -V I O L E T H WA M I

1993, Gutu, Zimbabwe Lives in London, UK

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s paintings draw upon her years growing up in Zimbabwe and South Africa to examine the ways we exist together and experience one another in an increasingly digital world. Hwami integrates visual fragments from a variety of sources in her canvases, including portraits, self-portraits, and images gleaned from the Internet. Elements repeat, as if one sees them through a family photo album or the scrolling feed of social media. Hwami’s installation for The Milk of Dreams comprises a room filled by floor-to-ceiling black-and-white vinyl photographs, each holding a single painting accompanied by an audio track. The installation is inspired by Zimbabwean sculptor Henry Munyaradzi’s (1931–1988) The Wedding of the Astronauts (1983–1994), a three-sided sculpture carved in soapstone. The work depicts a Shona wedding ceremony, with a preacher, the blessing of the birds, and the couple exploring the heavens, scenes that Hwami’s paintings mirror through the photographs she took on recent travels to Zimbabwe and South Africa and the audio she recorded at a Bira, or funeral procession ceremony in Zimbabwe. The work reflects Hwami’s investment in magical realism and Afro-Futurism, balancing Shona cosmology and Christianity, individuality and community, nature and humanity. – MK Kudzanai-Violet Hwami is one of the four recipients of the grant for the inaugural edition of Biennale College Arte, launched in 2021. Participation out of competition.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, A theory on Adam, 2020. Oil on canvas, silk screen, 200 × 200 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Victoria Miro. © Kudzanai-Violet Hwami

GABRIELLE L’ H I RON D E L L E H I L L

1979, Comox, Canada Lives on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples

Métis artist and writer Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s work challenges the notion of the city as a “settled” place while laying bare the material history of colonisation. Hill collects detritus like beer can tabs, dollar store lockets, and dandelions, incorporating these found objects into sculptures and works on paper that, since 2018, she has called Spells – drawings coated in tobacco-infused crisco. This practice both foregrounds the magic and power of discarded objects and throws into question the illegality of trespassing and the resale of goods. Many of Hill’s sculptures are made by stuffing pantyhose with ground tobacco. Before colonisation, tobacco was one of the most widely exchanged materials in the Americas; in Indigenous communities, it is still shared today as part of a complex reciprocal economy. Sculptures like Counterblaste (2021) thus serve as symbols for colonial governments’ imposition of capitalism onto Indigenous peoples, as well as a reminder of Indigenous cultures’ endurance in the present. The proportions of Disintegration and Dispersal (both 2019), both flags sewn from dried tobacco leaves, are based on the US dollar bill; they might call to mind the “tobacco notes” that were among the first forms of paper currency in British North American colonies. Hill’s evocative remixing of materials critiques settler colonialism while honoring expansive economic models that find power in reciprocity. – IW Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Exchange, 2019. Pantyhose, tobacco, cigarettes, thread, tobacco flowers, aluminium can tabs, spider charm, found metal hair clip, 43.9 × 51.3 × 79.7 cm. Photo Cemrenaz Uyguner. Courtesy the Artist; Unit 17, Vancouver. © Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

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S I M O N E FAT TA L

1942, Damascus, Syria Lives in Paris and Erquy, France

Born in Damascus, artist and writer Simone Fattal grew up in Lebanon and studied philosophy at Beirut’s École des lettres and Paris’ Sorbonne. Returning to Beirut in 1969, she began creating paintings and sculptures in a small live-in studio. In 1980, during the Lebanese Civil War, Fattal relocated to Sausalito, California, with her partner, the poet and painter Etel Adnan. There, she founded the Post-Apollo Press, a publisher devoted to innovative and experimental literary work. In 1988, Fattal returned to her artistic practice, creating sculptures that often appear as if recently excavated from an ancient archaeological site. Her figures employ minimum recognisable detail: two wide columns become legs, a connecting piece of clay the torso or head, and a slight lean to the side a gesture. Her sculptures follow a transformation of the human spirit into material form, both seeking and denying an underlying essence. For The Milk of Dreams, Fattal presents a sculptural installation in the outdoor sculpture garden designed by famed architect Carlo Scarpa within the Central Pavilion. The installation includes Adam and Eve (2021), a bronze cast of one of her first ceramic sculptures. Fattal has also produced three new sculptures, two in ceramic and one in bronze, combining abstract motifs with human form. – MK

Simone Fattal, Adam and Eve, 2019. Bronze, Adam: 73 × 22.5 × 39.5 cm; Eve: 47.3 × 26 × 19.5 cm. Photo Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the Artist. © Simone Fattal

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D J U NA BA R N E S M I R E L L A B E N T I VO G L I O A N D A N N A L I SA A L L OAT T I T O M A S O B I N GA M I L LY C A N AV E RO M I N N I E E VA N S I L S E GA R N I E R L I N DA GA ZZ E RA G E O RG I A N A H O U G H T O N M I NA L OY J OYC E M A N S O U R S I S T E R G E RT RU D E M O RGA N E U SA P I A PA L L A D I N O G I S È L E P RA S S I N O S A L I C E RA H O N G I OVA N N A SA N D R I HÉLÈNE SMITH M A RY E L L E N S O LT J O S E FA T O L RÀ UNICA ZÜRN

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The exhibition Materializzazione del linguaggio, curated by artist Mirella Bentivoglio as part of the 38th International Art Exhibition in 1978, included eighty artists – some of whom are featured in the current presentation – working primarily in Visual or Concrete Poetry, wherein the way that writing looks is as critical as what it means. Its ground-breaking introduction of an all-female group of artists to an overwhelmingly masculine context (a critic dubbed the display as the Biennale’s “pink ghetto”) envisioned textual art as a means for women artists to rewrite themselves, as well as their place in art history. Conceived, in part, as a response to Bentivoglio’s exhibition, this display gathers artists and writers spanning the 19th and 20th centuries who employ expanded forms of textual production as tools for emancipation and the practice of difference. Many of the artists included here – Tomaso Binga, Ilse Garnier, and Mary Ellen Solt – used Concrete poems to deconstruct the linearity associated with traditional text and classical narration. Here, however, writing is also understood as a bodily or spiritual practice. The mid-19th century saw a global revival of interest in Spiritualism and mediumistic practices that were largely the domain of female practitioners. In that context, Linda Gazzera performed mediumistic demonstrations with spiritual viscera appearing from thin air; Josefa Tolrà similarly claimed that her drawings were guided by spiritual entities she encountered while in a state of trance. Georgiana Houghton, Eusapia Palladino, and Hélène Smith used their own bodies as tools to communicate with spirits from other planets or dimensions, creating drawings, casts, and paintings that were received as messages from worlds beyond our own. While these artists were embedded in the world of Spiritualism, Sister Gertrude Morgan and Minnie Evans employed “automatic” processes to make paintings and drawings that convey visions, dreams, and hallucinations, treating artistic creation as the expression of an unconscious and deeply personal language. In the works and writings of Djuna Barnes, Joyce Mansour, and Unica Zürn, meanwhile, imaginary fabulation provides the opportunity to envision alternative worlds and freedom from male-centric language and culture. In each of these artists’ experiences, writing is reconfigured as a corporeal, visceral, and deeply creative practice with the potential to challenge established structures of power. Their writings embody what the French literary theorist Hélène Cixous described, in her 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” as écriture féminine (women’s writing), a style of writing that is peculiar to women and that reacts against the female voice’s suppression within the dominant, masculinist systems of language. As Cixous urges: “Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.”

Unidentified photographer, Séance with Palladino, 1909. Archive of the “Cesare Lombroso” Museum of Criminal Anthropology, University of Turin. © “Cesare Lombroso” Museum

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DJUNA BARNES

1892 – 1982, New York City, USA

In 1928, the American writer and journalist Djuna Barnes privately published Ladies Almanack, a literary experiment blending prose, poetry, drawings, and even bars of music. The book tells the tale of Dame Evangeline Musset and her whimsically named friends – Patience Scalpel, Doll Furious, and Señorita Fly-About – who freely, frivolously, proudly enjoy their homosexuality. Even on the cover, the “Members of the Sect,” as Barnes calls them, are portrayed as an army of bellicose adventuresses, fashionably dressed and riding white horses, as they put to rout a worried-looking knight. While the book is clearly a declaration of war on men, the web of words and images is so dense that the narrative becomes cryptic. It is punctuated by a series of satirical vignettes, titled after the months of the year and brimming with astrological symbols connected to the “almanac” theme. When she dedicated this book to her partner and fellow artist Thelma Wood, Barnes was in the middle of the decade she spent in Paris surrounded by a circle of women including Natalie Clifford Barney, Mina Loy, and Dorothy Wilde, and the novel shows an unusual cheerfulness for her writing. – SM

Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 1928. Illustrations. Published by Edward W. Titus, Paris, 1928. Courtesy Djuna Barnes papers. Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries. Authors League Fund and St. Bride’s Church, as joint literary executors of the Estate of Djuna Barnes

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M I R E L LA B E N T I VO G L I O

1922, Klagenfurt, Austria – 2017, Rome, Italy

In collaboration with

1926 – 2000, Turin, Italy

A N N A L I S A A L L O AT T I Italian poet, artist, and curator Mirella Bentivoglio’s graphic experiments employ Concrete and Visual Poetry to combine feminist and avant-garde discourses. She became a key figure in the international movements tied to verbal-visual experimentations, promoting the work of fellow female artists working with the same approach. Between 1971 and 1981 Bentivoglio curated fourteen exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including Materializzazione del linguaggio, held at the Magazzini del sale for the 38th International Art Exhibition. That exhibition – the first dedicated to women artists working with language as their chosen medium – presented the work of eighty Italian and international female artists. Storia del monumento (1968), a portfolio including six silkscreen works on paper, was realised in collaboration with artist Annalisa Alloatti. Across its pages the artists mutate the Italian word “monumento,” highlighting the linguistic fragments it contains: nume, meaning “godlike;” me non tu, or “me not you;” muto, meaning “I am mutating;” and temo, “I fear.” Bentivoglio and Alloatti dismantle the imposing significance of the monument as an abstract idea by extricating, sabotaging, and untethering language from predefined dialogical positions, rejecting standardised patriarchal discourse while also reclaiming and re-establishing their own subjectivities. – LC

Mirella Bentivoglio in collaboration with Annalisa Alloatti, Storia del monumento, portfolio containing 6 lithographs, 35 × 25 cm. De Luca Editore, 1968. Photo Riccardo Ragazzi. Archivio Mirella Bentivoglio; Collection Paolo Cortese. Courtesy Gramma_ Epsilon Gallery, Athens. © Mirella Bentivoglio

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TOMASO BINGA

1931, Salerno, Italy. Lives in Rome, Italy

In 1977, at Rome’s Campo D gallery, Bianca Menna – née Pucciarelli – wed her own alter ego Tomaso Binga in a ceremony that marked the metamorphosis of woman into artist. Her wry choice of a male pseudonym sums up the language games underlying her practice. Over her long career, Tomaso Binga has been a performer, poet, and visual artist, using words and actions to undermine patriarchal constructs. She has acted out the letters of the alphabet like a carnal primer, telling the story of an independent woman (Scrittura vivente, 1976), and obsessively inscribed panels, notebooks, clothing, and wallpaper to free herself of meaning and overturn linguistic conventions (Scrittura desemantizzata, 1972–1974). Her work took on shades of Concrete Poetry in the late 1970s, when Mirella Bentivoglio invited her to take part in Materializzazione del Linguaggio at the Biennale Arte 1978. The squares of her Dattilocodici are made by re-printing an ideogram that superimposes two typewritten graphemes in two colours at regular intervals. By combining an i with a 9 or a 7 or a j, the artist strips the original numbers and letters of their identity. The ideograms extend a verbal-visual invitation: if, as Binga believes, writing does not equate to describing, then readers can project their own subjectivity onto these texts. – SM

Tomaso Binga, Dattilocodice (plate 10), 1978. Typewriting, ink on paper, 55 × 50 cm. Photo Danilo Donzelli. Courtesy the Artist; Richard Saltoun, London

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M I L LY C A N AV E R O

1920 – 2010, Genoa, Italy

A handful of “spirit drawings” by Milly Canavero are the only remaining trace of a private, independent life cloaked in mystery. In 1973, after a chance encounter with a professional medium, she began producing a series of compositions – at first drawn with the aid of a planchette (a Ouija board for automatic writing) – which she believed to be messages from extraterrestrial forces. Canavero produced them with a precision achieved through obsessive, seamless movements: after laying out a set of circles, ovals, or spirals, the artist cut through the composition with spiky shapes resembling upward arrows, straight lines, triangles, and a strange hieroglyphic alphabet. In the series exhibited here, Untitled (1982–1986), these alphanumeric codes have been added after the initial sketch to specify its meaning or aid interpretation. Though her tendency to use unknown languages makes her practice comparable to the glossolalia of mediums, the distinctive aspect of Canavero’s work is the unusual order of her pictographic writing process, and the fact that it did not stem from altered mental or physical states. In keeping with the occult views at the root of her practice, these spirit drawings are not just the result of inward and physical movements, but rather traces of a cosmological experience still shaped by reality. – SM

Milly Canavero, Untitled, 1985. Marker on paper, 46.5 × 65 cm. Photo Elmar R. Gruber. The Elmar R. Gruber Collection of Mediumistic Art. © Elmar R. Gruber

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M I N N I E E VA N S

1892, Long Creek, USA 1987, Wilmington, USA

Born in a log cabin in North Carolina at the end of the 19th century, Minnie Evans became an artist late in life – and far outside the academic mainstream. A descendent of a Trinidadian slave, with no formal education beyond the sixth grade, Evans grew up a devout Baptist, long fascinated with the cosmology of her faith. Throughout her childhood, she was troubled by overpowering dreams and waking visions. Her drawings are rife with religious symbology, chimerical creatures, spiralling botanicals, and riotous colours. Evans’ work from the 1940s such as untitled (1943), with its delicate bands of leaves and flowers crowned by a bumble bee, was likewise influenced by the lush plant life at the Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she was employed as a gatekeeper and often painted while on the job. Later pieces demonstrate her experiments with a denser, highly pigmented style, characterised by symmetrical compositions anchored by faces and surrounded by curvilinear arrangements of vegetation, butterflies, and rainbows. In these emblematic floral abstractions, Evans relays her visions, interpreting her deep spirituality through her own dynamic personal style. – MW

Minnie Evans, untitled, 1967. Oil, ink, paper on board, 36.83 × 49.53 cm. Courtesy The Museum + The Gallery of Everything, London

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ILSE GARNIER

1927, Kaiserslautern, Germany 2020, Saisseval, France

The first version of Blason du corps féminin, from 1979, is a concrete poem by French artist Ilse Garnier realized on forty-six sheets of paper. In the introduction, her husband and fellow artist Pierre Garnier explains that his wife’s writing is a compelling approach to depicting the poetic power of the female body that has been sapped by the patriarchal vision of history. In each page that follows, Ilse Garnier focuses on the body of a different woman, choosing adjectives, lines, or geometric shapes to illustrate its qualities. She treats the letter o in the French word corps (body) as a symbol of the female figure: it multiplies when the body in question is free, expands when it is luminous as the sun, vanishes when it is absent. The graphic energy used to describe these women stands in clear contrast to the heraldic and poetic tradition alluded to by the title, conveying an idea of the feminine that cannot be reduced to a static image. Not coincidentally, when Garnier participated in the 1978 exhibition Materializzazione del linguaggio, curator Mirella Bentivoglio described her compositions as metaphors that wedded the expressiveness of words to the magnetism of images. Her works show how poetry is heightened by the freedom with which signs are used to construct text. – SM

Ilse Garnier, Blason du corps féminin, 1979. Portfolio with 46 illustrations. Published by Editions André Silvaire, Paris

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L I N DA GA ZZ E RA

1890, Rome, Italy 1942, São Paulo, Brazil

When Linda Gazzera was just twenty-one, Turin psychologist Enrico Imoda concluded that she was the greatest Italian medium of her generation. With Imoda’s endorsement, Gazzera spent 1908 and 1909 performing in esoteric circles throughout Europe. To ward off doubts, she would change in the presence of her hostess and allow other guests to prepare the “spirit cabinet,” an area marked off by drapery where the apparitions manifested. Gazzera would then go into a trance, taking instructions from her spirit guide: a cavalry officer named “Vincenzo,” who would tell stories of other souls, orchestrate their appearances, and order the taking of photos that were treated as clinical evidence for many years, sparking strong reactions from international scientists. The nineteen prints in the so-called Imoda Album (1909) were assembled by Gazzera’s mentor as a gift for the well-known doctor and anthropologist Cesare Lombroso. The medium appears surrounded by a series of “ectoplasms:” flat silhouettes of hands, flowers, or faces surrounded by voluminous drapery. Rather than currents of occult energy, they look like cutouts painted by some skilled hand. Rather than backing up Imoda’s pseudo-scientific claims, these photos are now traces of a fascinating hoax, showing how the body could become a very convincing theatre of magic. – SM

Enrico Imoda, Album, 1909. Contains photographs of seances held in Turin between 1908 and 1909 with the medium Linda Gazzera. Eighteen gelatin silver prints and one albumen print, in different sizes, inserted in a cardboard album, 14 × 19 × 2 cm. Donated to Cesare Lombroso by the physician Enrico Imoda. Archive of the “Cesare Lombroso” Museum of Criminal Anthropology, University of Turin. © “Cesare Lombroso” Museum

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G E O RG I A NA H O U G H T ON

1814, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain 1884, London, UK

Georgiana Houghton spent most of her life in Victorian-era London, a period which saw the rise in a host of beliefs in supernatural forces and energies. Spiritualism, which elaborated a method of communicating with the dead through mediums, was popularised in England in the 1850s, where it quicky saturated literary and artistic culture. For Houghton, Spiritualism enabled a closer relationship to God, even if her religious approach was not necessarily orthodox. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, she translated that religious ferocity into her “spirit drawings,” a multifaceted series of abstract works on paper. In October of 1865, Houghton claimed to come into contact with spiritual guides inhabiting a realm beyond the physical world. She documented the instructions she received during these encounters in distinctive automatic pencil drawings and abstract watercolours. In The Flower of William Stringer (1866), a knot of spiralling and straight lines flow in red, sepia, and blue waves. The Spiritual Crown of Annie Mary Howitt Watts (1867) is made of rhythmically layered curls of white, cranberry, and orange. Houghton’s aim, as she wrote in her 1881 autobiography, was “to show. . . the Light now poured upon mankind by the restored power of communion with the unseen.” – MW

Georgiana Houghton, The Flower of William Stringer, 1866. Watercolour on paper, ink on mount board, 2 pages, 49 × 42 × 3.5 cm (album). Collection The College of Psychic Studies, London © The College of Psychic Studies, London

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M I N A L OY

1882, London, UK – 1966, Aspen, USA

It is hard to place Mina Loy’s practice into a single stylistic category. Her peregrinations between Europe and America made her approach alternately Futurist, Dada, and Surrealist. As evidenced by her poetry collection Aphorisms on Futurism (1914) and the famous letter known as the Feminist Manifesto (1914), she seems to have adopted the “words in freedom” approach of the Italian avant-garde. Unlike Marinetti’s group, however, Loy thought of her works as messages addressed to an audience of women whom she urged to achieve intellectual, emotional, and sexual emancipation. Having settled overseas, the artist adopted a unique artistic approach that was close to Dada in its techniques, yet powerfully Surrealist in its results. Househunting (c. 1950) brings a new depth to the feminism expressed by Loy’s Aphorisms. Like the visual representation of a verse written thirty years before – “Forget that you live in houses, that you may live in yourself” – Househunting is an assemblage of different materials that form the image of a woman; surrounded by ten buildings, she wears a headdress containing a teapot, a ball of yarn, items of food, and laundry on a line. While the latter are clearly references to the stereotypes that hinder female independence, the figure’s surroundings allude to freedom, and seem to describe the modern spirit guiding the artist. – SM

Mina Loy, Househunting, c. 1950. Mixed media assemblage, 90 × 105.5 cm. Photo Zukor Art Conservation. Collection Carolyn Burke. Courtesy Carolyn Burke

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J OYC E M A N S O U R

1928, Bowden, UK – 1986, Paris, France

Born in the United Kingdom to an Egyptian family that soon moved to Cairo, the writer Joyce Mansour came in contact with Surrealism at about twenty, and upon the publication of her first poetry collection in 1953, became a touchstone for the Parisian cultural milieu. Even the title of her first work, Cris (Screams), suggests that her compositions are far from the lyricism of traditional poetry, but rather a way of howling out feelings often linked to sex or erotic performance. Moving beyond the Surrealist idea of the femme enfant or amour fou, Mansour’s poetry uses unfiltered language to describe an emancipated woman who is unafraid to follow the crudest sexual impulses, knows how to handle them, and can be both alluring and dangerous. The first edition of her collection Les Damnations, published in 1966, alternates Mansour’s text with eleven etched illustrations by Chilean artist and architect Roberto Matta. The oppressive world of despair evoked by the title is captured in these chaotic visions, from which naked, clearly female bodies emerge. Matta’s images are perfectly in keeping with the classic dreamlike style embraced by Surrealism; yet they accompany the words of a proud, rebellious woman who knows when to use her body as a weapon or indulge its whims. – SM

Joyce Mansour with illustrations by Roberto Matta, Les Damnations. Paris, Visat, 1966. Private Collection

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S I S T E R G E RT RU D E M O RGA N

1900, LaFayette, USA 1980, New Orleans, USA

After a series of divine revelations in 1934, Sister Gertrude Morgan – self-taught artist, devout Southern Baptist, street proselytiser, musician, and poet – left her “earthly” husband in Georgia and settled in New Orleans. After adopting the name “Sister” in the early 1940s, she would also preach at her own ministry, where up until her death in 1980 she would paint and write poetry. In response to what she believed was a divine calling to use art as a preaching tool, Morgan claimed that she was instructed to become the bride of Christ and thus began dressing in a white nurse’s uniform in anticipation of the divine wedding, as she depicts in the painting untitled (SABBATH DAY Poem) (n.d.). This idiosyncratic personal mythology plays itself out in exuberantly colourful, playful, and highly original depictions of the everyday and the sacred, which Morgan conveyed on any surface she could find such as cardboard scraps, window blinds, paper fans, Styrofoam trays and her guitar case. Many of her paintings, like untitled (Revelation 7 Chap.) (c. 1970), are direct interpretations of the Bible; some like Revelation I JOHN (c. 1970) combine messy masses of figures, scrawled out scriptural quotations, and self-portraits of Morgan in her white nurse’s uniform, embracing or holding hands with Jesus, as in untitled (New Jerusalem) (c. 1960 / 1970). – MW

Sister Gertrude Morgan, Revelation I JOHN, c. 1970. Acrylic, pencil, ink on 2 cardboard panels, 55.6 × 76.2 cm. Courtesy The Museum + The Gallery of Everything, London

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E U S A P I A PA L L A D I N O

1854, Minervino Murge, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (present-day Italy) – 1918, Naples, Italy

On 19 August 1888, the cultural weekly Fanfulla della domenica published a letter by entrepreneur and spiritualist Ercole Chiaia openly inviting the famous doctor and criminologist Cesare Lombroso to evaluate the credibility of the miracles performed by Eusapia Palladino, a medium from Puglia. The article describes Palladino as a thirty-year-old woman who could move objects, levitate, communicate with the dead, or manifest their presence through noises and visible phenomena, all while tied to a chair. Lombroso accepted Chiaia’s challenge in 1891, and after attending several demonstrations in which Palladino even summoned up the spirit of his mother, said he was forced to rethink his convictions. In 1909, in his treatise Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotici e spiritici, the doctor classified these “Eusapian” talents according to their physical or phenomenal characteristics, supplying considerable photographic material, including pictures of casts bearing the impressions of hands or faces imprinted on clay tablets during some séances, immediately drawing the attention of the art world. Many, however, believed that Palladino’s powers lay in obvious conjuring tricks, and her detractors vied with each other to unmask her. After a series of public shamings and a few fiery newspaper articles, the medium withdrew from the scene and died in Naples without public notice. – SM

Eugenio Gellona, Medianic cast, recto, 1906. Photograph of a plaster model of 2 hands obtained from a mould realised during a seance held on the 30th of November 1906 in Genoa at the presence of the spiritualist Eugenio Gellona. Albumen print, 12.5 × 17.5 cm. Archive of the “Cesare Lombroso” Museum of Criminal Anthropology, University of Turin. © “Cesare Lombroso” Museum

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GISÈLE PRASSINOS

1920, Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey) – 2015, Paris, France

The first poems by Gisèle Prassinos date to the early 1930s, when, at barely fourteen, she tried her hand at automatic writing and was hailed as a prodigy by the Surrealists. Although she published several quasi-Surrealist works, she developed an eccentric language of her own. In the 1960s Prassinos’ literary work took on a mixed-media approach, adopting new tools of expression. The fullest example is Brelin le frou ou le Portrait de famille (1975), the illustrated story of an outlandish French family told by Brelin, the child of an odd but strict scientist named Berge Bergsky. Prassinos made twelve panels of brightly coloured fabric, machine-sewn and hand-finished, that reproduce the book’s black-and-white drawings. In Portrait de famille, Doctor Bergsky looms over the rest. Brelin, symmetrical to his father and looking contrite, seems like the only one attempting to challenge his authority. As we can also see from Portrait idéal de l’artiste, Brelin is a domestic hero who fights the patriarchal regime established by the head of the household. Prassinos definitively proves she no longer needs any unconscious automatism to tell her stories: the force driving her visions is, simply, the world as it is. – SM

Gisèle Prassinos, Portrait de famille, 1975. Textile, cotton, felt, silk, and buttons on jute backing, 105 × 79 cm. Photo Ville de Paris / Bibliothèque historique. Collection Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris

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ALICE RAHON

1904, Chenecey-Buillon, France 1987, Mexico City, Mexico

Alice Rahon, Thunderbird, 1946. Oil on canvas, 32.1 × 99.1 cm. Photo Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco. Collection Gallery Wendi Norris

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G I O VA N N A S A N D R I

1923 – 2002, Rome, Italy

One of the few Italian women to take part in the Concrete Poetry movement, Giovanna Sandri was unquestionably the most experimental. Starting in the 1960s, her method challenged the traditionally linear nature of the poetic text, attributing an aesthetic value to its components – words, letters, syllables – that was equal to, or outweighed, their meaning. Drawing inspiration from advertising graphics, Sandri allowed the text to become a riddle or puzzle for the reader/viewer. It is no coincidence that Sandri entitled many of her works Costellazione, suggesting a parallel between poetry and stargazing. The freedom with which the artist steers, slices, shifts, slants, and bends each grapheme resembles the freedom of the Futurists’ parolibere (liberated words), but achieves results so extreme they are dizzying to look at, frustrating almost any attempt at linear reading. After her early published collection Capitolo zero (1968), and her many Costellazioni of the 1970s, Sandri’s work moved closer to Italian experiments in the field of Visual Poetry. But unlike colleagues who drew the visual elements of their poems from newspapers and magazines, the artist preferred the concreteness of dry transfer lettering, employing it to build monochrome, geometric images with clear-cut borders. Sandri’s work imbues the text with a physical quality that is unparalleled in both visual effect and content. – SM

Giovanna Sandri, Costellazione di lettere, 1977. Serigraph on cardboard, 48.5 × 69.5 cm

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HÉLÈNE SMITH

1861, Martigny, Switzerland 1929, Geneva, Switzerland

In 1900, psychologist Théodore Flournoy published Des Indes à la planète Mars: the first study to analyse spiritualism in psychological terms, it described the case of Swiss medium Hélène Smith. When this woman met Flournoy, her name was Catherine-Elise Müller and she was an ordinary sales assistant in a silk shop, yet could enter ecstatic states during which she produced writing in unknown languages or drawings of places she had never been. Between 1895 and 1900 Smith produced three stylistic categories of verbal-visual works that were published with Flournoy’s observations: the “Hindu” series, with Oriental landscapes and texts resembling Sanskrit; the “Royal” series, showing great castles; and the “Martian” series, with notes in a mysterious ideogrammatic script produced while communicating in a trance with a Martian named Astané. According to Smith, the planet’s inhabitants are reincarnated Earthlings. In contrast to the drawings’ fanciful imagery, Flournoy’s study employs a detached, clinical tone that left Smith unhappy; although the book won her adulation from spiritualists, the medium felt betrayed and withdrew from public life. Thirty years after it was published, at the height of the Surrealist movement, André Breton and his circle celebrated the power of automatism based on this material from the turn of the century. – SM

Hélène Smith, Paysage martien, c. 1896–1899. Gouache on paper, 25.8 × 21 cm. Photo Bibliothèque de Genève. Ms. Fr. 7843/3, planchet 2

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M A RY E L L E N S O LT

1920, Gilmore City, USA – 2007, Santa Clarita, USA

In the early 1960s, Mary Ellen Solt became involved with Concrete Poetry after a decisive encounter with the Brazilian group connected to the journal Noigandres, later publishing the seminal anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968). From that point on, Solt treated language as a versatile communication tool that could be structured around visual as well as lexical relationships. Rather than following the Concretist dogma that calls for all subjectivity to be stripped away, the resulting images are open to many different interpretations and readings. Flowers in Concrete (1965–1966) is presented as a verbal-visual herbarium, laid out in plates like any botanical guide. Solt juxtaposes, superimposes, and reverses graphemes to literally construct lobelia, zinnia, and lilac blossoms, geranium, calendula, and white rose petals, and dogwood, apple, and forsythia sprays. The image dedicated to this last flower, which was also shown in the exhibition Materializzazione del linguaggio (1978), is a prime example of her compositional approach. The word Forsythia becomes a root and base for verbal offshoots, and an acrostic with an ambiguous message. Although the string of words is anything but linear, Solt constructs the poem as a verbal and visual invitation for readers to give it their own meaning and become co-authors of the work. – SM

Mary Ellen Solt, Forsythia and Wild Crab, 1966. Ink on paper, 29 × 21 cm each. Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp

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J O S E FA T O L R À

1880 – 1959, Cabrils, Spain

Until 1941, Josefa Tolrà was known in the countryside around Cabrils as Pepeta, a healer and fervent Catholic; a few years after losing her son in the Spanish Civil War, she began going into long trances during which she drew and wrote extensively. As if to substantiate the notion that she was guided by disembodied entities, her compositions contain messages that seem too sophisticated for her basic education, and images too elaborate for a hand untrained in drawing. According to Tolrà, the spirits with whom she was in contact were well versed in geography, science, art, and philosophy, and prone to flaunt their skills in long streams of poetry, aphorisms, and reflections, or complex pictures of brightly coloured human figures, currents of energy, or extraordinary natural landscapes. Sometimes, as in the pages of Llibreta (1944) or the work Dibujo escritura fluídica (1954), the verbal and visual components share the page and flow into each other. The Christian images that the artist made around the same time are full of occult symbols; they suggest a religious syncretism very similar to the theosophic beliefs of the late 19th century and turn Josefa Tolrà’s feverish activity as a medium into the expression of a surprisingly modern sensibility. – SM

Josefa Tolrà, Dibujo escritura fluídica, 1954. Ink and marker on paper, 28 × 36.5 cm. Private Collection. © Fundació Josefa Tolrà

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UNICA ZÜRN

1916, Berlin, Germany – 1970, Paris, France

The disquiet captured in the artwork of Unica Zürn seems to flow from the same source as her depression, which led to repeated internment in psychiatric clinics. The artist’s mental problems accompanied her off and on throughout her long relationship with Hans Bellmer, up to her suicide in 1970. From the first time they met in 1953, the German artist saw Zürn as having the vitality that could bring his macabre, mangled dolls to life; several of his photographs – Unica Tied Up (1957) – show Zürn’s naked body bound with ropes that deform her flesh. At the same time, Zürn created a vast body of work that alternated or combined language and figuration: anagrammatic poems based on recombining the same group of letters, like Hexen Texte (1954), and restless, obsessive drawings that provided a release for her neuroses. Zürn’s dense compositions depict a dream world filled with monstrous creatures; the mark that defines them is as evanescent as a hallucination, and their features – eyes and lips, above all – are fragmented, repeated, and superimposed. As evidenced by La Mort de Kennedy (1964), the images are often flanked or completed by anguished bits of powerfully poetic writing. This writing heightens the tension of the drawings and reveals the gravity of Zürn’s inner conflict. – SM

Unica Zürn, La Mort de Kennedy, 1964. Chinese ink on paper, 90 × 74 × 2.4 cm. Photo Katinka Rutz, vision design. Collection Karin and Gerhard Dammann, Switzerland

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CHIARA ENZO

1989, Venice. Lives in Venice, Italy

Chiara Enzo’s meticulous, small-scale paintings capture fragmented bodies in haunting and unvarnished detail. Enlarged patches of bumped, nicked, and freckled skin, fuzzy napes of necks, taut ribcages, and soft bellies engraved with the impressions of tight clothing are made strange and unrecognisable. Derived both from life and from images culled from magazines, social media, and historical medical books and rendered in dense, textured marks, their surfaces appear charged and tangible, evoking surface, texture, warmth, and touch. As Enzo has said, our skin is our surface, our casing, our most immediate site of stimulation and pain; it is also our limit and boundary, the physical space where our interaction with the world begins and ends. Enzo has conceived of the present installation of more than twenty works as a total environment, titled Conversation Piece. The paintings’ small scale, in combination with their spatialised presentation, invites the viewer to experience them intimately close-up, yet as part of a greater ensemble. Insomuch as Enzo’s sensitive attention to the figure can feel tender and personal, seen from such extreme vantage points, it is also deeply ambiguous, or even menacing. Offered to the viewer for consumption, skin as seen up-close looks as delicate as a piece of fruit. – MW

Chiara Enzo, Torso, 2018. Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board, 23 × 22 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Zero..., Milan. © Chiara Enzo

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O VA R TA C I

1894, Ebeltoft, Denmark 1985, Risskov, Denmark

Ovartaci – born Louis Marcussen – apprenticed as a naturalistic craft painter before emigrating to Argentina in 1923. She travelled the country for six years before returning home in a frayed state. Upon her return, Ovartaci’s family admitted her to the psychiatric hospital in Risskov, where she lived and worked for the next fifty-six years. The artist took the name “Ovartaci” – essentially “Chief Lunatic” – as a play on “ovar,” a term of leadership in the hospital such as “Chief Psychiatrist,” and “taci,” derived from “tossi,” a colloquial term for a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Assigned male at birth, after years of requests for a sex change surgery and her own crude attempt, the hospital finally facilitated her female gender affirmation surgery.1 Ovartaci’s drawings and paintings feature groups of animal-like creatures with slim, elongated features. They often appear in mythological scenes that suggest earlier lives in Ancient Egypt, or in pagan circuses. Ovartaci also sculpted large dolls, costumed in both painted and fabric clothing. Dreams of escape run throughout her work, most overtly in her many drawn plans and cardboard and wood models of a helicopter that could fly beyond the hospital’s walls. – MK 1

In the last years of her life, the artist began self-identifying as a man. Most of the recent critical literature on the artist refers to Ovartaci by using female pronouns, as we have done in this text, a choice not meant to deny the validity of other views.

Ovartaci, FRØKEN OVARTACI, n.d. Gouache, crayon on canvas, 89 × 161 cm. Photo Archive Museum Ovartaci. Courtesy Museum Ovartaci

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NAN GOLDIN

1953, Washington, D.C., USA Lives in New York City, USA

Since the 1970s, Nan Goldin’s photographs have focused on people who live outside of established gender constructions. Her celebrated, diaristic Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979–1986) captures deeply intimate scenes of love, violence, and sex, all part of the artist’s own lived experience. Since the 1990s, she has expanded to installations that involve moving pictures, narrative scores, and voiceovers. Centering on themes of love, gender, sexuality, and social precarity, Goldin’s work captures life at its most unvarnished and true. Sirens (2019–2020) was conceived as an homage to Donyale Luna, often cited as the first Black supermodel, who died from a heroin overdose in 1979. Titled for the creatures of Greek mythology whose songs draw sailors to their deaths on rocky island shores, Sirens appropriates footage from thirty films – including 1969’s Satyricon; works by Kenneth Anger, Lynne Ramsay, Henri-Georges Clouzot and Federico Fellini; Andy Warhol’s “Screen Tests” of Luna; and footage from a 1988 London rave – to associate the beauty of the female body with the sensuality and ecstasy of a drug high. While Goldin’s film, scored by composer Mica Levi, presents a glamorous and romantic rendition of the pleasure of being high, its title alludes to the possible peril of opiate use and the difficulty of escaping its grasp. – IW

Nan Goldin, Sirens, 2019–2021. Single-channel video, 16 mins 1 sec. Installation view, Sirens, Marian Goodman Gallery, London, 2019. Photo Alex Yudzon. Courtesy the Artist; Marian Goodman Gallery. © Nan Goldin

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S H E R E E H OVS E P I A N

1974, Isfahan, Iran Lives in New York City, USA

Iranian American artist Sheree Hovsepian’s wall-based assemblages incorporate photographic prints into three-dimensional vignettes with nylon, ceramics, string, nails, and walnut wood in deep, custom-built box frames. Her compositions are imbued with an incisive recognition of the politics surrounding the body, emphasising the relationships between the people and things that are captured by her camera’s lens. Hovsepian conceives of her practice as a collaboration between bodies and manufactured materials, and the image of the artist herself – or sometimes her sister, playing the role of stand-in – often appears in her work. Her assemblages also frequently incorporate elements in ceramic, a material that – like a photograph – takes an impression, goes through a process of chemical transformation, and, when fired in a kiln, is always accompanied by the threat of failure. Hovsepian’s work for The Milk of Dreams continues her investigation into the materiality of photography and its representational, symbolic, and syntactical qualities. In these works, fragmented parts of the body are deployed as formal elements in a visual vocabulary of abstracted shapes and lines. As the artist has said, “For me, the body becomes a site of stratified consciousness. Assemblage becomes a metaphor for this.” – IW

Sheree Hovsepian, Privileged Prey, 2021. Silver gelatin photographs, ceramic, nails, string, velvet, walnut artist frame, 80 × 54.6 × 9 cm. Photo Martin Parsekian. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist

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AMY SILLMAN

1955, Detroit, USA Lives in New York City, USA

Amy Sillman is known for a robust and physical kind of painting – of stormy abstractions, extroverted gestures, and spontaneous tremors of colour – but also for her interventions in writing, curating, humour, and digital animation. Born in Detroit and raised in Chicago, Sillman moved to New York in 1975, where she spent a decade developing her work. In the mid-1990s she began to establish herself as a painter, but also as a thinker and writer about art, with a practice that encompasses the publication of the zine The O.G., various iPhone/ iPad animations, and teaching and curating. Sillman’s prominence in refreshing gestural abstraction for the 21st century rests on an expansion of the vocabulary between figuration and abstraction. Setting the viewer’s expectations up for an experience of gestural painting, Sillman’s works relish in incongruity, or make us laugh. Evoking a film strip or a home movie, Sillman’s new work for The Milk of Dreams speaks to the concept of change. From the position of the viewer, her horizontal and tightly packed images form a fragmented spatial narrative. Incorporating disjointed body parts both human and animal, as well as a mixture of formal, narrative, and compositional approaches, the works are also scaled to the viewer’s own body – whose position and perspective changes with every step. – MW

Amy Sillman, XL37 and XL27, 2020. Acrylic, ink on paper, 151.1 × 105.4 cm each. Photo John Berens. Collection of the Artist. Courtesy the Artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York/Brussels. © Amy Sillman

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B R O N W Y N K AT Z

1993, Kimberley, South Africa Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa

Bronwyn Katz makes delicate sculptures and installations from both natural materials such as iron ore and salvaged manufactured materials such as mattresses, steel wool scrub brushes, and corrugated steel. Her buoyant compositions appear hung on walls as multi-dimensional paintings, laid across floors like topographical landscapes, and hanging from ceilings or protruding from the ground up like so many stalactites and stalagmites. Katz uses found materials to draw on the physical, emotional, and spiritual history of their making. While she is driven by formal concerns expressed in an abstract, minimal language, her wire works paint evocative and specific stories. Her sculptures refer to the political context of their making by embodying subtle acts of resistance that draw attention to social constructions. Katz’s ongoing use of found mattress springs and other household materials refers to domestic life – specifically the intimate space of the bed, which is often the site for conception, birth, and death. Gõegõe (2021) is a new, large sculpture made from found bedsprings and black pot scourers. Placed on the floor, the sixmetre-wide work is named after a mythical water snake that is known by many different names in the mythology of many South African peoples. For Katz, the snake becomes a metaphor for our contemporary extractive relationship with the Earth and other living creatures. – MK Bronwyn Katz, Kãxu-da (I) (Become lost us) (detail), 2019. Salvaged bedspring, pot scourers, 185 × 135 × 40 cm. Photo Peres Projects. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Peres Projects, Berlin. © Bronwyn Katz

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ALEXANDRA PIRICI

1982, Bucharest Lives in Bucharest, Romania

Alexandra Pirici is a Romanian artist and choreographer known for staging public actions, gestures, and sculptures that provoke re-assessments of historical narratives and civic space, nature, and digital imagery. Emphasising the role that collective presence can wield in addressing power structures – or at least making them known – Pirici, a trained dancer, frequently assembles groups of actors and performers into formations that she describes as live sculptures, which act, move, shift, and sing. Activated over long durations of time, these works, which span from minimal arrangements to complex live environments, are not conceived as singular events, but rather, as ongoing actions that unfold over times, with no linear narrative, no beginning nor end. Pirici’s new ongoing performative action Encyclopedia of Relations (2022) is hinged on embodiments of collective relations as seen in biology and botany, as they are in constant stages of reconfiguration. Taking inspiration from symbiotic and parasitic interactions between individuals, as well as those negotiated in more abstract types of relations – between humans and technology, rocks and waves, plants and animals – performers choose to move through space according to a set of possible actions, which can be infinitely combined and recombined. Reminiscent of a Surrealist “exquisite corpse” game, through the body, the natural world merges with that of the fantastic. – MW Alexandra Pirici, Re-collection, 2020. Ongoing action (duet version). Exhibition view, Dance First Think Later, Museum of Art and History, Geneva, 2020. Photo Emanuelle Bayart. Courtesy the Artist; Artasperto. © Alexandra Pirici

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L O U I S E L AW L E R

1947, Bronxville, USA Lives in New York City, USA

Louise Lawler came to prominence in New York in the early 1980s as part of the Pictures Generation. Pictures artists, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, and Sherrie Levine, among many others, made critical work through the appropriation of widely circulated advertising imagery, slogans, and fine art, probing their audience to ask questions about the nature of art itself. Lawler is known for making photographs that capture cropped details of artworks installed in collectors’ homes, museum storage facilities, or auction rooms. By emphasising the “look” of the artwork in unity with its environment, she also shows a subjective, behind-the-scenes view of the art world, presenting what is often swept under the rug by austere white-cube galleries. In her recent works, Lawler began experimenting with digital effects, adding distortions and stretching images to engage their site of display. Lawler’s work for the The Milk of Dreams combines her many photographic methods into a multi-layered installation titled No Exit (2022): photographs of MoMA’s 2020 Donald Judd retrospective – taken with the lights off, after hours, in the dark – are positioned directly on top of Hair (adjusted to fit) (2005 / 2019 / 2021), a room-filling vinyl image. Lawler’s continued re-engagement with her images challenges the assumed meanings we attribute to art, status and culture. – IA

Louise Lawler, Hair (adjusted to fit), 2005 / 2019 / 2021 Adhesive wall material. Dimensions variable to match the proportions of a given wall at any scale determined by exhibitor. Courtesy the Artist; Sprüth Magers

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J A D É FA D O J U T I M I

1993, London Lives in London, UK

As a teenager, British artist Jadé Fadojutimi developed an obsession with Japanese popular culture. Today, she often paints to soundtracks from Japanese videogames or anime. The moments of nostalgia Fadojutimi experiences while painting – which are also sparked by memories from her childhood, or even the clothes in her wardrobe – seep into the canvases through explosive gestures and a vivid use of colour. Beginning each painting with an attitude akin to shoshin, the Japanese concept of a “beginner’s mind,” Fadojutimi allows the familiar objects that populate reality (a perceptive viewer might recognise objects like stockings and hats, patterned materials, or the faint suggestion of landscape lines) to elude recognition and assert their transcendent, metaphysical qualities. Having recently moved to a studio with six-metre ceilings, Fadojutimi is able to paint on a scale that she could previously have only imagined. For The Milk of Dreams, she has produced three new paintings (The Prolific Beauty of Our Panicked Landscape; And that day, she remembered how to purr; and Rebirth; all 2022) in ambitious, monumental sizes. These new works enhance the immersive quality that is central to her greater practice; rather than objects to view from a distance, the paintings become places or moments for the viewer to exist within and alongside. – LC & IW

Jadé Fadojutimi, A Bird’s-Eye View of The Fields of Doubt, 2021. Oil, oil stick, acrylic on canvas. 200 × 300 cm. Private Collection, California. Photo Mark Blower. Courtesy the Artist; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo. © Jadé Fadojutimi 2021

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SHUVINAI ASHOONA

1961, Kinngait Lives in Kinngait, Nunavut

Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona’s fantastical drawings inject surreal visions into depictions of contemporary Inuit life, overturning stereotypical notions of Inuit culture while capturing the dramatic changes it has experienced in recent history. Ashoona produces her work at the Kinngait Studios, a community-run art-making cooperative incorporated in 1959 as the artistic arm of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative. The humans who populate the domestic and quotidian scenes depicted in her pen-and-pencil drawings are joined by mermaids, human-animal hybrids, and fantastical sea creatures. Surreal details signal spiritual, cosmological, or phantasmatic forces in delicate coexistence with the everyday. In the two new works included here (both 2021), humans and animals both cohabitate and merge: in one drawing, a woman with a platypus mouth and webbed fingers reclines on an ice flow as a poncho-wearing, tentacled walrus confronts his own reflection; in the other, human figures are ambiguously enveloped by, costumed as, or walking alongside chimerical creatures. Ashoona’s merging of social experience, fantastical iconography, and narrative composition is infused with Surrealism’s mining of the subconscious and provides a simultaneously vivid and phantasmagoric vision of life in her community. – IW

Shuvinai Ashoona, Untitled, 2021. Graphite, colour pencil, ink on paper, 128 × 244.5 cm. Courtesy West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative. © Shuvinai Ashoona

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JANA EULER

1982, Friedberg, Germany Lives in Frankfurt, Germany and Brussels, Belgium

Jana Euler’s work bounds between stylistic conceits, trafficking in grotesque, monstrous, contorted, eroticised, and frequently off-putting representations of figures, both human and not. Aping the jokey, anarchist attitude, surrealist fixations, and twinned scepticism and faith in the field of painting characterised by German artists of the post-war period, Euler marries their radical gestures with savage satires of the human condition. In the artist’s work, the body is frequently displayed in positions of cartoonish, abject carnality or discomfiting vulnerability. Euler’s exaggerated bodies also appear in the form of animals. In her series great white fear (2019–2021), she presents paintings of sharks that call to mind the variably Hyperrealist, Abstract, and Surrealist techniques of famous male painters. For the 59th International Art Exhibition, Euler places on a plinth 111 ceramic shark sculptures, whose diminutive size forms a counterpoint to the animal’s epic proportions in great white fear. Instead, flies – one, Fly (eternity) (2021), a 500-year-old specimen preserved in amber, the other, Fly (moment) (2021), living and captured in extreme close-up macro photography – eclipse the sharks, in two theatrically scaled paintings. Staging an impossible encounter between the dead and the alive, the big and small, the flying and sea-bound, Euler, again, renders the familiar enigmatic. – MW

Jana Euler, Fly (eternity), 2021. Oil on linen, 260 × 240cm. Photo Jens Gerber. Courtesy the Artist; Cabinet, London; dépendance, Brussels; Greene Naftali, New York; Galerie Neu, Berlin. © Jana Euler

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PA U L A R E G O

1935, Lisbon, Portugal Lives in London, UK

Paula Rego’s uncompromising figurative work forces viewers into direct confrontation with human relationships and the social, sexual, and emotional power dynamics that often define them. Using strategies of parody, theatricality, and storytelling, Rego’s formally complex and psychologically charged domestic scenes, which can be as equally tender as they are distressing, centre the experiences of women in a world shaped by conflict. Deeply affected by her early life in Portugal under the dictatorship of Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar, she addresses the oppression and institutional violence towards women under political tyranny. In her mature work of the 1990s and 2000s, Rego intertwines references to Portuguese fairy tales, Disney princesses, and the biting satire of Francisco Goya and Honoré Daumier with autobiographical elements. Her celebrated Dog Woman Series, initiated in 1994, portrays women behaving and posturing like dogs in highly sexualised contortions. In Sleeper (1994), a woman is splayed on top of a blazer on the floor, with a plate of food nearby, implicitly asking if the figure is being punished or cared for. With imagery recalling difficult stories of seduction, rape, and infanticide, Oratório (2008–2009) reconfigures assumptions about who should receive the public’s devotion. In her recent series Seven Deadly Sins (2019), Rego revives her interest in making cloth dolls as a form of sculpture, extending her fascination with parables to three-dimensional forms. – MW Paula Rego, Sleeper, 1994. Pastel on paper on aluminium, 120 × 160 cm. Photo Nick Willing. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Victoria Miro. © Paula Rego

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PA U L A R E G O

1935, Lisbon, Portugal Lives in London, UK

In Paula Rego’s 1989 print portfolio Nursery Rhymes, which was subsequently published as a book in 1994, she takes traditional British poems and songs for children and satirises, transforms, and exaggerates them through lush etchings, lithographs, and aquatints, emphasising their bizarrely outlandish and often disturbing subject themes. Rego first began experimenting with printmaking in the 1950s as a student at the Slade School of Fine Art; over time, she has become a highly skilled printmaker, expressing the imaginative potential of the medium. As in the subjects of many of Rego’s resplendent paintings and drawings, her source materials’ whimsy and innocence belies the darkness embedded in their mature meanings, which frequently reflect upon the experience of human relationships and social dynamics, as they are controlled by conflict, violence, power, and culturally prescribed gender roles. The rodents in “Three blind mice” stagger in a pained stupor, as the farmer’s wife, who “cut off their tails with a carving knife” grasps her of their bloodied extremities. “The old woman who lived in a shoe” whips her child – one of so many kids stuffed in her home that “she didn’t know what to do.” In “Baa, baa, black sheep,” a young girl appears in a menacingly flirtatious embrace with a larger-than-life curly horned black sheep, as “the little boy who lives down the lane” spies from a distance. – MW

Paula Rego, Jack and Jill and Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, 1989. From portfolio Nursery Rhymes, 1989. Etching and aquatint, 32.3 × 21.5 cm (image) and 52 × 38 cm (paper). Photo Nick Willing and Mark Dalton. Courtesy Paula Rego; Cristea Roberts Gallery, London © Paula Rego

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CLAUDE CAHUN AND LISE DEHARME

1894, Nantes, France – 1954, Saint Helier, Jersey, UK 1898, Paris, France – 1980, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

In 1937, having already earned something of a reputation on the Parisian cultural scene, the French artists Lise Deharme and Claude Cahun published the short children’s book Le Cœur de Pic, which tells the title character’s surreal story through thirty-two brief poems by Deharme and twenty photographs by Cahun. On the cover, the protagonist brandishes the queen of spades playing card like a banner: a clear reference to Deharme’s nickname among the Surrealists, “Dame de Pique,” and a key to the entire verbal-visual structure of the book. The photographs inside likewise illustrate the story through a system of symbols. While Deharme constructs her text like a classic dream narrative full of ghosts, metamorphoses, enchanted animals, and other fantasies, Cahun builds miniature photographic sets where toys, foods, plants, and household objects become characters in the tale. One picture, for instance, portraying the grief of a plant widowed of its beloved butterfly, shows the statue of a young boy bent over with her back turned on a clump of nasturtiums; as Deharme’s verses say, she is crying tears of wisteria. Another image, representing the protagonist’s terrible toothache, turns the sculptural outline of a molar into the scene of a battle between a tiny Pic doll and the long, thin snake of a nerve. – SM

Lise Deharme with photographs by Claude Cahun, Le Cœur de Pic. Éditions MeMo, 2004 (originally published in 1937) © Éditions MeMo

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LEONORA CARRINGTON

1917, Clayton-le-Woods, UK 2011, Mexico City, Mexico

In the 1950s, after permanently settling in Mexico, Leonora Carrington dreamt up a series of bizarre children’s stories that she initially painted on the bedroom walls of her sons Gabriel and Pablo, later gathering them into a private notebook. The original version of this collection was a series of pages on which, by hand and in broken Spanish, the artist transcribed nine of the short bedtime stories she told her children, illustrating them with bright, outlandish watercolours. Leche del sueño (The Milk of Dreams) – as Gabriel Weisz, the artist’s son, dubbed the collection of fairy tales – conceals a universe of disturbing images that, by using a bizarre verbal-visual language, narrates the story of mutant creatures that fill her fanciful universes including children who lose their heads, vultures trapped in gelatin, and carnivorous machines. Under their childish veneer, Carrington’s stories are scraps of dreams that are like a mother’s milk, essential to a child’s growth and development. As it is in the whole Carrington’s work, the tales of Leche del sueño show a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination, and where everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else. – SM

Leonora Carrington, El cuento feo de las carnitas, in Leche del sueño. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2016. © Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

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CHRISTINA QUARLES

1985, Chicago, USA Lives in Los Angeles, USA

Christina Quarles’ paintings, drawings, and installations grapple with the limits of legibility and language in the fraught politics of bodies marked by race, gender, sexuality, and identity. Quarles’ paintings depict an excess of gestures in jarring pigments consisting of drips, lines, smears, and scrapes made with combs or dry brushes. With a background in graphic design, the artist pairs the fortuitous effects of dripping and seemingly improvisational brushstrokes with digital manipulation and laser-cut stencils. Her sinuous bodies contort, conjuring a sense of intimacy, fluidity, and the impossibility of outlining singular beings, as in the entwining figures in Hangin’ There, Baby (2021), the array of frenzied pigments in Gone on Too Long (2021), or the figures chaotically pulling at, pushing away, and stepping over each other in Just a Lil’ Longer (2021). Geometrical planes and architectural devices that allude to domestic environments, such as the curtain in (Who Could Say) We’re Not Jus’ as We Were (2021), centre depthless forms in space by framing gangly figures. In Had a Gud Time Now (Who Could Say) (2021), the extremities of subjects penetrate, sink, and emerge from a spatial plane depicted as a gingham tablecloth. As if pushing up against and trying to exceed the boundaries of the frame, the bodies suggest an alternative physicality defined by ambiguity. – LC

Christina Quarles, (Who Could Say) We’re Not Jus’ as We Were, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 178 × 330 × 5 cm. Photo Fredrik Nilsen Studio. Courtesy the Artist; Hauser & Wirth; Pilar Corrias, London. © Christina Quarles

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HANNAH LEVY

1991, New York City Lives in New York City, USA

Hannah Levy defamiliarises commonplace objects by warping or exaggerating their formal properties. Levy’s visual vocabulary includes medical equipment, gymnastic devices, safety bars, vegetables, pastries, and pearls. Her objects provoke repulsion and attraction to a humorous extreme. While her linear, metallic forms conjure associations with home or office furnishings, their skin-like sheaths confuse the separation between living and dead, animal and prosthetic. Indebted to the Surrealist fascination with the uncanny and the abject, her work takes an ambivalent view on the past century’s material culture. For The Milk of Dreams, Levy realises three new sculptures: a drooping sac of slumped silicon balanced on four polished metal arthropod-like legs; a thin membrane of silicone stretched over a winged steel structure that is reminiscent of a bat’s wing or a tent; and a over-sized marble facsimile of a peach pit, a material used in craft traditions that contains surprising levels of the poison cyanide. Each takes an ambiguous position between functional furniture and object of aesthetic contemplation, giving corporeal form to the cycles of production, consumption, and disposal that underlie contemporary life. – IW

Hannah Levy, Untitled, 2018. Nickel-plated steel, silicone rubber, zipper, 266.7 × 246.38 × 246.38 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Casey Kaplan, New York; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; Rennie Collection, Vancouver, CA. © Hannah Levy

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KAA R I U PS O N

1970, San Bernardino, USA 2021, New York City, USA

Kaari Upson is an artist from California who explored the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of the American familial experience. Upson is best known for her sprawling graphite drawings and eerie casts in silicone, resin, pigment, and charcoal – painted and distorted sculptures of furniture, figures, and domestic objects. Her compositions are abject, disquieting, and all-too-human, with sculptures slumping, sagging, and leaning against walls and corners as if to lament the psychological exhaustion of their genesis. Upson’s recent series Portrait (Vain German) (2020–2021) began with portraits that she painted in thick impasto and other materials on miniature canvases. From there, she used 3D modeling techniques to create molds and casts, onto which she painted layers of urethane, resins, and pigments. Possibly an allusion to her mother/herself, frequent subjects for her sculptures and videos, the complex dimensional paintings materialise in fleshy pinks, haunting blues, and fluorescent yellows. The paintings’ visages stare out as if from another realm, oscillating from ghoulish to skeletal to serene, from fragmentary to abstract to entirely obliterated, perhaps a meditation on sickness and the body’s eventual deterioration. – MK

Kaari Upson, Portrait (Vain German), 2020–2021. Urethane, resin, Aqua-resin, pigment, charcoal, fiberglass, aluminium, 74.3 × 58.4 × 7 cm. Photo Ed Mumford. © The Kaari Upson Trust

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MIRIAM CAHN

1949, Basel, Switzerland Lives in Stampa, Switzerland

From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, Miriam Cahn shunned painting as an act of feminist resistance against the Western art world’s male, Abstract and Minimalist Zeitgeist. Painting had passed its art historical prime by the 1990s, and Cahn picked up the brush at the age of forty-five. The artist explores what she believes to be the innate treachery, brutality, and beauty in the human condition, always in response to current events and with a staunchly progressive bend. Cahn’s imagery subsumes the viewer into nightmarish dreamscapes that evoke the violence felt on a human, bodily level as the result of global policy, war, and oppression. For the Biennale Arte 2022, Cahn exhibits one room installation titled unser süden sommer 2021, 5.8.2021 (2021) consisting of twenty-eight new works, including thirteen paintings, nine mixed media drawings, and six artist notebooks. In her drawings and paintings, objects become anthropomorphised as questionable appendages. Birthing imagery, gender-bending beings, erect phalluses and overtly sexual conduct are returning subject matter. Cahn’s works address crises and tragedies like the Persian Gulf War, #MeToo movement, World Trade Center attacks, and the Yugoslav Wars in a covert and unspectacular way. She does not glamourise trauma or virtue signal. Rather, she allows for ambiguity and emotive mark-making to take the lead. – IA

Miriam Cahn, unser süden, 17.7.21, 2021. Oil on canvas, 240 × 200 cm. Photo François Doury. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Jocelyn Wolff; Meyer Riegger

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JULIA PHILLIPS

1985, Hamburg, Germany Lives in Chicago, USA and Berlin, Germany

The titles of Julia Phillips’ sculptures serve as a registry of potential actions: Manipulator, Protector, Muter, Extruder, Mediator, Negotiator, Distancer. The very names of these works, which are primarily forged in delicate fleshcoloured ceramics and bits of metal hardware, imply a phantom presence. Formally, Phillips’ sculptures maintain the suggestion of the anonymous, absent, or invisible body, which can be detected through recurring devices such as buckles, straps, wing nuts, masks, and handles. Their material, linguistic, and metaphorical arrangements produce a deeply psychological, if ambiguous, resonance for the viewer, alluding to socio-political, institutional, and interpersonal systems of power or scrutiny. Phillips’ recent suite of sculptures (all 2021–2022) shift the focus to the relationship one has with oneself. In Veiled Purifier, inwardness is manifested through the use of fabric. Veiled and posed atop a tiled base inspired by patterning in St Mark’s Basilica, the work connotes a body looking inward. Bower, too, adopts architectural elements from Venetian churches to evoke the elevated interiority of such spiritual spaces. Mounted on a stone tile pattern inspired by the 16th century church of San Giorgio Maggiore, a ceramic and brass sculpture made from the impressions of a forehead and lower back allude to the motion of bowing. The psychic experience of spirituality is extended to the body, even in its partial absence. – MW

Julia Phillips, Bower, 2021–2022. Ceramic, bronze, granite, nylon hardware, dimensions variable. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. © Julia Phillips

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C H A R L I N E VO N H E Y L In collaboration with Matt Haimovitz and Jeffrianne Young of The Primavera Project

1960, Mainz, Germany Lives in New York City and Marfa, USA

Working in the vibrant Cologne art world of the 1980s only led painter Charline von Heyl to more firmly believe in the importance of her chosen medium: painting. The eight works on view here – produced in collaboration with Jeffrianne Young and cellist Matt Haimovitz’s The Primavera Project, a series of musical commissions by a diverse group of composers – reference the Greek myth of Zephyrus, god of the west wind, and the nymph Chloris, whose marriage with Zephyrus grants her dominion over the spring; a story famously repurposed in the 1480s Sandro Botticelli’s painting Primavera. Reinterpreting Botticelli’s work, these paintings combine themes of girlhood, transformation, desire, and ambivalence. Rendering mask-like faces, graphic red dots, patterned stripes, and layers of cartoonish leaping rabbits and birds against smears of charcoal and flat washes of black acrylic paint, in Primavera 2020 (2020), the harmonious natural world of Botticelli’s original is fractured, its botanical splendour tempered by psychic upheaval. The August Complex (2020), for example, draws an intuitive connection between Flora, the name Chloris takes after her transformation, and the flora and fauna destroyed by the the devastating 2020 wildfire in Northern California. Engaging the medium’s tropes of beauty and subjectivity, von Heyl consistently redefines the boundaries of contemporary painting. – IW

Charline von Heyl for Matt Haimovitz and Jeffrianne Young of the Primavera Project, Primavera 2020, 2020. Acrylic, charcoal on linen, 208.3 × 558.8 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Petzel, New York

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JAC Q U E L I N E H U M P H R I E S

1960, New Orleans, USA Lives in New York City, USA

The American artist Jacqueline Humphries came of age as painter in New York in the 1980s. Many of her peers deemed painting, as the adage goes, to be “dead;” to paint, as Humphries herself has said, was “artistic suicide.” Despite the theoretical orthodoxy of that moment, for over three decades, Humphries, alongside a cohort of artists including Charline von Heyl, Jutta Koether, Laura Owens, and Amy Sillman, has nonetheless upended the traditions of painterly abstraction in the face of the medium’s so-called “obsolescence.” Humphries is attuned to the relationship between abstraction and technology and many of her paintings invariably meditate on the mysterious gap between objects, their representations, and the materials – and materiality – of image-making. In the early 2000s, Humphries began making largescale works utilising silver and non-reflective black paints to reproduce the uncanny feeling of attraction that one feels when met with a monitor’s artificial glow. Over the last decade, she has begun to incorporate languages and signs pilfered from the digital world (such as ASCII, CAPTCHA, emoticons, and emoji) to associate them with expressionistic imagery and convey a sense of ambiguity. More recently, she has turned to patterning inspired by white noise. Suggesting the volatility of images awash in endless streams of data, the dense materiality of Humphries’ stencilled patterns operate as corrective to the idea that our screen culture is purely virtual; it is physical too. – MW Jacqueline Humphries, JHWx, 2021. Oil on linen, 5 panels, 281.9 × 254 cm each. Photo Ron Amstutz. Collection Glenstone Museum. Courtesy the Artist; Greene Naftali, New York. © Jacqueline Humphries

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C A R LA AC C A R D I

1924, Trapani, Italy 2014, Rome, Italy

Groundbreaking Italian artist Carla Accardi contributed to the creation of a new philosophy and style of abstraction starting in the immediate wake of World War II. Regarded for her colourful paintings made between the 1940s and 1970s, Accardi’s work is informed by linguistic concerns, as well as the influences of Marxism and feminism. Starting in the 1960s, Accardi accentuated the interplay of multiple spatial planes through her use of bolder pigmentation and Sicofoil, a clear plastic sheeting used in commercial packaging, as a painting surface. In paintings like Senza titolo (1967), the transparent material imbues the composition of fluorescent green marks with an environmental nature, while also emphasising the physical supports of the painting through the exposure of wooden stretchers. In paintings such as Assedio rosso n. 3 (1956) and Verdi azzurro (1962), opaque, fluorescent symbols, loops, and tendrils can be perceived as letters, words, and phrases, even if ones potentially not meant to be read. Language is freed from the page as well as from its received meanings, forms, and, in many instances, the obligations of communication. Accardi’s paintings create an experience in which inside and outside, looking and reading, seeing and perceiving are blurred. – MW

Carla Accardi, Assedio rosso n. 3, 1956. Enamel on casein on canvas, 97 × 162 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Tornabuoni Arte. © Tornabuoni Arte

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S O N I A D E L A U N AY

1885, Odessa, Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) 1979, Paris, France

Sonia Delaunay was a key figure in the Parisian avant-garde of the interwar years. Born to a Jewish Ukrainian family and raised in Saint Petersburg, at the age of eighteen Delaunay enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1905 she relocated to Paris, where Post-Impressionism and Cubism were dominant in the city’s galleries. In this highly experimental climate, Delaunay and her husband Robert pioneered Simultanism, a style of abstract painting that emphasises the transcendental effects of the interaction between colours. The works on paper included here exemplify Delaunay’s application of the principles of painterly abstraction to textile patterns. Seeking compositions that could be realised in loom-woven thread, Delaunay experimented with the rhythm, motion, and depth created by simultaneous contrast, where colours appear different depending on those around them. Senza titolo (Gouache no. 1230) (1930) displays her trademark use of concentric circles and offset tones to create a sense of chromatic dynamism. She conceived of painterly forms as units of chromatic information – not unlike pixels in a digital image – whose vibrancy and intermingling are as material as they are optical. Across her oeuvre, colour – as Delaunay once described it, “the skin of the world” – was a consistent source of inspiration. – IW

Sonia Delaunay, Senza titolo, 1933. Gouache on paper, 11.9 × 10.6 cm. Courtesy Gió Marconi, Milan

Sonia Delaunay, Senza titolo, 1929. Gouache on paper, 16.5 × 16.5 cm. Courtesy Gió Marconi, Milan

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VERA MOLNÁR

1924, Budapest, Hungary Lives in Paris, France

In the early 1950s, just a few years after she moved to Paris in 1947, Hungarian artist Vera Molnár made a series of abstract compositions based on the repetition of codified geometric shapes. These early works are in step with the artist groups throughout Europe who were exploring how to program and recombine graphic signs. As the only female founding member of GRAV (Group de Recherche d’Art Visuel), from 1961 to 1968 Molnár perfected her geometric language, complementing it with a systematic gesturalism; her Machines imaginaires are the product of pre-established rules that were slavishly followed in every stage of their creation. Molnár programmed her artistic output through algorithms that became truly mechanical only in 1968. Each work in her series Computer Drawings (c. 1970–1975) is different from the others, with segments, dots, and shapes responding only to the set of parameters that had been entered. These drawings stem from the dialogue between human and machine, and by playing with the equilibrium of this strange conversation, Molnár renders the former more adept and the latter more sensitive. – SM

Vera Molnár, Hypertransformation, 1974. Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper, 44 × 33 cm. © Galerie Oniris, Rennes

Vera Molnár, Transformation de carrés concentriques, 1974. Computer plotter drawing, 54 × 36 cm. © Galerie Oniris, Rennes

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SARA ENRICO

1979, Biella, Italy Lives in Turin, Italy

The T-shaped jumpsuit known as the tuta was invented in 1919 by Futurist artist Thayaht (pseudonym of Ernesto Michahelles) with the goal of designing attire that would function in natural relation to the body. Over the last century, the jumpsuit has become a symbolic item of clothing: flexible in its gender neutrality, practical as a uniform for trade workers, and infamous as the attire of prisoners. Adding to the rich history and iconography of the jumpsuit is artist Sara Enrico’s sculptural installation series The Jumpsuit Theme (2017–ongoing). Enrico began to draw a comparison between clothing and sculpture – how they both physically interact with the world around them and evoke new ways of communicating, oftentimes more intimate and personal than other forms of language. Enrico is interested in respite, in inactivity, when the body refuses to operate on hyperfunctional levels, and instead collapses into blissful non-use. In this installation, her sculptures, made by pouring pigmented concrete into a soft formwork of laboratory-made technical fabric, are installed on the floor, sprawled out as if napping. Shaped by used clothes that give them an approximate anthropomorphism, the sculptures are long and limby, with a skin-like texture that results from Enrico’s lengthy casting process. The artist and her suite of collaborators worked the materials – and concepts – through many layers of transformation, until at last they rest, completely still. – IA

Sara Enrico, The Jumpsuit Theme, 2022. Concrete, pigment, 33 × 125 × 35 cm. Photo Cristina Leoncini. Courtesy the Artist

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S A B L E E LY S E S M I T H

1986, Los Angeles, USA Lives in New York City, USA

Sable Elyse Smith’s Landscape works, a series of large-scale neons, are part of her ongoing and multi-faceted project about the US prison industrial complex and its insidious, endemic structures of anti-Black violence. For Smith, the psychic wound of mass incarceration is personal, too; she has been visiting her father in prison over approximately two-thirds of her life. Favouring a conceptual approach, Smith’s works in video, sculpture, photography, installation, and text defy conventional narratives of incarceration by drawing from personal stories and quotidian confrontations with the penal system. Smith’s neons like Landscape VI (2022), written in cool white letters, fully justified, and underscored by a bright orange-and-green horizon line, expand a tradition of Conceptual Art works: those executed in light by artists like Bruce Nauman, Glenn Ligon, and Jenny Holzer. As in these previous experiments, in which the very materiality of neon signage suggests a public presence or a guise of authority to be tested, in the Landscape series Smith creates a tension between the inherent publicness of neon and the nature of her text. Landscape VI might be read as an expression of the embodied, everyday effects of institutional violence, juxtaposing the tone of an interior monologue with the ostentatious address of neon signage. – MW

Sable Elyse Smith, Landscape III, 2017. Neon, 243.84 × 365.76 cm. Installation view, Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, New Museum, New York City, 2017. Photo Maria Hutchinson / EPW Studio. Courtesy the Artist; JTT, New York; Carlos/ Ishikawa, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles

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A M B R A C A S TA G N E T T I

1993, Genoa, Italy Lives in Milan, Italy

Ambra Castagnetti creates sculptures, videos, installations, and performances driven by the desire to transform our relationship to our own bodies and to the beings that surround us. For Castagnetti, catharsis facilitates metamorphosis, and the artist believes that action and active embodiment are the most effective ways to break through the limitations of identity. For The Milk of Dreams, Castagnetti realises Dependency (2022), a series of sculptures topped in brushed aluminium like operating tables; on them lie ceramic serpents and a Medusa-like head, piled like discarded scientific specimens. Hanging on the wall we find wearable sculptures to be donned by performers in an event that straddles BDSM bondage and an ancient interspecies ritual. For the work, Castagnetti is driven by anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ concept of “mindful body” and the Paleolithic belief in “fluidity,” the concept that humans, animals, plants, and other living entities could transform in shape between one another. For the artist, the body has no fixed identity, but rather is constituted in any single moment by environmental, social, and political circumstances. – MK Ambra Castagnetti is one of the four recipients of the grant for the inaugural edition of Biennale College Arte, launched in 2021. Participation out of competition.

Ambra Castagnetti, installation view, Aphros, Rolando Anselmi Galerie, Rome, 2021. Courtesy the Artist

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P. S TA F F

1987, Bognor Regis, UK Lives in London, UK and Los Angeles, USA

As a filmmaker, installation artist, and poet, P. Staff draws from a wide-ranging assortment of inspirations, materials, and settings, of which recent examples include Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, affect theory, the transpoetics of writers such as Che Gossett and Eva Hayward, as well as their own studies in modern dance, astrology, and end of life care. In Staff’s interdisciplinary practice, these varying threads serve to emphasise the processes by which bodies – especially those of people who are queer, trans, or disabled – are interpreted, regulated, and disciplined in a rigorously controlled society. The video installation On Venus (2019) continues Staff’s examination of the exchange between bodies, ecosystems, and institutions from a queer and trans perspective. Set above a mirrored floor flooded with radioactive yellow light, the moving images are comprised of warped footage documenting the industrial farming of commodities including urine, semen, meat, skins, and fur. The video’s second half includes a poem describing life on the planet Venus, a sibling to Earth but one described as a state of non-life or near-death, a queer state of being that is volatile and in constant metamorphosis. Staff’s work ultimately depicts states of violence that underpin the making of a human subject, inquiring what is at stake in the making of livable futures. – MW

P. Staff, installation view, P. Staff: On Venus, Serpentine Galleries, London, 2019. Photo © Hugo Glenndinning

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NOLO

E GI

OF ENCH

TMENT N A

M A R I NA A P O L L O N I O DA DA M A I N O LU C I A D I LU C I A N O L AU RA G R I S I G RA Z I A VA R I S C O NA N DA V I G O

The 1962 exhibition Arte programmata. Arte cinetica. Opere moltiplicate. Opera aperta, organised by artist, designer, and polymath Bruno Munari, was an innovative collaboration with the Olivetti corporation – producer of the world’s first desktop calculator – at the company’s store in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan. The exhibition featured artists – many associated with Gruppo T and Gruppo N – fascinated by the possibility of using then-nascent computational technologies to produce art. In his introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue, philosopher Umberto Eco suggests that these artists should be thought of as “programmers,” akin to engineers. Between 1959 and 1963, numerous similar groups emerged across Italy: Rimini’s Gruppo V, Gruppo Uno in Rome, Milan’s Gruppo MID, and Genoa’s Gruppo Tempo 3, among others. In the following decade, museums and galleries in Europe and the US hosted shows of graphics by computer engineers, and Optical and Kinetic artists across the Americas and Europe explored programmed aesthetics. Nove tendencije at the Galerija Suvremene Umjetnosti, Zagreb (1961); The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1965); the 33rd International Art Exhibition in Venice (1966); and Cybernetic Serendipity at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1968) were among several large-scale exhibitions in the 1960s that brought Optical and Programmed Art to a wider audience. Though the word “computer,” until the mid-20th century, referred to the mostly female workers who carried out calculations by hand, the artists presented here were largely marginalised in the overwhelmingly male artistic circles of their time. Conversations around Programmed Art tended either to envision technology as a powerful new tool for artists’ use, or to see the computer as a potential artistic author in its own right; in either case, the fact that new technologies were the purview of men was not in question. The artists in this presentation bring somatic complexity to “programmed” artistic creation. Whether employing actual industrial materials and technologies – such as Laura Grisi’s neon and Plexiglas, Grazia Varisco’s magnetic apparatuses, or Nanda Vigo’s illuminated glass and mirrors – or applying computational logic to work in traditional artistic media – as in Marina Apollonio’s optically dynamic reliefs, Dadamaino’s hand-painted raster gradients, or the complex mathematical rules governing Lucia Di Luciano’s masonite compositions –, each artist included here works on the boundaries between technology and the self. Their works emphasise the optical effects of the viewer’s movements, treat screens as skin-like membranes between body and machine, and complicate traditional modes of viewership with the attraction or repulsion of chromatic and luminous surfaces; art is reconceived as a technology of enchantment.

Marina Apollonio, Rilievo 703 (detail), 1964–1970. Photo Bruno Bani. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist

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MARINA APOLLONIO

1940, Trieste, Italy. Lives in Padua, Italy

Marina Apollonio’s artistic investigation focuses on creating perceptual stimuli through a combination of pure forms. Her practice has always overlapped with the rational approach, scientific objectives, and systematic style of Programmed, Concrete, Kinetic, and Optical Art. Apollonio’s first works from the early 1960s are drawings on paper, carefully filled in with two colours or tones; they are made up of repeated geometric figures, arranged in grids to create a dynamic effect on the eye. Exploring the relationship between the artwork and its surroundings, Apollonio began modifying the geometry of her early experiments to obtain a constantly different outcome. Each work in her series Rilievi (1964–1970), for instance, is like a three-dimensional version of her works on paper, featuring a metal lattice made from thin strips of aluminium. Mounted on dark or fluorescent sheets of coloured masonite, these meshes have a varying pattern in which the size, alternation, depth, and spacing of the strips changes to render the overall composition dynamic. Depending on the vantage point, their “motion” is accentuated by the background colour and by the qualities of the aluminium surface, which shimmers as it reflects the viewer’s movement. – SM

Marina Apollonio, Rilievo 902, 1964–1969. Aluminium, green fluorescent, Plexiglas, 49.5 × 49.5 × 6 cm. Photo Paolo Monello. Collection Prof. Ernesto L. Francalanci. Courtesy the Artist Technologies of Enchantment

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DA DA M A I N O

1930 – 2004, Milan, Italy

Edoarda Emilia Maino adopted the pseudonym Dadamaino in the 1960s. Though it originated with a felicitous typo in a Dutch catalogue, this whimsical change of identity also marked a much more significant shift that led the artist towards the perceptual dynamics of Programmed Art. Dadamaino adapted the methods of this Italian avant-garde current to cycles of work pervaded by a new emotional power. Some of her earliest experiments, like the series Volumi a moduli sfasati (1960–1961), adopt the scientific approach of perceptual experiments, but with slight, crucial variations: each work in the series superimposes two or more sheets of transparent plastic, punched with holes at regular intervals. Although the repetition of the holes and configuration of the grid suggest a clear, strict order, the hand-punching and misaligned surfaces make each perforation irregular, with an overall effect that confuses the eye. Resembling miniature labyrinths, her Cromorilievi (c. 1972–1975) are square panels onto which solid forms have been applied. Though the strict mathematical model governing their arrangement makes it irreversibly static, the units’ varied colours and shadows create a dynamic effect. Moving beyond kinetic experiments and beginning to express a verbal-visual sensibility, Dadamaino presents the mark or sign as a body, whether programmed or poetic in form. – SM

Dadamaino, Oggetto ottico-dinamico, 1960–1961. Milled aluminium plates on nylon threads on wooden structure, 96 × 96 cm (diagonal). Photo © Tornabuoni Arte. Private Collection. Courtesy Tornabuoni Arte

Giardini

155

LUCIA DI LUCIANO

1933, Syracuse, Italy. Lives in Formello, Italy

Among all the approaches that emerged from Programmed Art, Lucia Di Luciano’s stands out for its consistency and discipline. In the early 1960s, along with her husband Giovanni Pizzo, Di Luciano helped found two separate artistic initiatives in Rome: Gruppo 63, which lasted only one year but yielded a significant literary movement, and Operativo R, born from its ashes and just slightly longer-lived. Both championed an aesthetic investigation based on complex mathematical rules, emulating the strategies of technology without employing it directly. In an attempt, following the logic of the computers that were just then coming into use, to eliminate every trace of emotion from her compositions, the artist first gave up colour and, as we can see from her series Irradiazioni (1965), created psychedelic, black-and-white compositions on masonite of squares and rectangles that have been mathematically sequenced to give the appearance of movement through tensions, impulses, and vibrations. Their titles – Rapporto alternativo, Divergenze, Ritmi – bring to mind the structural experiments of Constructivism and the Bauhaus. These works, despite their intentionally anti-emotional, geometric austerity, become a sort of score over which the gaze can range at will, with as many different visual approaches as there are viewers. – SM

Lucia Di Luciano, Irradiazioni N.9, 1965. Morgan’s paint on masonite, 80 × 80 cm. Photo Bruno Bani. Courtesy the Artist; 10 A.M. ART Gallery, Milan

Technologies of Enchantment

156

LAURA GRISI

1939, Rhodes, Greece – 2017, Rome, Italy

Eschewing labels that alternately grouped it with American Minimalism or Italian Arte Povera, Laura Grisi’s artistic practice, starting in the 1960s, records the dramatic effect of natural phenomena, capturing their qualities in objects or technological settings that offer an unusual, insightful image of progress. With their seductive industrial finish, the looming pillars of her series Sunset Light (1967) present a high-tech version of the visual experience evoked in the title. The yellow neon core suggests the warm colour of the sky and casts a soft light on the viewer, whose movements are reflected by the Plexiglas to create a shifting surface, reminiscent of the sun’s. Grisi conceived these luminous columns as elements poised between nature and artifice, calibrating their light to create different moods and sensations. Aside from the obvious spectacle for the senses – which she later achieved by simulating other natural phenomena such as rain or wind – these works by Grisi, using mechanical and technological stratagems, create real or imagined landscapes that place viewers at the centre of an immersive, environmental experience: coming into alignment with the natural or artificial aspects of the sculptures, the body feels attuned with energies that alternate between physical and intimate, scientific and spiritual. – SM

Laura Grisi, Sunset Light, 1967. Neon, Plexiglas, steel, 219 × 30 × 30 cm. Photo Carlo Favero. Courtesy Laura Grisi Estate; P420, Bologna

Giardini

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G R A Z I A VA R I S C O

1937, Milan. Lives in Milan, Italy

In the early 1960s, Grazia Varisco embarked on an investigation in tune with international currents of Kinetic and Perceptual art. Alongside her fascination with the industrial aesthetic and with emerging computer technology, Varisco immediately focused on the relationship that a work establishes with the viewer, trying to foster engagement through kinetic stimuli. It is no coincidence that the group the artist joined in 1960 was called Gruppo T (for time), or that the other members – Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, and Gabriele Devecchi – thought of viewers as “co-authors” and exhibited their works with an invitation to “please touch.” The Tavole magnetiche (1959–1962) that marked Varisco’s debut within the group are simple metal surfaces on which visitors can move around magnets of various colours, shapes and sizes. She conceived subsequent works with shifting elements meant to provide perceptual stimulation. For instance, her Schemi luminosi variabili (1961–1968), already exhibited at the Biennale in 1964 and 1986, explore the full potential of real and illusory movement. The combined effect of movement and light – powered by the rotation of a motor inside transparent Perspex – makes luminous shapes emerge from the dark plastic surfaces, shifting like a kaleidoscope and endlessly recombined to create optical illusions, disruptions, and superimpositions. – SM

Grazia Varisco, Schema luminoso variabile R. VOD. LAB., 1964. Kinetic light object, black wooden box, blue Perspex (methacrylate), electric motor 3/2 rpm, neon lamp, 91 × 91 × 12.5 cm. Photo Thomas Libiszewski. Collection of the artist. Courtesy the Artist; Archivio Varisco

Technologies of Enchantment

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NA N DA V I G O

1936 – 2020, Milan, Italy

In the late 1950s, Nanda Vigo returned to Italy after studying architecture in Switzerland and America. Growing close to the Italian members of the Zero group, she embraced kinetic and perceptual experimentation through her own hybrid language. Vigo harnessed the use of natural and artificial light to great sensory effect, using industrial technology and materials like textured glass, mirrors, neon, Perspex, and aluminium. According to the artist, light has no dimension, and as in Manifesto cronotopico (1964), it adapts to any physical configuration. Her Cronotopi (1962–1968) are rectangular structures of aluminium and industrial glass set on the floor or on pedestals, reflecting the light that illuminates them from inside or outside. The artist also called them Spazi-tempi – in Greek, chronos means “time” and topos means “space” – and said the iridescent effect of the ribbed glass could transport viewers into another dimension. When installed so that visitors can walk through them, these sculptures give the illusion of constantly shifting surfaces. In 1967, Vigo began constructing Ambienti cronotopici with additional, complementary units. Though similar to Cronotopi, her Diaframmi (1968) have a tubular metal frame covered in textured glass. Vigo stacked or grouped these sculptural elements to mark out areas where space and time seem suspended, in a shimmering experience of the senses. – SM

Nanda Vigo, Diaframma, 1968. Glass, aluminium, and neon light, 100 × 100 × 25 cm. Photo Emilio Tremolada. Courtesy Archivio Nanda Vigo, Milan

Giardini

159

L I L L I A N S C H WA R T Z

1927, Cincinnati, USA Lives in New York City, USA

According to the famous exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968) at MoMA in New York, the 1960s heralded the beginning of a new, cybernetic age. Lillian Schwartz was fascinated by this growing technological innovation, and despite her traditional training in calligraphy and painting, she began working with engineers and programmers to create new visual experiences. At the MoMA show, the installation Proxima Centauri (1968), made in collaboration with Danish engineer Per Biorn – another member of the E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) group – was a translucent plastic dome that generated shifting red sculptures of light whose dynamic visual configuration varies with the viewer’s position. In the 1970s, after she started working at Bell Labs, the research and development branch of AT&T, Schwartz began to develop a hybrid language that superimposed hand-tinted photos and geometric drawings generated by algorithms to create psychedelic moving images. The brief films she made using this process, like Googolplex, Enigma, or Mis-Takes (all 1972), feature constantly mutating shapes accompanied by driving music, to produce an odd, mystic, almost spiritual sense of disorientation. Despite the revolutionary media and hypnotic, futuristic aesthetic that it employs, Schwartz’s work addresses timeless themes from a high-tech angle. – SM

Lillian Schwartz, Enigma (still), 1972. Film, 4 mins 5 sec. From the Collections of The Henry Ford. © The Henry Ford

160

AG N E S D E N E S

1931, Budapest, Hungary Lives in New York City, USA

The American artist Agnes Denes is recognised as a pioneer in Conceptual, Environmental, Ecological, and Land Art. Since the 1960s, Denes’ political objectives have been made explicit in her multi-faceted body of work that assumes the form of drawings, sculpture, photographs, and monumental public installations and that are grounded in ecological issues driven towards a post-Anthropocene future. In the over six metres long mono-prints Introspection I—Evolution (1968–1971) and Introspection II—Machines, Tools & Weapons (1969–1972), Denes diagrammatically visualises systems of knowledge. The first print traces the evolutionary developments of early man from ape to the present on an encyclopaedic scale. In the style of etchings and illustrations drawn from medical and engineering books, the print features anatomical studies and taxonomic tables. The latter print maps technology from the first manmade tools to the machines of the 20th century. Denes’ intersectional approach of expanding the field of science through the visual demonstrates her efforts in redefining abstract analytical notions to form new systems of language and knowledge that dissolve barriers between realms. In this way, Denes paves the way for new associations and understandings, reimagining the relationship of humans with the Earth. – LC Agnes Denes, Introspection I—Evolution, 1968–1971. Monoprint, 107.63 × 542.29 cm. Photo Stan Narten. Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects. © Agnes Denes Agnes Denes, Introspection II—Machines, Tools, & Weapons, 1969–1972. Monoprint, 101.6 × 626.75 cm. Photo Stan Narten. Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects. © Agnes Denes

Giardini

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ULLA WIGGEN

1942, Stockholm Lives in Stockholm, Sweden

When she was twenty-six years old, Ulla Wiggen took part in the landmark 1968 exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity curated by Jasia Reichardt at the ICA London. In the context of that exhibition – which explored the possibilities of the fusion of art and science – she showed a series of acrylic and gouache paintings on wood panels portraying the interior circuity of electronic devices. Titled TRASK and Vägledare (both 1967), these paintings capture an archetype of technological culture in an impeccably precise style. In Wiggen’s first gouache paintings of circuit boards and electronic bits, like Förstärkare (1964) and Kretsfamilj (1964), extraordinarily defined layers of paint give the works a physical presence – an effect achieved by applying paint to a ground of woven medical gauze. In her later work, Wiggen’s interest in the circuitry of brains and eyes supplants that of manmade machines. In her Iris Paintings (2016–ongoing), the artist presents human irises laboriously painted in blues, greens, hazels on round panels, a process that can take several months per piece to complete. Citing the blurring of her vision due to cataracts prior to treatment, the artist has stated that she wanted to visually express this liminal state – one between clarity and ambiguity, between consciousness and sleep. – MW

Ulla Wiggen, Iris XVIII Line, 2020. Acrylic on panel, 113.5 × 119 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Belenius, Stockholm; Galerie Buchholz. © Ulla Wiggen

162

CHARLOTTE JOHANNESSON

1943, Malmö, Sweden Lives in Skanör, Sweden

Charlotte Johannesson trained as a weaver in the 1960s. During the same period, she established in Malmö her studio Cannabis, named after the hemp plant from which she derived the fibres for her works, and with clear connotations to the favourite drug of the Sixties’ counterculture. Johannesson began practicing textile craft as art to address socio-political injustices. In 1978 she started merging weaving with early computer technology when she traded a tapestry for an Apple II, one of the first mass-produced personal computers, and applied the translatability of the vertical and horizontal lines of the loom to the language of computer programming. Johannesson’s fascination for the early “microcomputers,” as they were called back then, often appears as the subject of her work: the plotter print Computer Mind (1981–1986) depicts a figure connected to a computer via her nervous system. Since the 1980s, a number of Johannesson’s works have included images of world maps and of Earth seen from space, paired with slogans taken from popular culture, such as in the Take Me To Another World (1981–1986 and 2019) and The Target Is Destroyed (2019). Merging traditional weaving techniques with the experimental investigation of early computer technology, Johannesson continues to reinvent her practice to explore the possibilities for social and cultural change. – LC

Charlotte Johannesson, Pixel dream, 1981–1986. Original plotter print, 42 × 52 cm. Photo Helene Toresdotter. Courtesy the Artist; Hollybush Gardens, London. © Charlotte Johannesson

Giardini

163

L E N O RA D E BA R RO S

1953, São Paulo Lives in São Paulo, Brazil

Lenora de Barros began her trajectory in the 1970s, encouraged by the radical experimentations taking place at the time in Brazil. She was particularly influenced by the legacy of Noigandres, a Brazilian group formed in 1952 that explored a new genre of avant-garde poetry, placing an increased importance on the typography of language. De Barros’ POEMA (POEM) (1979) emphasises the visual and physical properties of language through bodily gestures. This sequence of black-and-white vignettes captures close-up images of a mouth provocatively revealing its tongue, which licks the keys of a typewriter, interacts with the type bars until they adhere to it, and disrupts the inner workings of the machine. With this muted act of defiance, Lenora de Barros suggests the possibility of the disintegration of borders between languages and the transformation of language into alternative narratives. Influenced by the words of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, and in particular by the challenge of the blank page, POEMA (POEM) marks the origin of a “wordless” poem birthed from the relationship between tongue and typewriter, creating tension between these two entities to point towards the repetition and mechanisation of gendered labour in both the domestic and professional realms. – LC

Lenora de Barros, POEMA (POEM), 1979 / 2014. Black-and-white inkjet print on cotton paper. Photograph by Fabiana de Barros. 6 elements, 22.2 × 29.8 cm each. Overall: 139.7 × 29.8 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Gallerie Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna; Bergamin & Gomide, São Paulo

164

SIDSEL MEINECHE HANSEN

1981, Ry, Denmark Lives in London, UK

In a world where CCTV cameras record all manner of public life, private images are ceaselessly uploaded to social media, deep fakes abound, and digital avatars can simulate human behaviour with increasing accuracy, our understanding of the body is progressively harder to separate from digital life. In Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s provocative and unsettling work, the ways these forms of photographic, televisual, and digital media impact our perceptions of ourselves is brought into sharp focus. Hansen’s work fixates on the amassment of capital created through the gendering of bodies, especially in the field of pornography. The video Maintenancer (2018), made in collaboration with filmmaker Therese Henningsen, focuses on the maintenance of sex dolls at a German doll brothel, presenting viewers in direct confrontation with women’s bodies as they are crafted and idealised for consumption, and the work of conservation involved in preserving their appearance. Many of Hansen’s sculptures follow a similar logic to her digitally rendered dolls: Daddy Mould (2018), the empty fibreglass mould of a silicon sex doll and Untitled (Sex Robot) (2018–2019), a ball-jointed wooden marionette, each reference human physical functionality but nonetheless maintain their commodity status. Like the technologised bodies in Hansen’s videos, art, sex, and product are closely linked. – MW

Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Maintenancer, 2018. Digital video, sound, in collaboration with Therese Henningsen, 13 mins 5 sec. Courtesy the Artist; Rodeo, London / Piraeus

Giardini

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ELLE PÉREZ

1989, New York City Lives in New York City, USA

Elle Pérez groups their photographs into what they call “configurations,” inviting the viewer into a give-and-take with the image: what we derive from these fragmented visions, and what they mean, is as much a result of our process of looking as it is a product of their contents. The photographs on view here weave together themes of fluidity and control from worlds that, at first, seem distinct. One strand is the landscape of Puerto Rico, seen here in images of the Cabachuelas Caves – shaped over centuries by the movement of the Atlantic ocean – and water pooling in the streets of Vega Baja during recent historic flooding. The weathered Plexiglas exterior of a New York bodega similarly bears the marks of passing time and bodies. Another strand is the mixed martial art maneuver known as a “clinch,” wherein two combatants – in this case, the artist’s friends Kenny and José – grapple in a tight hold. By recognising the common themes of surface and fluid movement central to these distinct scenes, Pérez weaves an abstract account of the echoes of diasporic history. Like a chorus, these images’ meaning lies in the harmonies that result from their convergence. – IW

Elle Pérez, Petal, 2020 / 2021. Digital silver gelatin print, 111.76 × 84.77 cm. Courtesy the Artist; 47 Canal

166

SHUANG LI

1990, Wuyi Mountains, China Lives in Berlin, Germany and Geneva, Switzerland

Shuang Li was raised in rural south-eastern China, where she grew up on a diet of YouTube, MySpace, knockoff Nintendo consoles, pirated videogames, and dakou CDs, hole-punched disks imported to China from the West as surplus plastic but disseminated in the underground market throughout the 1990s. Attuned from a young age to the innerworkings of technology as a dazzling agent of entertainment, she likewise has long been cognisant of its capacity to act as a profound vector of control over individuals in China’s new era of accelerated development and global Neoliberalism. Li’s interdisciplinary work underscores the friction between biopolitics and the body, digitised desire, and human intimacy. Like many Surrealists artists of the early 20th century, who frequently addressed the relationships between sexuality and commodity culture through the exploration of the human figure, Li suffuses digital spaces of consumerism with bodily eroticism. In Li’s 2021 work ÆTHER (Poor Objects) – a play on the word “ether” – she amalgamates disparate footage, including that of a solar eclipse with images brightened by ring lights, the lighting tool often used by social media influencers and vloggers. Forging an aesthetic and conceptual connection between these rings of light – one natural, one artificial, both uncanny – Li denotes the slippage between virtual experience and physical life – MW Shuang Li, I Want to Sleep More but by Your Side, 2018–2019. Video installation, 25 mins 27 sec, music by Eli Osheyack. Commissioned by Guangdong Times Museum for the exhibition Modes of Encounter: An Inquiry. Installation view, Peres Projects, ART021, Shanghai, 2021. Photo Lao Cui. Courtesy the Artist; Peres Projects, Berlin. © Shuang Li

Giardini

167

A N E TA G R Z E S Z Y K O W S K A

1974, Warsaw Lives in Warsaw, Poland

Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska employs the body – both her own and others’ – to question the social norms surrounding identity in a manner that brings her practice into dialogue with the work of feminist artists including Alina Szapocznikow, Ana Mendieta, and Cindy Sherman. In the series Mama (2018), Grzeszykowska subverts the relationship between mother and daughter by portraying her own daughter interacting with an eerily lifelike silicone doll modelled after the artist. The child imitates and assumes a maternal role, bathing and embracing the doll, while simultaneously treating it like a toy: painting its face, burying it in the dirt, and carrying it around in a push wagon. Oscillating between a human being left to the haphazard actions of a young child and a mere object, the doll blurs the animate with the inanimate. The young girl’s affirmation of subjectivity, possession, and control over the corpse-like object – which evokes the fetishised figure of the docile Surrealist puppet – is amended here with the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship. Grzeszykowska’s doll symbolises a rupture in the constraints assigned to bodies and social roles, re-examining motherhood through an exploration of self-alienation. – LC

Aneta Grzeszykowska, Mama # 32, 2018. Pigment ink on cotton paper, 50 × 36 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Raster; Lyles and King Gallery

168

JUNE CRESPO

1982, Pamplona, Spain Lives in Bilbao, Spain

June Crespo makes sculptures from industrial materials that reference architectural and bodily forms. Starting with fibreglass, resin, ceramic, bronze, and rebar, Crespo cuts, fragments, enlarges, and recombines existing materials into new intuitive forms. Some sculptures include recognisable elements – a stack of concrete mannequin hips and legs, piles of clothing, magazines, or a metal radiator –, while others devolve entirely into the abstract and amorphous. Each of Crespo’s sculptures suggests a body entrenched within an architectural space. By embedding clothing – both her own and others’ – within industrial materials, the artist points to domestic and intimate spaces. Her works become armatures, evoking the built environment’s simultaneous support and constriction of the human body and mind. Crespo’s installations reflect both future dystopian urban landscapes and our contemporary experience as composite cyborg creatures. Crespo’s new series of sculptures for The Milk of Dreams is an evolution of HELMETS (2020), two pairs of cast aluminium torsos stacked on top of each other, with the spouts through which the liquid metal is poured into the mould still attached, as well as a group of cast-concrete statues that expose the relief cast of shipping barrels. – MK

June Crespo, HELMETS VI, 2019. Stainless steel casting, bronze, ceramic coat, steel, 128 × 95 × 62 cm. Photo Daniel Mera. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Courtesy the Artist; Carreras Mugica Gallery, Bilbao

Giardini

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E LA I N E C A M E RO N -W E I R

1985, Red Deer, Canada. Lives in New York City, USA

Elaine Cameron-Weir’s sculptures combine metal, glass, concrete, and stone with ephemeral elements such as flame, scent, and light. They can resemble surgical instruments, laboratory equipment, torture devices, instruments of fetishism, military gear, or medieval armour, mixing protection, pleasure and pain in a precarious balance. The works’ somatic effect is accentuated by elements that bear the imprint of traces of the body. Low Relief Icon (Figure 1) and Low Relief Icon (Figure 2) (2021) is made of factory conveyor belts counterweighted by metal caskets used by the US military for transporting bodily remains, each illuminated by flicker lights and resting on a metallic floor originally designed to hide electrical cables. Adorning the pewter disks on the conveyor belts is the repeated image of the crucifix, invoking the hero narrative of individual sacrifice that obscures actions of a State that treats life as disposable. Made from a repurposed funerary backdrop and illuminated by neon and spotlights, Right Hand Left Hand, Grinds a Fantasizer’s Dust (2021) stands as a portal luring into a false promise of salvation, reflecting on the persistent exploitation of life. Cameron-Weir’s hybrid objects evoke the merging of body, technology, and machine, formalising the porous entanglement between the human and the non-human. – LC

Elaine Cameron-Weir, installation view, Elaine Cameron-Weir: STAR CLUB REDEMPTION BOOTH, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, 2021. Photo Jonathan Vanderweit. Courtesy the Artist; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; JTT, New York; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles

170

B I RG I T J Ü RG E N S S E N

1949 – 2003, Vienna, Austria

Austrian-born artist Birgit Jürgenssen produced a wide array of photographs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and wearable garments before passing prematurely at the age of fifty-four. She offers a sharp feminist perspective in a Viennese art world dominated by both the transgressive masculinity of Vienna Actionism and the conservative mores of the Austrian bourgeoisie. Jürgenssen’s experiments blend matters of identity and being, Freudian psychoanalysis and Surrealism, while maintaining a degree of distinctively utopian political thinking. In her surreal drawings from the 1970, bodies are shown both in metaphoric and literal terms: the well-dressed, part-crustacean figure in the drawing Fehlende Glieder (Missing Limbs) (1974); the nude seated body with the unmistakable furry head and upper back of a black cat in Ohne Titel (1977); and the small knives developing animal traits in Ohne Titel (1974), revealing the erotic, psychological, and emotional drives burning just beneath the surface of things. In Froschschultergürtel (Ergänzung zum menschlichen Bewegungsapparat) (1974), the relations between the boundaries of the inner mind and the external body become ambiguous, with a shield of bones strapped to the outside of a swimming-capped and bikini-clad woman’s body. Whether fantasy or nightmare, here, a representation of femininity is attached to something unfixed and altogether unknowable. – MW Birgit Jürgenssen, Frog Shoulder Belt (Addition to Human Motion Apparatus), 1974. Pencil, colour pencil on handmade paper, 45 × 62.5 cm. Photo Pixelstorm. Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen; Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna

Giardini

171

C O S I M A VO N B O N I N

1962, Mombasa, Kenya Lives in Cologne, Germany

Cosima von Bonin came of age as an artist in the 1990s amid the storied art scene in Cologne. In her practice, mixed references to art history, popular culture, and music are seen in tandem with a destabilising approach to craft and domestic activities. Many of her recent installations are populated with casts of cartoonish fabric characters – fish, whales, mushrooms, dogs, rockets – whose endearing appearances conjure a range of contradictions: delight and horror, softness and rigidity, and humour and sorrow. For von Bonin’s contributions to The Milk of Dreams (all 2022), these contradictions emerge through one of the artist’s favourite subjects: sea creatures. On the Giardini’s Central Pavilion’s façade we find WHAT IF THEY BARK 01-07, plastic sharks and fish adorned with surf boards, electric guitars, ukuleles, sarongs, and stuffed gingham-patterned missiles. Behind the façade’s columns are SCALLOPS (GLASS VERSION), a pair of scallops on a trapeze swing, and HERMIT CRAB (GLASS VERSION), a pair of plump crab claws draped on a cement mixer; next door to the installation, sea creatures flank a venetian boat (titled VENICE 1984). Playing with topical concerns such as capital, leisure, comfort, and performance of the self, von Bonin likewise satirises the affectations of contemporary art – particularly the storied lineage of the readymade – and of art history. – MW

Cosima von Bonin, WHAT IF IT BARKS 4 (GERRY LOPEZ SURFBOARD VERSION), 2018. Plastic, fabric, wood, steel stand, chains, Gerry Lopez 1970s surfboard, string, leather/plastic smiley face cooler bag, scarves, 200.7 × 114.3 × 103 cm. Photo Jason Mandella. Courtesy the Artist; Petzel, New York

172

MÜGE YILMAZ

1985, Istanbul, Turkey Lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Müge Yilmaz invites us to understand nature as its own thinking, acting being, and to join her in installations and rituals for protection. Yilmaz’s sculptures and performances draw on myriad ancient references read through feminist lenses, ranging from hieroglyphics from Neolithic Anatolia and hamsas, or Hands of Fatima, amulets; to traditional tattoos, made from ash mixed with a mother’s milk made for a new daughter. Her sculptures appear like painted shadows of gods, animals, and gestures frozen in time against a temple or cave wall. Here, Yilmaz realises The Adventures of Umay Ixa Kayakızı (2022). The installation is the library and life’s work of Umay, a retired astronaut. In Umay’s secret studiolo on an island ship, she has dedicated her life to reading and writing feminist science fiction – rare works written by women under their own names, as well as under male pseudonyms. Hand-carved by Umay, the totemic sculptures painted in vibrant blues and greens become the shelves that house her library, artefacts, and memorabilia – all the astronaut’s own grandchildren. The figures feature the heads of animals, hands holding powerful glyphs, and animating eyes that stare back and address the viewer. – MK

Müge Yilmaz, The Adventures of Umay Ixa Kayakizi (Feminist Science Fiction Library), 2021. CNC-cut and hand carved birch wood, poplar wood, bamboo, various books, glass, lights, plant, holographic screen, various seeds. Commissioned by Other Futures, Amsterdam. Clay work by Lorena Matic. Photo Pieter Kers | beeld.nu

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N ATI G P PA R T I C I OU NT R I E C

GIA

INI

AUSTRALIA

AUSTRIA

DESASTRES is an experimental noise project that synchronises sound with image. The work takes the form of a durational solo performance as installation. Marco Fusinato will be performing during the opening hours of the Biennale – a total of two hundred days. Fusinato will perform live in the pavilion using an electric guitar as a signal generator into mass amplification to improvise slabs of noise, saturated feedback, and discordant intensities that trigger a deluge of images onto a freestanding floor-to-ceiling LED wall. The images are sourced via a stream of words that have been put into an open search across multiple online platforms. The mass indexing is a mess – a morass of disparate and disconnected randomly generated images.

Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl present stage-like installations, in which they unfurl their entire artistic cosmos – from paintings, sculptures, textile works, photographs, text, and video to a fashion collection and a publication in the form of a magazine. The artists focus on the situation of the symmetrical architecture of the Austrian pavilion, that is both divided and connected by a colonnade. The two sections each bear the mark of one of the two artists. While distinguishing the two distinct positions, this also ensures that they remain in conversation with each other to emphasise the artist duo at appropriate points. Various materials, modes of operation, symbols, and forms appear to oscillate between the two presentations, duplicated and mirrored and translated into the preferred artistic practice in each case.

Marco Fusinato, a page from the Score for DESASTRES, 2022. Facsimile on Edition Peters manuscript paper, 45.5 × 30.3 cm. Courtesy the Artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl. Photo Christian Benesch

Giardini

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BELGIUM

BRAZIL

Playing is something natural, something that we discover and learn instinctively in our childhood. It is an essential human need. It is necessary to take time, to spend time, and to “waste” time in playing. Children’s play is to be understood as a creative relationship with the world. Since 1999, Francis Alÿs’s camera has filmed children playing in the public space. It started with the video Children’s Game #1: Caracoles, showing a young boy kicking a bottle up a steep street, only to let it roll back to him and then kicking it up again. Observing, investigating, and documenting human behaviour in urban life is a constant in Alÿs’s work. 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.

Jonathas de Andrade bases his work on his profound interest in an authentically “popular” culture. The installation is linked together by an index of idiomatic expressions and sayings involving human body metaphors along with a series of artworks that materialise the extraordinary poetic charge of those sayings, making them tangible. Two huge ears placed at the pavilion’s entrance and exit allude to the popular expression Entrar por um ouvido e sair pelo outro, allowing the visitors to go “in one ear and out the other,” while an inflatable balloon, which invades the space at various moments during the day, refers to the expression: Coração saindo pela boca (the heart coming out of the mouth). Altogether, the artworks constitute a partial and allusive – but powerfully physical – index of the sensations experienced by an imaginary Brazilian body, translated into simple and sometimes funny expressions, but which nevertheless capture and convey the historical moment in which we are living, in all its complexity.

Children’s Game #19: Haram Football, Mosul, Iraq, 2017. Photo Francis Alÿs. Courtesy the Artist

Project for the work Entrar por um ouvido e sair pelo outro, 2022. Digital image Alex Ninomia

Participating Countries

176

C A NA DA

DENMARK

In 2011, popular uprisings erupted across the globe, including the Arab Spring protests, the England riots, and Occupy movements in different regions of the world. The upheaval of that year is explored by Stan Douglas in four large-scale photographs that restage events in London, New York City, Tunis, and Vancouver, together with a two-channel video installation whose premise imagines a real-time collaboration between musicians in London and Cairo.

Step into a hyperrealistic world of unexpected drama. 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. This is, however, no ordinary family, which is obvious from the moment you enter their home and encounter the inhabitants as you walk through the rooms containing their belongings, food, and working tools. But who is this family, and what has happened to them and the world they live in? This is not so obvious. The whole setting by Uffe Isolotto is haunted by a deep uncertainty. It is impossible to tell whether it is tragic or hopeful. Perhaps it is both? Does the family embody the complex and unsettling experience of going forward in today’s radically changing world? If so, the more general question becomes, do we seek refuge in who we were or do we look for escape routes in what we might become?

Stan Douglas, London, 2011-08-09 (Pembury Estate), 2017. C-print on dibond, 150 × 300 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Victoria Miro; David Zwirner. © Stan Douglas

Uffe Isolotto, We Walked the Earth, 2022. Photo Jakob Hunosøe

Giardini

177

EGYP T

ESTONIA

The Promised Land… flowing and flooding with milk and honey… Land of extraordinary fertility… the aim, the purpose and serenity… A startling image whose core is pantheistic and sexual, as well as both sacred and profane… An eternal being of temptation and desire… A fragile, never-ending struggle… Redefining humanity… Coherent identity and a torn world… Loops of existence… Sceptic consciousness in the infinite time and space… Unpredictability… Uncertainty… In the Installation by Mohamed Shoukry, Ahmed El Shaer, and Weaam El Masry the human being is raptured in an eternal war between instinctive and volitional nature.

Through the metaphor of tropical orchids, Orchidelirium unveils a complex and dark account of colonial ecological exploitation with present-day repercussions. The overlooked story of the 19th-century artist and world traveller Emilie Rosalie Saal is a case study for entangled histories of self-determination, colonial experiences, neocolonial structures, botany, science, and art. Artists Kristina Norman and Bita Razavi, in conversation with curator Corina L. Apostol, have produced an immersive environment – encompassing Norman’s film trilogy and Razavi’s performative spatial intervention – connecting past and present through the lens of colonial botany and its sociopolitical ramifications.

Weaam El Masry, Mohamed Shoukry, Ahmed El Shaer, Eden-Like Garden 03, 2022. Media installation, 23 × 8 × 6 m, 3D simulation. © Weaam El Masry, Mohamed Shoukry, Ahmed El Shaer, Egyptian Ministry of Culture

Emilie Rosalie Saal, Bamboo Orchid, c. 1910–1920. Lithograph, 63.5 × 48.3 cm. Courtesy Corina L. Apostol Participating Countries

178

FINLAND

FRANCE

Security, both as a concept and as an industry, defines much of our public space and what kind of behaviour is tolerated within it. Pilvi Takala’s video installation Close Watch is based on her experience working covertly as a fully qualified security guard for Securitas. The multichannel installation is centred on a workshop she developed in response to issues encountered during her six-month employment in one of the biggest shopping malls in Finland. By making visible the hierarchies in the private security industry, Close Watch reflects on how control is enforced, and how we ultimately govern each other’s behaviour.

Zineb Sedira’s 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. 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 the background, she shines the spotlight on the film Les Mains libres, realised by the Italian director Ennio Lorenzini in 1964; for this project, she found and restored the reels of this first Italian–Algerian coproduction. A French artist with a plural identity, Zineb Sedira has constructed her work on a personal journey spanning France, the United Kingdom, and Algeria. For this new project she has teamed up with a curatorial team made up of Yasmina Reggad and the duo Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath.

Pilvi Takala, Close Watch, 2022. Video installation. Courtesy Carlos/Ishikawa and Helsinki Contemporary

Zineb Sedira, Les rêves n’ont pas de titre, 2022. © Thierry Bal

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GERMANY

G R E AT B R I TA I N

In her project, Maria Eichhorn focuses on the history of the German pavilion and its architectural transformation. The Bavarian pavilion, built in 1909, was renamed the German pavilion in 1912 and was redesigned in 1938 to reflect fascist aesthetics. A new façade, rear extensions, and a raised ceiling contributed to the pavilion’s intimidating appearance. Despite post-war modifications, the building still embodies the formal language of fascism. Maria Eichhorn uncovers traces of the original pavilion, hidden behind its 1938 redesign. The project also includes city tours to places of remembrance and resistance conducted by Giulio Bobbo and Luisella Romeo and developed with the Istituto Veneziano per la Storia della Resistenza e della Società Contemporanea (IVESER), performances by Nkisi and Jan St. Werner, and a catalogue.

Sonia Boyce depicts intimate social encounters that explore interpersonal dynamics. Working across drawing, photography, video, and installation, she composes works from images and voices captured during the participatory events she initiates. The exhibition Feeling Her Way (2022) is comprised of tessellating wallpapers, golden geometric structures, and colour-tinted moving-image works that immerse the space in the sound of Black British female vocalists, embodying feelings of freedom, power, and vulnerability. The central work shows the singers as they meet, improvise, and perform acapella together for the first time, demonstrating the potential of collaborative play as a route to innovation, a central tenet of Boyce’s practice.

Set of keys in the door to the main entrance of the German pavilion. Photo Jens Ziehe

Sonia Boyce, Untitled (behind the scenes Boyce at Abbey Road Studios, London), 2021. Photo Sarah Weal. © Sonia Boyce Participating Countries

180

GREECE

H U N G A RY

The artist and filmmaker Loukia Alavanou invites the public to a utopic voyage through time and space. Her installation Oedipus in Search of Colonus links the cultural past of classical Greece – especially the work of theatre author Sophocles – to the social reality of today, by showing the desperate existence of Roma communities in Nea Zoi, west of Athens. Loukia Alavanou and her team do so by using futuristic technologies of filmmaking, casting Roma as actors for a Sophocles play, and by creating a dramatic yet intimate atmosphere in the Greek pavilion, which becomes a self-reflective island in the middle of the world’s biggest exhibition. Art as an impossible place. Utopia.

Zsófia Keresztes’ exhibition deals with the stages in one’s search for identity. This concept reaches back to Arthur Schopenhauer’s porcupine dilemma but, moving on from this, it takes as its associative starting point an episode from Antal Szerb’s 1937 novel Journey by Moonlight, used by the artist as a poetic analogy. The exhibition, in four 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 – separate yet existing as one community – attempt to achieve their final form.

Loukia Alavanou, On the Way to Colonus (still), 2020. VR360 film. Produced by VRS, powered by Onassis Culture. © Loukia Alavanou

Zsófia Keresztes, After Dreams: I Dare to Defy the Damage, 2022. Studio view. Photo Dávid Biró. Courtesy the Artist; Gianni Manhattan Giardini

181

ISRAEL

J A PA N

How sovereign can art be? Ilit Azoulay casts off the restrictions of national and male representations and opens pathways into an interconnected Middle East. The Queendom, reigned by art, seems to have risen out of a total system crash. It is a rhizomatic realm, where stories coalesce. Panoramic Photomontages – based on the archive of art historian David Storm Rice (1913–1962) – presents a symphony of fracture and healing, while an audio work fills the venue with sounds of a universal language. Azoulay uses digital craftwork to visualise the afterlife of images and their transformations, accentuating histories of appropriation and missing links in their geographies of knowledge.

A new work by the artist collective Dumb Type. Mirrors on four stands rotate at high speed, reflecting lasers trained on them to project text onto the surrounding walls. The projected texts are all taken from an 1850s geography textbook, posing simple yet universal questions. The sounds of voices reading the texts are emitted from rotating parametric speakers, becoming highly directional beams of sound that travel around the room. In contrast to the discourses that surround it, the centre of the room is an empty space – a place that exists nowhere, but at the same time a place that could be anywhere. We live in a time of post-truth and liminal spaces. The centre is void.

Ilit Azoulay, Queendom Panel 3, 2022. Inkjet print, 200 × 150 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Braverman Gallery. © Ilit Azoulay; L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem

Kazuo Fukunaga + Dumb Type. Photo courtesy the Artist. © Dumb Type

Participating Countries

182

R E P U B L I C O F KO R E A

NORDIC COUNTRIES ( N O RWAY, S W E D E N , FINLAND)

In the infinite cycles of creation and extinction, it gyrates and descends; this theme permeates everything from energy to matter, life, and the universe – the cycles are ubiquitous and ever-present. The exhibition Gyre explores the world as a labyrinth, where there are both motion in stillness and stillness in motion, embracing nonhuman objects and material reality. Based on the artist – Yunchul Kim’s transdisciplinary research into literature, mythology, philosophy, and science, he creates a universe within the Korean pavilion, where his pataphysical installations continuously metamorphoses and are affected by cosmic events, atmosphere, light, and nature.

In a historic first, the artists Pauliina Feodoroff, Máret Ánne Sara, and Anders Sunna have transformed the Nordic Pavilion into The Sámi Pavilion in representation of Sápmi, their Sámi homeland. An act of Indigenous Sámi sovereignty, this project revolves around three key elements: transgenerational relations, holistic Sámi knowledge, and Sámi spiritual perspectives. New works include painting, sound, sculpture, smell, and performance. The works highlight the imbalance of colonial power relations across Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula, where Sámi people are forced to give up the bonds of kinship with land and waters that are essential in their lives, and propose ways of healing, repairing, and resurging Sámi worldviews today.

Yunchul Kim, Chroma V, 2022. Chromatic kinetic installation, acrylic, aluminium, polymer, LED, motor, micro-controller, 235 × 800 × 225 cm. Photo Studio Locus Solus. Courtesy the Artist

Anders Sunna, Illegal Spirits of Sápmi, 2022 (detail). Oil and acrylic paint, spray colour, and collage on MDF panels, wooden shelves, sonic dioramas, pentaptych, 300 × 275 cm. Photo Piera Niilá Stålka. Courtesy the Artist. © Anders Sunna

Giardini

183

POLAND

ROM A N I A

The project by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is inspired by the Renaissance Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara; it expands the European iconosphere and art history with representations of Roma culture, which is often overlooked. The interior of the Polish pavilion consists of an installation: twelve panels covered with depictions of the twelve months of the year in large-format textiles, which draw from the Renaissance astrological frescos from Palazzo Schifanoia. The symbols of the palace, including zodiac signs, the decan system, the time cycles, and the migration of images across time and continents, stand as visual and ideological points of reference, which the artist inscribes in a Polish–Roma identity and the vernacular historical experience, building the affirmative iconography of the largest European minority.

Adina Pintilie’s multichannel installation emerges from her ongoing research on the politics and poetics of intimacy and the body. Amidst the global resurgence of right-wing ideologies, as well as to the growing polarities between people and between belief systems, Pintilie imagines a space of togetherness, beyond borders and binaries. Departing from a practice of community building, Pintilie’s idiosyncratic methodology explores the central role of intimacy in the everyday. Nurtured by long-term collaboration with the protagonists, the Romanian pavilion is transformed into a contemporary cathedral that celebrates connections between bodies beyond any preconceptions.

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Re-enchanting the World (March), 2022. Textile installation, 462 × 387 cm. Photo Bartek Solik. Courtesy the Artist

Adina Pintilie, You Are Another Me—A Cathedral of the Body, 2022. Nine-channel installation, featuring Hermann Mueller, Dirk Lange, Grit Uhlemann, Christian Bayerlein, Laura Benson, cinematographer George Chiper-Lillemark. Courtesy the Artist

Participating Countries

184

RUS S I A

SERBIA

On 27 February 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, Curator Raimundas Malašauskas and artists Kirill Savchenkov and Alexandra Sukhareva announced that they will no longer participate in the project of the Russian pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition. On 1 March 2022, the Commissioner for the Russian Federation pavilion, Anastasia Karneeva, communicated to La Biennale di Venezia that the pavilion will remain closed for the entirety of the 59th International Art Exhibition.

You enter a space that is a fiction. An abstraction of time and space. It is pure modernist painting through which the artist returns reality into the picture. You enter a relationship mediated by technology that the artist inverts. The presentation underlines relations to technology and nature – in this case water as part of our body, but also water as our connection point rather the as a separation. In these waters the artist swims as he waits for the perfect image to emerge. The exhibition presents Vladimir Nikolic’s exploration over the last three years, intertwining the personal and intimate with political anxieties of uncertain futures if we don’t learn to be a different kind of human.

Vladimir Nikolić, 800m (detail), 2019. CinemaDNG image sequence converted to 4K video, 14 mins 10 sec. Courtesy the Artist

Giardini

185

S PA I N

SWITZERLAND

The exhibition takes as its point of departure an apparently simple act: to shift the Spanish pavilion. Located in a corner of the Giardini, the building appears slightly skewed with respect to its neighbours Belgium and Holland. Ignasi Aballí’s proposal endeavours to resolve this dilemma by replicating the building with new internal walls at an angle of 10 degrees, the required amount to align the building with its neighbours. The intervention disrupts spatial memory and modifies the exhibition space, its location at the Venice Biennale’s venue, and its relationship with the city of Venice. Supposing that the current location was an anomaly, why correct a building that was previously approved? Why compare it with its neighbours? What changes does this correction imply? This is where the apparently simple conceit becomes much more complicated.

Latifa Echakhch creates an exhibition akin to an orchestrated time-travel experience. A rhythmic and spatial environment that allows for a counter clockwise perception of time and of one’s own body, simultaneously exploring continuity, movements, and sequences. Ephemeral sculptures inspired by the folk statuary emerge in the orchestrated lighting capturing the rhythms composed by percussionist Alexandre Babel. You can see the music, but you can’t hear it. The artist draws from the vocabulary of ephemeral chariot constructions, tackling concerns and disputes, dreams, and utopias, playing with harmonies and dissonances, with the mixed feelings of expectation, fulfilment, destruction, and memories.

Ignasi Aballí, Correction, 2022. Installation view of the Spanish pavilion. Photo Adam Jorquera. Courtesy the Artist

The Concert, view of the entrance, Swiss Pavillion. Photo DR. Courtesy the Artist; Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv / Bruxelles; kamel mennour, Paris; kaufmann repetto, Milan / New York; Pace Gallery, New York / London / Hong Kong / Seoul / Geneva / Palo Alto / East Hampton / Palm Beach. © Annik Wetter Participating Countries

186

U N I T E D S TAT E S OF AMERICA

U R U G U AY

Characterised by an interest in performativity and affect, Simone Leigh’s expansive body of work in sculpture, video, and performance parses the construction of Black femme subjectivity. Leigh’s large-scale sculptural 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, redefining notions of space, time, and existence. Sovereignty commingles disparate histories and narratives, including those related to ritual performances of the Baga peoples in Guinea, early Black American material culture from the Edgefield District in South Carolina, and the landmark 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. With a series of new bronzes and ceramics, Leigh intervenes imaginatively to fill gaps in the historical record by proposing new hybridities.

In Persona, Gerardo Goldwasser offers a critical reflection that stages one aspect, as basic as it is complex, of human societies: the way they cover and exhibit bodies, discipline them, and also distinguish them. The proposal refers to the ways in which every human being is perceived as a person by constructing their appearance, their way of entering onto the scene every day of their life. Goldwasser’s Persona invites and urges us to make history. To look and think about the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses, about the doubts that assault the sciences, the arts, and the myths of our time, in black and white, like the anonymous and undated tailoring manual he inherited from his grandfather.

Simone Leigh, Sentinel IV, 2020. Bronze, 325.1 × 63.5 × 38.1 cm. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. © Simone Leigh

Gerardo Goldwasser, The Greeting, 1990–2022. Eighty-five sleeves made of cloth. Photo Rafael Lejtreger

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187

B O L I VA R I A N R E P U B L I C OF VENEZUELA

V E N I C E PAV I L I O N

The exhibition including artists Palmira Correa, Mila Quast, César Várquez, and Jorge Recio, proposes the understanding of the body as a presence that participates transversely on four levels: as metaphor and life, from the ecological dimension of the earth, mediating between humans and the macrocosm. The social body in its political action as a country, that space-time of human geography in which the community, historical awareness, values of independence are deprived. The body, which is one with the house, projection of its being that reproduces the biological functions and the delicate behaviours of our psyche. Finally, the body as microcosm, actor of life, sometimes with its balance of injuries that the human will wisely manage to redeem.

Alloro (laurel) is a journey that deals with change and metamorphosis through nature and art, which begins in the psyche, in a clean, perfect, almost aseptic place and ends in the warmth of Mother Earth, a journey that is accomplished through movement. Every single step in this movement is punctuated by the rhythm of music, sounds that are not just a background, but are created as a work, between the natural and the artificial, between who you are and who you want to be, who you can become. It is art, with its multifaceted language, that explores any of the stages of change – in the first place, free will and freedom of choice – which are embodied in the laurel plant, symbol of wisdom and glory, victory, fame, triumph, and honour, but which have their roots in the past, in the archetype, in the mind.

Mila Quast and César Vazquez, Dislexia, 2020. Video installation. Photo and © Mila Quast and César Vazquez

Paolo Fantin e Oφcina, Lympha, 2022. Installation, mixed media of hyperrealism.© Paolo Fantin e Oφcina

Participating Countries

188

EX H I

T BI

ION

AR S E NA

SIMONE LEIGH

1967, Chicago, USA. Lives in New York City, USA

Making use of premodern and contemporary sculptural techniques, including lost-wax casting and salt-firing alongside culturally potent forms such as cowrie shells, plantains, raffia, and tobacco leaves, 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. 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, goddess-like, over Manhattan’s busy 10th Avenue. Created as part of Leigh’s Anatomy of Architecture series (2016–present), Brick House – part woman, part house – is one of a group of sculptures that amalgamates bodies with architectural references, from the domed earthen dwellings of the Mousgoum people in Chad and Cameroon, clay-and-wood buildings of the Batammaliba in Togo, and Nigerian ibeji figures to the 19th century African American craft tradition of face jugs and Mammy’s Cupboard, a restaurant in Natchez, Mississippi constructed in the guise of a racist mammy archetype, whose massive red skirt houses the dining room. 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. – MW Simone Leigh, Brick House, 2019. High Line Plinth Commission, High Line, New York City, 2019. Photo Timothy Schenck. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; the High Line. © Simone Leigh

192

B E L K I S AY Ó N

1967 – 1999, Havana, Cuba

When the Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón was invited to exhibit at Biennale Arte 1993, Cuba was in a severe economic depression spurred by the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Ayón, determined to fly to Italy, but left with limited means for the twenty-mile trip to the Havana airport, headed out by bicycle ahead of her father, who carried her work on his own bike. Lagging behind, he didn’t make it to the airport in time, but astoundingly, the print arrived in Venice several days later, with the help of an Italian woman who happened to be traveling from Cuba to Milan. Her work was created using the printmaking technique collography, a collage-like approach in which heterogenous materials are amassed on a plate to create a composition, allowing for a vast range of tones, textures, and forms; in Ayón’s able hands, the subtle gradations of blacks, whites, and greys takes on a magical, redolent weight. Although a self-declared atheist, Ayón dedicated her life’s work to the codes, symbols, and tales of Abakuá, a secret Afro-Cuban fraternal society whose foundational myth is based on a woman’s act of betrayal. Throughout her oeuvre, Sikán, the princess typically depicted with no facial features but her eyes, is imagined in various religious scenes culled from Judeo-Christian scripture, as well as in mysterious scenarios redolent of Ayón’s life – one belonging to a real Afro-Cuban woman at the end of the millennium, occupied by her own interior dramas. – MW Belkis Ayón, Resurrección, 1998. Collography, 263 × 212 cm. Photo Watch Hill Foundation. Collection Watch Hill Foundation and von Christierson Family. Courtesy Watch Hill Foundation and von Christierson Family. © Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba

Arsenale

193

P O R T I A Z VAVA H E R A

1985, Harare Lives in Harare, Zimbabwe

Portia Zvavahera sees through her dreams. She pairs the emotional intensity of her inner life with the spiritualism of the Indigenous Zimbabwean and Apostolic Pentecostalist beliefs of her upbringing. Most often, the artist’s ghostly, larger-than-life paintings communicate a spiritual understanding of quotidian moments, including renderings of her family, shape-shifting animals, figures attending wedding processions or kneeling in prayer, or women giving birth and engaged in secular rituals typically marked as feminine. Zvavahera’s paintings, too, develop out of a ritualistic process of painting and stencilling to create layers of patterns and luminous colours, recalling processes of block printing in Zimbabwean textile design, while also establishing a rhythmic, almost musical, dynamic between material and mark. For The Milk of Dreams, Zvavahera presents a suite of four new works that continue her exploration of painting as a form of spiritual catharsis. Enveloped by cloak-like vessels of spiralling colour, the figures in paintings like Kudonhedzwa kwevanhu (2022) seem to float in and out of planes of existence, framed by fragments of the natural world, with otherworldly, owl-like creatures overseeing their communion. By portraying these ghostly figures in oil stick and fine brushwork, Zvavahera faces the harrowing visions that populate her subconscious to identify the warnings, or lessons, that they might offer. – MW Portia Zvavahera, Ndirikuda kubuda (I want to come out), 2021. Oil based printing ink, oil bar on canvas, 208 × 180.7 × 7.9 cm. Photo Stephen Arnold. Courtesy the Artist; Stevenson; David Zwirner. © Portia Zvavahera

194

GABRIEL CHAILE

1985, San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina Lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Lisbon, Portugal

Gabriel Chaile’s practice is informed by his long-standing exploration of impoverished communities, rituals, and artistic customs from his home in Argentina. Raised in the northern city of San Miguel de Tucumán with Spanish, Afro-Arab, and Indigenous Candelaria heritage, Chaile often employs materials, forms, and archetypal symbols associated with pre-Columbian cultures, which he synthesises in ways both poetic and humorous. Chaile creates spaces where historical precedent, Indigenous epistemologies, and prescient craft conventions comingle with contemporary life. His characteristic sculptures derive from a theory that he refers to as “the genealogy of form:” drawing upon objects such as pots and clay ovens that often take on anthropomorphic traits, he invokes the relationship of traditional Argentinian vessels to nourishment, support, collaboration, and community activities. For The Milk of Dreams, Chaile presents a group of five sculpture-ovens that portray, in a large format, members of his family. Along with the central figure of the group, which is titled Rosario Liendro (2022) after Chaile’s maternal grandmother, the artist presents the figures of his parents and paternal grandparents. When he cannot rely on direct knowledge, Chaile imagines his relatives’ features by using descriptions of them handed down in oral stories. This new series of sculptures is an expression of the body’s capacity for communalism, giving, and care – especially in the specific context of a family. – MW & SM Gabriel Chaile, exhibition view, Genealogía de la forma, Barro, Buenos Aires, 2019. Photo Santiago Orti. Courtesy the Artist; Barro, Buenos Aires

Arsenale

195

FICRE GHEBREYESUS

1962, Asmara, Eritrea 2012, New Haven, USA

At once pensive and exuberant, Ficre Ghebreyesus’ paintings capture the complexity of his East African childhood and life in diaspora, presenting fantastical landscapes drawn from longing for a time and place interrupted by conflict. Born to a Coptic Christian family in what was to become the capital city of Eritrea, Asmara, at the beginning of the country’s thirty-year-long War of Independence from Ethiopia (1961–1991), Ghebreyesus left home as a teenage refugee, eventually settling in New Haven, Connecticut. There, Ghebreyesus and his brothers opened a popular restaurant specialising in East African food; he devoted himself further to making art, eventually enrolling in the MFA program at Yale. When he died in 2012, most of his paintings had never been publicly displayed. In the large, unstretched canvas City with a River Running Through (2011), a cityscape of the modernist stucco-painted houses found throughout Asmara is constructed from a chequerboard of orange and peach forms that resemble traditional Eritrean basketry and embroidery. In Nude with Bottle Tree (c. 2011), a figure stands in a densely patterned landscape near a bottle tree, an ancient Kongolese custom of adorning tree branches with discarded vessels as a means for warding off evil spirits. On the right side of the canvas is another figure, reminiscent of Yoruba horse-and-rider sculptures, holding musical instruments. Together, they stand at a crossroad between worlds. – MW Ficre Ghebreyesus, Nude with Bottle Tree, c. 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 182.9 × 213.4 cm. Photo Christopher Burke Studio. Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. © The Estate of Ficre Ghebreyesus

196

R O S A N A PA U L I N O

1967, São Paulo Lives in São Paulo, Brazil

Rosana Paulino’s practice spans drawing, embroidery, engraving, printmaking, collage, sculpture, and installation to explore the history of racial violence and the persisting legacy of slavery in Brazil, deconstructing the production and dissemination of racist theories that served as justification for European colonialism and the slave trade. The drawings of the Wet Nurse series (2005) examine the role of Black enslaved women who breastfed their masters’ children. Entangled networks of veins leading from reddened breasts sprout from nipples, indicating milk while also suggesting blood. In the Weavers (2003), roots grow from women’s breasts, vaginas, eyes, and mouths – the tendrils bind and torture their very maker. The series Senhora das plantas (2019) depicts webs of roots and plants spreading from women’s bodies. Trunks emerging from the ground rise to amalgamate with bodies that in turn merge with, are wrapped by, and grow flowers, plants, and trees in the Jatobá series (2019). In the series Carapace of Protection, made in the first decade of the 2000s, bodies emerge from cocoons, the process of metamorphosis granting the human-insect a momentary sense of euphoria. Revealing the promise of transformation and the possibility of avoiding fixed paradigms, the skin becomes the relic of an earlier time and the shedding of constraints. – LC

Rosana Paulino, from Senhora das Plantas series, 2019. Watercolour, graphite on paper, 37.5 × 27.5 cm. Photo Bruno Leão. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, New York. © Rosana Paulino

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197

B R I T TA M A R A K AT T - L A B B A

1951, Idivuoma, Sápmi/Northern Sweden Lives in Övre Soppero, Sápmi/Northern Sweden

The artist Britta Marakatt-Labba was born into a family of reindeer herders in Sápmi, one of the northernmost regions of the world and home to the Sámi Indigenous community. For over four decades, her artistic practice has yoked methods of visual storytelling to the Sámi people and the Nordic landscape, which she has achieved with touching works that alternate between history and the present. Marakatt-Labba is known for her embroidery work, for which she threads fine wool, silk, and linen onto white fabric grounds, as well as for prints, illustrations, scenic designs, and costumes produced for film and theatre. The new embroideries Milky Way and In the Footsteps of the Stars (both 2021) are composed as if the landscapes they contain were refracted through an orb or reflected in an eye, suggesting the parabolic projections used to create two-dimensional maps. Within the landscapes delineated by their borders are images of flora, fauna, stars, and figures wearing red ladjogáhpir (or horn hats), a particular Sámi women’s hat that is topped by a curved wooden horn covered with embroidered fabric. Sámi cultural history is bridged with the present through Marakatt-Labba’s characteristic iconographic hybridity. – MW

Britta Marakatt-Labba, Circle 4, 2021–2022. Embroidery, appliqué, 35 × 35 cm. Photo Hans Olof Utsi. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist

198

T H AO N G U Y E N P H A N

1987, Ho Chi Minh City Lives in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Trained as a painter, Thao Nguyen Phan creates installations and videos that intertwine the real and the imaginary, mixing mythology and folklore with urgent issues around historical amnesia, industrialisation, food security, and the environment. Her recent projects have focused on the Mekong River, exploring the social and environmental changes caused by climate change, overfishing, dam construction, and looted heritage in the aftermath of colonialism. First Rain, Brise Soleil (2021–ongoing) addresses US imperialism in the region and the 1977–1991 war between Vietnam and Cambodia. The film opens with the fictional narrative of a Vietnamese-Khmer construction worker who specialises in brise-soleil, the concrete lattices for shading and ventilating buildings that, in cities like Ho Chi Minh City (before 1976 named Saigon), unite a traditional Vietnamese building technique with a modern material linked to US domination. The film’s second half, set during the 18th century’s feudal wars, centres on a folkloric love story between a Vietnamese medicinal healer and a Khmer woman that unfolds around the symbolic significance of a durian (or “thouren”) fruit, a major product of the Mekong Delta. Contrasting the solitude of Saigon’s urban setting with the deceptively lush landscape of the Mekong, the video addresses romantic love from several women’s perspectives, producing a narrative that transforms and flows like the river itself. – IW Thao Nguyen Phan, First Rain, Brise-Soleil (still), 2021–ongoing. Three-channel video installation, colour, sound, 16 mins. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Zink Waldkirchen, Germany. © Thao Nguyen Phan

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E G L Ė B U DV Y T Y T Ė In collaboration with

MARIJA OLŠAUSKAITĖ and J U L I J A S T E P O N A I T Y T Ė

1981, Kaunas, Lithuania. Lives in Vilnius, Lithuania and Amsterdam, the Netherlands 1992, Vilnius. Lives in Vilnius, Lithuania and Amsterdam, the Netherlands 1989, Vilnius. Lives in Vilnius, Lithuania and New York City, USA

Working at the intersection of music, poetry, video, and performance, Lithuanian artist Eglė Budvytytė explores the power of collectivity, vulnerability, and permeability between bodies and the environments they inhabit. In the film Songs from the Compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars (2020) she examines human hubris toward animals, plants, bacteria, and fungi. Shot in the lichen forest and sand dunes of the Curonian Spit in Lithuania, this video depicts shape shifting bodies moving among each other in close proximity. The work is accompanied by a mesmerising musical composition and is narrated by the artist, who draws from biologist Lynn Margulis’ theory of endosymbiosis – which refers to the interaction and cooperation of composite organisms – as well as from speculative science fiction author Octavia E. Butler – who disrupts anthropocentric hierarchy through tropes of hybridity and symbiosis. Songs from the Compost is a hypnotic exploration of bodies’ interdependency, disintegration, and decay, demonstrating the necessity of intertwined networks between human and non-human beings for nurturing interspecies relationships. – LC

Eglė Budvytytė in collaboration with Marija Olšauskaitė and Julija Steponaitytė, Songs from the Compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars (still), 2020. 4K video, 30 mins. Courtesy the Artist. © Eglė Budvytytė

200

NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE

1930, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France 2002, La Jolla, USA

Niki de Saint Phalle is best known for her Nanas (French slang for “girls”) – large, leaping female figures painted in kaleidoscopic hues and often found frolicking through fountains or city squares – and the Tarot Garden (1979–2002), a vast sculpture park she built in Tuscany, Italy, alive with fantastical mosaiced and mirrored creatures. Beginning her career with a series of Tirs (Shooting Paintings), wherein she would explode bags of paint on canvas by shooting them with a rifle, the artist quickly expanded into sculpture, installation, public art, architecture, parks and playgrounds, videos and films, and various editioned multiples which brought her art to the broadest public possible and funded her most ambitious outdoor projects. De Saint Phalle’s female forms are bulbous and broad, with breasts, bellies, and buttocks accentuated with painted hearts, flowers, suns, and mandala-like concentric circles. With Hon-en katedral (1966), a collaboration between de Saint Phalle, her partner Jean Tinguely, and others presented at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, visitors could literally enter the splayed figure through an opening between her legs. Towering over 2.5 metres tall, Gwendolyn (1966 / 1990) is one of de Saint Phalle’s first monumental Nanas. If Gwendolyn’s wide, sinuous curves do not adequately accentuate her pregnancy, then the bullseye painted on her stomach proudly announces it. – MK

Niki de Saint Phalle, Gwendolyn, 1966 / 1990. Painted polyester resin on metal base, 262.3 × 200.3 × 125.1 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Salon 94, New York. © Niki Charitable Art Foundation

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A LE

A NE

A SA

A GOU

A BAG A K

A BOTT

X A C

A SHELL

ING

A LE

POT

AINER

RU T H A SAWA M A R I A BA RT U S Z OVÁ A L E T TA JAC O B S M A RU JA M A L L O M A R I A S I BY L L A M E R I A N S O P H I E TA E U B E R-A R P T O S H I KO TA KA E Z U BRIDGET TICHENOR T E C L A T O FA N O

In her 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Le Guin takes up anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s radical reframing of the genesis of human culture to illuminate the capacious power of storytelling. Fisher suggests that human invention has its source in the acts of gathering and care that have typically been overlooked in favour of heroic, masculinist narratives of domination over nature. Rather than the hunting arrows and spears that are often identified as the first human technological inventions, Le Guin reminds us that our ancestors’ first creations were surely vessels for holding gathered nuts, berries, fruits, and grains, along with the bags and nets used to carry them. “We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, […] the long, hard things,” Le Guin writes, “but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.” Le Guin’s text invites us to take up the vessel as a metaphor for thinking through technology and the writing of narrative, acknowledging that stories are neither Promethean nor apocalyptic, but rather containers that open spaces for the expression of life. Taking up Le Guin’s potent metaphor, this display is conceived as an iconology of vessels in various forms – including nets, bags, eggs, shells, bowls, and boxes – and their symbolic, spiritual, or metaphorical links to nature and the body, whether realised in bag-like sculptural shapes, volumetric ceramics, or scientific explorations of bodily reproduction. Taking into account the arguments of some feminist critics against symbolising the female body as a container – specifically, one for carrying children –, this presentation considers the vessel as not only an empty conveyor of other objects, but a potent metaphorical device and expressive tool of its own. Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s design objects, for example, are functional containers that are imbued, via their abstracted ornamentation, with the ethos of modernity. The womb-like sculptures that Ruth Asawa weaves from metal wire remain open and transparent, without definable interiors or exteriors and in constant negotiation with their surroundings. In contrast, Toshiko Takaezu’s vividly glazed porcelain and stoneware ceramics are fully enclosed, evoking planetary bodies or the fertility and mystery of nature. Volumetric forms are explored as vessels for carrying life in Maria Sibylla Merian’s meticulous studies of Surinamese insects and flora, with particular attention to nature’s sculptural genius, and in the bodies of the fantastical carapace-like creatures that inhabit Bridget Tichenor’s paintings. The recurring motif of the egg – a vessel that is both produced by and creates new life – in Maria Bartuszová’s ovoid plaster casts is met by the more literal papier-mâché models of the womb used by Aletta Jacobs in her pioneering anatomical studies. Tecla Tofano’s ceramics, meanwhile, imbue a traditionally gendered and devalued medium with potent political and feminist imagery, while Maruja Mallo turns concave shapes of shells into precarious portraits of sensual bodies.

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R U T H A S AWA

1926, Norwalk, USA 2013, San Francisco, USA

Ruth Asawa began making art as a teenager while forcibly detained by the US government in an internment camp during World War II alongside her family and thousands of other people of Japanese descent, including animators from Walt Disney, who helped her learn to draw and paint. After moving to San Francisco in 1949, Asawa began constructing suspended sculptures, transforming everyday industrial materials – rough brass, steel, and heavy copper wire – into sinuous and graceful spherical forms, which, although three-dimensional in volume, do not contain any interior mass. Inspired by a basket weaving technique learned during a 1947 summer trip to Mexico while she was at Black Mountain College, Asawa’s looped-wire sculptures like Untitled (S.030, Hanging Eight Separate Cones Suspended through Their Centers; c. 1952) are grounded in the singular qualities of her chosen material. Making use of wire’s capacity for malleability, translucency, and solidity, the hanging sculpture Untitled (S.101, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form; c. 1962) is comprised of a series of translucent wire cocoons – a form that gives the work’s surface a womblike identity. In their suggestion of waves, plants, and trees, Asawa’s supple forms make particular use of the formal connection between the interior and exterior surfaces of the work, a relationship that the artist long described as interdependent and integral. – MW

Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.030, Hanging Eight Separate Cones Suspended through Their Centers), c. 1952. Iron wire,193.04 × 60.96 × 60.96 cm. Photo Dan Bradica. Private Collection. Courtesy David Zwirner. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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M A R I A B A R T U S Z O VÁ

1936, Prague, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czech Republic) – 1996, Košice, Slovakia

In Maria Bartuszová’s body of more than five hundred works, we see the traces of a mysterious natural world. In the 1960s, after leaving her native Prague for Košice, the artist embarked on a delicate yet obsessive investigation that used humble materials to explore the generative power of natural phenomena. Hanging rubber balloons from a support and filling them with plaster, Bartuszová used the force of gravity to create round abstract forms that resemble nests, seeds, and eggs, or maternal and erotic parts of the human body. In the 1980s, unquestionably inspired by nature, she produced a series of generally ovoid sculptures that emulate the purity, and perishability, of organic shapes. Bartuszová created these thin, frail shells of whole or fragmented matter using a technique called “pneumatic shaping,” which involved coating balloons rather than filling them. Before the surface collapsed under the pressure of the solidifying plaster, the artist would mould the balloon, twisting, pressing, and layering it, and in the end, binding it with cords. These “living organisms,” as Bartuszová called them, inevitably resemble hatched or hatching eggs or cocoons, yet their roundness and the fact they are often tied and grouped together, suggests an inclusive human society. – SM

Maria Bartuszová, Untitled, 1986. Plaster, 15 × 13 × 11 cm. Photo Michael Brzezinski. Courtesy The Estate of Maria Bartuszová, Košice; Alison Jacques, London. © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice

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A L E T TA J A C O B S

1854, Sappemeer, the Netherlands 1929, Baarn, the Netherlands

The many achievements of Aletta Jacobs, the first woman admitted to a Dutch university and for many years the only female doctor in the Netherlands, include her work as a leading international figure in the feminist movement. In addition to heading the Dutch Association for Women’s Suffrage, Jacobs combined her courageous civil rights activism with the solid scientific training that was then considered an exclusively male purview. After opening the country’s first birth control clinic, launching a major family planning campaign, and working for the abolition of prostitution, in 1897 Jacobs published De Vrouw. Haar bouw en haar inwendige organen (The Woman: Her Structure and Her Internal Organs). With folding plates drawn by Jacobs herself, the book describes the female body in detail, including the reproductive system. Its primary goal was to explain how reproductive organs work to the growing number of women who no longer wanted their own sexuality to feel like a mystery. The scientific literature of the late 19th century was beginning to unscramble the discoveries of modern physiology, largely through the study of anatomical models. The papier-mâché replicas of the uterus made by the pioneering company Auzoux, for instance – which Jacobs used in her studies – depict the stages of a pregnancy in a way that is as scientific as it is artistic. – SM

Aletta Jacobs, Womb Models by the Ateliers Auzoux, 1840. Papier-mâché model, 25 × 25 × 25 cm. Photo S.L. Ackermann, University Museum Groningen. © Universitymuseum Groningen

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M A RU JA M A L L O

1902, Viveiro, Spain 1995, Madrid, Spain

Starting in 1936, when the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War forced her to leave Madrid and seek refuge in Argentina, Maruja Mallo’s artistic output moved away from the Surrealist path she shared with her friend Salvador Dalí and closer to the Latin American currents of Magical Realism. Even in its title, the painting series Naturaleza viva (1942) breaks with the darker moods normally associated with the still life genre, adopting bold colours, mesmerising patterns, and entrancing shapes, and managing to depict unreal scenes with disconcerting nonchalance. Recognising every element of the composition as bearing a special affinity to a part of the female body, Mallo created eccentric silhouettes where the floral component always corresponds to the hair, and large seashells form the chest or belly. Their concavity is a clear allusion to female sex organs, which, like a shell, contain the most precious organic substance or are the site of the boldest erotic desire. In any case, one meaning does not exclude the other: in Maruja Mallo’s view, each woman’s body houses a complexity that – as Dalí’s jocular description of Mallo underscored – makes her “mitad ángel, mitad marisco” (half-angel, half-crustacean). – SM

Maruja Mallo, Naturaleza viva XIV, 1943. Oil on masonite, 42.9 × 30.5 cm. Colección Leandro Navarro, Madrid. Courtesy Galeria Leandro Navarro, Madrid; Ortuzar Projects, New York. © VEGAP

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M A R I A S I BY L L A M E R I A N

1647, Frankfurt am Main, Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire (present-day Germany) – 1717, Amsterdam, Dutch Republic (present-day the Netherlands)

In 1699, naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian set out on the first scientific voyage ever made by a woman, and, upon reaching the Dutch colony of Suriname, spent the next two years documenting the life cycle of tropical butterflies. Merian drew on the knowledge of members of the local communities to hone her research methods. Her keen artistic gaze soon showed her that insects, which the culture of the time tended to associate with the devil, were capable of fascinating transformations. From then on, their metamorphoses were the focus of her artistic practice. For the first time, the sixty hand-coloured plates in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) depict about ninety species of insects along with the plants on which they complete their metamorphoses. In plate 11, the artist shows a sample of Erythrina fusca, or coral bean, its leaves and pods housing caterpillars and chrysalides that will become silk moths. Another illustration, plate 5, shows the life cycle of a tetrio sphinx moth with golden wings and showy curled proboscis, depicted as it flutters around a cassava root inhabited by a boa. These images present spectacular scenes of nature’s delicate cycles, where every detail is about to turn into something else. – SM

Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, Plate 48, 1702–1703. Watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic over lightly etched outlines on vellum, 38.4 × 27.7 cm. Courtesy Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021

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S O P H I E TA E U B E R -A R P

1889, Davos, Switzerland 1943, Zürich, Switzerland

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a key member of the Dada movement who eschewed boundaries between fine and applied arts and, despite living across two world wars, produced works in which joy and colour triumph above all. Taeuber-Arp studied textile design at the School of Arts and Crafts in St. Gallen and dance at the Laban School in Zürich and was a member of the Schweizerischer Werkbund, an association of professional artists in Switzerland. Upon moving to Zürich in 1915, she began making textile works and geometric nonrepresentational paintings she referred to as “concrete,” bridging the nascent Constructivist movement and textile design. A small cloth bag of 1920, for example, is embroidered with glass beads that form geometric patterns reminiscent of her painted compositions; while over a hundred years old, it still appears astoundingly contemporary. A signatory of the Zürich Dada Manifesto, Taeuber-Arp performed often at the movement’s celebrated Cabaret Voltaire, for which she also designed sets, costumes, and small marionette puppets that don a robotic or cyborgian futuristic sensibility. In 1926, Taeuber-Arp moved to France, splitting time between Strasbourg and Paris. In 1940, she left Paris in advance of the Nazi occupation. In 1942, she returned to Switzerland, where she died from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of fifty-three. – MK

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Geometric Forms and Letters (Pompadour), 1920. Glass beads, thread cord, fabric, 17.3 × 13 × 0.3 cm. Photo Alex Delfanne. © Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth

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T O S H I K O TA K A E Z U

1922, Pepeekeo, USA 2011, Honolulu, USA

Hawaiian artist Toshiko Takaezu’s skill in the art of ceramics was honed during an extended visit to Japan on which she explored her cultural roots. Whether larger than a person or small enough to hold in one’s palm, her wheel-thrown or hand-shaped works from the 1960s on are rounded, richly decorated, hollow objects resembling ordinary pots but not intended to hold anything. Takaezu’s elongated or spherical works almost completely enclose an empty space that is inaccessible to the gaze and, like a soul in a body, makes them unique. Even when installed in groups, as in her series Trees (c. 1970) or Stars (1999), each preserves its own totemic identity. Their surfaces evoke the smooth volcanic contours of her homeland, with nebulous marks and drips of colour created by multiple different glazes. Her series of bizarre celestial bodies titled Moons (c. 1980–2000) are spheres of stoneware with a small hole at the base: blue and gold, pearl and ochre, dull and lustrous, the touches of colour on these works conjure up cosmological images. In the installation Gaea (Earth Mother) (1990), where they are cradled in hammocks strung between trees, Takaezu’s sculptures suggest the fertility of nature or of a womb. – SM

Toshiko Takaezu, Cherry Blossom / Sakura, c. 2000. Glazed stoneware, 132 × 59 × 59 cm. Photo William E Hacker. Private Collection. © The Family of Toshiko Takaezu

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BRIDGET TICHENOR

1917, Paris, France 1990, Mexico City, Mexico

The fanciful creatures that inhabit Bridget Tichenor’s paintings include strange figures with human faces and long insect legs who live inside shells, carapaces, or armour. Their hybrid bodies are gigantic, and they tower over natural landscapes that seem suspended in twilight, with a mood clearly influenced by Surrealism or Magical Realism. Like almost all of Tichenor’s oeuvre, these paintings were made after she moved to Mexico in the 1950s, where she joined other European friends like Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Alice Rahon. Tichenor studied in Italy with Giorgio de Chirico and then in the United States with Paul Cadmus. From the former she drew a highly metaphysical approach, while from the latter she learned the ancient techniques of egg tempera, putting them at the service of her fascination with pre-Columbian mythology, mysticism, and symbolic, cryptic narratives. Her work Dueto solitario (1964) shows a barren volcanic landscape containing two large, speckled shells, painted with scientific precision. While one is tightly shut and explicitly suggests female genitals, the other is wide open, its spacious cavity housing an anthropomorphic moon with a hypnotic gaze. Drawing on the firmament of myths that link the moon to magic and the sacred, Tichenor represents the shell as a woman capable of holding and nurturing life, but also of becoming a magnetic, mesmerising, divine being. – SM

Bridget Tichenor, Dueto Solitario, 1964. Oil on masonite, 40.3 × 25.5 cm. Photo Javier Hinojosa. Private Collection. © Estate of Bridget Tichenor

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T E C L A T O FA N O

1927, Naples, Italy 1995, Caracas, Venezuela

Tecla Tofano refused to follow the dominant artistic styles set by her male counterparts in 1960s and 1970s Venezuela. When the Zeitgeist demanded abstraction, she explored figuration. When painting was fashionable, Tofano became a ceramist. When Pop Art came to prominence, her sculptures remained uniquely handmade. Tofano countered machismo in Venezuela by fighting for equality between men and women and even promoted gender nonbinary alternatives, like in her exhibition Ella, él… ellos (1978) at Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas, which featured large ceramic figures of a woman, man, and genderless person. From the mid 1950s to 1963, Tofano made traditional ceramic objects on a potter’s wheel. These were mostly brightly coloured vessels with rough, textured surfaces. From 1964 to 1978 she made hand-moulded works, and large-scale installations, often featuring body parts and consumer objects in roughly finished and asymmetrical styles. On the Way to Liberation (from the series Of the Female Gender) (1975) – one of Tofano’s most significant works – represents a pregnant woman clasping her head between her hands as a snake emerges from her belly and coils around an inverted female symbol and cross, addressing both the sacrifice of maternity and, in a critical mode, the submissive act of motherhood within society. – IA

Tecla Tofano, On the way to liberation (from the series Of the Female Gender), 1975. Clay and enamel ceramic, 30 × 20 × 12 cm. Photo Luis Becerra. Collection Luis Felipe Farias. Courtesy Daniel Cordova. © Estate of Tecla Tofano

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C É L E S T I N FA U S T I N

1948, Lafond, Haiti 1981, Pétion-Ville, Haiti

Célestin Faustin’s 1979 painting Pourtant ma Maison est Vide captures a world steeped in spirituality, fantasy, eroticism, and metaphysical dilemma. Demonstrating Faustin’s technical virtuosity and vivid imagination, the work represents an extraordinary dimension of 20th -century Haitian art inspired by Vodou, the spiritual belief system with roots in West African religions, Catholicism, Islam, European folklore, and freemasonry, in tandem with Haiti’s Indigenous Taíno religions. Working among a generation that followed the “Haitian Renaissance,” Faustin portrays the lived experience of the mythical and spiritual that has actively shaped Haitian life. Faustin may have not approached political events directly, but his surreal visions of spiritual paradise, such as the 1979 painting Jardin d’Eden, express a haunted poetry of being alive. In Pourtant ma Maison est Vide, hallucinations dissolve into a surreal landscape populated in the foreground by two blue and bald nude figures who together prepare for the ceremonial slaughter of a sheep. A ghostly woman stands at the door of a hut as a man with a machete hurries into the shadowy mountains. As the Martinican intellectual Édouard Glissant reflected, “Myth anticipates history as much as it inevitably repeats the accidents that it has glorified; that means that it is in turn a producer of history.” – MW

Célestin Faustin, Pourtant ma Maison est Vide, 1979. Oil on canvas, 30.48 × 40.64 cm. Photo Marcus Rediker. Collection Marcus Rediker

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FRANTZ ZÉPHIRIN

1968, Cap-Haïtien, Haiti Lives in Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Frantz Zéphirin’s artistic career began when he was a boy, selling his paintings of colonial homes that line Cap-Haïtien’s coast. His customers were tourists passing through the port town on cruise ships. By his teens he was exhibiting in local galleries, and he quickly developed a signature style that laced brilliant colours with pattern play in packed compositions. Zéphirin focused on Haiti’s landscape and its complex history of slavery, rebellion, revolution, and spiritual endurance. The Slave Ship Brooks (2007), for example, shows the ship that brought thousands of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. The slavers are depicted as animals and the Africans as humans, forced to peer out from the dungeons of the vessel. Chained to the exterior of the ship are rebels, the forerunners of those who would lead the Haitian Revolution and end French colonial rule. Zéphirin’s work also captures the power of Haiti’s majority religion, Vodou; he is, himself, a Vodou priest and currently lives and works in a temple in the mountains outside Port-au-Prince. The canvas Les Esprits Indien en face Colonisation (2000) centres a mermaid figure, half native Taíno woman, half fish. In the distance is a Spanish vessel; the Indigenous woman holds a steadfast, forward gaze, a gesture repeated by an African man positioned in her chest. Together, they provocatively confront the viewer with moral outrage at the millions of lives lost to colonialism and genocide. – IA

Frantz Zéphirin, The Slave Ship Brooks, 2007. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 101.6 cm. Photo Marcus Rediker. Collection Marcus Rediker

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M Y R L A N D E C O N S TA N T

1968, Port-au-Prince Lives in Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Through her artistic innovations with drapo Vodou, the Vodou flag, Myrlande Constant has deeply changed how her nation’s traditional religious art registers with those unfamiliar with Haiti. Constant worked within an entirely male environment of flag-makers in the early 1990s when she made a radical shift in the tradition by using glass beads instead of sequins. After three decades dedicated to the medium, Constant’s method and style has influenced every drapo Vodou artist working today. Constant’s flags are large in size, often up to two metres wide, stretched on wood frames. Her energised, packed compositions are traced with hand-beading by the artist and many assistants. Her work merges contemporary culture with Haitian history and Vodou religion: deities and Christian saints (which are part of the hybrid Vodou belief system) are often immersed in magical atmospheres. Framed by imagery of electric guitars, albino fish, and purely decorative beaded adornments, Sirenes (2020), shows a crowded group of hybrid beings, their bodies transmogrifying from human to animal to mythic creature. GUEDE (Baron) (2020) presents spirits of fertility and the dead alongside altars, crosses, and the Pagan five-pointed star. Incorporating iconic symbology with an innovative technique, Constant’s work boldly adds to the cultural fluidity that burns at the core of Haiti’s soul and does so in defiance of gendered traditions. – IA Myrlande Constant, Sirenes, 2020. Sequins, glass beads, silk tassels on canvas, 208 × 261 cm. Photo Armando Vaquer. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist and CENTRAL FINE Gallery, Miami Beach. © Myrlande Constant.

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FELIPE BAEZA

1987, Guanajuato, Mexico Lives in New York City, USA

I open against my will dreaming of other planets I am dreaming of other ways of seeing this life These lines title a large-scale painting by Felipe Baeza, who combines collage, mixed media, egg tempera, and printmaking to make heavily textured twodimensional works. Dreams of other planets, of another life arise through bodies depicted in states of transformation – often half human, half flora. Full foliage bursts from human heads, overtakes torsos and limbs, and erotically vines its way in and out of desirous mouths. Baeza’s approach to material aligns with the concepts that underline his work. This is visible in the new works shown at the Biennale Arte 2022, a continuation of a series Baeza has developed since 2018. He builds up his figures with layer after layer on panel, canvas, and paper, then sanding, carving, and altering the elements within each composition. This intense material manipulation recharacterises traditional drawing and painting processes and, reflecting the artist’s experience of migration to the United States from Mexico and migration across the globe, express his intent to create “fugitive bodies.” Described by the artist as love letters, his paintings and collages are a form of imaginative self-portraiture and future building. – IA

Felipe Baeza, Por caminos ignorados, por hendiduras secretas, por las misteriosas vetas de troncos recién cortados, 2020. Ink, Flashe, acrylic, varnish, twine, egg tempera, cut paper collaged on paper, 227.33 × 280.67 cm. Photo Ian Byers-Gamber. Collection Thelma and AC Hudgins. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. © Felipe Baeza

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P I N A R E E S A N P I TA K

1961, Bangkok Lives in Bangkok, Thailand

Over the last four decades, Pinaree Sanpitak has developed an enigmatic inventory of symbols distilling women’s bodies to their most elemental parts, expressed variously through vessels, breasts, eggs, and subtly curved profiles. Characterised by sensitivity and ethereality, Sanpitak’s paintings and drawings are tethered to a captivation with her own body, and potent concepts of the sacred and the spiritual that the body contains. In the mid-1990s, inspired by the powerful experience of breastfeeding her own child, Sanpitak began producing many images of the breast. In the new series on view here, which includes textured paintings that incorporate acrylic, feathers, gold and silver leaf, and silk, she reduces the breast motif into the form of the mound and the vessel, correlating personal experience with forms that recall Buddhist offering bowls or stupa shrines, a sacred domed structure found in many East and South Asian nations. Sanpitak’s Offering Vessels series of the early 2000s registers the vessel as a container of perception and experience or as a repository of emptiness. More than simply an expression of the physical figure, the bowls seen in pieces such as Offering Vessels #8 (2001–2002) and Offering Vessels #16 (2002) speak to the body’s wide-ranging potential across the sacred and profane. – MW

Pinaree Sanpitak, Breast Vessel in the Reds, 2021. Acrylic, pencil, feathers on canvas, 250 × 250 cm. Photo Aroon Permpoonsopol. Courtesy the Artist. © Pinaree Sanpitak

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LU I Z RO Q U E

1979, Cachoeira do Sul, Brazil Lives in São Paulo, Brazil

Often taking the form of cinematic vignettes accompanied by original dreamlike scores, Brazilian artist Luiz Roque’s short films address vital social, geopolitical, and environmental aspects of contemporary culture – including identity, queer bioethics, automation, and artificial intelligence –, positioning his subjects in surreal settings at once languorously utopian and eerily postapocalyptic. The silent Super8 film presented here, Urubu (2020), was made in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced Roque to spend many months inside his São Paulo apartment during a government-enforced lockdown in Brazil. Urubu was inspired by the artist’s interest in the observational distance of nature documentaries. Backgrounded by the historically layered architecture of São Paulo, to which Roque turned his camera from his apartment window during his many months in isolation, the image of an urubu – a common urban bird in São Paulo – captured in mid-flight poetically condenses the feeling of suspension wrought by the unprecedented conditions of the pandemic. The video combines visual techniques drawn from cinema – in this case, a continuous loop – with the contemplative, detached disposition of documentary. Likewise, the short night film XXI (2022) meditates upon body disputes, automated desires, and dialogues between human and non-human figures in a hot summer in a Latin American city. – MW

Luiz Roque, Urubu (still), 2020. Full HD video transferred from Super8 film (looped). Courtesy the Artist; Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, New York

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M AG DA L E N E O D U N D O

1950, Nairobi, Kenya Lives in Farnham, UK

Magdalene Odundo’s understated, anthropomorphic ceramic vases speak to a layered understanding of the ceramic arts, following in a long tradition of associating women’s bodies with architecture or vessels. Hand-coiled and scraped with a gourd, Odundo’s objects are laboriously produced via a method that involves gradually hollowing out a ball of clay and slowly pulling material upwards to form the pot. Instead of using traditional glazes after shaping the clay, she uses an ultra-refined terra sigillata slip, burnishes her surfaces with stones and polishing tools, and fires her objects multiple times, transforming her raw materials into voluptuous and shimmering red-orange and black sculptures. Born in colonial Kenya in 1950, Odundo did not start working in pottery until she moved to the United Kingdom in 1971, where she developed an interest in modernist sculpture, ancient Greek stoneware, and global craft traditions. In the early 1970s she would travel to Nigeria to study at the Pottery Training Centre in Abuja, where she made rounded earthenware forms inscribed with linear geometric markings inspired by the taut, full-bodied shapes of Abuja pottery – primarily made by women. Odundo speaks of clay vessels as having an inside and an outside. “I think very much of the body itself as being a vessel; it contains us as people,” she says. – MW

Magdalene Odundo, Untitled Vessel, 2020–2021. Ceramics, 57 × 32 cm. Photo David Westwood. Wakefield Council Permanent Art Collection (The Hepworth Wakefield). Courtesy the Artist; Thomas Dane Gallery. © Magdalene Odundo

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S A F I A FA R H AT

1924 – 2004, Radès, Tunisia

Tunisian artist, educator, and activist Safia Foudhaïli Farhat’s massive fibre works articulate weaving as an expression of the reforming spirit of her time. Dissolving the borders between art, craft, and design, her richly textured tapestries like the vibrant green diptych Gafsa & ailleurs (1983) reveal the ingenuity of her approach. Farhat was raised in an elite family in the harbour city of Radès and was among a small group of women who were educated under French colonial rule. Following Tunisian independence in 1956, Farhat became the first Tunisian woman to teach at the Institut supérieur des beaux-arts in Tunis, eventually becoming the school’s director. Farhat’s instrumentalisation of weaving has been understood as a modernist homage to a tradition predicated on women’s labour. A combination of bold geometric patterns, vivid colours, and figurative motifs woven from dyed, handspun wools, Gafsa & ailleurs borrows from craft traditions originated by women from Tunisia’s southern interior. Blending different pile heights and textures, the imposing diptych takes on a collage-like quality, depicting a verdant landscape dotted with a galloping horse who seemingly rushes into a fantastical terrain of abstract shapes. Merging the natural world with an imaged one, and ancient techniques with new applications, Gafsa & ailleurs is a postcolonial projection forward and nod to Farhat’s cultural past. – MW

Safia Farhat, Diptyque Gafsa & ailleurs, 1983. Tapestry, diptych, 320 × 294 cm and 293 × 167 cm. Photo Slim Gomri, © Slim Gomri/Musée Safia Farhat. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Museum Safia Farhat, Tunis. © Safia Farhat

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RO B E RT O G I L D E M ON T E S

1950, Guadalajara, Mexico Lives in La Peñita de Jaltemba, Mexico

As a child, Roberto Gil de Montes relocated from Guadalajara to an East Los Angeles neighbourhood that was a growing centre of the Chicano movement. Reflecting his friendships with artists such as Carlos Almaraz, the paintings Gil de Montes began to produce after graduating from the Otis College of Art and Design employ fragmented narrative elements, lush colour, and extreme frontal compositions. His work revisits and reinvents tradition in equal measure, with frequent references to pre-Columbian and Huichol iconography – including creatures invested regionally with cosmological significance, such as dogs, jaguars, deer, and dancers – alongside the quotidian and oneiric experiences of his own life, and the occasionally perceptible stylistic influences of canonical Mexican Modernists including Rufino Tamayo and Frida Kahlo. The oil-on-linen painting El Pescador (2020) wryly queers Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–1486), with the part of its titular goddess, who famously emerges from a giant shell, played by a reclining young fisherman. Animation is suspended and fields of vision are unsettled in the paintings UP and El monje (both 2021), in which subjects are vertically inverted or seen through layers of rippling water. This is an imaginary of incongruity and colour where fidelity to the absurd and reverence for the humble clarify and illuminate with deceptive naïveté. – IW

Roberto Gil de Montes, El Pescador, 2020. Oil on linen, 196 × 257 × 4.5 cm. Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China. Courtesy the Artist; Kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York

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S A O D AT I S M A I L O VA

1981, Tashkent Lives in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and Paris, France

Saodat Ismailova’s video works encompass themes of memory, spirituality, immortality, and extinction. Her new three-channel video Chillahona (2022) is filmed in Tashkent, in the underground cells of the same name, structures for practicing isolation and meditation often built next to the tombs of local saints in Central Asia. Today they are used by local people for self-isolation. Built in the shape of an eight-winged dome, the cell consists of three levels, which are mirrored by the three channels of the film. The first screen documents people visiting the chillahona; the second depicts the devotees carrying out their rituals and prayers; while the third traces the visit of a troubled young woman and her moment of self-isolation. Next to the videos hangs a Falak, a traditional Tashkent embroidery representing female cosmology and evoking protection, healing, and fertility, which the artist makes out of white fabric and illuminates with a coloured light. Working between the boundaries of real and imagined spaces, Ismailova draws from the specific cultural identity and history of Central Asia, often through ancestral knowledge and epic folklore stories featuring women as protagonists, to reveal a broader understanding of what it is to be human. – LC

Saodat Ismailova, Two Horizons (still), 2017. Two-channel HD video, 16:9, 22 mins. Courtesy the Artist. © Saodat Ismailova

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V I O L E TA PA R R A

1917, San Fabián de Alico, Chile 1967, Santiago, Chile

In the early 1960s, when she already had a flourishing international career as a singer-songwriter, Violeta Parra began making canciones que se pintan (songs that paint themselves): a series of paintings, sculptures, and embroideries that were a natural outgrowth of her music. Her arpilleras – huge embroideries – are the most complex of these works: ancestral images inspired by pre-Columbian art, telling stories full of timeless emotion. They show women, men, or animals gathered in festive, historic, or spiritual scenes. Thick wool stitches, bits of macramé, and knitted braid are used to lend three-dimensionality to the figures. Combate naval I (1964) depicts Chile’s struggles during the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), with national hero Captain Arturo Prat proudly brandishing a Chilean flag as his ship, the Esmeralda, sinks. In El circo (1961), a group of colourful characters are singing and dancing, perhaps inebriated by the fumes emanating from a large pitcher at the centre, or perhaps fallen victim to the evils pouring from this strange Pandora’s box. Parra’s arpilleras were a tool for relaying deeply felt needs that were private and shared, local and international, and tied to both high and low culture. – SM

Violeta Parra, El circo, 1961. Jute fabric with lanigraphy, 153 × 240 cm. Photo Marcelo Montealegre. Courtesy Fundación Violeta Parra

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DELCY MORELOS

1967, Tierralta, Colombia Lives in Bogotá, Colombia

For three decades, Delcy Morelos has developed a practice across painting, installation, and sculpture in which soil, clay, fabrics, fibers, and other natural elements are the primary materials. Over time, her paintings turned from reds to earth tones, and then into large scale immersive installations made of soil. In Earthly Paradise (2022), the soil rises above the ground, and masses of earth surround the spectator’s body. Visitors can smell the earth’s aroma mixed with hay, cassava flour, cacao powder, and spices like cloves and cinnamon while sensing the soil’s moisture, temperature, texture, and darkness. While this installation evokes the Minimalist aesthetics of works such as Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977), Morelos’ use of earth is informed by Andean and Amazonian Amerindian cosmologies and conveys the notion that nature is not something inert that we access and control at our will from an outside and exceptional position, but that we are earthly beings – we become, live, die, and decompose with and as the earth. As the soil penetrates and affects our body and senses, our human becoming takes a new shape: we apprehend we are always becoming humus, as the Latin etymology of the very word “human” recalls. –MH

Delcy Morelos, Moradas, 2019–2020. Soil, mixed media, iron, wood, fabric, dimensions variable. Photo Ernesto Monsalve. Collection of the Artist. Galería Santafé, Bogotá. Courtesy the Artist

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JAIDER ESBELL

1979, Normandia, Brazil 2021, São Sebastião, Brazil

Through his work as an organiser, educator, and curator, self-taught Makuxi artist Jaider Esbell was a tireless advocate for Indigenous rights and ecological urgency. Born in the traditional territory known today as Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol, Esbell spent his childhood learning the stories of Makunaimî, the great ancestor of his people, from his grandfather. Initially working as a high voltage electrician for a State-owned company, he received a degree in geography before turning fully to art in 2016. Esbell was a frequent writer and campaigner on behalf of his people, the Makuxi, and advocated what he described, combining art with activism, as “artivism:” the idea that art can be a powerful force in the struggles for Indigenous cultural recognition and land rights. Named for Makunaimî, the paintings in Esbell’s Transmakunaimî: o buraco é mais embaixo series are abstract renderings of scenes from the horizon of existence. Some of these paintings depict Makunaimî’s relation with the living forces of the Caribbean Amazon. Others, like A vaca and A luta do boi com Makuinaimî (both 2017), express the colonial invasion of the territory. Even when their imagery verges on total abstraction, Esbell’s paintings express the continuity and power of nature as a response to the exploitations of hegemonic society. – IW

Jaider Esbell, A vaca, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 89 × 90 cm. Photo Marcelo Camacho. Private Collection. Courtesy Galeria Jaider Esbell de Arte Indígena Contemporânea. © Jaider Esbell Estate

Jaider Esbell, Pajés, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 89 × 89 cm. Photos Marcelo Camacho. Private Collection. Courtesy Galeria Jaider Esbell de Arte Indígena Contemporânea. © Jaider Esbell Estate

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E M M A TA L B O T

1969, Stourbridge, UK Lives in London, UK

In her ecstatic paintings on silk, which appear in curtain-like sheaths, the British artist Emma Talbot makes the case that formal experiments can be politically liberating. Citing the French literary theorist Hélène Cixous’ 1970s-era theory of l’écriture féminine, Talbot conceives of textile and its formal characteristics as a means to articulate a feminist artistic language. Marked by the influence of postanthropocentric and posthuman thought, Talbot’s large-scale paintings, drawings, animations, and sculptures incorporate simplified figuration, mythological motifs, rhythmic patterns, vivid colours, and calligraphic texts to express aspects of Talbot’s personal and interior experiences as they extend to topics ranging from technology, nature, urbanism and ecopolitics to the pandemic and aging. Taking its title from Paul Gauguin’s historic painting of 1897–1898, which he painted within a moment of deep crisis and existential reckoning, Talbot’s Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Where Are We Going? (2021) takes on the human desire for escape in our environmentally catastrophic present. Implicitly critiquing Gauguin’s self-exile to Frenchcolonised Tahiti, where his painting is set, Talbot covers her painting with texts that question what nature is and how – or if – it is possible to “return” to it ethically. – MW

Emma Talbot, installation view, Emma Talbot. Sounders of the Depths, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, 2021. Photo Peter Cox. Courtesy the Artist; K21 Kunstmuseum The Hague; Galerie Onrust Amsterdam; Petra Rinck Galerie Düsseldorf. © Emma Talbot

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S H E R O A N AW E H A K I H I I W E

1971, Sheroana, Venezuela Lives in Mahekototeri and Caracas, Venezuela

Working between drawing, painting, and printmaking, Yanomami artist Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe carries forms of knowledge, spirituality, labour, and aesthetics in Indigenous life that have survived colonisation onto the page. Born in Sheroana, a small Indigenous community on the Upper Orinoco River in the Venezuelan Amazon, Hakihiiwe began making paper from natural fibres in the 1990s, a skill he learned by studying with the Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata. Atop sheets fabricated from local plant life, Hakihiiwe renders delicate dotted lines, circles, grids, curves, webs, and squiggles that reference forms of ancestral knowledge in highly personal ways. Hakihiiwe has often said in interviews that he alludes to ancient patterns, shapes, and forms in an effort to preserve memory. In Hakihiiwe’s recent series of delicate monoprints, he composes abstractions of the environment through the rhythmic repetition of transcribed symbols used in Yanomami culture as well as new symbols created by his observations of the surrounding jungle or his community. Referencing insects, animals, and plants, the lines and dotted triangles in pieces like Iri mamiki (2021) suggest budding branches; in Yaro shinaki (2021), the lozenge-shaped leaves of a yaro tree; or in Omawe (2021), the delicate form of a dragonfly. Prints like Hahoshi (2021) have less concrete natural analogues, nonetheless the reference lilts of the waxing and waning of celestial bodies. Together, they form a growing and expanding graphic compendium of Yanomami symbols and signs. – MW Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Omayari misi, 2021. Monoprint on mulberry paper, 76 × 144 cm. Photos María Teresa Hamon. Courtesy ABRA Gallery. © Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe

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FIRELEI BÁEZ

1981, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic. Lives in New York City, USA

The visual references in Firelei Báez paintings, drawings, and installations range from mythology and science fiction to histories of the African diaspora. By re-examining ancient folk tales, Báez reflects on the theme of Black resistance, imagining new interpretations and possibilities for dissemination for the pages of history on the transatlantic slave trade. Her artistic practice interrogates dominant narratives of identity and Black subjectivity, as her protagonists expose the flimsiness of constructed hierarchies that privilege certain narratives over others. A series of recent paintings feature hybrid forms that oscillate between female avatars, plants, landscapes, and bodies of water. Báez layers these over blown-up reproductions of historical found material, such as maps of trade routes and travelogues, revealing obscured narratives of Black resistance and enhances the overlooked contributions and mythologies of women. Báez’s new paintings for The Milk of Dreams – made by layering paint drips that extend outward from the canvas – approach the medium as a method for giving form to memory. The artist applies abstract, calligraphic gestures that coalesce into the suggestion of nautical bodies or tendrils of hair. Her new paintings take mark-making as an entry-point for personal, embodied engagement with Afro-diasporic cultural memory: “A melding,” as the artist describes it, “of both the depicted illusory body and the materiality of my own presence.” – LC Firelei Báez, Untitled (Drexciya), 2020. Oil, acrylic on canvas, 228.6 × 291.5 cm. Collection Suzanne McFayden. Photo Phoebe d’Heurle. Courtesy the Artist; James Cohan, New York. © Firelei Báez

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S A N D R A VÁ S Q U E Z DE LA HORRA

1967, Viña del Mar, Chile Lives in Berlin, Germany

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra grew up during Pinochet’s seventeen-year military regime, leaving Chile to study in Germany in the 1990s. She often seals her drawings with molten beeswax, a process that evokes a religious connotation and adds a layer of vulnerability to their materiality. Symbols deriving from Indigenous and marginalised cultures appear as emblems in the drawings, for example, Santa Muerte, the dressed-up skull in Der Tod und das Mädchen (2015). The female figure is often depicted as creator and Mother Earth but also as violated or submissive. Displayed here inside a house-like wooden structure designed by the artist, Vásquez de la Horra’s works show female bodies melding with surrealistic landscapes (as in Erupciones [2019] and Flotante y su genealogía [2020]), dissolving into light (Saludo a Olorun, 2021), or becoming carriers or companions to texts (América sin Fronteras [2017] and La Voz de un Pueblo que lucha [2019]). In a new series of graphite, watercolour, and wax-on-paper works, she employs accordion folds to bring her figures into sculptural space. Her practice explores themes of mortality, rebirth, sexuality, myth, and ritual as well as examining the violence and subjugation experienced by people of African descent throughout Latin American history. – LC

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, PACHAMAMA, 2019. Drawing (leporello), graphite, watercolour on paper, waxed. 234 × 49 cm. Photo Eric Tschernow. Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf. Courtesy the Artist. © Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

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N O A H D AV I S

1983, Seattle, USA 2015, Ojai, USA

Noah Davis’ work was dedicated to detailing contemporary Black American life through a uniquely incisive and often melancholic lens. Recalling an older generation of American artists including Fairfield Porter, Jacob Lawrence, and Palmer Hayden, his work is equally influenced by painters Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans’ figuration. Isis (2009) portrays Davis’ wife Karon as the Egyptian goddess of magic in a golden, fan-winged costume. The Conductor (2014) – from a series focused on Los Angeles’ “garden city” Pueblo del Rio – depicts a tuxedoed man conducting an unseen orchestra, verging further into the territory of the surreal. Davis’ keen eye likewise turned toward history: 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007) references the “forty acres and a mule” that were rumoured to be given to freed Black families at the end of the American Civil War, employing ironic Magical Realism to evoke the bitter disappointment of the US government’s pursuit of waged plantation labour rather than Black land rights. The figure depicted in The Future’s Future (2010) is strapped into what resembles a virtual reality simulator, the leafy plants surrounding him suggesting projections from a digital realm. Despite the tragic brevity of Davis’ career, these works demonstrate his approach to painting as the opening of portals onto memory, history, and worlds beyond our own. – IW

Noah Davis, Isis, 2009. Oil, acrylic on linen, 121.9 × 121.9 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis; David Zwirner. © The Estate of Noah Davis

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CANDICE LIN

1979, Concord, USA Lives in Los Angeles, USA

Candice Lin is known for her inventive use of materials – ranging from tea to cactus tinctures to fungi to dead bats – in ways that emphasise their particular properties, including scents and tastes. Lin embraces exhibition tactics often associated with anthropology and natural history, which she re-purposes and re-formulates to pose complex questions about the colonial histories embedded in these disciplines and materials. Xternetsa builds off of Lin’s recent installation works Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping (2021), a tented temple-like structure including indigo textiles, ceramic cats, and a video animation guiding visitors through Qi gong movements, and the table-top pieces from The Mountain (2016), which held, among other objects, paintings, living silkworms, mulberry plants, ceramic fragments, and a taxidermised iguana. Reconfigured in Xternetsa, the tables lead us through stages of transformation: mud from a swamp in Saint Malo, the first Asian settlement in the United States, has been fired into ceramics; starch from the kudzu plant has been boiled and molded into bioplastic; and traditional Chinese herbs such as ginseng and Dong quai have been electroplated in copper. Together, her materials evoke historical backstories of artisanship, labour, ritual, botany, global trade, and the violent power of Western colonial desire to envelop them all. – MW

Candice Lin, Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping, 2021. Hand-printed (katazome), hand-drawn (tsutsugaki) indigo panels, steel bar, dyed rugs, glazed ceramics, epoxy resin, feathers, block-printed, digitally printed fabric (masks), bells, tassels, miscellaneous small objects, dimensions adaptable. Installation view, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2021–2022. Courtesy the Artist; François Ghebaly Gallery

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AAG E GAU P

1943, Børselv, Sápmi/Northern Norway 2021, Karasjok, Sápmi/Northern Norway

Sculptor, set designer, and political activist Aage Gaup is a central figure in Sámi and Norwegian art. After training at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art in southern Norway, Gaup took on a commission for a primary school in Láhpoluoppal in northern Norway, moving to the nearby town of Máze. In 1978, a group of eight Sámi artists, including Gaup, founded the Máze Group whose home in the small town served as the base for many activists taking part in protests against the construction of a nearby dam on the Alta River. Eventually known as the “Alta Action,” the first Indigenous uprising in Europe, the protests would serve as a turning point in the movement for political and cultural representation for Indigenous people across Sápmi, the Sámi homeland, which encompasses parts of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and north-western Russia. The Milk of Dreams features Gaup’s work Sculpture I & II (1979), which resembles a wave suspended in mid-air. A painted blue stripe at the bottom, yellow in the middle, and orange on top suggest a river with its bank and perhaps the sky or sunrise above it. The artist also described the work in musical terms, as a reference to the structure of the Sámi joik. – MK

Aage Gaup, Sculpture I & II, 1979. Wood, paint, screws, wires, 62 × 78 × 274 cm & 65 × 75 × 298 cm. Photo Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum / Kim G. Skytte. Collection and Courtesy Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Tromsø, Norway

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ZHENG BO

1974, Beijing, China Lives on Lantau Island, Hong Kong

Zheng Bo is committed to all-inclusive, multi-species relationships. Through a socially and ecologically engaged art practice, he forges an alternative path that de-emphasises a human-centric worldview and strives instead for interconnectedness between all living beings. He has devoted himself to the study of plants, learning from biology and botany experts while creating art and daily rituals that focus on interspecies care. He makes performance and video art, community workshops, and drawings, in which he pushes standard notions of human-plant coexistence, allowing for imaginative thinking to lead towards what he conceives as a posthuman vibrancy. In his ongoing video and performance series Pteridophilia, which began in 2016, the artist explores the erotic possibilities between plants – specifically ferns – and queer men. Sex occurs in many ways in the works, provocatively moving past the mere sensuous and into climactic acts of pleasure. The eco-sexual curiosities of Pteridophilia were further developed in a film and dance piece, Le Sacre du printemps (Tandvärkstallen) (2021), in which Zheng collaborated with five Nordic male dancers in a forest in Dalarna, Sweden. The troupe cultivated relationships beyond the fern, feeding the collective sexual desires of the pine trees, moss, and one another through touch and movement. – IA

Zheng Bo, Le Sacre du printemps (Tandvärkstallen) (still), 2021. 4K video, colour, sound, 20 mins. Courtesy the Artist; Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong. © Zheng Bo

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S O LA N G E P E S S OA

1961, Ferros, Brazil Lives in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Solange Pessoa creates installations, drawings, paintings, and sculptures that position the viewer in a space of sublime sensorial experience. Influenced by the experiments of other Brazilian artists such as Lygia Clark, Tarsila do Amaral, and Maria Martins, Pessoa adopts a visceral and fantastical relationship with her local landscape in south-eastern Brazil and the conceptual connections between the body and nature. Since the 1980s, Pessoa has been incorporating organic materials into her enigmatic and fantastical work, creating primordial and ritualistic forms that beat with both life and are muted by the spectre of death. The bold black-and-white drawings that encompass Pessoa’s Sonhíferas series (2020– 2021) depict sinuous creatures and insects in the act of metamorphosis. Pessoa’s series of carved soapstone sculptures (pedra-sabão) demonstrate the pliability of materials as metaphoric resources, connoting histories of both process and fabrication, nature and culture. Presented in a densely packed installation of almost fifty sculptures, the works in Nihil Novi Sub Sole (2019–2021) appear in botanical groups organised so that they create pathways for visitors. Their tactile, sensuous nature creates an environment of subtle mystery – a viewing experience of both feeling and perception. – MW

Solange Pessoa, Sonhíferas, 2020–2021. Fourteen paintings. Oil on canvas, 158 × 150 cm each. Photo Daniel Mansur. Courtesy the Artist; Mendes Wood DM Sao Paulo, Brussels New York

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P R A B H A K A R PA C H P U T E

1986, Sasti, India Lives in Pune, India

Indian artist Prabhakar Pachpute is known for versatile work that combines the political, the personal, and the surreal. Born in the village of Sasti in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district, Pachpute comes from a family of coal miners. Addressing sobering subjects that have impacted his community’s lived experiences, his work is often suffused with pensive, poetic undertones or fantastical elements that are both alluring and unsettling. Pachpute is best known for theatrical, wall-sized charcoal drawings, and his chosen medium is a poetic tribute to his familial history and the principal subject of his critique. The surreal scene depicted in Unfolding of the Remains-II (2022) was, in part, inspired by the discovery of a Roman-era warship in an eastern Serbian mine, where it had been buried for 1,300 years. The ten-metre-wide canvas, displayed on a charcoal-washed wall, positions the viewer on the lip of a mining pit, with animals traditionally used for their labour in mining operations and displaced by the same activities traversing the despoiled landscape. Distant, vaguely mechanical and biomorphic forms – including a scarecrow with exhaust tubes for arms – harken the encroachment of human industry and infrastructure. Collapsing multiple temporalities into a single murallike image, Pachpute’s painting pays reverence to the passage of time while also testifying to its consequences. – MW & IW

Prabhakar Pachpute, The close observer, 2020. Acrylic, charcoal pencil on canvas, 213 × 487 cm. Photo Amol K. Patil. Courtesy the Artist; Experimenter, Kolkata; Artes Mundi 9; National Museum, Cardiff, Wales

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I G S H AA N A DA M S

1982, Cape Town Lives in Cape Town, South Africa

Raised in Bonteheuwel, a former segregated township in Cape Town, South Africa, Igshaan Adams grew up in an acutely challenging setting, against which he has maintained a multifaceted racial, religious, and sexual identity. Adams’ largescale tapestries are inspired by the geometric patterns of linoleum floors found throughout the Cape Town homes of friends and neighbours. Stitched together with fragments of locally sourced wood, plastic, beads, shells, string, and rope, they are deeply linked to commodity trading and local environs in postcolonial Africa. In some tapestries, Adams records other types of movement by drawing from “desire lines,” unplanned paths made as a consequence of erosion from foot traffic, which throughout the Apartheid era were used to connect communities that the government wanted to forcibly separate. For The Milk of Dreams, Adams zooms in on desire lines between the Bonteheuwel train station in Cape Town and Epping, one of the city’s industrial neighbourhoods, where many seek work. Presented in tandem with a twisting wire installation inspired by the dust clouds created by the Indigenous Northern Cape riel dance, makeshift pathways born of necessity are transposed against an uplifting sign of collective joy. – MW

Igshaan Adams, Bonteheuwel / Epping, 2021. Wood, painted wood, plastic, bone, stone and glass beads, seashells, polyester and nylon rope, cotton rope, link chain, wire (memory and galvanised steel), cotton twine, 495 × 1170 × 325 cm. Photo Mario Todeschini. Courtesy the Artist; blank projects, Cape Town; Casey Kaplan, New York. © Igshaan Adams

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TA U L E W I S

1993, Toronto, Canada Lives in New York City, USA

Tau Lewis transforms foraged textiles and artifacts through painstaking processes of sewing and quilting into imaginary talismans and magical beings who inhabit sci-fi worlds. Recalling the works of Gee’s Bend quilters, the textiles of Faith Ringgold, the assemblages of Betye Saar, and the dreamlike “shack” sculptures of Beverley Buchanan, Lewis creates subversive monuments, paying tribute to philosophies of material ingenuity as an act of agency across diasporic communities. Activating the ideological malleability of textiles and their historical association with feminised labour, Lewis also dissolves the space between artistic and political poles, especially between practices traditionally delineated as craft, ritual, or art. The artist positions textiles and handmaking at the centre of an exploration of identity, bodies, and nature. Her fantastical bodies grow as if from a handmade garden, protective vessels standing in opposition, as the artist has said, to the myth that there cannot be a nurturing and healing relationship between the Black body and the landscape. In Lewis’ new body of work, Divine Giants Tribunal (2021), she presents epically scaled masks, which are three metres tall. Hand-stitched from scrap fabrics, furs, and leathers, these monumental faces create a material lineage not only with Lewis’ own work, but also with mythical objects and symbology. Taking inspiration from Yoruba masks and the writings of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, Lewis dramatises the otherworldly mythologies engrained in these mask forms. – MW Tau Lewis, Sol Niger (With my fire, I may destroy everything, by my breath, souls are lifted from putrified earth), 2021. Recycled leather, coated nylon, steel armature, 304.8 cm × 310 cm × 122 cm. Photo Pierre Le Hors. Courtesy the Artist; Stephen Friedman Gallery. © Tau Lewis, 2021

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I B RA H I M E L- S A L A H I

1930, Omdurman, Sudan Lives in Oxford, UK

Recognised for his lyrical, dreamlike drawings and paintings, Sudanese artist, intellectual, and poet Ibrahim El-Salahi’s work bridges Arabic calligraphy, Sudanese ornament, Islamic spiritualism, and abstract painting techniques learnt as a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the 1950s. A founder of the Khartoum School, a Modernist group typified by an interest in exploring Sudanese aesthetic heritage following the nation’s independence in 1956, El-Salahi was hired by the Sudanese government to establish the country’s Department of Culture, running his own television show, Bayt Al-Jak (Jack’s House). In 1975 he was falsely accused of involvement in a failed antigovernment coup and held for six months in Khartoum’s notorious Kober Prison. During his incarceration he secretly made drawings on scraps of cement casing, which he hid in the sand to prevent detection. The drawings from El-Salahi’s new Behind the Mask series were made during the Covid-19 pandemic. Depicting exaggerated figures and faces, dissonant linear abstractions, and knotty landscapes – each divided by frames whose placement is determined by the folds in the medicine packages and envelopes on which they’re drawn – El-Salahi’s new drawings match the claustrophobia of the pandemic with equally cramped and idiosyncratic compositions. – MW

Ibrahim El-Salahi, Behind the Mask, 2021. Pen, ink on the back of a medicine packet, 14 × 13 cm. Photo Justin Piperger. Courtesy the Artist; Vigo Gallery

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JESSIE HOMER FRENCH

1940, New York City, USA Lives in Mountain Center, USA

The self-proclaimed “regional narrative painter” Jessie Homer French is known for landscape paintings and genre scenes that rely on incongruous combinations and dreamlike imagery to create mysterious, unforgettable pictures of life, death, and nature. In many of her small-scale paintings, the West Coast wilderness is shown in penetrating detail, offering eccentric yet pensive portrayals of the American environment and humans’ uncertain role within it. Evoking American pastoral, regionalist, and realist painting traditions, Homer French’s works often involve imagery of stillness, estrangement, death, decay, and disaster. Appearing in swathes of bright, flattened colour, coyotes roam amid spiny Joshua trees, fish leap over rocks in craggy creeks, a deer lies dead in tufts of grass. In Winter Burial (2020), slabs of stone dot a snow-topped ground; in Bitterbrush and Sagebrush, Bridgeport Cemetery, and Island Deer (all 2020), bodies rest peacefully in their caskets beneath marked graves in wintery landscapes. Homer French’s haunting themes also encompass the spectre of natural disaster, including the American West Coast’s prevalent wildfires, as in Burning and ON FIRE (both 2020). Mojave Stealth Bombers (2013), wherein the titular vehicles fly over an airfield and wind farm, is a menacing scene of confrontation between nature and human encroachment. – MW

Jessie Homer French, Oil Platform Fire, 2019. Oil on canvas, 61 × 61 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Various Small Fires Los Angeles/Seoul; MASSIMODECARLO. © Jessie Homer French

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ALI CHERRI

1976, Beirut, Lebanon Lives in Paris, France

Ali Cherri is an artist working across film, video, installation, drawing, and performance. In Cherri’s practice, the urgent political realities of his Beirut childhood during the decade-long Lebanese Civil War are positioned beside moments in history. Situated in a continuum, the ancient world and contemporary society merge as spaces of mythmaking. In Cherri’s new multi-channel video installation Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022) he traces the history of the Merowe Dam, one of the largest hydroelectric dams in Africa, located on the Nile River in Northern Sudan. The work imagines the punishing construction of a dam as a portal to a fantastical world. In the video, a seasonal brickmaker spends his days in the heat performing the gruelling ancient task of shaping mud into bricks; at night, he secretly builds a structure in mud and scrap, which ultimately transforms into a mystical creature with bodily presence. Envisioned as a monster, this creature functions as a metaphor for the devastation wrought by the creation of the dam, whose construction in the early 2000s led to the forced displacement of more than 50,000 people in surrounding areas, and the mud workers as exiled, temporary labourers. Reflecting upon imaginaries surrounding mud and deluge – Ancient Egyptian myths of the flooding Nile, the Jewish legend of the golem, Noah’s Ark, – Cherri furthermore captures deeply held associations in both myth and history with these natural occurrences: the creation of the Other. – MW

Ali Cherri, Untitled, 2022. Multi-channel video installation, 20 mins (looped). Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Imane Farès, Paris. © Ali Cherri

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SEDUC

THE CY

M A R I A N N E B RA N D T R E G I NA C A S S O L O B RAC C H I GIANNINA CENSI A N NA C O L E M A N L A D D A L E XA N D RA E X T E R E L SA VO N F R E Y TAG - L O R I N G H OV E N KA R L A G RO S C H FLORENCE HENRI H A N NA H H Ö C H REBECCA HORN K I K I KO G E L N I K LILIANE LIJN LOUISE NEVELSON ANU PÕDER L AV I N I A S C H U LZ A N D WA LT E R H O L D T S O P H I E TA E U B E R-A R P M A R I E VA S S I L I E F F

O TI

R BO

Though the concept has existed since the dawn of the mechanical age, the term “cyborg” – a portmanteau that combines “cybernetic” and “organism” – was first used by scientists Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in 1960. Unlike the robot or the android, the cyborg is a human that has become integrated with an artificial technology, bestowing it with enhanced functions or abilities. Writing in 1985, Donna Haraway repurposed the term to describe how the boundaries between human, animal, and machine had been irreversibly breached. Identifying the female body as the site where those boundaries are most vulnerable, Haraway sees the cyborg as an avatar of hybrid identity that signals the beginning of a new, posthumanist, and postgender future. This presentation takes up Haraway’s framework to consider the included artists as cyborgs: hybrid bodies whose work engages concepts of the self that are extended, relational, or prosthetic – including, but also beyond, the idea of an engineered prosthesis. Working within and on the periphery of the celebrated 20th-century avant-gardes – particularly Dada’s fascination with mechanical hybridity and the theatrical and photographic experiments of the Bauhaus –, each of these artists envisions the cyborg body as the key to a truly new, modern subjectivity. The artists in this display also appropriate sexist stereotypes, such as the woman-machine, the vamp, or the “Future Eve” in order to reclaim agency from the objects of masculine fantasies. Some of these artists create images that acknowledge the self’s mediation through technological or otherwise material apparatuses, as in Marianne Brandt’s mirrorrefracted self-portraits, Florence Henri’s semi-abstract photomontages, Rebecca Horn’s image of affective intimacy forged in steel and gears, or Anna Coleman Ladd’s finely crafted prosthetic masks for war veterans – the only true prosthetics included here. Louise Nevelson’s intricate sculptural installation evokes the inner workings of early machines, while in Kiki Kogelnik’s paintings, bodies and their interrelationships are treated as formal and chromatic devices to construct exploded, robotic selves. In other cases, human-like images or forms are deployed to depict the self as constructed through or integrated with outside materials, as evident in Hannah Höch’s photomontages, wherein bodily forms are pieced together from found images. Regina Cassolo Bracchi’s surprisingly vivacious joined aluminium figures, Anu Põder’s mannequin-like sculptures and busts, and Liliane Lijn’s totems likewise play in the space between human and anthropomorphic object. Bodily adornments, meanwhile, are used to create exuberant and valiantly modern identities in Karla Grosch and Lavinia Schulz’s theatrical costumes and masks. The display is overseen by four “sentinels” – Giannina Censi, Alexandra Exter, Marie Vassilieff, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven –, each of whom represents a different paradigm of the cyborg through radical, relational, and holistic self-expression.

Marianne Brandt, Spiegelungen (Stilleben aus Metall und Glas). Bauhaus Dessau (detail), 1928–1929. Courtesy Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (I 11953 F) / © (Brandt, Marianne [geb. Liebe]) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr)

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MARIANNE BRANDT

1893, Chemnitz, Germany 1983, Kirchberg, Germany

In 1924, the year she began studying at the Bauhaus in Weimar and produced the first in a series of metal items that launched her pioneering industrial design career, German artist Marianne Brandt also made two abstract collages and took her first documentary photographs. These works marked the beginning of a visual practice that the artist pursued for at least a decade. Between 1924 and 1932, Brandt made about fifty collages that she alternately referred to as Montagen or Photomontagen. Each is a neutrally coloured panel on which the artist has assembled a blend of black-and-white, sepia, and colour newspaper and magazine cuttings. All feature female figures that depict the key traits of the German feminist movement known as Neue Frau (New Woman). A group of photos showing Brandt in her studio, her image reflected by the objects she has designed, reveals her allegiance to this new spirit with a look that is both feminine and masculine, her delicate features made androgynous by a Bubikopf (short-cropped) haircut. The image she presents in Selbstporträt mit Schmuck (1929) seems like a perfect manifesto of this new generation, and her body, more armoured than bejewelled, proclaims its right to be consciously displayed. – SM

Marianne Brandt, Das Atelier in der Kugel II (Selbstportrait). Bauhaus Dessau, 1928–1929. Black-and-white photograph, 17.7 × 23.7 cm. Courtesy Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (I 11951 F) / © (Brandt, Marianne [geb. Liebe]) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / © (Gropius, Walter) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / Image by Google

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REGINA CASSOLO B RAC C H I

1894, Mede, Italy 1974, Milan, Italy

After abandoning the naturalistic style of her early work in marble and plaster, Regina Cassolo Bracchi – better known just as Regina – began creating iconic metal objects that made her the sole Futurist woman sculptor of the early 1930s. Layering, joining, and slicing thin sheets of aluminium, she made sleek figures in the round and relief-like panels. Although the chilly, hard-edged nature of the material gives them an air of futuristic brutality, these robot-like figures suggest a kind of movement that – as we can see from the élan of her famous Danzatrice (1930), or the sinuous girl in Aerosensibilitá (1935) – takes on a vibrant lyricism. Regina’s female subjects, in particular, strike such light, supple poses that they bring abstract nuances to Futurism’s technological iconography. L’amante dell’aviatore (1935), for instance, shows a young woman with arms wrapped around her head and her face tilted back. Though her image is inscribed on two sharp-edged, superimposed sheets of aluminium, it houses a delicate energy that is clearly spiritual in nature. In 1948, after about a decade of exhibiting alongside Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Benedetta Cappa, and Fillìa, among others, Regina shifted towards the visual language of the Movimento per l’Arte Concreta (MAC), and her sculptures became even more sensorial. – SM

Regina Cassolo Bracchi, Danzatrice, 1930. Aluminium, 45 × 30 × 15 cm. Photo © Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio. Collection Archivio Gaetano e Zoe Fermani. Courtesy GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo

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GIANNINA CENSI

1913, Milan, Italy 1995, Voghera, Italy

As Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1917 manifesto on Futurist dance had suggested, Giannina Censi’s aim was to express the lyricism that the second-wave Futurists saw in the aeronautical technology of the day; starting with their first touring performance, Simultanina (1931), she employed geometric, rhythmic, jerky gestures that gave the entire body a unique plasticity. In her famous Danza aerofuturista (1931), Censi wore an aviator’s suit and cap designed by Enrico Prampolini out of metallic fabric; it looked like chrome on the chassis of a cyborg, a celestial vision that was half woman, half machine. Dressed in this costume, the dancer moved to scattered notes of music, jerking her legs and arms in time to the Marinetti’s recitations of parolibere (liberated words). She sometimes struck unnatural, sculptural poses that, captured in an extensive series of photographs, express the athletic ideal upheld by the Futurists. In more radical experiments called Tereodanze, Censi would improvise in utter silence against a backdrop of Futurist paintings, seemingly immersed in dizzying celestial vistas. In this setting the dancer’s body could be definitively transformed into the flying machine celebrated by the movement, or convey the emotions of a pilot, expressing what Futurism’s Aeropainters called the “extraterrestrial spirit.” – SM

Giannina Censi, Danza aerofuturista, 1931. Black-and-white photograph, 24 × 18 cm. Foto Santacroce, Milano, 1931. Courtesy Mart, Archivio del ‘900, Fondo Censi

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ANNA COLEMAN LADD

1878, Bryn Mawr, USA 1939, Santa Barbara, USA

When Anna Coleman Ladd returned in 1917 to Paris, where she had grown up in the late 19th century, France had been devastated by World War I. Coleman Ladd, who was well known in American circles as a Neoclassical sculptor, enlisted as a Red Cross volunteer. In Paris, she saw the urgency of providing care to veterans who were returning from the front with injuries, amputations, and permanent disabilities, and were often seriously disfigured. Having heard of a London workshop that was creating facial prostheses for British soldiers, Coleman Ladd persuaded the Red Cross to set up a similar department in France, ultimately producing about a hundred masks for veterans – an astonishing number, considering that each was made by hand and took about a month’s work. An initial plaster cast based on pre-war photos was used to make a latex and copper or silver mask, which was painted with oils, in several sittings. The studio also provided psychological counselling to the men: often treated as monsters, they had to grapple with the sudden loss of the status they held before the war. In contrast to the bizarre and provocative uses that avant-garde artists invented for them at the time, Coleman Ladd employed masks as a precious tool, showing that science and art could collaborate with a shared objective. – SM

hotographs documenting Anna Coleman Ladd’s creation of cosmetic masks to be worn P by soldiers badly disfigured during World War I, 1920. 2 photographs, 14 × 11 cm each. Anna Coleman Ladd papers, 1881–1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

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E D I S O N ’ S TA L K I N G D O L L S

c. 1887–1890

In 1877, American inventor Thomas Edison announced the advent of the phonograph: a cylinder that could be turned with a crank to record and play back − for the first time in history − snippets of speech. Edison initially distributed his invention in settings like fairs and carnivals, then began inserting miniature phonographs into toys to make them talk. He founded the Edison Phonograph Toy Manufacturing Company in 1887, marketing the first dolls just before Christmas in 1890. These Talking Dolls are figurines about sixty centimetres high, each featuring a different hairdo and decorated ceramic face, with painted wooden limbs. The perforated metal chest houses a removeable phonograph, each holding a recording of a nursery rhyme recited by different Edison Company workers. Within a month, many dolls had been returned to the manufacturer. The voices, recorded in conditions that were less than ideal, were distorted even more by the dolls’ metal bodies, becoming shrill, almost demonic shrieks. The dolls are definitive examples of the eerie automatons that are a theme of the modern era, inspiring both fascination and repulsion. Edison himself came to describe his creations as “little monsters” and pulled them from shelves, scrapping those left unsold. – SM

Talking doll invented by Thomas Edison and developed by the Edison Phonograph Toy Manufacturing Company, c. 1887–1890. Print, black-and-white, 25.4 × 20.32 cm, n.d. Original photograph, c. 1890–1899

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ALEXANDRA EXTER

1882, Białystok, Russian Empire (present-day Poland) – 1949, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France

Alexandra Exter’s works draw on Constructivism, Cubism, and Futurism interchangeably, offering a perfect fusion based on their shared fascination with technology. After studying in Kiev and travelling between Moscow, Paris, and Rome, Exter began painting geometric figures that broke with the monumental, static quality favoured in academic painting. In the artist’s extensive work as a stage designer starting in the 1920s, each costume, object, or detail is conceived in perfect continuity with the set, transporting the story into fanciful, utopian dreamworlds. In 1924, Exter worked on the first big-budget Soviet sci-fi movie Aelita. The silent picture tells the story of a Russian engineer who travels to a dystopian Mars and falls in love with its queen, rebelling against her when he realises she is a tyrant. Exter created a setting that aesthetically links the alien and industrial worlds: the Martians are distinguished from humans by eccentric accessories made from celluloid, acrylic glass, and lightweight materials, which in the sketches look like strange metal prostheses buttressing the body and turning it into a mechanical hybrid; Aelita sports a crown of thin spoking rods and a long petroleum-green dress that swirls dizzyingly around her half-naked body. She is a stern, striking amazon that Exter imbues with power and danger by dressing her in – or making her resemble – technology. – SM

Alexandra Exter, Costume design for a female character in Aelita, the Queen of Mars, 1924. Gouache, ink, and graphite on paper, 48.26 × 32.7 cm. Gift of The Tobin Endowment, TL2001.61. McNay Art Museum. © 2021 McNay Art Museum/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Firenze

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E L SA VO N F R E Y TA G - L O R I N G H O V E N

1874, Swinemünde (Świnoujście), German Empire (present-day Poland) – 1927, Paris, France

Having moved to America in the early 1910s, Elsa Plötz – better known as Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven – earned her title by marrying the heir to an impoverished German family of nobles. Lacking financial support, she posed for young artists and performed as a soubrette in Greenwich Village clubs in New York. The photos that capture these moments show a middle-aged woman striking strange poses, her body adorned with objects that were stolen or found in the garbage. In one picture, the Baroness is in a messy apartment, posed as if about to leap, wearing a feathered helmet and a striped leotard. She looks like an erotic cyborg, a paragon of what she called “Teutonic” femininity, who turns every canon of identity on its head and flaunts the same bewitchingly hybrid aesthetic as the art she made in that period. Starting in 1917, the Baroness created assemblages and sculptural objects similar to the readymades of her friend Marcel Duchamp, earning her the moniker “Mother of Dada.” Her Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1920) portrays Duchamp as a wine glass blossoming with a marvellous bouquet of feathers. Like the tangle of pipes irreverently titled God (c. 1917), made with Dada artist Morton Schamberg, this assemblage has the same wryly sensual, solemn air as the Baroness’ decorations of her own body, and likewise becomes the simulacrum of a contradictory, shapeshifting modern identity. – SM

Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven Working as a Model, December 1915. Photograph, gelatin silver print, 32.34 × 26 cm. Photo Bettmann via Getty Images

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KA R LA G RO S C H

1904, Weimar, Germany – 1933, Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine (present-day Israel)

Having studied under the famous Gret Palucca, with a training grounded in the principles of Expressionist dance, the dancer and athlete Karla Grosch adopted a rhythmic, dynamic style based on dramatic movements and geometric poses. The few photos that document her approach were taken by the painter and photographer T. Lux Feininger and capture Grosch’s theatrical collaboration with Oskar Schlemmer. The latter, who headed the Bauhaus theatre department, cast the dancer in the 1929 production Materialtänze, and at the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin, she performed two unusual pieces dedicated to metal – Metalltanz – and glass – Glastanz. While the former is characterised by sheet-metal components amid which the dancer performs incredible athletic movements, the latter features costumes that severely limit Grosch’s range of motion, with a skirt of long, thin crystal rods creating the sense of a strange, divine being, half human and half robot. In Futurist style, and showing the fascination with technology that Schlemmer shared with the European avantgardes, the images documenting these dances hint at a new dynamic governing body and mind: as the former is modified by costumes and by futuristic settings, the latter grows more powerful, with an expanded, artificial intelligence that mirrors the elements grafted onto its physical structure. – SM

Glastanz, by Oskar Schlemmer, 1929. Black-and-white photograph, 17.4 × 11.4 cm. Photo Robert Binnemann. Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin

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FLORENCE HENRI

1893, New York City, USA 1982, Compiègne, France

Born in America and raised in Rome, Florence Henri moved to Berlin when she was just twenty. Fascinated by the feminist model of the Neue Frau (New Woman), she depicts the complex, hybrid femininity that was widespread after the war. Like many female artists of her generation, she played with her features to create a fluid identity: in her photographs, the body becomes a collection of signs that, like the abstract compositions of her early paintings, can be dismantled, reassembled, revealed, and concealed. Yet these black-and-white photos seem less linked to the historical avant-gardes than to the Neue Sehen (New Vision) movement. Founded in about 1927 by László Moholy-Nagy, around the time the artist attended the Bauhaus summer school, it favoured a photographic gaze with strong composition and a Surrealist slant. In one of her self-portraits, Autoportrait (1928), probably the most famous, Henri’s image is reflected in a vertical mirror with two metal spheres at its base: arms folded and resting on a wooden table, and face framed by a masculine haircut, the artist looks at herself with a gaze that seems almost resigned, coming to terms with her own appearance. Although Henri rejected any conceptualisation of her photographs, this iconic portrait seems to capture the complex, hybrid femininity that was widespread after the war, and which she encountered on her many sojourns in Europe. – SM

Florence Henri, Autoportrait, 1928. Photographic gelatin silver print. Courtesy Archives Florence Henri © Martini & Ronchetti

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HANNAH HÖCH

1889, Gotha, Germany – 1978, Berlin, Germany

Hannah Höch was the only official female member of the Berlin Dada group. Though her male associates – starting with her partner, Raoul Hausmann – downplayed the importance of her work, she took an innovative approach to the movement’s visual language. The photomontages she made into the 1930s brim with figures who, even when they seem powerful, are victims of fragmentation. The deformed female figure in Deutsches Mädchen (1930) – where two disproportionately small eyes and a dark fringe are pasted over a young woman’s delicate features –, is a far cry from the confident, seductive image demanded by the growing feminist movement. Höch considered the Neue Frau (New Woman) ideal a fad. Drawing images from magazines that celebrated it, she presents an instable identity that more closely reflects the complexities of modern women. This critical stance is equally evident in Höch’s series Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (1924–1930), where she challenges the perceived cultural supremacy of colonial powers by combining pictures of fashionable bodies with imagery from various non-European traditions. In Der heilige Berg (1927) – in which two mountain climbers have large Asian sculptures where their heads should be –, Höch shows that her grotesque figures are not mere whimsy, but offer an original, perhaps cynical, view of progress. – SM

Hannah Höch, Deutsches Mädchen, 1930. Collage on cardboard, 21.6 × 11.6 cm. Photo Anja Elisabeth Witte. Collection Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst. © VG Bild-Junst, Bonn

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REBECCA HORN

1944, Michelstadt, Germany Lives in Odenwald, Germany

In the early 1970s, Rebecca Horn began her body extension performances, wherein she attached various wood, metal, and fabric structures to her body such as sweeping canvas wings, tantalizingly long finger gloves, a mask covered in pencils, and a lofty unicorn horn. Having been confined to a sanitarium early in life due to a terrible lung disease, Horn pressed at the edges between the self and its surroundings, questioning the end of the body and the beginning of its container. In the following years, the artist’s oeuvre expanded, shifting from bodily prostheses to kinetic sculptures and installations, as well as films that often featured her moving sculptures. In all her works, a tension resides at the edges of the body and in the space just before the moment of touch. In Horn’s Kiss of the Rhinoceros (1989), two enormous metal arms, each tipped with a metal rhinoceros horn, form an almost complete circle. The arms pull slowly apart from one another, and when the horns reach one another at the apex of the circle, a bolt of electricity flows between them. The work breathes with the rhythmic opening and closing of its steel arms. Horn, however, renders this human bodily gesture in a cyborg form of animal, metal, and mechanical parts, questioning the primacy or purity of the human form. – MK

Rebecca Horn, Kiss of the Rhinoceros, 1989. Steel construction, aluminium, motors, electric devices, 250 × 540 × 28 cm. Photo Gunter Lepkowski, Berlin. Courtesy the Artist; Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Thomas Schulte Gallery, Berlin; Galleria Trisorio, Naples, Italy; Galeria Pelaires, Palma-Illes Balears, Spain. © Rebecca Horn / VG Bild Kunst

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K I K I KO G E L N I K

1935, Graz, Austria 1997, Vienna, Austria

Even six decades after its inception, Pop Art instantly conjures images of post-war consumer culture in the public imagination. But Kogelnik was as much enthralled with the utopia of Pop art as she was at odds with it. Kogelnik’s art involved a sardonic feminist critique of the techno-politics of the Cold War era and within this vision, she conceived the body as a type of technology, and saw machines as agents guided by tenets of both control and liberation. In her colourful cyborg silhouettes, like those in Cold Passage or M (both 1964), stylish X-rayed depictions of bodies are rendered in cut-up parts, necessarily anonymous and dehumanised when translated through the fetishising mechanisms of the machine. In Female Robot (1964), this approach is taken a step further with the inclusion of a pair of scissors – another instrument of the subject’s fragmentation. Yet, these images are also oddly freeing. In the suite of paintings Artificial Man in Four Parts (1967), the robotic body is shown in black-and-white, presented as if directly scanned from an X-ray machine. Highlighting the brain, the heart, the hand, the sexual organs, the body appears generative, an agent of feminist militancy instead of gendered regulation. – MW

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LILIANE LIJN

1939, New York City, USA Lives in London, UK

Liliane Lijn has spent over six decades working between the fields of art, poetry, and science, creating sculptures, installations, paintings, and videos that engage with notions of Surrealism, mythology, feminist thought, and language. When Lijn emerged as an artist in Paris at the end of the 1950s, she experimented with the concepts of light, energy, and movement, most notably creating her mechanised Poem Machines – moving cylinders printed with words that spun at high speeds until they created a vibration effect. In the 1970s and 1980s, inspired by the rise of second-wave feminism, Lijn became increasingly interested in applying her multimedia approach to the human form, particularly focusing on the idea of women losing the body in an increasingly mechanised society. In the humanoid sculptures Feathered Lady (1979) and Heshe (1980), Lijn imagines a futuristic and ambiguous female form – part machine, part animal, and plant – out of soft feather dusters and synthetic fibres, which are contrasted with industrial materials like piano wires, steel, and optical glass prisms that reflect and re-direct light. In Gemini (1984), Lijn uses the functions of tension and release characteristic of metal springs as a kinetic formal device, furthering her search of a new feminine form. – MW

Liliane Lijn, Heshe, 1980. Female figure, chromed steel, synthetic fibres, optical glass prism, 196 × 72 × 63 cm. Photo Lewis Ronald. Courtesy the Artist; Rodeo, London/Piraeus. © Liliane Lijn

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LOUISE NEVELSON

1899, Pereiaslav, Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) 1988, New York City, USA

Louise Nevelson (born Leah Berliawsky) created elegant, room-sized sculptures throughout the post-war period, during which she honed her best-known artistic process, which involved salvaging cast-off wood parts – oftentimes recognisable household objects and architectural ornamentation – from New York City streets and arranging them in modular stacked, sprawling crates that she then painted in a unifying colour. Nevelson’s 1968 sculpture Homage to the Universe echoes abstract expressionism and Colour Field painting’s fascination with colossal scale, the use of non-traditional materials, and experimentation with bold formal gestures. Coated in a uniform layer of matte black paint, which at a distance reads as a solid plane, the intricacy of Homage to the Universe derives, in part, from the thrifty method of its construction, in addition to its thoughtful instrumentalisation of colour. Nevelson frequently spoke of black, the colour she most frequently used in her sculptures, as one of grace, dignity, and grandeur. Throughout the 1960s, Nevelson titled several of her large-scale wall works with the name “Homage,” reflecting social, religious, and personal issues. In some of these works, she pays tribute to broader concepts – the moon, the world. With Homage to the Universe, this homage is used to celestial effect, expressing awe at the depth and endlessness of the universe. – MW

Louise Nevelson, Homage to the Universe, 1968. Black painted wood, 284.5 × 862.5 × 30.5 cm. Courtesy Gió Marconi, Milan. © SIAE

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ANU PÕDER

1947, Kanepi, Estonia 2013, Tallinn, Estonia

During the 1980s and 1990s, Anu Põder’s most prolific period, she developed an approach that utilised mannequins and dolls, a motif frequently used in Surrealism to represent fantasies of cyborgs or automata. Combining representations of fragmented body parts – alternately cut-up, abject, wounded, and incomplete – with often-fragile or ephemeral materials, Põder created a series of sculptures in which representations of the women’s bodies likewise emerge as uncanny doubles, whose very materiality is subject to processes of hybridisation, transformation, and decay, or projections of desire. Before Performance (1981), a life-sized headless mannequin fashioned from textiles and plastic, is covered with measurements related to idealised body proportions, her body divided into zones as if an animal carcass prepared for slaughter by a butcher. As opposed to a body that is about to be cut up, Figure Which Was Made to Walk (1984) is scarcely held together. In With a Trombone from the Gill of Lasnamäe (Pink Bird) (1988), abstracted forms read interchangeably as parts of instruments, limbs, or architectural tubing; the body is pushed further into the realm of the human-machine. – MW

Anu Põder, Before Performance, 1981. Readymade objects, textile, metal, 160 × 50 × 50 cm. Photo Stanislav Stepaško. Collection Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn / Eesti Kunstimuuseum. Courtesy Maarja Kask. © Anu Põder

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L AV I N I A S C H U L Z A N D WA LT E R H O L D T

1896, Lübben (Spreewald), Germany – 1924, Hamburg, Germany 1899 – 1924, Hamburg, Germany

During the Weimar era in Germany, Lavinia Schulz was a key example of a new type of dancer. Considered an accessible form of expression for women, dance had fast become a component in the repertoire for modern living. Along with her husband and artistic partner Walter Holdt, she performed Expressionist dances from 1919 until 1924 in Hamburg in a style that built on varying intensities of “creeping, stamping, squatting, crouching, kneeling, arching, striding, lunging, and leaping in mostly diagonal-spiralling patterns.”1 Schulz and Holdt created a series of fantastical costumes that transformed dancers into a type of hybrid artwork. In contrast to the costumes made at the Bauhaus by Oskar Schlemmer and Xanti Schawinsky, Schulz and Holdt’s costumes were characterised by forms drawn from nature and the animal world. Maskenfigur “Toboggan Mann” (1924) don outlandish split red and multi-coloured patterned suits, topped by large masks shaped like a bug’s head, while the blobby, cartoonish Tanzmaske “Technik” (1924) has googly eyes that pop from its triangular face. In the 1980s, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg rediscovered the costumes, as well as a series of studio photographs taken by Minya Diez-Dührkoop. This finding revealed Schulz’s work to be a significant testimony to the fantastic creativity and artistry of Weimar-era dance culture. – MW 1 K.E. Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, pp. 215–216.

avinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, Maskenfigur “Toboggan Frau”, 1924 L (replica 2005–2006). Linen, wires, 188 × 135 × 107 cm. Photo Maria Thrun. Collection Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

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S O P H I E TA E U B E R -A R P

1889, Davos, Switzerland 1943, Zürich, Switzerland

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a key member of the Dada movement who eschewed boundaries between fine and applied arts and, despite living across two world wars, produced works in which joy and colour triumph above all. Taeuber-Arp studied textile design at the School of Arts and Crafts in St. Gallen and dance at the Laban School in Zürich, and was a member of the Schweizerischer Werkbund, an association of professional artists in Switzerland. From 1916 to 1929, Taeuber-Arp would teach textile design at the Zürich School of Arts and Crafts, a position that supported her and her husband, the artist Jean Arp. Upon moving to Zürich in 1915, she began making textile works and geometric nonrepresentational paintings she referred to as “concrete.” Her discerning assemblies of circles, squares, diagonal lines, and other shapes bridged the nascent Constructivist movement and textile design. A signatory of the Zürich Dada Manifesto, Taeuber-Arp performed often at the movement’s celebrated Cabaret Voltaire, for which she also designed sets, costumes, and small marionette puppets that don a robotic or cyborgian futuristic sensibility. In 1926, Taeuber-Arp moved to France, splitting time between Strasbourg and Paris. In 1940, she left Paris in advance of the Nazi occupation. In 1942, she returned to Switzerland, where she died from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of fifty-three. – MK

Marionette Guard after a design by Sophie Taeuber for the play “King Stag”, 1918, photographed by Ernst Linck. Black-and-white photograph, 5.6 × 11.5 cm. Courtesy Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/ Rolandswerth. © Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth

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M A R I E VA S S I L I E F F

1884, Smolensk, Russia 1957, Nogent-sur-Marne, France

One picture of the artist Marie Vassilieff seems to sum up the originality of her work: wearing an eccentric Harlequin costume designed for the “Bal Banal” – a party for Russian émigrés held in Paris in 1924 – she is sitting on a stool, legs and arms akimbo, gazing at the viewer through a metal mask. While the geometric dress evokes her early Cubist aesthetic, Vassilieff’s pose is robotic, calling to mind the hundreds of dolls the artist created over her long but little-known career. In the 1910s, after she arrived in Montparnasse and opened her atelier, the artist began making a series of handcrafted marionettes. These dolls served no theatrical purpose, instead expressing the general avant-garde fascination with dummies as sculptural objects. Although they are all crafted using simple materials like recycled fabric, sawdust, papier-mâché, and wire, they follow two different styles. Some, which are heads alone, strive for a “primitive” aesthetic; the other, more numerous group of portraits de poupées are full-body caricatures of the many figures who gravitated around the Académie like Le Corbusier, Josephine Baker, or Jean Cocteau, offering a precious, whimsical record of the Parisian community’s social and intellectual life. – SM

Marie Vassilieff, Mask and doll portrait, c. 1928. Gelatin silver print, 23.8 × 17.8 cm. Photo Nicolas Brasseur. Private Collection. © Marie Vassilieff

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K A P WA N I K I WA N G A

1978, Hamilton, Canada Lives in Paris, France

Drawing from her training in anthropology, Kapwani Kiwanga’s research-based work in film, sculpture, performance, and installation signals anti-colonial struggle and attention to systems of power through a combination of conceptual and architectural strategies. In Kiwanga’s recent site-specific installation Plot (2020), three largescale, semitransparent paintings on fabric were hung throughout the Munich Haus der Kunst’s central hall, evoking colours found in the neighbouring Englischer Garten. The curtains also functioned as containers for hybrid metal sculptures, inflatable volumes, and living plants. Referencing 19th-century glass containers used to import foreign plants to Europe, the sculptures point to architecture and nature’s manipulation throughout history to serve human desires. Other works, like Dune (2021), incorporate organic ingredients of human exploitation: specifically, sand used for fracking – the extraction of oil and gas – in southern Texas. Terrarium, a new installation for The Milk of Dreams, fuses the concerns of these past projects. In it, Kiwanga creates an environment with a desert sunset palette, comprising large semitransparent paintings and a series of glass sculptures containing sand. Kiwanga imagines sand as a political material: a harmful product of the oil industry and a reminder of an increasingly arid planet. – MW

Kapwani Kiwanga, Landscape: Foreground, Middle ground, Background, 2020. Trevira fabric, textile colour paint, dimensions variable. Exhibition view, Plot, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2020. Photo Dominik Gigler. Courtesy the Artist; galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin. © Kapwani Kiwanga

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NO OR ABUARAFEH

1986, Jerusalem Lives in Jerusalem, Palestine and Maastricht, the Netherlands

Palestinian artist Noor Abuarafeh has built a complex body of work that attests to history’s construction, documentation, and interpretation. Through the replications, repetitions, and gaps in stories, memories, and archives, she imagines alternative mythologies and materials for the future. In recent years, Abuarafeh has looked at history’s manufacture through the processes of preservation that occur in museums and exhibitions. Reflecting on what individuals, governments, or private interests choose to safeguard or endow with exceptional significance, Abuarafeh articulates the tension between what is included in the project of nation-building and what is left out. Abuarafeh’s video Am I the Ageless Object at the Museum? (2018) is part of a long-term project that draws parallels between museums, zoos, and cemeteries as repositories for preservation and display. Viewers are led through zoos in Palestine, Switzerland, and Egypt, which, much like museums, conform to a standard in which animals are collected, caged, and subjected to an uneven power dynamic. Spliced with images of stuffed animals and pinned bugs from natural history museums, live animals are similarly made to appear like objects. Recounting childhood memories about zodiac signs, the evolution of hippos, the mythical symbology of whales, the narrator imagines themselves as a large cetacean, exposed to sunlight and nature, as if that body is also their own. – MW Noor Abuarafeh, Am I the Ageless Object at the Museum? (still), 2018. Video installation, mixed media, 15 mins. Exhibition view, The Moon is a Sun Returning as a Ghost, Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem, 2019. Courtesy the Artist; Al-Ma’mal Foundation

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ELIAS SIME

1968, Addis Ababa Lives in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Elias Sime’s large-scale abstractions are made from thousands of electrical wires, type keys, microchips, and computer hardware components. His focus on electronic materials began approximately ten years ago, out of a long career working with assemblage art and architectural installations in Ethiopia, his home country. The artist incorporates obsolete technological equipment as a natural extension of his materially-driven practice, utilising castaway objects that surround daily life. The new compositions made for The Milk of Dreams (titled Red Leaves; two Veiled Whispers; all 2021) look like offspring of abstract colourfield painting, but incorporate technophilic materials, with pink, green, and purple colours one might find in a box of old cords. Sime’s use of colour, pattern, and grids often reference landscapes as seen from a plane or satellite, evoking natural vistas imprinted by human labour and advancement. Aligned with his foray into an array of electronic materials is Sime’s research into ancient Ethiopian carving, weaving, and building rituals, desiring to connect a long lineage of oral history and vernacular techniques with contemporary massproduced objects. He exhibits decades of technical training and attention to pattern and colour, with subtle suggestions of figuration or realism that bring hundreds of people’s, including the viewer’s, life cycles into the picture. – IA

Elias Sime, Tightrope: Narcissism, 2017. Reclaimed electronic components, wire on panel, 162.6 × 241.3 cm. Courtesy the Artist; James Cohan, New York. © Elias Sime

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LIV BUGGE

1974, Oslo Lives in Oslo, Norway

Growing up in a family that participated in sled dog racing, the Norwegian artist Liv Bugge spent frequent time in a dog yard, where she had upwards of sixty huskies as peers and friends. Through these animals, she learned a way of living based on collaboration, non-verbal communication, and an interest in the complexity of overlapping life cycles, all of which she tests the bounds of in her art. As such, throughout Bugge’s work, collaboration is posed alongside power structures and systems of control, conversation and dialogue are envisioned through senses such as touch, and the mechanisms that separate human from non-human life and structured society from wildness are made complex. Bugge’s video installation PLAY (2019) presents 16mm film footage recorded with a pack of Siberian huskies, exhibited on wooden dog houses retrofitted with projections. Shot onsite at a snow-covered Nordic dog yard with the help of the artist’s family, huskies, as opposed to humans, are the focus of the work: they sit still, jump, play, and sniff. Shown in undramatic and everyday fashion, the lives of these huskies suggest a different model of survival than that of aggression and strength; an unspoken collaborative relationship between humans and animals becomes the determinant of content and composition in the work. – MW

Liv Bugge, PLAY, 2019. 16mm film transferred to HD video, doghouses, euro-pallets. Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger. Courtesy the Artist

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TAT S U O I K E D A

1928, Saga, Japan – 2020, Tokyo, Japan

Working in proximity to US military compounds and naval bases in Japan during and following World War II, Tatsuo Ikeda composed a visual vocabulary that escaped order and realism. Primarily drawing and painting on paper, Ikeda creates surreal scenes where mutated bodies morph with nearly unrecognisable architecture set on backgrounds of swirling line drawings or empty gradients. Ikeda lived for almost a century and shaped his art career around the tumults that he experienced as a result of US and Japanese political affairs. After the war, Ikeda enrolled in Tokyo’s Tama Art and Design School, joining a generation of Japanese artists that made highly expressive work, charged with the reclamation of personal identity and culture, and with strong anti-imperialist, anti-nationalist, and pacifist political ideals. One of the many chapters in Ikeda’s artistic production is a body of work called Elliptical Space, created between 1963–1965 after the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security was signed between the US and Japan. This demoralised Ikeda, and he turned his focus to exploring human anatomy and consciousness on a microbiotic level. In these paintings, the suggestion of planets in orbit become one and the same as surreal bodily forms, all made up of hundreds of contoured figures that fit together like puzzle pieces. – IA Tatsuo Ikeda, BRAHMAN: Chapter 3: Floating Sphere-2, 1977. Acrylic on paper, 39.5 × 39.5 cm. Courtesy Fergus McCaffrey, New York, Tokyo. © The Estate of Tatsuo Ikeda

Tatsuo Ikeda, BRAHMAN: Chapter 4: Helix Granular Movement-4, 1979. Acrylic on paper, 39.5 × 39.5 cm. Courtesy Fergus McCaffrey, New York, Tokyo. © The Estate of Tatsuo Ikeda

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D ORA BUD OR

1984, Zagreb, Croatia Lives in New York City, USA

Dora Budor trained as an architect in her native city of Zagreb, yet in her immersive artworks she uses the language of “minor” architecture: rather than making buildings, she selectively takes them apart. In site-specific installations and interventions, space is animated to a disorienting effect. Describing her activities in the context of worldmaking – the process of creating new realities or fictions through the recycling of what already exists – Budor suggests a struggle in favour of the totality of the imagination. For The Milk of Dreams, Budor presents Autophones (2022) – resonant sculptures embedded with sex toys. Here, Budor imbues forms associated with industrial power with a sightless libidinal energy. Autophones are crafted in collaboration with a musical instrument workshop and shaped from wood selected for its specific acoustic properties; their enclosures are derived from moulds traditionally used for casting industrial machines, such as the now-inactive 20th-century air hammer visible nearby in the exhibition space. Referring to the Arsenale’s history as a complex of State-run military shipyards and armouries, the work interrelates industrial production, the privatisation of pleasure, and the mechanics of biopolitical control. – MW Dora Budor, The Preserving Machine, 2018–2019. Biomimetic robot bird, tinted vinyl enclosure, custom audio-to-motion computer navigation system, detritus, parts of building remains from the construction site of the concert hall Musiksaal (elements from 1886, 1905, 1930), architectural mock-up façade by Herzog de Meuron. Dimensions variable. Photo Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel. Saastamoinen Foundation, Finland. Courtesy the Artist. © Dora Budor

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TERESA SOLAR

1985, Madrid Lives in Madrid, Spain

Teresa Solar’s art alludes to material entities in states of transformation. Suspended between the biological and the industrially produced, the tangible and the mythical, her works of sculpture, drawing, and video present a hybrid world inflected by fiction and storytelling, natural history, ecology, and anatomy. Within her sculptural practice, large-scale installations and smaller objects made from contrasting materials frequently appear in families of sister sculptures. For Solar, clay, in particular, takes on consequential meaning: as a primordial geological substance and constituent part of the built environment, it is naturally suffused with stories of self-protection, isolation, and states of transformation. Many of Solar’s recent projects explore these concerns through sculptures that take on zoomorphic shapes or resemble bodily appendages. Solar’s new series Tunnel Boring Machine (2022), comprises three large sculptures inspired by animals and prehistoric life forms reminiscent of fish gills, dolphin fins, beaks, blades, and oars. Treated with a high polish finish, these works speak to a conception of abstracted time: they are inventions of fiction and simulation, compositions of a long hidden earthly skin. – MW

Teresa Solar, Tunnel boring machine, 2021. Clay, resin, 173 × 124 cm. Supported by 1646. Photo Jhoeko. Courtesy Travesia Cuatro Gallery

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A L L I S O N K AT Z

1980, Montreal, Canada Lives in London, UK

Allison Katz’s painterly language derives from a curiosity about the everyday, an irreverent wit, and a virtuosic grasp of the properties of her materials. Katz describes her work in relation to “voice” – as she says, “a more apt qualifier for terms like sensibility, style, temper, because it implies dialogue, exchange, and influence.” Katz draws from a diverse array of references, blurring calcified distinctions associated with painting in art history. Katz’s new works for The Milk of Dreams (all 2022) draw on clichés associated with the city of Venice: Birth Canal depicts a canal in Montreal – Katz’s birth city – as a substitute for Venice’s famous waterways. In Milk glass, two octopuses made in Venetian Murano glass are reflected across the canvas. Titled with a near-homonym of “Venice,” Be nice shows a truce between two fighting cocks, referring to the city’s historical importance at the intersection of finance and the arts. Night Philosophy simultaneously references William Blake’s depiction of the biblical king Nebuchadnezzar and Edgar Degas’ painting Young Spartans (c. 1860), which shows a group of teenage wrestlers. Portrait of the artist as a young girl(s) is sourced from a multiple-exposure photograph of Katz as a child that incidentally evokes both Little Red Riding Hood and the elusive central character in the Venice-set horror thriller Don’t Look Now. Together, these works present an auto-fictional and psychologically charged index of motifs. – MW & IW

Allison Katz, S.O.S., 2019. Acrylic, rice, sand on canvas, 225 × 170 cm. Photo Filippo Armellin. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Gió Marconi, Milan. © Allison Katz

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Ö Z L E M A LT I N

1977, Goch, Germany Lives in Berlin, Germany

Özlem Altın works with a vast archive of self-made and found images, including texts, replicas and prints from books, pictures pilfered from magazines or the Internet, artistic material from museum collections, and her own photographs and paintings, which she assembles in multi-layered collages and site-specific installations. While Altın references visual strategies of appropriation and recombination of mass media images and text used throughout 20th century-art history, her own works underscore the narratives and interconnections that occur when disparate pictures are brought into proximity. In these narratives, the body is made central, presented, as the artist has said, “as means for the diffusion of knowledge, experience, communication, and exchange.” Altın’s new work Translucent shield (calling) (2022) is a collage of black-and-white photographs, both found and taken by the artist, printed on white canvas. The collaged imagery includes photographs that Altın took while accompanying her friend in labor and relates either directly or metaphorically to birth, death, and the force and violence of transitions between states of being. Layered with transparent white ink that creates the impression of an over-exposed photograph or an image seen through a porcelain screen, the work confuses inside and outside, creating a visual diagram of the liminal space between life and death. – MW

Özlem Altın, The Lovers (Intuition), 2017. Ink, lacquer, oil paint on photoprint, 92.5 × 91.5 cm. Photo Markus Krottendorfer. Courtesy the Artist. © Özlem Altın

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J A M I A N J U L I A N O -V I L L A N I

1987, Newark, USA Lives in New York City, USA

Expansive, bright, chaotic, and bawdy, Jamian Juliano-Villani’s paintings beckon you in with their recognisable cartoonish punchiness, but beneath them – like much of American popular culture –, humour and eroticism run in parallel to vulnerability and trauma. Composed through a process that Juliano-Villani has described as “a poor man’s Photoshop” with pictures borrowed from movies, memes, stock photography, art history, and collected printed matter, her acrylic airbrushed canvases, while chaotic, serve as meticulously crafted mirrors to the anarchy of everyday life. Juliano-Villani’s new paintings for The Milk of Dreams draw from the artist’s recent interest in cinematography, and particularly the emotionally charged landscapes captured in films like Peter Greenaway’s 1996 erotic drama The Pillow Book and Jonathan Demme’s 1998 adaptation of Toni Morrison’s “Southern Gothic” novel Beloved. Intrigued by the nostalgia with which the images of landscapes are invested – providing their viewer a sense of history and purpose that is, ultimately, fake –, these paintings approach imagery as simultaneously rooted in history and ever-present. For the artist, the malleability of cinematic tropes (the “shadows left over after your eye looks away,” as she describes them) suggests the frustrated temporality of the Covid-19 pandemic, wherein the accessibility of images from across history clashes with the relentless present-ness of the here and now. – MW & IW Jamian Juliano-Villani, Origin of the World, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 127 × 188 cm. Photo Charles Benton. Courtesy the Artist; JTT, New York; MASSIMODECARLO

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T E T S U M I KU D O

1935, Osaka, Japan 1990, Tokyo, Japan

Tetsumi Kudo was part of a generation of Japanese artists that was highly skeptical of traditional society in the wake of the events of World War II. An essential figure in the development of “Anti-Art” in 1950s Tokyo, Kudo regularly participated in the annual Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition – then Japan’s most significant venue for contemporary art –, showing work that sharply critiqued the rampant consumerism and political orthodoxy of Japan’s postwar recovery. After moving to Paris in 1962, Kudo began creating works guided by his feeling that, in a “New Ecology” where human, nature, and technology had become intertwined, ethical values were as exchangeable as commodity goods. This idea is evident in Your Portrait (1966), where a human eye is affixed to the interior of a pegboard box. Cultivation (1972) presents a garden of cactuses wryly imprisoned in a DayGlo-pink cage. Kudo often employed fluorescence to create an uncannily high-tech aura, as in the luminous Flowers (1967–1968) or the acidic tones of the phallic apparatus depicted in Pollution-cultivationnouvelle écologie (1971). His postnatural visions capture the ambiguous detachment of a world reshaped by human desire. – IW

Tetsumi Kudo, Garden of the Metamorphosis in the Space Capsule (interior view), 1968. Painted wood, artificial flowers, fabric, black light, 350.5 × 350.5 × 350.5 cm. Photo Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich. Courtesy Hiroko Kudo; the Estate of Tetsumi Kudo; Hauser & Wirth. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

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J OA N NA P I O T ROWS KA

1985, Warsaw Lives in Warsaw, Poland and London, UK

Joanna Piotrowska’s psychologically charged photographs probe human behaviour and the dynamics of familial relations, exploring intimacy, violence, control, and self-protection. The artist reveals moments of care as well as hierarchies of power, anxieties, and imposed conventions that play out in the domestic sphere. In the Frantic series (2016–2019), Piotrowska invites her subjects to construct makeshift shelters in their own homes out of readily available domestic objects. While reminiscent of the innocent children’s activity of fort-building, the proposed activity also exposes the home as a space loaded with complex emotions and embodied memory. In Untitled (2017) a couple crouches, barely covered by their construction, while in Untitled (2017) a young woman lies on the floor surrounded by pillows and blankets – typically suppliers of comfort – with her arms raised in surrender and with a fixed gaze. The black-and-white photographs in Piotrowska’s Self-Defense series (2014–15) depict young women, most often in their bedrooms, performing gestures and actions from self-defense manuals, implying the structural violence against women in a patriarchal society as well as the possibility of rebellion against such a culture. Through these unsettling images, Piotrowska challenges conventional narratives of the family and the home and their irreconciled tension with the reality of the wider socio-political realm. – LC Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled, 2016–2018. Silver-gelatin hand print, 120 × 95 cm. Courtesy Southard Reid; Galeria Madragoa; Galerie Thomas Zander; Galeria Dawid Radziszewski

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LOUISE BONNET

1970, Geneva, Switzerland Lives in Los Angeles, USA

Louise Bonnet began her creative career working in illustration and graphic design. She shifted into the realm of painting in 2008, making acrylic paintings of people such as Yoko Ono or characters from films. Five years later, at the encouragement of artist friends, Bonnet picked up oil painting, which enabled her to manipulate light and build volume to describe the luxurious, imagined figures for which she is now known. Bonnet’s large, jewel-toned canvasses struggle to contain the tensed figures that clamber, crawl and crouch within their edges. While physical gender markers such as breasts and nipples announce themselves loudly in her paintings, Bonnet explains that her interest is in the ways that our bodies get the best of us and constantly betray us – failing, cramping, or leaking bodily fluids such as urine, saliva, blood, or milk. For The Milk of Dreams, Bonnet realises Pisser Triptych (2021–2022), a new, large-scale triptych, reminiscent of an altarpiece. The work references humans’ cycles of consumption and excretion – taking up and transforming raw materials, only to ceaselessly spit out waste on the other side. For Bonnet, excess bodily fluids have the opportunity both to pollute the landscape around us, but also to fertilise and enrich it. The crux is the gap between our feeling of, and actual capacity for, control. – MK

Louise Bonnet, Pisser Triptych, 2021–2022. Oil on linen, triptych. Left panel: 213.36 × 177.8. Centre panel: 213.36 × 365.76. Right panel: 213.36 × 177.8 cm. Overall dimensions variable. Photo Joshua White. Courtesy Gagosian. © Louise Bonnet

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MARIANNA SIMNETT

1986, London, UK Lives in Berlin, Germany

The work of the British-Croatian artist Marianna Simnett contains the most thrilling aspect of mythology and folklore: their blasé morbidity. In her viscerally felt films, sound installations, performances, and sculptures, Simnett crafts deeply ambiguous, morally bewildering, and often terrifying stories that unearth the conditions under which we as humans perceive our bodies and desires. While informed by the fantastical visions and narrative structures of fables, her works also play with biomedical aesthetics, which often manifest themselves in gruesome, jarring events. Simnett’s newest installation The Severed Tail (2022) for the 59th International Art Exhibition approaches the undeniable link between animals and humans from a mythological and historical perspective, portraying the tail as a charged body part representative of our “animal selves” lost through the process of human evolution. Set in a fetish club, in which characters don tails and ornate costumes, the fantastical three-channel video weaves anxiety-producing, violent, and sometimes sexually charged references: animal docking, unborn tailed fetuses and genetic mutations. – MW

Marianna Simnett, Blood in My Milk, 2018. Five-channel HD video installation with 9.1 surround sound, 73 mins. Installation view, New Museum, New York City, 2018. Photo Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio. Courtesy the Artist. © Marianna Simnett

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C A R O LY N L A Z A R D

1987, Upland, USA Lives in New York City and Philadelphia, USA

In Carolyn Lazard’s video CRIP TIME (2018), a set of hands deposits dozens of pills into a seven-day-a-week organiser. Accompanied by the sound of pills spilling from their child-proof containers, the video is a meditation on the temporality of illness and the work of care. This conceit is one which Lazard, who was trained as a filmmaker, addresses through quiet and conceptually driven videos, sculptures, installations, performances, and autotheoretical texts. Presented in The Milk of Dreams are works from Lazard’s 2020 exhibition SYNC that explore the relationship between time, labour, and debility. Sinks are installed like TVs, reframing our conceptions of domestic space. Workers’ comp (2021) is a power lift recliner chair in active state of adjustment and support. The work Privatization (2020) requires that HEPA air purifiers be allotted to fit the exhibition space’s proportions. In Cinema 1, Cinema 2 (2020) the illusion of fire is produced through a screen of steam and projected light. At the installation’s centre is Half Life (2021): a hourglass that marks the toxic dust from one of an endless number of industrial sites slowly poisoning adjacent Black communities across the globe. Seen with the drawing Carolyn Working (2020), an image of the artist in bed staring at a laptop, viewers are pointed back to some of labour that produced this body of work. – MW

Carolyn Lazard, installation view, SYNC, Maxwell Graham/ Essex Street, New York City, 2020. Courtesy the Artist; Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York. © Carolyn Lazard

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RA P H A E LA VO G E L

1988, Nuremberg, Germany Lives in Berlin, Germany

Creatures of the natural world are a source of fascination for the German artist Raphaela Vogel, who frequently includes animal parts both natural and synthetic – cow, goat, lion, and elk hides, fragments of leather, toy dinosaurs, horse statuettes – in her ambitious multimedia installations. She often employs videos made with sophisticated editing techniques and digital technologies including scanners and drones, which are at times accompanied by screeching, dark metal soundtracks. In creating her obscure and enigmatic worlds, Vogel’s environments suggest myths, relics, and ritual sacrifice, drawn both from art history, literature, and the viewer’s imagination. Vogel’s manner of experimentation with the transfigured body appears in The Milk of Dreams in a colourful large-scale anatomical model of a penis, afflicted in cartoonish detail with numerous diseases and conditions – prostate and testicular cancer, genital warts, erectile dysfunction – as spelled out in a series of explanatory plates. Sitting atop a carriage, the sickly sculpture is led cheekily by a fleet of white giraffes, as if an aristocrat or member of an imagined royal family. Placed in the domain of the fantastical, the humour of Vogel’s composition proposes another effect: the fragmented body in Vogel’s vision has experiences all its own. – MW

Raphaela Vogel, Können und Müssen (Ability and Necessity), 2022. Polyurethane elastomer, steel, brass, anatomical model, 220 × 135 × 1030 cm. Photo Kati Göttfried, Vienna. Courtesy the Artist; BQ, Berlin; Meyer Kainer, Vienna; Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich

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J E S FA N

1990, Scarborough, Canada Lives in New York City, USA and Hong Kong

Hand-blown glass globules injected with melanin, black mould, soybean-filled capsules, testosterone-laden soap, oestrogen-rich cosmetics, and his own mother’s urine: through these evocative materials, Jes Fan offers a critical means to explore properties that he describes as both politically contested and utterly absurd. Experimenting with the very markers of biology that typify identity formation, and thus the constructions of the racialised and gendered body, Fan’s works make evident the fraught intersection between biology and identity. Trained as a glassmaker, Fan frequently creates bulging hand-blown glass orbs, which he injects with hormonal substances. Glass changes in shape and matter throughout the process of its creation; when it is formed, its transparency and capacity to contain other objects further accentuates its potential for multiplicity. In sculptural works like Systems II (2018), bloated glass pieces containing suspended specks and droplets of melanin, testosterone, and oestrogen sag and hang off over rigid resin and metal armatures. Conceived as an accumulation of the themes and forms that have characterised his previous work to date, Fan’s new sculpture for The Milk of Dreams addresses the glands and interiority of life through an animistic approach to objects and a sculptural exploration of the body’s entanglement with technology. – MW

Jes Fan, Visible Woman, 2018. 3D printed resin, PPE pipes, pigments, 152 × 196 × 15 cm (diptych). Installation view, Mother is a Woman, Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, 2018. Photo Michael Yu. Courtesy the Artist; Empty Gallery, Hong Kong. © Jes Fan

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MIRE LEE

1988, Seoul, South Korea Lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Mire Lee makes kinetic sculptures that suggest the tension of states of aliveness. Often composed of low-tech motors, steel rods, and PVC hoses filled with grease, silicone, and oil, these animatronic apparatuses at once resemble machines and internal organs. For Lee, the process of creating these sensory objects is itself tied to the body; as she describes it: “I touch and feel the material up-close, put my hands inside any gap, use my teeth to give hold, I bend, stretch and crawl around the scale of the work.” Inspired by the concept of vorarephilia or “vore” – the fetish of being swallowed or swallowing another alive – Lee’s recent suite of sculptures entitled Carriers (2020) creates situations in which disparate physical materials feed on one another. For The Milk of Dreams, she realises a new work that extends the concept of the carrier to a sculptural structure, laced with a pump and ceramic sculptures dotted with holes that ooze liquid clay, a substance that will dry, layer and crack over time. Accompanied by benches that double as sculptures, one of which also oozes mysterious viscous liquid, they also suggest the settings in which these bodily functions exist, producing an affective landscape, a house with holes. – MW

Mire Lee, Carriers: Offsprings, 2021. Silicone, pigmented glycerine, metal tank, peristaltic pump, other mixed media, c. 150 × 280 × 310 cm, dimensions variable. Photo Frank Sperling, HR Giger & Mire Lee. Exhibition view, HR GIGER & MIRE LEE, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, 2021–2022. Courtesy Tina Kim Gallery, New York. © Mire Lee

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K E R S T I N B R ÄT S C H

1979, Hamburg, Germany Lives in New York City, USA and Berlin, Germany

Kerstin Brätsch’s paintings explore the ways the body can be expressed psychologically, physically, and socially. She draws on an expansive history of painting including mosaics, stained glass, paper marbling, and stucco marmo and stretches across modes of production such as oil paint on Mylar, digital hybrids, multifaceted installations, and collaborations. Brätsch uses psychics and mediums to question her own belief in painting, examining paintings’ mystical dimensions through their infinite potential readings. Within plainly visible support structures such as wood or steel frames, the artist mobilises sophisticated material technologies to mesmerising ends. Wächter (life is Beautifool _heiliger Johannes) (2012–2021) comprises stained glass, sliced agate rock, and an artist-made steel armature that pushes the work into three-dimensional, architectural space. In Brushstroke Fossils for Christa (Stucco Marmo, with gratitude to Walter Cipriani) _FACE and Brushstroke Fossils for Christa (Stucco Marmo, with gratitude to Walter Cipriani) _MAN (both 2019–2021), the painting gesture becomes a body of fossilised fragments. Taken as a whole, the entire environment is a painting dissected into its constituent parts that work with light, material, form, and shapes to push the limit of what a painting can actually be. – MK Kerstin Brätsch, Secreta_Secretorum_Seele (Seitenstechen), 2012–2021. Luster, enamel, glass jewels, sliced agates, church window bordering, lead, drawn glass on antique glass, 96.5 × 61 cm (glass), 490.2 × 3.6 cm (steel). Photo Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the Artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York/Brussels; Gió Marconi, Milan

Kerstin Brätsch, Nammu (Mutter), 2012–2021. Schwarzlot, Luster, enamel, glass jewels, sliced agates, church window bordering, lead and drawn glass on antique glass, steel, c. 90 × 60 cm (glass), 490.2 × 3.6 cm (steel). Photo Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the Artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York/Brussels; Gió Marconi, Milan

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SANDRA MUJINGA

1989, Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo Lives in Oslo, Norway and Berlin, Germany

Sandra Mujinga’s multidisciplinary practice is driven by a profound interest in the body – and its absence. In her uncanny installations, ghostly hooded figures, sculptures resembling flayed skins, and fantastical hybrid creatures are made instruments of observation. Taking inspiration from animal survival strategies such as camouflage and nocturnality, science fiction’s concept of “world-building,” posthumanist thought, and Afro-futurism, Mujinga proposes an imaginary world where cyborg existence does not necessarily signal a threat to autonomy; rather, hybridity functions as protection. Mujinga’s 2019 quartet of sculptures Mókó, Libwá, Zómi, and Nkáma are bodies without insides. Presented in an installation vibrating with neon green light, these larger-than-life hooded figures, titled in the Bantu language Lingala, are comprised of human-shaped cloaks with textile limbs that evoke tentacles and trunks; humanoid beings that have evolved to meet the reality of our catastrophic era. In the 2020 tulle sculptures Míbalé, Mísatóxi, Mínei, and Mítáno, futuristic representations of bodies likewise loom above viewers. These long-armed figures stand watch, their animalistic forms a symbol of self-sufficiency. The sculptures in Reworlding Remains (2021) and Sentinels of Change (2021), woven from upcycled textiles, take inspiration from dinosaur fossils. These sculptures are positioned in a liminal space, in which decay and rebuilding exist on the same timeline. – MW Sandra Mujinga, Sentinels of Change, 2021. Two sculptures, green light, 270 × 100 × 35 cm; c. 800 × 300 × 200 cm. Photo Mathias Völzke. Courtesy the Artist; Croy Nielsen, Vienna; The Approach, London

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M A RGU E R I T E H U M E AU

1986, Cholet, France Lives in London, UK

Marguerite Humeau’s supernatural, biomorphic sculptures could have been lifted from a work of science fiction, occupying a world in which hypermodern technology and medical equipment have displaced human life. A vacillation between speculative science and ancient myth, robot and fossil, biomedical engineering and archaeological discovery is a defining characteristic of Humeau’s practice, which plays out in physical spaces that read as cyborg temples and laboratories of the extinct. Working with researchers in the fields of zoology, biology, and paleontology, Humeau has dyed carpets with every chemical in the human body, made soundscapes conjuring noises made by prehistoric animals, created contemporary versions of Paleolithic-era “Venus” statuettes, and directed pink hippopotamus milk through simulated veins. In new pieces made from aluminium, salt, plastic ocean waste, and algae for The Milk of Dreams, Humeau borrows from research on ecstatic rituals, trances, animal morphology, and climate change. Posing ritual as an expression of consciousness, she stages sinuous marine sculptures as if caught in a moment of religious rapture. What emerges here is a type of sublime understanding of mortality that may exist beyond the domain of humans. – MW

Marguerite Humeau, The Dancers III & IV, Two marine mammals invoking higher spirits, 2019. Polystyrene, polyurethane resin, fibreglass, steel skeleton, pollution particles, 251 × 214 × 240 cm. Installation view, the Prix Marcel Duchamp, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019. Photo Julia Andréone. Courtesy the Artist; C L E A R I N G, New York, Brussels; White Cube, London, Hong Kong. © Marguerite Humeau

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L U YA N G

1984, Shanghai Lives in Shanghai, China

New media artist LuYang creates immersive installations that drop viewers into videogame-like material worlds using video, sculpture, lighting, and sound. The installations deploy a mixture of Japanese anime aesthetics, make-believe and real scientific explorations, religious iconography, and humorous, sardonic imagery of contemporary tech culture. High-energy soundtracks infiltrate the space, with techno, opera, or death metal reverberating through the galleries. In his new anime for the 59th International Art Exhibition, titled DOKU – Digital Descending (2020-ongoing), the artist creates a fictional storyline marked by the ironic insertion of many real-life current events. In the film, the viewer travels with his protagonist, Doku, on a journey that involves six spiritual reincarnations (including heaven and hell), a revenge shaman, and anxious plane passengers. From afar, LuYang’s spaces resemble the multisensory frenzy of an arcade or fun house. His strange and euphoric works come from his research in neuroscience labs, hip hop influences, goth street style, and the practice of Otaku (a Japanese term for one’s obsession in computers and popular culture niches, like anime and manga), and what one can only imagine to be the deepest corners of the artist’s mind. His world reflects the dynamism of China’s current historical moment and its influences and interpretations within a globalised culture. – IA

LuYang, DOKU – LuYang’s digital Reincarnation, 2020–ongoing. A digital avatar on different platform and media. Courtesy the Artist

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Z H E N YA M A C H N E VA

1988, Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg), Russia Lives in Saint Petersburg, Russia

Zhenya Machneva’s tapestries transform the gleaming steel fantasy on which the Soviet Union’s economic fortune was to be built into a world of the uncanny. Inspired by a visit to the Leningrad telephone equipment factory where the artist’s grandfather worked for forty years, Machneva intertwines images of obsolete factories, industrial landscapes, and mechanical objects with the digital present. Created on manual looms, Machneva’s tapestries stand in contrast to the speed and efficiency of contemporary technologies while mirroring the work ethic that made the industrial labour possible in the first place. In works like Elephant Head, Portrait, Totem (all 2020), or A Dog (2021), human and animal analogues complicate the idea of technology as a purely logical domain. A Girl (2022) suggests a reprisal of the human-machine hybrids envisioned by the early 20th century avant-gardes. Echo (2021), inspired by a furnace Machneva found inside an abandoned train depot on the outskirts of Budapest, similarly builds a mask-like composition out of bolts, gaskets, and snaking wires. The image of a hardwired automaton rendered in supple thread encapsulates the play between Machneva’s own decidedly low-tech process and the quasimechanical images it produces. – MW

Zhenya Machneva, Echo, 2021. Hand-woven tapestry, 165 × 125 × 4 cm. Photo Iona Didishvili. Courtesy the Artist. © Zhenya Machneva

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S O N D R A P E R RY

1986, Perth Amboy, USA Lives in Newark, USA

Sondra Perry rigorously considers the dehumanisation of Black bodies from a historical and personal perspective, using visual strategies culled from computer-based media to reflect critically on the intricacies of experience and identity. Perry’s installations and videos are replete with technologies of representation, including easy-to-access tools like avatars, open-source 3D modelling softwares, found footage from YouTube, and chroma-key blue screens, which together lend a DIY air to her uncanny cyborg aesthetic. Centrally, Perry creates a juxtaposition between digital culture and discussions of politics, injecting an important, but all too rarely discussed theoretical confluence: media theory and critical race studies. Over the last few years, Perry, who was born in the Jersey Shore beach town of Perth Amboy, has frequently reflected on the violent history of the Middle Passage, often inserting herself into images that tell a history of the transatlantic slave trade and the devastating brutality enacted against those people captured at sea. Lineage for a Phantom Zone (2021) centres around a hair salon that used to operate in Perry’s studio building in Newark, New Jersey, and the artist’s search for the land upon which her grandmother was born and worked as a sharecropper. Presented in an immersive installation, the dreamlike narrative reflects upon the ways the telling of history constructs lived experience and the collective imagination can hold transformative power. – MW

Sondra Perry, Lineage for a Phantom Zone (still), 2021. HD video, 5 mins 49 sec. Courtesy the Artist; Bridget Donahue NYC

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M O N I RA A L QA D I R I

1983, Dakar, Senegal Lives in Berlin, Germany

Raised in Kuwait, Al Qadiri has spent the last decade creating sculptures and videos that assume a range of strategies to explain the Persian Gulf region’s stunning urban and economic development over the last decades. Her interpretation of the Gulf’s so-called “petro-culture” is manifested through speculative scenarios that take inspiration from science fiction, Arab soap operas, Gulf War-era pictures of burning Kuwaiti oil fields, traditional melancholic music, pearl diving, and oil drilling machinery. Al Qadiri’s objects extract understandings of the present through the manifold contradictions of consumption and desire. Al Qadiri has looked to the symbolic aspects of oil, creating supernatural works that relish in the magical transcendence of the Gulf landscape – notably, its vast interior deserts and oyster beds that feed the ancient practice of pearl diving in the Persian Gulf – in tandem with the mechanisms that aid oil extraction. OR-BIT 1-8 (2016–2018), a series of 3D-printed sculptures coated with iridescent automotive paint, similarly embodies the unnerving potency of oil drilling. Representing drill heads, these tabletop sculptures magically float with the aid of a commercial magnetic rotation platform, inserted into the base of each of them. ORBITAL (2022) similarly presents floating sculptures, sized up to a more monumental scale. Spinning in the air, these shining drill heads create an experience of wonder; they become terrifying symbols of environmental devastation. – MW Monira Al Qadiri, OR-BIT 1-8, 2016–2018. Series of 6 3D printed levitating sculptures, automotive paint, 30 × 30 × 30 cm each. Photo Raisa Hagiu. Courtesy the Artist. © Monira Al Qadiri

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E L I S A G I A R D I N A PA PA

1979, Medicina, Italy Lives in New York City, USA and Palermo, Italy

Elisa Giardina Papa’s darkly humorous, research-based works frame the presentation and performance of gender, sexuality, and labour in the 21st century digital economy. Giardina Papa’s new video installation “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale (2021) is built from what the artist calls a “socio-poetic and socio-magical” archive passed orally between generations in Sicily and the southern Mediterranean region. Consisting of moving images and ceramics made in collaboration with Sicilian artisans, the work is set in the postmodern city of Gibellina Nuova, an unfinished “concrete utopia” built after a devastating earthquake in western Sicily in the 1960s, and follows a fictionalised community of unruly teen girl outsiders who spend their time riding bikes customised with powerful sound systems. Modelled after Sicilian stories of donne di fora – loosely, “women from the outside and beside themselves” – “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale’s visual narrative is woven together with references to Sicilian fairy tales, chants of female healers known as inciarmatrici, fables passed to the artist in Sicilian dialect by her grandmother, and the 16th- and 17th- century Spanish Inquisition trials in Palermo. Drawing from history, folklore, and oral tradition, this digital collage creates a tale that generates an imaginative space beyond predetermined categories of humanness and womanhood. – MW

Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale (preparatory storyboard), 2022. Video, ceramic installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the Artist. © Elisa Giardina Papa

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GEUMHYUNG JEONG

1892, Long Creek, North Carolina, USA 1987, Wilmington, USA

Techno-capitalism has us hurtling towards a digitally native society and yet, still, there is something deeply unsettling about human/non-human interaction. Choreographer and performance artist Geumhyung Jeong uses her body and animatronic figures built from DIY parts to emphasise the uncanny relationships that have developed between people and machines. Her work occupies an in-between space – a comfort with technology that is uncomfortable, a sensitivity towards objects that is non-consensual, a beautiful and horrifying revelation of techno-social opposition and similitude. Jeong intentionally maintains an amateur, toy-like, experimental quality to her engineered beings. They are clunky but responsive, alluring but humble. Their playfulness is foregrounded in the curious amalgamation of prosthetic parts. The “toys” on view here – presented alongside videos documenting Jeong’s own interactions with her machines – are DIY robots created by the artist following her self-taught learning in programming electronic circuits and mechanisms, a process she has compared to sewing stitch-by-stitch. While they initially appear sturdy and functional, these robots reveal their fragile instability when they begin to move. Imbuing her “toys” with a clumsiness that evokes the desire to pamper and care for them from the human observer, Jeong creates encounters between human and machine that test our capacity for empathy when non-human entities seem to need our help. – IA

Geumhyung Jeong, Toy Prototype, 2021. Installation view, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Photo Kanghyuk Lee. © Geumhyung Jeong

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TISHAN HSU

1951, Boston, USA Lives in New York City, USA

Tishan Hsu has described technology’s integration with the body as his central artistic preoccupation. As he has said, “I consider myself a cyborg. Google is my memory.” In the early 1980s, Hsu had been working as a “word processor” at a Wall Street law firm, encountering computers before they were widely accessible. His early bulging paintings and tiled sculptures evoke the hours he spent immersed in such a technological orbit: saturated with static, bits of digital data, scratchy surfaces, floating orifices, and fragmented body parts, these works dissolve the threshold between screen and flesh. Hsu’s most recent works, like Watching 3 and Breath 7 (both 2022), use innovative fabrication techniques and materials – particularly silicone and alkyd, a durable synthetic resin – to call to mind bodily orifices, organic matter, or biotic growths. Watching 2 (2021)’s psychedelic raster pattern is embellished with a nipple, a belly button, the display screen of a thermometer gun, and imagery related to emotional surveillance technologies. Phone-Breath-Bed and Breath 3 (both 2021) play on the technologies that simultaneously disembody and connect human beings, with particular attention to medical apparatuses. At the root of these works is the question of technology’s effects – whether distorting, surveilling, or life-giving – on human beings. – MW

Tishan Hsu, Phone-Breath-Bed (detail), 2021. Polycarbonate, silicone, stainless steel wire cloth, UV cured inkjet, wood, steel, plastic, 115.6 × 195.6 × 121.9 cm. Installation view, skin-screen-grass, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York City, 2021. Courtesy the Artist; Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, Miguel Abreu Gallery; New York. © Tishan Hsu

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J A N I S R A FA

1984, Athens Lives in Athens, Greece and Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Janis Rafa creates disquieting, fable-like films, videos, installations, and cinematic narratives that place people in relation to non-human beings – animals, plant life, both alive and dead. Common to her narratives are ritual forms of parting with or coming into proximity with dead beings, including burial, cremation, digging, and archaeology. Her films may be fantastical, but they fall far from an escapist fantasy. Rafa’s 2020 short film Lacerate was originally commissioned by Fondazione In Between Art Film as part of an initiative devoted to the subject of domestic and gender-based violence towards women. Appearing like a scene from a memento mori painting come to life, the work is carefully staged in the decaying remains of an opulent home, which viewers find swarming with restless dogs, who noisily pant and gnaw at strewn hunks of meat, household objects, and furniture. Piles of strikingly feathered dead fowl are arranged with potatoes and onions in a sink beneath a running tap. Luxurious trays of fruit and cups of milk rot on a dining table. On the floor lies a bearded man, bleeding from his neck; dogs sniff and prod him, like they do with any other remnant of meat. Inspired by the iconography of biblical paintings like the 17th-century Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi’s famous proto-feminist work Judith Beheading Holofernes, Lacerate creates an allegory of self-defense against gendered violence, combining art historical symbolism with distressing, nightmarish imagery. – MW Janis Rafa, Lacerate (still), 2020. Single-channel video, sound, 16 mins. Courtesy the Artist; Fondazione In Between Art Film. © Janis Rafa

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LY N N H E R S H M A N L E E S O N

1941, Cleveland, USA Lives in San Francisco, USA

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work spans installation, performance, photography, video, interactive media, and Net Art, engaging with themes of surveillance, privacy, artificial intelligence, the cyborg, and genetic engineering. In her video works, such as a Seduction of a Cyborg (1994) – in which a blind woman agrees to a treatment that allows her to see images via a computer screen – or Teknolust (2002) – the story of a bio-geneticist who creates three cyborg clones from her own DNA – technology is made complex: it is a tool for control, but also as instrument of empowerment. Hershman Leeson’s mirror-printed series Missing Person presents photographic portraits of people who do not exist. Created using AI technologies, Missing Person, Cyborg (2021) captures a lifelike blonde woman placidly staring at the camera. Faint numbers on the corners of her eyes and hidden and on her neck identify the flaws in the AI system, making obvious the constructed character of her naturalistic features. The video Logic Paralyzes the Heart (2021), narrated by a 61-year-old cyborg, opines on the body’s integration with digital and military-based systems of control. In it, individuals are hauntingly transformed into their data – in the age of surveillance, little more than an analogue for who they are. – MW

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Logic Paralyzes the Heart (still), 2021. Digital video, 13 mins 35 sec. Courtesy the Artist; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; Bridget Donahue, New York. © Lynn Hershman Leeson

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BA R BA RA K RU G E R

1945, Newark, USA Lives in Los Angeles, USA

Barbara Kruger’s image and text work is renowned for its rhetorical power and visual urgency. In the 1960s and 1970s, Kruger worked as a graphic designer and picture editor for magazines including Mademoiselle, Vogue, House & Garden, and Aperture. There she developed the graphic sensibility she would later instrumentalise in her art, employing cropped, largescale black-and-white photographs overlaid with pithy aphorisms typeset in Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed and set against red or black bars – a now-iconic design schema. Kruger started to investigate media’s execution of words and images to construct desire and identity from a feminist perspective in the late 1970s. Over the decades these methodologies have expanded to include the up-scaling and spatialising of her visual practice through both still and moving images. Located at the very end of the Corderie building, Kruger’s new installation for The Milk of Dreams, including a three-channel video component, is mapped to fit the site’s spatial parameters. Kruger’s imploring phrases of command (“PLEASE CARE,” “PLEASE MOURN”) implicate the viewer in a direct confrontation with the work, using the ironically disembodied mode of address that is characteristic of her practice to call attention to our own bodies’ viscera and excreta. – MW

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Beginning/Middle/End) (detail), 2022. Site-specific installation, print on vinyl. Three-channel video installation (on 3 flatscreen monitors), sound. Dimensions variable. 5 mins. 35 sec. Courtesy the Artist; Sprüth Magers

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D I E G O M A RC ON

1985, Busto Arsizio, Italy Lives in Milan, Italy

Diego Marcon’s newest film/video work The Parents’ Room (2021) plays on a loop, with its beginning and end marked by a computer-generated blackbird swooping down onto a snowy windowsill. The scene moves into a room where a man sits on the edge of an unmade bed, a woman lying beside him. The man begins a choir-backed monologue detailing the story of his murder spree and suicide. The victims – his wife, daughter, and son – enter the scene one-by-one. The human element in this work – something one might find comfort in – is overcast by the dark shadow of what appears to be a chilling afterlife. The film is reminiscent of stop-motion animation, but Marcon creates this effect with live actors. Made from casts of the actors themselves, the synthetic prostheses they wear become eerie, inanimate doubles, such that there is something off about the animated figures – more corpse-like than living. Marcon’s works, like The Parents’ Room, Monelle (2017), and Ludwig (2018), enter the “uncanny valley,” where extreme representative realism evokes a response of repulsion and restlessness. Manipulating every element of the set, lighting, costume, sound, and script, Marcon creates characters that give the viewer goosebumps with simultaneous feelings of aversion and unsettling familiarity. – IA

Diego Marcon, The Parents’ Room (still), 2021. 35mm film, CGI animation, colour, sound, 6 mins 53 sec (looped). Courtesy the Artist; Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee, Napoli

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RO B E RT G RO S V E N O R

1937, New York City, USA Lives in East Patchogue, USA

Since the 1960s, Robert Grosvenor has been developing a diverse artistic language, making use of architectural concepts and spatial dynamics in sculptures that evince both a solemn austerity and a winking mischief. Grosvenor is known for largely making his sculptures by hand from inexpensive materials, even when they appear industrially produced. The sensuousness of Grosvenor’s approach is compounded by an eccentricity that suggests the Space Age fantasies of his early years, as well as darker future. Untitled (1987–1988), a structure made from corrugated iron, appears as if a vestige from a potentially apocalyptic event. Formed by the sides of the trailer where Grosvenor stores tools in his studio, the sculpture contains no ceiling, floor, nor wheels, signalling architecture without providing its functionality. Untitled (2018), a steel industrial container whose interiors are painted in gold, houses a red scooter, which sits in isolation, at a remove from the viewer. Block of Water (2019), a rectangular pool made from concrete blocks, is filled with water, serving as protection but nonetheless ephemeral. While buoyed by an economy of form, Grosvenor’s artworks maintain a distinct strangeness, structured as they are at a peculiar cognitive remove from the forms and spaces they resemble. Not quite a pool nor shed nor garage, these structures turn the dial on the expectation of experiencing an apparently solid thing; they’re a trick to the mind. – MW Robert Grosvenor, Untitled, 2018. Steel, wood, rubber, gold wall paint, 259.1 × 243.8 × 609.6 cm. Photo Steven Probert. Courtesy the Artist; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Robert Grosvenor

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P R E C I O U S O KOYO M O N

1993, London, UK Lives in New York City, USA

Precious Okoyomon – poet, artist, and chef – stages sculptural topographies composed of living, growing, decaying, and dying materials, including rock, water, wildflowers, snails, and vines. For Okoyomon, nature is inseparable from the historical marks of colonisation and enslavement. In their work, plants like kudzu – a vine native to Asia that was first introduced by the US government to farms in Mississippi in 1876 as a means to fortify erosion of local soil, which had been degraded by the over-cultivation of cotton, and then turned to be uncontrollably invasive – become metaphors for the entanglement of slavery, racialisation, and diaspora with nature, nonetheless holding the capacity for change and revitalisation. In their new work for The Milk of Dreams, To See the Earth before the End of the World (2022), titled after a poem by Ed Roberson, Okoyomon’s sculptures are set against a field of wild growth; here kudzu appears again in the midst of a network of rivers and sugar cane, the latter of which the artist’s grandmother grew in her backyard when Okoyomon was growing up in Nigeria. Much like kudzu, sugar cane is a plant whose very essence is saturated with the economic and historical circumstances of the transatlantic slave trade. Following the play Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant, whose native Martinique was once one of the world’s largest producers of sugar, Okoyomon’s installation attempts to invoke a politics of ecological revolt and revolution. – MW Precious Okoyomon, exhibition view, Earthseed, MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt, 2020. Photo Axel Schneider. Courtesy the Artist; MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST; Quinn Harrelson Gallery

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GIULIA CENCI

1988, Cortona Lives in Cortona, Italy and Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Incorporating everyday found objects and modelled elements in sculptures and immersive installations, Giulia Cenci hybridises the natural with the synthetic to explore themes of technology and nature. The objects, cast and re-cast in an alchemical process, are then cumulatively combined into site-specific arrangements. The moulds of human and animal parts are then re-shaped into different animals such as wolves or horses, while other pieces suggest fragments of limbs. These are paired with casts of industrial remnants in rubber and metal, discarded parts of machinery from cars and piping. The materials are then coated with organic components such as graphite powder, marble dust, and ashes. Composing complex objects through modification, fragmentation, and hybridisation, Cenci pushes towards the disruption and disintegration of hierarchical distinctions between machines, animals, plants, bacteria, and humans. Cenci’s work for The Milk of Dreams, titled dead dance (2021–2022), constitutes a 150-metre walk through an environment constructed from remnants of industrial farming equipment. This armature is populated by fragments of human and animal bodies, each cast in aluminium salvaged from auto parts and some of which appear in multiple iterations. With this spatialised progression of chimeral figures, Cenci explores the conditions underlying the industrial production of food and, in turn, of life itself. – LC Giulia Cenci, lento-violento (defeated) (detail), 2020. Metal, acrylcast, found objects, studio dust, marble dust, vulcanic ash, ash from the artist’s stove, blackbone, 213 × 771 × 690 cm. MAXXI, Rome collection. Photo Giorgio Benni. Courtesy the Artist; SpazioA, Pistoia; MAXXI, Rome. © Giulia Cenci

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V I RG I N I A OV E RT ON

1971, Nashville, USA Lives in New York City, USA

Virginia Overton’s site-specific sculptural installations explore the untapped potentialities of objects associated with industry and infrastructure. Her materials often include rope, car parts, trusses, lighting, lumber, logs, cement, as well as their attendant machines, such as cranes, pickup trucks, and gantries that hoist and move them. Her materials frequently behave performatively – modifying a site by obstructing, bisecting or echoing its inherent qualities. For The Milk of Dreams, Overton presents two sculptural works for the Arsenale, the heart of the Venetian naval industry since the early 12th century. Overton suspends in the water spheres reminiscent of glass floats used by seamen to keep fishnets, longlines and droplines adrift, in the luminous pink hue of Venetian streetlamps. Encased within hand-knotted rope netting, Overton’s buoy rises and falls with the tides, highlighting the lagoon’s variability. A second sculpture comprises a large-scale tulip-like form. Cast from pre-existing molds typically used for architectural tunnels, three vertically interlocked concrete segments create an upright structure, dotted with circular pink glass “windows,” forming a triangular aperture to the sky. Additional elements along the waterfront function as benches, offering viewers a moment of repose amidst the physically and psychically layered historical strata of the Arsenale. – MW

Virginia Overton, Untitled (Chime), 2021. I-beam, miscellaneous metal, paint, steel cable, 320 × 167.6 × 45.7 cm. Photo The Ranch. Courtesy the Artist; Bortolami; The Ranch, Montauk, NY. © Virginia Overton

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WU TSANG

1982, Worcester, USA Lives in Zürich, Switzerland

Wu Tsang’s works accentuate the intersections of collaboration, performative strategies, experimental processes, aesthetics, and storytelling. Tsang’s films, immersive installations, and performances surface from a visual language the artist describes as “in-betweenness” – states of inseparability and flux that cannot be reduced to fixed notions of identity, experience, or binary understanding. Frequently created in tandem with figures involved in art, music, dance, literature, including the performance collective Moved by the Motion and the scholar and poet Fred Moten, Tsang’s work suggests the capacity for art to express a multiplicity of voices. For The Milk of Dreams, Tsang presents Of Whales (2022), an installation based on her feature-length film adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and psychedelic ocean environments generated from XR (“extended reality”) technologies. Of Whales refocuses the source material’s profound meditation on knowledge, exoticism, and eroticism through a postcolonial lens. Imagined from the perspective of the whale and the “motley crew” of sailors aboard the Pequod whaling ship, this complex work sets Melville’s tale in the context of mid-19th century maritime history, the transatlantic birth of modern capitalism, and mass civil unrest. The immensity of the ocean becomes a symbol of the unknown; reflections gesture to the presence of oblique perspectives and complexify the idea that any point of view is singular or straightforward. – MW Wu Tsang, Moby Dick (still), 2022. Film. Produced by Schauspielhaus Zürich. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Cabinet Gallery, London; Antenna Space, Shanghai. © Ante Productions

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TOURMALINE

1983, Boston, USA Lives in New York City, USA

Tourmaline is an activist, writer, and filmmaker whose practice confronts the historical erasure of Black, queer, and trans communities. Her films weave together portraits of queer icons, drag queens, and gay and trans liberation activists whose cultural contributions have too often been flattened, pathologised, or neglected entirely. In her experimental filmic portrayals, figures such as the activists Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (The Personal Things, 2016), Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera (Happy Birthday, Marsha!, 2018), and legendary drag queen Egyptt LaBeija (Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones, 2017) come to life through narratives that play with the details conventionally offered by history or found in archives. Mary of Ill Fame (2020–2021) shapes a fictional story around Mary Jones (played by Rowin Amone), a Black trans woman and sex worker who was part of a community of “girls of ill fame” and eventually incarcerated in the 1830s for stealing a man’s wallet. Mary of Ill Fame imagines Jones in Seneca Village, an autonomous New York City community of free Black and Irish immigrants located on the land occupied today by Central Park. Splicing between images of Jones in brutal confinement and in a gracious, picturesque Seneca Village home, Tourmaline builds a fantasy space of power, freedom, and pleasure that the actual Jones deserved. – MW

Tourmaline, Mary of Ill Fame (still), 2020–2021. 16mm film, sound, 17 mins 14 sec. Courtesy the Artist; Chapter NY, New York

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A N D RO E RA DZ E

1993, Tbilisi Lives in Tbilisi, Georgia

Inspired by Donna Haraway and John Berger’s contemporary theories on interspecies relations, Andro Eradze fills the frames of his works with plants and animals poised to exceed their boundaries. His camera follows scenes on the cusp of something undefined: a smouldering campfire, a stormy forest of wind-whipped trees, a flooding football pitch. Accompanied by haunting, transcendent soundtracks, his films feel like a compilation of the transitional moments of a feature film, leaving the viewer with a sense of expansive anticipation. Eradze’s new video installation for The Milk of Dreams, titled Raised in the dust (2022), stems from the conclusion of classical Georgian poet Vazha-Pshavela’s The Snake Eater (1901). The poem’s protagonist has a supernatural talent for understanding the language of nature; he must decide between his connection to nature and his social responsibilities, ultimately bowing to the latter. Eradze’s film takes place in a forest. Taxidermized animals appear one by one, disturbed by an uproar of New Year’s Eve fireworks. Critical of the human carnival that is disruptive, toxic, and fatal for wildlife, Eradze’s film repositions fireworks as an entry point onto the dark and mythological side of the forest, a world of plants, animals, and phantoms. – MK Andro Eradze is one of the four recipients of the grant for the inaugural edition of Biennale College Arte, launched in 2021. Participation out of competition.

Andro Eradze, Nightvision, limited access (still), 2021. HD video, 2 mins 53 sec. Courtesy the Artist

300

SIMNIKIWE BUHLUNGU

1995, Johannesburg Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa and Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Simnikiwe Buhlungu researches the production of knowledges, how they are disseminated, and by whom. Through film, sound, installation, and text, Buhlungu transports viewers into metaphorical and theoretical considerations of the ways we come to ‘know’ and what informs those narratives. For The Milk of Dreams, Buhlungu realises And the Other Thing I Was Saying Was: A Conversomething (2022), an interactive sound installation of theremins, electronic musical synthesisers that – through the interaction of its electromagnetic fields and our bodies – play recorded sounds coming from different sources: namely, Pink noise, Mam’ Miriam Makeba, Binyavanga Wainaina, Hadedas and a Percussive Rhythm Section. Together, and with interaction from audience, this conver-something departs off of “dreaming” as a thought, a confession, as communication from biological systems, as ubiquitous bodily language, shared socio-historical encounters, as an imagination, a time-sensitive annoyance, as a mistake, as a pause, an adlib, as something very real – opening up this conver-something to existing beyond “spoken,” articulable language. – MK Simnikiwe Buhlungu is one of the four recipients of the grant for the inaugural edition of Biennale College Arte, launched in 2021. Participation out of competition.

Simnikiwe Buhlungu, What We Put In The Skafthini (A Mixtapenyana), 2021. Audio cassette tape, 9 mins 57 sec. Commissioned by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Courtesy the Artist

Arsenale

301

AKI SASAMOTO

1980, Kanagawa, Japan Lives in New York City, USA

Aki Sasamoto’s “performance-slash-installation” work questions the nuances of everyday life, channelling queries about topics ranging from cravings and laundry to garbage, cleaning, and romance through absurdist scenarios, deadpan humour, and a stream of consciousness logic. Sasamoto’s ideas or questions crystalise through a system of structured improvisation. Her installations – often realised through meticulous arrangements of sculpturally altered objects – provide the tools for scenarios to occur, functioning like a score, with stories unfolding and interconnections forming through the body moving in time and space. On view at the Giardino delle Vergini inside a selfstanding building, the components of Sasamoto’s piece Sink or Float (2022) appear to levitate. On top of a series of tables constructed from stainless-steel commercial sinks that have been retrofitted with thousands of small air-blowing holes – the same technology used in industrial air float tables – a collection of objects enacts a chaotic, improvised set of movements. At one end of the space, framed by a construction of HVAC air ducts, is a rotisserie oven and a commercial cooler that have been transformed into light boxes. Sasamoto’s constructed environment employs controlled chaos to transform the everyday into the fantastical, inviting the viewer to retune their perceptions of the seemingly mundane in everyday life. – MW

Aki Sasamoto, random memo random, 2017. Performance, mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the Artist; Take Ninagawa, Tokyo

302

M A R I A N N E V I TA L E

1973, East Rockaway, USA Lives in New York City, USA

Marianne Vitale creates monuments from the spectres of American industrial expansion – bridges, railroad tracks, freight train engines, dams, factories, outhouses – in an excoriating critique of the contemporary collapse of Western society. She burns, breaks, bruises, and builds anew, forcing us to interrogate our own histories through the objects we abandon in the name of progress. For The Milk of Dreams, Vitale presents two series of works in a secluded garden part of the Giardino delle Vergini. For fifteen years, Vitale has constructed scale models of North American bridges in her studio, taking them outdoors to burn them and eventually exhibiting their charred skeletons. Installed here are seven of her now-iconic burned bridges cast in bronze. If the bridges portray the ruptured connection nodes of a climate-ravaged future, Bottle People (2020–2021), a series of liquor bottles swaddled in fabric and cast in bronze, represents a bestiary of ancient microbial phantasms unleashed from the ashen earth. Dozens of these gesturing figures, suspended off walls as if levitating, portray agony, despair, hope and amusement. – MK

Marianne Vitale, Bottle People, 2020. Bronze, dimensions variable. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist

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F N O O PAV I L I I E D A R T S L APP

SPE

PRO

C JE

S O P H I A A L- M A R I A TIGER STRIKE RED

Promoters

La Biennale di Venezia with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London Curator

Cecilia Alemani Artist

Sophia Al-Maria 1983, Tacoma, USA Lives in London, UK

Qatari American artist, writer, and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria explores the echoes of colonialism and racism as they have bled into the present via the inherent biases of our algorithms and machines. Tiger Strike Red (2022) is a new single-channel video devised for the Pavilion of Applied Arts in the context of The Milk of Dreams. The video was inspired by the peculiar eroticism of the automaton known as “Tippoo’s Tiger,” made for Tipu Sultan – an 18th century ruler of Mysore in South India –, which depicts a tiger mauling a British soldier and is now in the collection of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. For Al-Maria, this automaton demonstrates a yearning for revenge on the colonial oppressor and, in the suggestive coupling of man and beast, the subconscious fantasy of male impregnation. In Tiger Strike Red, Tippoo’s Tiger becomes a shapeshifting spirit, heard in voiceover, who guides the viewer from the museum’s galleries to the dungeon of a London dominatrix and a junk shop selling remnants from a David Attenborough-narrated television program about Indian tigers. Tiger Strike Red proposes that the imaginary monsters conjured by Britain colonialism are still deeply entangled in our present-day machines and technologies. – IW

Sophia Al-Maria, Tiger Strike Red (still), 2022. Single-channel HD video and installation, 24 mins. Courtesy the Artist; Project Native Informant, London

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305

N EN

ALE

LLEGE

RTE

Biennale College is the project by La Biennale di Venezia dedicated to training and supporting young artists in all the Artistic Departments and in the specific activities of La Biennale’s organisational structure. Already operating in the Cinema, Dance, Music, and Theatre Departments and the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC), Biennale College is conceived with the ambition to promote young talents, offering them the opportunity to work closely with international mentors to develop “creations” that become part of the programmes of the Artistic Departments. For the inaugural edition of Biennale College Arte, launched in 2021, over 250 young emerging artists under 30 from 58 countries around the world have joined an open call for participation. More than half are women. The four finalists are: Simnikiwe Buhlungu 1995, Johannesburg. Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa and Amsterdam, the Netherlands Ambra Castagnetti 1993, Genoa, Italy. Lives in Milan, Italy Andro Eradze 1993, Tbilisi. Lives in Tbilisi, Georgia Kudzanai-Violet Hwami 1993, Gutu, Zimbabwe. Lives in London, UK The four artists received a grant of 25,000 euros for the realisation of their final work. The artworks are presented, out of competition, as part of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams. Tutors: Barbara Casavecchia, Gianni Jetzer, Yasmil Raymond, Francesco Stocchi, Roberta Tenconi.

307

N ATI G P PA R T I C I OU NT R I E C

SENA

ALBANIA

A RG E N T I NA

Lumturi Blloshmi (1944–2020) works in painting, photography, installation, and performance. Her works are characterised by a certain irony and distinct way of reflecting and overcoming the reality in which she lived. Her dynamic personality and self-awareness, nourished by philosophy, poetry, sensuality, and spirituality, have given form to a distinctive body of work that bears witness to the remarkable journey of a creative spirit who endured and created despite political, physical, and ideological limitations imposed by life and by the particular context of Communist Albania after the Second World War. This presentation consists of a selection of Blloshmi’s works from the 1960s until the 2010s, spanning self-portraits and compositions in painting and photography that say as much about Blloshmi’s aesthetic essence and personal reality as they do about the specific political and social context in which they were created. The pavilion is conceived in such a way as to reflect Blloshmi’s tangible yet simultaneously ungraspable universe and its openness to interpretations.

Mónica Heller builds an all-encompassing setting, inspired both by the multisensory architectural design of Argentine suburban bingo halls and by the surrealist universes of interwar painting and poetry. Screens and projections are home to different characters that dwell in an oscillating world: beings that construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct themselves in time loops as short as infinite. Each screen encases an animated portrait and in each one – through absurd humour, harsh lyricism, and the metaphysical mood of 3D rendering – a series of events unfolds, in which transposable and restless metabolisms constantly reorganise themselves into a wide array of inexplicable possibilities.

Lumturi Blloshmi, Self-portrait, 1966. Oil on canvas, 65 × 48.5 cm. Photo Albes Fusha. Courtesy Lumturi Blloshmi Estate

Mónica Heller, El origen de la substancia importará la importancia del origen (still), 2022. 3D animation video installation, dimensions and duration variable Arsenale

309

CHILE

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol is an experimental path focusing on the conservation of peatlands, the most efficient natural ecosystem for regulating the planet’s climate yet one of the most overlooked by research. In the language of the Tierra del Fuego’s indigenous Selk’nam people, Hol-Hol Tol means the “heart of peatlands”. The exhibition including artists Ariel Bustamante, Carla Macchiavello, Dominga Sotomayor, and Alfredo Thiermann immerses us in a material and ancestral experience of the Patagonian peatlands through a large multisensory installation and scientific experiment. Profoundly rooted in the environmental humanities, this project aims to both raise the profile of peatlands and outline possible courses of action at a political, social, and ecological level.

Meta-Scape is inspired by the “Scape”, represented by “poetry” in the traditional Chinese literary context. From the contemporary perspective of media theory, Meta-Scape connects an ecological or system image presented by “Scape” to the current human context of “human-technologynature”. “Scape” is an evolving term in the discourse system of traditional Chinese culture. Based on the human context of “human-technology-nature”, Meta-Scape aims at representing the “Structure of Understanding” created by the Chinese nation in the process of comprehending and transforming the world and exploring the civilisation landmark set by mankind for the coexistence of the future world by taking the “Scape” in traditional Chinese culture as a principle concept, holding the attitude of transcending time indicated by “Meta”.

Field Trip to the Peatlands of Karukinka, Patagonia, 2022. Photo Benjamín Echazarreta. Courtesy Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol

Liu Jiayu, Stay in Absolute Void; Remain Silent Within, 2022. Machine learning, Houdini, touch designer, 3D print, photopolymer, projection mapping, dimensions variable. Photo Haobo Huang. © Jiayu Liu Studio

Participating Countries

310

GHANA

ICELAND

Ghana will present the exhibition Black Star – The Museum as Freedom. Entitled after the Black Star that symbolises Ghana through its flag, national football team, and most important monuments, it also became a symbol of the connection of Africa with its diasporas through Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line and his Back-to-Africa movement revived now in Ghana as Beyond the Return; as well as for Pan-Africanism and anticolonialism with the symbol described as the “Lodestar of African Freedom”. The pavilion exhibition examines new constellations of this freedom across time, technology, and borders. It includes large-scale installations by Na Chainkua Reindorf, Afroscope, and Diego Araúja, in an exhibition designed by architect DK Osseo Asare and curated by Nana Oforiatta Ayim, director of ANO Institute of Arts & Knowledge in Accra and director at large of Ghana’s Museums and Cultural Heritage.

Throughout his career, the artist Sigurður Guðjónsson has explored the boundaries of matter and the enigma that underlies every object around us. In Perpetual MOTION, he brings attention to the continual flux of energy and an unperturbed level in nature, combining concepts of space, energy, and time into a multisensory sculpture. The artwork is staged as a gigantic screen split into two perpendicular axes in which a magnified image of metal dust vibrates in a gentle cadence that blends with a soundscape created with granular synthesis. Inspired by the space of the Arsenale, Perpetual MOTION is a celebration of camera and vision, poetic experimentation, and perceptual spaces.

Sigurður Guðjónsson, Perpetual MOTION (still), 2022. Video. Courtesy the Artist; Berg Contemporary

Arsenale

311

IRELAND

I TA LY

Using steel, limestone, wood, and glass, Niamh O’Malley shapes, and assembles objects to create a purposeful landscape of forms. Sculptures tall and free-standing, ground-bearing, and cantilevered, with paced and looped moving image, inhabit and animate. As Lizzie Lloyd writes “time and again support systems dominate, becoming a part of, not just a means of displaying work”. Gather invites communality and mobilisation. O’Malley’s sculptures gesture towards enabling, offering protection, conveying sensations of touch and more – of grabbing, holding, caressing surfaces, offering a moment of tether and precarious poise.

History of Night and Destiny of Comets is an installation by Gian Maria Tosatti that combines literary references, visual art, theatre, and performance. It confronts the tricky balance between Humanity and Nature, between the dreams and mistakes of the past and the prospects future. The first part, History of Night, traces the rise and fall of the Italian industrial “miracle”, the vast warehouses between Ragusa and Cremona, the single paradoxically homogeneous panorama of a hypothetical journey into the Italian provinces that today reflects the frustration of a working-class that has come to an end. This scenario sets the stage for the epiphany of the last act, Destiny of Comets, that is, of humanity that has crossed the earth in a rapid and luminous trajectory without, in the end, being guaranteed the right to inhabit this planet forever. Here, imagination is overturned in a cathartic epiphany.

Niamh O’Malley, Vent (still), 2022. HD digital video on LED screen, 4 mins 23 sec looped, 160 × 150 × 30 cm. Courtesy the Artist

Gian Maria Tosatti, History of Night and Destiny of Comets, 2022. Drawing

Participating Countries

312

REPUBLIC OF KO S OVO

L AT V I A

Jakup Ferri presents paintings, embroideries, and carpets in a monumental display. Ferri’s works are inspired by children’s drawings, folk art, and so-called Outsider Art. The paintings and embroideries are based on the artist’s (slightly) surreal drawings depicting everyday scenes involving animals, children, acrobats, and utopian architecture. The handwoven carpets with geometrical patterns, on the other hand, are based on the artist’s son’s avatar designs from the computer game Animal Crossing. Ferri, who, for his textile works, collaborates with women from Albania, Kosovo, Burkina Faso, and Suriname, considers carpetmaking and embroidering as a technique of coherence and community building.

Skuja Braden, an international artistic collaboration that was born in 1999 between Ingūna Skuja from Latvia and Melissa D. Braden from California, USA, presents a multilayered installation that maps the mental, physical, and spiritual areas within the artists’ home. The ideals and affiliations of its inhabitants are revealed, and insight is offered into different readings of the history of a region to test the readiness of its society to live up to the challenges of the present day. In the exhibition, home is echoed by images in porcelain, a material that Skuja Braden has mastered superbly. Their porcelain comes to life in everyday objects, fountains, bendy hoses, and male and female physiques and nature.

Jakup Ferri (in collaboration with Jip Ferri), Tintirinti, 2021. Hand–woven carpets (wool), dimensions variable. © Jakup Ferri. Photo Leonit Ibrahimi. Courtesy the Artist

Skuja Braden, Selling Water by the River (no.1), 2022. Porcelain, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo © Kristīne Madjare. Courtesy the Artists. © Skuja Braden (Ingūna Skuja and Melissa D. Braden) Arsenale

313

LEBANON

GRAND DUCHY OF LUX E M B O U RG

The World in the Image of Man, curated by Nada Ghandour, illustrates the perpetual action of the human imagination on the reality of the world through a theme, a city, and two artists who maintain a political and aesthetic dialogue. More than ever, fiction nourishes our daily lives. Beirut, as a world city, is the place where this borderless theme is embodied. Ayman Baalbaki’s monumental installation and Danielle Arbid’s video evolve between a mental image that has become reality due to Baalbaki’s plastic gesture, and a tangible reality that has become pure vision in the eye of Arbid. The artistic dialogue takes place in the polysemic urban character of Beirut, at the heart of the upheavals of the global crisis and the emotional instability of a technologised world, in a scenography designed by Aline Asmar d’Amman.

Tina Gillen’s Faraway So Close is a large-scale installation presenting a new suite of paintings made especially for the Luxembourg pavilion. Referencing the Sale d’Armi’s history as a military storage space, Gillen presents canvases on supports inspired by painted film backdrops, “as if the paintings were only there temporarily, waiting to be moved again, rearranged”. Themes such as landscape and dwelling that are recurrent in Gillen’s work accompany more recent pictorial research on the representation of natural phenomena that elude our control as well as “uncertain landscapes” marked by climate and environmental changes brought about by human activities.

Lebanese Pavilion. Danielle Arbid (video) and Ayman Baalbaki (installation). Scenography by Aline Asmar d’Amman/Culture in Architecture. © Culture in Architecture

Tina Gillen, Arctic Forecast II, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 270 × 190 cm. Photo We Document Art. Courtesy the Artist and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. © Tina Gillen Participating Countries

314

M A LTA

MEXICO

Diplomazija Astuta – including artists Arcangelo Sassolino, Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, and Brian Schembri – reimagines Caravaggio’s seminal Maltese altarpiece The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist as a kinetic, sculptural installation. Through induction technology, molten steel droplets fall from the sky into seven rectangular basins of water, each representing a subject in The Beheading. By transposing the Oratory of the Decollato’s zeitgeist onto the Malta pavilion, Diplomazija Astuta resituates Caravaggio’s immanent themes within modern life, prompting viewers to negotiate an immersive space where the tragedy and brutality of Saint John’s execution is experienced in the present day, injustices of the past are reconciled, and shared humanist principles are upheld in the future.

The exhibition explores the ways in which Mariana Castillo Deball, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, and Santiago Borja Charles approach forms of knowledge that have not been fully colonised by the modern episteme, existing in resistance, and actualising themselves to affirm opposite and alternate ways of life to an anthropocentric principle of progress. The works explore transactions between cultures and forms of knowledge that disobey the exoticist musealisation of dissident practices. By imagining decolonial futures that may rid us of realities of oppression subduing diverse human, nonhuman, and more-than-human life forms today, Hasta que los cantos broten / Until the Songs Spring proposes alternative methodologies to unlock new speculative realities.

Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (detail), 2022. Steel, water, induction and electrical systems. 590 × 1498 × 1498 cm. Photo Massimo Penzo

Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Soneto de alimañas, 2022. Photo Claudia López Barroso

Arsenale

315

NEW ZEALAND

S U LTA N AT E O F O M A N

Interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara presents an ensemble exhibition, Paradise Camp, from the unique perspective of Fa‘afafine – “in the manner of a woman” or third gender in Sāmoa. Conceived eight years ago, Paradise Camp comprises a suite of twelve tableau photographs in saturated colour that upcycle paintings by Paul Gauguin; a five-part episodic “talk show” series whereby a group of Fa‘afafine comment wittily on select Gauguin paintings and Kihara’s personal research archive. Kihara’s audacious reenactments address intersectionality between decolonisation, identity politics, and climate crisis from a staunchly Pasifika perspective, telling their story from the Pacific.

The Sultanate of Oman’s inaugural pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2022, curated by Omani curator and art historian Aisha Stoby, presents a group exhibition entitled Destined Imaginaries displaying new bodies of work by three generations of Omani contemporary artists Anwar Sonya, Hassan Meer, Budoor Al Riyami, Radhika Khimji, and the late artist Raiya Al Rawahi. Each artist has developed these works, an abstract timeless habitat of future relics with insights, during the extraordinary events of the past two years, and each have tackled the questions asked by the Curator of the International Exhibition The Milk of Dreams Cecilia Alemani, specifically “What would life look like without us?”

Yuki Kihara, Two fa‘afafine (After Gauguin), 2020. Hahnemühle fine art paper mounted on aluminum, 94 × 72.4 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Milford Galleries, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Anwar Sonya in Raiya Al Rawahi’s Speed of Art, 2017–2022

Participating Countries

316

P E RU

PHILIPPINES

Herbert Rodriguez abandoned his studies at the Art School at the Universidad Católica del Perú in 1981, just as turmoil dawned upon the country. Peru was caught in a spiral of violence, as subversive armed group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a Maoist–Pol Pot movement, declared war on the state. A bloodbath ensued through clashes between the Shining Path and the armed forces in the Andes and patches of the Amazon forest. Lima suffered under terrorist attacks. Rodríguez embraced a critical stance in his art, defending human rights and championing the anarchism of the subterráneos (underground scene created by young men and women) in Lima. In 1989, however, he directly confronted the Shining Path on symbolic ground with his Arte-Vida project at the Universidad de San Marcos: the campus became a cultural theatre of war. The exhibit comprises the remnants of his artwork of the period.

The exhibition presenting works by Gerardo Tan, Felicidad A. Prudente, and Sammy N. Buhle is a collaborative and interdisciplinary project exploring the networked translation of cultural data into visual language, experimenting with sound, transcription, painting, video, and textiles. It is inspired by indigenous weaving practices connecting the customary and the contemporary. The exhibit thus appears in a binary format: Speaking in Tongue is a two-channel video installation within a tunnel, showing the transmission of a traditional chant into codes transcribed through painting; Renderings follows the transmutation of sound from the native looms into textile renditions, arranged according to the metaphoric properties of weaving and the intersection of technology and tradition.

Herbert Rodríguez, Violencia Estructural Perú, 1988. Collage on paper, 130 × 72 cm. Photo Juan Pablo Murrugarra

Gerardo Tan, Felicidad A. Prudente, Sammy N. Buhle, Andi taku e sana, Amung taku di sana / All of us present, This is our gathering, 2021. Photo At Maculangan Arsenale

317

SAUDI ARABIA

SINGAPORE

This artwork forms a monolith tree-like installation that occupies and consumes the space it inhabits. It has been carefully crafted combining natural elements and a mechanical structure, creating a visceral effect on the viewer. This work references the drawn line, which for Muhannad Shono stems from a personal, defining encounter with ways of the past and previous beliefs as well as his investigation of life cycles and power of nature and regeneration. It also alludes to nature as it writhes, fighting for its survival, shedding its skin, and ushering in hope for rebirth and new beginnings. The energy emanating from the artwork signifies the evolutional battle whereby living organisms are presently being forced to deal with their prevailing instinct to survive. Yet it also transmits a message of wisdom contained in nature itself, urging us to learn from it.

Taking the form of a book, film, and paper maze, Shubigi Rao’s exhibition Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book explores the persistence of endangered languages, the futures of public and alternative libraries, and the cosmopolitanism of regional communities that have blossomed and waned in historic centres of print and trade, including Venice and Singapore. The five thousand copies of Pulp Vol. III collected by La Biennale visitors will find their way across the world, germinating small libraries to resist erasure and circumvent geopolitical and cultural divides.

Cover of racy Jawi novel published by Qalam Press, Singapore, as shown by Faris Joraimi, Singapore. Courtesy the Artist. © Shubigi Rao Participating Countries

318

REPUBLIC OF S L OV E N I A

REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

Marko Jakše paints spaces of human imagination. Animals and strange creatures dominate over humans, existing species are joined by hermaphrodites and apparitions from fantasy islands, unknown expanses of the universe, or the future. Rich in oneiric undertones, Jakše’s art depicts paradoxical, antithetical entities relating to the symbols and relics of sunken civilisations, spirituality, religions, mythologies, and art heritage. His paintings challenge the idea of controlling nature and the related categories of existence, the scientific systems, and the knowledge of what is the primordial in and outside us; and above all, how something is. Jakše’s response to these questions covers a broad range from Nietzschean Dionysian abandon to metasymbolistic and metaromantic allegories reflecting the enthralling drama of human passions and yearning – mysterious games without a master.

South Africa’s national exhibition proposes that, as ruinous as the Covid-19 pandemic has been, adversity can bring opportunity. The theme Into the Light is an invitation to use this opportunity to step into the light of self-discovery. The exhibition features artists whose work reflects personal journeys through sophisticated use of photography, new media, and technology. The three artists are Roger Ballen, Lebohang Kganye, and Phumulani Ntuli. The exhibition layout takes the viewer on a journey that symbolises a process of self-discovery and moving “into the light”. It does so by leading the visitor through different layers of exploration that become more intimate and personal.

Roger Ballen, Stare, 2008. Black and white photograph displayed on lightbox

Arsenale

319

TURKEY

UKRAINE

Füsun Onur, a pioneer of contemporary and conceptual art in Turkey, has pushed the boundaries of painting and sculpture for more than fifty years, giving form to her art through instinct and intuition and creating a language beyond time. In Once upon a time… she tells a meaningful story using a minimalist approach and silent music. Figures made by bending and twisting metal wire dance, make music, travel, fall in love. Some of them are suspended in space, others reenact the scenes of a stage play with their ping-pong-ball heads and colourful clothes made from crepe paper. In a time when everyone’s life has been turned upside down, when all known truths are being questioned, Onur offers a masterwork on conceiving alternative worlds, creating new languages, learning from nonhumans, loving and living together.

Pavlo Makov is an artist from Kharkiv whose practices in the early 1990s focused on exploring the parallels between the human body and urban landscape. The artwork The Fountain of Exhaustion, originally created in 1995, was intended as a paradoxical symbol of life: one river flows into another, and yet both become exhausted and run dry. Since then, the fountain has never been integrated into urban space and has never fully functioned as a processual object with actual water input. The project has only gained relevance over the last twenty-seven years, breaking free from the limiting context of the Eastern European metropolis of its birth and growing to stand for the global exhaustion of culture, economy, and politics. In view of the ongoing pandemic, it came to represent the accumulation of exhaustion.

Füsun Onur, Once upon a time…, 2022. Metal wire, crepe paper, ping-pong balls, variable dimensions. Photo Noyan Ayturan. Courtesy the Artist

Pavlo Makov by The Fountain of Exhaustion mounted on the Oleh Mitasov’s house, 1996. Archival photograph, 16.5 × 17 cm. Courtesy the Artist. © Pavlo Makov Participating Countries

320

U N I T E D A R A B E M I R AT E S

REPUBLIC OF U Z B E K I S TA N

Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim developed this single, room-filling installation commissioned for the Emirates pavilion. Dozens of human-sized, biomorphic sculptures cluster in undulating colour and movement – suggesting bodies or trees, metamorphosis, and mutation. The colour spectrum transforms across the span of the installation from bright, saturated hues to earth tones, to stark black and white: from sunrise to sunset. Ibrahim’s practice spans more than forty years of prolific experimentation and production. He is known for developing the first Land Art practice in the region and as a core member of “the five”, a tightly knit group of experimental, conceptual artists who are part of the visual arts vanguard in the UAE since the 1980s.

The pavilion presents a reflection on the work of the scientist Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His book Kitab Al-Jabr Wa-al-Muqabala, introduced to Europe under the title Dixit Algorizmi, was the first scientific text to present algebra as a discipline independent of geometry and arithmetic. This Latin transliteration of al-Khwarizmi’s name gave us the modern word algorithm. The “innovation acceleration” we consider particular to our time is assumed to be the product of a prevalently Western scientific tradition, but reality is more nuanced. It represents the apex of centuries of research spanning multiple civilisations. Dixit Algorizmi—Garden of Knowledge sets out to question the prevailing narrative around the histories and geographies of technological development, exploring forgotten roots and overlooked resonances with distant places, times, and cultures.

Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Flowers in Vase, 2021. Papier-mâché, cardboard. Photo John Varghese. Courtesy National Pavilion UAE

Garden of Knowledge

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321

THE

T CI

N ATI G P PA R T I C I OU NT R I E C

IN TH

ARMENIA

REPUBLIC OF AZERBAIJAN

Gharīb denotes a sense of belonging and estrangement permeating Arabic, Armenian, and Farsi imaginaries. The notion has long been associated with the underground, clandestine activities of music making, illegal social clubs, psychotropic substance trade, and the political margins. Alternate tuning systems, modes of sonic dissent, and gentle oscillations between mystic thought and charlatanism compose the cosmology of the Gharīb pavilion. In this exhibition by artist Andrius Arutiunian, the gharīb presents itself as a form of dissonance with Western-influenced understandings of time, rhythm, and attunement, both musical and political. A certain musical score emerges, dotted by the voices of the unheard, the disappeared, and the radical.

An exhibition of works by seven contemporary Azerbaijani women artists, Born to Love is a reinterpretation of the principles of the time, imbued with the history of Azerbaijani culture and trends in modern technology. The discovery of nature, life, and the Universe poses enormous challenges to humans. We would all like to better understand who we are, where we come from, and where we are going – we would like to focus on something bigger than ourselves and more significant than the latest electronics or fashion. The Covid-19 pandemic turned the world upside down. Quarantine has reshaped the territory of art, and the virus has created its realist mythology – about how disease and death can come suddenly and change the course of our lives. Born to Love, which presents works created during a time like no other before, aims to honour the art community and shed light on its diligence and tenacity in ensuring that art always survives.

Andrius Arutiunian, Seven Common Ways of Disappearing, 2021. Score fragment. Courtesy the Artist

Zhuk (Narmin Israfilova), Born to Love, 2022. Painting, installation. Photographic rendering Zhuk (Narmin Israfilova). Image courtesy Zhuk (Narmin Israfilova) In the City

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PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF BANGLADESH

BOLIVIA

The project aims to represent Rabindranath Tagore’s thinking focused on the passage of time and its ability to erase all that is ephemeral and superficial, preserving only what is true. The theme of the exhibition starts from this idea to connect to the concept of time expressed in the title Time: Mask and Unmask, which also reflects the precarious moment that humanity has been facing for over two years, the pandemic crisis. This stage is marked by the use of masks that have necessarily conditioned people’s daily life, to the point of generating contradictory feelings: the need to “be masked” which means to escape or try to escape the danger of death and the desire to “unmasking”, the hope, that is, to restore the original balance between the human being and nature.

For Walter Benjamin, the aura of the work of art was destined to disappear because of its reproducibility, first with photography, then with collage, and finally with cinema. So what makes a work of art not repeat itself and kill itself? Wara Wara Jawira (River of Stars) represents a part of the cosmos, not as a work of art, but as a reading that seeks to incorporate different transdisciplinary points of view instead of impressing with a single truth, to evoke the intimate sensations of comfort and Bolivian domesticity instead of wonder and wonder.

Mohammad Iqbal, Peace in Time of Disquiet, 2021. Oil on canvas, 183 × 153 cm

Collective Warmichacha, Yakana constelación de la llama de la noche, 2022. Mixed media. Photo Collective Warmichacha. Courtesy Collective Warmichacha Participating Countries

326

BULGARIA

REPUBLIC OF C A M E RO ON

Exploring the Spazio Ravà interior, Michail Michailov creates an absurd minimalist environment where the narrative unfolds. At the core of the There You Are project lie the Dust to Dust drawings, masterfully capturing the microscopic detritus of human existence. Along with the strange cleaning tools and endless cyclical actions in the Just Keep on Going video series, the exhibition metaphorically describes the lonely search for meaning in everyday dynamics. The pavilion window is obscured by the Headspacing structure: gazing inside isolates the observer’s head, her senses falling into a laboratorial environment centred on the deep nature of perceptions not subject to words.

The Cameroon Pavilion compares four Cameroonian artists with four international artists, with the aim of creating a dialogue on the theme of chimeras and possible utopias, a 360-degree comparison and dialogue with paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos. Particular attention is paid to technology, which increasingly represents a possible way out and development for the young Cameroonian generations, exploring the emerging world of NFTs in an international key, to which a historical exhibition never seen before in the Biennale has been reserved. New forms of emancipation are expected from Africa through a more democratic and widespread approach to finance and the economy with the new digital platforms.

Francis Nathan Abiamba (Afran), Amanita a New York, 2022

In the City

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C R O AT I A

CUBA

Those who experience Tomo Savić-Gecan’s project might not even know they have – at least not at first. The Croatian-born, Netherlands-based artist has conceived a discreet but radical conceptual and performative project that uses artificial intelligence and lead stories from randomly selected major news sources to address our “post-truth” era and the technologies that drive it. The algorithm determines where a visitor will encounter the piece, for how long, and everything about the spare gestures of the five performers who comprise it.

Terra ignota is a Latin term used in cartography to refer to regions that have not been explored, mapped, or documented, unknown territories that are still waiting to be revealed. We have apparently found most of what there is to discover on our planet, and we are now exploring other surfaces in the Solar System. However, we should strive for all forms of integration and connection between humans and nature to secure the survival of all forms of life and discover a New World.

Tomo Savić-Gecan, Untitled (Croatian Pavilion), 2022

Rafael Villares, Immersion Series

Participating Countries

328

G E O RG I A

G R E NA DA

I Pity the Garden by Tbilisi-based artist duo Mariam Natroshvili and Detu Jincharadze is an immersive large-scale video installation and interactive VR experience that presents nonlinear storytelling of an Anthropocene era garden. The self-generating visual sequence of the video projection is not predefined – the quaked earth has detached from objective reality, it is shaken by human deeds, a puzzle composed of images of real places and fragmented environments. The setting is similar to an abandoned video game where no human is visible. Only traces, irreversible mistakes, and wounds in the earth can be seen. It is a poetic work that employs the technological age’s language of the new surrealism to speak about the end and the beginning.

The Cypher Art Collective of Grenada explores a cultural ritual of Carriacou, the Shakespeare Mas. Players dressed in colourful costumes recite passages from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to each other in the open-air theatre of the road. Generations have practiced this, with influences from West Africa, England, France, and Scotland. This is not an anthropological study, but a starting point for the imagination of the artists. Film, paintings, installations make up the multifaceted display, also focusing on the “right to opacity” – claimed by Édouard Glissant and connected to the right to human and cultural diversity, multilingualism and multiethnicity – and the theme of journey, meant as encounter and rediscovery.

Mariam Natroshvili and Detu Jincharadze, Silence, 2022. Digital image from the VR experience I Pity the Garden. Courtesy the Artists

Billy Gerard Frank, Palimpsest Tales Spun from Sea and Memories Young Cugoano, 2022. Still from video. Photo © John Johnston In the City

329

G U AT E M A L A

I V O RY C O A S T

Inclusion suggests a thought on the standing of the human being in society, her or his relationships and history, a new calling to accept the differences and respect them, considering that each individual in her or his own singularity is part of the whole we called human beings. The hyperrealist artist highlights in this large painting the beauty and goodness of the Guatemalan people. Inspired by Caravaggio, it summarises the emotions of the past, present, and future, the values of Guatemalan society in the last two hundred years of independence. Also part of the exhibition is a room with a constant display of videos and images that allow visitors to better understand Guatemalan culture.

Stories help define the value of spontaneous creation when one is looking to interpret and represent the socio-economic realities of the subject and of the collective. To merge – through art – traditions and innovations, memories and dreams of the future. Aboudia represents an African society torn in its social fabric. Armand Boua portrays the human condition as a response to the inhumanity that dominates the world. Frédéric Bruly Bouabré is one of the founding fathers of contemporary African art. Aron Demetz explores the world through a parallel sculptural universe inhabited by fictional creatures and mysterious forms. Laetitia Ky denounces, through the metamorphosis of the body, the modern definitions of the contemporary human condition. Yeanzi reinterprets an iconography capable of transforming the experiences of the past into a powerful expressive form for the future.

Christian Escobar “Chrispapita”, Inclusion, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 700 × 280 cm. Photo Roberto Andres. © Christian Escobar “Chrispapita”

Aboudia, La famille, 2021. Mixed media, 150 × 150 cm

Participating Countries

330

REPUBLIC OF K A Z A K H S TA N

K E N YA

In the inaugural national pavilion of Kazakhstan at Biennale Arte 2022, the transdisciplinary collective ORTA set up a full-scale research Centre based on the ideas of the artist, inventor, writer, and “urban madman” Sergey Kalmykov who died in complete obscurity in Almaty in 1967, but who inspired generations of contemporary artists in the region. Filled with rusting robots, embroidered memory drives, foil reflectors, and a monumental cardboard and light generator, the Centre will function as a platform for scientific and artistic experiments, which will eventually lead to opening of the Portal to the mysterious Fourth Dimension and reveal a hitherto unseen approach to human creativity – the Art of the New Genius.

Exercises in Conversation showcases the work of Dickens Otieno, Syowia Kyambi, Wanja Kimani and Kaloki Nyamai, exploring relationships and dynamics between participants in a conversation, the interchanging roles of both talker and listener, and how this complex relationship affects, influences and occupies the space of a story, of history and of pedagogy. The individual practices of the artists are strongly rooted in their respective identities and stories, approaching their art making through distinguished uses of language and forms, pushing conceptual and material boundaries and in the process, responding to the kaleidoscopic nature in which Kenyan contemporaneity continues to be conceived.

ORTA collective, Alexandra Morozova inside the Circular Cardboard-Light Generator of Genius, 2022. Photo ORTA collective. Courtesy and © ORTA collective

Wanja Kimani, Image No. 1, Venus II, 2019. Still from film. Courtesy the Artist

In the City

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KY R G Y Z R E P U B L I C

LITHUANIA

Building on the foundations of the 2005 Central Asian pavilion, the Kyrgyz Republic participates for the first time as a dedicated country pavilion with artist Firouz FarmanFarmaian. The exhibition investigates the immaterial substance of memory through the sourcing of archaic cosmogonies across sacred material, derived semiology, and spiritual realms. The artist draws inspiration from what he defines as a nomadic displacement, the result of his childhood exile following the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution that led him to investigate his clan’s tribal past and, in this instance, the hereditary ties linking him to central Asia, Kyrgyz culture, and the myths and epics related to the idea of Turan.

Gut Feeling by Lithuanian artist Robertas Narkus is a complex work that manoeuvres between an honest desire to change the world, a persistent belief in the promise of collaboration, the egocentric ambitions of the artist, and a flirtation with financial structures, technological progress, and humour. The term “gut feeling” describes a certain sense of intuition, a hunch that, according to half-forgotten folklore and the latest scientific discoveries, closely links the activities of the gut with the brain. In collaboration with a renowned fermentation specialist, scientists, fellow artists, local residents, and small businesses, Narkus has created a social sculpture in one of the last remaining nongentrified Venetian campi in the Castello district – a surrealist cooperative producing a mysterious product made from an invasive species of seaweed harvested from local waters.

Firouz FarmanFarmaian, Zero One, Sketch of the Installion, 2021. Acrylic Marker, White China Ink, White HB Pencil on Black Canson Paper, 75 × 106 cm. Courtesy the Artist

Robertas Narkus, Gut Feeling, 2022

Participating Countries

332

REPUBLIC OF NORTH M AC E D O N I A

MONGOLIA

Landscape Experience by Robert Jankuloski and Monika Moteska is a multimedia project that includes video installations, objects, and photographs. The “aesthetics” of abandoned (neglected) landscapes, placed in a new context, with new layers of transcription of the dispositions life-death, beautiful-ugly, vital-toxic are the focus of this project. Through a critical-discursive approach, the authors point out the dangers that lurk if serious systemic steps are not taken to overcome the Anthropocene’s greatest challenges, such as the uncontrolled misuse of the natural resources of planet Earth in the form of mindless (explicit or implicit, real or psychological, physical or chemical) wars, in which we are all victims, and most of all the youngest, the innocent, and the idealists.

Munkhtsetseg Jalkhaajav (Mugi)’s interdisciplinary works explore the notion of pain, fear, healing, and rebirth. Mainly reflecting her personal experiences, she investigates complexities of female bodies, minds and souls, and the connection with oneself and nature, while capturing tension between different realms. Seemingly fictional yet grounded, her unique works embody invisible forces such as spirits, and myths, and tell sensible stories of women, unborn children, and the sorrowful fates of animals. The exhibition presents sculptures, collages, and video pieces, spread across three different rooms entitled Miscarriage, Dream of Gazelle, and Pulse of Life, offering a journey through the intimate, fragile, yet powerful world of Mugi.

Robert Jankuloski, Monika Moteska, from the cycle Landscape Experience 3. Multimedia project installation. Photo Robert Jankuloski

Munkhtsetseg Jalkhaajav (Mugi), Cosmic Bodies, 2014–2022. Stretch fabric, sponge, thread, wires, synthetic hair, glue and oil on paper. Dimensions variable, height of 250 cm. Photo Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar

In the City

333

M ON T E N E G RO

NAMIBIA

The pavilion presents works by artists Dante Buu, Lidija Delić, Ivan Šuković, Darko Vučković, and Jelena Tomašević as well as works from the collection of art of the Non-Aligned Countries by Zuzana Chalupová, René Portocarrero, an unknown author from Iraq, and a documentary on the work of the artist Bernard Matemera. The exhibition resembles a sci-fi tale of possible futures, weaving through the intergenerational, multitemporal views of artists from various social and historical contexts who settled in present-day Montenegro.

The Lone Stone Men of the Desert is an art project by the artistic collective RENN comprising a variable number of sculptures resembling stylised human figures, which have been scattered across the world’s most ancient desert since 2014. Each sculpture carries a tag with a number identifying it and a distinctive message suggesting a possible encounter that it is moving towards. Separated from each other by kilometres of desert, posed in astonishing, untainted locations, far from urbanisation, these stone men seem to incite a reflection on the “deserts” that keep the different human cultures apart, and on the need of their encounter to discuss, as a collective, the place of humankind in nature.

Darko Vučković, Soft Form IX, 2019. Porcelain, 13 × 18 × 13 cm. Photo Darko Vučković. Courtesy the Artist. © Darko Vučković

Participating Countries

334

N E PA L

THE NETHERLANDS

Ang Tsherin Sherpa collaborates with artists from the Himalayas to both capture and problematise contradictory conceptualisations of the region – often seen through a reductive and fetishised “Shangri-La” gaze. This body of work incorporates accounts encoded in oral cultures, woven languages, and quotidian rituals to implicate an intersectional and intertwined past. Drawing upon materials from a shared Himalayan history – nature spirits, nomadism, polysemic imagery – these compositions explore how such vocabularies have been adopted, muted, reappropriated, digested, and regurgitated, consequently transcending their respective valuations within Bön, Buddhist, Hindu, Western, and capitalist worlds.

When the body says Yes is a new immersive video installation by melanie bonajo (they/them). The installation is part of the artist’s ongoing research into the status of intimacy in our increasingly alienating, commodity-driven world. For bonajo, consensual touch can be a powerful remedy for the modern epidemic of loneliness. About the project, bonajo says, “We brought together a group of international gender queer people, where many have a bicultural identity and we expanded on sexuality beyond the Western discourse, what our genitals mean to us and others, self-expression as a healing modality, the way our body matrix sends and receives information about closeness and touch, and how that is embodied in different language structures. Do you know the sensational dimensions of your No? How do you feel when your body says Yes?”

Ang Tsherin Sherpa, Clay models and bronze casts removed from their moulds in a workshop in Kathmandu, 2022. Dimensions variable. Photo Tsering Dorje Gurung

melanie bonajo, When the body says Yes. Photo Sydney Rahimtoola

In the City

335

PORTUGAL

REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO

Vampires in Space resorts to expectations on the figure of “vampires” to address issues of gender identity, nonnuclear families, reproduction, and the role of mental health today. It presents a narrative installation, including film, poetry, and exhibition design, about the melancholic reality of a trip to a distant exoplanet – after all, in space it’s always night and, in their immortality, vampires are perfect to deal with the incommensurability of spatial distances. This longevity allows for a science fictional retrospective exercise anchored in Pedro Neves Marques’s own trans, nonbinary experience, as well as a political critique of an history of control over bodies and desire.

Several present-day thinkers take as a given a dichotomy in contemporary reality, and register an increasingly evident divergence between an anthropocentric will to power directed towards a superhuman, hyperhuman, or transhuman condition, and a wish to attain greater awareness of the limits and finitude which can be ascribed to the Posthuman as a bearer of new ethical, environmental, and social values and, at the same time, a filter and tool to connect again – as bodies, as organisms among other organisms – with nature. The metamorphic posthuman we would like to see in our near future will be able to interact with their macrocosm of reference by imagining other forms of coexistence and transformation, thus creating new conditions of existence which are alternative to those we are accustomed to today.

Pedro Neves Marques, Vampires in Space, 2022. Film still. Courtesy Galleria Umberto Di Marino; Foi Bonita a Festa

Michelangelo Galliani, Un giardino imperfetto, 2022. Marble, water, wood, and steel, 300 × 300 × 300 cm. Photo Enrico Turillazzi, Parma. Courtesy Cris Contini Contemporary, London UK, Porto Montenegro MNE Participating Countries

336

SYRIAN ARAB REPUBLIC

U GA N DA

Art in this ancient culture has always represented a way of shaping society by fostering love and hope and providing an opportunity for rebirth. The participation of the five contemporary artists from Syria in the Biennale Arte 2022, together with other international artists, reflects the typical characteristics of Syrian art: experience, diverse influences, and many different tools. Each artist possesses a distinctive style, a particular technique, a philosophy, and different points of view and attitudes towards the events that inspired their works in the pavilion. Despite their different approaches, they are united by their passion, humanity, and profound love for their country, as well as by their common cultural identity and ineluctable common destiny.

Radiance – they dream in time, curated by Shaheen Merali, is a result of multiple processes, including online conversations, field trips to the centres of excellence developing artistic practices and resources through curatorial and organisational support. A gestation period of two years that has allowed Acaye Kerunen and Collin Sekajugo time for contemplation, review, the reevaluation of ideas, and conversations. Uganda, especially its capital city Kampala and its second city Jinja, has provided a fast-paced economy from which a cultural environment has taken root, one that that embraces contemporary Africanity in terms of its relationship to design, text, exhibition-making, performance, and context.

Collin Sekajugo, Stock Image 013 – Engaged, 2018–2021. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 120 × 120 cm. Photo Maximilien de Dycker. © Collin Sekajugo Studio In the City

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REPUBLIC OF Z I M BA BW E Presenting works by Wallen Mapondera, Ronald Muchatuta, Kresiah Mukwazhi, and Terrence Musekiwa, I did not leave a sign? corresponds to the magic and strange beauty in the unexpected, uncanny, disregarded, and unconventional, which are at the centre of this exploration of legacies. Haunted by the spectre of a past we cannot shake, a present we cannot bear, and a future we can no longer confidently imagine, we argue for the usefulness of enlivening stories of resistance and survival and how to centre ourselves at the heart of chaos. This is a map.

Wallen Mapondera, Takatumwa II (Diptych B)

Participating Countries

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E MAR

SPECIA

PROJECT

E L I S A G I A R D I N A PA PA

Promoters

La Biennale di Venezia Curator

Cecilia Alemani Artist

Elisa Giardina Papa 1979, Medicina, Italy Lives in New York City, USA and Palermo, Italy

Elisa Giardina Papa’s “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale (2022) reimagines the Sicilian myth of the donne di fora (“women from the outside and beside themselves”), described in orally passed-down tales as feminine, but also masculine; human, yet part animal; and benevolent, yet vengeful. This video installation – which complements the artist’s presentation at the Corderie in the Arsenale – envisions the donne di fora as teenaged “tuners” who ride bikes customised with powerful sound systems through the abandoned Postmodern architecture of Gibellina Nuova. The ride of the “tuners” is interspersed with text and visual motifs from a 19th-century collection of Sicilian fairy tales, Giardina Papa’s fragmented childhood memories of songs and stories told by her grandmother, and the 16th- and 17th-century Inquisition trials that criminalised women that were believed to be donne di fora. “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale repurposes the magical, ritualistic, and fantastical as radical forces that might explode prescribed categories of humanity and womanhood. Displayed in Forte Marghera – a 19th-century gunpowder store built to protect the city of Venice from its explosive contents –, the installation proposes the combustible power hidden in suppressed histories. – IW

Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale (preparatory storyboard), 2022. Video, ceramic installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the Artist. © Elisa Giardina Papa

In the City

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OLLAT

A ER

ENTS

A L B E R TA W H I T T L E : D E E P D I V E ( PA U S E ) U N C O I L I N G M E M O RY

ANGELA SU: ARISE, H O N G KO N G I N V E N I C E

Deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory is an installation of new work by award-winning artist Alberta Whittle. Spanning two rooms in a former boatyard, Alberta’s work is an environment containing works in tapestry, film, and sculpture connected through a shared vocabulary of motifs and ideas. Through her rich symbolism, Alberta encourages us to slow down in order that we may collectively consider the historic legacies and contemporary expressions of racism, colonialism, and migration and begin to think outside of these damaging frameworks.

In Arise, Angela Su conveys a speculative narrative through interlocking fictional perspectives. The act of levitation serves as an organising metaphor that reappears throughout Su’s drawings, moving images, embroideries, and installations. The artist assumes the guise of fictional alter ego to explore myriad cultural and political valences of rising in the air. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a new video work, The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O. This pseudo-documentary tells the story of Lauren O, a fictional character who believes she can levitate, and her involvement with Laden Raven, an activist group catalysed by the US antiwar movement of the 1960s. Su’s video comprises found footage and clips of a new performance by the artist. Weaving together fact and fiction, the work suggests an alternative space for action and disruption. Traces of Lauren O and Laden Raven are embedded in the constellation of artwork in the exhibition, which also invites the audience to take a journey in Su’s fictional world.

Alberta Whittle, Lagerah – The Last Born (still), 2022. Video, single channel. Photo Jaryd Niles-Morris. Courtesy the Artist; Scotland+Venice. © Alberta Whittle

Angela Su, The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O, 2022. Performance for the video. Photo Ka Lam. Video commissioned by M+. Courtesy the Artist In the City

343

ANGELS LISTENING

A P O L L O, A P O L L O K AT H A R I N A G R O S S E

Seven large-scale angels, cast in bronze with mouths “taped” shut, encircle a gilded confessional in Rachel Lee Hovnanian’s immersive installation Angels Listening. This interactive exhibition invites viewers to relinquish their innermost thoughts, whether repressed due to fear of judgement or sheer inability, onto pieces of ribbon. Once discarded on-site, the viewer’s voice joins a chorus of shed confessions – demonstrating the liberation associated with catharsis and the sanctity of meditative environments in moments of shared isolation. Rachel Lee Hovnanian is a Miami-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the complexities of modern feminism and the psychological effects of technology.

In a black setting, Apollo, Apollo features a compositive image of Katharina Grosse’s hands printed on a metallic mesh fabric, depicting a moment where the boundaries between the artist’s body and the coloured material blur in the act of creating. With its metallic fluidity and hued intensity, which takes on special resonance in the Venetian context, this work blends the transparent with the opaque, letting light filter through, creating a gateway to a dreamlike world in which visitors question the boundaries between reality and imagination.

Katharina Grosse, Study for Apollo, Apollo, 2021. Photo Daniela Görgens. © Katharina Grosse and VG Bild Collateral Events

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B O S C O S O D I AT PA L A Z Z O VENDRAMIN GRIMANI. W H AT G O E S A R O U N D C OM E S A RO U N D

C ATA L O N I A I N VENICE_LLIM

Bosco Sodi, renowned for his use of raw natural materials in large-scale sculptures and paintings, has been chosen by the Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro for an artist residency at Palazzo Vendramin Grimani. The essential simplicity of the material and the intense pigments, sought by Sodi from all over the world, form the basis of his creative process, which the artist described as a “controlled chaos” that produces “something completely unrepeatable”. The works will be created by the artist in the androne or ground-floor hall of the palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal and forms the core of the exhibition curated by Daniela Ferretti and Dakin Hart.

Llim (silt) adheres to the canals and glass tubes, connecting them, and progressively assimilates the layers that make up Venice. That a city surrounded by water became the glass-making centre of the Western world is due to viscosity: the ability of glass and water to mutate between states of matter facilitates collaboration and coexistence. Water has fertile power because it becomes silt when in contact with the earth. From the black mud of the Nile comes the Arabic word khemia, alchemy, which found a source of inspiration in glass. Llim does not aspire to the obtaining of gold nor of the quintessence: it moves Venice’s foundation with the same calm that it metabolises and returns the materials to their origin.

Bosco Sodi, Untitled, 2021–2022. 195 clay spheres, 15–25 cm. The hands of the artist modelling a sphere. Photo Alex Krotkov Photography, 2022. Courtesy the Artist. © Bosco Sodi

Lara Fluxà, Silt, 2022. Designer Carles Murillo

In the City

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C L A I R E TA B O U R E T : I A M S PA C I O U S , SINGING FLESH

E U G E N RA P O RT O RU: T H E A B D U C T I O N F RO M T H E S E RAG L I O RO M A WO M E N : P E R FO R M AT I V E S T RAT E G I E S O F R E S I S TA N C E

Claire Tabouret: I am spacious, singing flesh presents a new critical reading of key dimensions of the artist’s work in a remarkable survey exhibition curated by Kathryn Weir that explores multiple transformations: of self, other, collective identities, struggle, release, and refuge. A powerful and unexpected dialogue is also created with several devotional objects drawn from the Italian context, invoking an ambivalent threshold in Tabouret’s practice, a portal into multiple temporalities and subjectivities through which to consider alternative relationships amongst human beings, and between human beings and their environment, in communication with the supernatural in the face of ecological and social crises.

A multifaceted and kaleidoscopic time capsule, an installation series of sitespecific items that populate the Roma domestic space. The series is grounded in an understanding of the significance of the narratives that such objects embody, as well as their capacity to inform and reflect Roma culture, Roma lives, and the distribution of Roma knowledge. The story of the increasing presence of oriental carpets in Eastern European households is retraced, inviting meditation on the specific timespace configuration of notions of identity and history, but also trauma, hope, the body, and affect. A series of interventions further reflects on the double minority position of Roma women, creating a resonant chamber allowing us to listen to and learn from their voices.

Claire Tabouret, The Spell, 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 130 × 75 cm. Photo Marten Elder. Courtesy the Artist; Almine Rech. © Claire Tabouret

Eugen Raportoru, The Abduction from the Seraglio, 2021. Installation view. The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant. © Alex Busuioceanu Collateral Events

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E WA K U RY L U K I , W H I T E KA N GA RO O

F R O M PA L E S T I N E WITH ART

Ewa Kuryluk’s exhibition is a meeting with the artist and the intellectual, as well as a journey in the footsteps of places important to her: Corinth, “Little Italy” in postwar Warsaw, “Little Venice” in London, and New York. The erudite and postmodern prose and essayism of the art historian, however, gives way here to a sensitive daughter, sister, and lover whose story floats in ephemeral and personal installations made of time, air, and fabric. Ewa Kuryluk, a Polish artist, is known worldwide thanks to over fifty solo shows in Europe, the USA, South America, Canada, and Japan. She is a pioneer of ephemeral textile installation, painter, photographer, art historian, novelist, and poet. Her work can be found in public and private collections in Europe and the USA.

The exhibition, promoted by the Palestine Museum US, shows the richness of contemporary art produced in Palestine and the diaspora. Contextualizing the language of modernism, artists interpret codes and symbols as artist to show the beauty of Palestine’s land and people. The olive tree, beloved by the people, stands at the centre of the exhibition atop a historic map of Palestine, surrounded by embroidered dresses and paintings. From Palestine With Art creates a powerful statement matching Palestinians’ determination to embrace land and heritage.

Ghassan Abulaban, How I See Her, 2021. Oil on canvas, 120 × 90 cm. Photo Courtesy Ghassan Abulaban In the City

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F U T U R E G E N E R AT I O N A R T PRIZE @ VENICE 2022

HA CHONG-HYUN

Future Generation Art Prize @ Venice 2022 presents the sixth edition of the first global art prize with twenty-one artists and eighteen different countries. In a world that tumbles from one crisis to another, the exhibition suggests potential futures that offer a more inclusive reality, compelled by past experiences, new technological advancements, and the sheer need for change in ecological strategies. With the emphasis on the global flows of labour, capital, and technology, geopolitics becomes an unavoidable theme. Some works reflect upon the unhealed scars of colonisation, ongoing conflicts, and the gradual exhaustion of natural resources, while others examine the relationship between the natural world and spiritualism, suggesting the intangible practice of art as a tool of caring for each other’s communities. The exhibition unveils a fragile intimacy and tension in how queer identity has the potential to change our world today.

Ha Chong-Hyun is best known as a Dansaekhwa artist, but that designation applies only to one aspect of a varied practice that has been devoted to the exploration of materials and their properties for more than fifty years. Following the Korean war, Ha produced abstract and three-dimensional works using found objects that reflected the lasting traumas of war. In 1974 he began his acclaimed Conjunction series which employs bae-ap-bub, the artist’s innovative method of pushing oil paint through the back of the canvas weave to the front. This approach personifies Ha’s commitment to challenging the status quo and developing a unique artistic vocabulary. This retrospective is intended to present the full breadth of his materials, methods, and creative experimentation, as well as to highlight his pioneering role in “contemporary” Korean art.

Aziz Hazara, Bow Echo, 2019. 5-channel digital video, 4 mins 17 sec. Courtesy the Artist. Photo Maksym Bilousov. © PinchukArtCentre

Ha Chong-Hyun, White Paper on Urban Planning, 1967. Oil on canvas, 112 × 112 cm. Photo Chunho An. Courtesy the Artist; Kukje Gallery Collateral Events

348

H E I N Z M AC K – V I B R AT I O N O F L I G H T

IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS

In an extensive solo show the ZERO founder and kinetic artist Heinz Mack, who represented Germany at the 35th International Art Exhibition in 1970, presents an impressive cross-section of his work in one of Venice’s most iconic venues. In the form of an imposing spatial installation, Mack’s monumental paintings and light steles meet there with masterpieces by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. Through the light-mirroring steles, the atmospheric venue with its Renaissance paintings is taken up and reflected. Light, which plays the central role in Mack’s oeuvre and in this exhibition, also determines his contemplative colour field paintings that transcend the historic space into a temporary place of meditation.

The archive exhibition and events are meant to be viewed as interacting platforms, speaking to each other and prompted by each other’s materials. They are not separate curatorial initiatives but assemblies that address memory (archive) and presence (event), both sustaining a faith in the future. The archive becomes an aesthetic event and the event becomes a deliberative archive. The event is a lively seminar of performative gestures and the archive comprises enigmatic objects. Impossible Dreams acknowledges the constraints of the prevailing crisis and at the same time works towards the realisation of a possibility. Impossible means “not-yet possible”, a description of a condition and a hope for better things, persons, and worlds to come. Just like dreams arising from trauma and bodies and spirits migrating across different realms, the project is a work of memory and conversation.

Heinz Mack, The Garden of Eden (Chromatic Constellation), 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 363 × 600 cm. Photo Weiss-Henseler Werbefotografie. Courtesy Archive Studio Mack

Taiwan Exhibitions, 1995–2019

In the City

349

K E H I N D E W I L E Y: A N A RC H A E O L O GY O F SILENCE

L I TA A L B U Q U E R Q U E : LIQUID LIGHT

Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence is a reflection on the brutalities of American and global colonial pasts. The exhibition includes a collection of new monumental paintings and sculptures that meditate on the deaths of Black men all over the world and how global media has exposed these atrocities that were once silenced. “That is the archaeology I am unearthing”, Wiley states. “The spectre of police violence and state control over the bodies of young Black and Brown people all over the world”. The new portraits tell a story of survival and resilience, standing as monuments to endurance and perseverance in the face of savagery.

The 25th-century female astronaut of Lita Albuquerque’s film commutes an otherworldly knowledge across the planes of the celestial and terrestrial. Like traders arriving in the Venice of old, or tourists disembarking today, her encounter with Earth is one of wonder and apprehension – wonder at what has survived the corruption of time and apprehension towards its continued survival. An amalgam of iconography, personal history, and emotional landscapes that embody the artist’s mythology, Liquid Light is exhibited as a tryptic video installation, in concert with installation components sourced and created locally, in collaboration with Venetian artisans.

Lita Albuquerque, Liquid Light, 2022. Film with sound, 27 mins. Photo David McFarland. Image Courtesy the Artist

Collateral Events

350

LOUISE NEVELSON. PERSISTENCE

L U C I O F O N TA N A / ANTONY GORMLEY

Organised for the 60th anniversary of Louise Nevelson’s presentation for the American Pavilion of the 31st Venice Biennale in 1962, this exhibition focuses on the genre that would prove to be Nevelson’s most definitive contribution to twentieth-century art: assemblage. Curated by Julia Bryan-Wilson, the exhibition brings together more than sixty works spanning thirty years of production, underscoring Nevelson’s extraordinarily inventive combining of materials, including monumental black gridded walls and smaller, lesser-known collages made with everyday stuff like newsprint, flattened bits of metal, cardboard, foil, sandpaper, and fabric. Installed non-chronologically, these works demonstrate Nevelson’s remarkable persistence, affirming the ongoing relevance of her work for contemporary audiences.

Lucio Fontana / Antony Gormley is an exhibition built on a concise, selective conversation between artworks that look at the implications of light, space, and absence. A selection of drawings realised by Lucio Fontana between 1946 and 1968 and a series of works on paper covering many aspects of Antony Gormley’s research, are integrated with sculptures by each of these artists. Both in their two- and three-dimensional capacities, the work of the artists “inhabits” space and viewers’ attention shifts from the object in space to the space itself. Each work carries with it the trace of the reality of the moment in which the gesture, be it sculptural or graphic, releases the energetic tension contained in its very execution. The sign therefore also becomes a recording of time.

Installation view of 16 Americans, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 16, 1959 − February 17, 1960. Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photo © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

From left to right: Antony Gormley, CHROMOSPHERE XI, 2019. Carbon and casein on paper, 27.7 × 38 cm. © Antony Gormley; Lucio Fontana, Ambiente Spaziale, 1948. Gouache on paper, 37.7 × 22.5 cm. © Fondazione Lucio Fontana

In the City

351

P E R A + F L O R A + FA U N A T H E S T O RY O F INDIGENOUSNESS AND THE OWNERSHIP O F H I S T O RY

R O A D O F FA I T H

The discourse about indigenousness and nature is largely affected by mainstream cultural attitudes of industrialised nations, the very nations that are contributing to the existing environmental problem. This leads to questions such as, can aesthetic thinking lead to conservation and restoration of nature or indigenousness? Can indigenous populations across the globe challenge the mainstream documented (art) history written by the nonindigenous? Can indigenous populations achieve the liberty to collectively claim “their own history and narratives”, antagonising the dominant discourse? Pera + Flora + Fauna intends to interrogate the interrelations between indigenousness, dominant culture, and nature.

The Road of Faith shows an awakening process by humanity following its own intuition to fight against the chaos of its mind and godhood. The exhibition consists of three parts: Ocean bloom, Ode to the Nymph of the Luo River, and With the immutability of the absolute. The literary work from Chinese classical Ci Fu, Ode to the Nymph of the Luo River is presented with colour ink and VR technology. In this transmission from two to three dimensions, using original music containing phonemes of Chinese opera and Western opera as a guide, the audience can see the consistent confrontation and struggle of human beings and their own greediness in the cycle of reincarnation.

Wenhua Dai, “Ode to the Nymph of the Luo River”, color ink, long scroll, 2021. Splash-ink on long scroll of traditional Chinese handmade rice paper, 11 × 3.3 m. Photo Wenhua Dai. Courtesy Huacai Art Museum

Collateral Events

352

RON Y P L E S L : T R E E S G R O W F R O M T H E S KY

S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y: T H E I TA L I A N PA I N T I N G S

The exhibition project by Czech artist Rony Plesl addresses the questions of the essence of human existence and the definition of humanity. It also touches on the relation of humanity and nature, providing its immediate reflection on multiple layers of meaning. The narrative of the overall concept and site-specific installation of the unique glass artworks revolves around a journey, around a seeking of our path in the world of today. The realisation of the Venice project is a world premiere of the unique technology of glass casting in a global context, allowing the creation of a glass sculpture without any limitations.

Virtuosic abstract painter Stanley Whitney, born in Philadelphia in 1946, has been exploring the formal possibilities of colour within ever-shifting grids of multihued blocks and all-over gestural fields since the mid-1970s. A formative period spent living in Italy in the early 1990s, where Whitney was absorbed by the country’s art and architecture, forever transformed the composition of his paintings. This exhibition, cocurated by Cathleen Chaffee and Vincenzo de Bellis, is the first to gather works Whitney made in Italy from the 1990s to now, and to consider the influence of Italian art and architecture on his painting.

In the City

353

TA K E Y O U R T I M E

T I M E S R E I M AG I N E D : C H U N KWA N G Y O U N G

Francesca Leone turns her gaze to the concept of Time: it is the time of rust that oxidises on metal, scratches it, scars it; it is on this skin that the artist intervenes and delicately insinuates colour, covers the wounds. It is in this dialogue of memories that Leone builds her own visionary narrative, where a painful Nature demands a pause, as these works whisper, inviting us to stop, give time to one’s thoughts, and let dreams surface. Taking one’s time means allowing oneself the privilege of a glance, giving time to art to write one’s own story. An insurgent gesture to bring forth a new utopian thought, a new enchantment.

Times Reimagined is an aesthetic laboratory by Chun Kwang Young, an artist who has been working for about thirty years with the theme of the interconnectedness between living beings and the socioecological values of their relationships. His hanji (Korean mulberry paper) oriented reliefs, sculptures, installations, and, as a highlight, the site-specific architectural structure made in dialogue with architect Stefano Boeri are all being staged during the Exhibition. The paper, which once lived as books, was reborn as symbolic creatures, reimagining the knowledge, information, and values that have judged and determined our times. Through these, audiences are encouraged to reconsider existing nonecological practice and seek new exits.

Francesca Leone, Space 1 (detail), 2021. Oil on recycled sheet metal, dimensions variable. Photo Sebastiano Luciano. Courtesy the Artist

Chun Kwang Young, Aggregation 03-BJ001, 2003. Mixed media with Korean mulberry paper, 450 cm diametre. Photo and © Chun Kwang Young

Collateral Events

354

TUE GREENFORT: M E D USA A L GA LAG U NA

U N C O M B E D, UNFORESEEN, U NCONSTRAINED

The installation Medusa Alga Laguna by Danish conceptual artist Tue Greenfort focuses on diverse interspecies of life in Venice’s lagoon and brings in a human and nonhuman relationship. The sculptural manifestations – sometimes in glass as a reference to realistic mid-nineteenthcentury nature representations – transport us into the biodiverse world of Venetian waters. It reveals the fascinating complexity of marine lifeforms such as algae and jellyfish. The solo exhibition is presented by the ERES Foundation Munich, an institution that promotes dialogue between science and the fine arts. The show continues Greenfort’s project Alga in Munich (2021).

Parasol unit, London introduces a group exhibition by eleven international contemporary artists, whose presentations align with the phenomenon of entropy, or a measure of disorder. According to curator Ziba Ardalan, artists Darren Almond, Oliver Beer, Rana Begum with Hyetal, Julian Charrière, David Claerbout, Bharti Kher, Arghavan Khosravi, Teresa Margolles, Si On, Martin Puryear, and Rayyane Tabet have independently identified and poignantly responded to a number of unfavourable phenomena that, over the past few decades, have increasingly reached a degree of significance in our day-to-day life and environment and within our social and collective history, thus threatening life on planet Earth.

Tue Greenfort, Medusa, 2007–2014. Murano glass, 37 × 42 × 40 cm. Photo KÖNIG Galerie, Berlin. Courtesy the Artist; KÖNIG Galerie, Berlin. © Tue Greenfort

Si On, Doomsday, 2020. Metal, wood, clothing, wooden sculptures, dimensions variable, Installation view: MAM Project 028: Si On, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2020. Photo Furukawa Yuya. Courtesy Mori Art Museum

In the City

355

VERA MOLNÁR: ICÔNE 2020

W I T H H A N D S S I G N S G ROW

Vera Molnár: Icône 2020 is an exhibition centred on a new commission, Icône 2020, founded, produced, and curated by Francesca Franco. This is Vera Molnár’s first ever glass sculpture in a career that spans over eighty years. Taking the new commission as a centre point, this exhibition explores the process that made this sculpture possible, bringing together preparatory sketches, original plotter drawings, and documentation material that reveal the complexities behind the making of Icône 2020, encouraging new thinking about sculpture and the unimaginable ramifications of computational art.

The Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira supporting the initiative of the Odalys Foundation and the Signum Foundation, have enabled an intervention in the Palazzo Donà, the Italian headquarters of Signum Foundation, which includes several site-specific projects. This is a group of four young artists (Ruth Gómez, Nuria Mora, Daniel Muñoz, and Sixe Paredes) who usually work in the urban context, or street art, approaching painting on walls with a sort of illegality. What the creative processes of these artists have in common is the same relationship with the street and the desire to share their vision of the world through art. The palazzo could be seen as a set of micronarratives from the personal territory of each artist, a territory that is public – now – but also unchallenged, because of its historical burden. A multiple work in the inner hall of the palazzo, in the form of a large assemblage of images, evokes the Cave of Altamira.

Vera Molnár, Icône 2020, 2021. Murano glass and 24K gold leaf, 60 × 60 cm. Photo Cristiano Corte. Courtesy New Murano Gallery

Collateral Events

356

WITHOUT WOMEN

“ Y I I M A” A R T G R O U P : A L L E G O RY O F D R E A M S

Zinaida’s artwork Without Women is about the purity of sheep-breeders’ life in nature and the transformation of male energy. From childhood until they are too old, men in Carpathian villages leave their dwellings to go to the mountains for five months. Among the abundance of sheep and cows they process milk into butter and cheese. In this act of sublimation, which completely unveils male roles, masculinity is renewed to the point of purity. In their solitary environment, men can fully and vividly express and renew their masculine nature. Much like monks, these men live in the bosom of nature alone and without women. The artwork consists of three videos and an installation, The Milk of Life.

Allegory of Dreams is a comprehensive contemporary art exhibition showing documentation of performance art, photography, videos, and indoor and outdoor sculptures. Curated by the international curator João Miguel Barros, the exhibition showcases works by “YiiMa”, an art group formed in Macau by Ung Vai Meng and Chan Hin Io. In line with The Milk of Dreams, the exhibition is conceived and developed as an Allegory of Dreams. By featuring recordings of the two artists’ live performance, the event aims to present visitors with Macau’s unique cultural environment full of memories and history, offering them an opportunity to experience its dreamlike yet allegorical scenes of daily life.

Zinaida, Without Women, 2017. 24 × 32 cm. Photo Zinaida Kubar

In the City

357

EE TIN GS

A RT

PROG

JUNE Tues. 7 – Sat. 11 10am and 5pm each day Teatro Piccolo Arsenale

Leonora Carrington’s literary and artistic work guides the title and themes of the 59th International Art Exhibition, The Milk of Dreams. To pay tribute to the artist’s imagery, a series of conversations, roundtables and keynote lectures will be held over five days in June, each anchored in Carrington’s life and oeuvre while expanding to the broader themes of the Exhibition. The talks will bring together artists, scholars, curators, thinkers and writers from various fields to discuss topics such as the metamorphosis of the body and of humanity, the posthuman turn, our relationship to the Earth and technologies, Surrealism, Spiritualism, magic, Indigenous epistemologies, the writing of fiction, and feminisms. Speakers (in progress) include, among others, Susan L. Aberth, Tere Arcq, Matthew Biro, Rosi Braidotti, Mel Y. Chen, Susanne Christensen, Andrea Giunta, Jack Halberstam, Saidiya Hartman, Jennifer Higgie, Alyce Mahon, Joanna Moorhead, Christina Sharpe, Adrien Sina, Grazina Subelyte, Marina Warner. The programme may be subject to change. Additional events, conversations and performances will take place throughout the seven months of the Exhibition. Please check the official website of La Biennale di Venezia for up-to-date listings. Free admission Recordings of events will be available at www.labiennale.org

Meetings on Art

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PA R T I C I PAT I N G C O U N T R I E S

ALBANIA

Commissioner Ministry of Culture of Albania Curator Adela Demetja Participant Lumturi Blloshmi A RG E N T I NA

Commissioner Paula Vázquez Curator Alejo Ponce de León Participant Mónica Heller ARMENIA

Commissioner Arayik Khzmalyan (Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports of the Republic of Armenia) Curators Anne Davidian Elena Sorokina Participant Andrius Arutiunian AUS T RA L I A

Commissioner Australia Council for the Arts Curator Alexie Glass-Kantor Participant Marco Fusinato AUSTRIA

Commissioner Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport Curator Karola Kraus Participants Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl REPUBLIC OF AZERBAIJAN

Commissioner Ambassador Mammad Ahmadzada

Curator Emin Mammadov Participants Fidan Akhundova Agdes Baghirzade Infinity Sabiha Khankishiyeva Fidan Novruzova (Fidan Kim) Ramina Saadatkhan Zhuk (Narmin Israfilova) PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF BANGLADESH

Commissioner Liaquat Ali Lucky Curator Viviana Vannucci Participants Mohammad Eunus Jamal Uddin Ahmed Mohammad Iqbal Harun-Ar-Rashid Sumon Wahed Promity Hossain Marco Cassarà Franco Marrocco Giuseppe Diego Spinelli BELGIUM

Commissioner Jan Jambon, Minister-president of the Government of Flanders and Flemish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Culture, ICT and Facility Management Curator Hilde Teerlinck Participant Francis Alÿs BOLIVIA

Commissioner Roberto Aguilar Quisbert – Mamani Mamani Curator Collective Warmichacha Participants Collective Warmichacha: Adriana Aneiva Guerra Ana Rosy Bustamante Villalobos Andres Armin Kuljis Molina Augusto Mendoza Caleb Rodriguez

Claudio Fabian Vargas Hernani David Fernando Portillo Morales Fabiana Nicole Lopez Bruño Fatima Choque Gabriela Lugones Guzman Hector Canonge Illampu Adhemar Aguilar Jove Illimani Gabriel Aguilar Jove Iris Kiya Jacquelin Mamani Pacajes Jasmany E. Vasquez S. Javier Sebastian Abecia Achá Jessica Violeta Vásquez Velarde Joaquin Salvador Molina Saavedra Johnny Aduviri Rodriguez Jose Luis Saenz Nuñez Juan Carlos Usnayo Juan Pablo Villalobos Krystel Adeline Jiménez Loría Lenard Gery López Silva Luis Leonardo Calisaya Castillo Luis Oscar Jiménez Torres Maria Pereira Melvin Mariano Alarcón Campos Samuel Martínez Bejarano Santiago Romero Merida Solandré Vasquez Padilla Yody Ruben Quisbert Quispe B RA Z I L

Commissioner José Olympio da Veiga Pereira (Fundação Bienal de São Paulo) Curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti Participant Jonathas de Andrade BULGARIA

Commissioner Iara Boubnova Curator Irina Batkova Participant Michail Michailov

362

R E P U B L I C O F C A M E RO O N

Commissioner Armand Abanda Maye Curators Sandro Orlandi Stagl Paul Emmanuel Loga Mahop Participants Francis Nathan Abiamba (Afran) Angéle Etoundi Essamba Justine Gaga Salifou Lindou Shay Frisch Umberto Mariani Matteo Mezzadri Jorge R. Pombo NFT: Kevin Abosch João Angelini Marco Bertìn (Berxit) Cryptoart Driver Lana Denina Alberto Echegaray Guevara Genesis People Joachim Hildebrand Meng Huang Eduardo Kac Gyula Kosice Julio Le Parc Marina Nuñez Miguel Soler-Roig Miguel Ángel Vidal Burkhard von Harder Gabe Weis Clark Winter Shavonne Wong Wang Xing Alessandro Zannier ZZH C A NA DA

Commissioner National Gallery of Canada Curator Reid Shier Participant Stan Douglas CHILE

Commissioner Ximena Moreno Curator Camila Marambio Participants Ariel Bustamante Carla Macchiavello Dominga Sotomayor Alfredo Thiermann

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

Commissioner China Arts and Entertainment Group Ltd. (CAEG) Curator Zhang Zikang Participants Liu Jiayu, Wang Yuyang, Xu Lei, AT Group (Central Academy of Fine Arts [CAFA] Institute of Sci-Tech Arts+Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence [TLBI] Group Project) C R OAT I A

Commissioner Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia Curator Elena Filipovic Participant Tomo Savić-Gecan CUBA

Commissioner Norma Rodriguez Derivet Curator Nelson Ramirez de Arellano Conde Participants Rafael Villares, Kcho Giuseppe Stampone

ESTONIA

Commissioner Maria Arusoo (Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art, CCA) Curator Corina L. Apostol (Tallinn Art Hall, TAH) Participants Kristina Norman Bita Razavi FINLAND

Commissioner Raija Koli (Frame Contemporary Art Finland) Curator Christina Li Participant Pilvi Takala F RA N C E

Commissioner Institut français with the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture Curators Yasmina Reggad Sam Bardaouil & Till Fellrath Participant Zineb Sedira G E O RG I A

Commissioner Danish Arts Foundation Curator Jacob Lillemose Participant Uffe Isolotto

Commissioner Magda Guruli Curators Giorgi Spanderashvili Khatia Tchokhonelidze Vato Urushadze Participants Mariam Natroshvili Detu Jincharadze

EGYP T

GERMANY

DENMARK

Commissioner Egyptian Ministry of Culture – Accademia d’Egitto, Rome Curator Mohamed Shoukry Participants Mohamed Shoukry Weaam El Masry Ahmed El Shaer

Commissioner Ellen Strittmatter (ifa) Curator Yilmaz Dziewior Participant Maria Eichhorn

List of Participants

363

GHANA

Commissioner Akwasi Agyeman, CEO Ghana Tourism Authority Ministry of Tourism, Arts And Culture Curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim Participants Na Chainkua Reindorf Diego Araúja Afroscope G R E AT B R I TA I N

Commissioner Emma Dexter, director of Visual Arts at British Council Curator Emma Ridgway Participant Sonia Boyce OBE RA GREECE

Commissioner National Gallery of Greece – Alexandros Soutsos Museum (represented by Marina Lambraki-Plaka) Curator Heinz Peter Schwerfel Participant Loukia Alavanou

H U N G A RY

Commissioner Julia Fabényi Curator Mónika Zsikla Participant Zsófia Keresztes ICELAND

Commissioner Auður Jörundsdóttir, Icelandic Art Center Curator Mónica Bello Participant Sigurður Guðjónsson IRELAND

Commissioner Culture Ireland Curators Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Participant Niamh O’Malley

G U AT E M A L A

Commissioner Felipe Amado Aguilar Marroquín, Minister of Culture Participant and Curator Christian Escobar “Chrispapita”

Commissioner The Japan Foundation Participant Dumb Type Project members Shiro Takatani Ryuichi Sakamoto Ken Furudate Satoshi Hama Ryo Shiraki Takuya Minami Marihiko Hara Hiromasa Tomari Yoko Takatani REPUBLIC OF K A Z A K H S TA N

Commissioner Meruyert Kaliyeva Curator and Participants ORTA collective (Alexandra Morozova, Rustem Begenov, Darya Jumelya, Alexandr Bakanov, Sabina Kuangaliyeva)

I S RA E L

Commissioners Michael Gov Arad Turgeman Curator Shelley Harten Participant Ilit Azoulay

G R E NA DA

Commissioner Susan Mains Curator Daniele Radini Tedeschi Participants Cypher Art Collective of Grenada: Oliver Benoit, Billy Gerard Frank, Ian Friday, Asher Mains, Susan Mains, Angus Martin, Samuel Ogilvie Giancarlo Flati Identity Collective Anna Maria Li Gotti Nino Perrone Rossella Pezzino de Geronimo Marialuisa Tadei

J A PA N

I TA LY

Commissioner Director-General for Contemporary Creativity – Ministry of Culture Onofrio Cutaia Curator Eugenio Viola Participant Gian Maria Tosatti I V O RY C OA S T

Commissioner Henri Koffissé N’koumo Curators Massimo Scaringella Alessandro Romanini Participants Aboudia Armand Boua Frédéric Bruly Bouabré Aron Demetz Laetitia Ky Yeanzi

K E N YA

Commissioner Kiprop Lagat Curator Jimmy Ogonga Participants Dickens Otieno Syowia Kyambi Kaloki Nyamai Wanja Kimani R E P U B L I C O F KO R E A

Commissioner Arts Council Korea Curator Young-chul Lee Participant Yunchul Kim

R E P U B L I C O F KO S O V O

Commissioner Alisa Gojani-Berisha Curator Inke Arns Participant Jakup Ferri

364

KY R G Y Z R E P U B L I C

Commissioner Saltanat Amanova Curator Janet Rady Participant Firouz FarmanFarmaian L AT V I A

Commissioner Solvita Krese, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art – LCCA Curators Andra Silapētere Solvita Krese Participants Skuja Braden (Ingūna Skuja, Melissa D. Braden) LEBANON

Commissioner and Curator Nada Ghandour Participants Danielle Arbid Ayman Baalbaki LITHUANIA

Commissioner Kęstutis Kuizinas Curator Neringa Bumblienė Participant Robertas Narkus G RA N D D U C H Y O F LUX E M B O U RG

Commissioner Ministry of Culture, Luxembourg Curator Christophe Gallois Participant Tina Gillen REPUBLIC OF NORTH M AC E D O N I A

Commissioner Dita Starova Qerimi, NI National Gallery of the Republic of North Macedonia Curators Ana Frangovska Sanja Kojic Mladenov Participants Robert Jankuloski Monika Moteska

M A LTA

Commissioner Arts Council Malta Curators Keith Sciberras Jeffrey Uslip Participants Arcangelo Sassolino Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci Brian Schembri MEXICO

Commissioner Diego E. Sapién Muñoz Curators Catalina Lozano Mauricio Marcin Participants Mariana Castillo Deball Naomi Rincón Gallardo Fernando Palma Rodríguez Santiago Borja Charles MONGOLIA

Commissioner Nomin Chinbat, Minister of Culture of Mongolia Curator Gantuya Badamgarav Participant Munkhtsetseg Jalkhaajav – Mugi M O N T E N E G RO

Commissioner Jelena Božović Curator Natalija Vujošević Participants Dante Buu Lidija Delić and Ivan Šuković Darko Vučković Jelena Tomašević Art collection of the Non-Aligned Countries: Zuzana Chalupová René Portocarrero Unknown Iraqi author Bernard Matemera

N E PA L

Commissioners Kanchha Kumar Karmacharya – Nepal Academy of Fine Arts Sangeeta Thapa – Siddhartha Arts Foundation Curators Sheelasha Rajbhandari Hit Man Gurung Participant Ang Tsherin Sherpa THE NETHERLANDS

Commissioner Mondriaan Fund Curators Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg Geir Haraldseth Soraya Pol Participant melanie bonajo NEW ZEALAND

Commissioner Caren Rangi ONZM Curator Natalie King OAM Participant Yuki Kihara NORDIC COUNTRIES ( N O RWAY, F I N L A N D, SWEDEN)

Commissioners Katya García-Antón, Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) Leevi Haapala, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma / The Finnish National Gallery Gitte Ørskou, Moderna Museet Curators Liisa-Rávná Finbog Katya García-Antón Beaska Niillas Participants Pauliina Feodoroff Máret Ánne Sara Anders Sunna

NAMIBIA

Commissioner Marcellinus Swartbooi, Directorate of Arts – Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture Curator Marco Furio Ferrario Participant RENN

List of Participants

365

S U LTA N AT E O F O M A N

Commissioner Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth, Sayyid Saeed bin Sultan bin Yarub Al Busaidi Curator Aisha Stoby Participants Anwar Sonya Hassan Meer Budoor Al Riyami Radhika Khimji Raiya Al Rawahi P E RU

Commissioner Armando Andrade de Lucio Curators Jorge Villacorta Viola Varotto Participant Herbert Rodriguez PHILIPPINES

Commissioner National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) – Arsenio “Nick” J. Lizaso Curators Yael Buencamino Borromeo Arvin Flores Participants Gerardo Tan Felicidad A. Prudente Sammy N. Buhle POLAND

Commissioners Janusz Janowski (from 2022), Hanna Wróblewska (until 2021) / Zachęta – National Gallery of Art Curators Wojciech Szymański Joanna Warsza Participant Małgorzata Mirga-Tas P ORTUGAL

Commissioner Direção-Geral das Artes Curators João Mourão e Luís Silva Participant Pedro Neves Marques

RO M A N I A

Commissioner Attila Kim Curators Cosmin Costinaș Viktor Neumann Participant Adina Pintilie REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO

Commissioner Riccardo Varini Curator Vincenzo Rotondo Participants Elisa Cantarelli, Nicoletta Ceccoli, Endless, Michelangelo Galliani, Rosa Mundi, Roberto Paci Dalò, Anne-Cécile Surga, Michele Tombolini SAU D I A RA B I A

Commissioner Visual Arts Commission, Ministry of Culture Curator Reem Fadda Participant Muhannad Shono SERBIA

Commissioner Maja Kolaric Curator Biljana Ciric Participant Vladimir Nikolic SINGAPORE

Commissioner Rosa Daniel – National Arts Council Curator Ute Meta Bauer Participant Shubigi Rao REPUBLIC O F S L OV E N I A

Commissioner Aleš Vaupotič Curator Robert Simonišek Participant Marko Jakše

REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

Commissioner Nosipho Nausca Jean Ngcaba Curator Amé Bell Participants Roger Ballen Lebohang Kganye Phumulani Ntuli S PA I N

Commissioner Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation of Spain AECID Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo Curator Bea Espejo Participant Ignasi Aballí SWITZERLAND

Commissioners Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia Madeleine Schuppli, Head of Visual Arts Sandi Paucic, Project Leader Rachele Giudici Legittimo, Project Manager Curators Alexandre Babel Francesco Stocchi Participant Latifa Echakhch S Y R I A N A RA B R E P U B L I C

Commissioner and Curator Emad Kashout Participants Saousan Alzubi Ismaiel Nasra Adnan Hamideh Omran Younis Aksam Tallaa Giuseppe Amadio Marcello Lo Giudice Lorenzo Puglisi Hannu Palosuo

366

TURKEY

Commissioner Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) Curator Bige Örer Participant Füsun Onur U GA N DA

Commissioner Juliana Akoryo Naumo Curator Shaheen Merali Participants Acaye Kerunen Collin Sekajugo U K RA I N E

Commissioner Kateryna Chuyeva, Deputy Minister for European Integration of the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine Curators Lizaveta German Maria Lanko Borys Filonenko Participant Pavlo Makov U N I T E D A R A B E M I R AT E S

Commissioner Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation Curator Maya Allison Participant Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim U N I T E D S TAT E S OF AMERICA

Commissioner Jill Medvedow (ICA/Boston) Curator Eva Respini (ICA/Boston) Participant Simone Leigh

REPUBLIC OF U Z B E K I S TA N

Commissioner Gayane Umerova – Art and Culture Development Foundation Curators Space Caviar (Joseph Grima, Camilo Oliveira, Sofia Pia Belenky, Francesco Lupia) Sheida Ghomashchi Participants Charli Tapp/Abror Zufarov CCA Lab B O L I VA R I A N R E P U B L I C OF VENEZUELA

Commissioner Paola Posani Curator Zacarías García Participants Palmira Correa Mila Quast César Vázquez Jorge Recio

R E P U B L I C O F Z I M BA BW E

Commissioner Raphael Chikukwa – National Gallery of Zimbabwe Curator Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa Participants Wallen Mapondera Ronald Muchatuta Kresiah Mukwazhi Terrence Musekiwa V E N I C E PAV I L I O N

Commissioner Maurizio Carlin Curator Giovanna Zabotti Participants Paolo Fantin, Oφcina Pino Donaggio Goldschmied & Chiari Ottorino De Lucchi Artefici del Nostro Tempo

U R U G U AY

Commissioner Silvana Bergson Curators Laura Malosetti Pablo Uribe Participant Gerardo Goldwasser

List of Participants

367

C O L L AT E R A L E V E N T S

A L B E R TA W H I T T L E : D E E P D I V E ( PA U S E ) U N C O I L I N G M E M O RY

Promoter Scotland + Venice Curators The 2022 Scotland + Venice presentation is a multi-partner project commissioned by Scotland + Venice, initiated by Glasgow International and supported by Glasgow Life through Tramway Participant Alberta Whittle ANGELA SU: ARISE, HONG KO N G I N V E N I C E

Promoter M+, West Kowloon Cultural District Authority Hong Kong Arts Development Council Curator Freya Chou Participant Angela Su ANGELS LISTENING

Promoter Centro Studi e Documentazione della Cultura Armena Curator Annalisa Bugliani Participant Rachel Lee Hovnanian A P O L L O, A P O L L O K AT H A R I N A G R O S S E

Promoter Foundation Louis Vuitton Curator Claire Staebler Participant Katharina Grosse

B O S C O S O D I AT PA L A Z Z O V E N D RA M I N G R I M A N I . W H AT G O E S A R O U N D C O M E S A RO U N D

Promoter Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro Curators Daniela Ferretti Dakin Hart Participant Bosco Sodi C ATA L O N I A I N VENICE_LLIM

Promoter Institut Ramon Llull Curator Oriol Fontdevila Participant Lara Fluxà C L A I R E TA B O U R E T : I A M S PA C I O U S , SINGING FLESH

Promoter FABA FUNDACIÓN Almine Y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte Curator Kathryn Weir Participant Claire Tabouret

E U G E N RA P O RT O RU: T H E A B D U C T I O N F RO M T H E S E RAG L I O R O M A W O M E N : P E R F O R M AT I V E S T R AT E G I E S O F R E S I S TA N C E

Promoter ERIAC European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture Curator Ilina Schileru Participant Eugen Raportoru E WA KU RY L U K I , W H I T E KA N GA RO O

Promoter Starak Family Foundation Anna and Jerzy Starak Curator Ania Muszyńska Participant Ewa Kuryluk

F R O M PA L E S T I N E W I T H A R T

Promoter Palestine Museum US Curator Nancy Nesvet Participants Ghassan Abulaban Hanan Awad Ibrahim Alazza Jacqueline Bejani Karim Abu Shakra Lux Eterna Mohamed Khalil Mohammed Alhaj Nabil Anani Nadia Irshaid Gilbert Nameer Qassim Rania Matar Rula Halawani Salman Abu Sitta Samar Hussaini Samia Halaby Sana Farah Bishara Susan Bushnaq Taqi Sabateen

F U T U R E G E N E R AT I O N A R T PRIZE @ VENICE 2022

Promoter Victor Pinchuk Foundation Curator Björn Geldhof Participants Alex Baczynski-Jenkins Wendimagegn Belete Minia Biabiany Aziz Hazara Ho Rui An Agata Ingarden Rindon Johnson Bronwyn Katz Lap-See Lam Mire Lee Paul Maheke Lindsey Mendick Henrike Naumann Pedro Neves Marques Frida Orupabo Andres Pereira Paz Teresa Solar Trevor Yeung Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings

368

HA CHONG-HYUN

Promoter Kukje Art and Culture Foundation Curator Sunjung Kim Participant Ha Chong-Hyun H E I N Z M A C K – V I B R AT I O N OF LIGHT

Promoter Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Curator Manfred Möller Participant Heinz Mack IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS

Promoter Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan K E H I N D E W I L E Y: A N A RC H A E O L O GY OF SILENCE

Promoter Musée d’Orsay Curator Christophe Leribault Participant Kehinde Wiley

L I TA A L B U Q U E R Q U E : LIQUID LIGHT

Promoter BARDO LA Curators Elizabeta Betinski Neville Wakefield Participant Lita Albuquerque

LOUISE NEVELSON. PERSISTENCE

Promoter The Louise Nevelson Foundation Curator Julia Bryan-Wilson Participant Louise Nevelson

L U C I O F O N TA N A / ANTONY GORMLEY

Promoter Associazione Arte Continua Curator Luca Massimo Barbero Participants Lucio Fontana Antony Gormely P E R A + F L O R A + FA U N A T H E S T O RY O F INDIGENOUSNESS AND THE OWNERSHIP O F H I S T O RY

Promoter PORT People of Remarkable Talents Curators Amir Zainorin Khaled Ramadan Participants Azizan Paiman Kamal Sabran Kapallorek Artspace Kim Ng Projek Rabak Saiful Razman Stefano Cagol R OA D O F FA I T H

Promoter Fondazione EMGdotART Curator and Participant Wenhua Dai RO N Y P L E S L : T R E E S G ROW F R O M T H E S KY

Promoter House of Art Ceske Budejovice Curator Lucie Drdova Participant Rony Plesl S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y: T H E I TA L I A N PA I N T I N G S

Promoter Buffalo AKG Art Museum Curators Cathleen Chaffee Vincenzo de Bellis Participant Stanley Whitney

TA K E YO U R T I M E

Promoter Nomas Foundation Curator Danilo Eccher Participant Francesca Leone T I M E S R E I M AG I N E D : C H U N KWA N G YO U N G

Promoter Boghossian Foundation Curator Yongwoo Lee Curatorial Advisor Manuela Lucà-Dazio Participants Chun Kwang Young Stefano Boeri

TUE GREENFORT: M E D USA A L GA LAG U NA

Promoter ERES Stiftung Curator Sabine Adler Participant Tue Greenfort

U N C O M B E D, U N F O R E S E E N , U N C ON S T RA I N E D

Promoter Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art Curator Ziba Ardalan Participants Darren Almond Oliver Beer Rana Begum with Hyetal Julian Charrière David Claerbout Bharti Kher Arghavan Khosravi Teresa Margolles Si On Martin Puryear Rayyane Tabet

List of Participants

369

V E RA M O LNÁ R : I C ÔN E 2 02 0

Promoter Accademia d’Ungheria in Roma Curator Francesca Franco Participant Vera Molnár W I T H H A N D S S I G N S G ROW

Promoter Fundación Odalys Signum Foundation Curator Alfonso de la Torre Participants Ruth Gómez Nuria Mora Daniel Muñoz Sixe Paredes

WITHOUT WOMEN

Promoter Visual Research Support Foundation Curator Peter Doroshenko Participant Zinaida “ Y I I M A” A R T G R O U P : A L L E G O RY O F D R E A M S

Promoter The Macao Museum of Art Curator João Miguel Barros Participants “YiiMa” Art Group (Ung Vai Meng, Chan Hin Io)

370

THE MILK OF DREAMS S P E C I A L P RO J E C T S – S U P P O RT E R S C O S I M A VO N B O N I N

SIMONE LEIGH

PA U L A R E G O

WHAT IF THEY BARK 01-07, 2022 VENICE 1984, 2022 HERMIT CRAB (GLASS VERSION), 2022 SCALLOPS (GLASS VERSION), 2022 AXE, 2022

Brick House, 2019

Sleeper, 1994 Metamorphosing after Kafka, 2002 Sit, 1994 Geppetto Washing Pinocchio, 1996 Oratorio, 2009 Gluttony, 2019 Snow White and her Stepmother, 1996 The Blue Fairy Whispering to Pinocchio, 1996 La Marafona, 2005 Nursery Rhymes, 1989

With the additional support of: Petzel Gallery, New York Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa GIULIA CENCI

dead dance, 2021–2022 With the additional support of: Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Mondriaan Fund SpazioA Ammodo K A P WA N I K I WA N G A

Terrarium, 2022 With the additional support of: Global Affairs Canada/Affaires mondiales Canada, Embassy of Canada to Italy/Ambassade du Canada en Italie The Shifting Foundation LUMA Foundation Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin Institut français BA R BA RA K RU G E R

Untitled (Beginning/Middle/ End), 2022 With the support of: Sprüth Magers Maharam L O U I S E L AW L E R

No Exit, 2022 With the additional support of: Sprüth Magers Maharam

With the support of: Hauser & Wirth P R E C I O U S O KOYO M O N

To See The Earth Before the End of the World, 2022 With the additional support of: LUMA Foundation Ammodo V I RG I N I A OV E RT O N

With the additional support of: Victoria Miro

Untitled (tulip), 2022 Untitled (pink buoy), 2022

WU TSANG

With the support of: White Cube, London and Hong Kong Bortolami Gallery, New York Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich Kunstgiesserei St.Gallen, Switzerland The Corning Museum of Glass, New York A L E XA N D RA P I R I C I

Encyclopedia of Relations, 2022 With the additional support of: Audemars Piguet Contemporary Ammodo UniCredit Bank European ArtEast Foundation The Administration of the National Cultural Fund, Romania Romanian Cultural Institute Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden CHRISTINA QUARLES

Hangin’ There Baby, 2021 (Who Could Say) We’re Not Jus’ as We Were, 2021 Had a Gud Time Now (Who Could Say), 2021 Gone on Too Long, 2021 Don’t Let It Bring Yew Down (It’s Only Castles Burnin’), 2021 Just a Lil’ Longer, 2021 With the support of: Hauser & Wirth

List updated to 16 March 2022

Of Whales, 2022 With the additional support of: VIVE Arts VIA Art Fund Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Antenna Space Albyon Studio LUMA Foundation A N D RA U R S U T A

Canopic Demijohn, 2021 Impersonal Growth, 2020 Yoga Don’t Help, 2019 Succubustin’ Loose, 2020 Terminal Figure, 2021 Canopic Jerrycan, 2021 Phantom Mass, 2021 Half-Drunk Mummy, 2020 Predators ’R Us, 2019 With the additional support of: David Zwirner CECILIA VICUÑA

Leoparda de Ojitos, 1977 Paro Nacional, 1977–1978 Llaverito (Blue), 2019 (after the lost original 1979) La Comegente (The People Eater), 2019 (after the lost original 1971) Martillo y Repollo, 1973 Bendígame Mamita, 1977 Virgen Puta, 2021 NAUfraga, 2022 With the additional support of: Lehmann Maupin 372

THE MILK OF DREAMS INSTITUTIONS SUPPORTING THE ARTISTS A C C I Ó N C U LT U R A L E S PA Ñ O L A ( A C / E )

H O N G KO N G A R T S DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL

LITHUANIAN COU NCIL F O R C U LT U R E

June Crespo Georgiana Houghton Maruja Mallo Teresa Solar Josefa Tolrà Remedios Varo

Zheng Bo

Eglė Budvytytė

IASPIS, THE SWEDISH ARTS G RA N T S C OM M I T T E E

M O N D R I AA N F U N D

A G E N C Y F O R C U LT U R A L A F FA I R S , G O V E R N M E N T O F J A PA N

Aki Sasamoto AMMODO

Dora Budor Giulia Cenci Gabriel Chaile Mire Lee Delcy Morelos Precious Okoyomon Alexandra Pirici BRITISH COUNCIL

Ibrahim El-Salahi Marguerite Humeau Marianna Simnett P. Staff Emma Talbot C A NA DA C O U N C I L FO R THE ARTS

Charlotte Johannesson Britta Marakatt-Labba Ulla Wiggen

Eglė Budvytytė Giulia Cenci Mire Lee Janis Rafa

INSTITUT FÜR AUSLANDSBEZIEHU NGEN

N AT I O N A L A R T S C O U N C I L OF SOUTH AFRICA

– I FA

Igshaan Adams

Özlem Altın Cosima von Bonin Kerstin Brätsch Jana Euler Katharina Fritsch Charline von Heyl Rebecca Horn Julia Phillips Rosemarie Trockel Sandra Vásquez de la Horra Raphaela Vogel I N S T I T U T F RA N Ç A I S

Ali Cherri Simone Fattal Marguerite Humeau Saodat Ismailova Kapwani Kiwanga Vera Molnár

OFFICE FOR C O N T E M P O R A RY A R T N O RWAY ( O C A )

Liv Bugge Aage Gaup Sandra Mujinga PHILEAS – A FUND F O R C O N T E M P O R A RY A R T

Kiki Kogelnik Birgit Jürgenssen S A H A A S S O C I AT I O N

Özlem Altın Müge Yilmaz

I N S T I T U T RA M ON L LU L L

SWISS ARTS COUNCIL P R O H E LV E T I A

D A N I S H A R T S F O U N DAT I O N

Josefa Tolrà

Miriam Cahn

Sidsel Meineche Hansen Ovartaci

T H E J A PA N F O U N DAT I O N

Tau Lewis

ESTONIAN CENTRE F O R C O N T E M P O R A RY A R T, F I N A N C E D BY E S T O N I A N M I N I S T RY O F C U LT U R E

Anu Põder E T X E PA R E B A S Q U E INSTITUTE

June Crespo

Ruth Asawa Tatsuo Ikeda Tetsumi Kudo Aki Sasamoto Toshiko Takaezu KO R E A A R T S M A N A G E M E N T S E RV I C E ( K A M S )

Mire Lee KO R E A F O U N DAT I O N

Geumhyung Jeong List updated to 9 March 2022

373

V I S I T O R I N F O R M AT I O N

V E N U E S , D AT E S AND OPENING TIMES

Venice, Giardini – Arsenale Giardini and Arsenale, from 23 April to 25 September: 11am – 7pm (last admission 6.45pm) from 27 September to 27 November: 10am – 6pm (last admission 5.45pm) Arsenale venue only: until 25 September, on Fridays and Saturdays extended opening until 8pm (last admission: 7.45pm) Closed on Mondays** Infopoint: Giardini (Viale Trento) and Arsenale (Campo della Tana) Four access to the Exhibition: Giardini (Viale Trento) Giardini (Sant’Elena) Arsenale (Campo della Tana) Arsenale (Ponte dei Pensieri) Forte Marghera 18 April – 25 September: 11am – 7pm 27 September – 27 November: 10am – 6pm Closed on Mondays**

I N F O, T I C K E T S A N D G U I D E D T O U R P U RC H A S E

TICKETS

ART + DMT FORMULA

A single ticket is valid for one entrance to the Giardini venue and one entrance to the Arsenale venue, and can be used also on different days.

(1 Art ticket + 1 performance/ concert to choose)

Full price € 25 Concession € 20* (Over 65, Venice residents)

Art + Theatre € 35 (24 June – 3 July) Art + Dance € 35 (22–31 July) Art + Music € 35 (14–25 September)

Students and/or Under 26 € 16*

T I C K E T S FO R G RO U PS

(min. 10 max.), for purchase of 50+ group tickets in a single transaction, please email booking@labiennale.org) Adults € 18 University Students € 15 Secondary School Students € 10 Special project “Biennale Sessions” passes: € 20* (for affiliated Universities, reservation required, min. 50 visitors)

A C C R E D I TAT I O N

Accreditation is strictly personal and it’s valid for multiple entries in both venues depending on the type of accreditation chosen.

www.labiennale.org

Full price € 85*

Help the environment, save your ticket in pdf format on your mobile/tablet or print it on recycled paper

Concession € 50* (for Venice residents; not available online: to be purchased at the infopoint of the Exhibition) Students and/or under 26 € 45* Weekly € 45* (valid for 7 consecutive days from validation date – closing days excluded)

FREE ADMISSION

Children up to 6 years old; the free ticket can be downloaded online in combination of a purchase of a full price ticket, or a Venice residents or over 65 reduction, or alternatively it can be collected at the Info point at Giardini or Arsenale venues Adults accompanying disabled visitors holding a disability ID must collect the free ticket at the Info points at Giardini or Arsenale venues. Free admission for nursery schools, elementary schools and junior high schools participating in Educational activities; booking required.

E D U C AT I O N A L

Guided tours, theoretical and practical thematic-educational itineraries, laboratories and creative workshops. Available in Italian and in several foreign languages. Average duration 1h 45’, 2h. Reservation and payment in advance are required. This is a paid service; entrance ticket not included.

** except on 25/04, 30/05, 27/06, 25/07, 15/08, 5/09, 19/09, 31/10, 21/11 * a valid ID is required at the entrance

374

GUIDED TOURS

S E RV I C E S F O R V I S I T O R S

Reservation required For visitors organised in groups Available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Russian

Bar, restaurant, bookshop, infopoint, restroom with changing table, courtesy transport service with electric cars for visitors with reduced mobility. Subject to availability: stroller, walker, wheelchair, foldable stools.

Adults 1 venue € 90 – 2 venues € 150 Universities 1 venue € 70 – 2 venues € 120 High Schools 1 venue € 60 – 2 venues € 100 Elementary and Junior Schools 1 venue € 60 Nursery Schools 1 venue € 50

GUIDED TOURS AT F I X E D T I M E S

Reservation required For visitors not organised in groups. Available in English and Italian, Giardini and Arsenale venues: € 8 per venue, per person Tours start at 11.15am and 2.15pm

FA M I LY F R I E N D LY GUIDED TOUR

Available every weekend, reservation required. Available in Italian € 8 per venue, per person (for participants up to 12 years of age free ticket to enter the exhibition) Arsenale (Saturday), Giardini (Sunday): 3pm Guides making use of Whisper technology are requested to adopt a behaviour that does not disturb other visitors.

E D U C AT I O N A L A N D P RO M O T I O N

promozione@labiennale.org T. +39 041 5218 828 T. Info Schools +39 041 5218 731 Mon > Fri 10am – 1pm / 2–5pm Sat 10am – 1pm

Cloakroom service for bags and small items.

HOW TO GET TO THE EXHIBITION VENUES

Small to medium size pets on a leash are admitted to the Giardini green area only

From Piazzale Roma (bus station) and Ferrovia (train station): to Arsenale: Actv lines 1 and 4.1 to Giardini: Actv lines 1, 4.1, and 5.1 (line 6 from Piazzale Roma only) From Tronchetto: to San Zaccaria: Actv line 2

S E RV I C E S F O R FA M I L I E S

Giardini: restroom with changing table, stroller. Arsenale: restroom with changing table, stroller, family area

C ATA L O G U E

La Biennale di Venezia, available at STORE.LABIENNALE.ORG AC C E S S I B I L I T Y

Arsenale: the exhibition area is fully accessible thanks to the presence of wheelchair ramps, elevators and uniform external itineraries. Giardini: ramp, stairlift or assistance procedure

SAFETY MEASURES

In line with the hygienic-sanitary protocols envisaged for cultural activities, it is recommended to show up at the gates equipped with masks, to wear them during the visit in the interior spaces and to keep a safe distance from other visitors

C ATA L O G O AT T I V O

Ask the personnel wearing the “Ask Me!” T-Shirt for more information about The Milk of Dreams

A D VA N C E D S A L E S NETWORK

Online on www.vivaticket.it Vivaticket Sales Points Info and prices on www.vivaticket.it

La Biennale di Venezia labiennale la_Biennale BiennaleChannel

375

G I A R D I N I A C C E S S I B I LT Y

All of the Pavillions are accessibile, some of them also by the following means: Ramp Stairlift or assistance procedure Lift Uniform outdoor area (graveled ground) Shuttle Cars

EG P.VE

BR PL

RO HU EE

IL GR

UY BE

AU US

P.N. DK

GB CH VE

JP CA KR

Boat Stop DE Giardini

376

A R S E N A L E A C C E S S I B I LT Y

All of the Pavillions are accessibile, some of them also by the following means: Ramp Stairlift or assistance procedure Lift Uniform outdoor area (graveled ground) Shuttle Cars

CN UZ

ITALIA

GH SI SG UA KS LU

OM LB MT IS MX

LV SA AR

PAA

NZ AL PH

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5 9 T H I N T E R N AT I O NA L ART EXHIBITION The Milk of Dreams LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

Editorial Activities and Web Head

Flavia Fossa Margutti SHORT GUIDE Graphic Design and Layout

A Practice for Everyday Life, London

Translations Copyediting

Rosanna Alberti Caterina Vettore PA R T I C I PAT I N G C O U N T R I E S A N D C O L L AT E R A L E V E N T S Editorial Coordination

Maddalena Pietragnoli Editorial Team

Anna Albano Francesca Dolzani Giulia Gasparato Editorial Realisation

EXHIBITION

Liberink srls, Padova Stefano Turon Coordination Livio Cassese Layout

Managing Editor

Copyediting

Manuela Hansen Texts

Isabella Achenbach Liv Cuniberti Manuela Hansen Melanie Kress Stefano Mudu Ian Wallace Madeline Weisburg Copyeditors

Nicola Giacobbo Supervisor Anna Albano Allison Grimaldi Donahue Camilla Mozzato Editorial Team

Francesca Dolzani Ornella Mogno Translations from English to Italian

Teresa Albanese Translations from Italian to English

Johanna Bishop Translations

Stefano Turon, Liberink Coordinator Translations from English to Italian

Oriana Bonan, Giulia Galvan, Giuliana Schiavi for Alphaville Roberta Prandin Translations from Italian to English

Salvatore Mele for Alphaville

Rosanna Alberti Caterina Vettore Translations from English to Italian

Oriana Bonan, Giulia Galvan, Giuliana Schiavi per Alphaville Roberta Prandin Translations from Italian to English

Salvatore Mele per Alphaville © by SIAE 2022 Eileen Agar, Sonia Boyce, Marianne Brandt, Leonora Carrington, Julian Charriere, Ithell Colquhoun, Firouz Farman Farmaian, Lucio Fontana, Katharina Fritsch, Marco Fusinato, Jane Graverol, Katharina Grosse, Hannah Höch, Rebecca Horn, Tishan Hsu, Tetsumi Kudo, Heinz Mack, Maruja Mallo, André Masson, Vera Molnár, Nuria Mora, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Louise Nevelson, Gisèle Prassinos, Máret Ánne Sara, Zineb Sedira, Bosco Sodi, Anders Sunna, Rosemarie Trockel, Remedios Varo, Alberta Whittle

© La Biennale di Venezia 2022 All Rights Reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The captions and credits of the images in this publication have been compiled with the outmost care. Any errors or omissions are unintentional, and we will be glad to include appropriate credits and solve any copyright-related issues in future editions if new information comes to the attention of La Biennale di Venezia.

Cover images

© Cecilia Vicuña. Courtesy the Artist; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London © Felipe Baeza. Courtesy the Artist; Maureen Paley, London © Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba. Courtesy Belkis Ayón Estate © Tatsuo Ikeda. Courtesy Estate of Tatsuo Ikeda Printed on

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La Biennale di Venezia First Edition April 2022

ISBN 978-88-98727-64-3

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