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

EXHIBITION

BIENNALE BIENNALEARTE ARTE 2022 2022

EXHIBITION EXHIBITION EXHIBITION

LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA President

Roberto Cicutto Board

Luigi Brugnaro Vice President Claudia Ferrazzi Luca Zaia Auditor’s Committee

Jair Lorenco President Stefania Bortoletti Anna Maria Como Director General

Andrea Del Mercato Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Department

Cecilia Alemani

LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

Director General

5 9 T H I N T E R N AT I O N A L ART EXHIBITION

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

Curator of the

CENTRAL S E RV I C E S

59th International Art Exhibition

Andrea Del Mercato

Cecilia Alemani Artistic Organiser

Marta Papini Assistant to the Curator and Managing Editor

Manuela Hansen

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

Secretariats General Secretariat

Caterina Boniollo Maria Cristina Cinti Elisabetta Mistri Chiara Rossi Protocol Office

Debora Rossi

Francesca Boglietti Lara De Bellis

Legal and Institutional Affairs

Biennale College Secretariat

Claudia Capodiferro Giacinta Maria Dalla Pietà

Stefano Mudu

Martina Ballarin Francesca Oddi Lucrezia Stocco

Staff of the Curator

Human Resources

Assistant to the Curator and Artistic Research

Ian Wallace Research and Texts

Liv Cuniberti Exhibition Design

Formafantasma Graphic Identity

Director

Graziano Carrer Luca Carta Giovanni Drudi Antonella Sfriso Alessia Viviani Rossella Zulian

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

P U RC H A S I N G, P RO C U R E M E N T AND ASSETS

Director

Head

Flavia Fossa Margutti Giovanni Alberti Roberta Fontanin Giuliana Fusco Silvia Levorato Nicola Monaco Maddalena Pietragnoli

TECHNICAL AND L O G I S T I C A L S E RV I C E S Director

Cristiano Frizzele Exhibition Design, Events

Director

and Live Performance

Fabio Pacifico

Silvia Gatto Silvia Bruni Annamaria Colonna Cristiana Scavone

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

Hospitality

Facility Management

Linda Baldan Jasna Zoranovic Donato Zotta

Giulio Cantagalli Piero Novello Maurizio Urso

Assets

Information Tecnology

Maurizio Celoni Antonio Fantinelli

Andrea Bonaldo Michele Schiavon Leonardo Viale Jacopo Zanchi

Purchasing and Procurement

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 ROM O T I ON

E D I T O R I A L AC T I V I T I E S AND WEB

Valentina Borsato Administration, Finance, Management Supervision

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

INSTITUTIONAL AND CINEMA PRESS OFFICE Head

S P E C I A L P RO J E C T S, P ROM O T I ON OF VENUES

Paolo Lughi Director

Sponsorship

Paola Pavan Promotion

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

Francesca Buccaro Michela Lazzarin Fiorella Tagliapietra

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 C O N T E M P O R A RY A R T S

Executive / Head of Organisation

Director General

Executive / Head of Organisation

Joern Rudolf Brandmeyer

Andrea Del Mercato

Francesca Benvenuti

Debora Rossi

Marina Bertaggia Emilia Bonomi Raffaele Cinotti Stefania Fabris Stefania Guerra Francesca Aloisia Montorio Luigi Ricciari Micol Saleri Ilaria Zanella

Secretariat

Historical Archives

Mariachiara Manci Alessandro Mezzalira

Veronica Mozzetti Monterumici

Venice International Film

Programming and Production

Festival Programming Office

Michela Mason Federica Colella Maya Romanelli

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

Piera Benedetti Silvia Menegazzi Daniela Persi Industry/Cinema Accreditation

VISUAL ARTS A RC H I T E C T U R E PRESS OFFICE

Flavia Lo Mastro

D A N C E , T H E AT R E , MUSIC PRESS OFFICE

Biennale College Cinema

Valentina Bellomo

Head

Emanuela Caldirola Head

Maria Cristiana Costanzo Claudia Gioia

C O L L A B O R AT O R S F O R 5 9 T H 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

Ilaria Grando

Library

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

Thanks to

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP

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 V-A-C Foundation, Moscow, Venice Elisa Nuyten Sue & Beau Wrigley Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Emilie Pastor and Sibylle Rochat, Founders of Concrete Projects Antonella Rodriguez Boccanelli Charlotte Feng Ford Komal Shah & Gaurav Garg Angela Timashev 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 20 February 2022

GOLDEN LION 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 hyperrealistic 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 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 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: 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.

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 K U 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

Roberto Cicutto, Introduction

Cecilia Alemani interviewed by Marta Papini, The Milk of Dreams

Cecilia Alemani, Acknowledgements

Leonora Carrington, The Debutante

C E N T R A L PAV I L I O N , G I A R D I N I

THE WITCH’S CRADLE – HISTORICAL CAPSULE

Alyce Mahon, Daughters of the Minotaur: Women Surrealists’ Re-Enchantment of the World

160

CORPS ORBITE – HISTORICAL CAPSULE

Jennifer Higgie, Body Language

E S S AY S 209

Marina Warner, Viral Spiral, or Seven Twists in a Witch’s Duel

215

Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Critical Theory

254

TECHNOLOGIES OF ENCHANTMENT – HISTORICAL CAPSULE

Azalea Seratoni, Surprising

C O N V E R S AT I O N 320

Silvia Federici and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in conversation moderated by Manuela Hansen, On Re-Enchantment and Chi’xi

329

366

ARSENALE

A L E A F A G O U R D A S H E L L A N E T A BAG A S L I N G A S A C K A B O T T L E A P O T A B O X A C O N TA I N E R – HISTORICAL CAPSULE

Christina Sharpe, What Could a Vessel Be?

E S S AY S 417

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

422

Donna J. Haraway, Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others

429

Mel Y. Chen, It Misses You

498

S E D U C T I ON O F T H E C Y B O RG – H I S T O R I C A L C A PS U L E

Matthew Biro, The Cyborg as Producer

E S S AY S 545

Achille Mbembe, Meditation on the Second Creation

549

N. Katherine Hayles, Novel Corona: Posthuman Virus

553

Yuk Hui and Anders Dunker in conversation, On Technodiversity

657

Jack Halberstam, Of Owls and Things

661

Chiara Valerio, Glossary: Incomplete and in order of appearance, from 9 March 2020 to 26 April 2021, partial and emotional, like memory

665

Igiaba Scego, The Long Journey of Miss Clara (Quasi-Theatrical Monologue of a Captive Rhinoceros)

711

Pavilion of Applied Arts Special Project

715

Forte Marghera Special Project

719

List of Works

745

Biennale College Arte

ARTISTS

532

Noor Abuarafeh

522

Anna Coleman Ladd

234

244

Carla Accardi

114

Ithell Colquhoun

523

Hannah Höch

490

Igshaan Adams

388

Myrlande Constant

478

Jessie Homer French

112

Eileen Agar

294

June Crespo

524

Rebecca Horn

628

Monira Al Qadiri

267

Dadamaino

181

Georgiana Houghton

712

Sophia Al-Maria

466

Noah Davis

144

Sheree Hovsepian

566

Özlem Altın

186

Lenora de Barros

636

Tishan Hsu

267

Marina Apollonio

114

Valentine de Saint-Point

618

Marguerite Humeau

112

Gertrud Arndt

114

Lise Deharme

240

Jacqueline Humphries

381

Ruth Asawa

252

Sonia Delaunay

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami

Shuvinai Ashoona

276

Agnes Denes

534

Tatsuo Ikeda

334

Belkis Ayón

115

Maya Deren

406

Saodat Ismailova

450

Firelei Báez

267

Lucia Di Luciano

381

Aletta Jacobs

392

Felipe Baeza

470

Ibrahim El-Salahi

640

Geumhyung Jeong

112

Josephine Baker

238

Sara Enrico

280

Charlotte Johannesson

179

Djuna Barnes

152

Chiara Enzo

116

Loïs Mailou Jones

381

Mária Bartuszová

700

Andro Eradze

574

Jamian Juliano-Villani

113

Benedetta

438

Jaider Esbell

306

Birgit Jürgenssen

179

Mirella Bentivoglio

130

Jana Euler

116

Ida Kar

in collaboration with

180

Minnie Evans

570

Allison Katz

Annalisa Alloatti

522

Alexandra Exter

192

Bronwyn Katz

Merikokeb Berhanu

226

Jadé Fadojutimi

528

Kapwani Kiwanga

180

Tomaso Binga

630

Jes Fan

524

Kiki Kogelnik

314

Cosima von Bonin

410

Safia Farhat

652

Barbara Kruger

598

Louise Bonnet

Simone Fattal

578

Tetsumi Kudo

521

Marianne Brandt

386

Célestin Faustin

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

606

Kerstin Brätsch

115

Leonor Fini

200

Louise Lawler

626

Dora Budor

523

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

590

Carolyn Lazard

362

Eglė Budvytytė in collaboration

Katharina Fritsch

610

Mire Lee

with Marija Olšauskaitė

181

Ilse Garnier

330

Simone Leigh

and Julija Steponaitytė

462

Aage Gaup

296

Hannah Levy

538

Liv Bugge

181

Linda Gazzera

494

Tau Lewis

698

Simnikiwe Buhlungu

342

Ficre Ghebreyesus

300

Shuang Li

148

Miriam Cahn

644

Elisa Giardina Papa

524

Liliane Lijn

113

Claude Cahun

412

Roberto Gil de Montes

458

Candice Lin

302

Elaine Cameron-Weir

142

Nan Goldin

181

Mina Loy

180

Milly Canavero

115

Jane Graverol

602

LuYang

113

Leonora Carrington

268

Laura Grisi

117

Antoinette Lubaki

521

Regina Cassolo Bracchi

523

Karla Grosch

622

Zhenya Machneva

312

Ambra Castagnetti

676

Robert Grosvenor

117

Baya Mahieddine

684

Giulia Cenci

290

Aneta Grzeszykowska

382

Maruja Mallo

521

Giannina Censi

442

Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe

182

Joyce Mansour

338

Gabriel Chaile

116; 523

Florence Henri

358

Britta Marakatt-Labba

474

Ali Cherri

648

Lynn Hershman Leeson

674

Diego Marcon

Charline von Heyl

282

Sidsel Meineche Hansen

120

Augusta Savage

382

Maria Sibylla Merian

525

Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt

248

Vera Molnár

270

Lillian Schwartz

434

Delcy Morelos

196

Amy Sillman

182

Sister Gertrude Morgan

540

Elias Sime

614

Sandra Mujinga

582

Marianna Simnett

Mrinalini Mukherjee

183

Hélène Smith

117

Nadja

188

Sable Elyse Smith

525

Louise Nevelson

562

Teresa Solar

117

Amy Nimr

184

Mary Ellen Solt

402

Magdalene Odundo

310

P. Staff

680

Precious Okoyomon

383; 526

Sophie Taeuber-Arp

118

Meret Oppenheim

382

Toshiko Takaezu

156

Ovartaci

446

Emma Talbot

688

Virginia Overton

120

Dorothea Tanning

Akosua Adoma Owusu

383

Bridget Tichenor

486

Prabhakar Pachpute

383

Tecla Tofano

182

Eusapia Palladino

184

Josefa Tolrà

408

Violeta Parra

696

Tourmaline

350

Rosana Paulino

121

Toyen

118

Valentine Penrose

Rosemarie Trockel

286

Elle Pérez

692

Wu Tsang

634

Sondra Perry

138

Kaari Upson

482

Solange Pessoa

Andra Ursuţa

354

Thao Nguyen Phan

268

Grazia Varisco

230

Julia Phillips

121

Remedios Varo

586

Joanna Piotrowska

454

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

204

Alexandra Pirici

526

Marie Vassilieff

525

Anu Põder

Cecilia Vicuña

183

Gisèle Prassinos

268

Nanda Vigo

134

Christina Quarles

706

Marianne Vitale

114

Rachilde

594

Raphaela Vogel

646

Janis Rafa

122

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

118; 183

Alice Rahon

122

Laura Wheeler Waring

119

Carol Rama

272

Ulla Wiggen

124

Paula Rego

122

Mary Wigman

119

Edith Rimmington

318

Müge Yilmaz

119

Enif Robert

384

Frantz Zéphirin

396

Luiz Roque

464

Zheng Bo

120

Rosa Rosà

184

Unica Zürn

364

Niki de Saint Phalle

346

Portia Zvavahera

183

Giovanna Sandri

398

Pinaree Sanpitak

702

Aki Sasamoto

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 female and male 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 interviewed by Marta Papini

The Exhibition The Milk of Dreams was conceived and put together in a period of enormous instability and uncertainty. Its development coincided with the outbreak and spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, which caused this edition to be postponed for a year. The only time La Biennale di Venezia had ever been forced to do such a thing, since its foundation in 1895, was during the two World Wars. What has it meant to you to organise a Biennale Arte at this historical juncture? I was appointed Curator of the 59th International Art Exhibition in January 2020, just a few weeks before the virus swept around the globe and changed our lives forever. Italy went into lockdown in the early days of March. We all remember those terrible images of empty streets and of the hospitals in Bergamo: the army trucks, the fear, doubt, and confusion. A few months after my appointment, the Exhibition that was scheduled to open in May 2021 was postponed to April 2022, because the Biennale Architettura curated by Hashim Sarkis − which was supposed to precede it − couldn’t possibly have opened in the spring of 2020. So this was the whirlwind of events surrounding the birth of the show. It is now opening a year late, and with the vernissage just four months away, we are grappling with the spread of the Omicron variant… For months I fantasised that this would be the Biennale of rebirth, celebrating the end of the pandemic, but that now feels too optimistic. Still, the fact that this show can open at all is somewhat extraordinary: it may not be the symbol of a return to normal life, yet it’s the outcome of a collective effort that seems almost miraculous.

During these endless months in front of a screen, I’ve pondered the question of what role the International Art Exhibition should play at this historical juncture. The simplest, most sincere answer I could find is that the Biennale Arte 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 of communication and communion. The Milk of Dreams is not an exhibition about the pandemic, but it inevitably registers the shock waves of our era. And at 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. We began working together in New York in early 2020, as soon as you were appointed. I remember that for the first few months of the year we’d planned trips and visits all over the world. We were soon forced to completely revise our calendar, organising online studio visits instead of going in person. How do you think this influenced the research process? The Milk of Dreams grew out of hundreds of conversations that I had with artists between January 2020 and December 2021: a stretch of time that felt like an eternity, and not just because of the upheavals rattling the world. In the research and development phase, a curator would normally be travelling around the globe to immerse herself in new art scenes. Whereas instead – except for a trip to Scandinavia in March 2020, and one to Berlin the following September – I spent those two years sitting at my desk, in a sort of cubbyhole carved out of my New York flat, among piles of books and catalogues, zooming for hours on end. Online visits were no substitute for being physically present in an artist’s studio, in the full context of experience and experimentation that shapes their work. On the other hand, many of the conversations I had over the months took on an almost confessional quality – with the freakish blend of hypercommunication and sudden intimacy, once the stuff of reality shows, that has gradually become familiar to us all. This odd sense of emotional proximity, amplified by the climate of fear and uncertainty and by the radical disruption of everyday life, sparked many conversations of startling existential profundity; they sprang from the contrast between physical distance – accentuated by the screen – and sudden closeness, with the feeling that there was no time to lose. Do you think there was any common thread to these conversations you were having with artists? You could say that the questions that kept emerging seem to capture this moment in history, when the very survival of the species is threatened, but also to sum up inquiries that permeate the sciences, arts, and myths of our time. How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates animal from plant, human from non-human? What are our responsibilities towards other people, other organisms, and the planet we live on? And what would life look like without us? Although these riddles have fired the imaginations of artists and philosophers for

quite some time, they used to feel more abstract. But with the state of emergency we’ve been living in since 2020, they’ve taken on a new sense of urgency for everyone, as truly concrete, tangible concerns. So those became the guiding questions for this Exhibition. In other words, The Milk of Dreams is inevitably a product of its time, even when it comes to simple, practical matters like receiving the artworks – with deadlines completely derailed by the international shipping crisis – or securing paper for the catalogue, given the global supply chain problems that have affected the entire process. This Exhibition has grown out of a completely transformed landscape, and the transformations are still ongoing: at the time of this conversation, I still don’t know whether the artwork I want for the first room at the Arsenale will arrive before the opening… The past editions of the Biennale Arte often rejected the idea of having a thematic structure. This Exhibition instead brings together artists into a perimeter that feels thematically consistent. How did the themes take shape, and what was the process involved? I think it’s important to note that the themes came from the artists and the works themselves. I tried to follow an inductive method rather than imposing any theme from the start, in part because I think many of today’s artists take a similar approach, one that is more localised, even “weaker,” if you will, less ideological and more open to difference: “situated knowledge,” as Donna Haraway would call it.1 To summarise, one might say the Exhibition revolves around three main themes: the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; the connection between bodies and the Earth. Or, as Rosi Braidotti – whose writings on the posthuman have been fundamental to this Exhibition – succinctly puts it, the end of the centrality of man, becoming-machine and becoming-earth. Many contemporary artists and thinkers have been 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.”2 They challenge the Renaissance and Enlightenment notion of the human being – especially the white European male – as motionless hub of the universe and measure of all things. And in its place, they propose new alliances among species, in worlds inhabited by porous, hybrid, manifold beings. Under the increasingly invasive pressure of technology, the boundaries between bodies and objects have been utterly transformed, bringing about profound mutations that remap subjectivities, hierarchies, and anatomies. As Judith Butler points out: “Bodies come into being and cease to be: as physically persistent organisms, they are subject to incursions and to illnesses that jeopardize the possibility of persisting at all. These are necessary features of bodies − they cannot ‘be’ thought without their finitude, and they depend on what is ‘outside themselves’ to be sustained − features that pertain to the phenomenological structure of bodily life.”3 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 only widened with the 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 it has been kept at a distance, filtered by technology, disincarnated, rendered almost intangible. The pressure of technology, the outbreak of the pandemic, the heightening of social tensions, and the looming threat of environmental disaster remind us every day that as mortal bodies, we are neither invincible nor selfsufficient, but rather part of a symbiotic web of interdependencies that bind us to each other, to other organisms, and to the planet as a whole. So many artists seem to be celebrating a new communion with the nonhuman world, cultivating a sense of kinship between species and between the organic and inorganic, the animate and inanimate. Others react to the dissolution of supposedly universal systems, rediscovering localised forms of knowledge and new politics of identity. Still others 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.”4 How did you arrive at The Milk of Dreams? And why is Leonora Carrington such a central figure in your research? In my work as a curator, I’ve often turned to literature for inspiration when trying to find titles or describe the feel of my shows. I’ve always had trouble with lofty-sounding choices like Making Worlds or All the World’s Futures – as a matter of fact, I decided from the outset that there would be no “world” in my title. I have to say that seems to be a male habit, as if curators were demiurges obsessed with their worlds and palaces… I prefer to seek the help of those most skilled with words, especially since literature can offer the very blend of precision, individuality, and vagueness that I think it’s important to adopt. In part, so that the art and artists are left free to be themselves, rather than being forced to illustrate some abstruse curatorial theory. Carrington is a key figure in 20th-century art history, but for decades received much less attention than her male peers. Her life story is an incredible existential adventure that seems to sum up the whole 20th century: World War II, her flight from Nazism, exile, madness, hospitalisation, ECT, Cardiazol… And the women of Surrealism paid dearly for their revolutionary choices, or at least more than the men did; while Carrington was in an asylum, Max Ernst was rebuilding a life with Peggy Guggenheim. In Carrington’s work and biography, art and life are inextricably entangled. This is an aspect that feels more topical than ever, at a time when artworks are increasingly reduced to products, and the cultural discourse tends to pigeonhole everything into very rigid definitions of identity. Leonora Carrington’s life embodies a radical vision of gender, against the backdrop of a century that exerted an almost unbearable pressure on identity, imprisoning it in the normative constraints of race, sexuality,

individuality… Carrington responds by reinventing herself through an endless series of metamorphoses and figures of the imagination: witch, priestess, visionary goddess, totem animal, a constant transformation that led her to the asylum, to flight, and to exile. Carrington was not only a great artist but an extraordinary writer, and her stories blend humour with a sense of mystery and piercing social insight. I began my research for this Exhibition by reading lots of artists’ writings, because I wanted their voices to be my starting point. Up to then I was only familiar with Carrington’s short stories and her fictionalised autobiography Down Below, the dramatic tale of her descent into the hell of Spanish psychiatric hospitals in 1939. So when I began working on the International Art Exhibition, I first read The Hearing Trumpet, her hilarious novel about a group of old ladies who rebel against institutionalisation. Then I came across her book of children’s stories, The Milk of Dreams: a collection of phantasmagoric fairy tales that Carrington originally wrote and illustrated on the walls of her sons’ bedroom in Mexico City – once again, we see art mingling with life, and what’s more, in the private, traditionally female space of the home. Both the words and the drawings are of stunning visionary power, and most people seem to have found them terrifying, given that they’re full of headless children, vultures in gelatin, and carnivorous machines. Like many of her works, this book describes a world free of hierarchies, where everyone can become something else, where humans, animals, and machines coexist in a symbiotic relationship that is sometimes joyous, sometimes disquieting. To me, Carrington’s figures of transformation seemed to sum up the concerns of many contemporary women artists. When asked where she was born, Carrington would say she was the product of her mother’s encounter with a machine, suggesting the same bizarre union of the organic and the artificial that characterises much of her work. This idea also seems to be central to the thinking of Donna Haraway; in reference to cyborgs, she tells us: “Cyborgs and companion species each bring 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.”5 What is your connection with Surrealism, and what role do you think the movement still plays today? Surrealism is the movement that first introduced me to contemporary art, as is true for many people. I was initially captivated by Surrealist literature, then did my undergraduate Philosophy thesis on Georges Bataille and Documents, the dissident Surrealist journal that he headed in Paris in the late 1920s. Over the years, I’ve continued to delve into artistic languages that – like Surrealism – open a window onto the irrational and unconscious mind. In 2017, I curated a project titled Il mondo magico (so I guess I am something of a demiurge myself) for Padiglione Italia at the 57th International Art Exhibition. It presented the work of three Italian artists – Giorgio Andreotta

Calò, Roberto Cuoghi, and Adelita Husni-Bey – who showed a new faith in the transformative power of the imagination and a new interest in magic, themes that flow directly from the Surrealist universe. But beyond my own personal interest, I think it’s more interesting to note that art historians have been shedding new light on the role played by women and by sexuality in Surrealism, but also in Dada, Futurism, and Bauhaus. One need only think of the key studies by Whitney Chadwick first or those by Dawn Ades, Mirella Bentivoglio, Ruth Hemus, Renee Riese Hubert, Amelia Jones, Maud Lavin, Alyce Mahon, Elizabeth Otto, Lucia Re, Claudia Salaris, Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, Marina Warner, to name a few of the writers who inspired my research and to whom we are deeply indebted; or the recent shows like Fantastic Women at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (parallel to Biennale Arte 2022); or the many retrospectives of figures like Meret Oppenheim or Toyen, to cite just the latest examples. In the last few years major attention has also been focused on the international nature of the movement, and its view of colonialism and non-European cultures – explored in exhibitions like Art et liberté at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, or Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Tate Modern in London. The Caribbean author Suzanne Césaire described Surrealism as “the domain of the strange, the marvelous, and the fantastic […] Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucinations and madness,”6 a description that holds true in our time, and continues to inspire many artists of today. The fulcrum of The Milk of Dreams, at the Central Pavilion, is a presentation of various artists active in the 1930s who were linked to Surrealism, including Eileen Agar, Claude Cahun, Leonor Fini, Ithell Colquhoun, Carol Rama, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo. This is the first of the thematic “time capsules” that punctuate the show. The works in this section seem pervaded by the idea that bodies and identities can be reinvented to arrive at new anatomies of desire, an approach that continues to inspire many women artists today. They show a politicisation of identity and sexuality that feels more topical than ever, while the idea of a communion between self and universe prefigures more recent discussions of ecology and feminism, and the importance of local and Indigenous cultures. The combinations of human, animal, and machine that inform the work of Carrington, Varo, or Jane Graverol also have more than one counterpart in the work of many contemporary artists shown in the Central Pavilion: the posthuman, hybrid, disobedient bodies convoked by Sara Enrico, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Birgit Jürgenssen, Ovartaci, Julia Phillips, Christina Quarles, Shuvinai Ashoona, and Andra Ursuţa, who imagine new combinations of the organic and artificial, whether as a means of self-reinvention or a disquieting foretaste of an increasingly dehumanised future. Nor can be help but notice troubling parallels between the first few decades of the

20th century and those of this millennium, with their rapid technological advances, pandemics, social crises, and waves of authoritarianism. You mentioned the Surrealist “communion between self and universe” as key to how contemporary art addresses environmental issues. Many artists in the Exhibition focus on the relationship between body and nature today, with different and sometimes surprising results… Many of them seem to explore complex new relationships with the planet, suggesting unprecedented ways of coexisting 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 overlap with new forms of ecological activism in works by Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe and in Jaider Esbell’s dreamlike compositions. The paintings and assemblages by Paula Rego envision new forms of symbiosis between animals and human beings, while Merikokeb Berhanu, 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 Belkis Ayón, who drew on Afro-Cuban traditions to describe an imaginary matriarchal community in a series of intricate black-and-white works. A similar rediscovery of art’s myth-making aspect can 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 history, dreams, and religion. And tapping into Indigenous knowledge to subvert colonialist stereotypes, Argentine artist Gabriel Chaile presents a new series of monumental sculptures, made from unfired clay, which tower like the idols of a fanciful Mesoamerican culture. While talking about Carrington and Surrealism, you mentioned the first “time capsule” in the Central Pavilion. Could you tell me more about how you got the idea for these capsules, and where it led? In addition to many works from the last few years and new projects conceived specifically for the Exhibition, The Milk of Dreams also includes many historic pieces and objects made over the course of the 20th century. As visitors move through 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 narrative not built around systems of direct inheritance or conflict, but around forms of symbiosis, solidarity, and sisterhood.

With a specific choreography of architectural space developed in collaboration with the design duo Formafantasma, these presentations also prompt reflection on how the history of art is constructed around museum practices that establish hierarchies of taste, and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. They 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. Though the stories told in these capsules might seem at first glance like minor, lesserknown episodes, they truly foreshadow the concerns of recent decades, and can serve as interesting models for our time. Recent editions of the Biennale Arte have often focused on offering a snapshot of the present. You’ve decided to bring past and present together, juxtaposing works from very different eras. What led you to take this wide-ranging approach? The Milk of Dreams is a transhistorical exhibition that reinterprets the past in light of the present. One ought to note that it is a fairly recent idea − and quite partial − that the Biennale should be completely absorbed with the present. In over a century of activity, there have been innumerable examples of editions that took on the vital task of redrafting art history and reinterpreting the past: one need only think of the 1948 edition, after the many long years of Fascism. Because it reinvents itself with every edition, the Biennale is an ideal tool for looking at art history in a new light. It is not weighed down by cumbersome institutional legacies, as museums are by their collections; and yet, to an even greater degree than documenta or other recurring shows, the Biennale Arte exists in continuity with the past. We can list exactly who exhibited in every single room of the Central Pavilion over the years, whether it was Gustav Klimt in 1899 or Wassily Kandinsky in 1905 or Alberto Giacometti in 1964, to cite a few names at random: in short, the past is always very present. The halls and rooms of these exhibition spaces continue to be haunted by what was there – but also what was left out, or kept out – in previous editions. History is constantly being rewritten from the perspective of the present, and each new generation of artists looks for its precedents by revisiting and reinventing the past. I conceived this edition as a palimpsest reminding us that there is no such thing as objective history, and that every telling of it is constructed from a specific point of view. So the capsules found throughout The Milk of Dreams highlight various moments in 20th-century art history, and sometimes in the history of the Biennale Arte itself, to tell stories that unfortunately have yet to be absorbed into the official canon. This means that the Exhibition is pervaded by the almost ghostly presence of the past. Speaking of stories not yet absorbed into the canon, you’ve decided to give considerable space to women and to gender nonconforming artists, a choice that I personally hope will mark a turning point. Why is this so important today? Yes, for the first time in its 127-year history, the International Exhibition will include a sizeable majority of women and non-binary artists. This 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. It’s a position that means a lot to me personally and has profoundly shaped my work as a curator in the past. Obviously, one can’t pretend to bring about gender equality by simply presenting an exhibition with lots of women. But it can serve as a corrective – or even just an important symbolic gesture – in the context of an institution that never granted equal space to male and female artists until its 58th edition, in 2019, curated by Ralph Rugoff. On average, from 1895 through the end of the 20th century, women made up less than 10 percent of the artists in the Biennale. In the last two decades, the average has risen to 30 percent, a figure that still not only fails to reflect demographics in Italy or the world, but completely ignores the fundamental contribution of hundreds of contemporary women artists. Does the history of the Biennale offer any precedents that shaped your thinking on this point? One of the capsules is inspired by Materializzazione del linguaggio, an exhibition that the artist Mirella Bentivoglio curated for Biennale Arte 1978. At the invitation of President Carlo Ripa di Meana, in an attempt to counterbalance the vast male majority in all of the Biennale events that year, Bentivoglio curated a show of Visual and Concrete Poetry by women artists at the Magazzini del sale, which some were quick to label a “pink ghetto.” But Bentivoglio took a very pragmatic approach: the field of Visual and Concrete Poetry, which emerged in the 1950s and reached full bloom in the 1960s and 1970s, was officially dominated only by male voices, whereas the female poets, despite being very active, were never invited to big events. Before Materializzazione del linguaggio, at major group exhibitions like the famous Sound Texts, Concrete Poetry, Visual Texts show in Amsterdam at the Stedelijk in 1971, only 2 percent of the artists were women. After Bentivoglio’s work in this show and many others, that figure rose to 20 percent. As Bentivoglio herself stated: “So what was missing was not quality, but only information.”7 Unfortunately, the overall situation has not changed much since then: flip through any art magazine, and you’ll see ads for all-male exhibitions, galleries where only 10 percent of the artists are women, and entire calendars of museum programming focused solely on men. I think that as women, professionals, and citizens, we have to point out this behaviour and develop practices of revision and reparation. I’ve tried to pay homage to Materializzazione del linguaggio in one of the capsules at the Central Pavilion. It juxtaposes the visual writings and concrete poems by Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Ilse Garnier, Giovanna Sandri, and Mary Ellen Solt with experiments in automatic and mediumistic writing by figures like Eusapia Palladino, Georgiana Houghton, and Josefa Tolrà, and other forms of what was once called écriture féminine, ranging from Gisèle Prassinos’ tapestries to Unica Zürn’s micrographies. Symbols and words also crop up in other sections of the Exhibition, especially in the work of contemporary artists such as Bronwyn Katz, Sable Elyse Smith, Amy Sillman, or Charline von Heyl, while Jacqueline Humphries’ typographic paintings seem to be in dialogue with Carla Accardi’s graphemes, and with the machine code that informs the art of Charlotte Johannesson, Vera Molnár, and Rosemarie Trockel.

Many times, over the months, we’ve tried to imagine how this choice will be seen, especially in Italy. Do you think the Exhibition will be labelled “politically correct”? I’m not particularly interested in how people describe it. Some are sure to call this show “the women’s Biennale,” but no one ever dreamed of calling 127 years of exhibitions that were 90 percent male “the men’s Biennale.” Apparently only men have the luxury of always passing for universal. But thank heavens, most of the artists in the show seem to have a different vision of the world. I’ll ask something I’ve asked you more than once: would you call this a feminist exhibition? I’m always hesitant to label a show “feminist,” especially one as vast as the Biennale Arte, because by now feminism means so many different things, with different nuances depending on nationality and cultural context. Of course there are artists in the show who explicitly call their practices feminist, like Barbara Kruger, Birgit Jürgenssen, Simone Leigh, Rosana Paulino, Niki de Saint Phalle, or Sandra Vásquez de la Horra. But there are also artists who would probably reject that definition. Rather than seeing the show as the expression of any unified feminist position, I like to think of it as a vessel for voices and visions that converge in many points, without having to be squeezed into a single category. For instance, there are artists whose works could be called “ecofeminist:” I’m thinking of Delcy Morelos, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Solange Pessoa, Pinaree Sanpitak, and Cecilia Vicuña, who also share an interest in ancient myths and archetypical images. But then there are artists like Teresa Solar and Marguerite Humeau who touch on environmental issues, yet take a more futuristic approach, and who I don’t think would describe their visions as feminist. And there are also those who are tired of being contrasted with their male peers, and who reject the label of “women artists” in general, imagining other forms of radical subjectivity. To sum up, getting back to the original question, if by feminism you mean an approach to the world that emphasises connections and interdependence, then yes, it’s a feminist show. But then, once again − shouldn’t we be asking whether all the previous editions were “masculinist”? So maybe it would be more accurate to say that the Exhibition shows different currents of feminism, respecting their complexities and their varied definitions. I think that above all, this Exhibition is moved by a sense of curiosity, and a desire to preserve the rich complexity of multiple viewpoints. Another time capsule is 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. In this section, ovoid carapaces by Surrealist artist Bridget Tichenor are juxtaposed with Mária Bartuszová’s delicate ceramics, 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, whereas video artist Saodat Ismailova peers into underground isolation cells that serve as places of refuge and meditation. You could say that this constellation of works also reflects on what used to be called “central core imagery,” on whether there is such a thing as female or feminist iconography, and how the depiction of the body can be used for political ends. It is not only women who deal with bodies and politics... Many other artists in the show combine political and social themes with projects that revisit local traditions, as in Ali Cherri’s video about the dams built on 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 medication through a meditative practice of meticulous daily drawings. Speaking of illness and medication, the relationship between bodies and biotechnology is a recurring theme of the Exhibition, which turns up in many different forms. Could you talk about how the last two capsules address these issues? The ties between human being and machine are the focus of many works on view: those of Agnes Denes, Lillian Schwartz, and Ulla Wiggen, for instance, or the screen-like surfaces by Dadamaino, Laura Grisi, and Grazia Varisco, collected in a second micro-exhibition that explores Programmed Art and Kinetic Abstraction in the 1960s. These artists and many others present an image of “embodied” technology. The polarised and polarising relationship between individuals and technology reminds me of a passage by Paul B. Preciado, who writes that in contemporary society, “the body’s technopolitical production seems dominated by a series of new technologies of the body (biotechnology, surgery, endocrinology, genetic engineering, etc.) and representation (photography, cinema, television, Internet, videogames, etc.) that infiltrate and penetrate daily life like never before.”8 The final section of the show at the Arsenale is introduced by the fifth and last time capsule, revolving around the figure of the cyborg. It brings together women artists, working over the course of the 20th century, who imagined new fusions of human and artificial, the avatars of a posthuman, postgender future. This capsule includes artworks, artefacts, and documents from early 20th-century artists such as the Dadaist Baroness Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven, Bauhaus photographers 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. Once the machines show up, the Exhibition takes on a different mood, which seems to extend some of the atmospheres of the Central Pavilion… Yes, after moving through a vast, diaphanous installation by Kapwani Kiwanga, the show takes on colder, more artificial tones and the human figure becomes increasingly evanescent, replaced by animals and hybrid or robotic creatures. 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. And other works hover between obsolete technology and mirage-like visions of the future. Zhenya Machneva’s abandoned factories and decrepit equipment seem to spring 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 mechanisms gone haywire, a large installation by Barbara Kruger conceived specifically for the Corderie combines slogans, poetry, and language-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, which concludes the show at the Artiglierie. The catalogue went hand in hand with the development of the show, and in some ways fed into it. Could you tell me more about that? I simply love printed matter: my apartment is so full of books that it sometimes becomes hard to get from room to room. As soon as I learned that the Biennale Arte would be postponed, I decided to use the extra time to create a book that would enrich the experience of the show and capture the unusual context in which it took shape, always keeping in mind that it might not be easily accessible in person because of the pandemic. Since the opening was put off for a year, we had the chance to commission original writing, spark new conversations, and track down existing texts that sum up many of the ideas raised by the Exhibition, while also putting it into the context of broader concerns that are just as urgent. In the volume, Rosa Braidotti introduces the posthuman feminist turn, Silvia Federici and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui talk abut the idea of “re-enchantment,” and Marina Warner presents seven stories of metamorphosis and tales inspired by the pandemic. Writing about “otherness” with respect to humanity itself, Mel Y. Chen, Jack Halberstam, and Igiaba Scego deal with non-anthropocentric forms of thought and relationships between species; Yuk Hui and Achille Mbembe invite us to rethink our relationship to technology and the Earth; Chiara Valerio builds a personal glossary of terms inspired by the pandemic. After the Exhibition closes, the catalogue will be an ideal tool for remembering, interpreting and perhaps also exorcising those hours and hours in front of the computer. It was very important to me that the outcome be an object, made of ink, images, and thoughts set down on paper.

What impression would you like this Exhibition to leave? The events of recent months have yielded a torn, riven world, and The Milk of Dreams is trying to imagine other modes of coexistence. So despite the climate that forged it, this is an optimistic Exhibition, which celebrates art and its capacity to create alternative cosmologies and new conditions of existence. To borrow the words of Rosi Braidotti: “We live in permanent processes: processes of transition, hybridization and nomadization, and these in-between states and stages defy the established modes of theoretical representation.”9 This Exhibition asks artists not to reveal who we are, but to absorb the worries and fears of this time and show us who and what we can become. One of the previous editions of the Biennale Arte I often go back to is the one from 1948, which is often labelled the Biennale of rebirth, after the dark years of Fascism. It was a Biennale that on the one hand introduced contemporary movements and new artistic languages, and on the other looked back, rediscovering the many artists and forms of expression that had been censured or obscured in the previous decades. My copy of the catalogue from the 24th International Art Exhibition of 1948 is one that I bought online a few years ago. It once belonged to a young woman named Lucia, whose name is written in cursive on the first page, along with her temporary address at the “student lodgings, Scuola Giustina Renier Michiel 1884,” not far from the Gallerie dell’Accademia. Did she go by herself or with a friend? How long did she stay in Venice? Did she write her address in the book in fear that she might lose it in the Giardini? Lucia also left comments on some pages of the catalogue. She thinks that room 31 is “frightening,” while the one dedicated to Marino Marini “interferes with your digestion,” no less. Paul Klee seems “obsessively strange” to her, while she enjoys Scipione’s “symphonies of browns.” Further on, she enthuses over the works by Carlo Corsi, calling him “World-class!” for paintings that incorporate “used envelopes and tram tickets.” All she says about Pablo Picasso’s legendary solo room is that it “looks like a warship.” The most densely commented pages are the ones on the Impressionists, whose works were shown by the hundreds in the German Pavilion left empty by Nazism and the war. She finds Monet “warm and vibrant,” while Manet is “soft and vivid.” She notes van Gogh’s “intensity” and sense of “the infinite.” She also likes Marc Chagall and Georges Braque in the French Pavilion, and Henry Moore and J.M.W. Turner in the British one. In the American Pavilion she puts a star by Georgia O’Keeffe, then runs across the bridge to admire the solo show by Oskar Kokoschka, praising his “movement and life.” Oddly, there are no notes on the pages about the collection that Peggy Guggenheim was showing that year in the Greek Pavilion, with works by Duchamp, Picabia, Max Ernst, Pollock, and Rothko, which marked the triumph of abstraction and American art in Venice. The introduction by La Biennale’s President Giovanni Ponti contains words that are perfectly topical even today: “Let mankind, still reeling from the anguish and torment it has suffered, welcome the invitation extended by this gathering of artists from around the globe; let our wish

come true, for […] visitors to flock from all over the world to this green oasis, to our island of art and dreams.” Secretary General Rodolfo Pallucchini instead stresses that it is important for the Biennale to provide historical context, so that viewers can better appreciate the innovative nature of the most radical contemporary work. And the critic Giuseppe Marchiori, in introducing the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti movement, notes that after the hiatus of the war, artists and visitors alike are “searching for new connections among men.” A few pages later, Lucia has left two intriguing notes. The first reads “Cursed flesh,” whereas the second is quite clear and scathing: “Where are the women?”

3 4

See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, 14(3), Autumn 1988, 575–599. Rosi Braidotti, “Preface: The Posthuman as Exuberant Excess,” in Francesca Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), XI. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 30. Silvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018). Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 4. Suzanne Césaire, “The Domain of the Marvellous,” View, 1, 1941; also found in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 157. Mirella Bentivoglio, “I segni del femminile,” in Daniela Ferrari (ed.), Poesia visiva. La donazione di Mirella Bentivoglio al Mart, exhibition catalogue (Rovereto, 19 November 2011 – 22 January 2012; Cinisello Balsamo, Silvana Editoriale, 2011), 18. Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York City: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013), 77. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2002), 1.

AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

Cecilia Alemani

First and foremost, I would like to thank all the artists in The Milk of Dreams: their creative voices and endless enthusiasm amaze me day after day. I would like to thank the President of La Biennale di Venezia Roberto Cicutto, who has supported my vision for the Exhibition The Milk of Dreams with excitement and encouragement throughout these unprecedented times. I would also like to thank President Paolo Baratta who had appointed me in January 2020, and to whom I am indebted for trusting me with such prestigious endeavor and for offering many essential suggestions. La Biennale di Venezia is 127 years young: its success and exemplary role in the global contemporary arts field is grounded in its talented team. I am grateful to the entire team of La Biennale di Venezia for its expertise and professionalism and for working with me in great synergy. I am forever indebted to my small but excellent curatorial team, and above all to the Artistic Organiser Marta Papini, with whom I had already organised the Padiglione Italia at the 57th International Art Exhibition. In these two long years we spent together mostly on Zoom, connecting from the most intimate corners of our lives and flats, we worked as partners, colleagues, and friends, always motivated by reciprocal respect and admiration. Her curatorial expertise, professional competence, and sense of irony have pushed me through this long journey and have greatly contributed to this Exhibition. I look forward to seeing her brilliant curatorial career in the years to come. I am also grateful to Manuela Hansen, Assistant to the Curator and Managing Editor, who has overseen the rich content of this book, has managed the textual and visual contributions of all 213 artists in the Exhibition, and has commissioned new critical essays. This was not a small task, and I praise her for her incredible organisational skills, for her academic rigour, and above all for never losing her smile. This Exhibition is the result of in-depth cultural and art historical research: I want to thank Stefano Mudu for bringing to my attention many overlooked artists, unique objects, and exceptional stories of individuals: these findings are the result of his vivacious intellectual curiosity. Big thanks also to Liv Cuniberti, Lara Facco, Paul Heckler, Melissa Parsoff, and Ian Wallace for helping me in these long months of process. Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin of Formafantasma, together with Gabriele Milanese and Ibrahim Kombarji have been invaluable collaborators and creative partners on the Exhibition design and the

layout of the show. Emma Thomas and Kirsty Carter of A Practice for Everyday Life, together with their talented team consisting of Olivia Diaz, Daniel Griffiths, and Eugenia Luchetta have designed a gorgeous book and a brilliant graphic identity. Special thanks to the artists who lent their beautiful eyes to the graphic identity: Belkis Ayón, Felipe Baeza, Tatsuo Ikeda, and Cecilia Vicuña. I wish to thank Leonora Carrington and her fantastic creatures for accompanying me in this journey. I am personally grateful to Gabriel Weisz Carrington, Patricia Argomedo, Daniel Weisz, the Fundación Leonora Carrington, and Paul De Angelis for their support and enthusiasm since the very beginning. I am thankful to Teresa Arcq for her expertise on Leonora Carrington and on many other Surrealist women artists, and to Wendi Norris and Melanie Cameron for helping locate so many invaluable artworks. My gratitude goes also to many friends who have accompanied me in this long adventure, providing guidance, love and comfort: Massimiliano Gioni for persistently pushing me to never give up, and also Giacomo Alemani Gioni, who, even at the young age of six, always says to his friends how proud he is that his mama is curating the Venice “Bignale.” Vera Alemani, not only for helping us locate some of these hard-to-find works, but for always being there for me. And also: Fabrizio Alemani and Mariateresa Marietti, Paololuca Barbieri, Francesco Bonami, Carlo Bronzini Vender and Tanya Traykovski, Valentina Castellani and Gianluca Violante, Maurizio Cattelan, Giacomo Donati, Nuccia and Giovanni Gioni, Noah Horowitz and Louise Sørensen, Dakis and Lietta Joannou, Valentina Mazza, Jenny Moore, Tony and Elham Salamé, Nick Simunovic, Simone Subal, Ali Subotnick, András Szántó. I want to thank the High Line, and in particular Robert Hammond, Joshua David, Mauricio Garcia, Tara Morris, and Gail Beltrone for believing in me and for allowing me the freedom to take on this project. I am extremely grateful to Don Mullen, as well as Shelley and Phil Aarons, Tom Hill, Catie Marron, Mario Palumbo, Sue Viniar, and the entire Board of Directors of Friends of the High Line for always being my biggest fans. Big thanks to my stellar art team, with Jordan Benke, Janelle Grace, Melanie Kress and Constanza Valenzuela from whom I learn something new every day. My deepest gratitude goes to all the people who have believed in my vision and in the artists and have helped us make many of these projects possible. I would like to thank the Teiger Foundation and its Board of Trustees with Gary Garrels, Kati Lovaas, John Silberman, and Joel Wachs, as well as Larissa Harris and Andrea Escobedo, and above all the late David Teiger, who I still remember with joy and affection in Venice, sitting at a table at Il Nuovo Galeon restaurant in Via Garibaldi, always so incredibly curious to learn about new artists. A huge thank you to Pietro Beccari, Olivier Bialobos and the Dior family for supporting this project and a heartfelt thank you to Maria Grazia Chiuri, whose love for women artists has been so inspirational. I am grateful to Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation, who helped me bring so many projects

from the Global South. Special thanks to Jemma Read, Kate Levin, Anita Contini of Bloomberg Philanthropies for making the Exhibition more accessible through Bloomberg Connects. Rachel Rees, Audrey Teichmann, and Denis Pernet of Audemars Piguet Contemporary have been partners and collaborators in one of the Exhibition most complex artworks. Thank you for making it possible. A heartfelt thank you to Marc Payot and Ivan Wirth, as well as Tamar Nahmias and Joelle Griesmaier of Hauser & Wirth for bringing Simone Leigh’s Brick House to Venice. There is a group of visionary women who have been incredibly generous with their support and time, and I would like to thank them all: Beatrice Bulgari, Charlotte Feng Ford, Nicoletta Fiorucci, Maja Hoffmann, Teresa Mavica, Victoria Mikhelson, Elisa Nuyten, Emilie Pastor and Sibylle Rochat, Antonella Rodriguez Boccanelli, Komal Shah, Margherita Stabiumi, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Angela Timashev, Sue Wrigley.

A DV I S O R S

A group of advisors helped me in my research, especially in those parts of the world where I couldn’t travel to. Many of the artists they recommended are included in The Milk of Dreams. Thanks to Venus Lau, Alvin Li, Ranjit Hoskote, Marie Hélène Pereira, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Nontobeko Ntombela, Guslagie Malanga, Ellen Greig, Nora Razian, Júlia Rebouças, Marina Reyes Franco, María Isabel Rueda, María Wills, Camila Marambio, Joanna Warsza for their precious suggestions. AUTHORS

A huge thank you to the authors of the catalogue for enriching this Exhibition with art historical essays and with creative writings: Matthew Biro, Rosi Braidotti, Leonora Carrington, Mel Y. Chen, Silvia Federici, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Manuela Hansen, Jack Halberstam, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Jennifer Higgie, Yuk Hui and Anders Dunker, Ursula K. Le Guin, Alyce Mahon, Achille Mbembe, Marta Papini, Igiaba Scego, Azalea Seratoni, Christina Sharpe, Chiara Valerio, and Marina Warner. Big thanks to all the writers of the artists entries: Isabella Achenbach, Liv Cuniberti, Manuela Hansen, Melanie Kress, Stefano Mudu, Ian Wallace, and Madeline Weisburg. Special thanks to the team of editors and translators including Teresa Albanese, Johanna Bishop, Nicola Giacobbo, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, and Camilla Mozzato, who have edited, translated, and overseen hundreds of texts in Italian and in English. J U RY

The Jury has a great responsibility, one that will change some of these artists’ life forever. I’m grateful to Adrienne Edwards, President of the Jury, as well as Lorenzo Giusti, Julieta González, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Susanne Pfeffer for their wise judgement. COLLEGE

Big thanks for the tutors of the first edition of the Biennale College Arte: Barbara Casavecchia, Gianni Jetzer, Yasmil Raymond, Francesco Stocchi, Roberta Tenconi for providing guidance and support to these emerging talents.

I would like to thank all the lenders, including museums, foundations, estates and private collectors for separating from their beloved artworks for almost nine months, as well as all the people who facilitated these loans. I am also grateful to the many colleagues, curators, and art lovers who have helped me in these two years.

Shelley and Phil Aarons Miguel Abreu Rebecca Adib Vera Alemani Barbara Alesci Patrick H. Alexander Anthony Allen Giuseppe Alleruzzo Claudia Altman Siegel Brooke Anderson Yesaki Kaory Araiza Maria Arusoo Fernanda Arruda Meskerem Assegued Francesca Astesani Ninagawa Atsuko Jennifer Augustyniak Defne Ayas Belkis Ayón Estate Giovanni B. Martini Olivier Babin Cristina Baldacci Alberto Barbera Ludovica Barbieri Sam Bardaouil Simone Battisti Pietro Beccari Andrea Bellini Mathilde Belouali-Dejean Myriam Ben Salah Michael Benevento Jordan Benke Adrienne Bennett Ruth Beraha Allison and Larry Berg Claude Bernés Olivier Bialobos Jennifer Bibb Leonardo Bigazzi Joaquin Biglione Taciana Birman Daniel Birnbaum Tim Blum Natasha Boas Francesco Bonami Edoardo Bonaspetti Pilar Bonet Julve Joe Borelli Stefania Bortolami Isabella Bortolozzi Anne Boschmans Stella Bottai Amy Bouhassan James Brett Brian Briggs Gavin Brown Laurel Brown Elena Brugnano Daniel Buchholz Beatrice Bulgari Ane Bülow Natascha Burger Carolyn Burke Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti Gisela Capitain Paolo Carli Andrea Cashman

Gabriel Catone Germano Celant Aaron Cesar Delphine Charpentier Stephen Cheng Jennifer Chert Rowena Chiu Maria Grazia Chiuri Chris von Christierson Helga Christoffersen Ella Christopherson Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Cristina Cilli Toby Clarke James Cohan Simon Cole Tine Colstrup Roger Conover Eduardo Constantini Anita Contini Luca Cooper Paula Cooper Fiona Corridan Paolo Cortese Micaela Costa Eduardo Costantini Jacopo Crivelli Visconti Bice Curiger Deborah D’Ippolito Lisa Dahl Karin Dammann Lindsay Macdonald Danckwerth Carolina Dankow Joshua David Karon Davis Camille de Alencastro Massimo De Carlo María de Corral Antoine de Galbert Pablo León de la Barra Haco de Ridder Pierre Floriane de Saint Marco De Scalzi Sigismond de Vajay Bruno Decharme Jeffrey Deitch Flavio del Monte Ignacio del Real Mme Marie-Gilberte Devise Tiziana Di Caro Maria Cristina Didero Arjen Dijkstra Andrei Dinu Ivana Dizdar Bridget Donahue Carla Donhauer Stephanie Dorsey Lilah Dougherty Daniel Dulière Lia Durante Kristine E. Santos Line Ebert Fusun Eczacibasi Emma Enderby Okwui Enwezor Christopher Eperjesi Andrea Escobedo Bridgitt Evans Cecilia Fajardo-Hill Max Falkenstein Luis Felipe Farias Till Fellrath Charlotte Feng Ford Gaetano Fermani Zoe Fermani Lourdes Fernández

Melina Fernández Marco Ferraris Aicha Filal Elena Filipovic Nicoletta Fiorucci Don Fletcher Marina Fokidis Patrick Foret Kristen Gallerneaux Mauricio Garcia César García-Alvarez Katya Garcia-Antón Violette Garnier Gary Garrels Richard Gault Libby Gavin Kendy Genovese Candida Gertler François Ghebaly Tobin Gibson Natasha Ginwala Andrea Giunta Barbara Gladstone Marc Glimcher Mark Godfrey Slim Gomri Janelle Grace Maxwell Graham Peter Granados Jacqueline Grandjean Claire Greenaway Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn Rachel Greene Joelle Griesmaier Salomon Grimberg Jeremy Grosvenor Elmar R. Gruber Hannah Gruy Robert Hammond Quinn Harrelson Larissa Harris Stephen Hepworth Orlando Hernández Sofia Hernandez Tom Hill Maja Hoffmann Max Hollein Nina Hollein Noah Horowitz Christine Hourde Bellatrix Hubert Thelma and AC Hudgins William Huffman Çağla Ilk and Misal Adnan Carolina Italiano Daniel Jabra Jamillah James Amrita Jhaveri Priya Jhaveri Shanay Jhaveri Pam Johnson Adina Kamien Casey Kaplan Francesca Kaufmann Beth Kearney Seth Kelly Jamie Kenyon Esther Kim Varat Natalie King Kaarin Kivirähk Becky Koblick Amber Marie Kohl Satoshi Kondo Sylvia Kouvali Melanie Kress Mathias Kryger

Kersti Kuldna-Türkson José Kuri Cyrill Lachauer João Laia Jonathan Laib Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel Christophe Langois Rose Leadem Hena Lee Lorraine Lee Tet Rachel Lehmann Mia Lejsted Bonde Tracey Leming Lottie Leseberg Smith Radu Lesevschi Ruben Levi Kate Levin Arthur Lewis and Hua Nguyen Yadira Leyva Ayón Wolf Lieser Inti Ligabue Audun Lindholm Maira Liriano Kati Loovas Rose Lord Manuela Lucà-Dazio Florian Lüdde Francesca Luise Isaac Lyles Christine Macel Philomene Magers Michael Maharam Diego Majorana Ikenna Malbert Florencia Malbrán Lena Malm Chiara Mannarino Erin Manns Mónica Manzutto Luigi Maramotti Gió Marconi Catie Marron Chus Martínez Rosa Martínez Vittoria Matarrese Gill Matini Teresa Mavica Emanuela Mazzonis Fergus McCaffrey Jeremie McGowan Calla McInnes Giulia Migliori Leonid Mikhelson Victoria Mikhelson Victoria Miro Paulo Miyada Helen Molesworth Joanna Moorhead Manuela Moscoso Rodrigo Moura Ananya Mukhopadhyay Don Mullen Kenta Murakami Tamar Nahmias Yuta Nakajima Francis Naumann Iñigo Navarro Val Nelson and Helena Kergozou Henricks Netherlands Kim Nguyen Margot Norton Elisa Nuyten Natsuko Odate Robert Ortega Rosine Ortmans Richard Oversteet

Zuzana Pabisova Fabrizio Padovani and Alessandro Pasotti Lucrecia Palacios Maureen Paley Emily Palmer Lisa Panting Cecile Panzieri Sam Parker Priya Parthasarathy Rachel Passannante Emilie Pastor Florent Paumelle Marc Payot Yana Peel Agustín Pérez Rubio Denis Pernet Sophie Perryer Andreas Petrossiants Friedrich Petzel Filippo Piazzoni Sara Piccinini Camilla Pignatti Morano Simona Pizzi Abhishek Poddar Jeff Poe Annika Pohl-Ozawa Rebeka Põldsam Anna Pravdová Nadia Pugliese Laurens R. Schwartz Prateek Raja Priyanka Raja Allegra Ravizza Jemma Read Marcus Rediker Rachel Rees Chiara Repetto Clarissa Ricci Marta Rincón Vivienne Roberts Sibylle Rochat Katherine Rochester Julia Rodrigues Antonella Rodriguez Boccanelli Luis Romero Barbara Roncari Lucia Ronchetti Jessica Roscio Alexis Rose Stephanie Rosenthal Ralph Rugoff Christian Rümelin Nicole Russo Peter D Russo John Rust Mary Sabbatino Tim Saltarelli Alberto Salvadori Lola Sanchez-Jauregui Jay Sanders Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Gabriel Santiago Mendes Nicoletta Saporiti Hashim Sarkis Zenilda Sarmento da Silva Nick Savage Marie Savona Kamini Sawhney Attila Saygel Ingrid Schaffner Georg Schwarz Hank Scotch Komal Shah Sonu Shamdasani Amanda Sharp Jasper Sharp

Sheikh Hassan M. A. Al-Thani Alexandra Shtarkman Victoria Siddall John Silberman Raf Simons Adrien Sina Anthony Slayter-Ralph Matthew Slotover Marsha Soffer Diane Solway Arlette Souhami Allyson Spellacy Marc Spiegler Monika Sprüth Margherita Stabiumi Malin Ståhl Polly Staple Angela Steinmetz Jo Stella Fabienne Stephan Grazina Subelyte Ali Subotnick Valentina Suma Susan Swiatosz András Szántó Rafaella Tamm Chris Taylor Audrey Teichmann David Teiger Andrea Teschke Jana Teuscher The Underground Museum Chiara Tiberio Sarah Tignor Leslie Tonkonow Arthur Toqué Emmanuelle Toulet Jacqueline Tran Jasmin Tsou Christopher Turner Pelin Uran Constanza Valenzuela Roel Van Nunen Luc Volatier Helen Volber Jochen Volz Rodolphe von Hofmannsthal Joel Wachs Jan Waling Huisman Darren Walker Madeline Warren Melanie Weber Rowland Weinstein Carol Weisman Lisa Wenger Jo Widoff Nick Willing Hubert Winter Ivan Wirth Debi and Steven Wisch Jocelyn Wolff Matthew Wood Sue Wrigley Can Yavuz Celina Yeh Sanada Yoshimi Shani Zahavi Anna Zepp Bree Zucker David Zwirner Marlene Zwirner

T H E D E B U TA N T E Leonora Carrington

When I was a debutante, I often went to the zoo. I went so often that I knew the animals better than I knew the girls of my own age. Indeed it was in order to get away from people that I found myself at the zoo every day. The animal I got to know best was a young hyena. She knew me too. She was very intelligent. I taught her French, and she, in return, taught me her language. In this way we passed many pleasant hours. My mother was arranging a ball in my honour on the first of May. During this time I was in a state of great distress for whole nights. I’ve always detested balls, especially when they are given in my honour. On the morning of the first of May 1934, very early, I went to visit the hyena. “What a bloody nuisance,” I said to her. “I’ve got to go to my ball tonight.” “You’re very lucky,” she said. “I’d love to go. I don’t know how to dance, but at least I could make small talk.” “There’ll be a great many different things to eat,” I told her. “I’ve seen truckloads of food delivered to our house.” “And you’re complaining,” replied the hyena, disgusted. “Just think of me, I eat once a day, and you can’t imagine what a heap of bloody rubbish I’m given.” I had an audacious idea, and I almost laughed. “All you have to do is go instead of me!”

“We don’t resemble each other enough, otherwise I’d gladly go,” said the hyena rather sadly. “Listen,” I said. “No one sees too well in the evening light. If you disguise yourself, nobody will notice you in the crowd. Besides, we’re practically the same size. You’re my only friend, I beg you to do this for me.” She thought this over, and I knew that she really wanted to accept. “Done,” she said all of a sudden. There weren’t many keepers about, it was so early in the morning. I opened the cage quickly, and in a very few moments we were out in the street. I hailed a taxi; at home, everybody was still in bed. In my room I brought out the dress I was to wear that evening. It was a little long, and the hyena found it difficult to walk in my high-heeled shoes. I found some gloves to hide her hands, which were too hairy to look like mine. By the time the sun was shining into my room, she was able to make her way around the room several times, walking more or less upright. We were so busy that my mother almost opened the door to say good morning before the hyena had hidden under my bed. “There’s a bad smell in your room,” my mother said, opening the window. “You must have a scented bath before tonight, with my new bath salts.” “Certainly,” I said. She didn’t stay long. I think the smell was too much for her. “Don’t be late for breakfast,” she said and left the room. The greatest difficulty was to find a way of disguising the hyena’s face. We spent hours and hours looking for a way, but she always rejected my suggestions. At last she said, “I think I’ve found the answer. Have you got a maid?” “Yes,” I said, puzzled. “There you are then. Ring for your maid, and when she comes in we’ll pounce upon her and tear off her face. I’ll wear her face tonight instead of mine.” “It’s not practical,” I said. “She’ll probably die if she hasn’t got a face. Somebody will certainly find the corpse, and we’ll be put in prison.” “I’m hungry enough to eat her,” the hyena replied. “And the bones?” “As well,” she said. “So, it’s on?” “Only if you promise to kill her before tearing off her face. It’ll hurt too much otherwise.”

“All right. It’s all the same to me.” Not without a certain amount of nervousness I rang for Mary, my maid. I certainly wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t hate having to go to a ball so much. When Mary came in I turned to the wall so as not to see. I must admit it didn’t take long. A brief cry, and it was over. While the hyena was eating, I looked out the window. A few minutes later she said, “I can’t eat any more. Her two feet are left over still, but if you have a little bag, I’ll eat them later in the day.” “You’ll find a bag embroidered with fleurs-de-lis in the cupboard. Empty out the handkerchiefs you’ll find inside, and take it.” She did as I suggested. Then she said, “turn round now and look how beautiful I am.” In front of the mirror, the hyena was admiring herself in Mary’s face. She had nibbled very neatly all around the face so that what was left was exactly what was needed. “You’ve certainly done that very well,” I said. Towards evening, when the hyena was all dressed up, she declared, “I really feel in tip-top form. I have a feeling that I shall be a great success this evening.” When we had heard the music from downstairs for quite some time, I said to her, “Go on down now, and remember, don’t stand next to my mother. She’s bound to realize that it isn’t me. Apart from her I don’t know anybody. Best of luck.” I kissed her as I left her, but she did smell very strong. Night fell. Tired by the day’s emotions, I took a book and sat down by the open window, giving myself up to peace and quiet. I remember that I was reading Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. About an hour later, I noticed the first signs of trouble. A bat flew in at the window, uttering little cries. I am terribly afraid of bats. I hid behind a chair, my teeth chattering. I had hardly gone down on my knees when the sound of beating wings was overcome by a great noise at my door. My mother entered, pale with rage. “We’d just sat down at the table,” she said, “when that thing sitting in your place got up and shouted, ‘So I smell a bit strong, what? Well, I don’t eat cakes!’ Whereupon it tore off its face and ate it. And with one great bound, it disappeared through the window.” (1937–1938)

“The Debutante” is reprinted from The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2017), 3–7. Reprinted by permission of The Estate of Leonora Carrington. Copyright © 2017 The Estate of Leonora Carrington.

EX H I

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NTR AL E C

GIA

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

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

From saints, roosters, architectural models, and poodles to flies, shells, human figures, skulls, and objects of everyday life, Katharina Fritsch’s realistic sculptures dissolve the edges between the ordinary and the uncanny, stirring our deep-rooted dreams and nightmares while awakening our childhood memories of religious tales, fables, and myths. Together, 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 and threatening; as in the allegories traced through fairy tales, churches, or temples, both of these things can be true at once. Fritsch first emerged to international acclaim as part of a new tendency in European sculpture in the 1980s, later representing Germany at the Biennale Arte 1995. Appearing at the Biennale again in 1999, she displayed her frightful sculpture Rattenkönig (1993), a larger-than-life installation physically manifesting the titular phenomenon, the Rat King – represented here by a circle of sixteen nearly 3-metre-tall matte black rats with tangled tails in the middle knotted in a ball. In this work, as in many of Fritsch’s other sculptures, 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. The imposing sculpture Elefant / Elephant (1987) was among Fritsch’s first large-scale works. Cast in dark chromium oxide green polyester from the mould of a stuffed elephant named “Bibi” from the collection of the Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig in Bonn, it reproduces the textures and folds of the mammal’s body with startling exactitude. Hovering over viewers on a museum pedestal, its size, clarity of anatomical detail, and colour profile take on a supernatural effect, which is further dramatised by the audience’s associations with elephants across the public imagination. Fixing itself within viewer’s mind, 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 La 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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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 has been internationally lauded since the 1980s, when she emerged as a part of a new, radically inventive artistic scene in Cologne, Germany. Characterised by a convergence of shrewd feminist provocations and a penchant for aesthetic irony, her films and videos, “knitting pictures,” ceramics, drawings, collages, and projects for children are celebrated for their biting critique, especially in the context of a male-dominated environment. Like other women 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, while offering up a destabilising new way of perceiving politics and culture. 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 largescale 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 and media-saturated 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 stitching of the monochrome wool pieces – each knitted by Trockel’s longtime collaborator Helga Szentpétery – signal their hand-made quality, recalling, in some cases, the Modernist fascination with monochromatic painting; others evoke conventional fabric patterns while putting a playful twist on our expectations of both the gestural quality of abstract painting and textile design’s opticality. The ambiguity they present between manual and mechanised labour is redoubled by Trockel’s decision to show some of these works alongside their preparatory studies. Evoking the forms of Minimalist, Pop, and Op Art, these works present a wry assessment of the subjectivity of visual representation and of art’s commodification. – MW

Rosemarie Trockel, Fraction Bars, 2021. Acrylic wool on canvas, 50.2 × 100.8 × 2.2 cm. Photo Ingo Kniest. Photo Ingo Kniest. Courtesy Sprüth Magers. © Rosemarie Trockel / VG Bild Kunst, Bonn

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Rosemarie Trockel, Till the Cows come Home, 2016 and Study for Till the Cows come Home, 2016. Dark blue wool on canvas, wood, 296 × 296 cm and 100 × 100 cm. Photo Mareike Tocha. Courtesy Sprüth Magers. © Rosemarie Trockel / VG Bild Kunst, Bonn

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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A ANDRA URSUT

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

At once seductive and unsettling, Andra Ursuţa’s formally innovative 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 the visionary artworks of women from previous generations including the Polish and Estonian sculptors Alina Szapocznikow and Anu Põder, who also depicted women’s bodies in states of fragmentation and transformation, Ursuţa’s work emphasises the vulnerability of the human form and the complexity of desire. In recent years, Ursuţa has begun experimenting with cast crystal sculptures, fusing direct casts of her body parts with everyday objects, salvaged trash, and props, including glass bottles, plastic tubes, void fill packaging, old clothes, BDSM garments, and cheap Halloween costumes. To create her figures, Ursuţa combines the traditional technique of lost wax casting with 3D scanning and printing. As such, much like the hybridised bodies characteristic of her greater practice, her sculptures are forged through an intensive process of physical transformation. Although encapsulated in colourful semi-translucent crystal contours, the swirled patterns and textured surfaces shaped by her production process reveal a collision of organic and inorganic forms floating within these distorted, sci-fi objects. The lounging woman in Predators ’R Us (2020), as in many of Ursuţa’s sculptures, is both missing limbs and growing unusual appendages, such as a pair of tentacled slippers inspired by the techno-futurist alien from the movie Predator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The alien physique depicted in Impersonal Growth (2021) was likewise inspired by the Alien films’ monstrous “Xenomorphs.” Performing as a vessel both metaphorically and practically (some of Ursuţa’s sculptures have contained reserves of alcohol; many works, including Predators ’R Us, Half-Drunk Mummy [2019] and Succubustin’ Loose [2021] have a soda bottle opening protruding from a mouth or shoulder socket), these works function as winking innuendo as well as more abstract receptacles for the subjectivity of the artist’s own bodily experience and memory. 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. Presented as creatures fashioned from rigid parts, 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

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Andra Ursuţa, Yoga Don’t Help, 2021. Lead crystal, soda-lime glass, 130.2 × 60.3 × 52.7 cm. Courtesy the Artist; David Zwirner; Ramiken, New York. © Andra Ursuţa

Andra Ursuţa, Half-Drunk Mummy, 2019. Lead crystal, 160 × 85.1 × 48.3 cm. Courtesy the Artist; David Zwirner; Ramiken, New York. © Andra Ursuţa

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CECILIA VICUÑA

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

Since she was a teenager in Santiago, Chile, Cecilia Vicuña has committed herself to a genre-bending aesthetic and literary practice spanning performance, poetry, drawing, film, painting, and sculpture, together gripped by questions of the body, ecology, gender, and culture and the sins of sexism and colonialism. An exile following the violent CIA-supported and Pinochet-led military coup against Salvador Allende in the early 1970s, Vicuña’s work – created in Chile and in London, followed by Colombia, and then New York – 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, provisional constructions known as precarios, delicate arrangements of rocks, driftwood, thread, and pieces of garbage collected during walks along the coastline. Often, these sculptures are left untouched, exposed to the forces of weather and tides. Even today, in new precarios such as NAUfraga (2022), composed of ropes and debris found around Venice, the power of Vicuña’s oppositional politics remains potent: unlike colonial forces that degrade the environment and have obliterated or obscured the culture of her ancestors through fixed forms like architecture, the abstract and the impermanent recuperate language and memories by other means. Taken from the Latin words navis (ship) and frangere (to break), NAUfraga suggests the tragic exploitation of the Earth, which has caused Venice to slowly sink into the sea. Like her precarios, Vicuña’s paintings evidence her indebtedness to Indigenous ways of thinking, in modes that are articulated as very much continuous with contemporary artistic forms. Leoparda de Ojitos (1977) and La Comegente (1971), examples of Vicuña’s flat portraits from the 1970s, take inspiration from 16th-century paintings made by Incan artists in Cuzco, Peru, who were forced to convert to Catholicism and both paint and worship Spanish religious icons. Constituting a concrete symbol of the compulsory administration of colonial ideology, these paintings were nonetheless marked by acts of artistic rebellion, often in the form of local symbology purposefully integrated by the artists into their work. In her paintings, Vicuña similarly takes up the forms of colonial portraiture but integrates personal, revolutionary, and mythological iconography. Surrounded by landscapes in globular vessels, the central goddess-like figure in La Comegente shows a woman in the act of ingesting a row of people. 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, Pueblo de altares, 2019. Dimensions variable. Exhibition view, Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2019. Photo Constance Mensh

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MRINALINI MUKHERJEE

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

The Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee worked intensively with fibre 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. Born to artist parents in post-Partition Bombay and raised in Santiniketan, a utopian community in West Bengal, Mukherjee’s earliest works, botanic-inspired wall hangings, made in the early 1970s, were prepared from natural rope, without the use of traditional weaving armatures or preparatory drawings. Instead, she experimented intuitively with the ancient Arabic hand-knotting weaving technique of macramé, which she would continue to use throughout her life in order to create her increasingly daring and monumental soft sculptures, which stand tall like divinities. Working with fibre, and later, bronze and ceramic, in relative isolation from other women artists who followed parallel traditions in Europe and United States in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s like Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sheila Hicks, and Lenore Tawney, Mukherjee forged her own radical path, while receiving little critical recognition in the West until the 1990s. As Mukherjee streamlined her material methodology throughout the 1970s – a handwrought, labour-intensive process that involved acquiring and sorting through mixed bags of exceedingly heavy bundles of rope purchased from New Delhi markets, which had to be uncoiled, straightened, and separated according to colour and thickness, and then chemically dyed – 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 human sexual organs. While nature was her primary inspiration, by the early 1980s she was further influenced by an interest in the personification of deities in Hinduism, representations of which she would frequently see on temples during travels throughout India. Although Mukherjee quoted these anthropomorphic deities, her use of religious idioms was, according to her, “de-conventionalised” and “personal,” as, she insisted, were her methods and materials.1 – MW

Chrissie Iles, “An Interview with Mrinalini Mukherjee,” in Mrinalini Mukherjee: Sculpture (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 12; reprinted in Shanay Jhaveri (ed.), Mrinalini Mukherjee (Mumbai: Shoestring Publisher, 2019), 27.

Mrinalini Mukherjee, Vanashree, 1994. Dyed hemp, 250 × 130 × 90 cm. Photo Avinsh Pasricha. Collection Jayashree Bhartia. Courtesy Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation Next pages: Exhibition view, Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Breuer, 2019, New York City, 2019. © Foto 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

Lifeworlds abound in Merikokeb Berhanu’s paintings. Concentric circles, flowing lines, and rich, jewel-toned hues of red, blue, and deep yellow are emblematic of Berhanu’s practice. Brimming with abstract forms, at the blink of an eye her canvases become recognisable cosmologies and topographies, bearing with them evocations of nature and its universal rhythms. The rising and setting of the sun, the magnetic pull of the moon on the ever-shifting tides, the revolution of the seasons – these deeply familiar cycles are part of Berhanu’s work, influencing the stroke of her paintbrush and finding their voice in the organic composition of each painting. There is also a profoundly human element to her work. Geographical maps seem to materialise from the winding contours, suggestive of cities, farms, and roads seen from high above. Anatomical shapes emerge, and the canvases become portals to the complex inner workings of the body. Berhanu’s series Cellular Universe pays homage to these bodily forms, in particular 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 recognisable forms find their way into Berhanu’s body of work. 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. This is consistent across the six new acrylic on canvas paintings that Berhanu has created for the Biennale. 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 one of the artist’s signature elliptical wombs. Another looks over it from outside, perhaps a mother cow watching over her child. A greenwired motherboard hovers under the calf, like a dystopian, digital amniotic fluid. This intermingling, however, does not indicate a smooth coalescence of life with technology and scientific advancement. Rather, 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 LVI, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 172.7 × 172.7 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Addis Fine Art. © Merikokeb Berhanu

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

Merikokeb Berhanu, Untitled LVII, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 183 × 122 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Addis Fine Art. © Merikokeb Berhanu

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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 was born in Kinngait, Nunavut – once part of Canada’s Northern Territories and returned to Inuit control in 1999 – to Kiawak Ashoona and Sorosilutu, both celebrated figures in the region’s visual arts community. After attending high school in Iqaluit, she returned to Kinngait, living with her daughter and family members at outposts like Kangiqsualujjuaq and Luna Bay. These experiences informed Ashoona’s focus on scenes of contemporary life in the Inuit Nunangat homeland. Ashoona produces her work at the Kinngait Studios, a communityrun art-making cooperative incorporated in 1959 as the artistic arm of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative. The work of her aunts and fellow studio members Napachie Pootoogook, Mayoreak Ashoona, and Kenojuak Ashevak has provided a profound influence for her own practice. Ashoona’s pen-and-pencil drawings fuse past and present into a divinatory future. The humans who populate the domestic and quotidian scenes depicted in her drawings are joined by mermaids, human-animal hybrids, and fantastical sea creatures. Surreal details – a mother’s nourishing breast transformed into the Earth, the masklike faces of a hooded figure, the fluorescent orange tint of a giant octopus – signal spiritual, cosmological, or phantasmatic forces in delicate coexistence with the everyday. Earth-like planets and vividly coloured, humanoid animals are recurring motifs in Ashoona’s work, often contorted or conjoined into hybrid creatures or arranged into semi-diagrammatic tableaux. Also recurring are superheroes and other comic book characters, reflecting the influx of popular culture experienced by Inuit peoples amidst a greater shift from land-based, semi-nomadic life to settled communities. In the two new works included The Milk of Dreams (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 ponchowearing, 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 recalls the social orientation of midcentury Realist painting infused with Surrealism’s mining of the subconscious, providing 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 Shuvinai Ashoona, Untitled, 2021. Graphite, colour pencil, ink on paper, 128 × 249.5 cm. Courtesy West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative. © Shuvinai Ashoona

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

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

The filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu’s surreal and subversive films are poetic hybrids of documentary, narrative, and experimental methods that incorporate folklore, archival and found footage, Black pop culture icons, scenes of daily life, oral histories, and semi-autobiographical experiences to a captivating effect. Centering the nuances of race, nationality, gender, and sexuality in her work, Owusu, who is firstgeneration 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. Theorising this position of existing at the intersection of multiple identities, Owusu appends scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness – the concept of the “warring” and irreconcilable ideals negotiated within African American identities – to encompass identity categories that he excluded. Calling this a “triple consciousness” or “third cinematic space,” Owusu expands this notion to contend with the conflicts and difficulties for African immigrants, women, or queer people existing between variable consciousnesses as they intersect with both Black American and white American cultural spaces. In Owusu’s 2013 short film Kwaku Ananse, she 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 his double life in the US. In Ananse’s stories, which are celebrated throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and parts of the American South, the titular character typically appears as part spider, part man and through surprising turns and twists of fate, he imparts the lesson that nothing can be taken at face value. In Owusu’s interpretation, a young woman, who seeks the advice of Ananse, is shown in the act of preserving folkloric traditions, while also grappling with the truth that every individual has multiple aspects to their identity, which might conflict with each other. – MW

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

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GA B R I E L L E 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, seeking vulnerabilities in the understanding of urban space as defined by private property, while laying bare the material history of colonisation. On walks through the streets surrounding her studio, Hill collects detritus like beer can tabs, dollar store lockets, and dandelions; mementoes of urban space that, for the artist, symbolise her own memories of the changing neighbourhood and its communities. Hill incorporates these found objects into sculptures and works on paper, which, since 2018, she has called Spells, where they adorn laboriously applied layers of slowdrying oil. For the artist, 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 take the form of rabbits. The sculptures are made by stuffing pantyhose with ground tobacco, a historically important material in both Indigenous and colonial economies. 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 Kiss, Sonshine, and Cousin (all 2019), while disarming in appearance, thus serve as a symbol for colonial governments’ imposition of capitalism onto Indigenous peoples, as well as a reminder of Indigenous cultures’ endurance in the present. Disintegration and Dispersal (both 2019) likewise symbolically suggest the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. The proportions of Hill’s flags, which are sewn from dried tobacco leaves, are based on those of 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. Her Spell drawings are also permeated with tobacco’s symbolic presence, coated in tobaccoinfused Crisco and adorned with collected objects. The artist has gifted some of these pieces to friends, and used others for trade. By remixing materials and forms imbued with cultural, spiritual, historical, and economic significance, Hill critiques settler colonialism while honoring expansive economic models that find power in reciprocity. – IW

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Spell #10, for unsticking, 2019. Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paint, magazine cutouts, snake charm, tobacco flower, beer can tab, thread, 34.3 × 33 cm (framed). Courtesy the Artist; Unit 17, Vancouver. © Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

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Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Mint, 2019. Pantyhose, beer can tabs, tobacco, bunny fur, thread, 14 × 17.9 × 24.1 cm. Photo Cemrenaz Uyguner. Courtesy the Artist; Unit 17, Vancouver. © Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

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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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 reveal a deeply personal vision of Southern African life. Her canvases, replete with vibrantly pigmented oil paint, pastel, and silkscreen ink, draw upon her years growing up in Zimbabwe and South Africa, as well as the wider contemporary experience of seeing oneself and one’s influences refracted through screens. Deftly employing techniques of collage, Hwami’s paintings cohere in composition and palette, examining the ways we exist together and experience one another in an increasingly digital world. Her paintings resonate with an exploratory interiority, as the artist merges photographs of friends and family with images gleaned from the Internet. Hwami integrates visual fragments from a variety of sources in her canvases: portraits, self-portraits, people gathered in groups, accompanied by potted plants and other objects. Elements repeat, as if one sees them through a nostalgic family photo album or the scrolling feed of social media. Early influences include Manga and graphic novels, Zamrock and the Zim Heavy music scene, post-rock and classical genres, as well as thinkers such as Alain de Botton, Alan Watts and Terence McKenna. Hwami’s installation for The Milk of Dreams comprises a room filled by four 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 Hwami 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 Munyaradzi’s expression of Shona ontology and Hwami’s own investment in Magical Realism and Afro-Futurism. For Hwami, the installation pursues syncretism as a source of healing, 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. This work is 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

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S I M O N E FAT TA L

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

Simone Fattal is an artist and writer known for ceramic sculptures, abstract paintings and drawings of landscapes, friends, and literary characters. Born in Damascus, Fattal grew up in Lebanon and studied philosophy first at the École des lettres in Beirut, followed by the Sorbonne in Paris. Returning to Beirut in 1969, she took up her artistic practice, creating paintings and sculptures in a small studio she lived and worked in. During the Lebanese Civil War, in 1980 Fattal left Beirut for Sausalito, California, with her partner, the poet and painter Etel Adnan. There, she founded the Post-Apollo Press, a publisher inspired by the spirit of the Apollo space program and devoted to innovative and experimental literary work. In 1988, Fattal took up her artistic practice again, making ceramic sculptures in a class at the Art Institute of San Francisco. Fattal’s sculptural creations often take the form of series of figures or miniature scenes, all of which appear as if they have only recently been excavated from an ancient archaeological site. Her figures employ the least amount of detail or specificity to be recognised as such: two wide columns become legs, a connecting piece of clay the torso or head, and a slight lean to the side a gesture or suggestion of connection to another one of the figures. In many ways, 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 consisting of two figures: one with long, thin legs appears to be carrying a sack on its back, suggested by its asymmetrical torso; the second, shorter with barely a torso at all, appears to follow the second one as they both lean at the same angle as if walking on a long journey together. Fattal has also produced three new sculptures for the Biennale Arte 2022, two in ceramic and one cast 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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Simone Fattal, Herald II, 2021. Glazed stoneware, 36 × 12.5 × 5 cm. Photo Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the Artist; kaufmann repetto, Milan / New York; Fondazione ICA Milano; Pompeii Commitment, Archaeological Matters. © Simone Fattal

Simone Fattal, Ra with Isis, 2021. Glazed stoneware, iridescent glazed figure, 44 × 34.5 × 23 cm and black figure, 40 × 8 × 8 cm. Photo Andrea Rossetti. Collection Nicoletta Fiorucci Russo. Courtesy the Artist; Fondazione ICA Milano; Pompeii Commitment, Archaeological Matters. © Simone Fattal

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E WIT

E I L E E N AGA R G E RT RU D A R N D T JOSEPHINE BAKER B E N E D E T TA CLAUDE CAHUN LEONORA CARRINGTON ITHELL COLQUHOUN VA L E N T I N E D E S A I N T - P O I N T LISE DEHARME M AYA D E R E N LEONOR FINI J A N E G R AV E R O L FLORENCE HENRI LOÏS MAILOU JONES I DA KA R ANTOINET TE LUBAKI B AYA M A H I E D D I N E

’S

CRAD

NADJA AMY NIMR MERET OPPENHEIM VA L E N T I N E P E N R O S E RAC H I L D E ALICE RAHON C A RO L RA M A EDITH RIMMINGTON E N I F RO B E RT RO SA RO SÀ A U G U S TA S AVA G E D O R O T H E A TA N N I N G T OY E N R E M E D I O S VA R O M E TA VA U X WA R R I C K F U L L E R L A U R A 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 Renaissance 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. 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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D A U G H T E R S O F T H E M I N O TA U R : WOMEN SURREALISTS’ RE-ENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD Alyce Mahon

In Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the tale of the sculptor Pygmalion who is so disillusioned with real women that he crafts himself a perfect one: a nude sculpture made from ivory. His obsession with his work of art is such that on the Festival of Venus he begs the goddess of love to breathe life into it. When his wish is granted his “image maid […] seemed to soften at the touch, and its firm texture yielded to his hand, as honey-wax of Mount Hymettus turns to many shapes when handled in the sun, and surely softens from each gentle touch.” 1 Ovid’s tale reminds us of the powerful potential of metamorphosis to transform individual and collective experiences of the world, as well as the materiality of the person, animal, plant, or thing. In Western culture, from Ovid to Madame d’Aulnoy, the Brothers Grimm, Mary Shelley, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, and Walt Disney, shapeshifting has been central to our collective concept of primordial and magical realms. From the 1920s to the 1960s, as it spread from Europe to the Americas, the Surrealists drew on this canon, as well as looking to Native American, Oceanic and Afro-Brazilian mythology, to take the idea of metamorphosis in provocative new directions. They embraced metamorphosis as a means to promote their avant-garde belief that the real and surreal were inseparable, that a blurring of the waking and dream states was necessary – urgent even – for creativity and humanity. The Surrealists were also inspired by metamorphosis as a means to the return of the repressed, which was accelerated by their reading of Sigmund Freud, and their exploration of “convulsive beauty” and “mad love” (amour fou).2 As Robert Desnos wrote in 1930, “certainly

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André Masson, Pygmalion, 1938. © SIAE

Pygmalion is dead, if he ever existed. But the example of this Narcissus of art is not about to tempt us. What we love is life with its cortege of strange manifestations, miracles, profound gazes, abuses, hot embraces.” 3 This stance was both poetic and political, and the theme of metamorphosis became central to the Surrealists’ exploration of subjectivity in an increasingly dehumanised and war-torn world. Born out of World War I, Surrealism thrived and expanded globally between the wars, and during and after World War II. Its collective reinterpretation of ancient mythology and popular tales of metamorphosis allowed a diverse group of artists and writers to transcend the increasingly threatening 20th century, to debunk rationalist thought and hypocritical morality at a time of conflict, and terror. In particular, European fascism led to machine-like obedience, militarism, and myths of racial purity. Against these, the Surrealists called for a new “collective myth,” against “oppression based on the family, religion, and the fatherland,” as André Breton declared in a lecture in 1935.4 Women Surrealists led the way in the creation of this collective mythology. Offering what we might describe as Surrealist fairytales, they used metamorphosis to map an erotic landscape that undermined the heteronormative, exploring a radically new appreciation of fluid human identity, liberated from biological and social categories such as sex and gender. Anticipating Angela Carter and other later feminists, women Surrealists aimed to re-educate through re-enchantment, seizing upon the fairy figures of the crone, siren, sphinx, hermit, or femme arbre (woman as arboreal figure), as well as offering a new male imago, the Monsieur Vénus. Together, their tales and images of metamorphosis spoke to the conviction of Leonora Carrington, one of the most prominent women Surrealists, that “there are so many questions, and so much Dogmaturd to clear aside before anything makes sense […] curiosity can only be satisfied if the millennia of accumulated false data be turned upside down. Which means turning oneself inside out and to begin by despising no thing, ignoring no thing.” 5 In both text and image Carrington awakens our curiosity by staging bizarre creatures of metamorphosis within the familiar; domestic space such as the kitchen or nursery become an uncanny locus for female empowerment, craft, and shamanism. As the protagonist of her novel The Hearing Trumpet (1974) explains: “Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our liver, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream.” 6 Carrington fused this Surrealist architecture with the tales of the Irish “tribe of the Gods,” the Túatha Dé Danann, and the Gaelic fairy folk, the Sidhe, which had been told to her as a child. She also incorporated Mexican folklore and her own harrowing experience of mental breakdown during World War II (powerfully documented in Down Below, 1944). Carrington’s art draws us into an exploration of what she called “cosmic energy” which could be “masculine and feminine, microcosmic and macrocosmic” at the same time.7 Her art is peopled by marvellously hybrid creatures full of this energy and cross-breeding women with horses, men with birds, and flora with fauna. This hybridity abounds in her painting The House Opposite (1945), especially in the detail of the little girl in the lower half of the composition, whose wings reference the myth of Psyche, traditionally represented by a butterfly. The girl also carries a golden bowl in which a partridge sits, a bird that symbolises spiritual regeneration as well as the Resurrection in mythological and Christian texts. Animal symbolism is central to Carrington’s oeuvre,

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and the bird (and egg) denotes female fertility, creativity, and wisdom, as seen again in Portrait of the Late Mrs Partridge (1947).

Ithell Colquhoun, Gouffres amers, 1939. Photo and courtesy The Hunterian, University of Glasgow. © The Artist’s Estate

Carrington offers a subversive variation on Ovid’s Metamorphoses in her painting And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur (1953), depicting the Minotaur not as half-man, half-bull but as half-woman, half-bull. This female Minotaur has blue eyes and delicate hands, and wears a sulphuric red cloak, whose colour symbolises the final rubedo stage of transformation in alchemy, which leads to the philosopher’s stone. She is seated at a table with a crystal ball, nurturing the two cloaked children standing nearby her – rather than devouring them. Carrington modelled the children on her own young sons and the title, “And Then…” suggests she is weaving her own story round the popular zoomorphic myth as both an artist and a mother. These various elements typify her combination of diverse references in her work – Catholicism, alchemy, the Popol Vuh (an epic of Mayan mythology), Celtic myth, and Kabbalah – to craft enchanting tales for the modern world. However, it is always woman, defined by Carrington as “female-humananimal,” that weaves together these cultural threads.8 This reflects her insistence that woman’s rights had to be “taken back again, including the mysteries which were ours and which were violated, stolen or destroyed.” 9 Gouffres amers (1939) is one of a series of “Méditerranée” paintings by Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) in which the body morphs into craggy blue Mediterranean landscapes. The figure of the river god is mocked as he morphs into a feminised seascape: his limbs are a collage of corals, seaweed, and shells and his phallus is a conch, sprouting a seaweed flower. Similarly, in Tree Anatomy (1942) Colquhoun presents the mythological figure of Daphne – the beautiful mountain nymph metamorphosed by her father into a laurel tree to save her from the desires of Apollo – as a deep, dark entrance in a knotted tree trunk. In antiquity laurel leaves were often used to denote athletic (if not sexual) triumph but Colquhoun’s image of the femme arbre overturns such virtue: she creates shady vulvar recesses and magnifies them so that female sexuality is centre-stage, natural and open and growing. This morphology advanced Colquhoun’s pursuit of a new feminine idol that fused esoteric Christianity, Theosophy, Kabbalah, and Surrealist occultism and rejected the narratives of what she termed “tyrants and victims” in favour of “opposites bound together in mitigating embrace by a silkworm’s thread.” 10 In 1931 Eileen Agar decried the “rampant and hysterical militarism […] the male element” that was spreading in Europe and espoused a theory of generative femininity involving “artistic and imaginative life under the sway of womb-magic.” 11 Her photographs of the Brittany landscape, Rocks at Ploumanac’h (1936), gave form to these ideas. Through the lens of her Rolleiflex 6)×)6 camera, Agar transformed naturally occurring rock formations into fleshy sculptural forms with corporeal names like Rockface and Bum and Thumb Rock, exaggerated their lines, surfaces, and recesses through her manipulation of light and shadow. Later, Agar’s Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse (1936) was a wearable woman’s hat, constructed from a cork basket, a fish bone, bark, starfish, coral, and shells, giving form to the cycle of life and death. It evoked a chain of fluid associations: the shared meal, the fetishism of fashion, the fairy Mélusine (the half-woman,

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Eileen Agar, Butterfly Bride, 1938. © The Estate of Eileen Agar; Bridgeman images / SIAE

half-serpent, sea siren, beloved by Breton), or the Native American ceremonial practice of gift-giving, or potlatch, discussed by Marcel Mauss in his influential study The Gift (1925). Agar’s Ceremonial Hat was a threedimensional collage in which metamorphosis was heightened by found objects and suggestive juxtaposition, a technique she also incorporates in many paintings – for example, pasting two dead butterflies and a leaf onto The Butterfly Bride (1938), to ensure the “displacement of the banal by the fertile intervention of chance or coincidence.” 12 By extension, in Philemon and Baucis (1939), Agar used the automatic Surrealist technique of frottage (creating a rubbing from a textured surface) to relay Ovid’s tale of a pious, Phrygian couple who kindly host what appear to be poor strangers but are actually Zeus and Hermes in disguise. In return, the couple are granted their wish to be turned into entwined trees when they die – one oak and one linden. By literally rubbing tree bark with chalk on paper in this work, Agar evokes the materials that feature in the tale whilst emphasising the opening of the rational mind to chance. Leonor Fini brings a more illusionistic style to the theme of metamorphosis as she stages erotic bodies that seem to warm under her paint brush. Men morph into sleeping nudes and nymphs, recalling Pygmalion’s muse, and women into monstrously beautiful but dangerous sphinxes, as in L’Alcove (1941), Femme assise sur un homme nu (1942), and Chthonian Deity Watching over the Sleep of a Young Man (1946). Fini’s use of colour, texture, costume, and the antique (draped curtains, classical ruins, armour) augment her fluid play with gender roles and allow her to enhance the pearly skin and feminine hips of her males, as well as the potency of the sphinx as both the source and destroyer of man. In 1972 Fini produced 35 etchings for a luxury edition of the decadent novel Monsieur Vénus (1884) by Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery), in which the Pygmalion tale is reversed. The artist Jacques Silvert begins as a “mistress” to Raoule de Vénérande and ends as her wife and “wax figure covered with rubber transparent skin,” in a love story about “a woman who would love men and […] who b[uggers] them.” 13 Fini captures the potential of this libertine woman in portraying Raoule in phallically erect poses or with a sphinx like expression, and her object of desire, Jacques, like a nymph, with long hair, a full mouth, and curvaceously nude limbs. Promoting what we would now call the non-binary in her work, Fini once stated: “I find I am usually stronger than men, and this is reflected in my paintings. The men tend to be asleep, passive, unthreatening, of ambiguous sexuality. The women are awake, alert, in control yet not necessarily threatening… I am fascinated by the androgyne, for it seems to me to be the ideal. It unites the thinking aspect of the male with the imaginative side of the female. I would like to think of myself as androgynous.” 14 Dorothea Tanning also turned to 19th-century novels for inspiration, finding in the pages of Edgar Allan Poe, Gustave Flaubert, and Joris-Karl Huysmans an uncanny world of shape-shifting and an art of “sirens singing and crying by turns.” 15 In the small oil painting Avatar (1947), a sleeping blonde female flies on a trapeze out of her bedroom enclosure, seeming to have been birthed out of a tree hollow. Her perfectly banal clothing contrasts with an erotic abstracted form, part body and part organs, emerging from a framed mirror. It echoes her electrified state of mind in its formlessness. This composition invokes Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice leaps

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into the rabbit hole with glee – “Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end!”, as well as Carroll’s idea that the psyche was open to the “eerie” presence of fairies.16 Tanning draws the viewer towards thresholds that promise metamorphosis (tree hollow, door, mirror) all bathed in luminescent green – a colour which denotes the spirit in alchemy. She dares us to leap through these to the other side where the spirit and desires can take any form: “[E]nigma is a very healthy thing, because it encourages the viewer to look beyond the obvious and commonplace.” 17

Dorothea Tanning, Avatar, 1947. Private Collection, Chicago. Courtesy The Dorothea Tanning Foundation. © SIAE

Carrington, Agar, Colquhoun, Fini, and Tanning modelled new forms of social organisation in their art – a vocation they shared with other pioneering women Surrealists beyond the scope of this essay, such as Jane Graverol, Alice Rahon, Edith Rimmington, and Remedios Varo. Some of these women were official members of the Surrealist group and some were not, or they had fractious relations with it. Many of them knew each other and moved in the same social circles, although they lived and worked in different parts of the world. They were united by the idea of woman as a healer – whether in the guise of crone, witch, sphinx, hermit, or avatar. They challenged authority, whether bourgeois morality, patriarchy, militarism, nationalism, or fascism. They also paved the way for contemporary theories of metamorphosis as becoming and unbecoming, defying fixed signification. To borrow Hélène Cixous’ description of the hybrid text, their art grants us “access to the passage, to the trans., to the crossing of borders, to the delimitation of genuses-genders-genres and species.” 18 In refusing the divide between art and life, these artists open up a state of being that Rosi Braidotti calls “woman/animal/insect […] an affect that flows.” 19 Today, when narrative and visual culture have become so heavily mediated and technological, the materiality and intimacy of their stories and images is a rare luxury, but one that still resonates with poetic, political and polyvocal potential, breaking up “the law” and “the truth” with love and laughter.20 Alyce Mahon is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include the monographs Surrealism and the Politics Of Eros, 1938–1968 (Thames & Hudson, 2005); Eroticism and Art (Oxford University Press, 2005 and 2007); and The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde (Princeton University Press, 2020); and numerous critical essays on figures of the international avant-garde – Helena Almeida, Hans Bellmer, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Frida Kahlo, Pierre Klossowski, Jean-Jacques Lebel, André Masson and Roberto Matta, Pierre Molinier, Carolee Schneemann. She lives in Cambridge, England.

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1 2

6 7

Ovid, Metamorphoses (Boston: Cornhill, 1922), Book 10, 270. André Breton defined “convulsive beauty” as “veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magiccircumstantial or not at all,” and amour fou as “reciprocal and unique.” See André Breton, L’Amour fou (1937); English ed. Mad Love (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 19 and 93. Robert Desnos, “Pygmalion and the Sphinx,” Documents, 2(1), 1930, 32–39, annotated trans. Simon Baker, Papers of Surrealism, 2007(7), 5 [www.research. manchester.ac.uk/portal/ files/63517391/surrealism_issue_7.pdf]. André Breton, “Political Position of Today’s Art” (1935), in Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 232, emphasis in original. Leonora Carrington, “Commentary,” in Edward James (ed.), Leonora Carrington: A Retrospective Exhibition (New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1975), 23–24. Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (London: Virago Press, 1991), 17. Leonora Carrington, The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below, introduction by Marina Warner (London: Virago Press, 1989), 177. Leonora Carrington, “What is a Woman” (1970), in Penelope Rosemont (ed.), Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 372–375, 372. Carrington, “Commentary,” 23.

10 Ithell Colquhoun, “Water Stone of the Wise,” in Alex Comfort and John Bayliss (eds.), New Road 1943: New Directions in European Art and Letters (Essex: Grey Walls Press, 1943), 198–199. 11 Eileen Agar, “Religion and the Artistic Imagination,” The Island, 1(4), 1931, 102. 12 Eileen Agar, A Look at My Life (London: Methuen, 1988), 147. 13 Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus: A Materialist Novel (New York: MLA, 2004), 208, and XXIX. 14 Leonor Fini, quoted in Peter Webb, Sphinx: The Art and Life of Leonor Fini (New York: Vendome Press, 2009), 274. 15 Dorothea Tanning, Birthday (San Francisco: The Lapis Press, 1986), 65. 16 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Macmillan & Co., 1867), 4, emphasis in original, and Sylvie and Bruno (London: Macmillan & Co., 1889), 191. 17 Dorothea Tanning, interview with John Gruen, The Artist Observed (Pennington, GA: A Cappella Books, 1991), 189. 18 Hélène Cixous, “‘Mamãe, disse ele,’ or Joyce’s Second Hand,” in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), 105. 19 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2002), 118. 20 See Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds.), New French Feminisms: An Anthology (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 258.

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Leonora Carrington

Remedios Varo

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Remedios Varo

Dorothea Tanning

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Ithell Colquhoun

Edith Rimmington

Dorothea Tanning

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Leonor Fini

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Jane Graverol

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Leonora Carrington

Eileen Agar

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12, 13a–13b

Benedetta

Enif Robert

Valentine Penrose

100

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Carol Rama

101

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17, 18

Nadja

Gertrud Arndt

Florence Henri

102

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22, 23

Toyen

Claude Cahun

103

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Loïs Mailou Jones

104

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Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

27, 28, 29

Augusta Savage

Laura Wheeler Waring

105

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30, 31

Amy Nimr

Antoinette Lubaki

106

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Baya Mahieddine

107

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Ida Kar

Meret Oppenheim

Mary Wigman

Valentine de Saint-Point

108

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Alice Rahon

Josephine Baker

109

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41–43

Maya Deren

110

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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 2 Remedios Varo, Simpatía (La rabia del gato), 1955. Oil on masonite, 95.9 × 85.1 cm. Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires 3 Remedios Varo, Armonía (Autorretrato sugerente), 1956. Oil on masonite, 75 × 92.7 cm. Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires 4 Dorothea Tanning, Deirdre, 1940. Oil on canvas, 50.8 × 40.6 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy The Dorothea Tanning Foundation 5 Ithell Colquhoun, The Pine Family, 1940. Oil on canvas, 46 × 54 cm. Photo © The Israel Museum Jerusalem. The Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art in the Israel Museum 6 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 7 Dorothea Tanning, Avatar, 1947. Oil on canvas, 35.6 × 27.9 cm. Private Collection, Chicago. Courtesy The Dorothea Tanning Foundation 8 Leonor Fini, L’Alcove, 1941. Oil on canvas, 73 × 97 cm. Photo Nicholas Pishvanov. Collection Rowland Weinstein. Courtesy Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco. © Estate of Leonor Fini 9 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 10 Leonora Carrington, Ulu’s Pants, 1952. Oil and tempera on panel, 54.6 × 91.4 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco. © Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY 11 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 12 Benedetta, Le forze umane. Romanzo astratto con sintesi grafiche (cover illustration). Foligno, Franco Campitelli Editore, 1924. Courtesy Biblioteca comunale Augusta di Perugia 13 [13a–13b] Benedetta, Le forze umane. Romanzo astratto con sintesi grafiche (illustrations). Foligno, Franco Campitelli Editore, 1924. Courtesy Ministero della Cultura – Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana 14 Enif Robert, Un ventre di donna. Romanzo chirurgico by Enif Robert and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (cover). Facchi editore Milano, 1919. Collection Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Florence, Italy

15 Valentine Penrose, Ariane, c. 1934. Collage on paper, 16.2 × 20.3 cm. © The Artists Estate. All rights reserved. Supplied courtesy of The Roland Penrose Collection 16 Carol Rama, Appassionata, 1941. Watercolour on paper, 33 × 23 cm. Photo Sebastiano Pellion. Private Collection 17 Gertrud Arndt, Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 16, 1930. From portfolio Maskenselbstbildnisse (reprinted 1996), 24.1 × 19.3 cm. Museum Folkwang, Essen. Photo © Jens Nober 18 Gertrud Arndt, Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 13, 1930. From portfolio Maskenselbstbildnisse (reprinted 1996), 24.1 × 19.3 cm. Museum Folkwang, Essen. Photo © Jens Nober 19 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 20 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 21 Toyen, The Shooting Gallery (Střelnice), 1939–1940. From portfolio of 12 photolithographs, 32 × 44 cm each. Originally published by Fr. Borový, Prague, 1946 22 Claude Cahun, Self portrait (reflected image in mirror, checquered jacket), 1928. Monochrome negative, 11.8 × 9.4 cm. Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections 23 Claude Cahun, Je tends les bras, 1931. Monochrome negative with a pink tinge, 11 × 9 cm. Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections 24 Loïs Mailou Jones, Africa, 1935. Oil on canvas on board, 61 × 51 cm. The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina 25 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 26 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 27 Laura Wheeler Waring, The Crisis, April 1923 (cover illustration). Courtesy Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library 28 Laura Wheeler Waring, The Crisis, December 1928 (cover illustration). Courtesy Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library

29 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 30 Amy Nimr, Untitled (Fish and Skeletons), 1936. Watercolour on paper, 55 × 42.5 × 3 cm. Collection Sheikh Hassan M. A. Al-Thani 31 Amy Nimr, Untitled (Underwater Skeleton), 1942. Gouache on wood, 63 × 54.5 × 5 cm. Collection Sheikh Hassan M. A. Al-Thani 32 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 33 Baya Mahieddine, Femme robe jaune cheveux bleus, 1947. Gouache on board, 70 × 54 cm. Collection Jules Maeght, Paris. © Photo Galerie Maeght, Paris 34 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 35 Ida Kar, Surreal Study, 1947 / c. 2016. Photograph, modern bromide print, 25.4 × 20.6 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London. © National Portrait Gallery, London 36 Mary Wigman, Mary Wigman tanzt (still), 1932. Film, c. 10 mins. Collection BundesarchivFilmarchiv, Berlin. Film: K164573-1. © Mary Wigman Stiftung / Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln 37 Meret Oppenheim, Der Spiegel der Genoveva, 1967. Print, 25 × 17 cm. Private Collection 38 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 39 Alice Rahon, The Juggler, 1946. Wire marionette, 58 × 38 × 12 cm. Collection Francisco Magaña Moheno and Carlos Santos 40 Josephine Baker, Dans Revue des Folies Bergère, danse avec plumes... (still), 1925. Film, 56 sec. Courtesy GP archives. Collection Gaumont Actualité 41 [41–43] Maya Deren, The Witch’s Cradle (stills), 1943. Film, 12 mins 40 sec. Courtesy The New American Cinema Group, Inc./The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

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ARTISTS’ BIO GRAPHIES

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E I L E E N AGA R 1899, Buenos Aires, Argentina – 1991, London, UK Bum and Thumb Rock is one of seventy black-and-white photos that Eileen Agar took in the summer of 1936 in Ploumanac’h, a village on the French side of the Channel. Like others in this series, it seems to capture the peace and calm of the coastal landscape. But 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, alongside her fascination with the natural world. A few months before this photo, artist Roland Penrose and critic Herbert Read had already linked Agar’s fervid imagination to Surrealism. They included some of her works in the movement’s first British exhibition, praising the way she tempered its dreamlike images with a touch of frivolity. In 1936, as if to demonstrate the whimsicality pointed out by her colleagues, Agar made and wore a strange Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse: a sculptural, pointed 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, once again taking a comical approach to the underlying imagery of her oeuvre. All of Agar’s works from the 1930s onward seem to echo the unusual rock formations of Ploumanac’h, and even when not actually three-dimensional, have a distinctly sculptural quality. For instance, the layers and impasto in her paintings add volume to the surface, and as in Wisdom Tooth (c. 1960s),

suggest a landscape invaded by organic and inorganic incrustations. Amid patches of darkness, ultramarine blue backgrounds, geometric patterns and outlines of limegreen 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. Each of Agar’s works is a collage of images and objects that transport the viewer into a world that is unquestionably more magical – or witty – than the point of departure. – SM

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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 many different kinds of women. Some embody the ideal of the modern woman, while others seem to be from some Eastern tradition; one even spots occasional references to art history, or to film stars. In general, each photo is a fragment from a broad spectrum of identities that includes young girls, grieving widows, crying geisha, and bejewelled ladies in flowery, feathered hats. In the famous, iconic Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 13, for instance, 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), and has the proud gaze of someone who has a role in society and uses fashion to show it. Though Arndt herself believed in this specific ideal of womanhood – as we can see from other images not connected to this project – her self-portraits are utterly playful, driven by a clear desire for self-expression. At the time she took them, the artist had just definitively abandoned her career in textile design, and had never used photography except to document design objects or architecture. In this sense, Maskenselbstbildnis seems like a reclamation of artistic agency; though it 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 definitely 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

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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 environment of the southern Midwest, and getting her theatrical start

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with mediocre vaudeville troupes, Baker moved to Paris in 1925; there, at the age of just nineteen, she debuted at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in her first cabaret show, Revue nègre. French colonialism had reached its peak in those years, so it is no surprise that her European performances were a huge and instant success. 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, which she kept as a theatrical sidekick and pet. In the silent footage of Baker dancing at the famous Parisian music hall Folies Bergère, for instance, she performs an exuberant Charleston: bare-breasted, dripping jewellery, and dressed in an eccentric plumed costume, she looks like a mesmerising goddess, both modern and wild. Her sensuality and eroticism – quite outré for the conservative culture of the time – are offset, however, by the clowning facial expressions that remained her hallmark up until the 1950s. After World War II, having recorded several albums and become the first Black woman to achieve global celebrity, Baker began incorporating messages about civil rights into her shows. She memorably refused to perform for a segregated audience, responded publicly to threats from the KKK, and spoke at the March on Washington in 1963 alongside Martin Luther King. Her political convictions also led her to adopt twelve children from around the world, whom she affectionately called her tribu arc-en-ciel (rainbow tribe). They were with her until her death, which came unexpectedly a few days after she celebrated her fiftieth year in entertainment by opening a final show in Paris. – SM

woman to sign, the imagery in her paintings seems to hover, unreal. But whilst the abstraction of Velocità di un motoscafo (1922) or the series Sintesi delle comunicazioni (1933–1934) still focus on the Futurist celebration of progress, Benedetta’s writing expresses a spiritual revolution. Her literary work, which becomes verbal-visual in parolibere (liberated words) compositions and graphic synthesis accompanying the prose, describes seemingly ordinary characters who have extraordinary, mythic experiences. Luciana, Benedetta’s alter ego in Le forze umane, is a young woman from the outskirts of Rome, frustrated and anxious about her family and searching for her own identity. The autobiographical realism alternates with abstract chapters in pseudo-scientific language, accompanied by nineteen illustrations in black ink that portray the protagonist’s emotions: 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. Whether or not it is an autobiographical reference to meeting Marinetti, this drawing encapsulates ideas the artist must have absorbed from her Waldensian, 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

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CLAUDE CAHUN 1894, Nantes, France – 1954, Saint Helier, Jersey, UK

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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, deciding to omit her surname, 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; constantly striving for a total work of art, she unified her output, trying to capture the occult, cosmological side of the phenomena traditionally glorified by the movement. Simulating the dizzying perspectives of flight and the “extraterrestrial spirituality” suggested by the 1929 Manifesto of Aeropainting, which she was the only

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. In defiance of 1920s Europe’s strictly binary gender norms, Cahun and Moore adopted androgynous pseudonyms and self-presentations in both art and life. Experimenting with the culturally coded limits of femininity, Cahun may be understood as a precursor to artists such as Martha Wilson, Cindy Sherman, and Gillian Wearing. In Cahun’s photographs, she adopts a range of characters – a masked, vampish coquette in Self portrait (in robe with masks attached) (1928); a leering matron in Self portrait (with Nazi badge between her teeth) (1945); or even, as in Je tends les bras (1931), a limbed stone abutment – treating identity as a site of masquerade. Her frequent use of mirroring or doubling – as in Self portrait (reflected

image in mirror, chequered jacket) (1928) or Hands and Table (untitled) (1936) – creates unnerving, psychologically charged compositions while also making a winking reference to homoerotic or even narcissistic sexual desire. In the 1920s, Cahun moved with Moore to Paris where she performed in several experimental theatre productions that introduced her to members of the Surrealist circle. Although Surrealist artists espoused anti-bourgeois sentiments and openness to non-European influences, they held regressive notions regarding women and homosexuality. Women, in Surrealism, were often reduced to the role of the muse, or represented as fragmented, object-like body parts. While stylistically aligned with the movement, Cahun remained apart and distinct from it. Keepsake (1932), for example, 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 makes it appear severed, evoking the Surrealist trope of the dissected female body; yet, her eyes are not passive, directly confronting the viewer’s gaze or actively scanning the surroundings. Cahun rejects the figure of the muse, eluding categorisation through the power of ambiguity and continuous transformation. In 1937 Cahun and Moore moved to the island of Jersey where they mounted resistance campaigns against the Nazi occupiers by distributing activist leaflets to soldiers. During these campaigns, Cahun and Moore employed their incessant role playing to disguise themselves as elderly citizens. Nevertheless, they were eventually arrested and sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment; they were released when the island was liberated in May 1945. – LC & IW

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LEONORA CARRINGTON 1917, Clayton-le-Woods, UK – 2011, Mexico City, Mexico A strange female figure stands in front of a dark red background; slightly out of proportion, she wears a long mustardcoloured dress. Her shape is human up to the shoulders, but then her face becomes a black butterfly that levels a hypnotic yellow gaze on the viewer. In this Portrait of Madame Dupin (1949), the figure is also clutching an even stranger creature to her chest: probably her child, it has a knobby body that resembles a large root. This human-plant hybrid, like its insectile mother and most of the characters that people Leonora Carrington’s paintings,

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drawings and stories, seems like an obvious product of the half-real, half-fancied world the artist believed in from childhood. In the late 1920s, when she was barely in her teens, Carrington began constructing her own mythological universe, which was influenced by the Celtic legends she had heard from her Irish mother and would overlap with those of her fellow Surrealists. After moving to Paris in 1936, the artist 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 separated her from her partner Max Ernst and triggered a terrible breakdown that kept her shut away in a Spanish asylum for a year, Carrington 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 female figures, often monstrous, and in thrall to occult, cosmic, clearly spiritual forces. Portrait of the Late Mrs Partridge (1947), for instance, depicts a tall, powerful woman with a long neck, very small head, and electrified hair, dressed in a crimson robe and caressing a large blue bird. Carrington portrays her like some hallowed medieval icon, and like Madame Dupin, she becomes magical: capable of grasping and perhaps even shaping the stormy moods of her natural surroundings. – SM

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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 like automatism. 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. The year 1936 saw the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London – the first major Surrealist exhibition outside of France – as well as the foundation of the International Surrealist Bulletin, officially inaugurating the British Surrealist Group that would include members Eileen Agar and Paul Nash. Colquhoun joined the group in 1939 only to leave a year later, refusing to renounce her involvement with

occult groups or to display allegiance to British Surrealism alone. Greatly influenced by W.B. Yeats and other Irish writers, her interest in Celtic esotericism led her to move to Cornwall in the 1940s, where she would increasingly pursue mythology, alchemy, and the occult. The Pine Family (1940) portrays three pelvic forms that simultaneously suggest mutilated body parts and felled tree trunks, with stylised plants implying pubic hair. The ambiguous limb at the bottom of the canvas is labelled “celle qui boite” (“the one who limps”). This is a play on the name “Gradiva” (“the one who walks”), given to an anonymous woman from a Roman bas-relief in a novella by Wilhelm Jensen and subsequently adopted as the subject of a 1908 study by Sigmund Freud and a favoured muse of male Surrealist artists. The red-tinted figure ambiguously floating in the foreground is affixed with a tag reading “l’hermaphrodite circoncis:” “the circumcised hermaphrodite.” In the painting’s top half, a third figure is marked by a white flag bearing the name “Atthis,” referring to a character who features in the love poetry of the Archaic Greek writer Sappho. Alluding to disembodied phalluses and ancient mythology, the painting presents a deployment of Freudian tropes and symbolism related to fetishism and the fear of castration, as well as the various semiotic registers and markers that signal gender and sex. Engaged in the exploration of androgyny, Colquhoun displaces and subverts the male heterosexual desires that proliferated in Surrealism’s male-dominated currents. – LC

A clear leader in Parisian cultural circles, she was a muse, friend, and companion to the most famous figures of the European avant-garde, harnessing the “lust” that she celebrated as a key tool for tackling any artistic discipline – whether painting, poetry, or etching. In 1914, having lost her faith in Futurism, de Saint-Point turned all her attention to dance, presenting a new kind of performance that she called Métachorie – from the Greek for “beyond the chorus.” Augmenting the choreography with projected images and perfumes, it alternated movement with the recital of poems. The dancer would come on stage blindfolded, dressed in “oriental” or medieval costumes, to strike idéiste (ideative) poses; they are 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, Valentine de Saint-Point abandoned her Métachories after just a few stagings – two of which were in Paris and New York – and embarked on cosmopolitan peregrinations in search of a new artistic identity. After attempting to find a community of intellectuals in Corsica, she moved to Egypt, converted to Sufism, and died in Cairo in 1953, alone and forgotten. – SM

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

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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, French artist Valentine de Saint-Point recited her Manifeste de la Femme futuriste, expressing one of the most radical and inflammatory ideological positions in the movement. 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 first declaration of intent, 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.

Though they are by two different authors more than half-century apart, and differ in literary approach, 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, seem linked by strange affinities. Both sparked a scandal upon publication, which their authors stubbornly faced down; both tell the story of a woman bursting with volatile sensuality; and both draw curious parallels between her 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

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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. The thirty-five black-and-white illustrations for the second edition of Monsieur Vénus, published in 1972, closely resemble the eight bold drawings on fuchsia backgrounds in the first edition of Oh! Violette: in both, the bodies of the female characters are often nude and androgynous, surrounded by plants, and drawn in a sinuous, seductive style, so similar that it bridges the generation gap between the authors. In the late 1920s, Rachilde withdrew from the Parisian scene after shocking it with what was considered pornographic literature, while Deharme formed ties with Surrealism, influencing its ideological development with her revolutionary stories. We do not know if the two ever met, but their many similarities are reflected by their proud portrayals of modern, powerful women. – SM

man, played by Marcel Duchamp, who appears to have been summoned by the witch’s cradle, with string entangling all his fingers. In a flash, Duchamp is gone and the film cuts to a beating heart, a lingering shot, making the audience suddenly and poignantly aware of their own internal rhythm. Viewer’s heart and pictured heart coalesce into one synchronised beat and the present drifts to the past, to a revolutionary time in American cinema. For Deren, film was supposed to enable mistakes, provoke, and, ultimately, create an experience. She was a fierce champion of New York’s avant-garde and hated Hollywood. An integral member of the Greenwich Village bohemian scene, her artistic pursuits traversed film, dance, poetry, photography, and theory. Deren died far too young, at age 44, but her work, in its unflinchingly feminist, antiestablishment, spiritual, and curious way, left a permanent mark for generations of artists and cinephiles to come. The end, for Deren, is also the beginning. – IA

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M AYA D E R E N 1917, Kyiv, Ukraine – 1961, New York City, USA “The beginning is the end” is written on a woman’s forehead, wrapped around a pentacle – an occult, star-shaped symbol conjuring magical phenomena and the element of earth. The line can be read in a constant loop: the beginning is the end is the beginning is… a mantra, perhaps, for experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, who cast actress Pajorita Matta to wander from one ritual to the next in her Surrealist short film The Witch’s Cradle (1943). Silent and shot in black and white, 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. Deren never finished The Witch’s Cradle, which contributes both to its unique place in her oeuvre and its heightened Surrealist qualities. The writer-director avoided standard narrative arcs and comprehensible place and time in pursuit of a far more mystical work. The film’s title is a play on “Cat’s cradle,” a game played by two or more people weaving various figures from a looped thread of string. The connective thread in this unusual story is just that: a thread, weaving its way from one covert hand to a dark room, snaking up a blazer’s collar and back into open hands, not a cat’s cradle but a witch’s cradle. The film opens with a close-up of Matta’s nose and lips and quickly jump-cuts to a

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 Fini’s oppressive father. Over the years her father would try to bring her back to Argentina, even attempting to kidnap her, forcing Fini to disguise herself as a boy, sowing the seeds of her masquerades and gender reversals. It was an illness during her teen years, in which she had to keep her eyes bandaged for two months, that stimulated the development of her complex visual imagery drawing from dreams, the psyche, and pure imagination. In the 1930s she met artist Giorgio de Chirico, who would advise her to move to Paris and introduced her to the Surrealists including André Breton and Salvador Dalí. She rejected the invitation to officially join the group, disavowing Breton’s traditional view of women. A feminist icon, extravagant and independent, Fini wore eccentric theatrical dresses adorned with masks and ripped clothing, often captured in photographs by Lee Miller and Dora Maar. While she cultivated friendships with Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington, Fini exhibited across New York, Paris and London alongside the likes of Max Ernst and in 1943 her work was included in the exhibition 31 Women organised by Peggy Guggenheim at her gallery Art of This Century in New York. Fini forged an artistic career that expanded from the realm of drawing and painting to the dimensions

of literature and fashion, illustrating several famous books, working for Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and designing costumes for ballet, theatre and film, including Italian director Federico Fellini’s 8½. Fini was interested in the macabre, visiting morgues to study cadavers. This macabre pursuit is translated into a sensual encounter with the momentarily still body of Nico Papatakis in L’Alcove (1941). In the painting 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. She gazes down at his elongated fingers strategically and coyly placed. Exchanging roles, Fini 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 “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

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J A N E G R AV E R O L 1905, Ixelles, Belgium – 1984, Fontainebleau, France Although she was wholly allied with the Belgian Surrealist movement, Jane Graverol’s artwork seems to proclaim its stylistic independence. Like the rest of the group that formed around the wellknown painter René Magritte, Graverol constructed dreamlike, conceptual images, but 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 that, when not emerging from the landscape or appearing like a mirage, takes on bestial traits that 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 new techniques. Alongside oils, watercolours, and pastels, collage allowed her to juxtapose images from books or magazines, using the hybrid nature of montage to capture the metamorphoses that most her female subjects seem to be undergoing.

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The sphinx in L’École de la vanité (1967), exemplifies this approach; taking the ambiguity of the mythological figure (also portrayed in a small painting behind her) to an extreme, she conveys a femininity that is monstrous, yet aware of its own sensuality. Though her insides are a tangle of machinery and her body has wings and a tail, 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. For that matter, Jane Graverol’s artistic outlook is deeply rooted in the cultural context of the mid-20th century, and thus inseparable from the faith in progress that saw technology as a fundamental ally. This metamorphosis into a hybrid – natural, artificial, and fanciful, all at the same time – 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

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. After she moved to Paris in the 1930s, her practice turned towards still lifes or romantic archaeological landscapes, moving away from Surrealist symbolism though remaining inexorably pervaded by it. 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 This artist is also part of Seduction of the Cyborg; see p. 507.

a mostly imagined Africa, others sought to depict African art and culture in complex ways that eschewed Modernism’s exoticism and flattening of these forms. In Jones’ oeuvre, one sees her grappling with this very question. Striving to locate an appropriate visual language for her diasporic encounters, that 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

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LOÏS MAILOU JONES

I DA KA R

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

1908, Tambov, Russia – 1974, London, UK

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FLORENCE HENRI 1893, New York City, USA – 1982, Compiègne, France In one of her self-portraits, probably the most famous, from 1928, Florence 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 portray the complex, hybrid femininity that was widespread after the war, and which she encountered on her many sojourns in Europe. Born in America and raised in Rome, Henri moved to Berlin when she was just twenty; fascinated by the feminist model of the Neue Frau (New Woman) that she found there, she built her own multifaceted image. 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, in a constant metamorphosis of the self. Yet these black-and-white photos seem less linked to the historical avant-gardes than to the New Vision (or Neue Sehen) 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

For nearly seven decades, Loïs Mailou Jones – painter, teacher, intellectual – 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. Born in Boston to a middle-class family, Jones was the first Black graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and would later spend almost a half-century teaching art at Howard University, a hotbed of Black intellectual life in Washington, D.C. Jones’ artistic development was in no small part sustained by summertime sojourns to Harlem in the mid-1930s and 1940s, a sabbatical in Paris between 1937 and 1938, frequent visits to Haiti to teach, study, and paint, and trips across the African continent in the 1970s. 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; time spent in New York and Paris would prove particularly influential in the development of her use of this type of visual idiom. During the 1930s and 1940s, as both cities experienced a wellspring of intellectual and creative activity among artists, writers, and thinkers associated with the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude movements, traditional African plastic art forms, especially masks and textiles, were frequently positioned by peers in a forward vision of modernity. While some artists worked with the aesthetics of

One of Ida Kar’s most iconic photographs is a black-and-white picture in which the white cast of two female hands, perfectly detailed, emerges from a dark, dramatic background. The palms are cupped together to form a hollow, literally framed by a rim of unpolished material. This small sculpture bears every resemblance to a religious relic or precious archaeological artefact, but the title of the image, Surreal Study (1947), suspends all definitive interpretation, prompting freer, more ambiguous trains of thought. 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 that has turned a woman’s body into stone. Over the preceding decade, not surprisingly, Kar had been an active member of the Surrealist group Art et Liberté in Egypt. Both in this country, where she had moved at thirteen with her family, and during her years in Paris, she built a photographic practice aimed at overturning all semantic hierarchies. In the 1930s and 1940s, alongside the portraits for which she is best known, the artist took a series of photographs that could roughly be described as still lifes; they depict more or less ordinary objects, yet suggest an alternative – often emotional – interpretation of their features. L’Étreinte (1940), for instance, shows two bones from some animal, still joined by shreds of flesh and standing next to each other like two monolithic pieces of architecture or, as the title suggests, two abstract, embracing figures. Kar’s photographic eye has plucked

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these white remains from their original context (probably a slaughterhouse) and infused them with the dramatic, introspective narrative pathos that became her stylistic hallmark. In 1960, when 140 of her pictures were shown in the first photographic exhibition ever held at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Ida Kar clearly demonstrated that in the many portraits of artists that she took over the last twenty years of her career, her key aim was once again – as always – to analyse, control, and even subvert reality. – SM

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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 Leopold II of Belgium – posing as a philanthropist – was ravaging the Congo Free State, imposing a bloody dictatorship and enslaving millions of inhabitants. Although her colourful drawings bear no specific trace of the atrocities inflicted on the people of Congo, Lubaki’s story was deeply shaped by the exotic allure that Europeans saw in her art, and more generally, by the ethnographic gaze they levelled on all artists from the colonies. In 1926, during a military mission, Belgian administrator and art collector Georges Thiry came across the murals that Antoinette 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. Thiry’s attention initially focused on Albert, but extended to his wife when she began to make a separate series of works, signing them “Antoinet.” 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 seem to float on the page; arranged in frames that delimit the narrative space, they are filled in with a few quick strokes of natural pigment (primarily clay, charcoal, and kaolin). All of Lubaki’s drawings adopt a dreamlike style that alternates floral motifs with figures of people and animals. Whilst the characters in Untitled (three characters under a tree) hover around a stylised tree, echoing the exuberant hues of the sparse leaves on its branches, the creatures in Untitled (crocodile, fish, bird) live in fairytale harmony amid similar plants. In 1929, when these two drawings were presented to great acclaim at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels with about sixty other works, they were held up as the most spectacular example of what was considered “exotic” creativity. 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, and their ancestral, natural imagery truly seems to offer an alternative path. – SM

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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, saw to her education, and encouraged her creativity. The young, talented Baya was immediately embraced by the Parisian avant-garde, and until her return to Algeria in 1953, earned enthusiastic praise from leading figures on the international scene – starting with André Breton, who wrote the introduction to her first show. Though the Surrealists and Fauves saw her work as an authentic fusion of the “primitive” and naive aesthetics they strove to recreate, Baya’s style refused to be pigeonholed, acquiring unique traits that suggest a fairytale world. Aside from some small ceramic sculptures, her works are mainly paintings on cardboard; brightly coloured, they show lush natural landscapes inhabited only by richly dressed women, adorned with classic Maghrebi motifs evocative of One Thousand and One Nights. Their almond-shaped eyes seem to hide the quick wit of Scheherazade; resembling the Eye of Horus or hamsas (Hands of Fatima), they describe a femininity in perfect harmony with nature. Baya’s women are at the centre of a metamorphic process where birds, flowers, and plants are not mere decorative motifs, but grafted-on elements of other species that give the sense of a body in constant transformation. 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 devoid of men reveal a female figure as determined and independent as the young Baya herself. – SM

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NADJA 1902, Saint-André-lez-Lille, France – 1941, Bailleul, France In 1926, when she met André Breton in front of the Hôtel du Théâtre in Paris and spent ten days in dreamy conversation with him, Léona Delcourt was twenty-four, and had decided to call herself Nadja because that pseudonym was the beginning – in her words, “only the beginning” – of the Russian word nadezhda, hope. She had moved to the city when her family threw her out due to an unwanted pregnancy; by then the mother of a five-year-old girl, she hid her poverty under an innate allure and striking eccentricity. Nadja seemed to Breton not only a flâneuse, but the incarnation of the Surrealist muse; in the autobiographical novel Nadja published in 1928, he describes her as hovering between the height of creativity and the depths of madness. In the year following their encounters in Paris, before she entered a psychiatric hospital in 1927, Nadja sent to 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. A pencil drawing that looks like a self-portrait shows a woman in a long dress with blurred edges, pointing upward; a vast hand looms overhead like a monstrous being summoned by this witch, and on the table next to her, by an open book and a heart-shaped ashtray, is a large bouquet of flowers. One of them 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

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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 on several occasions, she found Cairo caught up in a new wave of artistic

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ferment that led to the foundation of the Art et Liberté group in 1938. Nimr soon embraced the revolutionary principles that guided the Egyptian avant-garde, and her cosmopolitan background and many contacts with European artists gave her a key role in spreading the Surrealist approach among its members. In keeping with the movement’s confrontational 1938 manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art, her works portray an unsettling universe. Throughout her career, they are characterised by a particular pathos and rawness in their approach to depicting the inexorable vulnerability of the human body. The artist seems to project herself into the feverish brushstrokes of gouache through what the members of Art et Liberté called “subjective realism,” exploring the mystery of reality and letting herself be guided by the currents of her own experience. With an iconography recurrent in her work, Untitled (Fish and Skeletons) (1936) and Untitled (Underwater Skeleton) (1942) show human skeletons floating in the depths. In both paintings, the carcasses blur into the bluish shadows of this 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, which imparts an even keener sense of disquiet to the scene. In 1943, a landmine killed Nimr’s eightyear-old son, and the Suez Crisis of 1956 forced her to leave Egypt for Paris. After this, Nimr sought refuge in an introspective imaginary that grew even cruder and more visceral. The blood-red angels or completely abstract figures she made in this period became a cathartic tool for easing the burdens of her tragic life, and through a dreamlike metamorphosis, attaining the freedom that the Egyptian Surrealists valued so deeply. – SM

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MERET OPPENHEIM 1913, Berlin, Germany – 1985, Basel, Switzerland Artist Meret Oppenheim forged ties to Surrealism when she moved from Switzerland to Paris in 1932 while still in her teens, and began associating with key figures in the movement. To André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and other members of the all-male group, the young artist must have seemed like the quintessence of Surrealist beauty. Pictures taken by Man Ray in the year she came to Paris portray her as a perfect femme fatale, completely naked, reading a book or turning the wheel of a printing press with ink-smeared arms.

Though she was one of the few women artists to be immediately welcomed by the movement, Oppenheim thought of Surrealism as ideologically permeable and felt free to pursue many avenues of experimentation, exploring dreams, humour, death, womanhood, and nature. In 1936, just three years after her artistic debut, Oppenheim opened her first solo exhibition at Galerie Marguerite Schulthess in Basel, where she presented Ma gouvernante (1936): two white highheeled 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 after that. Except for a period in the 1950s when her productivity slowed due to struggles with depression, all of her works – even those that are not actually sculptures – tend to be assemblages of different materials, disorienting in their ambiguity. The drawing 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. Probably inspired by the magical elements in Genoveva (1848), the only opera by German composer Robert Schumann, 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

whom she embarked on a similar trip to India in 1936–1937 – is borne out by the wildly eccentric collages. They combine images from science and fashion magazines to create magical landscapes where plants, animals, and monsters are a backdrop for the two women’s journey. In this surreal setting, Maria Elona and Rubia seem to set out on a path of discovery that is not only a cultural adventure, but a more personal, psychological one. Though they are not from Dons des féminines and actually predate it by about twenty years, the collages shown here, which bear an affinity to the famous work of Max Ernst, seem crafted from the same dreams, and feel very much like hallucinations. Made in the early 1930s, before her then-husband, the Surrealist artist Roland Penrose, remarried the photographer Lee Miller, these works allude to a restlessness in real life as well as of the imagination. The two women in Ariane (1934), for instance, face each other in a natural landscape, their bodies framing a city in the distance. This ordinary scene is interrupted, however, by a strange golden insect with wings, antennae, and two human legs. This bizarre creature affects the rest of the composition in the same way as the statue/ sideboard that floats over the mountainous landscape in La Stratégie militaire (1934). Narrative specificities aside, both of these bric-à-brac figures upset the balance of the image, suggesting the unexpected impact of the unconscious on any aspect of reality, even the most familiar. – SM

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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, which tells the story of two upper-middle-class European women on a trip to the East, alternating bilingual poems, in French and English, with extremely detailed collages. Although this multifaceted blend of word and image is consummately Surrealist in its themes, it was made thirty years after the movement began, and the independent attitude of many women associated with it in the late 1930s is taken to an extreme. 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, suggested by the symbolism in the poems – perhaps inspired by Penrose’s affection for the artist Alice Rahon, with

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 starting in the late 1930s. Displaced by World War II, Rahon and her husband, painter Wolfgang Paalen, fled France in 1939, joining, among others, André Breton, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo, as well as local Mexican artists Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. In exile, Rahon and her peers found community and acceptance, 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 a wide array of media including painting, sculpture, film, fashion design, dance, and literature. She was fascinated by humanity’s relationship to the natural world, but also believed in the supernatural and the fantastic. Prehistoric art was of particular

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interest to Rahon, and much of her artistic style is owed to the Late Stone Age paintings she observed in Spain’s Caves of Altamira, and to the Indigenous art she was able to study in Mexico and Canada. In some of her most important paintings, like Thunderbird (1946), she invoked the aesthetics of the prehistoric art seen in caves with gestural brushstrokes and contour lines that connect a web of symbolic figures on floating backgrounds, mostly in earth-toned colour palettes. There was a magic in prehistoric art that Rahon believed created portals through time, connecting the visible world with the invisible. These doorways to the invisible world took many forms. In 1946, a year after the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Rahon created a ballet inspired by the cosmos, and perhaps influenced by the ancient Mayans expertise in astronomy. In the ballet, five characters, including The Juggler (a magician) and Androgyne (a non-binary gender being), ponder the beginning of life following the destruction of the planet. The characters were first imagined through gouache on paper paintings, and then configured as three-dimensional marionettes made of wire. Rahon was able to channel the spiritual energy of ancestral cultures into her present, war-stricken, global moment, and did so through a plethora of artistic expressions. – IA This artist is also part of Corps Orbite; see p. 173.

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C A RO L RA M A 1918 – 2015, Turin, Italy Naked and fragmented bodies, grotesque faces and long red tongues, animal limbs and human prostheses: these are just some of the images that fill the world of Olga Carolina Rama, better known as Carol Rama, whose career of over five decades was characterised by a provocative, fraught, highly erotic visual language. Born into a solidly middle-class family in Turin, the artist taught herself to draw on her own, 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. The artist unabashedly describes the emotional drama surrounding the precariousness of the human body. 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, in wheelchairs, or lying in bed. Completely naked – except for high-heeled shoes – they are explicitly engaged in selfpleasure 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. But in the conservative art world of mid-century Italy, they drew harsh censorship that shuttered her first solo show in 1945, leading her to move away from such imagery. Yet even when it took the abstract, Concrete and Informel approach of her works from the 1950s and 1960s, Carol Rama’s oeuvre never lost the unmistakable undercurrent of damage and suffering that the artist saw as a reflection of her personality. – SM

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EDITH RIMMINGTON 1902, Leicester, UK – 1986, Bexhill-on-Sea, UK Up until the 1930s, the intellectual influence of Surrealism was felt above all in France, and only when its artists scattered abroad between the two world wars did it spread to other countries and became a touchstone for younger generations. Like many British artists, Edith Rimmington also came in contact with it in 1936, when she had the opportunity to admire the Parisian artists’ work at the first international exhibition of Surrealists at the New Burlington Galleries; she joined the movement the following year. The English strain of Surrealism was not a faithful copy of the French, nor would it have the same stylistic consistency; still, Rimmington drew on similar oneiric imagery and Freudian theories: her paintings and collages are seeded with allegories that criticise the decadence of society or the outrages of her time. In the purest kind of Surrealist investigation, Rimmington turned dreams, imagination, and exuberance into tools for redeeming even the harshest reality, arriving at a series of anthropomorphic or fragmented figures. These monstrosities 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, even the war, to which the artist often alludes.

The purpose of this investigation can be sensed in The Decoy (1948), a small painting that shows, almost life size, a flayed hand dangling down from the upper edge, surrounded – almost courted – by a myriad of colourful butterflies. Like the caterpillars and cocoons that have colonised its insides, they seem to help its decomposition along, easing the experience. 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. As animal life grows out of the vivisected body and its blood vessels turn into plant fibre, 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

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E N I F RO B E RT 1886, Prato, Italy – 1974, Bologna, Italy Just a few years after the first publication of the Manifesto of Futurism (1909) that officially celebrated the movement’s contempt for women, a group of stubborn, tenacious female artists rallied around the Florentine journal L’Italia futurista, which in 1916 and 1918 published articles and parolibere (liberated words) compositions challenging the sexism of the Italian avant-garde. These women shared the same faith in progress as their male colleagues, but as one can see from the literary output of actor and writer Enif Robert, resolutely adapted it to their urgent need for emancipation. In the experimental novel Un ventre di donna. Romanzo chirurgico (1919), Robert tells the story of a woman who has her uterus removed following an inflammatory disease. The story, which was probably autobiographical, describes the protagonist’s suffering during her recovery, and – interspersed with parolibere and letters of encouragement 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; without her reproductive organs, 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 first reprint of the book 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.

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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 – the Tuscan writer had already suggested a link between bodily health and the human 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

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, gave up the privileges of her aristocratic background, and became a feminist contributor to L’Italia futurista. Like many women artists and writers who gravitated around this Florentine journal during World War I, 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), is definitely the most inspired. Foreshadowing themes of her later writing, it 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 published several months later with the same title, 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 in this second article are accompanied by an abstract illustration that echoes the power of the words. 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 perhaps representing the tumultuous social, physical, and psychological metamorphoses faced by the Futurist woman. Aside from its portrayal of the female condition, this work shows Rosà’s artistic versatility: before she began writing, this “Viennese genius,” as Marinetti affectionately called her, was an illustrator, ceramicist, and sculptor, and the Decadent, Art Nouveau sensibility of her Central European background brought a newly eclectic angle to Futurism. 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; both her impassioned writing and her more abstract verbal-visual compositions took on intimate, mystical tones, encouraging women to be independent above all on the spiritual plane. – SM

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

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D O R O T H E A TA N N I N G (p. 105)

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 and a mentor to a formidable new generation of young Black artists, including Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight, Norman Lewis, Robert Blackburn, and Romare Bearden. Raised outside of Jacksonville, Florida, Savage (born Augusta Christine Fells) was the daughter of a poor Methodist minister and the seventh of fourteen children in the household. When Savage travelled to New York City in 1921, she had with her just $4.60, and found a job as an apartment caretaker while she attended The Cooper Union. In 1931, after spending time in Paris, the civically minded artist began to offer free classes in painting, drawing, and sculpture in her Harlem studio and helped to establish and direct the Harlem Community Art Center. Many of Savage’s touchstone works are expressive portrait busts of Black leaders, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, but her biggest and best-known piece is one that no longer exists. In 1937, a year before the death of her friend James Weldon Johnson, the civil rights activist and poet, Savage received a commission from the New York World’s Fair to create a sculpture for the international exposition. Inspired by Johnson’s song Lift Every Voice and Sing, broadly considered to be the Black national anthem at the time, Savage transformed his hymn into a monumental sculpture, retitled by fair organisers as The Harp. At nearly five-metre-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 to beckon the public into the ecstatic territory that The Harp constructs. It took Savage two years to complete and when the work debuted in 1939, it garnered significant acclaim. Nonetheless, no funds were available to cast it in bronze or store

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. After this powerful encounter, she began acquainting herself with the Surrealists, driven from Europe during World War II in the early 1940s. Her moment of recognition came in 1943 when Peggy Guggenheim enlisted her then husband Max Ernst to visit the studios of young artists while organising the allfemale exhibition 31 Women at her gallery Art of This Century. Enamoured with each other after this encounter, Tanning and Ernst married in a joint wedding ceremony with Juliet Browner and Man Ray in 1946. The artist engaged in the Surrealist preoccupation of exploring the psychic automatism of dreams as the manifestation of repressed thoughts relegated to the unconscious in paintings that combine the familiar with the unfamiliar to explore parallel realms, as well as fears, desires, and sexuality. In contrast to the pervasive roles forced upon women, including the child-woman and the muse, which were dominant within Surrealist discourse, Tanning’s female figures, and those of her contemporaries such as Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington, refute these 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 dangles on another trapeze bar behind her, across the expanding ceiling of a Victorian bedroom decorated with flower wallpaper. The body of the girl appears to be metamorphosing with a hybrid, biomorphic, winged creature bearing a beak; unknown forces of the unconscious imagination intrude upon the domestic space. The figure appears to have been ejected from a tree growing in the middle of the bedroom as she is thrust beyond the frame of the painting, thus bypassing the societal conventions that restrict female bodies to the limitations of the contained interior sphere. Tanning embodied the notion of the shapeshifter throughout her artistic career spanning seven decades.

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She eventually turned away from the predominantly visual mode of representation to the material and the tactile; in the 1950s her painting became more abstract, in the 1960s she embarked on creating uncanny stuffed figures of furniture transforming into limbs, and towards the end of her life she increasingly turned to language, publishing her first novel Chasm at the age of ninety-four. – LC

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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, championing a vaguely Cubist style of painting that she and her friend Jindřich Štyrský had dubbed Artificialism. 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, allowing her to embrace a consciously fluid identity. In addition to this grammatical ambiguity (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 In Paris, despite initial skepticism about Surrealism’s more oneiric aspects, Toyen explored many of the movement’s driving themes, taking her own bold, unique approach. From the smallest illustration to the largest oil painting, almost all of her works are highly erotic; when the figures are not explicitly engaged in orgiastic, homosexual, or sadomasochistic acts, they are placed in disturbing situations where animal instincts govern the back-andforth between feminine and masculine – sometimes violently so. The many women in these images by turns seem strong and vulnerable: always on the point of becoming fearsome predators, victims of sexual violence, or shattered porcelain dolls. The twelve black-and-white drawings in the portfolio The Shooting Gallery (Střelnice) (1939–1940) also address the double nature of human experience. In keeping with the ambiguous title – which might refer to military training or to something more recreational –, each shows a different post-war scene; amid fragments of buildings and corpses of animals, the only survivors that emerge are faceless girls or huge broken

toys. Though the accompanying texts (by fellow artists Karel Teige and Jindřich Heisler) suggest that Toyen’s drawings refer to the mingled joys and sorrows of youth, 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 attempting to employ more contemporary, inclusive language runs the risk of rewriting the past, we have chosen to use female pronouns here. This choice is in keeping with most of the literature on the subject, but is not meant to deny the validity of other views.

T RO P I Q U 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, bringing major social and cultural changes. In the United States, harrowed by segregation, this “pan-African” outlook sparked the birth of the “New Negro” movement – an intellectual and political revival that encouraged African Americans to carve out an active place for themselves in the modern city –, while in Europe, in the wake of World War I, anti-colonial sentiment began to spread through many countries. Paris, in particular, became a magnet for this cultural movement and attracted a growing number of Black intellectuals, especially from Africa and the Caribbean. As members of an emerging middle class in the colonies that had come to the French capital to study, they stressed the need to rediscover their African roots and use them as a tool of social emancipation. To spread their ideas, many also 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. Though some skeptics feared this new attitude might lead to further isolation, Césaire’s words inspired enormous optimism; reaching the colonies, they sparked the first pan-African intellectual movement in the Francophone world. This battle for racial pride continued along the same humanist lines when the poet returned to Martinique, where in 1941 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

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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 Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret who would introduce her to the Surrealist circle including André Breton, Max Ernst, Victor Brauner, Joan Miró, and Wolfgang Paalen. In Paris, Varo departs from academic painting, employing Surrealist strategies including automatism and decalcomania. Varo was 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. In tandem with her painting practice, Varo would write and use her writing as the sketches to her paintings and as guide to a deeper level of consciousness. Her writing took the form of dream journals, strange recipes, pseudo-scientific experiments, and letters that she would send to strangers. Having fled Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, she was forced to flee a second time from Paris during the Nazi occupation and, after her arrest in 1940, she immigrated to Mexico City in 1941, where she would remain until her untimely death in 1963. In Mexico, Varo forged close relationships with fellow European Surrealists, especially with 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

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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 The sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller is lauded for her influential representations of African American life, at a time when themes addressing the experience of the community were often suppressed and Black women had little access to formal artistic training. Frequently cited as an important predecessor to the Harlem Renaissance, Fuller is most famous for her allegorical works that examine diasporic identity and engage with pan-Africanist visual motifs. Born in Philadelphia in 1877 to a middle-class family, Fuller studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia) in the late 1890s and shortly after moved to Paris, where she enrolled at the Académie Colarossi and the École des beaux-arts and was trained in figure drawing and sculpture. In Paris, she would mingle with Henry Ossawa Tanner, a fellow Pennsylvanian expat and family friend and Auguste Rodin, whose sinuously handled surfaces inspired her to move beyond the conventions of her academic training. While in Paris, she also 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. Held at the Seventy-First Regiment Armory in New York City, the event was organised to promote the American Progressive Party’s political agenda and to celebrate the contributions of immigrants to American society. The work, 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 and seen in the work of other artists of the period like Edmonia Lewis: an intense interest in an imagined “Africa” – especially Ancient Egypt and Ethiopia – as a new articulation of African American culture identity. Of Ethiopia Awakening, Fuller wrote: “Here was a group who had once made history and now after a long sleep was awaking, gradually unwinding the bandage of its mummied past and looking out on life again, expectant but unafraid and with at least a graceful gesture.”1 – MW

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, quoted in Amy Helene Kirschke (ed.), Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 59. Originally published in Meta Warrick Fuller to Mrs. W.P. Hedden, October 5, 1921, Meta Warrick Fuller Papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York City.

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LAURA WHEELER WA R I N G 1887, Hartford, USA – 1948, Philadelphia, USA Laura Wheeler Waring was an American painter, illustrator, and educator, known for her vibrant portraits made throughout the 1920s and 1930s, which often portrayed Harlem Renaissance luminaries. Born to an upper-class family in Hartford, Connecticut, Waring was afforded the opportunity to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which was one of the only art schools in the US at the time to admit African American students. After graduating, Waring began teaching at what is now known as Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, historically the oldest Black university in the US, where Waring would become the Head of the Department of Art and Music and teach for the rest of her career. An advocate for the civil rights of African Americans, Waring was a member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and frequently contributed illustrations to the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis and its children’s publication The Brownies’ Book. Established by the storied scholar, writer, and activist W.E.B. Du Bois in 1910, The Crisis – which still operates online today – was a publication of vital significance to intellectual life throughout the Harlem Renaissance. Featuring a mix of commentary on current affairs, literature and poetry by African American writers, and advocacy for both socialism and the pan-African movement, which aimed to strengthen solidarity between members of the African diaspora, The Crisis also excelled in its instrumentalisation of visual imagery made by Black artists who shared political affinities with the magazine to engage and educate its readers. Under 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 is hardly from ancient times: in it, a male attendant waits on the central female figure as she takes a lion for a walk, a gender dynamic rarely seen in Egyptian iconography, but rather, from a new era. – MW

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M A RY W I G M A N 1886, Hanover, Germany – 1973, Berlin, Germany Mary Wigman was unquestionably the leading figure in Ausdruckstanz, an Expressionist style of German choreography that revolutionised the Central European dance world at the turn of the 20th century, dismantling the formalism of ballet. Wigman’s approach, honed over years of working alongside the famous teacher and theorist Rudolf Laban, did not aim to showcase the technical perfection or idealised stories of more traditional productions, trying instead to construct a vocabulary of movement capable of conveying the dancer’s emotional impulses. She used no theatrical frills, and starting with her debut piece Hexentanz (1914), strove for a sense of pure austerity: the stage is often bare, inhabited only by a barefooted dancer in a simple costume, who seems to move in search of a balance between body and mind, form and spirit. In the only scrap of footage that remains from a 1930 performance of her iconic shaman’s dance, Wigman seems to be in a trance state, a witch focused on mustering her deep-rooted powers. Moving to the rhythm of percussion music, with long interludes of silence, she is sitting on the ground, limbs taut and hands gripping something invisible, in thrall to a dramatic, delirious primal energy. To heighten the ancestral quality of the scene, her face is covered by a mask, and the curves of her body by a long brocade tunic that lends a degree of formal abstraction to her movements. It is no coincidence that critics have called this style “absolute dance:” in addition to celebrating the body’s potential, the performances of this choreographer and dancer 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 – Ruth St. Denis, Doris Humphrey, and Martha Graham, among others – Wigman told stories centred on an independent female figure who, even in later, more harmonious pieces like Pastorale or Dance of Summer (both 1929), is aware of her own unsettling power, and in control of her own life. – SM

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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. Rego was born in 1935 in a rigidly Catholic Portugal under the newly established authoritarian regime of Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar, a dictatorship that held power for four decades and used censorship and a secret police force to quell opposition. While Rego was growing up, Portuguese families – even those that were liberal, middle-class, and educated such as her own – had to speak in oblique terms about even the most everyday subjects for fear of retribution from the anti-democratic surveillance State. Deeply affected by her nation’s history, Rego frequently addresses the moral challenges of a society under political tyranny throughout her oeuvre, particularly the oppression and institutional violence towards women. Already demonstrating her confrontational artistic spirit, at the age of twentyfive, Rego made Salazar Vomiting the Homeland (1960), which as the title would indicate, made her personal views daringly evident. After attending boarding school in Kent, England, Rego would go on to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London between 1952 and 1956, which boasted an elite teaching staff, including figurative painters Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, as well as Victor Willing, who would soon become her husband. Rego’s early works from the 1960s, with their flashes of Miró, Dubuffet, and 19th-century political cartoons, establish a tension between the openness and sexual freedom experienced by her milieu and the suffering inflicted by despotic governance. As her art developed, an exploration of inter-personal and societal tensions would be brought to extremes. In her works made throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, her subjects, women often found in increasingly grotesque and perverse positions of vulnerability, render the difference between the sinister and the seductive unnervingly ambiguous. Even more unsettling is the uncanny magnetism of Rego’s scenes. But as she would say: “The grotesque is beautiful.”1 – MW

Paula Rego, quoted in Ben Eastham and Helen Graham, “Interview with Paula Rego,” The White Review, 1, 2011 (www.thewhitereview. org/feature/interview-with-paula-rego).

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Paula Rego, The Policeman’s Daughter, 1987. Acrylic on paper on canvas, 213 × 152 cm. Photo Nick Willing. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Victoria Miro. © Paula Rego

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Paula Rego, Geppetto Washing Pinocchio, 1996. Pastel on paper on aluminium, 170 × 150 cm. Photo Nick Willing. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Marlborough Fine Art. © Paula Rego Paula Rego, Metamorphosing after Kafka, 2002, Pastel on paper on aluminium, 110 × 140 cm. Photo Nick Willing. Kistefos Museum. Courtesy the Artist; Christen Sveaas Art Foundation. © Paula Rego 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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LEONORA CARRINGTON

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

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

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 woman 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

After permanently settling in Mexico, Carrington dreamed up a series of bizarre children’s stories for her two kids, which she drew directly on the walls of her apartment, later gathering them into a private notebook called Leche del sueño (The Milk of Dreams), as her son Gabriel dubbed them, and illustrating them with bright, outlandish watercolours. The mindbending visions of hybrid, mutant creatures that fill her fanciful universes include children who lose their heads, vultures trapped in gelatin, and carnivorous machines. The bizarre tales of Leche del sueño – and Carrington’s work as a whole – 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

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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, many of which are tenderly implanted in the collective Western consciousness, 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, employed in Nursery Rhymes to great effect. 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 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

Left page: Lise Deharme with illustrations by Claude Cahun, Le Cœur de Pic. Éditions MeMo, 2004 (originally published in 1937) © Éditions MeMo Leonora Carrington, Leche del sueño. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2016. © Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY This page: Paula Rego, Jack and Jill, 1989. Nursery Rhymes (illustration). Etching and aquatint, 32.3 × 21.5 cm (image) and 52 x 38 cm (paper). Photo Nick Willing and Mark Dalton. Courtesy Paula Rego; Cristea Roberts Gallery, London © Paula Rego Paula Rego, Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, 1989. Nursery Rhymes (illustration). Etching and aquatint, 32.2 × 21.6 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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JANA EULER

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

The German artist Jana Euler’s work bounds between a variety of stylistic conceits, trafficking in grotesque, monstrous, contorted, eroticised, and frequently off-putting representations of figures, both human and not. After graduating from Frankfurt’s Städelschule, Euler satirised the male-dominated artistic scene in her series Ambition Universe (2009–2010), in which she caricatured the academy’s influential network of artists and critics according to their astrological signs. 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 married their radical gestures with savage satires of the human condition, typically expressed in brutally naturalistic depictions, associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement of the 1920s. The body is ubiquitous in Euler’s work, frequently displayed in positions of cartoonish, abject carnality or discomfiting vulnerability. In paintings such as under this perspective, 1 (2015), two gigantic feet are stuffed into the contours of the canvas, each spawning a penile extension, which are crowned by a tiny face. In others like the massive canvas Analysemonster (2014), a gruesome troll-like creature with enormous hands, elephantine pink and orange ears, and a dribbling tongue shocks viewers into attention, its repulsive corporeality an uncanny mirror of our own. Euler’s exaggerated bodies also appear in the form of animals. In her series great white fear (2019), she presents paintings of sharks that call to mind the style of famous male painters in variably Hyperrealist, Abstract, and Surrealist techniques. Yet, if these plainly phallic creatures leaping out of the water are unambiguous critiques of the patriarchal history of painting, they also shed light on Euler’s decidedly diverse stylistic range: she cannot be reduced to one artistic trademark. 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 a 500-year-old specimen preserved in amber, the other 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

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Jana Euler, great white fear, 111 small ceramics (detail), 2021. Glazed ceramics, dimensions variable. Photo Diana Pfammatter. Courtesy the Artist. © Jana Euler

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

1985, Chicago, USA Lives in Los Angeles, USA

Christina Quarles’ practice, encompassing painting, drawing, and installation, grapples 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 tools like combs or dry brushes, unravelling abstract figures that exceed beyond the moulds of the conventional constitution of a body. With a background in graphic design, the artist pairs the fortuitous effects of dripping and seemingly improvisational rapid brushstrokes with digital manipulation and laser-cut stencils, creating defined outlines to plan and form composition. The sinuous bodies contort, conjuring a sense of intimacy and fluidity, of interchangeable existences rendering the impossibility of outlining singular beings – as in the entwining bodies in Hangin’ There, Baby (2021) and array of frenzied pigments in Gone on Too Long (2021). Appearing to cross a spatial zone of contradictory motions, on one axis the bodies conjoin and on the other they break – namely the figures chaotically pulling at, pushing away, and stepping over each other in Just a Lil’ Longer (2021). Embracing, colliding, and merging, the rotating subjects with protruding limbs give the impression of movement and shapeshifting in their converging. In Don’t Let It Bring Yew Down (It’s Only Castles Burnin’) (2021), entangled forms holding each other up, shaped by contours and gradients, bear witness to two others that appear to drag each other in a dance on a plane reminiscent of parquet flooring. 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 the depthless forms in space by framing the 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. By assuming the forms of leaking vessels portrayed in myriad patterns and psychedelic hues, Quarles disrupts pictorial norms that uphold traditional conventions of race, gender, sexuality, and identity. The artist seeks to convey embodiment that eludes definition and to mark identities in flux by employing fragmentation to depict the slippery, multiple self. The work reflects the artist’s lived subjectivity in the persistent experience of being misread as a queer, mixed-race, cis woman with the subsequent desire to destabilise societal expectations. As if pushing up against and trying to exceed the boundaries of the frame, the bodies suggest an alternative physicality defined by ambiguity. – LC

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Christina Quarles, Gone on Too Long, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 152 × 183 × 5 cm. Photo Fredrik Nilsen Studio. Courtesy the Artist; Hauser & Wirth; Pilar Corrias, London. © Christina Quarles

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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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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. Raised by her American father and German mother who had emigrated to the US from Hanover, Upson described her upbringing as constantly bombarded from the outside by unknowns that could upend reality at a moment’s notice. Her work first gained widespread recognition with the presentation of The Larry Project (2005–2012) at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2007. Upson began the project when a neighbour of her childhood home in San Bernardino abandoned his mansion; over the subsequent years, she would articulate drawings, videos, paintings, and sculptures that speculated about the identity of the person who had lived across from her parents, but whom she never met, to the point of merging his identity with her own. 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 said that she never wanted her work to be completed, to never have an end point, and to offer a place for the viewer “where the narrative cracks open.” The exhibition features ten paintings from the recent series Portrait (Vain German) (2020–2021). The series began with portraits that Upson 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, often making multiple paintings from the same mold. 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 eventual deterioration of the body. Upson created all these works while she was ill with cancer, a disease that recently took her life. –MK

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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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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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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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NAN GOLDIN

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

Since the early 1970s, American photographer Nan Goldin’s deeply personal photographs have given voice and visibility to her own communities. Goldin studied photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she worked with photographers David Armstrong and Mark Morrisroe. Goldin began carrying her camera everywhere she went, capturing friends, lovers, chosen family in their own spaces. From the beginning Goldin’s photographs focused on people who lived outside of established gender constructions. Her community was deeply impacted by the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, and her work took on a more explicitly political edge. 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. Goldin has also used her profile to address political issues, particularly the US overdose crisis, which has dramatically impacted her own life. Centering on themes of love, gender, sexuality, and social precarity, Goldin’s work is motivated by a dedication to capturing life at its most unvarnished and true. Sirens (2019–2020) is Goldin’s first film made entirely from found footage. She conceived of the work as an homage to Donyale Luna, who is often cited as the first Black supermodel. A cultural icon in 1960s New York, Luna died from a heroin overdose in 1979 at the age of 33. In Greek mythology, sirens are the nymph-like creatures whose alluring songs draw sailors to their tragic deaths on island shores. Sirens associates the mythological creatures’ seductive song and the beauty of the female body with the sensuality and ecstasy of a drug high. Composed of short clips from thirty films – including the 1969 movie 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 – and with a score by the composer Mica Levi, Sirens creates a filmic corollary to the seductive euphoria of drugs. While the film 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

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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 creates wall-based assemblages that push photography beyond its traditional boundaries into the realms of the sculptural and performative. Rather than selfcontained windows onto a frozen past, Hovsepian treats photographs as sculptural material, incorporating photographic prints into threedimensional vignettes with nylon, ceramics, string, nails, and walnut wood in deep, custom-built box frames. Her compositions revisit high Modernist approaches to the arrangement of form 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 as much as the formal relationship between her chosen materials. 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. Hovsepian’s assemblages 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. An exploration of vulnerability and the fine line between permanence and ephemerality is central to her approach. In recent years, her work has been inflected by readings in feminist theory and texts written by women artists. Particularly important to her thinking is the French feminist literary critic Hélène Cixous, who, in the 1970s, theorised an intrinsic relationship between the body and speech. Hovsepian conceives of photography as fundamentally associated with the production of desire, conscious recognition of the self, and the contingencies that surround the body, identity, and subjective experience. Hovsepian’s work for The Milk of Dreams continues the artist’s investigation into the materiality of photography and its representational, symbolic, and syntactical qualities. In these works, fragmented parts of the body – an isolated shoulder, a closely-cropped torso, or a floating arm, each photographed on a black background – are deployed as formal elements in a visual vocabulary of abstracted shapes and lines. These compositions, encased in their window-like frames, read as maps or diagrams of the relationship between the body and materiality, between representation and abstraction. As the artist has said, “For me, the body becomes a site of stratified consciousness. Assemblage becomes a metaphor for this.” – IW

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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 Next pages: Sheree Hovsepian, exhibition view, Arches and Ink, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York City, 2021. Courtesy JSP Art Photography

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MIRIAM CAHN

1949, Basel, Switzerland Lives in Stampa, Switzerland

Miriam Cahn refused to make oil paintings for the first two decades of her career. From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, Cahn worked in drawing, performance, photography, film, and text art, shunning painting as an act of feminist resistance against the Western art world’s Zeitgeist: male, Abstract and Minimalist oil painters. Painting had passed its art historical prime by the 1990s, and Cahn picked up the brush, aged 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. The body is always emphasised, a clear form but crudely rendered. 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, primarily in oil, nine mixed media drawings, and six artist notebooks. Cahn’s decades-long devotion to the figure continues in this new body of work. In her drawings and paintings, even unrecognisable and recognisable objects become anthropomorphised such that questionable appendages appear across compositions. Birthing imagery, genderbending beings, erect phalluses and overtly sexual conduct are return subject matter for Cahn. Her figures are often contoured, appearing to float, or perhaps swim, in blurry space – a suggestive quality that extends beyond the page or canvas and into the gallery space. Cahn prefers to install the works herself, spending weeks considering the space she’s working in and then, onsite, furiously composing entire rooms with her drawings and paintings – a dance between artist, gallery, and artwork. Cahn’s subject matter addresses crises and tragedies, like the Persian Gulf War, #MeToo movement, World Trade Center attacks, and the Yugoslav Wars, in a covert and unspectacular way, allowing for grim atrocities to travel through her psyche, hand, and canvas. She does not glamourise trauma, or virtue signal. Rather, she allows for ambiguity and emotive mark-making to take lead in her representational mode. Cahn’s quietly bold approach to realist painting, always with sensitivity for the subject matter, has made her ongoing, forty-plus year oeuvre defiantly contemporary. – IA

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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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Miriam Cahn, o.t., 25.7. + 3.8.21, 2021. Oil on canvas, 195 × 190 cm. Photo François Doury. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Jocelyn Wolff; Meyer Riegger Miriam Cahn, MARE NOSTRUM, 4. + 22.7.21, 2021. Oil on wood, 100 × 75 cm. Photo François Doury. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Jocelyn Wolff; Meyer Riegger

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CHIARA ENZO

1989, Venice Lives in Venice, Italy

The Venetian artist Chiara Enzo’s meticulously detailed, small-scale paintings capture phenomena of the observed world in which fragmented bodies – portrayed in both haunting and unvarnished detail – form a psychologically charged symbol of the limitations of their own corporeality. Enlarged and cropped within the frame, 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. Although characterised as paintings, Enzo’s works, which are also made in combination with pastels and coloured pencils, maintain the semblance of a drawing: derived both from life and from images culled from magazines, social media, and historical books on medicine and rendered in dense, textured marks, their surfaces appear charged and tangible. This tangible aspect of their physical presence makes them less portraits of individuals as much as haptic evocations of surface, texture, warmth, and touch. In this sense, while many of Enzo’s paintings portray skin, they do so from a metaphorical, rather than a literal, perspective. 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, whose intimate dimensions were inspired by the artist’s slow and laborious working process in her live-in studio. New works like Senza titolo (spots), Nuca, B., and Il prurito (all 2021) are near-photographic in their attention to the granular details of the body’s materiality and in their cropped, close-up framing of freckled and blemished skin. The paintings’ small scale, in combination with their spatialised presentation, invites the viewer to experience each of 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. As they are experienced at their diminutive size, viewers are forced into a position of intimate viewing that also comes at the risk of violence. Offered to the viewer for consumption, skin as seen up-close looks as delicate as a piece of fruit. – MW

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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 Chiara Enzo, Nuca, B., 2021. Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board, 19 × 19 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Zero..., Milan. © Chiara Enzo

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Chiara Enzo, Letti, 2018. Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board, 19 × 19 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Zero..., Milan. © Chiara Enzo Chiara Enzo, Senza titolo, 2019. Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board, 17.7 × 14.8 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Zero..., Milan. © Chiara Enzo Chiara Enzo, L’abisso, 2020. Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board, 29 × 15 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Zero..., Milan. © Chiara Enzo

O VA R TA C I

1894, Ebeltoft, Denmark – 1985, Risskov, Denmark

Ovartaci is the self-given name of the artist Louis Marcussen. Born into a large family in a small port town, Ovartaci apprenticed as a naturalistic craft painter before emigrating to Argentina in 1923. She travelled the country for six years with increasingly dwindling resources 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. Early on, Ovartaci clashed with the staff who restricted her creative output. Eventually, with increasing autonomy and freedom allowed by the hospital, Ovartaci’s artistic production flourished. The artist took the name “Ovartaci” – essentially “Chief Lunatic” – as a play on “ovar,” a term of leadership in the hospital such as “Head Nurse” or “Chief Psychiatrist,” and “taci,” derived from “tossi,” a colloquial term for a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Ovartaci idealised the female form and subjectivity, in both her art and personal life. A proclaimed Buddhist, Ovartaci epitomised the purity of female experience in the female yogi – someone free from sexual impulses and capable of travelling through different mental states and reincarnated lives. Assigned male at birth, after years of requests for a sex change surgery and her own crude attempt, in 1957 Ovartaci finally convinces the hospital to facilitate her female gender affirmation surgery.1 Ovartaci realised her great artistic range in readily available materials such as painted recycled paper and cardboard. Her drawings and paintings feature groups of fantastical female figures – animal-like creatures with slim, elongated features including almond-shaped eyes, wolf-like ears, pointed faces, and long, tapered limbs. The figures often appear in mythological scenes that suggest earlier lives in Ancient Egypt, the Tower of Babel, or a pagan circus. Ovartaci also sculpted large dolls, costumed in both painted and fabric clothing. Dreams of escape run throughout Ovartaci’s work, subtly in repeated winged figures, and most overtly in her many drawn plans and cardboard and wood models of a helicopter that could fly beyond the hospital’s walls – as well, perhaps, as the limitations and finitude of a single lifetime. –MK

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.

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Ovartaci, Untitled, n.d. Painted metal, 38 × 10 cm. Photo Archive Museum Ovartaci. Courtesy Museum Ovartaci

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Ovartaci, FRØKEN OVARTACI, n.d. Gouache, crayon on canvas, 89 × 161 cm. Photo Archive Museum Ovartaci. Courtesy Museum Ovartaci Ovartaci, Untitled, n.d. Lifesize doll, green pants, oil on cardboard, double sided, 139 × 50 cm. Photo Archive Museum Ovartaci. Courtesy Museum Ovartaci Ovartaci, Untitled, n.d. Lifesize doll with ears and shadow, cardboard, papier-mâché, 130 × 30 cm. Photo Archive Museum Ovartaci. Courtesy Museum Ovartaci

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DJUNA BARNES M I R E L LA B E N T I VO G L I O A N D A N N A L I S A A L L O AT T I TOMASO BINGA M I L LY C A N AV E R O M I N N I E E VA N S ILSE GARNIER L I N DA GA ZZ E RA G E O RG I A NA H O U G H T ON M I N A 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 S A P I A PA L L A D I N O GISÈLE PRASSINOS ALICE RAHON G I O VA N N A S A 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 R À 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 (one male 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 and texts 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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B O DY L A N G UAG E Jennifer Higgie

I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. — Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” The history of art is not tidy. It’s a living language, at once shaped by the culture it was born into and the one it now resides in. For too long, though, the tale was a skewed, phallocentric one, of men triumphing over other men, wielding their brushes like lovers gripping pistols at a dawn duel, the women cheering them on from the side-lines. Yet, in spite of the endless attempts to marginalise us, countless women, freed from the dictates of convention by the injustice of their exclusion, have stretched the limits of representation. For some, visions arrived fully formed, aided by spirits or ghosts. For others, daydreams of viable futures, the mystical pronouncements of tarot or the anarchic freedoms of poetry helped translate a seemingly immovable present into a dynamic set of potentialities which were manifested in myriad forms – visual, verbal, written. Women moved, spoke, made marks on various supports in their fervour to create new languages from old ones – languages that might better reflect the nuances of a rapidly changing world and their place in it. No two were alike – because no two women are alike. With the advent of the Second Industrial Revolution and the boom in new technologies – such as the discovery of electromagnetic waves and the invention of the telegraph and the X-ray – the idea took hold that

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what was once hidden could, given the right circumstances, be made visible. This had an impact not only on science and the development of psychoanalysis but on art and Spiritualism: it opened up the prospect of languages that might not simply describe external realities but also reflect seemingly intangible truths.

Georgiana Houghton, The Spiritual Crown of Annie Mary Howitt Watts, 1867. Collection Vivienne Roberts. Courtesy GeorgianaHoughton.com & Vivienne Roberts

In the mid-19th century, Modern Spiritualism grew in popularity across the globe – from the UK to America, Australia, and South Africa – and its followers shared a common goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions. Many of the women involved in Spiritualism used their body as a tool to communicate with other realms – an approach that could be read as a resistance, however unconscious, to the phallocratic logic that had so long dominated their lives. While artist mediums were united in their belief that the world is multi-dimensional, how they expressed their knowledge is wildly varied: some created abstract or diagrammatic paintings and drawings or composed pictures that, however obliquely, reference the physical world. Some channelled spirit guides, while others were fascinated by occult or esoteric rituals, or in organised belief systems such as Theosophy – which was informed in part by the visualisation of invisible forms, colour theory and mysticism – and later, in art movements such as Surrealism. As the curator Simon Grant observed: “In a period in which women campaigned together for their rights and self-determination, Spiritualism offered another way of harnessing the collective energy.”1 A remarkable early explorer of other realms was the English medium Georgiana Houghton, who was part of a loose group of 19th-century female artists that included Anna Mary Howitt, Elizabeth Wilkinson, Barbara Honywood, Catherine Berry, and Alice Pery. In the 1860s and 1870s, Houghton began painting a series of swirling abstract watercolours, declaring that a spirit called Lenny, seventy Archangels, and various Renaissance artists, including Titian and Correggio, guided her hand. In 1871, she rented The New British Gallery on London’s Bond Street in order to display 155 of her drawings: she titled the exhibition Spirit Drawings in Water Colours. To our modern eyes, Houghton’s high-key, near-hallucinogenic paintings anticipate 20th-century movements, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. In the mid-19th century, however, her work baffled audiences; widely mocked, her belief in the truth of her visions almost bankrupted her. In the decades that followed, many of the male artists who championed abstraction were also, to varying degrees, guided by Spiritualism and Theosophy, yet their endeavours were taken seriously. In 1911, Wassily Kandinsky wrote in Concerning the Spiritual in Art: The spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which she is one of the mightiest elements, is a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards and upwards. This movement is the movement of experience.2 That year, he painted Composition V, long considered to be the first Abstract painting in Western art – yet Houghton had been making comparable explorations forty years earlier. Only forty-six of Georgiana Houghton’s watercolours are now known to exist.3 When London’s Courtauld Institute of Art staged an exhibition of

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her work in 2019, it was the first time her pictures had been seen in the UK in nearly 150 years – and the freshness and originality of her pictures, even across the centuries, was astonishing. Numerous other artists around the globe shared Houghton’s paranormal explorations. In Switzerland, the medium and artist Hélène Smith – who died in 1929 and whom the Surrealists considered the “muse of Automatic Writing” – claimed she could communicate with, among others, Martians, Victor Hugo, and the 18th-century occultist Count Cagliostro. Later in the 20th century, the German author and artist Unica Zürn also practiced automatic writing, weaving her autobiography from anagrams; she also created fantastical drawings of chimerical beasts, imaginary plants, and all-seeing eyes. In the United States, Minnie Evans, who was born in 1892, painted and drew intricate faces that fuse with flora in a harmonious universe. Describing her process, she declared: I have no imagination. I never plan a drawing, they just happen. In a dream it was shown to me what I have to do, of paintings. The whole entire horizon all the way across the whole Earth was out together like this with pictures. All over my yard, up all the sides of trees and everywhere were pictures.4 Evans may have denied responsibility for her marvellous pictures, but their existence is a fact. Her words make clear that no single approach will determine the success of a work of art; to reduce inspiration or motivation to a predictable formula is an exercise in futility. *** With the rise of so-called “second wave feminism” of the 1960s and 1970s, activists challenged not just the sexism of the law and the workplace but also the ways in which women had for too long been creatively silenced by the patriarchy. In her famous essay from 1975, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” the French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous coined the influential term écriture féminine (women’s writing), declaring: Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Women must put herself into the text – as into the world, and into history – by her own movement.5

Unica Zürn, Untitled (interwoven double and multiple portraits showing Hans Bellmer), 1965. Private Collection. Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

Despite the radicalism of Cixous’ proposal that women need to find a new language in order to inscribe their femininity, in the decades before its publication, many writers – from Gertrude Stein, H.D., and Virginia Woolf, to Djuna Barnes, Joyce Mansour, and others – had wrestled with the written word to see what it was capable of. Between 1914 and 1919, the writer and artist Mina Loy, who was influenced by Futurism and Cubism, created startlingly vivid poems from fragments. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein summed up Loy’s originality with the observation: “Mina Loy [...] was able to understand without the commas. She has always been able to understand.”6 Loy observed of Stein that she “is not a writer

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in any of the currently accepted senses of the word. She does not use words to present a subject but uses a fluid subject to float her words on.”7 Both descriptions pre-empt the intentions of a revolutionary group of women artists and writers in the 1960s and 1970s who explored Concrete Poetry. The term – which the Brazilian artist collective Noigandres described as the “tension of word-things in space-time”8 – is something of a misnomer: rather than the weight that the word implies, Concrete Poetry allowed words and letters to tremble, erupt into dance and fly; be contrary, nonsensical, furious, and full of feeling.

Concrete Poetry: A World View (book cover), 1968

The rich contributions of women to this radical new art form were, in the main, unrecognised by the gate-keepers of culture. In the 1967 publication Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology, edited by Stephen Bann, out of twenty-three artists, not one female is mentioned. In the same year, Emmett Williams and Something Else Press published the first major international anthology of Concrete Poetry. It included the work of seventy poets and artists – only three of whom were women: Ilse Garnier, Bohumila Grögerová, and Mary Ellen Solt – Garnier and Grögerová were represented by works they made with their male partners. In 1968, Mary Ellen Solt edited Concrete Poetry: A World View – it, too, only included four women out of around ninety poets. Incensed by the ongoing omission of women from the narrative, in 1978, the Italian artist, writer and curator Mirella Bentivoglio – someone to whom categories were invented in order to explode – curated Materializzazione del linguaggio for the 38th International Art Exhibition – the first exhibition in the Biennale’s history dedicated to women artists. However, although the Biennale opened in July, Bentivoglio’s exhibition was launched in September: as someone who had curated numerous exhibitions devoted to women artists, she had been hastily invited to put together a show in response to widespread feminist protests at the lack of women in the main exhibition.9 The result was a coming together of eighty contemporary and historical female poets and artists, including the work of Futurists who had been overshadowed by their male counterparts. Although they worked across a range of media, they all sought, in Bentivoglio’s words, to “reactivate the atrophied tools of communication”10 and liberate words from the restrictions imposed upon them by the patriarchal demands of gender. In the catalogue, Bentivoglio wrote:

Materializzazione del linguaggio (cover of exhibition catalogue), 1978. Photo and courtesy Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia

Obviously women aren’t the only ones engaged in this work, but they do have double the motivation for engaging in the discourse: in the past they’ve been rendered immaterial (dare I say dematerialized) by the “abstract sublimity” of their public image, paralleled by their public absence; privately confined to daily, exclusive contact with the material world, women are now using every fibre of their beings to oppose a world rendered unreal (dare I say “derealized”) by repetitive mechanisms.11 1978 was a milestone in feminist art across Europe. The seminar Drugarica Žena. Žensko Pitanje – Novi Pristup? (Comrade Woman: Women’s Question – A New Approach?) took place in Belgrade; the First International

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Exhibition Women’s Art was staged in Wrocław in Poland, organised by the artist Natalia LL; and the curator and gallerist Romana Loda opened Il volto sinistro dell’arte, the final iteration of her decade-long series of exhibitions devoted to women artists – including Marina Abramović, Hanne Darboven, Gina Pane, VALIE EXPORT, Rebecca Horn, Natalia LL, and others – at her gallery in Brescia, Italy.12

Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959–1979, 2020. Courtesy Primary Information. Book cover featuring Lenora de Barros’ POEMA (POEM), 1979

The exhilarating, and long over-due book Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959–1979 13 is something of a celebration of the legacy of Materializzazione del linguaggio. It includes the work of fifty women artists from around the world – from Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Madeline Gins, to Liliane Lijn, Giovanna Sandri, Mary Ellen Solt, and others –, all of whom explored the activation of language via typography. To flip through the pages is to witness the work of artists to whom “liberating letters from words and words from the conventions that dictate how they should function in ordinary language and in traditional literary texts” was paramount.14 Exploring how to give shape to an inner world so harshly censored by patriarchal laws and mores, the fifty-two letters of the Roman alphabet are squeezed like so many tubes of paint. (As Bentivoglio wrote: “Surely there is a deep relationship between women and the alphabet, and not just because it is they who first transmit its form to children.”)15 Some artists treated words like objects: tiny sculptures that skip their way into meaning across a page; others created new shapes that stutter and sing. A syllable or a sentence might communicate in a clearly intelligible language or abandon legibility altogether. A single letter can roar; structures are flung to the wind and the bones of meaning picked dry and exposed to the elements. Each woman writes her story, utters her name, shapes her world. Her body moves through space and lands on the page.

Mirella Bentivoglio in collaboration with Annalisa Alloatti, Storia del monumento, 1968. Photo Riccardo Ragazzi. Courtesy Gramma_Epsilon Gallery, Athens. © Mirella Bentivoglio

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Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. She is the author of the novel Bedlam (Sternberg Press, 2006); the editor of The Artist’s Joke (The MIT Press, 2007); the author and illustrator of the children’s book There’s Not One (Scribe Publications, 2016). Her new book, The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits (2021) is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. She is currently working on a book about women artists and the spirit world.

5 6

Simon Grant, “Spiritualist Sisters in Art,” in Not Without My Ghosts: the Artist as Medium (London: Hayward Publishing, 2020). Grant curated the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition of the same name, that opened at London’s Drawing Room in 2020. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), accessed www. gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5321/ pg5321.html. Most are in the collection of the Victorian Spiritualist Union in Melbourne, Australia. The Monash University Museum of Art is currently compiling a catalogue of Georgiana Houghton’s work. Minnie Evans, quoted in Nina Howell Starr, “The Lost World of Minnie Evans,” The Bennington Review, 111(2), 1969, 41. Accessed https://americanart. si.edu/artist/minnie-evans-1466. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs, 1(4), 1976, 875. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).

9 10 11 12

13 14 15

Mina Loy, “Gertrude Stein,” in Sarah Crangle (ed.), Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), 233. Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre (eds.), Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959–1979 (Brooklyn, NY: Primary Information, 2020), 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid. Ibid. In 2019, curators Raffaella Perna and Marco Scotini celebrated the significance of 1978 with the exhibition Il Soggetto Imprevisto. 1978 Arte e Femminismo in Italia / The Unexpected Subject: 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy at FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea in Milan. Balgiu and de la Torre (eds.), Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959–1979. Ibid., 13. Mirella Bentivoglio, quoted by Lucy Ives in “But Is It Concrete?,” Poetryfoundation.org, January 25, 2021.

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1a–1c

Mirella Bentivoglio with Annalisa Alloatti

Tomaso Binga

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Giovanna Sandri

Ilse Garnier

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5, 6, 7

Mary Ellen Solt

Unica Zürn

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9, 10, 11

Milly Canavero

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Josefa Tolrà

Hélène Smith

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Georgiana Houghton

Alice Rahon

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16, 17

Sister Gertrude Morgan

Minnie Evans

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20, 21

Linda Gazzera

Eusapia Palladino

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Mina Loy

Djuna Barnes

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Gisèle Prassinos

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[1a–1c] 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 2 Tomaso Binga, Dattilocodice (plate 10), 1978. Typewriting, ink on paper, 55 × 50 cm. Photo Danilo Donzelli. Courtesy the Artist; Richard Saltoun, London 3 Giovanna Sandri, Costellazione di lettere, 1977. Serigraph on cardboard, 48.5 × 69.5 cm 4 Ilse Garnier, Blason du corps féminin, 1979. Portfolio with 46 illustrations. Published by Editions André Silvaire, Paris 5 Mary Ellen Solt, Forsythia, 1966. Ink on paper, 29 × 21 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp 6 Mary Ellen Solt, Geranium, 1966. Ink on paper, 29 × 21 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp 7 Mary Ellen Solt, Wild Crab, 1966. Ink on paper, 29 × 21 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp 8 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 9 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 10 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 11 Milly Canavero, Untitled, 1986. Marker on paper, 46.5 × 65 cm. Photo Elmar R. Gruber. The Elmar R. Gruber Collection of Mediumistic Art. © Elmar R. Gruber 12 Josefa Tolrà, Dibujo escritura fluídica, 1954. Ink and marker on paper, 28 × 36.5 cm. Private Collection. © Fundació Josefa Tolrà 13 Hélène Smith, Paysage martien, c. 1896–1899. Gouache on paper, 25.8 × 21 cm. Photo Bibliothèque de Genève. Ms. Fr. 7843/3, planchet 2 14 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

15 Alice Rahon, Thunderbird, 1946. Oil on canvas, 32.1 × 99.1 cm. Photo Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco. Collection Gallery Wendi Norris 16 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 17 Sister Gertrude Morgan, untitled (SABBATH DAY Poem), n.d. Paint on card, 30.5 × 22 cm. Courtesy The Museum + The Gallery of Everything, London 18 Minnie Evans, untitled, 1967. Oil, ink, paper on board, 36.83 × 49.53 cm. Courtesy The Museum + The Gallery of Everything, London 19 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 20 Unidentified photographer, Séance with Palladino, recto, 1909. Photograph of a table levitation during a séance with Eusapia Palladino and others at the Society of Psychic Studies in Milan in 1909. Albumen print, 16.8 × 12. Archive of the “Cesare Lombroso” Museum of Criminal Anthropology, University of Turin. © “Cesare Lombroso” Museum 21 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 22 Mina Loy, Househunting, c. 1950. Mixed media assemblage, 90 × 105.5 cm. Photo Zukor Art Conservation. Collection Carolyn Burke. Courtesy Carolyn Burke 23 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 24 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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ARTISTS’ BIO GRAPHIES

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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. Their aesthetic resembles the popular prints known in France as images d’Épinal, tempering the crudeness of medieval iconography with the verve of a more traditional naive style. In The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings (1915) Barnes had already championed a modern, uninhibited vision of womanhood, inspired by the community of feminist rebels she frequented in Greenwich Village; the female image in Ladies Almanack, however, is a proud, confident one that seems to draw strength from the social stigma attached to homosexuality.

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 similar to Evangeline Musset’s, and the novel shows an unusual cheerfulness for her writing. After this sisterhood – which included Natalie Clifford Barney, Mina Loy, and Dorothy Wilde – drifted apart, Barnes returned to America in the early 1930s and entered the darkest period in her literary career. Her subsequent, most famous novel, Nightwood (1936), describes the urban wanderings and nocturnal encounters of Robin Vote, a character who, like Barnes, is trying to mend the fragments of an identity that cannot be reconciled with the hostilities and vices of the modern world. – SM

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M I R E L L A B E N T I VO G L I O 1922, Klagenfurt, Austria – 2017, Rome, Italy In collaboration with

A N N A L I S A A L L OAT T I 1926 – 2000, Turin, Italy Italian poet, artist, and curator Mirella Bentivoglio’s graphic experiments employ Concrete and Visual Poetry to combine feminist and avant-garde discourses. Influenced by the typographic experiments of Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, Concrete and Visual Poetry – both of which treat letters and words as graphic marks, activating the materiality of language – first emerged in the 1940s, flourishing in the 1960s and 1970s in practices associated

with Italian artist groups including Neoavanguardia, I Novissimi, Gruppo 63, and Gruppo 70. At the same time, a new wave of feminism swept across Italy, gaining impetus from the widespread mobilisation of the student and workers’ protest movements of 1968–1969. Bentivoglio’s work unites these currents of revolutionary artistic and social energy. Bentivoglio abandoned conventional poetry when she began engaging actively with feminism in the 1960s. She became a key figure in the international Concrete and Visual Poetry movements and promoted the work of fellow female artists working in the verbal-visual field. 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; a last-minute addition to the Biennale programme, it opened in September 1978. 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,” including 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

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predefined dialogical positions, rejecting standardised patriarchal discourse while also reclaiming and re-establishing their own subjectivities. – LC

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TOMASO BINGA 1931, Salerno, Italy. Lives in Rome, Italy Bianca Menna, née Pucciarelli, married herself in 1977. At Campo D gallery in Rome, she wed her alter ego Tomaso Binga in a ceremony, captured in a photo, that marked the definitive metamorphosis of woman into artist. Her wry choice of a male pseudonym sums up the language games underlying her practice, but this impudent performance also helps clarify her goals. Over her long career, Tomaso Binga has been a performer, poet, and visual artist, using words and actions to undermine patriarchal constructs. On the one hand, with her body – often naked, she has acted out the letters of the alphabet like a carnal primer, telling the story of an independent woman (Scrittura vivente, 1976); on the other, with her writing – quick as a seismograph needle, she has obsessively inscribed panels, notebooks, clothing, and wallpaper, to free herself of meaning and overturn linguistic conventions (Scrittura desemantizzata, 1972–1976). Embracing a path that was already being explored around the world, Binga began in the early 1970s to play with the rules of language, through silent, incomprehensible rivers of writing that flow to the reader like subliminal messages. Her work took on shades of Concrete Poetry in the late 1970s, when Mirella Bentivoglio invited her to take part in Materializzazione del linguaggio, an exhibition at the Biennale Arte 1978, where Binga showed a graphic series that feels almost architectural. The squares of her Dattilocodici are made by repeating an ideogram, printed in two colours at regular intervals, that superimposes two typewritten graphemes. By combining an i with a 9 or a 7 or a j, the artist strips the original numbers and letters of their identity, creating a new, iconic character. Whilst the blue frame and red centre give the Dattilocodici a tactile feeling, the ideograms work linguistically, dismantling conventions and extending a verbal-visual invitation. Their interlinguistic power lets them cross geographic and cultural boundaries: if, as Binga believes, scrivere (writing) does not mean descrivere (describing), then each reader can project their own subjectivity onto these texts. – SM

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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 becoming involved in psychic practices at a late age through a chance encounter with a professional medium, she began producing a series of compositions – graphic ones at first, drawn with the aid of a planchette (a Ouija board for automatic writing), then half-philosophical, half-literary streams of text – which she believed to be messages from extraterrestrial, universal forces. Though they vary depending on the parameters of the séance where they were made, after just a few years these drawings took on a unified aesthetic. Canavero produced them with a precision achieved through obsessive, seamless movements, performed freehand in just a few seconds, and usually in a certain order: after laying out a set of circles, ovals, or spirals, the artist cuts through the composition with spiky shapes resembling upward arrows, as well as straight lines, triangles, and a strange hieroglyphic alphabet. In the series exhibited here, Untitled (1982–1986), these alphanumeric codes occupy gaps in the shapes, and 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, and though its aesthetic features are based on paranormal beliefs, the distinctive aspect of Milly 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. The artist seems to construct her abstractions systematically, without abandoning herself to any kind of bodily vibration or trance, but rather remaining present and focused. 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

a devout Baptist, long fascinated with the cosmology of her faith. Throughout her childhood, she was troubled by overpowering dreams and waking visions, but it wasn’t until Good Friday, 1935, at the age of fortythree, that Evans experienced a vision in which a heavenly voice told her to “draw or die.”1 Her first artistic efforts were a pair of small, squiggly pen-and-ink drawings on paper, My Very First and My Second (both 1935), now both held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The works that followed were even further enlivened with a divine presence drawn from artist’s private dreamscape, and included florid depictions of angels and demons, as well as a proliferation of eyes, which she equated with the omniscience of God. Although rife with religious symbology, chimerical creatures, spiralling botanicals, and riotous colours, Evans did not readily provide interpretation of her work, claiming her own mystification as to its meanings by way her subconscious. As she would state, “I have no imagination. I never plan a drawing, they just happen. In a dream it was shown to me what I have to do, of paintings. The whole entire horizon all the way across the whole Earth was out together like this with pictures. All over my yard, up all the sides of trees and everywhere were pictures.”2 In addition to its religious inspirations, 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 like untitled (1946, reworked 1962–1963 / 1968) and untitled (1967) 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 1

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M I N N I E E VA N S 1892, Long Creek, USA – 1987, Wilmington, USA

Typed transcript from Nina Howell Starr, “Conversations with Minnie Evans” (1962– 1973), Nina Howell Starr Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Minnie Evans, quoted in Nina Howell Starr, “The Lost World of Minnie Evans,” The Bennington Review, 111(2), 1969, 41.

Born in a log cabin in Long Creek, North Carolina, in 1892, 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

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(p. 169)

ILSE GARNIER 1927, Kaiserslautern, Germany – 2020, Saisseval, France The first version of Blason du corps féminin, from 1979, is a green folder containing forty-six sheets of paper, each with a poem by French artist Ilse Garnier. In the brief introduction, her husband and fellow artist Pierre Garnier explains that the patriarchal vision of history has sapped the poetic power of the female body, but that his wife’s writing is a compelling approach to depicting it. 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. Overall, 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 mere static image. The plates are a celebration of the non-verbal within poetry. They eloquently outline the principles of literary Spatialism, the avant-garde movement the couple founded in 1963, which aimed to deconstruct the linear body of the text and overcome semantic restrictions by exploring the infinite possible combinations of letters and geometric marks. Ilse Garnier had applied this method in 1965 to a series called Poèmes mécaniques, in which letters were shifted, repeated, or removed to create images, often abstract. Using the latter as scores, the artist also undertook pioneering experiments in sound poetry. 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. In this second exhibition at the Biennale, her works show once again how their poetry is heightened by the freedom with which signs are used to construct the text or alter its identity. – SM

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L I N DA GA ZZ E RA 1890, Rome, Italy – 1942, São Paulo, Brazil When Enrico Imoda presented her to the international scientific community as the greatest Italian medium of her generation, Linda Gazzera was just twenty-one. The

psychologist from Turin had concluded, after examining her case, that she was a gifted psychic, capable of making the souls with whom she communicated “appear.” With Imoda’s endorsement, Gazzera spent 1908 and 1909 performing in esoteric circles throughout Italy and Europe, and always following the same scenario. 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 themselves. Only then would Gazzera go into a trance and begin taking instructions from her spirit guide: a cavalry officer named “Vincenzo,” who answered the questions of those present while mocking them grotesquely; he would tell stories of other souls, orchestrate their appearances, and order photos to be taken. While these visual records can no longer be considered clinical evidence, the pictures taken at Gazzera’s séances were treated as such for many years, sparking strong reactions from famous international scientists. After taking part in several séances, Nobel Prize winner Charles Richet confirmed the authenticity of the photos, but her critics far outweighed him, and were probably why she stopped performing and mysteriously moved to Brazil. The eighteen prints in the so-called Imoda Album (1909) were assembled by Gazzera’s mentor as a gift for the wellknown doctor and anthropologist Cesare Lombroso. Though not all taken on the same occasion, they show the stages in an average séance, forming a charged narrative sequence. After several shots showing the medium in a clearly altered state, she appears surrounded by a series of “ectoplasms” summoned by Vincenzo. Whether manifested as hands, flowers, or faces (generally female), these flat silhouettes are surrounded by voluminous drapery, and rather than currents of occult energy, 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

Spiritualism, which elaborated a method of communicating with the dead in séances through mediums, originated in Upstate New York and was popularised in England in the 1850s, where it quicky saturated literary and artistic culture – visible through the works of authors like Arthur Conan Doyle and William Butler Yeats. For Houghton, a devout Christian and a trained artist, Spiritualism enabled her to maintain a closer relationship to God, even if her religious approach was not necessarily orthodox. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, she would translate that religious ferocity into her “spirit drawings,” an extraordinarily layered and multifaceted series of abstract works on paper. Houghton made the watercolours The Flower of William Stringer and The Spiritual Crown of Annie Mary Howitt Watts in 1866 and 1867, respectively, shortly after she achieved her first mediumistic drawings. In October of 1865, Houghton – who had decided to devote her life to Spiritualism following the death of a sister – had claimed to come into contact with spiritual guides inhabiting a realm beyond the physical world. Led by her “invisible friends,” she extensively documented the instructions she received during these supernatural encounters in highly distinctive automatic pencil drawings and eventually in abstract watercolours, too. In The Flower of William Stringer, Houghton lays out a knot of spiralling and straight lines, which flow in red, sepia, and blue waves across the page. The Spiritual Crown of Annie Mary Howitt Watts is made of rhythmically layered curlicues of white and grey atop a mass of cranberry red, blue, and yellow lines of colour. On the verso of each piece, an elaborate description attempts to clarify the message of the work, whose meaning, the artist declared, came from spirits who simply directed her hand. Houghton’s aim, as she wrote in her 1881 autobiography Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance, was “to show ‘What the Lord hath done for my soul’ by granting me the Light now poured upon mankind by the restored power of communion with the unseen.”1 –MW 1

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Georgiana Houghton, quoted in Simon Grant, “Georgiana Houghton: Medium and Spiritualist,” Raw Vision, 92, Winter 2016–2017, 22.

G E O RG I A NA H O U G H T ON 1814, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain – 1884, London, UK

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Born in the Canary Islands in 1814 to British parents, Georgiana Houghton spent most of her life in Victorian-era London, a period which saw a deep and sustained religious revival, as well as the rise in a host of beliefs in supernatural forces and energies, occult stories, and other uncanny transmissions.

1882, London, UK – 1966, Aspen, USA

M I N A L OY

It is hard to corral Mina Loy’s practice into a single stylistic category; the modernism of her works springs from a restless sensibility, and her constant peregrinations between Europe and America led her to identify at

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different points in time with Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. After studying art in England and Germany, Loy moved in 1905 to Florence, where she focused primarily on writing. As one can see from 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 primarily addressed to an audience of women, whom she urged to achieve intellectual, emotional, and sexual emancipation. She herself led an independent life, and in 1916, having separated from her husband, she left her children to embark on a long international pilgrimage that took her to Argentina, Switzerland, England, and then to New York in 1936. Having settled overseas, Loy adopted a unique artistic approach that was close to Dada in its techniques, yet powerfully Surrealist in its results. In her collage Surreal Scene (c. 1930), the artist was already putting the female body at the centre of technological, mystical, and scientific iconographies, suggesting the mental and physical complexity of every woman. But it is in Househunting (c. 1950) that Mina Loy brings a new depth to the feminism expressed by her Aphorisms. Like the visual representation of a verse written thirty years before – “Forget that you live in houses, that you may live in yourself” – it 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 the line. While the latter are clearly references to the stereotypes that stifle and hinder female independence, the figure’s surroundings instead allude to freedom, and seem to describe the modern spirit guiding the artist. – SM

J OYC E M A N S O U R 1928, Bowden, UK – 1986, Paris, France For the second wave Surrealists, who had gone through the horror of World War II without relinquishing their vision of woman as the object of troubled desires or muse of fanciful creations, Joyce Mansour was to be the essence of female provocation, both irresistible and repellent. Born in the United Kingdom to an Egyptian family that soon moved to Cairo, the writer 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, forming a close friendship with its key figure, André Breton. 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. Inexplicably overlooked by the literary canon, her poetry is considered among the most interesting of its time; when illustrated by the many artists who engaged with her words, including Roberto Matta, Hans Bellmer, and Wifredo Lam, the result is even more powerful. Her collection Les Damnations, published in 1966 with illustrations by Chilean artist and architect Roberto Matta, is a perfect balance of verbal and visual. The first edition contains eleven etchings that alternate with the text. Despite their overall abstraction, the oppressive world of despair evoked by the title is captured in these chaotic visions, from which naked, clearly female bodies emerge. Unlike the irrational images by other women artists who were associated with the movement around the same time – like Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn – Matta’s are perfectly in keeping with the classic dreamlike style embraced by Surrealism; yet they accompany the words of a proud, rebellious woman, provocatively insolent, who knows when to use her body as a weapon or indulge its whims. – SM

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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. There, she could be seen singing and preaching the Gospel, accompanied by a guitar and tambourine. After adopting the name “Sister” in the early 1940s, she would also preach at her own ministry: the tiny Everlasting Gospel Mission, housed in a whitewashed shotgun style home, 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, her guitar case, and even the back of a “For Sale” sign placed in her yard by a real estate agent. Many of her paintings, like untitled (Revelation 7 Chap.) (c. 1970), are direct interpretations of the Bible, in this case a childlike vision of angels descending from Heaven; 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. In 1960, Morgan was discovered by the New Orleans art dealer Larry Borenstein, who became a fierce advocate for her art and music. With his help, she would also soon come to the attention of the mainstream New York art world: Andy Warhol was an admirer and included her in the first issue of Interview in 1973. Parallel to this moment, the Black Arts Movement was in full force. Yet, Morgan did not fit neatly into either of these worlds. Not only was she separated by geography and theoretical framework, but also by artistic intent. She maintained that her creative vision came to her directly from Jesus: “He moves my hand. Do you think I would ever know how to do a picture like this by myself?”1 – MW 1

Sister Gertrude Morgan, quoted in Sara Barnes, with Elaine Yau and William A. Fagaly, “A Mission to Accomplish,” Raw Vision, 103, 2019, 50.

(p. 175)

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 titled “A Challenge to Science,” in which the entrepreneur and spiritualist Ercole Chiaia openly invited the famous doctor and criminologist Cesare Lombroso to evaluate the credibility of the miracles performed by Eusapia Palladino, a medium from Puglia who was the rage of all the elegant Neapolitan salons. The article describes Palladino as a thirty-year-old woman, robust and illiterate, who could move objects, levitate, communicate with the dead, or have them manifest their presence through noises and visible phenomena, all while tied to a chair. Despite initial reluctance, Lombroso accepted Chiaia’s challenge in 1891, and after attending several demonstrations in which Palladino even summoned up the

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spirit of his mother, said he was forced to rethink his convictions, and wrote a series of scientific publications on the woman. 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. In addition to documenting telekinesis, levitation, and apparitions of the dead, the book contained pictures of casts bearing the impressions of hands or faces: during some séances, Palladino would touch a wooden box during her trance, apparently imprinting the features of the deceased on the clay tablet that it contained. The resulting plaquettes have exceptional aesthetic qualities that immediately drew the attention of the art world, which tried in vain to reproduce their pathos. Amid the general enthusiasm, however, the seal of approval granted by Lombroso and other influential scientists, including the Nobel laureates Charles Richet and Pierre and Marie Curie, attracted the first accusations of fraud. Many 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 decided to withdraw from the scene, and died in Naples without public notice. – SM

(p. 177)

GISÈLE PRASSINOS

family told by Brelin, the first-born child of an odd but strict scientist named Berge Bergsky. Pushing the physical boundaries of the book format, Prassinos made twelve panels of brightly coloured fabric, machine-sewn and hand-finished, that reproduce the blackand-white drawings inside. These tapestries portray the characters in the story as strange groupings of geometric figures, in bizarre images that are only apparently childish. Despite the playful mood, Portait de famille, the tapestry that perhaps best represents the narrative, is a family portrait that seems to reveal the backstory through a carefully planned composition. Whilst the figure of Doctor Bergsky (second from the left) looms over the rest like a monarch, the figure of Brelin, symmetrical to his father and looking contrite, seems like the only one capable of attempting to challenge his authority. His role, as we can also see from Portrait idéal de l’artiste, is that of a domestic hero – perhaps the artist’s alter ego – who fights the patriarchal regime established by the head of the household and by society in general. Having moved away from dyed-inthe-wool Surrealism, Prassinos definitively proves she no longer needs any unconscious automatism to tell her stories: the force driving her visions is her own experience, or simply, the world as it is. – SM

(p. 173)

ALICE RAHON 1904, Chenecey-Buillon, France – 1987, Mexico City, Mexico

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

This artist is also part of The Witch’s Cradle. To read the artist biography, see p. 118.

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. André Breton and Paul Éluard thought she had a unique gift for narratives of the unconscious, but the artist felt guided by much more conscious inspiration; although she published several quasi-Surrealist works like Le Feu maniaque (1939), she developed a language of her own, more eccentric than oneiric. The texts she wrote up to 1939, when she definitively left the movement, describe absurd characters and shapeshifting bodies that resemble exquisite corpses, but without any accompanying visual element.

(p. 169)

It is no coincidence that Sandri entitled many of her works Costellazione: suggesting a parallel between poetry and stargazing, she asks the reader to single out the core pattern that lends rhythm and support to her compositions. Even in purely visual terms, these poems do seem like astral configurations of black or blue dry transfer lettering, interspersed with graphic marks and following no grammatical or lexical rules. 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. Whether or not it is clear, the message of each poetic composition ends at the edge of each page; though sometimes arranged into published collections suggesting some narrative, they are presented on individual sheets of paper or large panels. 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. In a literal take on the title Materializzazione del linguaggio – the exhibition she participated in at the Biennale Arte 1978 – Giovanna Sandri’s work imbues the text with a physical quality that is unparalleled in both visual effect and content. – SM

(p. 172)

Prassinos’ literary work added a figurative component only in the 1960s; turning into prose, it took on a mixed-media approach, adopting new spheres and tools of expression. The fullest example is unquestionably Brelin le frou ou le Portrait de famille (1975), the illustrated story of an outlandish French

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

HÉLÈNE SMITH

1923 – 2002, Rome, Italy

1861, Martigny, Switzerland – 1929, Geneva, Switzerland

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 investigation ranged between literature and art, taking a particularly radical approach to which she remained loyal even after Visual Poetry blunted the typographic edge of Concrete experiments. 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. Like other international women artists, Sandri did not eschew the communicative value of language, but rather, drawing inspiration from advertising graphics, allowed the text to become a riddle or puzzle for the reader/viewer.

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 at Swiss silk shop, yet could enter ecstatic states during which she produced completely automatic writing in unknown languages, or drawings of places she had never been. Led by several spirit guides and constantly monitored by Flournoy, between 1895 and 1900 Smith produced a wealth of verbal/visual works that were published with the doctor’s observations. They fall into three stylistic categories: the Hindu series, with “Oriental” landscapes and texts resembling Sanskrit; the Royal series, showing the interiors and

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exteriors of great castles; and the Martian series, which seems like a cross between the two, engaging Smith in intriguing conversations with another planet. Whilst communicating in a trance state with her main contact, a Martian named Astané, Smith would take notes in a mysterious ideogrammatic script. These alien signs, which linguist Ferdinand de Saussure saw as a distorted version of French, serve a specific descriptive purpose, accompanying a series of drawings that offer a vivid, normalised image of life on Mars. The planet’s inhabitants are similar to Earthlings, and according to the medium, are actually their reincarnations. Astané, for instance, is shown with long hair and a fakir’s tunic, while his house and other buildings have recognisably pseudo-Asian features. Only nature seems otherworldly: the Martian plants are luxuriant, but resemble no known species. In contrast to the fanciful imagery in the drawings, Flournoy’s study employs a detached tone of clinical analysis that left Smith unhappy; although the book won her adulation from spiritualists and requests for demonstrations, the medium felt betrayed and withdrew from public life. Yet thirty years after it was published, and even after her death, Smith’s popularity continued; 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

(p. 170)

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, balancing the rigorous approach of this movement with the interpretative one of traditional poetry, Solt treated language as a versatile communication tool that could be structured around visual as well as lexical relationships. The resulting images are constructed like constellations of letters or words, but rather than following the Concretist dogma that calls for all subjectivity to be stripped away, they are open to many different interpretations and readings. While Moonshot Sonnet (1964) employs grids and codes from NASA images of the moon landing, and The Peoplemover (1968) offers a series of slogans for demonstrations against the Vietnam War, Flowers in Concrete (1965–1966) suggests a link between nature and poetic vitality. This

collection is presented as a verbal-visual herbarium, laid out in plates like any botanical guide, and uses symbols and letters to recreate nine kinds of flowers. Solt juxtaposes, superimposes, and reverses the 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 definitely the most complex, and a prime example of Solt’s compositional approach. The word Forsythia – the name of the plant and title of the poem – becomes a root and base for the ramification of verbal offshoots, and an acrostic with an ambiguous message. Although the string of words – “forsythia out race spring’s yellow telegram hope insists action” – 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.

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, in a metamorphosis that seems to arise from the same ancestral force. Given Tolrà’s Catholic background, this energy was considered a powerful divine influence, but could also come from an equally powerful esoteric source. As one sees in the Christian images that the artist made around the same time, and like those of many other mediums, the psychic’s artworks 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

(p. 170)

And indeed, whether typewritten or handwritten, published in a book or shown on large panels at the Biennale, Solt’s words germinate just like the flowers of imagination and creativity. – SM

(p. 172)

J O S E FA T O L R À 1880 – 1959, Cabrils, Spain Among the many occult beliefs that spread across Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century, such as telepathy, telekinesis, and spiritism, mediumship is unquestionably the closest to artistic practice, since it involves a particularly sensitive person transcribing or illustrating messages from the souls with whom they are in contact. These skills often go hand in hand with an anomalous creativity that is suddenly manifested after physical, mental, or emotional trauma, like that of Josefa Tolrà, known as Pepeta. Until 1941, this medium was known in the countryside around Cabrils as 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. Regardless of their origin, these compositions are of great aesthetic value. But as if to substantiate the notion that she was guided by disembodied entities, they 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

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, which were rooted in her family background, began to manifest themselves in her youth, and 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 famous series of his photographs – like Unica Tied Up (1957) – show his partner’s naked body bound with ropes that deform her flesh. Although this practice might seem sadistic or even misogynistic, both partners saw it as an opportunity for artistic exchange, and Zürn herself stressed the affinity between their investigations. In the period that she was posing for Bellmer, she created a vast body of work that alternated or combined language and figuration. On the one hand, she wrote anagrammatic poems based on recombining the same group of letters, like Hexen Texte (1954); on the other, drawing provided a release for her neuroses, translating them into restless, obsessive works. If letting the unconscious take over is a boon to creativity, as the Surrealists Zürn frequented in Paris believed, her drawings of the 1950s and 1960s show a disquiet as devastating as it was artistically fruitful. The dense compositions shown here depict a dream world filled with monstrous creatures; the mark that defines them is

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as evanescent as a hallucination, and their features – eyes and lips, above all – are so fragmented, repeated, and superimposed that they can no longer be traced back to a human or animal. When not drawn in black ink, these figures become even more vibrant, almost electric, summoned from the dark background with colour pastels. The images are often flanked or completed by anguished bits of writing that seem carelessly jotted down, yet are powerfully poetic. Even more than the figurative element, this writing, which sometimes names people or places, heightens the tension of the drawings and reveals the gravity of Zürn’s inner conflict. – SM

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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) pointedly 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 deconstructs this appliance, suggesting 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, thus exploring the erotic relationship between body and machine. The tension created between these two entities points towards the repetition and mechanisation of gendered labour in both the domestic and professional realms. De Barros’ tongue intervenes in the mechanism of the typewriter, interrupting the system and subsequently challenging structures of power. In the 1980s, de Barros focused on writing poetry and worked for the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. In 1990, she moved to Milan where her interest in deconstructing language was brought into physical space for her first solo exhibition Poetry Is Something from Nothing (1990) at the experimental space Mercato del sale. During this time, de Barros encountered artists from the movement of Visual Poetry whose ideas and works, in particular those of Mirella Bentivoglio, were greatly stimulating. Her practice has expanded into the realm of performance incorporating pop art, Fluxus, Neoconcretism, and Conceptual Art while keeping the relationship between language and the body at the centre of her research. – LC

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Lenora de Barros, POEMA (POEM), 1979 / 2014. Blackand-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

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 comprised of original texts, are part of the artist’s ongoing and multi-faceted project about the US prison industrial complex and the insidious structures of anti-Black violence endemic to the system. For Smith, the psychic wound of mass incarceration is historically and collectively founded, and is personal, too; she has been visiting her father in prison over the last twenty years – for approximately twothirds of her life. Favouring a conceptual approach, Smith’s works in video, sculpture, photography, installation, and text defy conventional narratives of incarceration, instead drawing from personal stories and quotidian confrontations with the penal system. But when displayed in public, her experiments with language, form, sound, and colour also draw viewers into their critical fold. When experiencing one of Smith’s works, one must also examine one’s own biases. 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, whose brief, pithy, ironic, or disconcerting statements, appear in LED lights upon storefronts, outdoor walls, billboards, and gallery spaces. 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 statements, which can be read simultaneously as personal and more broadly social, and otherwise signal the presence of light and poetry in a variety of registers. Smith has spoken of her interest in language’s ability to deploy a subject position – to create closeness and distance through an “I” or a “you” or a “they.” This range of proximity is similarly tested in the interplay between the personal and communal characteristics of portraiture and what the artist dubs as “landscape.” While a landscape connotes aesthetic control over an environment, it is also an abstraction, the bigger picture. – MW

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Sable Elyse Smith, C.R.E.A.M., 2018. Aluminium light boxes, steel, 355.6 × 833.12 cm. Installation view, Agora, High Line Commission, The High Line, New York City, 2018. Photo Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the Artist; JTT, New York; Carlos/ Ishikawa, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles Next pages: 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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B R O N W Y N K AT Z

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

Bronwyn Katz makes delicate, fibrous 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 multidimensional paintings, laid across floors like topographical landscapes, and hanging from ceilings or protruding from the ground up like so many stalactites and stalagmites. In her practice, Katz draws on the knowledge that land is a repository of memory and that places reflect the experiences of those who inhabit them. For Katz, the land remembers and communicates the memory of its occupation. The artist 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 whispering 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 life’s major events: conception, birth, and death. Gõegõe (2022) is a new, large sculpture made from found bedsprings and black pot scourers. Placed on the floor, the six-metre-wide work is named after a mythical water snake that is known by many different names in the mythology of many South African peoples. The shining, dark-coloured snake is known both to live in rivers and at times to be the river itself. According to a story told to Katz by her grandfather, the snake once had a diamond on its forehead that was stolen by a man in the middle of the night. Rendered blind by the man, when it woke, the snake began to destroy everything in its path. For Katz, the snake becomes a metaphor for our contemporary extractive relationship with the Earth and other living creatures. – MK

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Bronwyn Katz, //xa//xasen (I) (STUDY), 2019. Salvaged bedspring, pot scourers, 185 × 135 × 40 cm. Photo Peres Projects. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Peres Projects, Berlin. © Bronwyn Katz Next pages: 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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AMY SILLMAN

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

The New York painter Amy Sillman is known for a robust and physical kind of painting – of stormy abstractions, extroverted gestures, and spontaneous tremors of colour –, but also buttressed by interventions in forms such as writing, curating, humour, and digital animation. With this approach, she has helped to invigorate the boundaries of contemporary painting today with a hybrid and physical, yet speculative practice. Born in Detroit and raised in Chicago, Sillman moved to New York in 1975, where she spent a decade developing her work while being involved in various artist-run publications such as Heresies and art spaces such as Four Walls. Since the mid-1990s, she began to establish herself as a painter, but also an exacting thinker and writer about art, with a practice that also encompasses the ongoing publication of the zine The O.G., various iPhone/iPad animations, and an active life in teaching and curating. Sillman has published frequently, with illuminating essays on Abstract Expressionism, elements of form, and other artists from Laura Owens and Maria Lassnig to Eugène Delacroix. Sillman’s prominent role in refreshing the position of gestural abstraction in the 21st century rests on an expansion, as the artist says, of the vocabulary between figuration and abstraction. In pieces like Psychology Today (2006), fragmented legs and torsos burst from a yellow box that floats against a ground of flat stripes of colour. In others, like the vivid green and chartreuse painting Nose (2010), a roughly outlined nose and hand – or at least, suggestions of them – erupt from the crookedly striated composition, creating a moment of slapstick. Setting the viewer’s expectations up for an experience of gestural painting, especially as it has been profoundly influenced by the storied history of Abstract Expressionist art, these works relish in incongruity, especially when these forms 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 type of fragmented narrative that unfurls in space. 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

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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 Next pages: Amy Sillman, installation view, Twice Removed, Gladstone Gallery, New York City, 2020. Photo David N. Regen/Gladstone Gallery. Courtesy the Artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York/ Brussels. © Amy Sillman

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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 is highly aware of the photographic act of image-making. Lawler came to prominence in New York in the early 1980s as part of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists who focused on institutional critique and sharp analysis of mass media culture. Pictures artists, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, and Lawler, 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 as they are 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 and the reconfiguring of an artwork’s meaning as it cycles through various contexts. This air of transparency is often supported by the titles and captions that accompany her photographs. With an exhibitionist attitude, her work often appropriates that of male artists who have received inflated market success. In her recent works, Lawler began experimenting with digital effects that alter the artworks and spaces she documents, often making the scenes almost unrecognisable. She adds digital distortions and stretches images to engage their site of display, as in her adjusted to fit series, where works are printed on sheets of vinyl that can match the ratio of the wall of their installation or fill entire rooms. By turning documentary photographs into reflexive, distorted scenes, she continues her longstanding effort to animate conventions within the world of visual culture. 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 roomfilling vinyl image. Lawler’s continued re-engagement with her images challenges the assumed meanings we attribute to art, status and culture. In a society exponentially shaped by economic trends, her work presents an honest perspective on art’s status and function as a commodity. – IA

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Louise Lawler, Untitled (Skylight), 2021. Dye sublimation print on museum box, 121.9 × 200 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Sprüth Magers Next pages: 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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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, both immediately perceptible and not. Emphasising the role that collective bodily presence can wield in addressing power structures – or at least making them known – Pirici, a trained dancer, frequently assembles groups of actors and dancers 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. Some of Pirici’s earlier actions occurred in her hometown of Bucharest, where she initiated performative works to address Romanian cultural policy. If You Don’t Want Us, We Want You (2011) humorously confronted banal, heroic political monuments and public sculptures in the city. In one of the several actions that the work consisted of, Pirici staged performers in front of an equestrian statue of the turn-of-the-century Romanian monarch Carol I, where, positioned on the ground, they embodied the horse, multiplying it, placing the oversized sculpture in relation to the human scale, and attempting to change its signification. In more recent works, like the large-scale piece Aggregate (2017–2019), dozens of performers were organised into veritable living landscapes, in which they enacted choreographic gestures that reference popular culture. In this work, collectivity manifests itself in such references, but also is emphasised in the relationship between performer and audience member: swarming the visitors, dancers and actors initiate everyone present in the space into the framework of the piece. 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

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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 Next pages: Alexandra Pirici, Aggregate, 2017–2019. Performative environment. Exhibition view, Art Basel Messeplatz, Basel, 2019. Photo Andrei Dinu. Courtesy the Artist. © Alexandra Pirici

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Alexandra Pirici, Re-collection, 2018. Ongoing action. Exhibition view, Upheaval, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, 2020. Photo Alexandra Pirici. Courtesy the Artist. © Alexandra Pirici

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VIRAL SPIRAL, OR SEVEN TWISTS IN A WITCH’S DUEL Marina Warner

“All things are always changing, / But nothing dies…”1 Mestra has a father, Erysichthon, who’s a profiteer, a blasphemer against the gods and nature: intent on his own profit, he cuts down a grove sacred to Ceres, the goddess of plenty and harvest, and then, even after the most serious warnings, he fells a huge, ancient oak hung about with prayers and offerings. For this, the dryad of the tree curses him; Ceres hears her despair and summons Fames to slide into Erysichthon while he’s sleeping and take possession of him: he begins to dream of food. When he wakes, he frenziedly devours everything around – till there is nothing left of his great wealth. To procure more food, his eyes light on “his daughter, worthy of a better father,” comments Ovid.2 Mestra refuses to be sold and begs the gods to help her. Neptune responds to this cry, and when her first client reaches for her, the young woman finds she can take another form – and turns into a fisherman. But Erysichthon, now seeing an advantage to him in her new shapeshifting powers: “Sold her again, / Sold her again and often, to many masters, / So she would go away, now mare, now heifer, / Now bird…”3 The story ends with a satisfyingly grisly revenge on Erysichthon, who finally devours himself. The shapeshifting daughter is a figure of survival, her father a living allegory of consumerism. She’s not a nymph or a goddess, but a girl to whom the gods grant polymorphous powers. Her story belongs in a special group about tricksters who keep mutating their outward form. It exemplifies one aspect of the principle that Ovid’s Metamorphoses sets out with the closing speech of Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher whose thought echoes so much of Sanskrit and Buddhist thought. His doctrine is also a form of panpsychism, and the classical names for the protagonists of tales of metamorphosis, and the tales’ prominence in European Renaissance humanism shouldn’t obscure how their belief in wild, polymorphous fluidity is profoundly at variance with ideas of the Western unified individual.

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“Nothing dies:” someone’s spirit, however unhoused, unbodied, and dislocated, still remains. This gives a happier twist on the loss of self that takes place so violently in Ovid’s many tales of sudden change, when subjects are permanently transformed into stone or plant or bird or river.4 The poet is often passing on origin stories for natural phenomena – or making them up – but knowing that the nightingale was once a woman called Philomela doesn’t accord with what the classical, humanist, Christian tradition means by personhood. But these ideas are fading, and both before and during Covid-19, concepts of sympathy between species and between sentient and non sentient phenomena have intensified. From the first rumours of pangolins in the wet market in Wuhan to the hygienic protocols of handwashing and mask wearing, each one of us has now been sensitised to the invisible bonds that link us to the life of plants and animals in the commons of the air we breathe. The chain of transmission had to be interrupted, and survival has depended on separateness, even isolation. The pandemic plunged us all into a tormenting paradox: we have learned that our human bodies are communicating vessels by default not design, that we all exist in intimate and contagious proximity, regardless of species, intention, relationship, consciousness, or agreement. However, we also recognise our global interconnectedness meant keeping apart from one another. Artists consequently move in opposite directions: at one pole, their works are charged with an exhilarating sense of our human oneness with the earth, plants, and all creatures, including insects and monsters (see the work of Rosana Paulino); and, at the opposite pole, they’re agonistically convulsed with knowledge of pollution and contagion and the subcellular, microscopic, impalpable life force of Coronavirus (such a pretty name for this heedless killer).

In the 1930s, a young woman in England desperately wants to become a horse, adopts a lactating hyena for her close friend, evokes passionate lovemaking with a wild boar, and imbues fruits, flowers, and vegetables with cannibalistic appetites; in France, she dreams of flocks of butterflies and writes to her beloved friend Leonor Fini that she has seen her again in a dream: “Walking on I come to a château in ruins and full of cats,” so Leonora Carrington writes to her soul sister. “I meet you and we look at each other in a mirror. You have a lynx’s head, and I myself have a horse’s head.”5 After Carrington moves to Mexico, she develops another dazzling creative conspiracy, with Remedios Varo. Together the women absorb all kinds of occult knowledge of Mexican ancient cosmology; they experiment with narcotic-induced visions. Varo’s first husband, Benjamin Péret, compiles a treasure trove of Latin American myths and philosophy, one of the many works that nourished the artists’ remarkable original inventions – many of them innovatory myths woven form the fabric of the traditions around them filled with animal deities and hauntings by dream creatures.6 Meanwhile, in England, Edith Rimmington and Ithell Colquhoun also tap esoteric knowledge, producing exceptionally singular visions of birds, rocks, flowers in fantastic zoomorphoses and multiple mutations. The virus itself has soon begun to show itself adept at shapeshifting; it keeps mutating, sprouting new variants; virologists are trying to keep up and the rest of us fear it will change again and elude science’s powers. It’s like those nightmares of being chased but it’s spooling in reverse: we pursue, we reach out, we miss. The unstoppability of metamorphosis could seem a game of tag if the consequences of failing to keep up in the chase weren’t so deadly serious.

The jinn of the Qur’an – male and female – are likewise infinitely mutable; made of air and fire, their elements are the clouds, springs, and the depths of the sea. They can tower to the clouds in the shape of a tusked and terrifying monster or shrink to the size

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of a pomegranate seed and hide in the depths of the sea. In the One Thousand and One Nights, after a prince has been changed into an ape, a beautiful princess sets about saving him from the malignant ifrit or jinni who has cursed him to take this shape. She’s also an enchantress, a jinniya in human form. When the evil jinni assaults her in the shape of a lion, she pulls out one of her hairs, turns it into a sharp sword and cuts him in two; his head becomes a scorpion, she changes herself into a snake; her enemy parries this and turns into an eagle; the snake becomes a vulture… the sequence continues: now he’s a black cat, she a brindled wolf. The cat finally takes shape as a pomegranate and bursts, scattering seeds everywhere, which the princess, in the shape of a cock, tries to gobble up – but one is left, and this last seed turns into a fish and dives into the depths. The princess becomes a bigger fish, and plunges in after him, but the ifrit bursts back out of the water like a firebrand. She takes him on, and in the conflagration that ensues, she reduces him to ashes, but is irreparably burned herself.7 In fairy tales, these concatenations of metamorphoses are known as “witch’s duels,” because the evil sorceresses in the stories have these virus-like powers to spiral through a score of shapes. They have antecedents: shapeshifters and trickster gods twist and turn through Celtic legend and Norse mythology and surface among stories of primordial, elemental forces in ancient Greek sources as well as Ovid. They resonate more closely with contemporary approaches to metamorphosis because they dramatise a process of transformation rather than a teleological alteration of appearance. These tales are also associated with visceral forces of revenge and retribution and deeply rooted dreams of escape and flight.

When Zeus desired the goddess Nemesis against her will, she changed herself into a fish: “By the limitless dark water of the sea she tried to escape, but Zeus pursued her […] as now she fled through the wave of the loud roaring sea, […] and now again over the dry land with its fruitful clods. And all this time she kept changing into the various wild animals that the land nurtures.”8 Zeus chases her, changing his own shape to keep up with hers, and finally, takes the form of a swan and rapes her – she’s now in the form of a goose and gives birth to an egg from which will hatch Helen of Troy.9 The name of the goddess – Nemesis – matters: she’s Revenge embodied, and a long tragedy will ensue from Zeus’ crime, as the cycle of violence done to women continues. When Helen is abducted by Paris, her violation unleashes the deadly Trojan war.

Nemesis tries to escape Zeus by diving deep into the sea, the mutable element; it is in the depths that Proteus lives, the marine divinity whose name has become proverbial for shapeshifting. He is the Old Man of the Sea and his father is Poseidon, the god of the sea. Like the sirens, who are likewise magical aquatic beings gifted with foreknowledge, Proteus “can speak infallibly”10 and will help the Greek king Menelaus, the husband of the abducted Helen of Troy, to find his way home after the fall of Troy. Proteus has a daughter, a sea goddess herself, Eidothea, and she tells Menelaus that: “When the sun hits the midpoint of the sky, / The old god bobs above the salty water…,”11 and gathers his pod of seals around him to take his siesta (“Their breath smells sour / From gray seawater, pungent salty depths.”12). Menelaus must surprise him: “And hold him there, despite his desperate struggles. In trying to escape, he will change shape To every animal on earth, and then Water and holy fire. You must hold fast Unshaken, and press harder; keep him down.”13

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Later, when Menelaus strikes, Proteus struggles wildly, and Menelaus reprises the scene, in bardic style: “The old god still remembered all his tricks, And first became a lion with a mane, Then snake, then leopard, then a mighty boar, Then flowing water, then a leafy tree. But we kept holding on…”14 The Old Man of the Sea then does indeed tell the Greek king how to get home, and reveals to him the sufferings of his friends and fellow fighters. “Then the old god sank Beneath the waves.” Proteus, this “old god” later teaches the mortal Peleus how to overcome the resistance of Thetis, the sea goddess, who arrives, riding on a bridled dolphin, to take her usual nap in her usual sea cave. Peleus, instructed by Proteus, seizes her and holds on to her; it is as if Proteus has been able to transmit his own powers of mutation to her attacker, just as Homer is providing Ovid with the verbal means to dramatise the struggle. Ted Hughes’ anachronisms reach towards the violence of the scene: “He found himself Gripping A tigress By the shag of her throat As her paw hit him with the impact Of a fifty-kilo lump of snaggy bronze Dropped from a battlement.”15 Achilles, the doomed hero of the Trojan war, will be born from this rape. On the psychosocial level, in the story of the rape of Thetis, such a shapeshifting sequence reverberates with female sexual experience and deeply rooted female stratagems of self-defence and redress.

The craftsman god, Hephaestus, is born with bodily deformities: his mother Hera rejects him and throws him down from Mount Olympus. He falls to the depths of the sea, where Thetis gathers him up and cares for him tenderly. He grows up down below, and remains there, setting up his forges in the core of volcanoes. At the request of Thetis, he makes magnificent armour for her son Achilles, including the famous shield, one of the earliest works of art ever described, in an epic ekphrasis. He’s attended by golden handmaidens whom he’s fabricated; they act as his assistants. And it is Hephaestus who fashions Pandora, the first woman, like a statue out of clay, to be later animated by the gods. These “manufactured maidens” are the earliest AI automata in literature. From the start, human imagination linked the idea of human machines to the primal forces, for Hephaestus is a master of fire as Thetis is a mistress of water. Shapeshifters are close to the elements – the ability to mutate reproduces the properties of water and fire. Mestra is fugitive, adept, slippery; it’s not an accident that the god of oceans gift her powers. 16 And protean changes of shape also have mass, the mass and weight of water.

When the Old Man of the Sea turns up in the One Thousand and One Nights, he appears in the shape of a spindly old man, and he begs Sindbad for a ride on his shoulders. Sindbad agrees, and finds his burden getting heavier and heavier as his burden urges him on further and further…17

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In On Growth and Form, the biologist D’Arcy Thompson analyses the morphologies shaped by water; he compares, in a fascinating passage, a drop of ink unfurling in a glass with the tentacles and bell or umbrella of the medusoids, or jellyfish. He also explores splashes, viscous threads, cylinders, and membrane tension; his analysis gives a truly illuminating context to the current aesthetic explorations of fractal geometry, topological bulges and holes, of waves and curves and bulbs and pods, animal- and plant-like in their associations.18 Awareness of elemental materiality, of contingency and mutability, has shaped a biomorphic aesthetic in many different areas of modern and contemporary art: from the droop and sag of Eva Hesse’s sculptures and Louise Bourgeois’ stitched figures to the bulbous, baked clay athanors of Gabriel Chaile and the swelling, floppy and fluid structures of Hannah Levy and Mrinalini Mukherjee. Bagginess has become inspirational, 19 and biomorphism is closely connected to plasma and other fluids and to the morphology of whales, jellyfish, octopus, frogspawn, fish, squid, dolphins, seaweeds, recently discovered deep ocean seasnails and lumpsuckers, huge worms to rival the most shuddery fears of legendary chthonic monsters.20 The aesthetic tendency gains a political dimension in several artists’ work, expressed perhaps most powerfully in Paul Gilroy’s “hydrophanic ethics.” Describing Olaudah Equiano’s heroic efforts to save his fellow crew members – white (galley slaves) as well as black captives – from shipwreck, Gilroy invokes the all-importance of water as a metaphor for the radical sympathy he is calling for: “[Equiano’s] conduct exemplifies the generosity and empathy demanded alike by […] the elaboration of a hydrophanic ethics in which meaning is revealed through the mediating agency or presence of water.”21 In bodies in metamorphosis today, biomorphic, watery epiphanies also lead to visions of fusion, self-obliteration, dissolution. The more hermetically sealed in our separateness from one another, the more impossible and impermissible it has become to touch, to hold, to kiss, to be pressed up against strangers in a crowded place, the more ideas of merging and entangling have come to characterise representations. Visions of contiguity, porosity, intermingling, and absorption transmit nightmarish terrors (contiguity spells contagion) but they also convey nostalgic longings for proximity, and even for an abandonment of the embodied individual into that indeterminate, amniotic bliss of oneness with oceanic immensity, dissolved in sympathy with other beings, becoming no one.

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Marina Warner’s award-winning books explore myths and fairy tales; they include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), and Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985). She has published five novels and three collections of short stories; her essays on literature and art include several on Leonora Carrington’s writings (introductions to The House of Fear and The Seventh Horse; afterwords to The Debutante and Down Below). She has curated exhibitions, including The Inner Eye: Art beyond the Visible (1996). Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists came out in 2018 for Thames & Hudson and Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir in 2021 for William Collins. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College in London and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities. She is currently writing a book about the concept of “sanctuary.”

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The lines continue: “The spirit comes and goes, / Is housed wherever it wills, shifts residence / From beasts to men, from men to beasts, but always / It keeps on living… / So do I teach that spirit / Is evermore the same, though passing always / To everchanging bodies.” Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press [1955], 1983), Book 15, lines 876–879, p. 370. For this essay, I am also drawing on Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Loeb Library [1916], 1999), and Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004). I would like to acknowledge the inspiration of Alice Oswald’s book-length poem Nobody, with watercolours by William Tillyer (London: 21 Publishing, 2018), reprinted as Nobody (London: Jonathan Cape, 2019). Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Miller, Book 8, line 847, p. 465. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Humphries, Book 8, lines 871–874, p. 208. For example: Daphne changes into a laurel tree to escape Apollo; Io, transformed into a heifer, pathetically writes her name in the ground with her hoof so that her parents can recognise her; Actaeon tries to order off his hounds but, now that has become a stag, the same animal he has hunted all his life, cannot speak and reveal himself, so the pack turns on him and tears him to pieces; Niobe is turned into a mountain streaming with tears for the loss of her children, who have been petrified in the form of statues. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books 1, 3, 6. See P.M.C. Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis in Greek Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press [1990], 1999), passim.

10 11 12 13 14 15

Whitney Chadwick, The Militant Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), 88. Benjamin Péret, Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d’Amérique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1960). This remarkable work deserves more attention – and translations. “The Tale of the Second Dervish,” in Robert Irwin (ed.), The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights, trans. Malcolm C. Lyons (London: Penguin Classics, 2008), vol. 1, 86–88; see also Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (London: Vintage Books, 2014), 36–53, 395–396. Malcolm Davies (ed.), The Cypria (Washington, D.C.: The Center for Hellenic Studies, 2019), Fragment F7, pp. 86–87. The better-known version of this myth features the mortal Leda as the victim of Zeus’ assault, and consequently the mother of two eggs, from which Castor and Pollux, Helen and Clytemnestra are hatched. See Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 95, 97–110. Homer, Odyssey (New York: Norton, 2017), Book 4, line 383, p. 164. Ibid., lines 398–399, p. 164. Ibid., lines 403–404, p. 165. Ibid., lines 414–418, p. 165. Ibid., lines 455–459, p. 166. Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (London: Faber, 1997), 102; rendering Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 11, lines 70 ff. In Mestra’s story, it is Neptune, the god of the sea, who gifts her with shapeshifting powers, and the narrator is the river god Achelous,

who explicitly compares her powers to his own mastery of transformations, but says that she has a greater range. Mestra survives paternal abuse to become the wife of Autolycus, who quite appropriately is himself a trickster, the son of Hermes, god of codes and crossroads. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 11. “The Fifth Journey of Sindbad,” in Irwin (ed.), The Arabian Nights, vol. 2, 492–493 (Lyons’ translation does not name the “incubus” as the Old Man of the Sea but elsewhere he has been identified with him). D’Arcy W. Thompson, On Growth and Form, ed. John Tyler Bonner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 49–87, fig. 15. See Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986), in Denise DuPont (ed.), Women of Vision: Essays by Women Writing Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988; http:// theorytuesdays.com/wp-content/ uploads/2017/02/The-Carrier-BagTheory-of-Fiction-Le-Guin.pdf), and reprinted in this volume. Katherine Ellen Foley, “Meet the New Species of Deep-Sea Fish So Gooey It Melts When Brought to the Surface,” Quartz, 12 September 2018 (https:// qz.com/1387690/a-new-fish-found26000-feet-deep-melts-at-thesurface-of-the-sea). Paul Gilroy, “Never Again: Refusing Race and Salvaging the Human,” Holberg Lecture 2019 (https://holberg prisen.no/en/news/holberg-prize/ 2019-holberg-lecture-laureatepaul-gilroy); see also, for imagery of dissolution, the poem by Oswald, Nobody, with watercolours by Tillyer, a poem inspired by the Odyssey.

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P O S T H U M A N C R I T ICA L T H E ORY

Rosi Braidotti

I N T R ODUC T ION

Whether we appreciate the term or not, these are posthuman times and scholarship in this field is in full expansion. Spectacular developments, notably in the life and neural sciences and the study of the Earth and ecological systems, as well as digital information technologies, have altered our shared understanding of what counts as the basic unit of reference for the human. The posthuman turn is triggered by the convergence of posthumanism, on one hand, and postanthropocentrism, on the other. The former focuses on the critique of the humanist ideal of “Man” as the universal representative of the human, while the latter criticises species hierarchy My argument in favour of Posthuman Critical and advances ecological Theory starts from the assumption that a new, justice. subtler, and more complex relationship to our planetary dimension is now needed and that a more egalitarian relationship to non-human others is called for. Academic research needs to rise to the challenge, as evidenced for instance by the widespread acceptance by the scientific community of the term “Anthropocene”1 as the correct definition of our geological era. Posthuman Critical Theory argues for the pertinence of the posthuman predicament as a way of reframing the Anthropocene issue. The term “Posthuman Critical Theory” therefore marks the emergence of a new type of discourse that is not merely the effect of the convergence of posthumanism and postanthropocentrism and a culmination of these two strands of thought, but rather a qualitative leap in a new and more complex direction.

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T H E P O S T H U M A N A S F IGU R AT ION

The posthuman is a figuration, or conceptual persona, not a concept in the strict sense of the term. It operationalises the critical thinker’s engagement with the present by a specific methodology, which I have developed out of the feminist neomaterialist branch of poststructuralist philosophy. The key notion is to draw discursive and material cartographies of the present, which account for the documents and the monuments, the semiotic and material conditions of contemporary knowledge production. A cartography is a theoretically based and politically informed map of the present or “actual moment” in terms of scholarly and discursive production. It rests on Deleuze’s insightful philosophy of time as a continuum, which defines the present as a multilayered and pluridirectional concept. The present is both the record of what we are ceasing to be and the seed of what we are in the process of becoming: it is here and now, but also virtual. This notion is crucial in Deleuze’s philosophy, as it refers to the sum total of possible alternative modes of being. He develops it with Spinoza, but also Leibniz, as a form of “perspectivism,” that is, as the idea of multiple possible worlds and of multiple modes of perception of this very possibility. For Deleuze this notion acquires ethical connotations and it points to an intensive, qualitative shift in ways of becoming. By extension, it means for me that the task of cartography is to provide insights into multiple dimensions: to be critical about the actual conditions, but also creative in terms of new figurations or navigational tools that aim at actualising the virtual. An adequate cartography aims to bring forth alternative figurations or conceptual personae to steer a course through an account of the present in its dual aspects, as noted above. In other words, a figuration fulfils the double function of documenting and exposing the sedentary and restrictive structures of dominant subject-formations (power as potestas, or entrapment). On a more affirmative level, however, the same figuration also expresses alternative representations of the subject as an ongoing process of transformation (power as potentia, or empowerment). In some ways, a figuration is the dramatisation of both the processes of critical thinking and of virtual becoming. This is where radical epistemologies such as feminism and anti-racism enter the picture as well. I read the philosophical function of figurations in terms of the feminist method of Adrienne Rich’s “politics of locations” or Haraway’s “situated knowledges” as a form of radical immanence. In this perspective, a figuration is also a map of one’s historical and social locations that enables analyses of specific power formations and the elaboration of forms of resistance. This approach assumes a feminist neomaterialist perspective, namely the embodied and embedded situated, relational, and affective structure of (feminist) knowledge production. Politics of locations, or radical immanence, is one of feminism’s conceptual contributions to contemporary critical thought. The other is affirmative politics. I define the posthuman accordingly as a critical and creative figuration, or as a conceptual persona that illuminates the complexities of the present, defined as both the actual and the virtual. In philosophical terms – as opposed to the specific geological sense of the term – it is less of a substantive entity than a conceptual persona that illuminates a series of emerging discourses generated by the intersecting critiques of humanism and of anthropocentrism. What the posthuman makes thinkable nowadays, across many fields, is the discursive and material unfolding of this critical convergence. Some of them are linked to discourses of extinction, crises and survival, but many are generative and propositional. Let me point out the more obvious ones. First, any lingering notion of human nature is replaced by a continuum, which Haraway describes as “naturecultures.” 2 This

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shift also brings to an end the categorical distinction between life as bios, the prerogative of Anthropos, and the life of animals and non-humans, or zoe. 3 What comes to the fore instead are new human/non-human linkages, which include complex media-technological interfaces of biological and nonbiological matter. The double mediation, bio- and info-technological, is of crucial importance to the posthuman predicament. These discourses express not only the critical interrogation of the category of anthropocentrism, or species supremacy, but with it also the awareness of the relational structure of the embedded and embodied, extended self. They also allow an “ecosophical” vision of subjectivity on a multiplicity of nomadic, “ecosophical” levels,4 which include the environmental, the social, and the psychic. A CA RT O G R A P H Y OF T H E P O S T H U M A N P R E DICA M E N T

As a result of the premises stated above, I propose to approach the posthuman as a multiplicity that expresses the same intuition about a change of paradigm, away from anthropocentrism. Posthuman scholarship covers a range of diverse positions and often opposed political agendas. The proliferation of productive scholarship, however, takes place alongside a considerable amount of social theory and general literature that focuses on shared anxiety about the future of both our species and our humanist legacy. In a recent survey, 5 I identified some metapatterns across the different areas of posthuman scholarship and defined them as creative interdisciplinary hubs, or generative productive cores. The pattern they design is not linear, but rather like rhizomic lines that zigzag through different fields – notably the critical “studies” areas that have been growing interstitially since the 1970s, as well as several established disciplines. Let me give some examples: first, comparative literature and cultural studies, which have played a pioneering role and have innovated on methods as well as themes. Especially relevant are ecocriticism and animal studies. Another pioneering interdisciplinary hub is what we used to call “media studies,” which in posthuman scholarship has taken a more material turn in order to account for the political economy of human/non-human interaction and mediated affect in our times. Environmental studies are another crucial innovator in postanthropocentric thinking, with intellectual giants such as Donna Haraway straddling this field and science and technology studies. Throughout my work, including that on the posthuman, I foreground the innovative impact of feminist, gender, and LGBTQ+ theory, as well as postcolonial and decolonial studies, as intersectional hubs. In their efforts to think their way across and hopefully out of patriarchal logic and phallocentric violence, feminists have been among the first to theorise a qualitative posthuman shift based on the continuum between the human and the non-human actors of change. This trend is picking up momentum in contemporary queer posthuman and inhuman theories, with special emphasis on “posthuman sexuality.” A sort of intergalactic alliance of feminists and LGBTQ+ with aliens and monsters lies at the heart of the science fiction horror genre, which is one of the most popular contemporary cultural trends. It supports the composition of an assemblage between women and LGBTQ+ as the others of “Man,” and the other “others” in the form of non-whites (postcolonial, Black, Jewish, Indigenous, and hybrid subjects), non-anthropomorphic organisms (animals, insects, plants, trees, viruses and bacteria), and so forth – a colossal hybridisation of species. The main link between feminist theories and the posthuman critical turn for me lies in the notion of embodied and embedded, relational and affective structures of subjectivity. The feminist neomaterialist tradition is the genealogical missing link here, which contemporary feminist materialism is developing further. The

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emphasis on vital embodiment is also on a spin, with Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenologically oriented carnal thought evolving to Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter” and inventive life. Karen Barad’s posthuman “performativity” gives way to Stacy Alaimo’s transcorporeality and multispecies becoming.6 In other words, the critique of the humanist and anthropocentric idea of the human has generated a number of alternative visions and values. This is all the more true if we keep in mind that the “human” is not a neutral term, but rather one that indexes access to privileges and entitlements through processes of “humanisation” (“normalisation”) that are driven by and enforce power relations. By extension, we cannot naively take the posthuman as an intrinsically subversive or liberatory category: the “posthuman” is not postpower. I have argued, on the contrary, that gender, race, class, and age are serious power differentials and that, in order to address them, we need to negotiate new assemblages or transversal alliances. A significant development in this area is the recasting of disability studies in the affirmative mode of proposing “otherwise enabled” bodies that defy the expected standards of normality, not merely in terms of gender normativity. So, in spite of the negative rhetoric, there is no crisis here, just a huge vitality of inspiration. It is crucial to point out, however, that these developments are taking place in the context of advanced capitalism. The global economy can be said to be postanthropocentric in that it responds to one single prompt: the profit motive. It consequently unifies all species under the imperative of the market, and its excesses threaten the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Advanced capitalism both invests in and profits from the scientific and economic control and the commodification of all that lives: it controls and has patented the genetic codes of most organisms. This context produces a paradoxical and rather opportunistic form of postanthropocentrism on the part of market forces, which happily trade in life itself. The opportunistic political economy of bio-genetic capitalism induces, if not the actual erasure, at least the blurring of the distinction between the human and other species, when it comes to profiting from them. Seeds, plants, animals, and bacteria fit into this logic of insatiable consumption alongside various specimens of humanity. The uniqueness of Anthropos is intrinsically and explicitly displaced by this equation. What constitutes capital value today is the informational power of living matter itself, transposed into data banks of biogenetic, neural, and media information about individuals, as the success of Facebook demonstrates at a more banal level. The focus is on the accumulation of information itself, its immanent vital qualities and self-organising capacity. My position as a Deleuzian – that is to say, a neo-Spinozist critical thinker – is clear: living “matter” is a process ontology that interacts in complex ways

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with social, psychic, and natural environments, producing multiple ecologies of belonging.7 A change of paradigm about the human is needed to come to terms with these new insights. Human subjectivity in this complex field of forces must be redefined as an expanded relational self, engendered by the cumulative effect of all these factors. 8 The relational capacity of the postanthropocentric subject is not confined within our species, but includes all nonanthropomorphic elements: the non-human, vital force of life, which is what I have coded as zoe. It is the transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories, and domains. Zoe-centred egalitarianism is, for me, the core of the postanthropocentric feminist turn: it is a materialist, secular, grounded, and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of life that is the logic of advanced capitalism. A V I TA L M AT E R I A L I S T A P P R OAC H

Posthuman Critical Theory, in my perspective, is neomaterialist. It rests on process ontologies based on the reappraisal of Spinoza developed by French philosophers since the 1970s9 that foreground the positivity of difference as a process of differential modulation within a common matter. The key notion is that matter, including the specific bound volumes of matter that constitutes humans themselves, is not organised in terms of dualistic mind/body oppositions, but rather as materially embedded and embodied subjects-in-process. This emphasis on the univocity of life does not deny the power of differences, but rather argues that they are not structured according to the dialectical principle of internal or external opposition, and therefore do not function hierarchically. Critical Spinozism therefore consists in activating the concept of materialism, defining matter as vital and intelligent, or self-organising, and thereby producing the combination of “vitalist materialism” or “radical immanence.” 10 Vital materialism highlights the embrainment of the body and the embodiment of the mind: all matter being one and immanent to itself, it is self-organising in both human and non-human organisms, and it is driven by the ontological desire for the expression of its innermost freedom (conatus). This approach offers the advantage of redefining traditional binary oppositions, such as nature/culture and human/non-human, paving the way for a non-hierarchical and more egalitarian relationship among members of the same species as well as between different species. The feminist and anti-racist critical traditions have done ground-breaking work in dis-engaging difference form this hierarchical system, which resulted in making entire sections of living beings into marginal and disposable bodies: these are the sexualised, 11 racialised, and naturalised others who carry difference as a negative mark on their backs.12 In opposition to this, vital materialism encourages the nomadic politics of “becoming-minoritarian” through a politics of affirmation based on a neomaterialist vision of matter as a multilayered and multidirectional relational force. The focus is on the force of relationality, which is not a way of denying antagonism, but rather a different method of reworking it, starting from the specificity of one’s locations and the complex web of social relations that compose the self. This self is not an atomised entity but a non-unitary relational subject, nomadic and outward bound. Transversality is a way of actualising the primacy of the relation, of interdependence and co-creation, with emphasis on non-human or ahuman life: the force and autonomy of affect and the logistics of its actualisation.13 Nomadic transversality actualises zoe-centred egalitarianism.14 Another significant advantage of this posthumanist vital materialism is that, by introducing an inclusive postanthropocentric vision of subjectivity, it also embraces non-human agents. Vital neomaterialist theories lead to a productive

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zoe-centred approach that urges us to question the violence and the hierarchical thinking that result from human arrogance and the assumption of transcendental human exceptionalism. In my view, materialist relationality stresses posthuman ethics as compassionate co-construction of transversal subjectivity.15 It also constructs theoretical and political connections with non-Western epistemologies and especially with the ancient field of Indigenous knowledge systems, which propose different modes of both environmental governance and ecosophical belonging.16 By extension, vital materialist ontologies support nature–culture–media ecologies, which undo the categorical separation between natural entities and manufactured artefacts. This is one of the most radical aspects of Critical Posthuman Theory, namely the extent to which it challenges such a divide, by proposing a classification of all entities – things, objects, and human organisms included – in terms of their forces and impacts upon other entities in the world. An ethical discussion of forces, in other words, rather than a discourse about origins and causality, produces a displacement of the anthropocentric value systems. This makes it possible to expand the continuum nature–culture to include media and digital networks, that is, “media ecologies.”17 Digital networks can be approached as a continuum of self-organising vital systems of environmental, technological, psychic, social, and other kinds. Not only are we all “part of nature,”18 but, in addition, we inhabit Haraway’s “naturecultures” – which are technologically mediated and globally interlinked. All living matter today is mediated along multiple axes: we are immersed in “medianatures.”19 P O S T H U M A N C R I T ICA L T H E ORY

The cartographic approach encourages an epistemological and political line of argument, which I would like to apply to a redefinition of the mission of the contemporary humanities.20 As I have argued elsewhere, my basic criteria are cartographic accuracy; the importance of combining critique with creative figurations; the ethics of affirmation; transdisciplinarity; the principle of nonlinearity; the powers of memory and the imagination; and the tactical method of defamiliarisation.21 Let me illuminate some of them. In a vital materialist philosophy of becoming, the past is always recomposed as action or praxis in the present – doubled up as actual and virtual becoming. This intensity is simultaneously after and before us, both past and future, in a flow or process of mutation, differentiation, or becoming. In posthuman critical thinking, we need to keep in mind the larger picture and pursue an affective opening-out toward the geophilosophical or planetary dimension of “chaosmosis,” as Guattari calls it. The thinking subject must be turned into the threshold of gratuitous (principle of nonprofit), noninstrumental (principle of nomadic mobility or flow) acts that express the vital energy of transformative becoming (principle of nonlinearity). This is precisely what the notion of the virtual refers to, in Deleuze’s thought. The ethical principle is the actualisation of the intensity of affective forces and relations. Of all the set criteria for Posthuman Critical Theory, however, the most important is the tactical method of defamiliarisation, that is to say, disconnection of the subject from familiar and habitual patterns of identity. Elaborated by feminist and postcolonial thought as a central method for critique of dominant subject formations, the task of defamiliarising our habits of thought is akin to the critique of the power we inhabit and have become accustomed to: to evolve toward a posthuman frame of reference. Consequently, these disidentifications occur along the axes of becoming-woman (sexualisation), becoming-other-than-European (racialisation), and becoming-animal or -earth (naturalisation).22 Some of these deterritorialisations engage anthropomorphic agents, while the process of becoming-earth demands a more radical break with established patterns of thought and introduces a radically imminent planetary dimension. We have to account for our relational ethical deficits,

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notably toward those who are marked as “different,” that is to say as “otherwise” human, as well as the non-human others. The ethical frame of reference becomes the world, in all its open-ended, interrelational, transnational, multisexed, and trans-species flows of becoming: a native or Indigenous form of cosmopolitanism.23 These criteria frame a Posthuman Critical Theory that can never be dissociated from an ethics that demands respect for the complexities of the real-life world we are living in and is willing to translate such complexity into academic scholarship in the humanities. We need to move toward what I call the “critical posthumanities,” by which is meant an intensive form of interdisciplinarity, transversality, and boundary-crossing among a range of discourses. Posthuman Critical Theory amounts to higher degrees of disciplinary hybridisation and requires intense defamiliarisation of our habits of thought, through nomadic encounters that subvert the protocols of institutional reason. A vision of matter as autopoietic calls for a revision of the subject of knowledge as a complex singularity, an affective assemblage, and a relational vitalist entity.24 These are the building blocks of qualitative shifts toward Posthuman Critical Theory, as opposed to a mere quantitative proliferation of non-human objects of study. In the present public debate about the future of the university, new institutional alternatives are being experimented with. For instance, the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford embodies the transhumanist model through a programme called “Superintelligence,” which combines the humanistic belief in the perfectibility of Man through scientific rationality with a posthuman program of enhancement. In a splendid tribute to Royal science – and the corporate world – the director Nick Bostrom pledges allegiance to the European Enlightenment in combining brain research with robotics and computational sciences, plus clinical psychology and analytic philosophy. The posthuman in this project gets redefined as a superhuman metarationalist entity. I want to plead for a different approach, grounded in vital materialist affirmative ethics, based on a different understanding of matter as immanent interconnections. The task of critical theory is activating subjects to enter into new affective assemblages, to co-create alternative ethical forces and political codes. Posthuman Critical Theory marks the end of what Vandana Shiva called “monocultures of the mind” 25 and it pursues the radical politics of location and the analysis of social forms of exclusion in the current world order of “biopiracy,”26 “necropolitics,”27 and worldwide dispossession. 28 Furthermore, it foregrounds subjectivity by stating that the posthuman critical subject is a complex assemblage of human and non-human, planetary and cosmic, given and manufactured, which requires defamiliarisation from traditional ways of thinking. The critical posthuman thinker remains committed to social justice and, while acknowledging the fatal attraction of global mediation, she is not likely to forget that one-third of the world population has no access to electricity.

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C ONC LU S ION: R E C OM P O S I NG H U M A N I T Y

Posthuman Critical Theory proposes to resist any foregone conclusion about the transition the “human” and “humanity” is going through and to focus instead on the ongoing processes of transformation. It would be equally false to assume that the posthuman implies relations and values that are intrinsically progressive, or that it will automatically undo power relations based on class, gender, race, sexuality, age, or disability.29 There is in fact large and growing evidence that points to the exact contrary. I have argued that what we need instead is accurate cartographic accounts of new subject positions as transversal alliances between human and non-human agents, which may account for the ubiquity of technological mediation and the complexity of inter-species alliances, while foregrounding continuing patterns of exclusion and marginalisation. In my critical frame, the posthuman “we” is not to be taken for granted, but needs to be constructed in the concrete practice of becoming-posthuman as a collective assemblage. Indeed, “we” are in this posthuman predicament together. But “we” are not the same, in locations, power, accountability, potestas, and potentia. Advanced capitalism is postanthropocentric in unifying all species under the imperative of the market, and its excesses threaten the sustainability of our planet. But in the era of the Anthropocene it is also neohumanistic in forging a new panhuman bond made of vulnerability and fear of extinction. It is both an unstable category and a deeply challenged one in our Anthropocene present. Against corporate panhumanism, I argue that “we” only makes sense as a praxis, a project enacted through a collectively shared project that aims at actualising the virtual, that is to say, at assembling a missing people. Starting from philosophies of radical immanence, vital materialism, and the feminist politics of locations, I have argued for embedded and embodied relational and affective cartographies of the new power relations that are emerging from the current geopolitical order. Instead of embracing the idea of a new panhumanity, bonded in shared vulnerability or anxiety about survival and extinction, in what Ulrich Beck calls a “World Risk Society,” I want to plead for affirmative politics grounded in immanent interconnections: a transnational ethics of place. The posthuman as a conceptual persona or navigational tool expresses the affirmative ethical dimension of becoming-posthuman as a gesture of collective self-styling, or mutual specification. It actualises a community that is situated and hence not universalist, not bound negatively by shared vulnerability, the guilt of ancestral communal violence, or ontological melancholia, but rather by the compassionate acknowledgment of interdependence with multiple others most of which, in the age of the Anthropocene, are not

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anthropomorphic. I am not in favour of even a partial rapprochement with universalism, but considering the global reach of problems in the era of the Anthropocene, some generic lines need to be drawn. The crucial ethical imperative is to refuse to conceal the power differentials that divide us. There may well be multiple and potentially contradictory projects at stake in the posthuman recomposition of “humanity” right now: many contested ways of becoming-posthuman. Rosi Braidotti is a graduate of the Australian National University (BA Hons) and the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (PhD). She is Distinguished University Professor and was the founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University (2007–2016). Her main publications include Nomadic Subjects (2011) and Nomadic Theory (2011), both with Columbia University Press; and The Posthuman (2013) and Posthuman Knowledge (2019) with Polity Press. In 2016 she co-edited Conflicting Humanities with Paul Gilroy, and Posthuman Glossary in 2018 with Maria Hlavajova, both with Bloomsbury Academic. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a member of the Academia Europaea and holds a knighthood in the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands.

“Posthuman Critical Theory” is reprinted and edited from Journal of Posthuman Studies, 1(1), 2017, 9–25. Reprinted and edited by permission of the publisher and author. Copyright © 2017 Pennsylvania State University Press.

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The Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term “Anthropocene” in 2000 to describe our current geological era in terms of human impact upon the sustainability of the planet. The adoption of “Anthropocene” as a scientific term was officially recommended by the International Geological Association in Cape Town in August 2016. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge, UK/ Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006). Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London/New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 2000). Rosi Braidotti, “The Contested Posthumanities,” in Rosi Braidotti and Paul Gilroy (eds.), Conflicting Humanities (London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 9–45. See Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs,

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28(3), 2003, 801–831; Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). Guattari, The Three Ecologies. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 19942). Braidotti and Gilroy (eds.), Conflicting Humanities. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988); Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990). I use “sexualise” here to mean “assume a sexual/gendered identity.” Braidotti, Transpositions. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013). Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge, UK/Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019). Simone Bignall, Steve Hemming, and Daryle Rigney, “Three Ecosophies for the Anthropocene: Environmental Governance, Continental Posthumanism and Indigenous Expressivism,” Deleuze Studies, 10(4), 2016, 455–478.

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Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005). Genevieve Lloyd, Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge. Braidotti, The Posthuman. Braidotti, Transpositions. Braidotti, The Posthuman. Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge. Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology (London: Zed Books, 1993). Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1997). Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 15(1), 2003, 11–40. Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2002); Braidotti, The Posthuman.

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Jadé Fadojutimi, Even an awkward smile can sprout beyond the sun, 2021. Oil, oil stick, acrylic on canvas. 200 × 170 cm. Photo Mark Blower. Private Collection, Los Angeles. Courtesy the Artist; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London. © Jadé Fadojutimi 2021

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J A D É FA D O J U T I M I

1993, London Lives in London, UK

British artist Jadé Fadojutimi’s monumentally scaled paintings create immersive environments shaped by emotion and memory. As a teenager, Fadojutimi developed an ongoing obsession with Japanese popular culture. Today, she often paints to soundtracks from Japanese videogames or anime; media that explore a broad spectrum of emotions and experiences beyond typical heroic narratives. 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. Developing intuitively from fragments of the artist’s thoughts and experiences, her paintings – which are sometimes completed in a single sitting – demonstrate a sense of self that is liberated from the constraints placed on identity, opening space for a multiplicitous subjectivity. 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. Amalgamations of entangled shapes recur throughout the paintings, including ovals and bold lines achieved through performative bursts of movement; together, they conjure internal landscapes. Through layers of rapid brushstrokes in sumptuous purples, vibrant oranges, acid greens, rich blues, and bright yellows, Fadojutimi forms complex compositions that shift between figuration and abstraction, each dissolving into the other. Wrought with bursts of movement, Fadojutimi’s paintings present visceral expressions, perspectives, and perceptions that grapple with notions of identity and belonging, offering a window into alternative realms and realities. 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

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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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Jadé Fadojutimi, There exists a glorious world. Its name? The Land of Sustainable Burdens, 2020. Oil, acrylic, oil stick on canvas, 190 × 230 cm. Photo Mark Blower. Courtesy the Artist; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London. © Jadé Fadojutimi 2021 Jadé Fadojutimi, Vital Abundance, 2020. Oil, oil stick on canvas, 110 × 140 cm. Photo Mark Blower. Baltimore Museum of Art Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London. © Jadé Fadojutimi 2021

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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 type of registry of potential actions: Manipulator, Protector, Muter, Extruder, Mediator, Negotiator, Distancer. Although grounded in their physical presence, these works, which are primarily forged in delicate flesh-coloured ceramics and bits of metal hardware, are profoundly influenced by such instrumentalisation of language; their very names imply a phantom presence which carries out an action or is acted upon. Formally, Phillips’ sculptures also maintain the suggestion of the anonymous, absent, or invisible body, which can be detected both through hollow and negative spaces created by casts of fragmented necks, collarbones, and the backs of heads, but also through recurring devices such as buckles, straps, wing nuts, masks, and handles, which implicate the body even when it is not portrayed. But despite the insinuation of functionality, whether clinical, industrial, disciplinary, or recreational, these tool-like apparatuses are not meant for use. Instead, their material, linguistic, and metaphorical arrangements produce a deeply psychological, albeit purposefully ambiguous, resonance for the viewer, alluding to systems of power or scrutiny that exist on socio-political, institutional, and inter-personal levels. While Phillips has addressed both antagonistic and conciliatory power relationships between multiple entities or people in previous works, her recent suite of sculptures Veiled Purifier, Bower, and Stabilizer (all 2021–2022) shift the focus to the relationship one has with oneself. Orienting this body of work specifically within the spiritual dimension, Phillips adapts her titles to describe a mode of introversion characteristic of worship. In Veiled Purifier, inwardness is manifested formally through the use of fabric. Posed atop a tiled base inspired by patterning in St Mark’s Basilica and ensconced in a veil, the work connotes a body looking inward towards itself. Bower, too, adopts architectural elements from Venetian churches to evoke the elevated interiority such spiritual spaces make available to individuals. Here, a ceramic and brass sculpture made from the impressions of a forehead and lower back allude to the motion of bowing. Mounted on a stone tile pattern inspired by the floors of the 16th-century church of San Giorgio Maggiore, the psychic experience of spirituality is extended to the body, even in its partial absence. – MW

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Julia Phillips, Veiled Purifier, 2021–2022. Ceramic, silk, bronze, marble, dimensions variable. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. © Julia Phillips

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

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Julia Phillips, Stabilizer, 2021–2022. Ceramic, bronze, glass case, 137 × 61 × 28 cm. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. © Julia Phillips

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C H A R L I N E VO N H E Y L

1960, Mainz, Germany Lives in New York City and Marfa, USA In collaboration with Matt Haimovitz and Jeffrianne Young of The Primavera Project

Working as a painter in the complex and vibrant Cologne art world of the 1980s only led Charline von Heyl to more firmly believe in the importance of her chosen medium. In addition to artists like Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, and Rosemarie Trockel, von Heyl’s circle in Cologne included the influential critics Diedrich Diederichsen and Isabelle Graw, founder of the journal TEXTE ZUR KUNST. In 1990 she joined the then Galerie Christian Nagel, where artists like Mark Dion and Andrea Fraser were exhibiting work that was decidedly Post-Painterly and Conceptual. Employing stripes, grids, and zigzags; shallow space, loose backgrounds, and representational imagery; and charcoal swipes and intentional drips of paint, von Heyl’s works are at once rebellious and spirited, remaining dedicated to the possibilities of contemporary painting. The eight works on view here each 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 1470s as a marriage allegory in Sandro Botticelli’s painting Primavera. Von Heyl produced the series in collaboration with Jeffrianne Young and Grammy-nominated cellist Matt Haimovitz’s The Primavera Project, a series of musical commissions by a diverse group of composers that reimagine the magical enigma interpreted in Botticelli’s painting. Reinterpreting the free mixing of imagery from antiquity and Christianity that was common in Botticelli’s time, these paintings combine themes of girlhood, transformation, desire, and ambivalence with dazzling optical effects. The Nymphs (2020) – which captures the ambiguous eroticism of the gaze – and Pagan Prophet (2021) each make use of interference paint, whose colour appears to change depending on the angle the work is viewed from. Von Heyl also bridges ancient mythology with recent events: The August Complex (2020) draws an intuitive connection between Flora, the name Chloris takes after her transformation, and the flora and fauna destroyed by the devastating 2020 wildfire in Northern California. Employing an excess of imagery, visceral compositions, and critical engagement with the medium’s tropes of beauty and subjectivity, von Heyl consistently redefines the boundaries of contemporary painting, approaching the medium, in her own words, as the act of “putting down thoughts in silent shapes.” – IW

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Charline von Heyl, Pagan Prophet, 2021. Acrylic on linen, 208.28 × 187.96 cm. Photo Alex Marks. Courtesy the Artist; Petzel, New York

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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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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: iconic when worn on the stage and red carpet, flexible in its gender neutrality, practical as a uniform for trade workers, and infamous as the attire of prisoners. The jumpsuit, like all fashion, carries representational weight depending on how and why it’s worn. Adding to the rich history and iconography of the jumpsuit is artist Sara Enrico’s sculptural installation series The Jumpsuit Theme (2017–ongoing). Experimenting with the jumpsuit on a deep material level, 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 iteration of the 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 installation is complex to make, and Enrico enlisted a bricklayer, seamstress, and engineer to assist in the construction. The artist and her suite of collaborators worked her materials – and concepts – through many layers of transformation, gaining and releasing physical energy until at last they rest, completely still. – IA

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

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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 a painter in New York in the 1980s, at a time when many in the art establishment viewed painting with great suspicion. When she was a student in the Whitney Museum’s notoriously theory-driven Independent Study Program, many of her peers who practiced conceptually oriented postmodern critiques of media and representation 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,” challenging traditional assumptions about the critical capacity of the field and forging new pathways for painting’s expanded significance. In particular, 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, she began making large-scale works inspired by the illumination of computer screens on users’ faces, 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 technology, such as ASCII, CAPTCHA, emoticons, and emoji, in an effort to further parse the terms of painting’s capacity as an interface for both expression and disembodiment. Some of her works are built upon a dense ground of symbols drawn from ASCII, a character-based encoding system invented for electronic communication in the 1960s; others are layered onto grids of neatly painted smiley face emoticon. Seen together, appropriated signs of the digital and marks associated with the expressionistic take on an ambiguous tenor. An emoticon is a symbol of both feeling and perfunctory feeling: joy, laughter, friendliness, satisfaction, crankiness, boredom – but more often, nothing at all. 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

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Jacqueline Humphries, (#J^^):), 2017. Oil on linen, 254 × 281.9 cm. Photo Jason Mandella. Glenstone Museum. Courtesy the Artist; Greene Naftali Gallery, New York, © Jacqueline Humphries Next pages: 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

A ground-breaking artist of the Italian post-war period, Carla Accardi contributed to the creation of a new philosophy and style of abstraction starting in the immediate wake of World War II. Regarded, in particular, for her exuberant, colourful paintings made between the 1940s and 1970s, Accardi experimented with questions of material, form, space, and colour, informed by linguistic concerns, as well as the influences of Marxism and feminism. In 1946, Accardi moved to Rome, and with group of friends and peers, including her husband Antonio Sanfilippo, she soon formed the Marxist-influenced Gruppo Forma 1. In its manifesto – which Accardi was the only woman to sign – and subsequent artistic assertions, Gruppo Forma 1’s members laid out a means by which to reconcile Marxist politics with abstract art, while also breaking free from the determinism of geometry. While Accardi’s early paintings consisted of interlocking geometric forms, starting in the 1960s she 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 such as the horizontal Senza titolo (1967), the transparent material imbues the composition of fluorescent green marks with a powerfully environmental nature, while also emphasising the physical supports of the painting through the exposure of wooden stretchers. Throughout her work using Sicofoil, and more traditional materials such as tempera or enamel on canvas, Accardi demonstrates a radical updating of the possibilities inherent in the relationship between art and language. In her vibrant 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. Seen in the forms of signs, language is freed from the page as well as from its received meanings, forms, and, in many instances, the obligations of communication entirely. Seen through repeating signs and expanding marks, Accardi’s paintings create an experience in which inside and outside, looking and reading, seeing and perceiving is blurred. – MW

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Carla Accardi, Verdi azzurro, 1962. Casein tempera on paper laid on canvas, 70 × 100 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Tornabuoni Arte. © Tornabuoni Arte

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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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VERA MOLNÁR

1924, Budapest, Hungary Lives in Paris, France

All the works by Hungarian artist Vera Molnár, even the ones that made her a pioneer of Algorithmic and Programmed Art, show her solid academic training, with a formal rigour reminiscent of leading avantgarde figures such as László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, and Paul Klee. In the early 1950s, just a few years after she moved to Paris in 1947, Molnár honed her natural talent for schematic drawing and made a series of abstract compositions based on the repetition of codified geometric shapes. Paying homage to the modern masters after whom they are named, these early works show a contemporary sensibility, in step with the groups of artists across 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. The works that grew out of this investigation are titled Machines imaginaires and are the product of pre-established rules that were slavishly followed in every stage of their creation. Even before she began relying on electronic devices a few years later, Molnár programmed her artistic output through algorithms that became truly mechanical only in 1968. Obtaining permission to use a computer that had just been purchased by the University of Paris, the artist communicated with the machine through alphanumeric code, and harnessed its calculation and graphing capabilities to create very precise geometric print-outs. With the exception of the holes along the sides of the paper, 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. Whether they are sequences of concentric squares, apparently random arrangements of superimposed polygons, or chaotic configurations of line segments, Molnár is keenly aware that these drawings stem from the dialogue between human and machine, and by playing with the equilibrium of this strange conversation, she renders the former more adept and the latter more sensitive. – SM

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Vera Molnár, Histoire d’I (réf. E), 1977. Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper, 30 × 30 cm. © Galerie Oniris, Rennes

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Vera Molnár, Hypertransformation, 1974. Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper, 44 × 33 cm. © Galerie Oniris, Rennes Vera Molnár, Transformation de carrés concentriques, 1976. Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper, 54 × 36 cm. © Galerie Oniris, Rennes

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Vera Molnár, Transformation de carrés concentriques, 1976. Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper, 54 × 36 cm. © Galerie Oniris, Rennes Vera Molnár, Transformation de carrés concentriques, 1974. Computer plotter drawing, 54 × 36 cm. © Galerie Oniris, Rennes

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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, Delaunay went to live with relatives in Saint Petersburg at a young age. At 18, she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Germany, producing works that were inspired by the bright colours and robust formalism of Neo-Impressionist and Symbolist painting. 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. Ukrainian and Russian folk art – and especially textile designs – were early and enduring influences on Delaunay’s art, which expanded beyond painting to encompass various modes of design. The works on paper included The Milk of Dreams – some of which were intended as designs for fabrics – exemplify Delaunay’s application of the principles of painterly abstraction to textile patterns. Seeking compositions that could be realised in the warp and weft of loom-woven thread, Delaunay experimented with the senses of rhythm, motion, and depth created by simultaneous contrast, where colours appear different depending on those around them. An untitled gouache of 1930 is a prime example of this approach: on a taupe field, rectangles of peach, yellow, pink, and ochre are overlaid by dots of red and blue paint, with tonal variations emerging optically from the interplay between the forms. Senza titolo (Gouache no. 1230) (1930) displays Delaunay’s trademark use of concentric circles and offset tones to create a sense of chromatic dynamism. Delaunay 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. In 1918 Delaunay established Casa Sonia, an interiors and fashion workshop and store, in Madrid; in this context she designed sets, costumes, and furniture for plays by Tristan Tzara and films by Marcel L’Herbier and René Le Somptier; and the artist’s label “Tissus Delaunay” sold her designs worldwide. In her thinking, the distinction between painting and modes traditionally relegated to the world of craft was immaterial. Across her oeuvre, colour – as Delaunay once described it, “the skin of the world” – was a consistent source of inspiration. – IW

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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 Sonia Delaunay, Senza titolo, 1929. Gouache on paper, 20 × 16 cm. Courtesy Gió Marconi, Milan

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CHNOLO

ES I G

ENCHAN

ENT

MARINA APOLLONIO DA DA M A I N O LUCIA DI LUCIANO LAURA GRISI G R A 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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SURPRISING Azalea Seratoni

Sometimes naming things is enough to cause a precipitate: before the name, there was something soft and shapeless, after it, one sees a branching multitude of corals.1 This was the effect of Bruno Munari’s theoretical move in the early 1960s, when he decided to apply the name “Programmed” to a certain kind of art that was developing around him.

Almanacco Letterario Bompiani (volume cover), 1962. Courtesy St. John’s University Archives and Special Collections, Queens, New York

Milan was the birthplace of this term. It is where Munari was doing many different things in accordance with his talents. Since the 1930s he had been hitching art to the fortunes of publishing and industry – Bompiani, Mondadori, Einaudi, Olivetti, before and after post-war reconstruction – by overseeing editorial projects and graphic design. Every year, Valentino Bompiani put out a literary almanac that gave an overview of cultural news and tried to forecast the new directions and dimensions that the future might hold. The theme for the 1962 edition, spelled out on the cover between a strip of punched tape and a work by Gianni Colombo that one might call “primordial computer art,” is Le applicazioni dei calcolatori elettronici alle scienze morali e alla letteratura (The Applications of Electronic Computing Devices to the Moral Sciences and Literature). It is in the almanac’s table of contents that the term “Arte Programmata” appears for the first time, introducing a list of artists: Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gabriele Devecchi, Gianni Colombo, Grazia Varisco, Enrico Castellani, Karl Gerstner, Enzo Mari, Munari himself, and Dieter Roth.2 One quickly notes that Varisco is the only woman.

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Gruppo T took shape around the end of 1959. They met at school, during their years at the arts-focused high school and at the Accademia di Brera in the course taught by Achille Funi. In January 1960, Zita Vismara and Mino Pater’s gallery hosted their first exhibition, Miriorama 1, and then four solo shows by Boriani, Devecchi, Colombo, Anceschi. Miriorama 6 was their second group show, when Varisco officially joined the collective. As she tells us: Enzo Mari, left, outside the opening of the Arte programmata exhibition at Olivetti’s Milan showroom in May 1962. Photo Mario Dondero/Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia

“The Four” got in contact with Galleria Pater for the Miriorama show in January. I was always there and active in the group, but realised that “the Four” didn’t picture and maybe didn’t dare to show each other that they pictured me as a member... Quite naturally, without rancour, to avoid feeling excluded from something that concerned me, I simply asked WHY NOT ME? Maybe I caught them off guard? They acknowledged that the question was justified and immediately agreed, although they felt it was necessary to cite historical precedents in France (Cercle et Carré with Sophie Taeuber-Arp)… So that made me a legitimate member of Gruppo T. I don’t know... Looking back, it struck me that in the late 1950s, ideas and behaviour were guided by a CONDITIONING about men and women... which was of course entirely to men’s advantage.3 Varisco was also the only woman in the exhibition Arte programmata. Arte cinetica. Opere moltiplicate. Opera aperta that Munari organised in May 1962 at the Olivetti shop in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan,4 with Gruppo T, Enzo Mari, and Gruppo N taking part along with Munari.

The public is reflected in Davide Boriani’s work Surfacemagnetica at the opening of the Arte programmata exhibition at Olivetti’s Milan showroom in May 1962. Photo Mario Dondero/Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia

There had already been some shows by Gruppo T, they made these rudimentary objects, with hand cranks, so I told them there were already things like motors, electronics; they came up with a lot of ideas and I suggested to Olivetti that they sponsor a Programmed Art show [...] Programmed Art is based on actual programming, where you say, if I combine this with that, then many different situations could come about, which I might foresee or might not. In the Programmed Art exhibition, only some of the works were actually Programmed Art.5 The exhibition travelled to Venice and Rome – where the artists from GRAV (Groupe de Récherche d’Art Visuel) and Getulio Alviani also exhibited – and then to Düsseldorf and London, before coming to the United States with the help of the Smithsonian Institution.6 In the Milan exhibition, Varisco presented 9x9xX (1961). This very complicated contraption – with vertical and horizontal blades moving at right angles, driven by motors – seems wonderfully awkward and lumbering compared to the sophistication of her later Schemi luminosi variabili (1961–1968), the series that derived from this early concept. That’s how experimentation works. Through a progression of studies and trials, through the investigation of materials, and through disciplined enquiry into what is not yet known but must be discovered, a shapeless magma is transformed into a sublime artifice. But that box lit by neon tubes – observed through a screen of industrial glass whose diagonal ribs create immediate visual interference – contained longing. It showed that what matters in art are the implications of knowledge. It did not do this with a fixed, completed form, but by programming its own constant variations. A motor generates

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a mechanised form of movement that is, however, repetitive by definition. The regular sequence of events tricks our minds, generates knowledge that influences what we see, projects what we know onto what has yet to happen. It is a question of interrupting this automatism and placing our gaze, our whole being, in a state of alertness and receptiveness at every level, so that it is not relying on repetition, on the reciprocal reinforcement of illusion and anticipation. The greater the probability that a given image will appear, the less information it provides. For images to present themselves as perennially new and imbued with the constant possibility of new information, one must find a way to defer their repetition. The changeability of the image, the ambiguity of its unpredictable metamorphosis, inspires participation. It invites viewers to engage with the work. But this spurring of our sensibilities goes beyond questions of form. It prompts us to hone and extend our capacity to see, altering our behaviour as a result of what we experience, with the utmost elasticity. It is a cognitive mode of action. Perception is one step in a larger process. There is something subversive in this art, but even more, there is something utopian, shocking to the average mind: this idea of changing along with something that keeps changing.

Gruppo T, 1962. Anceschi, Boriani, Colombo, Devecchi, Varisco. Artists at work in the Varisco family workshop. Courtesy Archivio Varisco

Milan was the right place at the right time. It had been the city of Futurism, which more than any other “ism” had channelled all its creativity towards achieving movement – that fundamental component of art – and towards the integration of different fields: a vision that for years continued to permeate the city’s cultural and business context, where the proximity of design and art came to be thought of as routine. And in Milan, there was also Lucio Fontana: “See, I am – unfortunately, you might say – someone who experiments.”7 Nanda Vigo would express this fusion of disciplines with magnificent grace. In 1959 she began to design a house. She conceived it as almost empty and replaced the walls with square and rectangular panels of frosted glass, illuminated from within with a system of neon lights. This was not just a technical solution. The problem with an inherently elusive element such as light, which seems impossible to formalise, is precisely that: to put it into a form. When Nanda Vigo’s work seems intent on escaping the bounds of a volume, or when it constructs an object or environment where an aesthetic experience can take place, light becomes both the substance and the subject. Her operating methods are all variations on the word “chronotopic,” which weds the notions of time and space, just as her work explores the relationship between art and design. It is a dialogue of misunderstandings that does not imply a loss of meaning, but rather, brings forth new forms of signification. Dadamaino, too, was always experimenting, searching for whatever could be found. She was fed up with the tangles of matter in Art Informel. There was the problem of finding a new dimension. As Fontana would say, “art was going to change dimension... not dimension as in first, second, third... but dimension as in a volume of thought.”8 Dadamaino began with the canvas, cutting it to reveal the stretchers and the wall. Thus, her Volumi (1958–1960) were born. Then in that empty space, a shadow came to dwell. It is an oval form, initially almost as big as the painting. We watch it move along the bottom, as if in search of a new rhythm. Now there are two

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openings, floating one over the other, stretching out vertically. The slashes become smaller and take on more regular shapes. They arrange themselves in a row, in twos, in threes. An eclipse occurs. The shadow turns into arcs of a circle, sections of a sphere, in temporal succession. Dadamaino began working with plastics. She applied an increasingly precise punctuation, making holes with a die and superimposing sheets of Rhodoid plastic in a flawless cadence. In her Volumi, before cutting, Dadamaino would draw the line the blade was to follow, but the cut never matches up with the perimeter traced by the pencil, as if from a basic incapacity to coincide, to correspond. Here too, in her Volumi a moduli sfasati (1960–1961), the arithmetical embroidery trembles under the blows of the die. It takes just a slightly warmer hand to make its weft vibrate. A work of art always creates its own temporality. Programmed Art insists on this idea. The Volumi a moduli sfasati are about time, about the time that is not spent – yet this is an invitation to spend it – observing the imperceptible shifts of a shadow in the gaps between these pierced sheets, which are similar, but do not match up, and impalpably interact through their semitransparency. Dadamaino, Volume, 1960. Courtesy Archivio Dadamaino

In the mid-1970s, with L’inconscio razionale, the perceptual experiment reached its peak, at the verge of invisibility. This is a combinatory game of intermittent lines in which one can just barely make out a grid. As Dadamaino stated: “L’inconscio razionale marked a fresh start, an entirely new working method, very similar in some ways to what happened in 1958, when I cut the canvases to reveal the stretchers.”9 A different position yielded a new language. Dadamaino came up with a form of writing. These are signs that never fall silent. They cover sheet after sheet in the series I fatti della vita (1978–1982), constantly thickening and thinning in Costellazioni (1981–1987). In Movimento delle cose (1987–1996) the surface regains its transparency and moves into an irresistibly human exercise, combining undifferentiated thought with conscious articulation in a hymn to the unfolding form. Space is a temporal notion. The environments that Laura Grisi created in 1968 are containers, closed rooms that recreate the manifestations of nature: rain, wind, air, fog. Using small pieces of technology – a dripping pipe hung from the ceiling, fans hidden behind a wall – or more complex machines, like the transparent monoliths with their curling spirals of neon in A Space of Fog, she restages events that might escape notice, were it not for her polite insistence that we pay attention. In a space that we move through and in a time that flows like a bodily sensation, we become aware of them. Grisi placed the individual at the centre of a rationally constructed artifice – a constant leap from one quality to another, which involves every element of the work, and every slight variation in breath and movement – knowing that whatever happens will be “according to specific, pre-established guidelines, that do not prevent spontaneity, but set limits and trace possible directions.”10

Laura Grisi, installation of four Antinebbia (Antifog), 1968. Private Collection, Rome. Courtesy Laura Grisi Estate, Rome

When she used the moving image in experimental films, Grisi began with herself. In The Measuring of Time (1969), the shot is a baroque marvel in its

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unfettered temporality. The camera – as if travelling along the spiral of a seashell or Borromini’s staircase in Palazzo Barberini – moves from her hands, to her whole figure, to her hands, as she counts grains of sand. This brief roundup of figures connected to our story – which allows us to linger on some, not just by inclination, but for the pleasure of tearing down certain narratives and building others – should also include Lucia Di Luciano and Marina Apollonio.

Lucia Di Luciano, Irradiazioni N.11, 1965. Photo Bruno Bani. Courtesy the Artist; 10 A.M. ART Gallery, Milan

Di Luciano’s work presents itself as something whose every part and every facet show an interdependence and sort of coherence. In its rhythmic structure of lines, squares and rectangles, the alternation of these ornaments, these fundamental patterns, enhances rather than interrupts the continuity of the visual discourse. It enhances the sense of progression, bringing out all its abstract fecundity and its capacity to captivate the senses. As she works, Di Luciano simultaneously guides the many different modifications that contribute to forming the object. Fully in control, she fits together all the pieces of the visual orchestration – a rigorous orchestration of interconnected elements – until the work is done. Yet she knows that the object, in itself, is merely a state among many other states, in a series of transformations that could go on forever. This bears a similarity to the electronic and concrete music compositions, based on the permutation of sound structures, that Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, and Pietro Grossi began experimenting with in those very years at their musical phonology studios in Milan and Florence. There is also a connection to the epistemological frontiers of science. Sounds, data, and signs cannot be contained in a single image, they can only be collected within organisms of knowledge, whose incomplete, complementary nature is the key to their formulation. Marina Apollonio’s sensorial snares concentrate the temporal discourse into an aesthetic of purely perceptual, geometric structures. The allure of her Dinamica circolare (1964) lies in the way they bring about, through the adept use of Gestalt principles, a hyperbolic germination that forces the hypnotised viewer to watch infinitely small white circles expand into black circles that expand into white circles that expand into black circles. Her Rilievi (1964–1970) are striking in their freshness. Their basic traits, with the sensorial quality of the surface, the texture, and structure of the metal mesh, echo the principles underlying an ancient human activity, the art of weaving. Weaving is a paradigm that lives on in very different fields, whether one is structuring a discourse or alternating the points of view in film editing. The Rilievi reverberate with this origin. At this point, one can naturally see what gives these works their ability to capture and hold us; they keep the intellect constantly straining towards some task, poised to follow their skilfully spun thread along a path of increasing refinement and knowledge, as they spur the gaze on in an irresistible chase.

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Azalea Seratoni is an art historian specialising in contemporary art. Alongside her work as an independent researcher, she also is a curator. Since 2016 she has taught Basic Design at the Scuola politecnica di design, Milan. She combines a constant interest in contemporary culture with historical investigations, focusing above all on the themes of temporality and the body in artistic experience, on theory of the image and visual culture, and on the borders between art and design. Her writings have appeared in il verri and Progetto grafico. In 2015, with Serena Cangiano and Davide Fornari, she curated the exhibition and catalogue (published by Johan & Levi) Arte ri-programmata. Un manifesto aperto.

1 2

Gaston Bachelard, La Psychanalyse du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 70. Sergio Morando (ed.), Almanacco Letterario Bompiani 1962. Le applicazioni dei calcolatori elettronici alle scienze morali e alla letteratura (Milano: Bompiani, 1961). Bruno Munari may well have been familiar with the book by Max Bense, Programmierung des Schönen. Allgemeine Texttheorie und Textästhetik (Programming the Beautiful: General Text Theory and Textual Aesthetics; Baden-Baden/ Krfeld: Agis, 1960). Grazia Varisco, Appunti con evidenziatore, in Serena Cangiano, Davide Fornari, and Azalea Seratoni (eds.), Arte ri-programmata. Un manifesto aperto, exhibition catalogue (Milan, Istituto Svizzero, 5–28 March 2015; Monza: Johan & Levi, 2015), 92. Bruno Munari, Giorgio Soavi (eds.), Arte programmata. Arte cinetica. Opere moltiplicate. Opera aperta, exhibition catalogue (Negozio Olivetti, Milan/ Venice/Rome, 1962; Milano: Officina d’Arte Grafica Lucini, 1962). Andrea Branzi, “Il gioco del fare. Colloquio con Bruno Munari sulla sperimentazione, il futurismo, il surrealismo e l’arte concreta, e sulle fontane che funzionano con cinque

sole gocce d’acqua,” Modo, 8(71–72), 1984, 40–43. 6 The exhibition was presented at the Olivetti stores in Venice (1962), Rome (1962), Düsseldorf (1963) and at the Royal College of Art in London (1964). From 1964 to 1966 it travelled to various locations in the United States: New York University, New York; Florida State University, Tallahassee; Junior Art Gallery, Louisville; Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia; Cornell University, Ithaca; Allentown Art Museum, Allentown; State University of New York, New Paltz; Oberlin College, Oberlin; Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago; George Thomas Hunter Gallery of Art, Chattanooga; Harvard University, Cambridge; Dartmouth College, Hanover; Tampa Art Institute, Tampa. 7 Tommaso Trini, Intervista con Lucio Fontana, in Trini, Mezzo secolo di arte intera. Scritti 1964–2014, ed. Luca Cerizza (Monza: Johan & Levi, 2016), 273. 8 Ibid. 9 See Dadamaino, “Dadamaino,” Data, 30, 1978, 44. 10 Umberto Eco, Introduzione, in Munari, Soavi (eds.), Arte programmata. Arte cinetica. Opere moltiplicate. Opera aperta, 3.

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1, 2

Dadamaino

3, 4

Marina Apollonio

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Laura Grisi

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6, 7

Grazia Varisco

Lucia Di Luciano

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9, 10

Nanda Vigo

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Dadamaino, Cromorilievo, inclinazione 30° - dal grigio 76 al 90, 1974. Wooden dowels on board, 50 × 50 × 10 cm. Photo Luigi Acerra. Courtesy Archivio Dadamaino 2 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 3 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 4 Marina Apollonio, Rilievo 703, 1964–1970. Aluminium, red fluorescent, Plexiglas, 50 × 50 × 5 cm. Photo Bruno Bani. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist 5 Laura Grisi, Sunset Light, 1967. Neon, Plexiglas, steel, 219 × 30 × 30 cm. Photo Carlo Favero. Courtesy Laura Grisi Estate; P420, Bologna 6 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 7 Grazia Varisco, Schema luminoso variabile R. VOD. DOM., 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 8 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 9 Nanda Vigo, Cronotopo, 1964. Glass and aluminium, 60 × 60 × 20 cm. Courtesy Archivio Nanda Vigo, Milan 10 Nanda Vigo, Cronotopo, 1964. Glass and aluminium, 60 × 60 × 20 cm. Private Collection, Milan. Courtesy Archivio Nanda Vigo, Milan 11 Nanda Vigo, Diaframma, 1968. Glass, aluminium, and neon light, 100 × 100 × 25 cm. Photo Emilio Tremolada. Courtesy Archivio Nanda Vigo, Milan

Nanda Vigo

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ARTISTS’ BIO GRAPHIES

(p. 262)

MARINA APOLLONIO 1940, Trieste, Italy. Lives in Padua, Italy Marina Apollonio’s artistic investigation has focused on creating perceptual stimuli through a combination of pure forms: carefully arranged into two- and threedimensional geometric patterns, they guide the eyes through new and unusual sensory experiences. Though difficult to assign to a single aesthetic current, her practice has always overlapped with Programmed, Concrete, Kinetic, and Optical Art, sharing their rational approach, scientific objectives, and systematic style. Like the artists of the GRAV, Zero, N, and T groups with whom she is often compared, Apollonio’s figurative abstraction has been deeply influenced by studies of perception; even today, she works to achieve the illusion of movement through the graphic devices of her compositions. 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, ranked and arranged in grids to create a dynamic effect on the eye. The resulting visual experience is a sort of vibration, influenced by both the simulated movement of the surface and the viewer’s position in front of it. 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 threedimensional 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. In the end, Apollonio’s work is grounded in the power of perspective: though actually static in nature, her works can be perceived and thus interpreted in infinite ways. – SM

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DA DA M A I N O 1930 – 2004, Milan, Italy Edoarda Emilia Maino (known as Dada) 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, after earlier Spatialist work, led the artist towards the perceptual dynamics of Programmed Art. Dadamaino developed a highly personal approach, adapting the methods of this Italian avantgarde 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 framed 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. This visual disorientation is Dadamaino’s main

objective; eluding rational control, it gives even the most rigid compositions a sense of intimacy. Resembling miniature labyrinths, her Cromorilievi (c. 1972–1975), are square panels onto which solid forms, varying in shape, colour, height, and orientation, have been applied. Though the strict mathematical model governing their arrangement makes it irreversibly static, the varied colours and shadows of the units create a dynamic effect that adds emotion to the viewing experience. The suggestion of movement is similar to the one found in a landscape, which changes according to the observer’s sensibility. Even when it becomes more delicate, with softly coloured marks of tempera – as in her many Costellazioni (1981–1987) – the resulting work has the quality of an inner vista that thickens and thins as it unfolds, in currents of restlessness or serenity. Moving beyond kinetic experiments and beginning to express a verbal-visual sensibility, Dadamaino’s artistic investigation presents the mark or sign as a body – whether programmed or poetic in form – and uses it to express a sense of perceptual or emotional movement. – SM

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LUCIA DI LUCIANO 1933, Syracuse, Italy. Lives in Formello, Italy Amongst all the approaches that emerged from Programmed Art, Lucia Di Luciano’s stands out for its consistency and discipline. Her stripped-down forms and geometrical, mathematical rigour exemplify a practice that has wedded the science of perception to the look of cutting-edge industrial design. In the early 1960s, along with her husband Giovanni Pizzo, whose rationalist

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sensibility she shared, Di Luciano was active around Rome and helped found two separate artistic initiatives: 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. Unlike similar groups such as Gruppo T and Gruppo N, both championed an aesthetic investigation based on complex mathematical rules, emulating the strategies of technology without employing it directly. The geometric rationality that was Di Luciano’s contribution to this experiment is based on the repetition of pure, modular forms organised into grids, applying the same combinatory, algorithmic processes as the computers that were just then coming into use. In an attempt to follow their logic and eliminate every trace of emotion from her compositions, the artist first gave up colour – reintroducing it, in a measured way, only towards the 1970s – and as we can see from her series Irradiazioni (1965), created psychedelic compositions using only black-and-white units. The latter, obsessively painted on masonite, are squares and rectangles that have been mathematically sequenced to give the appearance of movement: these geometric shapes are the building blocks of the compositions, combined to create tensions, impulses, and vibrations. Their titles – Rapporto alternativo, Divergenze, Ritmi – bring to mind the structural experiments of Constructivism and the Bauhaus, but rather than focusing on the formal aspect of the compositions, they explore the infinite combinatory possibilities guiding their creation and appreciation. 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

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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 summed up the interests that drove a complex, constantly evolving cultural scene, starting in the 1960s. Her works record 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) celebrate the visual experience evoked in the title, presenting a high-tech

version of it. 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. For instance, in the same period, the artist was experimenting with the form and dimension of the neons in Sunset Light; by colouring, bending, and finally enclosing them in transparent structures at various heights, she created the iconic series Spiral Light (1968). Though they have the same Plexiglas shell as before, these sculptures feature a blue core of light that whirls around itself, summoning up a twilight atmosphere. When not shown in isolation, these sculptures are grouped into theatrical configurations that heighten their effect on the perceiver. In A Space of Fog (1968), the artist arranges six pillars from her Spiral Light series within the space, letting their fog lights cut through the thick artificial mist that surrounded them. 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 Laura 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

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, in an experience that is both playful and sensorial. Continuing down this path, she conceived subsequent works as sensory catalysts, and though they lacked the same tactile engagement, designed them 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. Though of varying size, these works always feature a black box with an outer surface of blue Perspex. A motor inside powers the rotation of a second transparent surface inlaid with a geometric pattern and backlit with neon. The combined effect of movement and light makes luminous shapes emerge from the dark plastic surfaces, shifting like a kaleidoscope and endlessly recombined to create optical illusions, disruptions, and superimpositions. In 1962, when a prototype of Schemi luminosi variabili – also known as 9x9xX – was included in the first, famous exhibition of Programmed Art curated by Bruno Munari and Giorgio Soavi at the Olivetti shop in Milan, its shimmering form immediately defined the approach Varisco would take throughout her long career. – SM

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NA N DA V I G O 1936 – 2020, Milan, Italy

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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, a few months before Bruno Munari and Umberto Eco coined the term “Arte Programmata” and recognised her contribution to this new Italian movement, Grazia Varisco embarked on an investigation in tune with more 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 (standing 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

In the late 1950s, when Nanda Vigo returned to Italy after studying architecture in Switzerland and America, the Milanese art world was full of new fervour. Growing close to the Italian members of the Zero group – including Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni – she embraced Kinetic and Perceptual Experimentation, through her own hybrid language of art, design, and architecture. From the outset, her multidisciplinary approach was guided by a holistic vision of art, in which objects, settings, installations and buildings were tied together by the use of light. Whether natural or artificial, Vigo harnessed it 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 we can see in Manifesto cronotopico (1964), it adapts to any physical configuration, creating a spatially and temporally altered experience. Another example of this is her Cronotopi (1962–1968), rectangular structures of aluminium and industrial glass set on the

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floor or on pedestals, reflecting the light that illuminates them from inside or outside. Borrowing from physics, 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. Especially when installed so that visitors can walk through them, these sculptures give the illusion of constantly shifting surfaces, and create a contemplative, mystical mood. 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, and create architectural or maze-like structures depending on how they are arranged. Adapting the original design, which was intended for two towers in a cemetery outside Milan, Vigo stacked or grouped these sculptural elements to mark out areas where space and time seem suspended, in a shimmering experience of the senses. Stepping inside it – or any object or space this artist has designed – means embarking on a radical adventure where everything vibrates and becomes kinetic, whether it is in motion or not. – SM

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

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

With the famous exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968) at MoMA in New York, the 1960s heralded the end of the machine era and the beginning of a new, cybernetic one; around the same time, a sizeable number of artists around the world began to see technology as a knowledge system full of artistic potential. Like many other pioneers of what would soon be called New Media Art, the American artist Lillian Schwartz was also fascinated by this growing technological innovation, and despite her very traditional training in calligraphy and painting, began working with engineers and programmers to create new visual experiences. Human-sized computers, cathode tubes, and stroboscopes replaced the classic tools of art, and Schwartz’s work began to offer interactive, multisensory experiences. At the MoMA show, for instance, the artist presented 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 – it was a translucent plastic dome that generated shifting red sculptures of light; their visual configuration varies with the viewer’s position to produce a captivating dynamic effect. But in this and other works, Schwartz’s aim is to use technology as a tool for conceptual ends, not as an object of pure, futuristic fascination, as artists had done up to the previous decade. 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 analogue photos and geometric drawings generated by algorithms to create psychedelic moving images. Some of 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, Lillian Schwartz’s work is actually addressing timeless themes – from a high-tech angle. – SM

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

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ULLA WIGGEN

1942, Stockholm Lives in Stockholm, Sweden

1968 was a peak moment in systems-based art, made possible by artists’ burgeoning access to computing resources via universities, research institutions, and communications corporations as well as theories handed down from scientific fields. In exploring the limits and possibilities of cybernetics as a fusion between art and science, British critic and curator Jasia Reichardt’s landmark exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA London showed works from a range of media, including computer-generated graphics, music, poems, robots, and games. Also included in this context were a series of acrylic and gouache paintings on wood panels portraying the interior circuity of electronic devices by the Swedish artist Ulla Wiggen. Titled TRASK and Vägledare (both 1967), these paintings capture an archetype of technological culture in an impeccably precise style. While Wiggen’s paintings are representations, rather than demonstrations, of machine operations, their style of flattened objectivity conveys complex themes about the haptics of technology. Wiggen was closely involved with the art and technology scene in Stockholm that coalesced around the Moderna Museet, then directed by Pontus Hultén. In her first gouache paintings of circuit boards and electronic bits, like Förstärkare and Kretsfamilj (both 1964), Wiggen created extraordinarily defined layers of paint, an effect achieved by using woven medical gauze in place of canvas. After 1969, she studied to become a clinical psychotherapist, which became her primary focus for the next four decades. Enthusiastic reception to a 2013 solo exhibition of her Computer Paintings at the Moderna Museet reignited her inspiration to paint. In her later work, Wiggen’s interest in the circuitry of brains and eyes supplants that of manmade machines, exploring the way that decontextualised organs evoke a sense of engaging with the world that is both logical and incomprehensible. In her Iris Paintings (2016–ongoing), Wiggen laboriously paints human irises in blues, greens, and hazels on round panels. The artist has stated that she wanted to visually express the blurring of her vision due to cataracts prior to treatment – a state between clarity and ambiguity. The irises take on an uncanny quality: visitors are made aware of their movement and position, as if being surveilled by a phantom voyeur. Seen from the position of the artist, even in her attempt to break it down to parts, the body is no less enigmatic. –MW

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

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Ulla Wiggen, Kretsfamilj, 1964. Gouache on panel, gauze, 35 × 30 cm. Photo Åsa Lundén. Bonnier Group Art Collection. Courtesy the Artist; The Bonnier Group, Stockholm, Sweden; Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Ulla Wiggen Ulla Wiggen, TRASK, 1967. Acrylic on panel, 150 × 80 cm. Photo Åsa Lundén. Collection of Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Purchase 1968. Courtesy the Artist; Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Ulla Wiggen

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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 grounded in ecological issues driven towards a postAnthropocene future. Aspiring towards a restorative visionary idealism, her works assume the form of drawings including axonometric projections, diagrams, sculpture, photographs, and monumental public installations. In the celebrated work Wheatfield—A Confrontation (1982), Denes planted two acres of wheat in a Manhattan landfill, one block from Wall Street, which would later become Battery Park City. The sweeping field was framed by the Twin Towers – symbol of the excesses of capitalism. The spatial proximity between the corporate greed and the agricultural space signalled Denes’ efforts towards land reclamation and produced a stark confrontation with the mismanagement of waste and world hunger. The ephemerality of this work, which lasted four months, contrasts with the collaborative work Tree Mountain— A Living Time Capsule—11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years (1992– 1996). This virgin forest, which is to be maintained for four centuries, is situated on a manmade mountain that Denes created near Ylöjärvi in Finland. 11,000 pine trees were planted by 11,000 people in a mathematical pattern derived from the proportions of the golden ratio and the growth patterns of pineapple and sunflowers. In the more than six-metre 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. The innovations of her work can best be described by her invention of a “visual philosophy,” which renders invisible concepts, such as mathematics, logic, and thinking processes, into finely rendered visual form. In this way, Denes paves the way for new associations and understandings, reimagining the relationship of humans with the Earth. – LC

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Agnes Denes, Introspection I—Evolution (detail), 1968–1971. Monoprint, 107.63 × 542.29 cm. Photo Stan Narten. Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects. © Agnes Denes

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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

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CHARLOTTE JOHANNESSON

1943, Malmö, Sweden Lives in Skanör, Sweden

Charlotte Johannesson was trained as a traditional weaver in the 1960s. During the same period, she established in Malmö her weaving 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, often in satirical styles accompanied by slogans. In this she was inspired by the example of her precursor, the Norwegian, Malmö-born and also self-taught artist Hannah Ryggen (1894–1970). Johannesson’s politics appear through an upbeat feminism or in tapestries such as Drop Dead (1977), where she critiques the then newly developed hydrogen bomb. In 1978 Johannesson started merging weaving techniques 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. Between 1981 and 1985, together with her partner Sture Johannesson, she ran The Digital Theatre, one of the first computer graphics studios in Europe. As a digital artist, Johannesson wrote scripts to produce digital, on-screen or plotted imagery. Her fascination for the early “micro-computers,” as they were called back then, often appears as the subject of her work: in the plotter print Computer mind (1981–1986) for instance, the artist depicts a figure connected to a computer via her nervous system. When applied to textiles and prints, the computer-generated images have a pixelated effect – the word “pixel” was first invented in 1965 to describe video images related to space travel. Since the 1980s, a number of Johannesson’s works have included images of world maps and images of Earth seen from space, paired with slogans taken from popular culture, such as in 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

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

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SIDSEL MEINECHE HANSEN

1981, Ry, Denmark Lives in London, UK

In a world where CCTV cameras record all manner of public life, mobile images captured in private are ceaselessly uploaded to social media, deep fakes abound, and digital avatars can simulate human behaviour with increasing accuracy, our collective understanding of the body is progressively harder to separate from digital life. In the Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s provocative and unsettling work, the ways in which these forms of photographic, televisual, and digital media impact our perceptions of ourselves and our daily lives are brought into sharp focus. Throughout scenes populated by disembodied beings and CGI avatars, the digital body occupies a full-fleshed, hyperreal space, usually associated with the corporate aesthetics of entertainment and gaming. But surpassing a straightforward study of digital representation, Hansen’s work fixates on the amassment of capital created through the gendering of these bodies, especially in the field of pornography. In many of Hansen’s animated videos, she appropriates hypersexualised 3D readymade human models made available online through open source software for game designers and adult entertainment purveyors, also incorporating “genitalia props” and “pose sets” used for animating sex scenes. Thinking through the role that gender plays in the commodification of such 3D objects, the video Maintenancer (2018), made in collaboration with filmmaker Therese Henningsen, focuses on the maintenance of sex dolls at a German brothel, directly confronting viewers both with women’s bodies as they are crafted and idealised for consumption, and the work of conservation involved in preserving the fantasy of their appearance. In it, like in other pieces such as Love Doll Resurrect (2019), the genres of porn and horror are transplanted into the digital realm, signalling a transition into posthuman sex work. Many of Hansen’s sculptures follow a similar logic to her digitally rendered dolls, even as they exist in physical space. Daddy Mould (2018), the empty fibreglass mould of a silicon sex doll and Untitled (Sex Robot) (2018–2019), a ball-jointed wooden marionette, 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

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Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Daddy Mould, 2018. Industrial cast in two parts made from fiberglass, resin, Vaseline, 149 × 37 × 92 cm and 149 × 48 × 89 cm. Installation view, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, End-User, Kunsthal Aarhus, Århus, 2018. Courtesy the Artist; Rodeo, London / Piraeus

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Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Untitled (Sex Robot), 2018 / 2019. Ball-jointed, life-size figure made in wood, 176 × 25 × 40 cm. Photo Frank Sperling. Courtesy the Artist; Rodeo, London / Piraeus Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Maintenancer, 2018. Digital video, sound, in collaboration with Therese Henningsen, 13 mins 5 sec. Courtesy the Artist; Rodeo, London / Piraeus

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ELLE PÉREZ

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

Rather than focusing on photography’s documentary or truth-telling properties, New York-based artist Elle Pérez is interested in the layers of meaning that are projected onto a photograph by the viewer, as well as by the intimacy that develops from the photographic act’s intensity of eye contact and attention. For the artist, this approach is imbued with a broader potential: photography becomes a means to re-examine the world and to find new narrative and affective significance in things as they are encountered in everyday life. Pérez groups their images into what they call “configurations,” treating each photograph as a unit in an ongoing, syntactical sequence. Forming distinct expressive and affective modules, these configurations invite the viewer into a give-andtake with the image: what we derive from these fragmented visions, and what they mean, is as much a result of our process of looking – identifying formal repetitions, echoes, and allusions – as it is a product of the photographs’ contents. The mix of large- and small-format and digital photographs on view in Venice weave together themes of intimacy and tradition from worlds that, at first, seem distinct. One strand is an exploration of the Taíno Caribbean objects called cemís: carved devotional objects, understood to house the spirit of a specific person, that are traditionally consulted through a shamanistic process for advice or healing. Another is the martial art and combat sport Muay Thai – for Pérez, a practice of embodied research and self-experimentation –, and particularly the ambiguous intimacy of the clinch, wherein two combatants grapple in a tight hold. By recognising the themes of bodily autonomy and transformation central to these practices, Pérez frames Indigenous knowledge as a form of “body hacking,” rebuffing the idea that modifications to the body – and particularly transgender bodies – are aberrant or unnatural. Equally central to this group of work is Pérez’s technical experimentation, pushing digital cameras’ ability to detect extremely low levels of light and playing with the spatial distortions that are possible with a large format lens. While these images’ meaning may remain ambiguous, flashes of recognition are produced in the interplay between gesture, line, shadow, and the physical and mental landscapes mapped across the images’ contents. Rather than speaking for themselves, Pérez’s photographs sing as a chorus: their meaning lies not in their individual voices, but in the harmonies that result from their convergence. – IW

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Elle Pérez, pull, 2020 / 2021. Digital silver gelatin print, 111.76 × 74.61 cm. Courtesy the Artist; 47 Canal

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Elle Pérez, Charles with Blood, 2019. Courtesy the Artist; 47 Canal Elle Pérez, Petal, 2020 / 2021. Digital silver gelatin print, 111.76 × 84.77 cm. Courtesy the Artist; 47 Canal

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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’ – as material, questioning social norms surrounding identity and representation in a manner that brings her practice into dialogue with the work of feminist artists including Alina Szapocznikow, Ana Mendieta, and Cindy Sherman. Sherman, in particular, serves as a direct source of inspiration in Grzeszykowska’s photographic series Untitled Film Stills (2006), in which she appropriates Sherman’s iconic 1970s series of the same title by restaging the original photographs in colour. Whereas Sherman’s photographs use costumes, sets, and tropes from cinematic history to suggest stills from films that do not actually exist, Grzeszykowska’s response is to embody Sherman herself, as well her fictitious characters, updating and riffing on Sherman’s critique of mediated constructs of identity. Series like Beauty Masks (2017) use props such as fragmented body parts modelled in pigskin and cosmetic masks, challenging the boundaries of self-representation through deformation, abjection, and the invocation of the grotesque. Grzeszykowska’s work conflates the dichotomies of human and machine, organic and synthetic, and alluring and repugnant. In the series MAMA (2018), Grzeszykowska explores and subverts the relationship between mother and daughter by portraying her own daughter interacting with an eerily lifelike silicone doll modelled after the artist herself. The photographs capture the child imitating and assuming 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. The doll’s hyperrealistic representation only enhances the latent violence that underlines these scenes of care and affection. 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 that complies to the artist’s desires – 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

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

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Aneta Grzeszykowska, Mama # 34, 2018. Gelatin silver hand print, 50 × 36 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Raster; Lyles and King Gallery

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

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JUNE CRESPO

1982, Pamplona, Spain Lives in Bilbao, Spain

June Crespo makes open-ended sculptures from industrial materials that reference both architectural and bodily forms. Starting with fibreglass, resin, ceramic, bronze, and rebar, the artist cuts, fragments, enlarges, and recombines existing elements and materials into new intuitive forms that offer the possibility for a different reading from each viewer. 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 – slouching resin totems, concrete casts of vaguely industrial forms ratchet-strapped to the wall, or piled layers of thin rebar. Each of Crespo’s sculptures suggests a body entrenched within an architectural space, either through a photograph of a fragment of a person, or the curved opening of a cast element. By embedding clothing – both her own and that of others – among fibreglass, rebar, and other industrial materials, Crespo points to domestic and intimate spaces. Her works become armatures, calling to mind the ways that the built environment can simultaneously support and constrict the human body and mind. Crespo’s installations reflect both future dystopian urban landscapes and our contemporary experience as composite cyborg creatures. She refers to her sculptures as vessels, even “the manual gestures of all previous vessels.” For The Milk of Dreams, Crespo presents a new series of sculptures that are an evolution of HELMETS (2020), a body of work first exhibited at Artium, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art in Álava, Spain, in 2020. The series includes two pairs of cast aluminium torsos stacked on top of each other, with the casting sprues (the spouts through which the liquid metal is poured into the cast) still attached to the edges of the sculpture; as well as a group of cast-concrete statues that expose the relief cast of shipping barrels. – MK

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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

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HANNAH LEVY

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

Hannah Levy’s anthropomorphic sculptures arouse bodily awareness through a combination of corporeal and industrial materials. The artist appropriates commonplace objects and defamiliarises them by using unexpected materials and warping or exaggerating their formal properties. Levy’s visual vocabulary includes medical equipment, gymnastic devices, safety bars, vegetables, pastries, and pearls. Levy makes that which is familiar – nearly to the point of invisibility – deeply strange and magnetic, creating objects that exist in a limbo of what the artist calls “design purgatory.” Both unnerving and alluring, the objects provoke repulsion and attraction to a humorous extreme. Levy’s sculptures often reference 20th-century Modernist design. Matching these allusions with fleshy, corporeal casts, the artist imbues the Modernist ideal of immaculate geometry with a jarring return to organic matter, accentuating the pre-existing sensuality hidden in modern design. 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, defamiliarising their referenced objects and placing the viewer in an ambiguous and unsettling relationship to the sculpture. Levy’s work is indebted to the Surrealist fascination with the uncanny and the abject, while taking a retrospective and ambivalent view on the material culture of the past century. For The Milk of Dreams, Levy realises a group of three new sculptures. Untitled (2022) is a menacing structure, balanced on four polished metal arthropod-like legs supporting a sac of slumped glass created by allowing the weight of the heated, melting material to determine its own shape before cooling. Untitled (2022) consists of a thin membrane of silicone stretched over a winged steel structure. The work is reminiscent of the skin-and-bone anatomy of a bat’s wing, wedding the counterintuitive possibility of featherless mammalian flight with the ambiguous form of the tent, both a leisure accessory for naturalists and a dire necessity for the unhoused. Untitled (2022) is a carvedmarble, chair-sized facsimile of a peach pit, a material used for sculpting in ancient and contemporary craft traditions that also contains surprising levels of the poisonous toxin cyanide. Each of the sculptures 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

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Hannah Levy, Untitled, 2021. Nickel-plated steel, silicone, 172.72 × 187.96 × 187.96 cm. Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin. © Hannah Levy

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Hannah Levy, Untitled (detail), 2021. Nickel-plated steel, silicone, 172.72 × 187.96 × 187.96 cm. Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin. © Hannah Levy Hannah Levy, Untitled (detail), 2021. Nickel-plated steel, silicone, 152.4 × 177.8 × 215.9 cm. Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin. © Hannah Levy 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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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. Looking towards technology’s overlapping influence on the cultural formations of race, gender, sexuality, or nationhood, Li’s interdisciplinary video, sculpture, sound, and installation 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, which was often shown in dismembered parts or through exaggerated distortions, Li suffuses digital spaces of consumerism with bodily eroticism. In the video installation T (2017–2018), Li displays a pair of smooth CGI-animated feet, which, shown in a series of close-up shots, wobble and wag, fragmented from the rest of the subject’s body. Accompanying the disembodied imagery is a narration by a women’s sock salesperson for Taobao (a Chinese online retail website), who throughout the video is revealed to be a sexist cisgender man speaking in a traditionally feminine voice. In performing femininity and desirability to sell more socks on the Internet, the narrator’s account further complicates commodity fetishism for the digital age. In this context, labour is entangled in gendered stereotypes, global systems of demand, and a parallel invisible chain of supply, but in the virtual space these tenets resist being fixed. 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, which has proliferated among office workers who increasingly spend their days immersed in their laptops during the Covid-19 work-from-home era. 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

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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

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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 sculptural objects combine enduring materials like metal, glass, concrete, and stone with ephemeral elements such as flame, scent, and light. These works often have an implied adaptability via the use of pulleys, adjustable hardware, and functional parts sourced from the defense, medical, and scientific industries. These sculptures 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. In these posthuman compositions, past and future are conflated through objects that conjure a history of ritual – often through scents emanating from natural incense used in spiritual, medicinal, and funerary practices – together with mechanical or technological devices like neon and theatrical lighting. The multi-sensory quality of the works provokes visceral responses in the viewer, a somatic effect that is accentuated by elements that bear the imprint of traces of the body. In a series of works begun in 2017, abundant swaths of silk used for military parachutes lie encased under a grid of stainless-steel poles, suggesting the wrinkles and folds of the body’s skin. The hybrid objects evoke the merging of body, technology, and machine, formalising the porous entanglement between the human and the non-human. Low Relief Icon (Figure 1) and Low Relief Icon (Figure 2) (2021) are made of factory conveyor belts tautly counterweighted by metal cases used by the US military for transporting bodily remains. Resting on a modular, metallic floor repurposed from its original function of hiding electrical cables, each casket is illuminated by flicker lights. With candles alluding to funeral rites, the coffins suggest mourning but also State-sponsored violence. 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 likens life to a disposable object. 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. – LC

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Elaine Cameron-Weir, Untitled, 2018. Parachute silk, stainless steel, leather, 121.92 × 91.44 × 17.78 cm. Exhibition view, III: Heavyshield, Knowles, Cameron-Weir, Remai Modern, Canada, 2018. Photo Blaine Campbell. Courtesy the Artist; JTT, New York; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles Next pages: 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

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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 artworks including 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. Occupying overlapping avant-garde circles in the 1970s and 1980s with fellow Viennese artists such as VALIE EXPORT and Maria Lassnig, Jürgenssen’s inquisitive experiments with self-portraiture, representations of the female body, and the clichés of gender representation blend matters of identity and being, Freudian psychoanalysis and Surrealism, while maintaining a degree of distinctively utopian political thinking. As she once wrote, “between ‘waking and dreaming’ we can learn ‘seeing,’ and recognise ‘a tomorrow’ in the future.”1 Lesser known than her celebrated photographic series, Jürgenssen’s drawings from the 1970s express a perspective on feminism realised specifically through Freudian-inspired dreamlike tableaux. In these surreal compositions, all marked by the artist’s tremendous drafting skills, bodies are shown both in metaphoric and literal terms: they are presented in various stages of metamorphosis, often conceived as hybrid human-animal beings; objects, too, sprout animal appendages. In the drawing Fehlende Glieder (Missing Limbs) (1974) a well-dressed figure is part crustacean, sporting a Medusa-like hairdo with tendrils of spiny claws. The nude seated body, who pops a pointer finger into the mouth of a reclining man in Ohne Titel (1977) has the unmistakable furry head and upper back of a black cat. Recalling the psychosexually charged works of avant-garde elders like Meret Oppenheim, pieces like Ohne Titel (1974) capture small knives developing animal traits – a feathered tip, a fish tail, a roach’s haunch – 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 forms and boundaries of the inner mind and the external body become ambiguous. Portraying a swimming-capped and bikini-clad woman on a placid beach, Jürgenssen straps a shield of bones to the outside of the figure’s body. Whether fantasy or nightmare, here, a representation of femininity is attached to something unfixed and altogether unknowable. – MW

Birgit Jürgenssen, quoted in Werner Dornik, The Search Within: Art between Implosion and Explosion (Vienna: Österreichisch-Indische Gesellschaft, 1998), 76.

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Birgit Jürgenssen, Untitled, 1974. Pencil, colour pencil on handmade paper, 43.6 × 62.2 cm. Photo Pixelstorm. Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen; Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna

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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 Birgit Jürgenssen, Fehlende Glieder (Missing Limbs), 1974. Pencil, colour pencil on handmade paper, 62.5 × 43.5 cm. Photo Pixelstorm. VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna. Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen, Vienna

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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 wideranging 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 and choreography, 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 society rigorously controlled by capitalism, technology, and the rule of law. In their celebrated work Weed Killer (2017), Staff presents an unflinching depiction of sickness and intimacy. The video is propelled by a monologue, adapted from Catherine Lord’s memoir The Summer of Her Baldness (2004), which reflects upon the chemically induced devastation of chemotherapy, a process akin to “mainlining weed killer,” where deeply toxic substances must be ingested, paradoxically, in order to stay alive. This intertwining notion of affliction and contamination is a consistent theme through Staff’s work, as is the harsh, fluorescent palette used in the piece. On Venus (2019), a large-scale video installation originally made for the Serpentine Galleries in London and restaged in The Milk of Dreams, continues Staff’s examination of the exchange between bodies, ecosystems, and institutions from a queer and trans perspective. Set above a shining mirrored floor flooded with radioactive yellow light, which the artist describes as “ontologically dysphoric,” moving images are comprised of two parts. The first contains scratched, warped, and overlapping footage documenting the industrial farming of commodities including urine, semen, meat, skins, and fur, all variously used for the production of clothing, medicine, and commercial materials. The video’s second half includes a poem describing life on the planet Venus, a sibling reality 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, infused with the violence of pressure and heat, destructive winds and the disorientating lapse of day into night. Positioned between the ecological and the industrial, Staff’s work ultimately depicts states of violence that underpin the making of a human subject both near and far, inquiring what is at stake in the making of livable futures. – MW

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

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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 all driven by the desire to transform our relationship to our own bodies and to the other living beings that surround us. For Castagnetti, catharsis facilitates metamorphosis, and she often employs transformative processes in her sculpture-making. For example, installations made from an amalgam of natural and synthetic materials with titles like HONEY and LYCHEN (both 2021) appear to melt into puddles of black ooze at their bases. For Tauromachia (2021), Castagnetti cast bulls’ horns in bronze, following an ancient ritual connected to bullfighting. In Cheree Cheree (2021), the artist cast a tangle of snakelike impressions onto a charred ceramic background. Performance is necessary to the genesis of Castagnetti’s sculptural practice as the artist believes that action and active embodiment are the most effective ways to break through the limitations of identity. In a recent performance, Black Milk (2021), the artist tied performers to black ceramic sculptures with ropes and chains. The connected bodies point to the artist’s insistence that the body exists always in relation to others, and our capacity to change the situation around us. 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. This work is out of competition.

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

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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, Germany, where her earliest Conceptual works asserted a collective and ephemeral character. Although she has long since become invested in experimenting with a range of materials, including textiles, embroidery, and photographs to create objects, she nonetheless maintains the playful, ironic spirit that defined the art of many members of her cohort like Rosemarie Trockel, Charline von Heyl, and Jutta Koether, whose work mixed references to art history, popular culture, and music with a sly sense of humour. In von Bonin’s practice, these tenets are seen in tandem with a destabilising approach to craft and domestic activities, with sculptures and installations that implicitly prod at the constructions of feminism in Western society. For many of her projects initiated in recent years, she populates installations 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 most favoured subjects – sea creatures. On the Giardini’s Central Pavilion’s façade we find, as if placed on the pediment of a Greek temple, WHAT IF THEY BARK 01-07, hard plastic sharks and fish adorned with surf boards, electric guitars, ukuleles, sarongs, and stuffed gingham-patterned missiles. Behind the columns of the façade the artist installs 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; while 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’s appropriated and custom-fabricated elements likewise satirise the affectations of contemporary art – particularly the storied lineage of the readymade – and of art history. – MW

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Cosima von Bonin, THE BONIN / OSWALD EMPIRE’S NOTHING #05 (CVB’S SANS CLOTHING. MOST RISQUE. I’D BE DELIGHTED. & MVO’S ORANGE HERMIT CRAB ON OFF-WHITE TABLE NEXT TO PINK TABLE SONG), 2010, Materials and dimensions variable. Photo Markus Tretter. © Kunsthaus Bregenz, Cosima von Bonin

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Cosima von Bonin, installation view, WHAT IF IT BARKS? Featuring AUTHORITY PUREE, Petzel Gallery, New York City, 2018. Photo Jason Mandella. Courtesy the Artist; Petzel, New York. © Cosima von Bonin 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, scarfs, 200.7 × 114.3 × 103 cm. Photo Jason Mandella. Courtesy the Artist; Petzel, New York

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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 Luwian hieroglyphics from the Neolithic to Bronze Age in Anatolia; to hamsas, or Hands of Fatima, amulets; to traditional tattoos, made from ash mixed with a mother’s milk made for a new daughter. In On Protection (2021), the artist worked with an art historian and a zooarchaeologist to fill a gallery with depictions of protective rituals and goddesses in machine-routed and hand-carved wood. Her sculptures appear like painted shadows of gods, animals, and gestures frozen in time against a temple or cave wall, ready to be discovered by a future generation. Sculptures of imaginary landscapes with titles such as A New Élan Vital (2013) and Vibrational Objects (2014) reference thinkers including Jane Bennett and Henri Bergson who theorise that matter organises and acts on its own. The Water, the Soil, the Jungle (2016) featured three performers in camouflaged costumes made from a flowing grass-like material in white, brown, and green, respectively. These three characters – water, soil, and jungle – have since reappeared in many other performances: in The Concrete: The Mountain (Night Search) (2017), the characters guide the audience to find sources for water; in The Water (2017), the artist circumnavigated the Island of San Michele during the 57th International Art Exhibition, recreating Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead (1880). 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

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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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ON RE-ENCHANTMENT AND CHI’XI A C O N V E R S AT I O N B E T W E E N S I LV I A F E D E R I C I A N D S I LV I A R I V E R A C U S I C A N Q U I Moderated by Manuela Hansen

Silvia Federici (1942, Parma, Italy) is a feminist activist, writer, and teacher. In 1972 she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, the organisation that launched the Wages for Housework Campaign internationally. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (1949, La Paz, Bolivia) is an Aymara activist, sociologist, and oral historian. In 1983 she joined other Indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in founding the Andean Oral History Workshop, an independent group devoted to issues of orality, identity, and popular and Indigenous social movements, primarily in the Aymara region. In the following conversation, which took place on Zoom in March 2021, they touch upon concepts such as Silvia Federici’s proposal of re-enchanting the world through the commons and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s concept of the chi’xi. They were invited to have a conversation around these ideas and to reflect upon the present. To begin, can you tell me where you first met and how you encountered each other’s work?

We met at the Zócalo International Book Fair in Mexico City. It was 2017 or 2018. I had already read Silvia Federici’s Calibán y la bruja (Caliban and the Witch), published by Tinta Limón in Spanish.1 Since then, I’ve admired Silvia’s scholarship very much, the way she uses images, because for some time I had been reflecting about the importance of images as vehicles of cultural meanings that are not easily put into words. SRC

Silvia, I think we met before that, but we hadn’t spoken. Didn’t you come to that meeting on the commons that Raquel Gutiérrez organised in Puebla? 2 I saw you on the panel, and at that time Raquel gave me your books and I began to read you. SF

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SRC

You’re completely right.

A sense of urgency arises from both your work. Silvia Federici, you argue that the re-envisioning and re-invigorating of the collective and the commons will allow us to reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relationships with our bodies, with nature and with others; allowing us to “re-enchant” the world. Can you briefly summarise these notions?

There are different ways of thinking of the notion of the commons, and there has been a lot of writing coming from the South. The commons, broadly, is a different conception of how society is organised and of how we reproduce our lives. It is a conception of a society organised not around the principle of the State or of the market, but a society where people have equal access to the wealth that they produce, the wealth of nature, and also a sense of responsibility for their wealth. It’s about creating practices of collaboration and cooperation that are against the competitive way that is enforced upon us in capitalism. In this sense, the commons is a way to reclaim and recapture our relationship with the natural world and with each other. The commons is a politics that does not postpone the revolution, as in socialist Marxist movements, to a future that never comes, but tries to change the now.

Can you also talk more about the notion of the enchantment? SF I feel that we are living in a way that continuously mutilates us. We have lost the capacity to relate to the natural world, and we relate to it in a way that is very utilitarian and destructive. Now it is springtime in New York and I live close to a park, and when I go to the park, I see the magic, I see nature coming alive again, I see the re-enchantment of the world. We have become blind and deaf to the beauty and magic of this world, to its creativity, and the living organisms that surround us. And the re-enchantment of the world is intimately connected to the notion of the commons, which is a struggle that is already happening in so many places, particularly in Latin America because of the Indigenous tradition, and also in Africa; in places where communal structures still exist. This is spilling into the United States, where, for example, there is a great interest in urban farming, and in forms of exchange that are not monetary. Some say we are moving towards a “rurban world,” rural and urban at the same time. Re-enchanting the world is about re-ruralising the urban world, is about re-envisioning communal forms of life, and is about living in a relationship with the world where you interact with nature because you are part of it.

Silvia Rivera, in Un mundo chi’xi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis, you invite us to envision a chi’xi world that will allow us to emancipate ourselves from the illusion of the “One,” to challenge pervasive dualisms by recognising our “internal fissure” and our embodied contradiction brought by colonisation.3 Can you introduce us to the concept of the chi’xi?

SRC Chi’xi is a concept metaphor that I learnt from an Aymaran sculptor who told me that certain animals are chi’xi because they are indeterminate and contradictory: they are both female and male, they inhabit both the alaxpacha, the outer daily upper realm, and also the manqhapacha, the world

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underground, which is dark and interior. Animals and entities like the lizard or the serpent jump and cross the borders of contradictory spaces. It was very interesting to find that it is precisely the contradiction that gives force to these entities. There is a collective social schizophrenia when one denies the other half of one’s identity, the identity that is buried by colonialism. For example, the self-consciousness of the Indian population is divided between the Indian part that has been erased from history, and the Western tradition. We then have to lift the Indian side from the ways of colonial impositions, because the problem with the Indigenous identity, as well as with the female identity, is that it is defined from outside, and our own self-definition usually contradicts this definition from the outside. In this regard, the Aymara notion of pä chuyma, which I translate as the idea of “double bind” which was developed by Gayatri Spivak on the basis of Gregory Bateson’s idea of schizophrenia, refers to the suffocating and paralysing disjunctive, or divided soul, brought by colonisation. A gesture of decolonisation of one’s identity would then mean to recognise that the coloniser also lives within the colonised, and to put forward one’s internal contradictions, working with and from them. In other words, from the paralysing and schizophrenic pä chuyma state of mind one can become chi’xi through interrogating and re-arranging the hierarchical differences within one’s identity. Do you think, Silvia, that the chi’xi can be thought beyond the Andean culture? I’m thinking of its potential relation to the concept of queer, for example, as chi’xi does not suppose hybridity or synthesis but a contradiction, something that is and is not at the same time.

I have always thought that chi’xi was specially meant to deal with the contradictions in the Andean world. But as so many cultures are facing the brutality of colonialism and this double bind between coloniser and colonised, I actually think that chi’xi can be applied to many identity conflicts, and can also be taken as a positive way towards self-construction. I do believe that the chi’xi has something to do with the idea of queer, because a good idea cannot be just a product of one head, it has to be in the air before one says something.

SRC

I would like to explore points of contact between your writings. Do you think that the projects of re-enchanting the world and of a chi’xi world intersect or complement each other?

SF When Silvia was talking about the queer, I was thinking about the experience of being a woman, which is a constant living contradiction, it is the experience of living simultaneously in two worlds. On one side, being a “woman” brings in a whole discipline, rooted in the tasks assigned to us in the capitalist organisation of work. At the same time, the very things that we are fighting against are also things that we learn from. Fighting against them gives us strength, and particular forms of knowledge – so this is where the notion of “woman,” as a collective, contested, constantly changing identity, relates to the notion of chi’xi.

And do you see any relation between Silvia’s chi’xi and your conception of the commons? What is the role of micropolitics in these projects?

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Silvia’s chi’xi is very much related to my notion of the commons. Building communal relations and structures, in a world that is surrounded by capitalist individualist relations, is to constantly juggle the contradiction and living in two worlds at the same time. The micro-politics of beginning from the “here and now,” with the people with whom you have affinities, is crucial. Something I appreciate from the women’s movement is the notion that the personal is political – which is often misinterpreted as the idea that changes in your personal life are enough. But there is something positive in this notion: that you cannot think of changing the world unless you also change your everyday life. Alienated politics is when you go to a demonstration, but then you go back home, and everything remains the same. To change our lives means to confront the contradictions we experience in our life; learning from them transforms our relationships, our sense of solidarity – this, to me, is also what is involved in the concept of the commons.

Talking about the possible complementarity of our views, I would say that within an alienated environment of truncated or interrupted oppressions and capitalist individualisation, you try to, and can, overcome this situation by reconstructing communal ties through affinity. The idea of comunalidad, commonality, which Raquel Gutiérrez has developed as an idea of entramados comunitarios, that is, a tissue of intermingling relations that form a community, is a process that can be achieved through the deliberate joining of affinities.4 The commons is not inherited, or based on ties of blood or contract, but is a spontaneous way out of alienation and suffering.

SRC

For envisioning and building a chi’xi and re-enchanted world, you both invite us to look and turn to Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. Silvia Federici, in Re-Enchanting the World and in Beyond the Periphery of the Skin, you argue that commoning practices of Indigenous communities, in particular of women from those communities, are inspiration for a contemporary re-enchantment of our world.5 Silvia Rivera, you say that the Indigenous epistemology in which the animate and inanimate beings are subjects just as much as human beings offer us alternatives to override North-Atlantic capitalist and anthropocentric narratives.6 Can you both expand these ideas?

SF There is a huge history and literature on how the destruction and commercialisation of nature and the exploitation of human labour have come together under the process of patriarchal capitalist conquest. In this regard, the struggle of Indigenous people is very much related to the feminist struggle. The literature coming from Brazil or Argentina tells us how often, in the process of defending land against mining or petroleum extraction, a feminist perspective has developed. Because in order to defend the forests or reclaim waters and lands, you must fight patriarchal structures. Men’s patriarchal behaviour is a great obstacle to women’s ability to resist, it is a drain to women’s energy, and in many cases an obstacle. And this is where the question of re-commoning the world enters, because unless we create some positive alternative immediately, we, humans and non-humans, are not going to survive in this situation.

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SRC Silvia, I agree with you that the urban-agricultural space has become a prime site of re-commonalisation and of re-enchantment, because it has the capacity to change our perception. For example, we did some workshops with children at our urban farming space, where they came to sow vegetable seeds, and then they came to harvest. It was very nice to see the effect that this had in their subjectivities, to realise that the carrot is not coming from the supermarket but from the earth.

Yes, now schools are taking the children to communal gardens because many children think that the potatoes or carrots come from plastic bags, and to see a carrot coming out from the earth is magic.

SRC

Yes, that is magic.

MH Can you tell me more about the notion of magic? What is the potency of magic for the world we live in today?

Magic for me is a knowledge and a feeling of the creativity and interconnectedness of everything in nature and human relations. In the case of the carrot, to see it coming from the earth is to realise that the earth has great creative powers within itself. From this brown soil comes a carrot, an onion, come flowers in the spring, the leaves on the trees. When I say that this is magical, I recognise the existence of forces, of powers that are not visible and yet are transformative. Unfortunately, the notion of magic is most often associated with sorcery, with the desire to manipulate things or acquire new things or powers.

Silvia Rivera, were you speaking of the space El Tambo? Can you tell us more about the project? MH

It happened by chance. A friend lent us her 800 square metre plot of land in a very popular zone of the centre of La Paz, which is called “Tembladerani.” We started in 2010, so it’s now eleven years. The land was a garbage lot, and for many years we have been cleaning the earth and ended up building a house. Every year we do ceremonies and a cycle of rituals, which is another way of reconstructing the community and re-enchanting the world. For example, we dialogue with the Pachamama, with the Mother Earth, and its cyclic moments. We pay attention to processes in the sky that urban people usually don’t think of, like the effect of the full moon or the crescent or decrescent movements on the plants, for example. In the city you usually don’t know where the East and the West are because you don’t connect where the sun rises or sets. But once you become aware of the cycles of the universe, your urban experience can be changed completely. This dialogue gives you a sense of a world that is re-enchanted. You feel part of and in company with all the non-human beings and entities that respond to your care and vice versa.

SRC

What are your thoughts here Silvia Federici? I completely agree with Silvia about the importance of ritual. I want to mention a book in Spanish, Gobierno comunal indígena y estado Guatemalteco (Indigenous Communal Government and the Guatemalan State) by Gladys SF

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Tzul Tzul.7 Gladys is a fantastic woman from Guatemala, and she has written this potent book on the Indigenous system of Totonicapán, which is where she’s from. She describes a world in which the organisation of what we call “political life” comes out of daily reproduction, and she speaks in particular of the importance of rituals. For example, she writes about the fiesta, which is not just getting together, drinking and having a good time. The fiesta is a ritual, a moment of re-signification of what it means to be in the community. People work on it the whole year. Rituals are part of the creation of a common interest, a common history. Another aspect of struggle in Latin America that has been inspiring to me in the concept of the commons is the idea that we live in different simultaneous times. When people say “compañero presente,” they express a gesture of solidarity not only with the living but with those who have died. It means “we are your allies, we are your voice, you are not dead, you are with us, you are still inspiring us.” Because the world of the dead and the world of the living are continuous, they are not separate. Here too, rituals, like the “Day of the Dead” in Mexico, are important. This solidarity with those who are no longer with us, this determination to make them part of our life and not forget what they struggled for, to be their eyes, their voices; all this is part of re-enchanting the world. MH In relation to the notion of temporality, Silvia Rivera, you say that you are hesitant of using the prefix “post.” You also speak of the decolonial as a trend and the anti-colonial as a struggle. Can you explain what you mean by this? SRC In the Aymara idea of circularity of time, the spiral nature of time comes back to a previous point, but on a new level. Time goes back to the same but is never the very same. And I think that the linear part in the idea of postcolonialism, or “post” everything, is delusive because it shows the impatience to get rid of the past, to overcome the past, and to finally transcend it. I also think that postcolonialism is more a desire than a description of reality. Decolonial, worse, is a fad that is going to pass very soon. The anti-colonial, on the other hand, is a struggle that is not only very relevant today, but it has not yet achieved a situation of postcoloniality. The desire for postcoloniality is fine, but one should not confuse reality with desire.

I so much agree with you Silvia, on the circularity of time. I am also against the “post” trend and use “anti-colonial” instead. I never use postcolonial or decolonial, always “anti-colonial.” Because colonialism is not finished. We are seeing massive dispossession, massive displacement, millions of people thrown out of their ancestral lands and then left to die in the Mediterranean or in jails in the United States. Talking about the circularity of time, also witch-hunting has come back.

In this regard, does it make sense to speak of or imagine a post-pandemic world?

I am very pessimistic. I think this is the first of a series of pandemics to come. So, I don’t think we can face the post-pandemic period yet. But I also think we should struggle against pessimism. SRC

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Silvia Federici, you’ve been fighting for a long time against the disregard for reproductive labour in our capitalist society. Do you think that the pandemic has brought a somewhat greater awareness about the indispensable work of taking care of others, or reproductive work?

I think that the pandemic is bringing new attention to the crisis that women have been living for a long time. The question of women now being in the home with telework and then possibly taking care of the children and their schooling at home, and then doing domestic work, not to mention when somebody gets sick at home: this is the enormity of what reproductive work is. And many women – the so-called “essential workers” – don’t have the privilege of staying at home. Without reproductive work nothing moves. It is important for the life of people but also for the reproduction of the workforce – so the real beneficiaries are the employers and the whole capitalist world. I fault the feminist movement for not having done enough in this regard. Today everything is being enclosed. We are now buying bottled water, soon we are going to buy bottled air so that we can breathe. This pandemic has shown us that only because of the lockdown, which reduced pollution, in many regions of the world people have been able to see the sky. That is a huge crime. We also hear the number of people that are dying of Covid but we don’t hear the number of those who are dying of cancer because that would lead us to question the responsibility of all the chemicals that go into the earth and our own bodies, and the role of the pharmaceutical companies. The history of the last thirty years has been a history of epidemics; in Africa, for example, thousands of people died of cholera, meningitis, Ebola. We are only talking of Covid today because it is affecting Europe and the United States. But all over the world people have been dying because their immune systems have been destroyed, as they live in unsanitary condition, and without the most basic resources. SF

Speaking of enclosure, you’ve been saying for decades that capitalism has waged a war against our bodies – against the female body in particular – through strategies of enclosure. What are the most conspicuous forms of enclosure today?

Enclosures are everywhere. The politics that are taking place today are built on processes of constant enclosure: of land, of knowledge, of our bodies. Speaking of the encroachment of bodies, today even human genes are being patented. Capitalism learnt a long time ago that breaking the connective ties that people have with each other in the community, turning us into self-enclosed, isolated people, individual islands, gives capitalism a great power. When you are alone, isolated from other people, you are more easily defeated. I think that now many of the jobs that were done outside the home are being sent back into the home because it reduces the cost of production for companies, moreover to have a dispersed workforce makes it difficult for people to organise. Racism is a form of enclosure. In the United States studies are showing that within the Black community, even people who have fairly high levels of income have a lower life expectancy than that of white people with the same income level. This is because the tension of living in a racist society has a direct effect on our bodies. So, we need to create new structures. A new society. SF

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I want to return to the question of life with and under the pandemic. The pandemic has had very contradictory effects. On the one hand, all of a sudden, you had an incredibly clear atmosphere, the world stopped, and nature began to flourish again. But on the other hand, a terrible effect of confinement was the increase of feminicides. Also, that we cannot hug, we cannot shake hands, we have this physical distance. But, in a way, this also provoked an articulation of previous kinship networks and neighbourhood networks. With Covid, we now have a society that gives much more emphasis to the small than to the big, where we realise we can change certain attitudes from the people that surround us. And speaking of the chi’xi, I think we can take those contradictions as an opportunity to enhance the more positive and creative ways of adaptation and to try not to reinforce the more selfish and untrusting attitudes amongst each other. For example, we learnt that if we are not going to hug each other, our words are a more important expression of our emotions. If we are to challenge the most negative forecasts of what’s coming, we need to regain confidence in, and nurture, our immediate relations, our neighbours and kin.

SRC

I agree with you, Silvia. This is a great moment of opportunity. I hope we know how to use it.

Silvia Federici is author of, among others, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004), Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2018), and Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (PM Press, 2020). Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is author of, among others, Sociología de la imagen. Miradas chi’xi desde la historia andina (Tinta Limón, 2015), Un mundo chi’xi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis (Tinta Limón, 2018). Manuela Hansen is an Argentine curator currently living in New York.

Silvia Federici, Calibán y la bruja. Mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2011). Originally published as Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar is a Mexican militant intellectual currently working as Professor of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Puebla. See Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Un mundo chi’xi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018), 17; 56; 81. See Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, Horizontes comunitario-populares. Producción de común más allá de políticas estado-céntricas (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2017).

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See Silvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018); Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2020), 96. See Rivera Cusicanqui, Un mundo chi’xi es posible, 90. See Gladys Tzul Tzul, Gobierno comunal indígena y estado Guatemalteco. Algunas claves críticas para comprender su tensa relación (Indigenous Communal Government and the Guatemalan State: Some Critical Perspectives to Understand their Tense Relationship; Guatemala: Instituto Amaq’, 2018).

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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 – a formidable reversal of the bronze figurative sculpture tradition of Confederate statuary, many examples of which have been torn down across the US in recent years. Part woman, part house, Brick House is a sculpture through which history, ethnography, and Black female subjectivity are both expressed in materials and forms and across the cultural associations that those entities hold deep. Created as part of Leigh’s Anatomy of Architecture series (2016–ongoing), Brick House is one of a group of sculptures that amalgamates bodies with architectural references. As in many of Leigh’s recent projects, this series includes passages through multiple pan-African and Afrodiasporic cultural paths, 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. As Leigh has stated, when she began working on this series, she was likewise thinking about the long tradition in art history of associating women’s bodies with dwellings, containers, tools, or “loopholes of retreat” – spaces of concealment, escape, and refuge, as characterised by the former enslaved author Harriet Jacobs in her 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Alternately registering as a vessel, as a space of comfort, as an object of consumption, as a site of sanctuary, Brick House powerfully portrays the Black woman’s body as a site of multiplicity. – MW

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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

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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

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B E L K I S AY Ó N

1967 – 1999, Havana, Cuba

Although a self-declared atheist, the Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón dedicated her life’s work to the codes, symbols, and tales of Abakuá, a secret Afro-Cuban fraternal society originating from South East Nigeria and Cameroon by enslaved people, whose foundational myth is based on a woman’s act of betrayal. In its telling, Sikán, a princess, accidentally caught a mystic fish while filling a water jug, which was said to grant peace and prosperity to those who heard it speak. Upon taking the fish to her father, she was sworn to secrecy; instead, she told her mate, and was condemned to death. Appearing as the central character throughout Ayón’s oeuvre, Sikán, typically depicted with no facial features but her eyes, is imagined in various guises within the vast and often disturbing Abakuá mythology. All the same, Ayón made Abakuá lore, which itself does not have a tradition of figurative iconography, entirely her own. Embodying a world half-invented and half-adopted, Sikán appears in religious scenes culled from Judeo-Christian scripture, too, 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. The three-part cycle La consagración I, II, and III (1991) constitutes one of the works in which Ayón stages her fascination with Abakúa society. Made in arched formats and with symmetrically balanced compositions that mimic Medieval religious altarpieces, each section depicts a scene of spiritual anointment or annunciation in elaborately textured detail. Like much of Ayón’s art made during her short but intense career, these prints, and the other works on view here, were created using the printmaking technique collography, a collage-like approach in which heterogenous materials are amassed on a plate to create a composition, as opposed to techniques like etching or wood cutting, in which images are carved onto the plate’s surface. Collography, as a method, allows 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. – MW

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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

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Belkis Ayón, La consagración I, 1991. Monotype on paper, 12 parts. Triptych, part 1, 223.5 × 300 cm. Photo José A. Figueroa. Courtesy Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba; The State Russian Museum. © Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba; © The State Russian Museum 2022 Belkis Ayón, La consagración II, 1991. Monotype on paper, 12 parts. Triptych, part 2, 224 × 300 cm. Photo José A. Figueroa. Courtesy Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba; The State Russian Museum. © Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba; © The State Russian Museum 2022 Belkis Ayón, La consagración III, 1991. Monotype on paper, 12 parts. Triptych, part 3, 225 × 300 cm. Photo José A. Figueroa. Courtesy Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba; The State Russian Museum. © Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba; © The State Russian Museum 2022

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GABRIEL CHAILE

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

Gabriel Chaile’s practice incorporates sculpture, drawing, and installation; all are informed by his long-standing exploration of and relationship with 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 archaeological remains from pre-Columbian cultures, which he synthesises in ways both poetic and humorous. Calling himself a “visual anthropologist,” the artist brings attention to traditional communitarian conceptions of aesthetic production overshadowed by colonial power, creating spaces where historical precedent, Indigenous epistemologies, and prescient craft conventions comingle with contemporary life. Many of Chaile’s characteristic clay, brick, adobe, bronze, or iron sculptures derive from a theory that the artist refers to as “the genealogy of form.” Drawing upon objects such as pots and clay ovens – many of which can still operate as cookware – he invokes the relationship of traditional Argentinian vessels to nourishment, support, collaboration, and community activities, while also pointing to the history of their design. Often taking on anthropomorphic traits, or incorporating eggs or other oblong shapes, these objects look back in history even as they continue to serve their function today. Chaile’s recent work La Malinche (2019), named for the Indigenous interpreter to the conquistador Hernán Cortés, who brought much of Mexico under Spanish rule in the early 16th century, takes the form of a hybrid bird-woman clay oven. Evoking a range of images and associations from pre-Columbian pottery from north-eastern Argentina – some of which have been obscured over time – this work shows a vessel meant for survival in the process of transformation, permeated with the body of a historical figure who has been variously maligned as a traitor and understood as a victim of colonialist conquest. Chaile’s five new sculptures for the Biennale Arte 2022 similarly take the form of hybrid human-animal furnaces that draw on ancient ceramic vessels, here arranged in an installation that suggests a temple, factory, or honeycomb. At its centre, a seven-metre-tall adobe sculpture captures a hybrid being in the middle of a transformation. Overall, Chaile’s new series is an expression of the body’s capacity for communalism, giving, and care, moulded from history, but experienced in the present. – MW

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Gabriel Chaile, exhibition view, Genealogía de la forma, Barro, Buenos Aires, 2019. Photo Santiago Orti. Courtesy the Artist; Barro, Buenos Aires

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Gabriel Chaile, Indudablemente estos músicos están rayados, 2021. Adobe, wood, guitar strings, tempera, metal structure, 143 × 116 × 167 cm. Photo Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the Artist; ChertLüdde, Berlin Gabriel Chaile, Mamá luchona, 2021. Exhibition view, 2021. Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum, New York City, 2021. Photo Dario Lasagni. Courtesy the Artist; Barro, Buenos Aires; ChertLüdde, Berlin

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FICRE GHEBREYESUS

1962, Asmara, Eritrea – 2012, New Haven, USA

At once pensive and exuberant, Ficre Ghebreyesus’ graceful acrylic and oil paintings capture the complexity of the artist’s East African childhood and his life in diaspora, presenting a world suffused with memories, visions, and stories. Populated by swirling depictions of boats, airplanes, angels, fish, and music-making, their dreaminess reads as a type of romanticism, insomuch as these boldly pigmented, fantastical landscapes are drawn from genuine 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 difficult thirty-year-long War of Independence from Ethiopia (1961–1991), Ghebreyesus left his home city as a refugee when he was a teenager, traveling through and living in Sudan, Italy, and Germany, before finally settling in New Haven, Connecticut. There, Ghebreyesus opened and cooked at a popular restaurant specialising in East African food he owned with his brothers; he devoted himself further to making art, eventually enrolling in the MFA program at Yale. A working chef for most of his adult life, Ghebreyesus chose to turn down most exhibition opportunities. When he died in 2012, most of his paintings had never been publicly displayed. The multi-layered canvases City with a River Running Through (2011), Nude with Bottle Tree (c. 2011), and Fish (c. 2008–2011) draw from the intertwined influences of Ghebreyesus’ Asmara childhood and diasporic adulthood, using the concept of layering both formally and metaphorically. In the large, unstretched canvas City with a River Running Through, a cityscape is constructed in a chequerboard patchwork of orange and peach colours, patterns, and shapes that resemble traditional Eritrean basketry and embroidery, as well as modernist stucco-painted houses found throughout Asmara. In Nude with Bottle Tree, a figure stands in a densely patterned landscape near a bottle tree. An ancient custom of combining discarded vessels with tree branches, this tradition originated in the Kingdom of Kongo on the west African coast and was brought to the Americas by people forced into slavery; it has since become closely associated with African American communities in the southern United States, where it is often interpreted as a means for warding off evil spirits. On the right side of the canvas is another figure holding a musical instrument, reminiscent of Yoruba horse-and-rider sculptures that are ritual figurines depicting weapon-clad warriors. Together, they stand at a crossroad between worlds. As in Ghebreyesus’ greater oeuvre, identity and home are perpetually in flux. – MW

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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

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Ficre Ghebreyesus, City with a River Running Through, 2011. Acrylic on unstretched canvas, 185.4 × 563.2 cm. Photo Christopher Burke Studio. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. © The Estate of Ficre Ghebreyesus

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

1985, Harare Lives in Harare, Zimbabwe

Portia Zvavahera sees through her dreams. “The dream is like the prophet, telling you about the future, about what’s going to happen or what is causing something to happen in the future,” she has said. “We all sleep; we all have dreams.”1 Drawing from images and feelings rooted in her subconscious, Zvavahera 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 Harare-based 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, such as childcare. In these boldly patterned works, Zvavahera establishes her protagonists as divine, goddess-like figures, who occupy a space between the fantastical and the allegorical, between a spiritual plane and one of this Earth. Zvavahera’s paintings, too, develop out of a ritualistic process of painting and stencilling to create layers of patterns and luminous colours. With this method, areas of her canvases are built up to create modelled forms that sit on top of flat swatches of colour, 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 the artist’s 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, quoted in Sabine Russ, “Portia Zvavahera by Netsayi,” BOMB, 134, 2015, 36–45 (https://bombmagazine.org/ articles/portia-zvavahera).

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Portia Zvavahera, Ndirikukuona (I can see you), 2021. Oil based printing ink, oil bar on canvas, 220.7 × 191.5 × 7.9 cm. Photo Stephen Arnold. Courtesy the Artist; Stevenson; David Zwirner. © Portia Zvavahera

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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

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Portia Zvavahera, This is where I travelled [4], 2020. Oil based printing ink, oil bar on canvas, 242.5 × 201 cm. Photo Jack Hems. Courtesy the Artist; Stevenson; David Zwirner. © Portia Zvavahera

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

1967, São Paulo Lives in São Paulo, Brazil

Rosana Paulino’s multi-faceted practice spans drawing, embroidery, engraving, print-making, collage, sculpture, and installation as mediums to activate collective and personal memory, reflecting her position as a Black woman in Brazil. Paulino explores the history of racial violence – the objectification and subjection perpetrated on Afro-descendant people – and the persisting legacy of slavery in Brazil. In her work, the artist deconstructs the production and dissemination of colonial and racist theories that defined scientific knowledge and served as justification for European imperialism and the slave trade. In denouncing exploitative practices, the drawings of the Wet Nurse series (2005) examine the role of Black wet nurses – enslaved women who breastfed their master’s children. Entangled networks of veins leading from reddened breasts sprout out of the nipples, indicating milk while also suggesting blood ending in droplets, at times in the outlined bodies of babies. In the series of drawings the Weavers (2003), roots grow out of women’s breasts, vaginas, eyes, and mouths – the tendrils bind and torture their very maker. The series Senhora das plantas (2019) depicts women with webs of roots and plants spreading from their bodies, portraying them as active agents in the role of materialising life. Trunks emerging from the ground rise up to amalgamate with human bodies that in turn merge with, are wrapped by, and grow flowers, plants, and trees in the Jatobá series (2019). The presence of rhizomatic roots conveys the artist’s interest in biology – highlighted even more so by studies of animals and biological drawings that represent organisms in constant states of flux and transformation. In the series of anthropomorphic drawings Carapace of Protection, made in the first decade of the 2000s, bodies emerge from cocoons, the process of metamorphosis granting the human-insect bodies a momentary sense of euphoria in this enthralling transitory existence. 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. In her drawings, Paulino offers an opportunity to reconstruct identities, histories, and myths while also condemning the violence of domination and marginalisation committed on Black, and particularly female-identified Black bodies. – LC

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Rosana Paulino, from Jatobá series, 2019. Watercolour, graphite on paper, 65 × 50 cm. Photo Bruno Leão. Courtesy the Artist; Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, New York. © Rosana Paulino

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Rosana Paulino, from Jatobá series, 2019. Watercolour, graphite on paper, 65 × 50 cm. Photo Bruno Leão. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, New York. © Rosana Paulino 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 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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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, Vietnamese artist Thao Nguyen Phan creates installations and videos that explore history and culture through an intertwining of the real and the imaginary. Phan’s work mixes mythology and folklore with urgent issues around historical amnesia, industrialisation, food security, and the environment. Her recent projects have expanded on the beauty and suffering of the Mekong River, which originates on Tibet’s plateau and runs through the Chinese province of Yunnan, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia before meeting the sea on the coast of Vietnam. Often combining literary references, fictional memoir, pseudo-documentary, and re-enactments of stories from folklore, Phan explores the social and environmental changes to the river caused by climate change, overfishing, dam construction, and looted heritage in the aftermath of colonialism. Phan’s latest moving image work, First Rain, Brise-Soleil (2021–ongoing) expands her exploration of the Mekong region with a poetically woventogether narrative. The film, preluded by a quote from the Edo period Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, 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 are common across the global South and that, in cities like Ho Chi Minh City (before 1976 named Saigon), unite a vernacular building technique and traditional Vietnamese craftsmanship with a modern material linked to US domination. Through this fictional first-person narrative, the film addresses US imperialism in the region and the 1977–1991 war between Vietnam and Cambodia. 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, for which the Mekong Delta is a major production area. 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. By revealing the past and present violence and destruction that occurs in the Mekong Delta, First Rain, Brise-Soleil proposes a gentler view of modernity that embraces the poetry and lyricism of Indigenous knowledge and the region’s fragile ecosystem. – IW

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Thao Nguyen Phan, Becoming Alluvium (still), 2019–2020. Single-channel colour video, 16 mins 40 sec. Produced and commissioned by Han Nefkens Foundation in collaboration with Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona; WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; Chisenhale Gallery. Courtesy the Artist

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Thao Nguyen Phan, First Rain, Brise-Soleil (stills), 2021–ongoing. Three-channel video installation, colour, sound, 16 mins. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Zink Waldkirchen, Germany. © Thao Nguyen Phan

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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 the home of the Sámi Indigenous community, stretching across the northern borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. 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, bridging ancient customs, cultural practices, oral traditions, and mythology with personal memories and moments from her everyday life. A staunch advocate for self-determination and decolonisation, Marakatt-Labba became in the late 1970s part of the Sámi Dáidujoavku, who as a group fought for artistic autonomy while also partaking in the protests against the expanding hydropower and mining industries on Sámi land. Marakatt-Labba is best known for her poetic embroidery work, for which she threads fine wool, silk, and linen onto primary white fabric, as well as for prints, illustrations, scenic designs, and costumes produced for film and theatre. Celebrated among these are works like Historjá (2003–2007), a 24-metre-long embroidered narrative detailing the history, the land, and the cosmology of the Sámi people, a document whose monumentality and detail brings to mind other epic woven records of the past, like the Bayeux Tapestry. Depicting a heterogeneous cultural landscape, Historjá presents scenes and narratives that are often marginalised by mainstream accounts of history. 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 images of global maps. Within the landscapes delineated by their borders, MarakattLabba combines images of flora, fauna, stars, and figures wearing red ladjogáhpir (horn hats), a particular Sámi women’s hat that is topped by a curved wooden horn covered with embroidered fabric. The ladjogáhpir have historically been the target of Christian cultural bans, and have experienced a recent resurgence in popularity alongside the movement for Sámi autonomy. Marakatt-Labba’s embroideries thus bridge Sámi cultural history with the present through her characteristic iconographic hybridity. – MW

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

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Britta Marakatt-Labba, View, 2020. Embroidery, appliqué, 162 × 30 cm. Photo Hans Olof Utsi. Northern Norwegian Museum of Art, Tromsø, Norway. Courtesy the Artist Britta Marakatt-Labba, Felled, 2021. Embroidery, appliqué, 128 × 35 cm. Photo Hans Olof Utsi. Northern Norwegian Museum of Art, Tromsø, Norway. Courtesy the Artist

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E G L Ė B U DV Y T Y T Ė I N C O L L A B O R AT I O N W I T H M A R I J A OLŠAUSKAITĖ AND JULIJA STEP ONAITYTĖ

Eglė Budvytytė 1981, Kaunas, Lithuania Lives in Vilnius, Lithuania and Amsterdam, the Netherlands In collaboration with Marija Olšauskaitė and Julija Steponaitytė 1989, Vilnius Lives in Vilnius, Lithuania and New York City, USA 1992, Vilnius Lives in Vilnius, Lithuania and Amsterdam, the Netherlands

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. She approaches movement and gesture as technologies for a possible subversion of normative gender and social roles, demonstrating performance’s power to overturn the dominant narratives governing public space. In some works, she examines humans’ hubristic dominance over animals, plants, bacteria, and fungi, all of which are essential in sustaining ecologies. Songs from the Compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars (2020) is a video shot in the lichen forest and sand dunes of the Curonian Spit in Lithuania. Here Budvytytė draws from biologist Lynn Margulis’ writings on the theory of endosymbiosis – the interaction and cooperation of composite organisms – as well as the speculative world of science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, whose texts disrupt anthropocentric hierarchies through tropes of hybridity and symbiosis. The video is accompanied by mesmerising soundscapes, a musical composition by sound artist Steve Martin Snider, and the artist’s own voiceover narration, which, amplified through a vocal effects processor, reverberates as she shapeshifts between genders, identities, and states, generating a hypnotic feedback loop. Alternating between a dense forest and a rolling beach, the first frames of the video depict bodies walking in a trance-like state across the woods and lying in close proximity to one another on the carpeted ground of the lichen forest. Rhizomatic entanglements manifest in a figure, protruding with scales, merged with and subsumed by natural elements. A chorus of voices calls for gender abolition through the incarnation of non-binary beings. Slithering in contortions across the expanse of a beach until reaching water, the bodies deviate from the supposed superiority of human verticality. These bodies personify interdependency, disintegration, and decay, rebutting the illusion of autonomous self-sufficiency. Songs from the Compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars demonstrates the necessity of intertwined networks between human and non-human beings for nurturing interspecies relationships. – LC

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

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NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE

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

Niki de Saint Phalle was an artist working in search of “complete freedom.” She sought autonomy not only from the male-dominated social realities of her upbringing and the art worlds she entered, but also from the limitations of patrons, traditional fine arts institutions, and individual artistic media. De Saint Phalle is best known for her Nanas (French slang for “girls” or “chicks”) – 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 mosaicked and mirrored creatures. De Saint Phalle worked prodigiously, bounding across genres. Beginning her career with a series of Tirs (Shooting Paintings), wherein she would explode bags of paint on canvas with a rifle, the artist quickly expanded into sculpture, installation, public art, architecture, parks and playgrounds, videos and films, and various editioned multiples such as lithographs, inflatable dolls, perfumes, and jewellery, 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. These sculpted bodies become vessels – containers for fantasy, joy, care, and the individual viewer’s expectations of the female body. 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 quite literally enter the splayed figure through an opening between her legs. Here, the female figure becomes a house to be inhabited, where assumptions of domestic roles and labour abound. Towering over 2.5 metres tall, Gwendolyn (1966 / 1990) is one of de Saint Phalle’s first monumental Nanas made in polyester resin. If Gwendolyn’s wide, sinuous curves, balanced between diminutive head and feet, do not adequately accentuate her pregnancy, then the bullseye painted on her stomach proudly announces it. Gwendolyn may be named for Gwynne, the child of close friend Clarice Rivers, whose portrait is believed to be de Saint Phalle’s original inspiration for the Nanas series. – MK

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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 A NE T A SA C

A GO

D R U

A BAG A K

A BOTT

A SHELL

IN L S

A POT E L

A BOX A

N TA I N

R U T H A S AWA M Á R I A B A R T U S Z O VÁ A L E T TA J A C 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 K O TA K A 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 Mária 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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W H AT C O U L D A V E S S E L B E ? Christina Sharpe

The vessel appears as shape, container, bag, body, ship. There are ceramicists, weavers, and painters, who work with tactile, seemingly impervious materials, that they bring into supple, sinuous, fragile, sturdy, and graceful forms. These artists work with the intelligence of the material. And the works are propositions of what a vessel might be or do or gesture toward. There are the suspended wire sculptures of Ruth Asawa. Her intricate, fluid, and permeable wire works are made by hand.

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

They indicate motion, they still motion. Motion is implicit in them even when they are still. Their shapes echo plant life: they are botanical and organic. What Asawa referred to as “their continuous form” is drawn from the natural world and seems, to me, a gesture that holds porosity, the necessity of transformation, the necessity of shapeshifting. These forms counter a certain kind of formal and material rigidity, they are elegant, playful, and precise. “I have stood in a gallery hung with Asawa’s wire sculptures,” writes Thessaly La Force, “where the movement of my own body has caused them to sway, the shadows of the woven wire dancing against the floor. For a moment, I was quietly transported elsewhere – to the deep sea, to a forest or maybe to someplace altogether unearthly.” 1 The sculptures are layered, they make visible the movement between inside and outside. These are meditations on shifting flow, on permeability, on insides and outsides. They are biomorphic, filled with eyes, or eggs. They seem to make present so much of what a vessel might be: the tensile

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strength, vulnerability, and elasticity of a body or a form, how it might give, how it might or might not snap back. There are shapes and what appear to be figures and figures within figures and there are lines. Asawa “was interested in the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It’s still transparent. I realised that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.” 2 A line can be a kind of vessel. Transatlantic slavery, Middle Passage, the Haitian revolution, and Vodun come together in Frantz Zéphirin’s painting The Slave Ship Brooks (2007), a reimagining of the eponymous ship.

Frantz Zéphirin, The Slave Ship Brooks, 2007. Photo Marcus Rediker. Collection Marcus Rediker

The historical Brooks appears and reappears. There is the ship Brooks that made eleven voyages and first set sail from Liverpool in 1781. Then there are the diagrams of the Brooks that were created in 1787 and circulated by abolitionists in order to detail the ship’s cruel logistics. That “Description of a Slave Ship” was used as a tool to aid the work of abolition. In that Diagram, the 454 Africans who are imagined into the space of the hold are arranged in repeating rows and they are largely, though not completely, undifferentiated. The scores of figures are rendered as passive, their bodies are used to make visible the cruelty of the trade’s logistics for the most effective stowage and transfer of abducted Africans during the long, horrifying journey across the Atlantic. In the cosmology of Zéphirin’s Brooks, we see the eyes of those Africans locked in the hold of the ship and guarded by members of the crew, who are signified as animals: a rat and a buzzard hold rifles; a crocodile holds a spear; a boar holds a rifle and a whip. There is a skeleton figure with his back to the hold, a telescope in his hands, who looks toward the horizon. Another figure, who appears to be the captain, holds a manifest or bill of sale. There has been an uprising on board this ship and there are eleven African men, partially submerged, chained by their necks in a coffle, shackled to the hull. “Two of the enslaved, at right Toussaint Louverture and at left Dutty Boukman, break free of their chains, gesturing hopefully ahead to the Haitian Revolution they will lead.” 3 Of course, neither Boukman nor Louverture were on the slave ship Brooks but, on every journey that vessel made, and every journey every slaver made, there were desires for and actions toward freedom. “Every captain assumed that the enslaved would do anything to escape.” 4 There are multiple ends of the world depicted here. As well as multiple beginnings. This vessel has been moving for centuries. Is a vessel a continuous passage? What space was there on those terrible ships for fragility, for the spirit, for the delicacy of the vessel of the body?

Magdalene Odundo, Untitled Vessel, Symmetrical Series, 2009. Photo Lewis Ronald. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Thomas Dane Gallery. © Magdalene Odundo

Magdalene Odundo’s sublime ceramic sculptures combine the tenderness of body as vessel with the vessel as an object that acquires animacy in her hand. These terracotta sculptures are lucid, parabolic, simultaneously hollowed out and solid. Odundo says: “I’ve always equated clay with the humanity that’s within us, fragile like our bodies. It can tip over. You have

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it on its toes, but if you push just slightly on the wrong pivot, it will break your heart.”5 Is the body not a vessel? A vessel containing vessels, veins, arteries. Is the body a void? Is a vessel a form, a colour? For many years, at the beginning of every talk, Simone Leigh would state two things: that her work centred Black women and that we, Black women, are her work’s primary audience. It is important to hear it and to know it. That attentive primacy is Leigh’s practice of care – even if, even as, the spaces of care that she ushers us into are fleeting. Leigh has “been thinking about the labour of Black women, the forms of knowledge they carry and what kinds of labour they are involved in that’s not valued.” 6 Her nearly five-metre-tall Brick House (2019) is a bronze sculpture of a woman, who wears an Afro and four cornrows, each of which is decorated with a single cowrie shell at the end. Leigh imagines the cornrows on Brick House as buttresses, they are defence, fortification, supports. The woman’s torso is a combination of forms, both skirt and house. Leigh braids the corporeal, the useable, the inhabitable, and the ethereal. Simone Leigh, Brick House, 2019. Photo Timothy Schenck. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; the High Line. © Simone Leigh

Here there is the body as a vessel that the world works to break, but in Leigh’s hands and imagination is prized, cared for, rendered as monumentally beautiful. Is a vessel a person “into which something (like grace) is infused?” 7 Leaving New York City late in 2019, I caught a final glimpse of Brick House as she rose above the High Line, and I was transported. So, a vessel might be a ship, a person, a house, a container, a plant, a shell, a hammock, an egg-like form cracked and anthropomorphic. It might be a container, a form that holds liquids or solids, or one that allows for movement, transference, transformation, shapeshifting, or the passage of air and light. It might be a means of flight. What is a vessel in times of escalating catastrophe? Is a house a vessel? Is a nation? What is or should or could a vessel be in times of refusal, and resistance? Is a vessel a reimagining? What is or could a vessel be at the end of one world and the beginning of another one? Is a vessel a movement, like abolition? A movement with the capacity to make the conditions for all of our flourishing? What is a vessel when forest fires are so large and so hot, they produce pyrocumulonimbus clouds that spread fire from the air? These fires are so massive they produce clouds that make their own weather.

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What is a vessel when fire clouds spark 710,117 lightning strikes in western Canada over the course of fifteen hours? What is a vessel when a billion sea creatures – mussels, clams, starfish, and snails – bake in their own shells? Is a vessel a shell then? Is a vessel an ocean then? Does a vessel smell like decay? If you boil in your own skin can a vessel hold you? What is a vessel when eyas jump from their nests to escape the extreme heat? Is a nest a vessel? Is an egg?

Mária Bartuszová, Untitled (from the series Endless Egg), 1985. Photo Michael Brzezinski. Courtesy The Estate of Mária Bartuszová, Košice; Alison Jacques, London. © The Archive of Mária Bartuszová, Košice

What is a vessel when sea levels are rising, and the red breaking news headlines this morning warn that the Greenland icesheet experienced its largest ever melt? 8 What is a vessel when the young salmon in Sacramento River are on the verge of dying because the water is too hot to sustain their lives? Some fish were taken to other bodies of water by truck and some by plane. “To take or lift out by means of a vessel.” Is a vessel the body or is it the lift? What is a vessel when “funeral pyres burn, and the gravediggers know no rest?” 9 Is a vessel vulnerable? Is a vessel febrile? Is a vessel a shroud? Is it a coffin? What is a vessel for mourning this? What is a vessel when the wet-bulb temperature – that temperature at which sweat no longer evaporates and, therefore, humans can no longer shed heat – is in danger of being reached in several places around the globe? What is a vessel for holding a skin? A membrane? A life? What is a vessel when in the first six months of 2021 over 1,146 people have died in the Mediterranean Sea, while attempting to reach the shores of European nations? These migrants, refugees from brutal conditions, have been made to drift and sometimes drown, and sometimes die of dehydration and heat exhaustion. European powers think that not rendering aid will stop people from fleeing unlivable lives, the very unlivable lives produced by their extraction and exploitation. What is a vessel when you are locked in the same hold that marked economies of capital from the first ships to these? There are vessels that are not made to carry large numbers of people that nevertheless move across the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic filled past capacity with hundreds of people who have left one country and are attempting to reach another and something like safety. Is a vessel a pit? What is a vessel in a time of both drought and drowning?

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What is a vessel when the Sahara Desert is expanding to the Sahel? What is a vessel when European officials leave over 500 migrants at risk of drowning on the Mediterranean Sea? Is a vessel a plastic jug once filled with drinkable water, now empty? Is a vessel an undrinkable, unpassable ocean? What is a vessel when there are over 1,862 drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and the ocean is on fire after a pipeline rupture? Is a vessel a rig or is it a platform? Is the ocean a rig or a platform? What is a vessel when the forests in Siberia are on fire? When everything is on fire? Is a vessel a plant? Is it a forest? There are vessels that move and hold thousands of tourists. They are called cruise ships. There are vessels that move and hold hundreds of workers. They are also called cruise ships. What is a vessel when those cruise ship workers are stranded for months on ships that are not moving and unable to return to their home countries because the borders have been closed due to the spread of Covid-19? What is a vessel designed for pleasure but not for life? What is this vessel, the Ever Given, one of the largest cargo ships in the world, with “a gross tonnage of 220,940; net tonnage of 99,155; and deadweight tonnage of 199,629 tons at design draught” 10 that is stuck in the Suez Canal creating a jam of over twenty other cargo ships? What is a vessel when the world’s richest man finances a private suborbital flight while his minimum-wage earning employees sleep in tents near the warehouses where they work, or live in camper RVs in parking lots because they cannot afford housing? What is a vessel when these same workers are forced to wear diapers or urinate in bottles because productivity demands preclude bathroom breaks? Is a RV a vessel? Is a parking lot a vessel? Are millions of square feet of warehouse a vessel? What is a vessel pushed to the ends of endurance? What is a vessel when another one of the world’s richest men finances a supersonic space plane? Bridget Tichenor, Tarde Alegre, 1955. Photo Javier Hinojosa. Private Collection. © Estate of Bridget Tichenor

More colonisation, more settlement, more violence, more brutal logistics of removal and moving people from one place to another. In Derrick Bell’s short story The Space Traders, 11 hundreds of vessels arrive at the end of the 20th century to take away all of the Black people, naked and in chains, bound, once again, for slavery in another new world. Are these the vessels?

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What is a vessel moving and halted in the face of the vicious logistics of the saveable and the worthy, of the precious, the disposable and the fungible? Are drowning and flying the same? What is the juxtaposition of a vessel? The body is a vessel. There are people who are marked as only vessels, flesh, plastic, expendable, fungible, devalued. There are others who are marked as perfectible and carriers of knowledge; others marked as carriers of disease. There are vessels marked to work; people marked to die. There is the imagination as vessel. Is a vessel an inventory? What might a vessel be? What could a vessel be at the end of this world? “What Could a Vessel Be?” Copyright ©2021, Christina Sharpe. All rights reserved

Christina Sharpe is a writer, professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University (Toronto). She is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016). Her third book, Ordinary Notes, will be published in 2022 (Knopf/FSG/Daunt). She is working on a monograph called Black. Still. Life. (Duke University Press, 2025). Recent essays appear in Art in America; Okwui Enwezor and Naomi Beckwith, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (Phaidon, 2020); Sarah Meister et al., Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (MoMa, 2020); Alison Saar and Irene Tsatsos (eds.), Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe (Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, 2020); Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson (eds.), Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (MoMa, 2021); and in Melissa Blanchflower and Natalia Grabowska (eds.), Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied with Seeing (Walther König, 2021).

Thessaly La Force, “The JapaneseAmerican Sculptor Who, Despite Persecution, Made Her Mark,” The New York Times Style Magazine, July 20, 2020 (www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/ t-magazine/ruth-asawa.html). “Ruth Asawa, a Working Life,” Google Arts & Culture, all content adapted from Ruth Asawa and Daniell Cornell, The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2006; https://artsand culture.google.com/exhibit/ruth-asawaa-working-life/hAIygGBPp11bIg). Marcus Rediker, “Motley Crews and the Crucible of Culture: The Art of Frantz Zéphirin,” Beacon Broadside, August 12, 2014 (www.beaconbroadside.com/ broadside/2014/08/the-art-of-frantzzephirin.html). Mahamdallie Hassan and Marcus Rediker, “The Slave Ship: Marcus Rediker,” Socialist Review, 320, 2007 (http://socialistreview.org.uk/320/ slave-ship-marcus-rediker). “New Work By Magdalene A.N. Odundo Dbe,” exhibition (Salon 94, 3E 89th Street, New York City, 08.05– 30.07.2021; https://salon94.com/ artists/magdalene-an-odundo). Rianna Jade Parker, “‘What We Carry in the Flesh’: The Majestic Bodies of

Simone Leigh,” Frieze, June 4, 2019 (www.frieze.com/article/what-we-carryflesh-majestic-bodies-simone-leigh). 7 “Vessel,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster (www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ vessel). 8 Kasha Patel, “The Greenland Ice Sheet Experienced a Massive Melting Event Last Week,” The Washington Post, August 8, 2021 (www.washingtonpost. com/weather/2021/08/05/ greenland-melt-event-season-2021). 9 David Pierson and M.N. Parth, “Funeral Pyres Burn. Gravediggers Know No Rest. India’s Covid-19 Crisis Is a ‘Nightmare’,” Yahoo! News, April 28, 2021 (https:// news.yahoo.com/funeral-pyres-burngravediggers-know-190718726.html). 10 Ruth Michaelson and Michael Safi, “Tugs, Tides and 200,000 Tons: Experts Fear Ever Given May Be Stuck in Suez for Weeks,” The Guardian, March 27, 2021 (www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ mar/27/tugs-tides-and-200000-tonsexperts-fear-ever-given-may-be-stuckin-suez-for-weeks). 11 Derrick Bell, The Space Traders, first appeared in Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

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Ruth Asawa

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Aletta Jacobs

Sophie Taeuber-Arp

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4, 5, 6, 7

Mária Bartuszová

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Toshiko Takaezu

Bridget Tichenor

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Maruja Mallo

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12, 13

Maria Sibylla Merian

Toshiko Takaezu

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Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.273, Hanging Nine-Lobed, Single-Layered Continuous Form), c. 1959. Nickel-plated copper wire, 238.76 × 45.72 × 45.72 cm. Photo Laurence Cuneo. Private Collection. Courtesy David Zwirner. © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY 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 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 Top left: Mária Bartuszová, Untitled, 1984–1985. Plaster, 11 × 11 × 12 cm. Photo Michael Brzezinski. Courtesy The Estate of Mária Bartuszová, Košice; Alison Jacques, London. © The Archive of Mária Bartuszová, Košice Top right: Mária Bartuszová, Untitled, 1984–1985. Plaster, 17.5 × 17.5 × 20 cm. Photo Michael Brzezinski. Courtesy The Estate of Mária Bartuszová, Košice; Alison Jacques, London. © The Archive of Mária Bartuszová, Košice Bottom left: Mária Bartuszová, Untitled (from the series Endless Egg), 1985. Plaster, 30.5 × 14.5 × 11 cm. Photo Michael Brzezinski. Courtesy The Estate of Mária Bartuszová, Košice; Alison Jacques, London. © The Archive of Mária Bartuszová, Košice Bottom right: Mária Bartuszová, Untitled, 1986. Plaster, 15 × 13 × 11 cm. Photo Michael Brzezinski. Courtesy The Estate of Mária Bartuszová, Košice; Alison Jacques, London. © The Archive of Mária Bartuszová, Košice Toshiko Takaezu, Untitled Closed Form, 1960. Glazed stoneware, 17.5 × 16.5 × 16.5 cm. Photo William E Hacker. Private Collection. © The Family of Toshiko Takaezu Bridget Tichenor, La Espera (The Wait), 1961. Oil on masonite, 25 × 38 cm. Photo Javier Hinojosa. Private Collection. © Estate of Bridget Tichenor 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 Toshiko Takaezu, Cherry Blossom / Sakura, c. 2000. Glazed stoneware, 132 × 59 × 59 cm. Photo William E Hacker. Private Collection. © The Family of Toshiko Takaezu Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, Plate 5, 1719, second edition. Hand-coloured engraving on paper, 52.07 × 36.83 cm. Photo Lee Stalsworth. Courtesy the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay 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 Tecla Tofano, Vessel with personage (from the series The Canned), 1969. Clay and enamel ceramic, 40 × 24 × 24 cm. Photo Luis Becerra. Collection Luis Felipe Farias. Courtesy Daniel Cordova. © Estate of Tecla Tofano 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

Tecla Tofano

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ARTISTS’ BIO GRAPHIES

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R U T H A S AWA 1926, Norwalk, USA – 2013, San Francisco, USA Ruth Asawa – ground-breaking artist and arts education advocate – is best known for her intricate hanging wire sculptures, which she conceived of as line drawings in three-dimensional space. Born to vegetable farmers in rural southern California, 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. Following her release from the internment camp, Asawa enrolled at the Milwaukee State Teachers College but was ultimately prevented from receiving a teacher’s license due to continued discrimination against Japanese Americans. She instead headed to the storied Black Mountain College, outside of Asheville, North Carolina. There, between 1946 and 1949, she shared learning and living spaces with John Cage, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight, Anni Albers, and her future husband, the architect Albert Lanier; her mentors included the artist and former Bauhaus master Josef Albers, the radical architect and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller, and the avant-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham, whose progressive teachings in space, form, material, and movement collectively provided an enduring and defining influence on her work. After moving to San Francisco in 1949, Asawa began constructing suspended sculptures, which transform 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 during her time 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 shapes like 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

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M Á R I A B A R T U S Z O VÁ

nature at that point, she produced a series of generally ovoid sculptures that emulate the purity of organic shapes while also evoking their perishability. In contrast to the full, solid forms in her previous works, the casts from this phase of experimentation are always hollow: thin, frail shells of whole or fragmented matter. Bartuszová created them using a technique called “pneumatic shaping,” which – unlike the process she used in the 1960s – 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 based on interaction and dialogue. – SM

1936, Prague, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czech Republic) – 1996, Košice, Slovakia (p. 375)

In Mária Bartuszová’s body of more than five hundred works, even in the rare ones not made of plaster, we seem to see the traces of a mysterious natural world: fragile and sometimes ephemeral, they evoke organic forms and qualities. 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 – and perhaps collaborate with – 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. One of her first works, for instance, Untitled (Drop) (1963–1964) is a large droplet of white plaster hanging from a tree branch; created with a technique the artist called “gravistimulated casting,” it is eternally frozen just on the verge of falling. This sense of physical precariousness can also be found in Bartuszová’s work from the 1980s. Unquestionably inspired by

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, who was the first woman admitted to a Dutch university and for many years the only female doctor in the Netherlands, included her work as a leading international figure in the feminist movement. In addition to heading the Dutch Association for Women’s Suffrage, which fought until universal suffrage was proclaimed on 9 August 1919, Aletta 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).

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This book was an innovative contribution to scientific literature, with folding plates drawn by Aletta herself; it describes the female body in detail, including the reproductive system. As the preface to the first edition emphasises, it was geared towards educating the public, and although it might also enlighten some male physicians, 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. Jacobs’ words and drawings present the body as containing many separate organs, each with its own function and with no hierarchy between them, which act in synergy to keep everything functioning perfectly. Generally speaking, the scientific literature of the late 19th century was beginning to unscramble the discoveries of modern physiology, and when the complex parts of the human body could not be studied by dissecting cadavers, they were reproduced as anatomical models. The replicas of the uterus made by the pioneering company Auzoux, for instance, are full-fledged sculptures, crafted to scale from carefully painted papier-mâché, that depict the stages of a pregnancy in a way that is as scientific as it is artistic. These models unquestionably show a growing medical interest in the female body, and since they were used by Jacobs in her studies, seem imbued with the persistent spirit of her scientific and political struggles. – SM

Shells, seaweed, hydrangeas, coral, grapes, geraniums, and many other specimens of the sea and land hang suspended in dreamlike settings or against uniform backgrounds, and joined together, seem to generate strange, hybrid figures reminiscent of exquisite corpses. However, while the Surrealist game links images or words at random, the artist was well aware of the symbolism driving her works. Recognising every element of the composition as bearing a special affinity to part of the female body, she 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 one can see from the photo in Chile, and as Dalí’s jocular description of Mallo underscored – makes her “mitad ángel, mitad marisco” (halfangel, half-crustacean). – SM

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In 1705, the naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian published Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium: this milestone in entomology, containing meticulous illustrations and a text in Latin and Dutch, presented the studies of insect life in Suriname she had conducted five years before. In 1699, Merian set out on the first scientific voyage ever made by a woman, and upon reaching the Dutch colony after months at sea, spent the next two years collecting material to document the life cycle of tropical butterflies. Unlike other European scientists who relied on them only for manual labour, Merian let herself be guided by members of the local communities, drawing on their knowledge to hone her research methods. Her fascination with insects had developed at an early age, as a pupil in her stepfather’s painting studio, when she began collecting and raising silkworms. Her keen artistic gaze was rounded out by a scientific one, and soon showed her that insects, which the culture of the time tended to associate with the devil, were actually capable of fascinating transformations.

M A RU JA M A L L O 1902, Viveiro, Spain – 1995, Madrid, Spain A photograph taken in 1945 on the Chilean coast of the Pacific Ocean shows Spanish artist Maruja Mallo in the guise of a strange sea goddess, standing on a rock and draped from head to foot in a tangle of kelp. Though it records a moment of fun with her poet friend Pablo Neruda, the image of this droll get-up seems to capture the painter’s fascination with the natural world and her approach to its iconography. Starting in 1936, when the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War forced her to leave Madrid and seek refuge in Argentina, 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.

it yielded an extraordinary record that revolutionised the iconography of the natural sciences. For the first time, the sixty hand-coloured plates in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium depicted 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 a group of caterpillars and chrysalides that will become the silk moths flying around it. In another illustration, plate 5, Merian shows the life cycle of a tetrio sphinx moth with golden wings and showy curled proboscis, depicted with a touch of artistic license as it flutters around a cassava root inhabited by a boa. Scientific considerations aside, these images present spectacular scenes of nature’s delicate cycles, conjuring up a magical world where every detail is about to turn into something else. – SM

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T O S H I K O TA K A E Z U 1922, Pepeekeo, USA – 2011, Honolulu, USA

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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)

From then on, their metamorphoses were the main focus of her artistic practice; grounded in pure empirical observation,

All the works that Hawaiian artist Toshiko Takaezu has created since the 1960s testify to her amazing skill in the art of ceramics, honed during an extended visit to Japan during which she explored her cultural roots. Whether larger than a person or small enough to be held in one’s palm, her works are rounded, richly decorated objects that are always hollow inside. Thrown on the wheel or shaped by hand, they resemble ordinary pots, but are not intended to hold anything. Except for an imperceptible aperture at the top – necessary as a vent when they are fired – most of Takaezu’s works are elongated or spherical shapes that almost completely enclose and delimit a dark, empty space inaccessible to the gaze. This mysterious chamber is the essence of her sculptures, and like a soul in a body, makes them unique. The mystical, ancestral quality that it confers turns every work into a totemic figure; even when installed in groups, as in her series Trees (c. 1970) or Stars (1999), each one preserves its own identity, accentuated by the choice of textures and colours. The surfaces of Takaezu’s sculptures evoke the smooth volcanic contours of her homeland, with nebulous marks and drips of colour created by dipping each one into at least two or three different glazes, like the hues of real or imaginary landscapes the artist has wandered through. Her Untitled (Stoneware) works, for instance, look like bizarre celestial bodies, and belong to a series titled Moons (c. 1980–2000). Sometimes referred to by the Hawaiian word for Moon, Mahina, these are spheres of

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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, and when clustered together, they seem to tell a story as mysterious as the space within them. In the famous installation Gaea (Earth Mother) (1990), where they are cradled in hammocks strung between trees, Takaezu’s sculptures also suggest the fertility of nature or of a womb. – SM

scientific precision. Their openings are toward the viewer, but 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 shows the shell as a woman capable of holding and nurturing life, but also of becoming a magnetic, mesmerising, divine being, in perfect cosmic communion with nature. – SM

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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 This artist is also part of Seduction of the Cyborg. To read the artist biography, see p. 526.

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BRIDGET TICHENOR 1917, Paris, France – 1990, Mexico City, Mexico The many 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 alone or in groups 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. Like her European friends Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Alice Rahon, who had also crossed the Atlantic to flee the horrors of the war, she focused on dreamlike imagery depicted with obsessive technical precision. Though she had worked as a model for Coco Chanel and later as an editor for Vogue, Tichenor was a classically trained painter who had 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 preColumbian mythology, mysticism, and symbolic, cryptic narratives. Her shellbeings seem invested with a strange occult power, and their curving torso-vessels may well bear some connection to the monstrous, grotesque iconography that other women in her circle, especially the naturalised Mexican artists Carrington and Varo, used to approach the theme of the body. Her work Dueto solitario (1964), for instance, shows a barren volcanic landscape containing two large speckled shells, painted with

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T E C L A T O FA N O

at Galería Viva México, Caracas. This figurine 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. En vía de liberación addresses both the sacrifice of maternity and, in a critical mode, the submissive act of motherhood within society. Throughout her many chapters as an artist, author, and organiser, Tofano worked against the systemic oppression of minority populations, committing herself unwaveringly to the empowerment of women and the promotion of a future liberated from traditional gender roles. – IA

1927, Naples, Italy – 1995, Caracas, Venezuela Tecla Tofano refused to follow the dominant artistic styles set by her male counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s in Venezuela. When the Zeitgeist demanded abstraction, she explored figuration. When painting was fashionable, Tofano became a ceramist. And when mass-produced Pop Art came to prominence, Tofano’s sculptures remained uniquely handmade. Perhaps most importantly, she 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. In a career with many chapters, her work was consistently ahead of its time. Tofano moved from Naples, Italy, to Caracas in 1952, accompanying her Venezuelan husband. Soon after, she enrolled in the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Artes Aplicadas to study ceramics and enamel under ceramist Miguel Arroyo. In this early phase, from the mid-1950s to 1963, Tofano made traditional, utilitarian ceramic objects on a potter’s wheel. These were mostly brightly coloured vessels with rough, textured surfaces, lacking ornament and narrative, inspired by Japanese and Scandinavian simplicity. She was an organiser of the left-wing political party Movimiento al Socialismo, an activist with the feminist collective Miércoles, and a founder of the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer at the Universidad Central de Venezuela; during this period her work became more politically charged. From 1964 to 1978 her ceramics transitioned into figuration; 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) is one of Tofano’s most significant works, which was first exhibited in 1975 at her solo show Del género femenino

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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, and by his teens he was exhibiting in local galleries, keeping secret his true age. He was self-taught and determined, 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. Cap-Haïtien, or Le Cap, was the largest port in the former French colony. Ships carrying kidnapped and enslaved people from West Africa arrived at Cap-Haïtien in unthinkable numbers during the 18th century. In The Slave Ship Brooks (2007), the artist painted the infamous ship that brought thousands of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. In this powerful composition, he reverses the dehumanising effects: 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 artistic fervour descends from this legacy of rebellion and hard-won independence. His work also captures the power of Haiti’s majority religion, Vodou, which developed on the island as a mix between Roman Catholicism and traditional religions from West and Central Africa. Zéphirin is a Vodou priest himself, and currently lives and works in a temple in the mountains outside Port-au-Prince. Often described as surrealist for its foray into the fantastic, he prefers to call his style “historic animalist”– history paintings saturated with the mystical energy of Vodou and Haiti’s rich natural flora and fauna. Les Esprits Indien en face Colonisation (2000) centres a mermaid figure – half-native Taíno woman, half-fish, with a snake for an arm, a bird for another, and a face patterned with the red mask of death. In the distant sea is a Spanish vessel, “El Conquistador,” which brings disease and persecution to the Caribbean. The Indigenous woman holds a steadfast, forward gaze, a gesture repeated by an African man positioned in her chest, foreshadowing the African kidnappings and forced labour that will replace that of the murdered native peoples. Together, they provocatively confront the viewer with what they represent for the artist: the moral outrage at the millions of lives lost to colonialism and genocide. – IA

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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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C É L E S T I N FA U S T I N

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

The psychedelic dreamscape of Célestin Faustin’s 1979 painting Pourtant ma Maison est Vide captures a world steeped in spirituality, fantasy, eroticism, and metaphysical dilemma – the place where the world of the living and the world of the spirits meet. 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, freemasonry, in tandem with religions of Haiti’s Indigenous Taíno people. Working among an artistic generation that followed the “Haitian Renaissance,” a period in the 1940s and 1950s centred around painters including Hector Hyppolite, whose interest in dreams and the unconscious dovetailed with Surrealist art and caught the attention of figures like André Breton and Aimé Césaire, Faustin portrays the lived experience of the otherwise invisible mythical and spiritual worlds, which actively shaped Haitian social and political life. The grandson of a Vodou priestess, Faustin was proclaimed as a youth to have a mystical marriage to Erzulie Dantor, the fierce Voudou lwa (spirit) of maternal love, who was said to bestow him with his exceptional artistic talent but torturously controlled his dreams. Working throughout his short life during the brutal 1957–1986 regime of father-and-son dictatorship, “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Faustin may have not approached political events directly, but his surreal visions of spiritual paradise such as the 1979 painting Jardin d’Éden express a haunted poetry of being alive. In Pourtant ma Maison est Vide, hallucinations dissolve into a darkly surreal landscape populated in the foreground by two blue and bald nude figures – the knife-clad Erzulie Dantor and a thin seated man protectively holding his left hand over his crotch – who together prepare for the ceremonial slaughter of a sheep. Furthering the moving mixture of Vodou, history, and psychological torment, a ghostly woman stands at the door of a hut as a man with a machete – interpreted by art historians to be the escaped slave and symbol of the Haitian Revolution Nèg Mawon – hurries into the shadowy mountains. As the Martinican intellectual Édouard Glissant himself 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.”1 – MW

Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charleston, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 71.

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Célestin Faustin, Pourtant ma Maison est Vide, 1979. Oil on canvas, 30.48 × 40.64 cm. Photo Marcus Rediker. Collection Marcus Rediker Célestin Faustin, Respectez ce contrat, 1981. Oil on canvas, 40.64 × 60.96 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. In the Haitian religion, flags are sacred ritual objects that honour the spirits they represent. Historically, they are made with sparkling sequins that evoke lwa, or “The Invisible Ones” – spirits that transport humans to Bondyé, the divine creator. When the flag is ceremoniously unfurled, the lwa are summoned to inhabit the bodies of the congregation in a corporeally transformative moment. 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. Her labour-intensive beading technique is called tambour, which she learned working alongside her mother at a local wedding dress factory. Constant’s unique beadwork initially labelled her art as distinctly feminine. After three decades dedicated to the medium, Constant’s method and style have influenced every drapo Vodou artist working today. Her flags are large in size, often up to two metres wide, stretched on wood frames. On the back side, Constant draws her energised, packed compositions, which are then traced with hand-beading by the artist and many assistants. In a sacred act itself, Constant never sees the front of the work until it is complete. Vibrant colours and iridescent hues add dimension to the single plane. Constant’s 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 while humorous moments play out in the flags, which exist as both autonomous artworks and sacred objects. Framed by imagery of electric guitars, albino fish, and purely decorative beaded adornments, Sirenes (2020) shows a crowded group of lwa rising out of the sea in a boisterous gathering. The figures are hybrid beings, their bodies transmogrifying from human to animal to mythic creature. GUEDE (Baron) (2020) similarly shows syncretism in the Vodou religion and Haitian culture, presenting 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

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Myrlande Constant, GUEDE (Baron), 2020. Sequins, glass beads, silk tassels on cotton, 224 × 216 × 10.5 cm. Photo Armando Vaquer. Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, 21c Museum Hotels. Courtesy the Artist; CENTRAL FINE Gallery, Miami Beach. © Myrlande Constant

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Myrlande Constant, Saint Nicolas, 2020. Sequins, glass beads, silk tassels on canvas, 200 × 226 cm. Photo Armando Vaquer. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; CENTRAL FINE Gallery, Miami Beach. © Myrlande Constant

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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 (such as twine and glitter), egg tempera, and printmaking mediums to make heavily textured two-dimensional 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 is a language of passion, assisted by a palette of deep violet, indigo, black, blood and cherry red. Baeza’s approach to material aligns with the concepts that underline his work. This is visible in the new pieces shown at the Biennale Arte 2022, a continuation of a series the artist has developed since 2018. Using paper and transfer techniques, Baeza builds up his figures with layer after layer on panel, canvas, and paper, only to then sand, carve, and physically alter the elements within each composition. This intense material manipulation recharacterises traditional drawing and painting processes, and connects to the artist’s intent to create hybrid bodies, “fugitive bodies,” as he describes. Reflecting on the migration he experienced coming to the United States from Mexico, and migration across the globe, his densely layered works depict humans, interspecies bodies, and plants in commingling states of metamorphosis. Described by the artist as love letters, his paintings and collages are both deeply personal, a form of imaginative self-portraiture, and future building – Baeza’s othered and liberated bodies stand triumphantly, a declaration supporting many states of being, and the multiplicity of ways to see and experience life. Baeza’s exploration of the “fugitive body” is continued in a collageon-paper series called Gente del Occidente de México (2017–2019). Conflating the ancient and the contemporary, photographs of carved pre-Columbian stone sculptures are combined by Baeza with fragmented sections of human bodies taken from fashion and erotica magazines. Stone and flesh meet at the joints, creating new beings – not human, not relic, but somehow both. In this, as in the new works, is an acknowledgement and full acceptance of all politicised identities that have historically been disavowed. – IA

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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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Felipe Baeza, Don’t draw attention to yourself you’re already... (detail), 2022. Ink, embroidery, twine, acrylic, cut paper collaged on canvas, 91.44 × 76.2 cm. Photo Brad Farwell. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. © Felipe Baeza Felipe Baeza, Wayward (detail), 2021. Ink, cut paper, graphite, twine, acrylic collaged on paper, 167.64 × 121.92. Collection Allison and Larry Berg. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. © Felipe Baeza

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LU I Z RO Q U E

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

High-tech desert skyscrapers, the glittering lights of mountainous South American megacities, underground dwellings, dogs aboard empty private planes, smoke billowing from burning Modernist buildings: in the Brazilian artist Luiz Roque’s short films, Modernist objects and artworks, animals, gender-fluid dancers, famous travestis, and cityscapes exist in fantastical sci-fi atmospheres, emerging in seemingly suspended moments in time. Often taking the form of cinematic vignettes accompanied by original dreamlike scores, Roque’s filmic narratives 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. Whereas Roque’s works typically focus on queer voices and histories – particularly in relation to Brazil’s colonial history and its legacies in the present –, the silent Super8 film presented The Milk of Dreams, Urubu (2020), is more directly in dialogue with the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced the artist to spend many months inside his São Paulo apartment during a government-enforced lockdown in Brazil. Urubu was inspired in equal parts by the artist’s turn to his immediate surroundings while living under these conditions, and by his 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 the 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 is characteristic of Roque’s hybrid approach, combining visual techniques drawn from cinema – in this case, a continuous loop – with imagery that recalls the hypothetical premises of science fiction and 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 & IW

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

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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 course of the last four decades, Pinaree Sanpitak has developed her signature imagery: an enigmatic inventory of symbols referencing women’s body as distilled to their most elemental parts, expressed variously through vessels, breasts, eggs, and subtly curved profiles. In her delicate paintings and drawings, Sanpitak uses an aesthetic repertoire of highly minimal forms, eliciting complex emotions from simple imagery. Characterised by the sensitivity and ethereality of their line work, patterning, texture, and use of colour, these quiet works, while restrained, exert themselves outside the systematic repetitions of Minimalism. Rather, her practice is tethered to a captivation with her own body, and potent concepts of the sacred and the spiritual that the body contains. Starting in the late 1980s, Sanpitak began invoking the lived experience of women occupying their own bodies in her art, reflecting upon the potency of this idea within a universal framework. By the mid-1990s, inspired by the powerful experience of providing nourishment during breastfeeding her child, she began to refine her interests, producing many images of the breast, which debuted in her ground-breaking Bangkok exhibition Breast Works in the year 1994. In the new series on view here, which includes deeply saturated and richly 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, embodied experience with forms that recall both Buddhist offering bowls and stupa shrines, a sacred domed structure seen throughout Thailand, among other East and South Asian nations. Sanpitak has broadened her thinking around the body as a vessel beyond fertility, feeding, spirituality, and architecture, registering the concept of the vessel as a container of perception and experience or as a repository of emptiness, an ideal relevant to Buddhist thought that reflects Sanpitak’s ongoing interest in the boundaries of embodied experience. In the artist’s Offering Vessels series, made during the early 2000s, vessels appear in richly crafted charcoal and pencil drawings as elegantly wide-rimmed shallow bowls, which the artist has stated express a convivial capacity for giving and taking. As such, 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

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

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Pinaree Sanpitak, Breast Vessel in the Blacks, 2021. Acrylic, paper, charcoal on canvas, 185 × 185 cm. Photo Aroon Permpoonsopol. Courtesy the Artist. © Pinaree Sanpitak

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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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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, which would seal the exterior of the pot, 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. There she began to pursue her education in art and design and went on to receive an MA from the Royal College of Art in 1982. Inspired by early mentors including Eduardo Paolozzi, Michael Cardew, Zoë Ellison, and Henry Hammond, 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. This experience profoundly impacted Odundo, revealing important techniques across Indigenous material histories, and bringing complex conceptual frameworks to her pottery practice. Although it remains rooted in African ceramic traditions, Odundo’s work is steeped in dialogue with the body. Not only do her own balletic movements enacted while hand-forming pieces stand in opposition to commercial manufacturing and the mechanistic movements of the pottery wheel, but the refined necks, sharp rims, gestural poses, and bulging silhouettes of her vases appear bodily, too. 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. “Without the outside shell of the body, we wouldn’t exist.”1 As such, having both skin and body, Odundo’s vessels contain an interiority. – MW

Magdalene Odundo, quoted in Jonathan Anderson, “Worlds in a Vessel,” Blau International, 3, 2020 / 2021.

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Magdalene Odundo, Untitled Vessel, Symmetrical Series, 2009. Ceramics, 51 × 23 cm. Photo Lewis Ronald. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Thomas Dane Gallery. © Magdalene Odundo

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Magdalene Odundo, Untitled Vessel, Symmetrical Series, 2017. Ceramics, 63.5 × 33.3 cm. Photo Dan Bradica. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Thomas Dane Gallery. © Magdalene Odundo

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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 O D AT I S M A I L O VA

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

A thread of oneiric language weaves through Saodat Ismailova’s video works, encompassing themes of memory, spirituality, immortality, and extinction. In the video work Chillpiq (2016), two white buses cross a desolate landscape, bringing forty women to climb an archaeological site located on a sacred peak near the Karatau Mountains in Karakalpakstan. The women carry out their traditional ritual of praying for fertility by circling the flagpole and tying a cloth to it, a reference to the Qyrq Qyz, a mythological story of forty maidens who were buried on this site after the last battle between the Amazons and the Persians. While the sun sets, the images of the women dissolve, leaving their haunting presence as if joining the realm of the forty maidens in the myth. 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 selfisolation. 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

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Saodat Ismailova, The Haunted (still), 2017. Single-channel HD video, 16:9, 24 mins. Photo Anu Vahtra. Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris. Courtesy the Artist; The Haunted, Trømso Kunstforening (TKF), Norway. © Saodat Ismailova 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

Though best known as a star of the Latin American music scene, Violeta Parra had a versatile, enquiring mind, and not only experimented with writing, but created a multifaceted visual oeuvre. In the early 1960s, when she already had a flourishing international career as a singersongwriter, 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, expressing a deep fascination with her country’s traditional culture. Her arpilleras – huge embroideries – are definitely the most complex of these works: ancestral images inspired by pre-Columbian art, telling stories full of timeless emotion. Parra saw them as a form of visual note-taking, and as a self-taught embroiderer followed no set plan in making her pictures. They show women, men, or animals gathered in festive groups, historic scenes, or spiritual moments, and thick wool stitches, bits of macramé, and knitted braid are used to create the basic design and lend three-dimensionality to the figures. Their bodies seem to constantly morph into each other; crisscrossed by a labyrinth of stitches, they become vessels of spiritual identity or collective memory, at times bearing a social message. Combate naval I (1964), for instance, depicts Chile’s struggles during the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), with its greatest national hero, Captain Arturo Prat, proudly brandishing a Chilean flag as his ship, the Esmeralda, sinks. El circo (1961), on the other hand, seems like a tribute to Parra’s first appearances on stage: 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. The large solo exhibition that Parra opened in 1964 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, a few years before her tragic suicide, showed that her 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

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Violeta Parra, El circo, 1961. Jute fabric with lanigraphy, 153 × 240 cm. Photo Marcelo Montealegre. Courtesy Fundación Violeta Parra Violeta Parra, Árbol de la vida, 1963. Jute fabric with lanigraphy, 166 × 127 cm. Photo Marcelo Montealegre. Courtesy Fundación Violeta Parra

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S A F I A FA R H AT

1924 – 2004, Radès, Tunisia

Tunisian artist, educator, and activist Safia 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, which she also applied to stained glass and ceramics. Farhat was raised in an elite family in the harbour city of Radès – where a museum in her name opened in 2016 – and was among a small group of women to receive a primary and secondary school education under French colonial rule. Following Tunisian independence from France in 1956, Farhat became the first Tunisian woman to teach at the Institut supérieur des beaux-arts in Tunis, where she directed the atelier of decoration from 1958 until 1966, eventually becoming the director of the school, where she remained until 1973. In the post-independence landscape, women’s roles in the family were greatly expanded, which at the time was also understood to mean that women were to contribute to national productivity. In Tunisia, weaving had long been a traditional domestic skill; after independence, weaving became symbolic of Tunisianité – Tunisian cultural patrimony –, and under government patronage thousands of rural female weavers were employed at looms in the service of their newly formed country. Farhat’s instrumentalisation of the medium has been understood as a formulation of Modernism and as a declaration of women’s artistic autonomy and creativity, or a homage to a tradition predicated on women’s labour. This was compounded by her advocacy for the preservation of Northern African cultural heritage. A combination of bold geometric patterns, vivid colours, and figurative motifs woven from dyed, handspun wools, Gafsa & ailleurs borrows from Tunisian craft traditions originated by women from the country’s southern interior, while evoking enthusiasm for the new. This amalgamation of the historical and the contemporary is also manifested in Farhat’s composition. Blending different pile heights and textures, the threedimensionally imposing diptych takes on a collage-like quality, depicting a verdant green landscape dotted with a galloping horse, who seemingly rushes into a fantastical terrain of abstract shapes. Merging the natural world with an imaged one, ancient techniques with new applications, Gafsa & ailleurs is a postcolonial projection forward and nod to Farhat’s cultural past. – MW

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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

Roberto Gil de Montes moved from Guadalajara to Los Angeles as a child, relocating to an East Los Angeles neighbourhood that was a growing centre of the Chicano movement. Reflecting his involvement with Chicano art and friendships with artists such as Carlos Almaraz, the paintings that 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. Gil de Montes’ work revisits and reinvents tradition in equal measure, with frequent references to pre-Columbian and Huichol iconography 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. As well as being cultural referents, these images are personally informed by the artist’s sexuality and his astute observations of the interplay between the fantastical and the mundane. He explores the partially hidden realities and the forgotten or imagined stories of his exuberant home on the west coast of Mexico, often depicting creatures invested regionally with cosmological significance, including dogs, jaguars, deer, and dancers. The oil-on-linen painting El Pescador (2020) wryly queers Sandro Botticelli’s Renaissance work 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. The stylised orange grove of Botticelli’s painting is replaced by a sandy beach and coconut palm tree. 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. In UP, the figure dangles, autonomous, distinct, suspended from somewhere beyond the top of the canvas, with no bisecting horizon line to orient them or imply a prevailing steadiness to their posture. In El monje, the dashed brush marks of the flowers in moving water conjure, along with echoes of the demise of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, the inevitability of a rolling progression towards an unseen destination that is as corporeal as it is imaginative. This is an imaginary of incongruity and colour, of the instinctive and the misunderstood, where fidelity to the absurd and reverence for the humble clarify and illuminate with deceptive naïveté. – IW

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Roberto Gil de Montes, UP, 2021. Oil on canvas, 116.5 × 85.5 × 4.5 cm. Photo Gerardo Landa Rojano. Collection Beth Rudin DeWoody. Courtesy the Artist; Kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York

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Roberto Gil de Montes, Endangered Species, 2021. Oil on linen, 148.8 × 149.5 × 4 cm. Photo Gerardo Landa Rojano. X Museum, Beijing. Courtesy the Artist; Kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York

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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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Roberto Gil de Montes, El monje, 2021. Oil on canvas, 116.5 × 85.5 × 4.5 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York

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T H E CA R R I E R BAG T H E ORY OF F IC T ION Ursula K. Le Guin

In the temperate and tropical regions where it appears that hominids evolved into human beings, the principal food of the species was vegetable. Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food. The mammoth hunters spectacularly occupy the cave wall and the mind, but what we actually did to stay alive and fat Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time was gather seeds, roots, sprouts, shoots, for other things. So much time that maybe the restless leaves, nuts, berries, fruits, and grains, ones who didn’t have a baby around to enliven their adding bugs and mollusks and netting or life, or skill in making or cooking or singing, or very snaring birds, fish, rats, rabbits, and other interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off and tuskless small fry to up the protein. And hunt mammoths. The skillful hunters then would come we didn’t even work hard at it – much less staggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and hard than peasants slaving in somebody a story. It wasn’t the meat that made the difference. It else’s field after agriculture was invented, was the story. much less hard than paid workers since civilization was invented. The average preIt is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a historic person could make a nice living in wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then about a fifteen-hour work week. another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats… No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood spouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.

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That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his. When she was planning the book that ended up as Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her notebook, “Glossary”; she had thought of reinventing English according to a new plan, in order to tell a different story. One of the entries in this glossary is heroism, defined as “botulism.” And hero, in Woolf’s dictionary, is “bottle.” The hero as bottle, a stringent reevaluation. I now propose the bottle as hero. Not just the bottle of gin or wine, but bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else. If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you – even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it’s cold and raining and wouldn’t it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn’t it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient… Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Woman’s Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don’t even care. I’m not telling that story. We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, 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. And yet old. Before – once you think about it, surely long before – the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger – for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can’t eat home in – with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution. This theory not only explains large areas of theoretical obscurity and avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense (inhabited largely by tigers, foxes, and other highly territorial mammals); it also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it. (“What Freud

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mistook for her lack of civilization is woman’s lack of loyalty to civilization,” Lillian Smith observed.) The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreticians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that’s what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all. That’s right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero.

Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, with Oo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket. You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Boob and how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man.

If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again – if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time. Not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive or uncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off. However I don’t, nor does anybody else, consider myself heroic for doing so. It’s just one of those damned things you have to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories. It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. The wonderful, poisonous story of Botulism. The killer story. It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe. The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story. It’s unfamiliar, it doesn’t come easily, thoughtlessly to the lips as the killer story does; but still, “untold” was an exaggeration. People have been telling the life story for ages, in all sorts of words and ways. Myths of creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels...

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The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it. I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us. One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, “A story should be seen as a battle,” and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process. Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato. That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them. So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, than conflicts, far fewer triumphs then its myth is tragic. “Technology,” or “modern science” than snares and delusions; full of (using the words as they are usually used, in an unexamspace ships that get stuck, missions ined shorthand standing for the “hard” sciences and high that fail, and people who don’t undertechnology founded upon continuous economic growth), is stand. I said it was hard to make a a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as gripping tale of how we wrested the triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy. The fiction embodying wild oats from their husks, I didn’t this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers say it was impossible. Who ever said earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocwriting a novel was easy? alypse, holocaust, then or now). If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one. It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.

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Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool’s joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn’t over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars. (1986) Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929–2018) was an American celebrated author whose body of work includes twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.

“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” is reprinted from Dancing at the Edge of the World (Grove/Atlantic, 1989), 165–170. Copyright © 1989 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Used by permission of Grove/ Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

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SOWING WORLDS A SEED BAG FOR TERRAFORMING WITH EARTH OTHERS

Donna J. Haraway

The political slogan I wore in the Reagan star wars era of the 1980s read, “Cyborgs for Earthly Survival!” The terrifying times of George H.W. Bush and the secondary Bushes made me switch to slogans purloined from tough Schutzhund dog trainers, “Run Fast, Bite Hard!” and “Shut Up and Train!” Today, my slogan reads, “Stay with the Trouble!” But in all these knots – and especially now, wherewhenever that potent and capacious placetime is – we need a hardy, soiled kind of wisdom. Instructed by companion species of the myriad terran kingdoms in all their placetimes, we need to reseed our souls and our home worlds in order to flourish – again or maybe just for the first time – on a vulnerable planet that is not yet murdered. 1 We need not just reseeding but also reinoculating with all the fermenting, fomenting, and nutrient-fixing associates seeds need to thrive. Recuperation is still possible, but only in multispecies alliance, across the killing divisions of nature, culture, and technology and of organism, language, and machine. 2 The feminist cyborg taught me that; the humanimal worlds of dogs, chickens, turtles, and wolves taught me that; and, in fungal, microbial, symbiogenetic counterpoint, the acacia trees of Africa, the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific Islands, with their congeries of associates reaching across taxa, teach me that. Sowing worlds is about opening up the story of companion species to more of its relentless diversity and urgent trouble. To study the kind of situated, mortal, germinal wisdom we need, I turn to Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler.3 It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with. It matters wherehow Uroboros swallows its tale again. That’s how worlding gets on with itself in dragon time. These are such simple and difficult koans; let us see what kind of get they spawn. A careful student of dragons, Le Guin taught me the carrier bag theory of fiction and of naturalcultural history.4 Her theories, her stories, are capacious bags for collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living. “A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.”5

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So much of Earth history has been told in the thrall of the fantasy of the first beautiful words and weapons, of the first beautiful weapons as words and vice versa. Tool, weapon, word: that is the word made flesh in the image of the sky god. In a tragic story with only one real actor – one real world maker, the hero – this is the Man-making tale of the hunter on a quest to kill and bring back the terrible bounty. This is the cutting, sharp, combative tale of action that defers the suffering of glutinous, earth-rotted passivity beyond bearing. All others in the prick tale are props, ground, plot space, or prey. They don’t matter; their job is to be in the way, to be overcome, to be the road, the conduit, but not the traveler, not the begetter. The last thing the hero wants to know is that his beautiful words and weapons will be worthless without a bag, a container, a net. Nonetheless, no adventurer should leave home without a sack. How did a sling, a pot, a bottle suddenly get in the story? How do such lowly things keep the story going? Or, maybe even worse for the hero, how do those concave, hollowed out things, those holes in Being from the get-go, generate richer, quirkier, fuller, unfitting, ongoing stories, stories with room for the hunter, but that weren’t and aren’t about him, the self-making Human, the human-making machine of history. The slight curve of the shell that holds just a little water, just a few seeds to give away and to receive, suggests stories of becoming-with, of reciprocal induction, of companion species whose job in living and dying is not to end the storying, the worlding. With a shell and a net, becoming human, becoming humus, becoming terran, has another shape – i.e., the side-winding snaky shape of becoming with. There is room for conflict in Le Guin’s story, but her carrier bag narratives are full of much else in wonderful, messy tales to use for retelling or reseeding, possibilities for getting on now as well as in deep Earth history. “It sometimes seems that that [heroic] story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished… Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.”6 Octavia E. Butler knows all about the untold stories, the ones that need a restitched seedbag and a traveling sower to hollow out a place to flourish after the catastrophes of that Sharp Story. In Parable of the Sower, the US teenage hyperempath Lauren Oya Olamina grew up in a gated community in Los Angeles. Important in New World Santeria and in Catholic cults of the Virgin Mary, in Yoruba Oya, mother of nine, is the Orisha of the Niger River, with its nine tributaries. Wind, creation, and death are her attributes and powers for worlding. Olamina’s gift and curse was her inescapable ability to feel the pain of all living beings, a result of a drug taken by her addicted mother during pregnancy. After the murder of her family, the young woman traveled from a devastated and dying society with a motley of survivors to sow a new community rooted in a religion called Earthseed. In the story arc of what was to be a trilogy (Parable of the Trickster was not completed before her death), Butler’s sci-fi worlding imagined Earthseed ultimately flourishing on a new home world among the stars. But Olamina started the first Earthseed community in Northern California, and it is there and at other sites on Terra where my own explorations for reseeding our home world must stay. This home is where Butler’s lessons apply with special ferocity. In the Parable novels, “God is change,” and Earthseed teaches that the seeds of life on Earth can be transplanted and can adapt and flourish in all sorts of unexpected and always dangerous places and times. Note “can,” not necessarily “may” or “should.” Butler’s entire work as a sci-fi writer is riveted on the problem of destruction and wounded flourishing – not simply survival – in exile, diaspora,

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abduction, and transportation – the earthly gift-burden of the descendents of slaves, refugees, immigrants, travelers, and of the Indigenous too. It is not a burden that stops with settlement. In the sci-fi mode,7 my own writing works and plays only on Earth, in the mud of cyborgs, dogs, acacia trees, ants, microbes, and all their kin and get. With the twist in the belly that etymology brings, I remember too that kin, with the g-k exchange of Indo-European cousins, becomes gen on the way to get. Terran spawn all, we are side-winding as well as arboreal kindred – blown get – in infected and seedy generation after generation, blowsy kind after blowsy kind. Planting seeds requires medium, soil, matter, mutter, mother. These words interest me greatly for and in the sci-fi terraforming mode of attention. In the feminist sci-fi mode, matter is never “mere” medium to the “informing” seed; rather, mixed in Terra’s carrier bag, kin and get have a much richer congress for worlding. Matter is a powerful, mindfully bodied word, the matrix and generatrix of things, kin to the riverine generatrix Oya. It doesn’t take much digging or swimming to get to matter as source, ground, flux, reason, and consequential stuff – the matter of the thing, the generatrix that is simultaneously fluid and solid, mathematical and fleshly – and by that etymological route to one tone of matter as timber, as hard inner wood (in Portuguese madeira). Matter, mater, mutter make me – make us, that collective gathered in the narrative bag of Beyond the Cyborg – stay with the naturalcultural multispecies trouble on Earth. It is time to return to the question of finding seeds for terraforming for a recuperating earthly world of difference, wherewhen the knowledge of how to murder is not scarce. My carrier bag for terraforming is full of acacia seeds, but, as we shall see, that collection brings its full share of trouble too. I begin with the decapitated corpse of an ant found by scientist-explorers next to Seed 31 in a row of degerminated acacia seeds at the end of an ant colony tunnel in Le Guin’s story “‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’ and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics.” The therolinguists were perplexed in their reading of the touchgland exudate script that the ant seemed to have written in her biochemical ink on the aligned seeds. The scientists were uncertain both about how to interpret the script and about who the ant was – an intruder killed by the colony’s soldiers? A resident rebel writing seditious messages about the queen and her eggs? A myrmexian tragic poet? 8 The therolinguists could not apply rules from human languages to their task, and their grasp of animal communication was (is) still raggedly fragmentary, full of guesses across profound naturalcultural difference. From the scientific and hermeneutic study of other animal languages recorded in difficult expeditions of discovery, therolinguists held that “language is communication” and that many animals use an active collective kinesthetic semiotics as well as chemosensory, visual, and tactile language. They might have been troubled about their reading of this unexpected ant’s exudate text, but they felt confident that at least they were engaging therolinguistic acts and would someday learn to read them. Plants, however, they speculated, “do not communicate” and so have no language. Something else is going on in the vegetative world, perhaps something that should be called art.9 Phytolinguistics pursued along these lines by the scientists and explorers was just beginning and would surely require entirely new modes of attention, field methodology, and conceptual invention. The president of the Therolinguists Association waxed lyrical: “If a non-communicative, vegetative art exists, we must re-think the very elements of our science, and learn a whole new set of techniques. For it is simply not possible to bring the critical and technical skills appropriate to the study of weasel murder-mysteries, or Battrachian erotica, or the tunnel-sagas of the earthworm, to bear on the art of the redwood or the zucchini.”10 In my view, the president got it right about the need to question the tissues of one’s

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knowings and ways of knowing in order to respond to non-anthropocentric difference. But a closer look at that decapitated ant and the degerminated acacia seeds should have told those still zoocentric scientists that their sublime aestheticization of plants led them astray about earth-making companion species. Plants are consummate communicators in a vast terran array of modalities, making and exchanging meanings among and between an astonishing array of associates across the taxa of living beings. Plants, along with bacteria and fungi, are also animals’ lifelines to communication with the abiotic world, from sun to gas to rock. To pursue this matter, I need to leave Le Guin’s story for now and instead draw on the stories told by students of symbiosis, symbiogenesis, and ecological evolutionary developmental biology. 11 Acacias and ants can do almost all of the work for me. With fifteen hundred species (about one thousand of which are indigenous to Australia), the genus Acacia is one of the largest genera of trees and shrubs on Earth. Different acacias flourish in temperate, tropical, and desert climates across oceans and continents. They are crucial species, maintaining the healthy biodiversity of complex ecologies, housing many lodgers, and nourishing a motley of diners. Relocated from wherever they originated, acacias were the darlings of human colonial foresters and still are the stock-in-trade of landscapers and plant breeders. In those histories some acacias become the overgrowing destroyers of endemic ecologies that are the special responsibility of restoration biologists and just plain citizens of recuperating places.12 In part and whole, acacias show up in the most unexpected places. They give the bounty of the gorgeous hard-woods like Hawaiian koa, which are cut down in greedy, exterminating, global-capitalist excess. Acacias also make the humble polysaccharide gums, including gum Arabic from Acacia senegal, that show up in human industrial products like ice cream, hand lotion, beer, ink, jelly beans, and old-fashioned postage stamps. Those same gum exudates are the immune system of the acacias themselves, helping to seal wounds and discourage opportunistic fungi and bacteria. Bees make a prized honey from acacia flowers, among the few honeys that will not crystallize. Many animals, including moths, human beings, and the only known vegetarian spider, use acacias for food. People rely on acacias for seed pastes, fritters made from pods, curries, shoots, toasted seeds, and root beer. Acacias are members of the vast family of legumes. That means that, among their many talents, in association with fungal mycorrhizal symbionts (which host their own bacterial endosymbionts), many acacias fix the nitrogen crucial to soil fertility, plant growth, and animal existence.13 In defending themselves from grazers and pests, acacias are veritable alkaloid chemical factories, making many compounds that are psychoactive in animals like me. From giraffes’ points of view, acacias sport lovely leafy salads on their crowns, and the acacias respond to assiduous giraffe pruning by producing the picturesque African savannah flat-top tree landscape prized by human photographers and tourist enterprises, not to mention life-saving shade and rest for many critters. Supported within this big narrative netbag, I am ready to add a few details of my own to Le Guin’s ongoing carrier bag story of the decapitated ant and her acacia seed-writing tablet. The therolinguists were worried about the message they tried to decipher in the writing, but I am riveted by what drew ant and acacia seed together in the first place. How did they know each other; how did they communicate; why did the ant paint her message

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on that shiny surface? The degerminated seed is the clue. Acacia verticillata, an Australian shrub related to the coastal wattle so worrisome to southern Californian ecologists, makes seeds that are dispersed by ants. The wiley acacias draw the ants’ attention with a showy attachment stalk coiled around every seed. The ants carry the decorated seeds to their nests, where they consume the fat-rich attachment stalks, called elaisosomes, at their leisure. In time, the seeds germinate out of the nice womb provided by the ant tunnels, and the ants have the nutritious, calorie-dense food they need to fuel all those stories of their hard-working habits. In evolutionary ecological terms, these ants and acacias are necessary to each other’s reproductive business. Some ant-acacia associations are much more elaborate than that, reaching into the internal tissues of each participant, shaping genomes and developmental patterning of the structures and functions of both companion species. Several Central American acacias make large, hollow thornlike structures called stipules that provide shelter for several species of Pseudomyrmex ants. “The ants feed on a secretion of sap on the leaf-stalk and small, lipid-rich [and protein-rich] food-bodies at the tips of the leaflets called Beltian bodies. In return, the ants add protection to the plant against herbivores.”14 There is nothing like a dedicated bevy of angry, biting ants to make a day’s foraging uncomfortable and the leaf-grazer of whatever species move on to less infested pantries. In the 2005 BBC Science and Nature five-part special with David Attenborough, in the episode called “Intimate Relations,” we see these matters in exquisite, sensuous detail. We also witness that “some ants ‘farm’ the trees that give them shelter, creating areas known as ‘Devil’s gardens.’ To make sure these grow without competition, they kill off other seedlings in the surrounding vegetation.” 15 The ants accomplish this task by gnawing methodically through branches and shoots and then injecting formic acid into the conductive tissue of the offending plants. Similar ant-acacia mutualisms occur in Africa. For example, the Whistling Thorn acacias in Kenya provide shelter for ants in the thorns and nectar in extrafloral nectaries for their symbiotic ants such as Crematogaster mimosae. In turn, the ants protect the plant by attacking large mammalian herbivores and stem-boring beetles that damage the plant. The more one looks, the more the name of the game of living and dying on Earth is a convoluted multispecies affair that goes by the name of symbiosis, the yoking together of companion species, at table together. Ants and acacias are both highly diverse, well populated-groups. They are sometimes world travelers and sometimes homebodies that cannot flourish away from natal countries and natal neighbors. Homebody or traveler, their ways of living and dying have consequences for terraforming, past and present. Ants and acacias are avid for association with critters of all sorts of sizes and scales, and they are opportunistic in their approaches to living and dying in both evolutionary and organismic or colonial timeplaces. These species in all their complexities and ongoingness both do great harm and sustain whole worlds, sometimes in association with human people, sometimes not. The devil is truly in the details of response-able naturecultures inhabited by accountable companion species. They – we – are here to live and die with, not just think and write with. But also that, also here to sow worlds with, to write in ant exudates on acacia seeds to keep the stories going. No more than Le Guin’s carrier bag story – with the crusty elderly lady ready to use her purse to whack evildoers and the author avid for the mess as well as the order of her bumptious critters, human and not – is my story of these worldly-wise symbionts a tale of rectitude and final peace. With Le Guin, I am committed to the finicky, disruptive details of good stories that don’t know how to finish. Good stories

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reach into rich pasts to sustain thick presents to keep the story going for those who come after.16 These companion species are a prompt to shaggy dog stories – growls, bites, whelps, games, snufflings, and all. Symbiogenesis is not a synonym for the good, but for becoming with each other in response-ability. Finally, and not a moment too soon, sympoiesis displaces autopoiesis and all other self-forming and self-sustaining system fantasies. Sympoiesis is a carrier bag for ongoingness, a yoke for becoming with, for staying with the trouble of inheriting the damages and achievements of colonial and postcolonial naturalcultural histories in telling the tale of still possible recuperation. Le Guin’s therolinguists, even bound in their animal hides, had the vision of these scary and inspiring possibilities: “And with them, or after them, may there not come that even bolder adventurer – the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic, poetry of the rocks; each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the Earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space.”17 Communicative and mute, the old lady and her purse will be found in Earthseed communities on Terra and throughout timespace. Mutter, matter, mother. Donna J. Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in Biology at Yale in 1972 and writes and teaches in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and multispecies studies. Her books include Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (Yale University Press, 1976, 2004); Primate Visions (Routledge, 1989); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (Routledge, 1991); Modest_Witness@ Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseTM (Routledge, 1997, 20182); The Companion Species Manifesto (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); The Haraway Reader (Routledge, 2003); When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Manifestly Haraway (University of Minnesota Press, 2016); and Staying with the Trouble (Duke University Press, 2016). With Adele Clarke she co-edited Making Kin Not Population (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), which addresses questions of human numbers, feminist anti-racist reproductive and environmental justice, and multispecies flourishing.

“Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others” is reprinted and slightly edited from Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway, ed. Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 137–146, 173–175. A slightly revised version was published in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2016). Reprinted and edited by permission of Columbia University Press. Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press.

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In everything I write about companion species, I am instructed by Anna Tsing’s “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species,” Environmental Humanities, 1(1), 2012, 141–154; available at http://tsingmushrooms. blogspot.com.au. Without the deceptive comforts of human exceptionalism, Tsing succeeds both in telling world history from the point of view of fungal associates and also in rewriting Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Tsing’s is a tale of speculative fabulation, an sci-fi genre crucial to feminist theory. She and I are in a relation of reciprocal induction, that fundamental evolutionary ecological developmental worlding process that is basic to all becomingwith. See Scott F. Gilbert and David Epel, Ecological Developmental Biology: Integrating Epigenetics, Medicine, and Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2009). Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004) taught me that recuperation, not reconciliation or restoration, is what is needed and maybe just possible. I find many of the words that begin with re- useful, including resurgence and resilience. Post- is more of a problem. For Le Guin, see especially The Word for World Is Forest (New York: Berkley Books, 1976) and “‘The Author of Acacia Seeds’ and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics,” in Le Guin, The Compass Rose: Short Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). “The Author of Acacia Seeds” was first published in 1974 in Fellowship of the Stars. For Butler, see especially Parable of the Sower (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993) and Parable of the Talents (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998). Butler inspired a new generation of “stories from social justice movements.” See Adrienne M. Brown and Walidah Imarisha (eds.), Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2015). Le Guin’s work also pervades much writing for environmental justice and environmental resurgence. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” shaped my thinking about narrative in evolutionary theory and of the figure of woman the gatherer for Primate Visions. Le Guin learned about the “Carrier Bag Theory of Human Evolution” from Elizabeth Fisher, Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), in that period of large, brave, speculative, worldly stories that burned in feminist theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Like speculative fabulation, speculative feminism was, and is, a sci-fi practice. Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986), in Denise DuPont (ed.), Women of Vision: Essays by Women Writing Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 166. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” 169. My guide with and through sci-fi, my “mystra,” here is Joshua LaBare, “Farfetchings: On and in the SF Mode” (Dissertation, University of California Santa Cruz, 2010): LaBare’s term mystra begins to accrue meanings

on p. 17. LaBare argues that sci-fi is not fundamentally a genre, even in the extended sense that includes film, comics, and much else besides the printed book or magazine. The sci-fi mode is, rather, a mode of attention, a theory of history, and a practice of worlding. He writes, “What I call the ‘SF mode’ offers one way of focusing that attention, of imagining and designing alternatives to the world that is, alas, the case” (1). LaBare suggests that the SF mode pays attention to the “conceivable, possible, inexorable, plausible, and logical” (italics in original, 27). One of his principal mystras is Le Guin, especially in the lure of her understanding of “talking backwards” in the postapocalyptic Northern Californian sci-fi novel Always Coming Home. Reading Parable of the Sower together with Always Coming Home is a good way for coastal travelers to fill the carrier bag for recuperative terraforming before the apocalypse instead of just afterward. Instructed in this sci-fi mode, perhaps human people and earth others can avert inexorable disaster and plant the conceivable germ of possibility for multispecies, multiplacetime recuperation before it is too late. 8 Myrmex is the Greek word for ant, and one story has it that an Attic maiden named Myrmex annoyed Athena by claiming the invention of the plow as the maiden’s own and so was turned into an ant by the goddess. Me, judging from the tunnels ants dig all over the world and comparing that to Athena’s more sky-looking and heady credentials, I think Myrmex probably had the stronger claim to having authored the plow. Breaking out of daddy’s brain is really not the same as tunneling and runneling in the earth, whether one is goddess, woman, or ant. For actual ants, one could not do better than Deborah M. Gordon, Ants at Work: How an Insect Society Is Organized (New York: The Free Press, 1999); Gordon, Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Gordon, “The Ecology of Collective Behavior,” PLoS Biology, 12(3), 2014. For contrasting approaches to explanation, see Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), and Hölldobler and Wilson, The Ants (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1990). Based on her studies of developing behavior in harvester ant colonies in the Arizona desert and evidence that individual ants switch tasks over their lifetimes, Gordon has been a critic of E.O. Wilson’s emphasis on rigidly determined ant behavior. For me, Wilson is the heroic Athena to Gordon’s inventive Attic maid Myrmex with a seedbag and a digging tool. To get started with acacias, go to Wikipedia’s “Acacia” entry, and then to “Biology of Acacia,” a special issue of Australian Systematic Botany (2003). Lest one think all the world-building action is an ant story, check out Adam Mann, “Termites Help Build Savannah Societies,” Science Magazine, May 25, 2010. 9 Le Guin, “‘The Author of Acacia Seeds,’” 174. 10 Ibid.

See, for example, Gilbert and Epel, Ecological Developmental Biology; Gilbert et al., “Symbiosis as a Source of Selectable Epigenetic Variation,” Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 365(1540), 2010, 671–678; Margaret McFall-Ngai, “The Development of Cooperative Associations between Animals and Bacteria,” American Zoologist, 38(4), 1998, 593–608; McFall-Ngai, “Unseen Forces: The Influence of Bacteria on Animal Development,” Developmental Biology, 242(1), 2002, 1–14; and Myra J. Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). On symbiogenesis as the driver of evolutionary change, see Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species (New York: Basic Books, 2002). See the website of the Global Invasive Species Database for information about troublesome Australian acacias in South America and South Africa. See also “Pacific Islands Ecosystems at Risk” for information about Acacia mearnisii (black wattle). Several acacia species, especially the coastal wattle Acacia cyclops, worry conservationists in California. All of these disputed travelers teach us to stay with the multispecies trouble that motivates most of my work and play these days. See Paola Bonfante and Iulia-Andra Anca, “Plants, Mycorrhizal Fungi, and Bacteria: A Network of Interactions,” Annual Review of Microbiology, 63, 2009, 363–383. This article draws our attention to the many-faceted practices of communication among members of multispecies consortia. As the abstract summarizes, “Release of active molecules, including volatiles, and physical contact among the partners seem important for the establishment of the bacteria/ mycorrhizal fungus/plant network. The potential involvement of quorum sensing and Type III secretion systems is discussed, even if the exact nature of the complex interspecies/interphylum interactions remains unclear.” “Acacia,” Wikipedia; Martin Heil et al., “Evolutionary Change from Induced to Constitutive Expression of an Indirect Plant Resistance,” Nature, 430, 2004, 205–208. Attenborough, “Intimate Relations” (TV episode); Alison Ross, “Devilish Ants Control the Garden,” BBC News, September 21, 2005. My debts to Deborah Bird Rose are obvious here and throughout this essay. See especially her development of the idea of double death in “What If the Angel of History Were a Dog?,” Cultural Studies Review, 12(1), 2013, 67. Double death signifies the killing of ongoingness and the blasting of generations. Rose teaches me about Aboriginal ways of crafting responsibility, inhabiting time, and the need for recuperation in her Reports from a Wild Country. See also the important open-access journal Environmental Humanities, now under the protection of Duke University Press. Le Guin, “‘The Author of Acacia Seeds,’” 175.

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IT MISSES YOU Mel Y. Chen

Dear (are you/is it dear?), I miss you. Need I say this? The years – these years? – have shredded history, shaken possibility from the cone of time, shed it into other worlds. (I know I’m supposed to say that it only feels that way). How does one insist on healing, integrity, justice when those words seem to skirt an arc of optimism that isn’t met by the conditions of today? And rather than name these conditions, what would it be to contact them, to touch them? Because verbs, configurations, spatialisations of language mark something that feels absent. I want to intentionally miss the stubborn calculus that would yield a result. Not so much anarchic, as a studied miss. The losses accumulate, and I sense them the most. It’s a bad habit, an attachment. Because ample dreams will always wait in losses’ shadows. The skirting, on the other hand, it’s too close, it preserves the attachment. I am really sick – literally sick? – of these models of progress, of these mechanisms of change, even the names for them – I may be asked to rally them, cultivate them against the depredations of what is here now, but to be frank, dear one, I’d wish them sloughed off. Even as their stations hold and relations renew, I can’t be the only one to need, desperately need, a different model of space-time upon which to posit such dreams of otherness (it’s hard for a dreamer to dream without a model of some kind; you know which dreams, right?). The space-time I want needs also to fold. To make immediate the dream, not continually suspend or fracture or distance or irritate it; and also to give way, allowing for collapse. If patience and indulgence currently run from sparse to ample in my thoughts, “out of time” might be a way of announcing the presence of the fold. Oh, there are so many kinds of folds. I want to use more of them for this spacetime revision. Actually it’s soon time for me to moult, and that’s folds galore! I’ve moulted a few times, and while I’ve had iffy moments when the moult gets stuck

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across my air holes and I have to grasp and scratch, it feels like a fresh dip in water, except it’s the tingle of air all across my body. I’ve felt like I’m in the wrong body for a while, just pressing outward against a container that pinches me. It’s the greatest feeling when my middle pointy joint pops through and I can begin scooping it off and eating it. Hunch, reach, hook, squint, push, gulp, blinkswallow. Hunch, reach again, hook, squint, push, gulp, blinkswallow. We’ve all been through this, kinds of renewal. When the big looming kin made room for us when we were little and fearful of drying up, because our pond had become a thin puddle, it carved a stream and we crowded in, funnelled through, breathed again; that joy was there, the flush of the new kin, squiggling together. Even as the water snakes made do, fetching their young kin snacks, many of us remained. And now, raw and new, I am full of sensation. I can almost hear distant songs from farther away, my kin and otherkin. Growls too, rhythmic ones that come with repellent smells. And sorry to say it, but there’s a different tingle, otherkin that I feel has awaited this moment to jump on. You know, there’s lots of muck here, in the mud, on my body, we all live on each other, we eat, we lick (I miss a fly until I get it, so I often hit kin and otherkin), we definitely touch, or miss-hop, and some otherkin take rides. On and around my bumps – especially that favourite one I love to massage with my foot, but also inside my elbows and knees – there are dark soft pockets ready for new critters. I’ve come across kin with eggs back there, but on me there’s a webby little fungus already getting started. Feels like a touch of the nasty, of a little evil thing, and it stinks. It’s already making more of itself. I want to barf or spray it with my toxic gland, but obviously those won’t do anything. I’ve got plans for it. I’m going to scrape that area against the edges of some bark and see how much comes off (along with my nice new little mucous layer, ugh). And if I raise my arms my skin will stretch, so if I stalk my way over there with all my limbs stretched out, maybe I can dry up a little and encourage it to go elsewhere. It keeps trying to say things, to tell victorious stories of the tall ones with strange croaks who try to pluck us up to put us in their bins: they tramped it from cage to boot to hand to kin and otherkin and then again to kin and otherkin, stream, kin and otherkin, pond. I can’t bear those stories; I can’t bear the memories of the hurt sloughing, the sloughing that left kin without skin. I’d love to replace it with something else, like those sweet mudbeings who tend to my mucus and keep it fine. Or just go sit by a leaf, or a different mycobeing, those florid mushroom caps over the deep webs that keep my precious eyes out of the hard rain – yes, that combo is real, we repeatedly befriend. This is the new me and I deserve the right muck. What I definitely do very much not want is that fungal wrong-muck to go anywhere near my precious gonads. I got some beauties this life and I know it. And they are more than most of us have inside. The leaf ants, which I sometimes eat, tell me things – how the growling far away, a thing that no kin or otherkin saw, came at the same time that the water started changing and kin and otherkin started changing too. That stream water has a meanness to it, a meanness in it. I want less

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to go in there; I prefer the fresh puddles in the step of a furry one after rain. According to the leaf ants, newkin had extra legs, or no legs; extra bumps or no bumps; extra folds or no folds at all. Definitely a different hop about ’em, and a few seemed uncomfortable (maybe the bellychest should be snugly surrounded by those four legs but who am I to say?), but in the ones near me we were still all eating and pooping fine, so this life could go on a little longer. How much longer? As kin say, kin want to grow, stay, be? These days when I see kin I have really been feeling some urges there that aren’t the same as when I see a great worm or grub. The call that comes from my throat, especially when it bulges out with air, feels connected to my bellychest. I don’t know where this urge is coming from but I want to get in the water, find kin, slap that bellychest on kin and hold on tight for a while, digging in deep. If they’re into it, I am too. Whatever stream of eggs gets made and whatever they end up doing, that is all right. Perhaps we’ll stay in touch. My gonads will have gotten to kin, and I will feel gratified. For now, the life is fine. Back to the letter, the communing, the communing about the miss and the missing. I’m thinking mostly these days about a profound loss, a real one, that nevertheless brings me ever so many new kin. Bear with me; it’s about a blur. The blur is me, but it’s also us and them. Does it start with gender? The story I’ve been told is fundamentally one of sexing, gender, genre: categories, types, and their maintenance. No matter that many of these are inherited from the webby spread of geophagia – that swallowing/ self-reproducing pattern of colonial structures such as nation-States, to remake in its own terms. According to the story, all that is of consequence recurses out from people and their two types, the lady and the man type. That’s simplistic if nothing else, I grant you that. Yet every explanation, if I sit back and think about it, feels like a paraphrase of this thing so I’ll just leave it there: it’s secular, it’s religious, it’s basically most systems if you wanted to map the spread of that webby thing and not what it’s trying and failing to cover over. What it’s missing. And in that webby map, these two genders, as neat as two biscuits on a shelf, have somehow become the heart of everything, for better and for worse. So I refuse this occupation, though that may not matter for much; if language is both nothing and everything, what does pronominal specificity – not just about the addressee, which escapes with “you,” but about others such as the “third person” – beget after all? The fold is one of gender and species, of animate and inanimate. The trouble seems less to me about welcoming “they/them” and “it/them,” than a designated miss: when I duck or steer away from those webs, all I find is kin. It’s the blur, it’s the collapse, and here, I feel the fold coming. It misses you. By way of postscript: this piece intends to animate a vague and changing addressee, which might be human, amphibian, fungal, planetary, collective, multiple, hybrid, inanimate; it’s meant to evade precise determinacy. You will find moving through here toads, which are my first love in the world; a particular chytrid fungus which, due to some unknown combination of natural occurrence, the medical animal trade and the development of home pregnancy tests, and climate change, traversed a threshold from the ordinary to the deadly for amphibians worldwide; endocrine disruptors as common industrial waterway pollutants that have been associated with many effects in animals, among them the increase of what are labelled “intersex” frogs and toads; and, as I hope, a loving tack on the trans and disability politics of environmental claims of harm. The above presences are not announced, but suggested. What begins a letter, becomes a story, then comes back to the letter which perhaps couldn’t be, given the voice/address. There’s thus

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a kind of fold, collapse, or wish that I’m trying to execute, if bumpily, in the resonances between the seeming human-centred lament, the “miss” of the idealised target of environmental management and the “miss” of unjust loss that it creates, and the displaced toad voice whose authenticity is both unindictable and deeply weird, registering chemical and sexual difference while remaining somewhat undaunted and “local.” Such a burden the toad holds, one that feels precisely unspeakable despite its knowing intimately something of its position amidst multiple layered forces. Finally, I do not wish for the toad’s irrepressible liveliness to negate the need for care or environmental concern. The point, rather, is that militancies around purity can be particularly dangerous and can benefit from iconoclastic expression. Whether it works – whether it is “clunky” or “smooth,” disorderly or just right, a failed attempt or feels like home, I leave up to you.

Much gratitude to Devi Peacock, Jack Aponte, and Julia Bryan-Wilson for their game feedback and critical support.

Mel Y. Chen (who uses they/them/their pronouns) originally trained as a queer feminist linguist (PhD from UC Berkeley). Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke University Press, 2012) is Chen’s first book, which received the Modern Language Association’s GL/Q Caucus’ Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize for its contribution to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer studies in literature and cultural studies. They are completing a second book, Chemical Intimacies. Their research and teaching interests include queer and gender theory, animal studies, critical race theory and Asian American studies, disability studies, science studies, and critical linguistics.

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Delcy Morelos, Inner Earth, 2018. Soil, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo Hendrik Zeitler. Collection of the Artist. Roda Sten Konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden. Courtesy the Artist

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DELCY MORELOS

1967, Tierralta, Colombia Lives in Bogotá, Colombia

For three decades, Delcy Morelos has developed a dynamic practice across media such as painting, installation, and sculpture in which soil, clay, fabrics, fibers, and other natural elements are the primary materials. Starting her career as a painter, in early works such as in De lo que soy (1995) Morelos applies blood-red acrylic paint over paper surfaces through geometric yet gestural and organic strokes. These paintings depict red vessels and containers with uncontainable flesh and blood that spill in and out, their redness and unbounded energy bearing witness to Colombia’s historic political violence and armed conflict. Over time, her paintings turned from reds to earth tones, and then into large-scale immersive installations made of soil. In these more recent works, such as in En tierra (2016), a thin coat of soil covers the floor and walls of the exhibition space, and in others, such as in Inner Earth (2018) and Earthly Paradise (2022), the soil rises above the ground, and masses of earth surround the spectator’s body. Walking through Earthly Paradise, visitors can smell the earth’s aroma mixed with hay, cassava flour, cacao powder, 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 uses earth as a gesture that points towards her upbringing in the Indigenous territory of the Emberá-Catío people in Tierralta. Informed by Andean and Amazonian Amerindian cosmologies, these works convey 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. In Morelos’ earthen landscapes, the soil is full of will, desire, magic, and creative powers. As the earth 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. We become, live, die, and decompose with and as the earth. – MH

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Delcy Morelos, Inner Earth, 2018. Soil, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo Hendrik Zeitler. Collection of the Artist. Roda Sten Konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden. Courtesy the Artist Next pages: Delcy Morelos, Moradas, 2019–2020. Soil, mixed media, iron, wood, fabric, dimensions variables. 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. His artistic pursuits developed alongside his own research about the Western world while attending school. In 1998, at the age of nineteen, Esbell moved to Boa Vista, the capital of the Brazilian State of Roraima. 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, who are Indigenous to a territory that is currently divided between Brazil, Guiana, and Venezuela. He 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. Esbell’s own work in painting, drawing, video, poetry, writing, and performance merge Indigenous cosmology and socioenvironmental concerns with trenchant critiques of hegemonic culture. Before his death in 2021, his research explored txaísmo, an approach to creating forms of relation between the Indigenous and Western worlds based on reciprocity rather than colonial extractivism. 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. The spiritual energies that transcend temporal bounds are represented with vibrant, densely applied colour, emerging from chaos to settle in the form of animals, plants, and land masses. 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. As the artist once wrote, “A bush, no matter how small the branch, contains all the antidote for the poison that is the megalopolis.” –IW

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Jaider Esbell, Maikan e Tukui (Raposas e Beija-flores), 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 100 × 75 cm. Photo Filipe Berndt. Private Collection. Courtesy Galeria Jaider Esbell de Arte Indígena Contemporânea; Galeria Millan. © Jaider Esbell Estate

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Clockwise from top left: From the series Transmakunaimî: o buraco é mais embaixo 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, Espírito dos Caxiris, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 89 × 90 cm Jaider Esbell, A origem das lagartas de fogo, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 89 × 90 cm Jaider Esbell, Latinoamérica, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 90 × 90 cm Photos Filipe Berndt. Private Collection. Courtesy Galeria Jaider Esbell de Arte Indígena Contemporânea; Galeria Millan. © Jaider Esbell Estate

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Clockwise from top left: From the series Transmakunaimî: o buraco é mais embaixo Jaider Esbell, Muiraquitãs, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 89 × 90 cm Jaider Esbell, A cura dos sapos, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 90 × 90 cm Jaider Esbell, A luta do boi com Makunaímî, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 89 × 90 cm 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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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, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe carries forms of knowledge, spirituality, labour, and aesthetics in Indigenous life that have survived colonisation onto the page. Hakihiiwe, who is a Yanomami artist born in Sheroana, a small Indigenous community on the shores of the Upper Orinoco River in the Venezuelan Amazon, began making paper in the 1990s, a skill he learned by studying with the Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata, who taught him techniques utilising pulps from natural fibres. Atop sheets fabricated from local plant life, including shiki, abaca, mulberry tree bark, sugar cane, or bananas, Hakihiiwe renders delicate dotted lines, circles, grids, curves, webs, and squiggles that reference forms of ancestral knowledge in highly personal ways. Bearing witness to cultural traditions and social practices from his community, Hakihiiwe’s symbology draws from an expansive inventory of artistic signs typically used in basketry and body painting from ceremonial rituals. These art forms are most often practiced by women in Yanomami culture and Hakihiiwe learned them from his mother. The protection of knowledge is an essential concept of Hakihiiwe’s work; as he has often said in interviews, he references ancient patterns, shapes, and forms in an effort to preserve them. Relatedly, for Hakihiiwe, the surface of paper carries both conceptual and practical resonance: not only can it be fashioned from local materials, thus tying any marks made upon it to a specific place, but it also has the capacity to traverse time and space. In Hakihiiwe’s recent series of delicate monoprints, he composes abstractions of the environment through the careful use of rhythmic repetitions of transcribed symbols used in Yanomami culture as well as many 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. Others, 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

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Top to bottom: Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Hahoshi, 2021. Monoprint on mulberry paper, 76 × 144 cm Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Kepo, 2021. Monoprint on mulberry paper, 76 × 137 cm Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Mapuu thoki, 2021. Monoprint on mulberry paper, 76 × 144 cm Photos María Teresa Hamon. Courtesy ABRA Gallery. © Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe

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Top to bottom: Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Omayari misi, 2021. Monoprint on mulberry paper, 76 × 144 cm Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Pasho shina, 2021. Monoprint on mulberry paper, 76 × 144 cm Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Peripo, 2021. Monoprint on mulberry paper, 76 × 144 cm Photos María Teresa Hamon. Courtesy ABRA Gallery. © Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe

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Top to bottom: Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Puu nasipe wayurime, 2021. Monoprint on mulberry paper, 76 × 131.5 cm Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Shapono, 2021. Monoprint on mulberry paper, 76 × 144 cm Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Yoa, 2021. Monoprint on mulberry paper, 76 × 142 cm Photos María Teresa Hamon. Courtesy ABRA Gallery. © Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe

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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 epic curtain-like sheaths, the British artist Emma Talbot makes the case that formal experiments can be politically liberating. As she explains it, she experienced the dominance of Modernist modes of picture-making throughout her artistic training – the rectangular stretcher, the hard edges of the canvas, the critical remove between the artist and work –, but decided that simply because it was what she knew did not mean it was what she needed. Citing the influence of the French feminist literary theorist and writer Hélène Cixous’ 1970s-era theory of écriture féminine, or women’s writing, the endeavour of inscribing the feminine into the language of a text, in her early work Talbot began to conceive of the medium of textile and its formal characteristics – the way it flows, bends, and its surface absorbs paint; its strength, weight, irregularity, and immediacy – as a means to articulate a feminist artistic language. Her drawings on fine, handmade sheets of paper and soft sculptures constructed from stitched fabric and papier-mâché, too, express Talbot’s feminist instrumentalisation of material, as they are imagined outside of the confines of the “set of givens” that she describes. Marked also by the influence of postanthropocentric and posthuman thought, Talbot’s large-scale paintings, drawings, animations, and textile-based sculptures incorporate simplified figurative forms, mythological motifs, rhythmic patterns, vivid colours, and calligraphic texts, which together express aspects of Talbot’s personal life and interior experiences as they extend to topics ranging from technology and nature, urbanism and ecopolitics, to the pandemic and aging. Playing off the title of Paul Gauguin’s historic painting D’où venonsnous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? (1897–1898), which was painted within a moment of deep crisis and existential reckoning within the artist’s career, Talbot’s Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Where Are We Going? (2021) takes on existential anxiety and the desire for escape experienced by humans in our environmentally catastrophic present. Enacting an implicit critique of Gauguin’s self-exile to Frenchcolonised Tahiti, where his painting is set, Talbot covers her painting with texts that propose questions regarding what nature is and how – or if – it even is possible to “return” to it ethically. – MW

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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 Next pages: Emma Talbot, Ghost Calls, 2020. Acrylic on silk, 300 × 1500 cm. Photo Ruth Clark. Courtesy the Artist; DCA Dundee Scotland; Galerie Onrust Amsterdam; Petra Rinck Galerie Düsseldorf. © Emma Talbot

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FIRELEI BÁEZ

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

Firelei Báez works across painting, drawing, and installation. Her visual references 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. Positing the self as unfixed and mutable, Báez 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. This act of overlaying past and potential histories enriches obscured narratives of Black resistance and enhances the overlooked contributions and mythologies of women. Oppositional images are recurring motifs in Báez’s work, and the title of her immersive 2019 installation A Drexcyen Chronocommons (To Win the War You Fought It Sideways) was a response to the nautical Afro-Futurist mythology developed by Drexciya, a Detroit-based electronic music duo. They describe an underwater nation populated by a new generation of water-breathing humans: the unborn children of pregnant African women who were thrown off slave ships. Along with a map depicting the stars’ alignment at the start of the Haitian Revolution, the installation also included portraits of Black women wearing tignons, head-coverings imposed on free women of colour in Spanish-ruled Louisiana in the 18th century. In an act of rebellion, the women reclaimed this object of repression by transforming it into a fashionable garment. 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

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Firelei Báez, On rest and resistance, Because we love you (to all those stolen from among us), 2020. Oil, acrylic on canvas, 121.9 × 152.4 cm. Private Collection. Photo Phoebe d’Heurle. Courtesy the Artist; James Cohan, New York. © Firelei Báez

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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 Firelei Báez, To breathe full and free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction (19°36'16.9"N 72°13'07.0"W, 42°21'48.762" N 71°1'59.628" W), 2021. Mixed media installation with sound, acrylic, polystyrene foam, plywood, aluminium, rubber, perforated tarp, 6 × 22.86 × 8.15 m; 32 audio tracks, 48 mins 22 sec (looped). Installation view, ICA Watershed, Boston, 2021. Photo Chuck Choi. 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 D E L A H O R R A

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

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra grew up during Pinochet’s seventeen-year military regime and left Chile to study in Germany in the 1990s. Predominantly working with drawing, Vásquez de la Horra produces works that at times assume the form of folded house-like sculptures depicting hybridised, fantastical creatures belonging to the domain of fairy tales, dreams, and horror. The artist immerses the drawings into molten beeswax, which sets the works in a buttery yellow hue. The process of embalming seals the paper, evoking a religious connotation and adding a layer of vulnerability to their materiality. Influenced by literature, the artist’s works combine texts in Spanish, English, and German. She is especially drawn to Chilean poet Nicanor Parra’s anti-poetry: the use of prosaic language, merging irony and tragedy, to reflect the comical and the ordinary. Symbols deriving from Indigenous and marginalised cultures appear as emblems in the drawings. Santa Muerte, a dressed-up skull, is one of the recurring figures, such as in Der Tod und das Mädchen (2015). In Lazarus (2017), a risen Lazarus with Asian features walks with two dogs, referencing Chinese migration to Latin America in the late 20th century. Los vientos (2016), influenced by the song Angelitos negros by Spanish singer Lola Flores, illustrates two female figures portrayed as Yoruba people, an ethnic group originating in West Africa, puffing winds onto a sailboat determining its route. The female figure is often central in Vásquez de la Horra’s drawings, depicted as creator and Mother Earth but also as violated or submissive. Displayed here inside a house-like custom 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, the artist employs accordion folds to bring her figures into sculptural space, emphasising the physicality, texture, and facture of graphic marks. As a whole, her practice explores themes ranging from mortality, rebirth, sexuality, myths, rituals, traditions, and religions as well as examining the violence and subjugation experienced by people of African descent throughout Latin American history. –LC

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Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, La verdad es demasiado grande, 2017. Drawing in 2 parts, graphite, sanguine, watercolour on paper, waxed, 125 × 102 cm. Photo Eric Tschernow. Courtesy the Artist. © Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

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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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Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Cosmic Matroshka, 2020. Drawing in 3 parts, graphite, watercolour, gouache on paper, waxed, 200 × 101 cm. Photo Eric Tschernow. Courtesy Michael Haas Gallery, Berlin. © Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

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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 – employing them in ways that emphasise their particular properties, including their scents and their tastes. Some installations have used dried, pressed tobacco leaves. Others have incorporated indigo, poppy seeds, lard, metal castings, sugar, mud from the Thames, and pools of cochineal, a red-purple dye made from crushed insects, which progressively stained the gallery floor. Even so, Lin’s primary focus is not simply creating physical objects but boring into the cultural memory that her mediums contain. 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. As part of her research-based practice, Lin embraces exhibition tactics often associated with anthropology and natural history, which she re-purposes and re-formulates to accentuate, critique, and 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 many other objects, paintings, living silkworms, mulberry plants, ceramic fragments, and a taxidermised iguana. Reconfigured in Xternetsa, the tables lead us through stages of transformation, where changes in matter echo transitional moments in human histories: 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. Xternetsa reanimates the historical person known as “George Psalmanazar,” an 18th-century European who claimed to be from Formosa (present-day Taiwan). He performed his identity by publicly consuming opium and raw meat, sleeping upright, and writing a pseudo-ethnography that described the language, rituals, and customs of his native land. Examining race as a performative act entangled with notions of animality, intoxication, and contamination, the ceramic figures’ chests and bodies open up to reveal cabinets filled with tinctures, poisons, and dioramic scenes of alchemical workshops administered by cat-demons. – MW

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This page and next pages: 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

Since the 1970s, Aage Gaup has emerged as a central figure in Sámi and Norwegian art as a sculptor, set designer, and political activist. 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 around 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 the Indigenous Sámi people across Sápmi, as the Sámi call their homeland, an area which encompasses parts of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and north-western Russia. Gaup is best known for his monumental-scale carved wood sculptures that take on figurative and abstract geometric forms. The works engage both a Modernist conversation and pictorial conventions, spiritual perspectives and symbols from Sámi cosmology. Gaup makes much of his work in service of Indigenous and displaced people around the world. His carved wooden sculpture Forest Being (2016) was created to honour Indigenous people in South America, forcibly removed from their homes in the rain forest. Gaup created Gimme Shelter (2004) to speak for the world’s refugees, and was exhibited at the Tromsø Art Association in 2014 to raise funds for prostheses for children in Gaza. The Milk of Dreams features Gaup’s work Sculpture I & II (1979). The work resembles a wave travelling across the exhibition space, 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 wave is supported by two bird-branch scaffolds, as if trees on the banks of the river. The artist also described the work in musical terms, as a reference to the structure of the Sámi joik. Sadly, Gaup passed away unexpectedly in December 2021. – MK

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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 an interconnectedness between all living beings. Working out of Hong Kong, but also with a roaming practice, he has devoted the last ten years to the study of plants, learning from biology and botany experts while creating art and daily rituals that focus on interspecies care. Zheng is highly considerate of the politics and power dynamics created by and for humans. He makes performance and video art, community workshops, and daily 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. Zheng aims to honour the knowledge and bridges that naturally exist between plants, animals, and humans. Zheng also actively decides to function on a different, decelerated time scale, one that is unresponsive to the incessant antics of capitalist production. In a project from 2020 titled Drawing Life, the artist dedicated himself to a daily drawing practice that consisted of a walk and time spent looking and drawing the surrounding flora. Over the course of his year-long immersion, the artist’s materials consisted of just three pencils and a notepad. Zheng’s works build upon and develop out of one another. 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. The dancers spent one week in the coniferous forest, shaking, worshipping, moaning, and embracing the trees in libidinous ways. Zheng’s ultimate goal is to triumph interspecies equality through sensitive exchanges, and to show that non-systemic thinking and being can lead to healthier politics among an abundance of life forms. – IA

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

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N O A H D AV I S

1983, Seattle, USA – 2015, Ojai, USA

Artist and curator Noah Davis’ work was dedicated to detailing contemporary Black American life through a uniquely incisive, intimate, and often melancholic lens. Having studied painting at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York, Davis moved to Los Angeles in 2004. There, in 2012, he and his wife – the sculptor Karon Davis – founded The Underground Museum, an influential artist-run space in the Arlington Heights neighbourhood, to bring vanguard art to a predominantly Black and Latino area that lacked access to cultural institutions. Davis made approximately four hundred paintings, collages, and sculptures before his untimely passing at the age of thirty-two. Davis’ candid representations of Black American life place his work in dialogue with an older generation of American painters including Fairfield Porter, Jacob Lawrence, and Palmer Hayden. His work is equally influenced by painters Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans’ figuration. Davis’ paintings overlay memory and fantasy, drawing from photographs, Western art history, and his own experiences. His snapshot-like compositions often approach the surreal, with brushstrokes, drips, and swaths of hazy colour signalling the unseen or affective dimensions beyond visible reality. Some of Davis’ paintings blend fantastical subjects with the eccentric beauty of quotidian scenes. Isis (2009) portrays Karon, playing the role of the Egyptian goddess of magic, in a golden, fan-winged costume; the painting suggests that the sacred might be identified in everyday life. The Conductor (2014) – from a series focused on the potential of art in Los Angeles’ Pueblo del Rio, a “garden city” built in 1941 – depicts a tuxedoed man conducting an unseen orchestra from a house’s porch, 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), meanwhile, 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

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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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Noah Davis, 40 Acres and a Unicorn, 2007. Acrylic, gouache on canvas, 76.2 × 66 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis; David Zwirner. © The Estate of Noah Davis Noah Davis, The Conductor, 2014. Oil on canvas, 175.3 × 193 cm. The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis; David Zwirner. © The Estate of Noah Davis

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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

The Sudanese artist, intellectual, and poet Ibrahim El-Salahi is known as a foundational figure in the history of African Modernism. Recognised for his lyrical, dreamlike drawings and paintings, El-Salahi’s work bridges elements of Arabic calligraphy, Sudanese ornament, Islamic spiritualism, and formal traditions of painterly abstraction learnt as a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the 1950s. El-Salahi, along with painter Ahmed Shibrain, was a founder of the Khartoum School, a Modernist art movement typified by an interest in preserving and exploring Sudanese aesthetic heritage following the nation’s independence in 1956. Maintaining his public image in Sudanese culture throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, El-Salahi was employed by the Sudanese government, where he was tasked with establishing the country’s Department of Culture and ran his own television show, Bayt Al-Jak (Jack’s House), focused on discussions of art, culture, and social issues. In 1975 El-Salahi was falsely accused of involvement in a failed anti-government coup and taken to Khartoum’s notorious Kober Prison, where he was held without trial for six months. During his time in prison El-Salahi secretly made drawings on scraps of cement casing, which he hid in the sand to prevent detection. On his release he made his pivotal work of image and prose, Prison Notebook (1976). El-Salahi’s Pain Relief (2016–2019) and Behind the Mask drawings series (2020–2021) speak to his familiarity with working under situations of extreme discomfort. Limited in physical mobility and in constant pain due to health issues, he created this body of work from the comfort of his armchair, making dozens of tiny, inky line drawings on materials to hand – used envelopes and the backs of his medicine packets. The drawings from El-Salahi’s new Behind the Mask series, made during the Covid-19 pandemic, are likewise applied to the backs of medicine packaging but with their vigorous linework reflect the freneticism of the present moment. Depicting exaggerated figures and faces, dissonant linear abstractions, and knotty landscapes – each divided by rectangular frames whose placement is determined by the folds in the packages on which they’re drawn – El-Salahi’s new drawings match the claustrophobia of the pandemic with equally cramped and idiosyncratic compositions. All the same, El-Salahi says that when immersed in his drawings from his armchair, he can momentarily relieve the experience of pain, instead finding himself in a meditative sphere of the imagination. – MW

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Ibrahim El-Salahi, Behind the Mask, 2021. Pen, ink on the back of a medicine packet, 11 × 19.2 cm. Photo Justin Piperger. Courtesy the Artist; Vigo Gallery

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Ibrahim El-Salahi, Behind the Mask, 2020. Pen, ink on the back of a medicine packet, 17.9 × 10.3 cm. Photo Justin Piperger. Courtesy the Artist; Vigo Gallery 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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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, the landscape and collective memory emerge as spaces of mythmaking – whether of origin or of limitless progress. Archaeology, in particular, and its associated practices of the classification and museumification of objects, is frequently used in Cherri’s multifaceted artworks as a symbol for the kinds of fictions that materialise in the construction of the past. 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, through the tale of a brickmaker, whose activities conjure a poetic and supernatural view of development, geological catastrophe, and labour. Functioning as the final chapter in a trilogy of Cherri’s films including The Disquiet (2013) and The Digger (2015), which collectively explore issues of human and environmental disaster and the history of ruins and cartography in the Middle East, Of Men and Gods and Mud imagines the punishing construction of a dam as a portal to a fantastical world. In the film, 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, B-movie creatures – Cherri furthermore captures deeply held associations in both myth and history with these natural occurrences: the creation of the Other. Displaced from home, the victims of environmental exile become foreign, made monstrous. But envisioned as a generative product of the brickmaker’s imagination, the monster figure also becomes a generative vessel of the radical potential of the realm of fantasy to create a new and better world. – MW

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Ali Cherri, Grafting (G), 2018. Head of Eros in marble, Lobi protection figure from Burkina Faso, wood, dried jay wing. 50 × 15 × 15 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Imane Farès, Paris. © Ali Cherri

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

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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 her landscape paintings and genre scenes, which rely on incongruous combinations and dreamlike imagery to create mysterious, unforgettable pictures of life, death, and nature. The artist, who has lived in rural areas of British Columbia, Oregon, New York, and most recently the San Jacinto Mountains of the southern California desert, has spoken of the feeling of internalising whatever landscape she inhabits; in many of her delicate small-scale paintings, the West Coast wilderness, and southern California in particular, are shown in penetrating detail, offering eccentric yet pensive portrayals of the American environment and the uncertain role humans play within it. Evoking American pastoral, regionalist, and realist painting traditions, Homer French’s works are suffused with a quiet yet existentially charged atmosphere, often involving imagery of stillness and estrangement, death, decay, and disaster. Appearing as simplified forms, in swathes of bright, flattened colour and often shown from irregular perspectives, coyotes roam amid spiny Joshua trees in the sparsely populated desert, fish leap over rocks in craggy creeks as lightning strike in the mountainous distance, a deer lies dead in tufts of grass. Cemeteries appear frequently. In Winter Burial (2020), slabs of stone dot an unpopulated snow-topped ground; in Bitterbrush and Sagebrush, Bridgeport Cemetery, and Island Deer (all 2020), clothed bodies are shown peacefully resting in their caskets beneath marked graves in wintery landscapes. Homer French’s haunting themes also encompass the spectre of natural disaster, including the wildfires that impact the American West Coast, as in Burning and ON FIRE (both 2020). Mojave Stealth Bombers (2013), wherein the titular vehicles fly over an airfield and wind farm in a barren desert landscape, is a menacing scene of blunt confrontation between nature and human encroachment. – MW

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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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Jessie Homer French, Island Deer, 2020. Oil on canvas, 61 × 76.2 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Various Small Fires Los Angeles/Seoul; MASSIMODECARLO. © Jessie Homer French Jessie Homer French, Chernobyl, 2017. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 91.4 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Various Small Fires Los Angeles/Seoul; MASSIMODECARLO. © Jessie Homer French

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S O LA N G E P E S S OA

1961, Ferros, Brazil Lives in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

With visual research spanning prehistoric cave paintings, Tropicália, Land Art, Baroque architecture, lavish Papal ceremonial attire, Arte Povera, the plumage of rain forest birds, poetry, and craft traditions from Brazil’s interior, the artist 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; Clark, for whom Pessoa co-curated an exhibition at Museu de Arte de Belo Horizonte in 1993, remains a subject of profound fascination and study. Since the 1980s, Pessoa has been incorporating organic materials including stones, feathers, leather, hair, oil, fat, tree branches, animal blood, and moss into her enigmatic and fantastical work, creating primordial and ritualistic forms that beat with both life and are muted by the spectre of death. In her mature work, Pessoa continues to build on the intersections between body and nature, as well as culture and landscape. The bold black-and-white drawings that encompass her Sonhíferas series (2020–2021) depict sinuous creatures and insects in the act of metamorphosis. When shown in public, these drawings are typically presented in wall-sized installations, thus enveloping viewers in the landscape inhabited by her abstracted beings. This ritualistic experience also extends to Pessoa’s generative sculptural process. Making use of soapstone, a common soft rock used since ancient times in Brazil’s Minas Gerais region to make bowls, cooking surfaces, and pipes and variously deployed throughout the 18th and 19th centuries for statues and civic, military, or religious structures, Pessoa’s series of carved soapstone sculptures (pedrasabão) demonstrate the pliability of materials as metaphoric resources, connoting histories of both process and fabrication, nature and culture. Presented in a densely packed installation with almost fifty sculptures of varying volume, density, and morphology, the works in Nihil Novi Sub Sole (2019–2021) appear in botanical groups organised so that they create pathways for visitors. Seen in this manner, their tactile, sensuous nature creates an environment of subtle mystery – a viewing experience of both feeling and perception. – MW

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Solange Pessoa, Nihil Novi Sub Sole, 2019–2021. Soapstone, dimensions variable. Photo João Vargas. Courtesy the Artist; Mendes Wood DM Sao Paulo, Brussels, New York Next pages: 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

The Indian artist Prabhakar Pachpute is known for versatile work that combines the political and the personal with the surreal. Born in the village of Sasti in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district, Pachpute comes from a multi-generational family of coal miners who have long worked amid the harsh condition in what is popularly known as the region’s “Coal Belt.” Addressing sobering subjects that have impacted his community’s lived experiences, such as labour, consumption, displacement, migration, and ecological degradation, his work is often suffused with pensive, poetic undertones or fantastical elements that mark his potent messages with a magnetism that is both alluring and unsettling. Best known for his theatrical wall-sized charcoal drawings depicting dystopian landscapes exploited and abandoned by industry, Pachpute also makes small-scale works on paper and charcoal stop-motion animations, often made in combination with sculptures; his chosen medium – charcoal – is regarded as a poetic tribute both to his familial history and the principal subject of his critique. In his dreamy mural installations and immersive environments, Surrealist motifs, including human-and-machine hybrids, faceless figures, and imagined landscapes, cohere to strategies known in histories of the avant-garde as a means to create an alternative vision of the world amid a backdrop of conflict and mechanisation. 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-metrewide canvas, which is displayed on a charcoal-washed wall, positions the viewer on the lip of a mining pit, with both animals that have traditionally been used for their labour in mining operations and those displaced by the same activities traversing the despoiled landscape. In the distance, vaguely mechanical and biomorphic forms – including a skeletal scarecrow with exhaust tubes for arms – harken the encroachment of human industry and infrastructure on the landscape. Collapsing multiple temporalities into a single mural-like image, Pachpute’s painting pays reverence to the passage and loss of time, while also testifying to its consequences. – MW

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Prabhakar Pachpute, Sea of Fists, 2019. Charcoal, acrylic on wall, plywood cut out, dimensions variable. Photo Dani Bapista. Courtesy Experimenter, Kolkata; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai

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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

Combining weaving with installation, sculpture, and performance, Igshaan Adams highlights the social, spiritual, and political aspects of textiles. Framed as a malleable medium that can be stretched in many conceptual directions, his textiles evoke the tangible material of clothing and soft furniture, as well as other types of surfaces onto which personal histories are embedded, including prayer mats, floors, and foot paths. Raised in Bonteheuwel, a former segregated township in Cape Town, Adams grew up in an acutely challenging setting, against which he has maintained a complex and multifaceted racial, religious, and sexual identity. His approach to material and iconography is influenced by both this status of multiplicity and of liminality, which he charts through markers of the environments in which these hybrid identities were formed. Adams’ intricately crafted, large-scale tapestries are inspired by the patterns of linoleum floors with geometric motifs found throughout the Cape Town homes of friends and neighbours. Stitched together with fragments of locally sourced wood, plastic, beads, shells, string, and rope and suggesting the Scandinavian, Victorian, and Middle Eastern motifs that influence the original floor designs, they are deeply linked to both commodity trading and local environs in postcolonial Africa. When conceived of as worn-out surfaces that bear the traces of the people who walked upon them, these linoleum floor-inspired works take on even further meaning: they are imprints of memories and personal history, and then woven into myth. In other tapestries, Adams records other types of movement, 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 positioned between the Bonteheuwel train station and Epping, one of the city’s industrial neighbourhoods, where many seek work. Insomuch as Adams envisions the existence of this arid pathway as a symbol of collective resistance for a historically persecuted community, he also reroutes the symbolic resonance of the desire line into the sphere of the transcendent. Presented in tandem with a twisting wire installation inspired by the ethereal dust clouds created by the Indigenous Northern Cape riel dance – often described as “dancing in the dust” – makeshift pathways born of necessity are transposed against an uplifting sign of collective joy. – MW

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Igshaan Adams, Gesteelde Vuur vanaf die Altar (stolen fire from the altar), 2021. Nylon and polyester rope, white chain, silver chain, wire, cotton twine, 268 × 189 cm. Photo Jason Wyche. Instituto Inhotim Collection, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Courtesy the Artist; Casey Kaplan, New York. © Igshaan Adams Next pages: 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

Throughout her physically oriented practice, 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 the Gee’s Bend quilters, the textiles of Faith Ringgold, the assemblages of Betye Saar, and the dreamlike “shack” sculptures of Beverly Buchanan, Lewis, like her predecessors, creates subversive monuments through her laboured process, paying tribute to philosophies of material ingenuity as an act of agency across diasporic communities via her materials primed for re-use. 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 room-sized soft sculptures and dangling tendrils of stitched flowers that comprise Tau Lewis’ Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls (T.A.U.B.I.S) series (2020) are emblematic of the artist’s multifaceted approach, which positions textiles and handmaking at the centre of an exploration of identity, bodies, and nature. The work Opus (The Ovule) (2020), a mammoth blush and yellow sculpture with a bulging, open-mouthed head, and an even more mammoth tongue, is fashioned from pieces of hand dyed fabrics, recycled leather, jute, metal, safety pins, metal hooks, and wire, alongside so-called “secret objects.” In Symphony (2021), these reclaimed materials form the body of a hoop-skirted figure, whose armature recalls the idea of a dwelling, a refuge, and a womb. Together, these 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, she presents epically scaled masks of three metres high: Sol Niger (With my fire, I may destroy everything, by my breath, souls are lifted from putrified earth); Angelus Mortem; and Vena Cava (all 2021). Hand-stitched from scrap fabrics, furs, and leathers – much of which has been pilfered from previous projects – these monumental faces create a material lineage not only with Lewis’ own work, but also with the mythical objects and symbology that are similarly grounded in the nature of their components and functionality. Taking inspiration from Yoruba masks and the writings of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, who has contributed significant texts on the subject, Lewis dramatises the otherworldly mythologies engrained in these mask forms, which continue to accumulate new meanings and forms of aliveness in the present. – MW

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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 Next pages: Sol Niger (detail)

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DUCT

OF THE

MARIANNE BRANDT R E G I NA C A S S O L O B RAC C H I GIANNINA CENSI ANNA COLEMAN LADD ALEXANDRA EXTER E L S A V O N F R E Y TA G - L O R I N G H O V E N KA R LA G RO S C H FLORENCE HENRI HANNAH HÖCH 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 L Z 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

BORG Y C

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, posthuman, 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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T H E C Y B O RG A S P RO D U C E R Matthew Biro

Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, Tanzmaske “Technik”, photographed by Minya DiezDührkoop, 1924. Courtesy Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Throughout history, an artist’s relationship to technology – either their own tools of representation or instruments and machinery in their contemporaneous lifeworlds – was sometimes a matter of self-conscious interest. In the 20th century, however, as mass production boomed and the culture industries grew, this subject – essentially, how technology becomes an extension of the body and how it changes us – became an investigation of overwhelming importance. During the avant-garde revolutions of the 1910s and 1920s, left-wing artists embraced the machine and strategies of deskilling to undermine traditions of painting and sculpture that had grown increasingly abstract and autonomous. They used mechanisation to question the idea of the artist as a “genius,” or as an isolated “expressive” subject; and they worked and organised to bring art back into the service of life, calling for artists to imagine new forms of identity, community, and social justice. Avant-garde artists also seized upon the new technologies of photography and film, in part because they wanted to reach larger audiences, but also because they desired to affect people through more collectively-engaged media: mass-produced visual culture that crossed classes, nationalities, and even languages. Finally, avant-garde artists engaged with technology by representing the effects of mechanisation on the body, the mind, and the world: they envisioned cyborgs and networked environments, scenarios that anticipated theories of posthumanism today. The term “cyborg” was coined in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline as a neologism for a self-regulating human- (or animal-) machine hybrid, a sentient body altered so that it could live in hostile environments.1

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As I have argued, however, the figure already appeared visually in the 1910s and 1920s, where it was connected by artists and other cultural producers to the “new” men and women they saw emerging in modern industrial societies.2 The cyborg, in other words, existed visually – both in avant-garde art and in a broad range of visual culture – before there was a name for it. And although the cyborg has consistently appeared in hypermasculinised and hyperfeminised forms, it was also repeatedly deployed in the 1910s and 1920s – as well as subsequently – as a visual figure for hybrid identity, anticipating the posthuman cyborg theorised by Donna Haraway in the 1980s and 1990s. As Haraway understood it, the cyborg was more than just a merging of human with machine. 3 Instead, the cyborg indicated a new hybrid understanding of human identity, one that destabilised the fundamental distinctions traditionally used to structure the Western self and its societies, demarcations separating genders, races, ethnicities, nationalities, classes, religions, sexualities, age groups, and even species. The cyborg, moreover, was a creature of information: not only were its parts replaceable and its capabilities extendable, but it could be programmed, scripted, encoded with new knowledge and behaviours. This meant that it depended upon larger networked environments designed to extend its capabilities and powers, but that also exerted significant surveillance and control. Amplifying the warnings of Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, Haraway argued that the growth of technology was making human societies more stratified and bellicose. On one side were cyborg labourers, “the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of colour, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance.”4 On the other were the highly specialised cybernetic workforces, the technologicalindustrial elite, located primarily in the capitalist societies of the United States and Europe. Supported internationally by laws, governments, and the culture industries, the increasingly global and digital economy “feminised” labour. It introduced more women into the workforce, and it made all its subjects increasingly vulnerable and precarious, thereby creating ever-greater disparities of wealth and power. From its very beginnings, female artists were central to the development of this figure of the cyborg as an avatar of hybrid identity, as well as more generally to the complex technological transformation of art carried out by the historical avant-garde, arguably its most important legacy. For Walter Benjamin, the tragic Marxist theorist of art and culture, the political tendency of an artwork – its explicit left-wing message – amounted to little if it was conveyed through reactionary form. In “Author as Producer” (1934), he argued that “we are in the midst of a mighty recasting of literary forms, a melting down in which many of the opposites in which we have been used to think may lose their force.”5 What Benjamin required of the left-wing author, and by implication the avant-garde visual artist, was work that would transcend “specialization in the process of production” and turn the audience into collaborators – if not producers in themselves.6 “What matters…,” as he put it, “is the exemplary character of production, which

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is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers – that is, readers or spectators into collaborators.”7 As closer review of the historical record is now showing, women of the historical avant-garde led the way as artistic producers in this Benjaminian sense. They were advocates of revolution, both artistic and political; and as such, they were collaborative, technologically-oriented, and dedicated to expanding the media of art and the audiences they touched. As a group, they could be called “cyborg producers,” artists who not only represented the new hybrid body and mind, but who also engineered the transformation of modern artistic forms through an embrace of multiple avenues of technological representation. They envisioned cyborgs in multiple media, and they sought to treat their “apparatuses” – their modes of art making – in such a way as to turn their consumers into producers. Although cyborg producers did not disappear with the conclusion of the historical avantgarde in the 1930s (indeed the opposite is the case), they appear in the 1910s and 1920s with a powerful clarity and intensity. For this reason, a brief articulation of the figure as she emerges here illuminates powerful trajectories that continue to develop in the present day. Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, c. 1920–1925. Photo Bain News Service, Publisher. Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection

Alexandra Exter, Guardian of Energy (costume design for the film Aelita by Yakov Protazanov), 1924. The J. M. Kaplan Fund, Inc. Inv.: 341.1977, Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

As Irene Gammel, Amelia Jones, and others have convincingly demonstrated, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the long-marginalised Dadaist artist, poet, and feminist icon, might ultimately be more important for modern and contemporary art than her colleague (and unrequited “love”) Marcel Duchamp – at least in terms of the critical potential of her formal and conceptual breakthroughs.8 The Baroness’ unscripted street performances – interventions into the everyday life of New York, which she rendered strange through her highly unconventional, even aggressive fashion, makeup, speech, and actions – were probably the most radical art works produced by the New York Dada artists. Accessorised with common, mass-produced objects picked up or stolen from the city’s streets and department stores, the Baroness performed an aggressive rejection of traditional role models and conventions – in particularly those that centred around gender, sexuality, and propriety in all its forms. These urban performances were fundamentally feminist in that they directly contradicted primary patriarchal demands; for example, that women should remain sexually passive and subservient to male desire and direction. And they were also primordially cyborgian in that they blended the human with the machine and in various ways undermined distinctions between genders, species, and ethnicities. The Baroness also created collages, readymades, and assemblages; and she even seems to have an important hand in the selection of Fountain (1917), one of Duchamp’s most iconic readymades.9 But her most crucial contributions remain her ephemeral cyborg performances, which so shocked and upset her male colleagues, and which have been transmitted down to the present day through a variety of different technological and non-technological sources. These materials include photographs, paintings, objects, and assemblages, as well as language and writing – the Baroness’ own poetry, as well criticism and character studies from a variety of different Modernist voices, from Ezra Pound to Djuna Barnes. And perhaps because these performances can

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only be represented as a series of absences, they appear to have had a subterranean yet powerful effect on performance art from its inceptions until the present day.

If the Baroness embodied the performative side of the cyborg producer, then Hannah Höch, the Berlin Dadaist, represented its more photo-, film-, and design-based tendencies. Höch, of course, also performed; and like the Zürich Dadaist, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, she made geometricised, marionettelike dolls, with which she occasionally acted, perhaps evoking an awareness of the ways in which gender was imprinted during childhood play. But Höch’s significance lies more in her development of an uncanny “sutured” iconography that explored multiple modes of transhuman existence in an extremely sensual and corporeally-engaged way. More than any other artist in the 1920s, Höch visualised the human body as fundamentally mutable, networked, and transformable; and she did so in a shocking and novel way, one that combined pleasure with violence and that destabilised the separation between living and dead. Developing the new “anti-art” strategy of photomontage – an avant-garde “medium,” which, like readymade or assemblage, was understood to be more collaborative and collective than traditional fine arts media like painting and sculpture –, Höch imagined and elaborated cyborgs as figures that not only blended humans with machines, but also merged races, genders, species, and age groups. Like the Baroness, Höch had a feminist project; she was dedicated to undermining the patriarchal concepts that wielded sexual difference as a means of social control and oppression. But even more than the Baroness, Höch visualised a new human free of traditional categorical constraints; and by consistently creating composite bodies in her photomontages, as well as by mixing these chimeras with additional elements appropriated from either nature or culture, she rendered mutation, heterogeneity, and the disruption of difference visible and comprehensible to her audiences. For Benjamin, the paradigmatic “author as producer” was male: Sergei Tretyakov, the avant-garde writer, poet, playwright, journalist, and communist organiser. And while a number of male artists have also embraced the role of the cyborg producer since the second decade of the 20th century, the women of the avant-garde have played a different – and perhaps much more important – part in the development of this complex formal and iconographic network of posthuman imagining. The cyborg artist was thus never necessarily only female. But by attending to the figure’s roots in art made by women in the 1910s and 1920s, a different set of concerns come to the fore – concerns that seem particularly pressing today. The cyborg artist that appears when we trace feminine lineages in art since the historical avant-garde is a complex and powerful one, a chimera that recognises her position as both subject and object of representation, as well as a creator that seeks to heighten our awareness of the various signifying media that connect artist and audience to one another and to their worlds. Finally, the cyborg producer that emerges is an anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial, and anti-racist one, an avatar opposed to all forms of fascism and totalitarianism and dedicated to the undermining of traditional differences and to the performance and construction of new forms of heterogeneity and affiliation.

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After she emerged more than a century ago, the figure of the cyborg artist remained a powerful and attractive role model to cultural producers, an ideal that shows no sign of diminishing today. Indeed, as suggested by the work of Marie Vassilieff, Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Lyubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova – who not only powerfully imagined the merging of human with machine through various forms of avant-garde painting (from Cubism to Rayonism), but also expanded the media in which they worked to include, in a number of cases, the design of fashion, costumes, theatre sets, books, textiles, wallpaper, and even the production of sound poetry –, this essay has not come close to even delineating the cyborg producer’s very beginnings. We also see the cyborg producer appear powerfully again in feminist performance art since the 1960s (think, for a moment, of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, 1964), as well as postmodern media critique since the 1970s (for example, Cindy Sherman and Carrie Mae Weems), but it would take up too much space here to mention all the important iterations.10 If I conclude with only one contemporary example of the cyborg as producer, it is not because there is a lack of compelling cases to be discovered today. Hito Steyerl, however, can be seen as one of its most important avatars at the present moment, precisely because of how powerfully and complexly her art links the human to the non-human through technological mediation. Channelling both sides of the avant-garde feminist cyborg – the performative, linguistic, and literary aspects of the Baroness, as well as the media-hacking sensibility of Hannah Höch –, Steyerl has developed a significant body of work since the late 1990s, a heterogeneous corpus that takes a productive attitude towards its audiences, while exploring the posthuman condition towards which our worlds increasingly tend.

Marie Vassilieff, Danseuse américaine (d’après les traits d’Isadora Duncan), c. 1920. Collection Claude Bernès. Photo P. Delbo. © Marie Vassilieff

Although sometimes labelled a filmmaker, Steyerl works in multiple, high- and low-tech media including sculpture, photomontage, video, installation, performance, sound, and language; indeed, her theoretical texts, wherein she expounds a critical media theory that engages with the fraught relationship between art, labour, capital, war, and technology, cannot be separated from her films, perhaps her best known works. In addition to her engagement with multiple forms of signifying media, what makes Steyerl a paradigmatic producer is the way she seeks to educate and empower her audiences. In general, her art encourages spectators to recognise the ways in which the mass media and visual technologies such as film and video (as well as surveillance systems) have affected our lives. But more than that, by tracing the movement of images as they transform real people and events into representations that can then be manipulated and controlled, Steyerl reveals our posthuman condition, the fact that we are fundamentally mutable in terms of both body and soul. As Haraway argued, the emergence of the cyborg posed fundamental political questions. A creature of both imagination and reality, it reflected the technologically-mediated world and offered hints as to how human beings might adapt themselves to exist within it – for better or for worse. On the one hand, the cyborg allowed cultural producers to imagine new forms of social existence, family life, sexuality, spirituality, economic relations, and identity. On the other hand, it reminded us that we are all

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just cogs in a larger machine. Today, Haraway suggested, we are all cyborgs irrespective of whether we accept this designation or not. And as the tradition of the cyborg producer suggests, we must all work vigilantly and intensely to decide what our technological mediation ultimately means – for ourselves, our societies, and the Earth on which we exist. Matthew Biro is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Anselm Kiefer (Phaidon Press, 2013). In addition to publishing frequently in academic journals, he has also written essays and reviews on contemporary art, film, and photography for a variety of magazines, including Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Contemporary, Art Papers, and The New Art Examiner.

Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, “Cyborgs and Space” (1960), in Chris Hables Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook (New York: Routledge, 1995), 29–33. 2 Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 3 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Twentieth Century” (1985), in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150. 4 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 169. 5 Walter Benjamin, “Author as Producer” (1934), in Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 224. 6 Benjamin, “Author as Producer,” 230. 7 Ibid., 233. 8 See Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity – A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002); and Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004). 9 Gammel, Baroness Elsa, 220–228. 10 See, for example, Julia Bryan-Wilson’s trenchant analysis of Ono’s Cut Piece, which argues that the work is an example of feminist performance art that goes far beyond a mere critique of the male gaze. Although Ono invites the audience to cut off pieces of her clothing, thus opening herself up to the threat of violence from

scissor-wielding spectators, she remains in control of the collaborative work, carefully setting the parameters of the performance, and directing camera operators to capture the audience as they interact with her. Both performer in and director of the artwork, Ono mixes multiple media (performance, photography, film, and mass-produced printed matter) to critique the dominant history of modern art in which male artists often demonstrated their artistic merit through their representation – or misrepresentation – of female bodies. In addition, however, through her ruined clothing and partial nudity – which evoke not only the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Japan when the artist was a child, but also contemporaneous fighting in Vietnam –, Ono also condemns the development of warfare in the 20th century, which came more and more to target civilian populations (and thus many more women and children). What makes Ono a paradigmatic cyborg producer is her creative destruction of multiple binaries – self/other, performer/audience, uniqueness/mass-reproduction, past/ future, and (though her own creative persona) East and West – as well as her fundamentally left-wing politics. Using technological means to inveigh against the networked world’s deleterious effects, Ono restages the past, inviting her mid-1960s audiences to imagine a better future. See Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” Oxford Art Journal, 26(1), 2003, 99–123.

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Marianne Brandt

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Marianne Brandt

Florence Henri

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Alexandra Exter

Edison’s Talking Doll

Marie Vassilieff

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Marie Vassilieff

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Alexandra Exter

Karla Grosch

Sophie Taeuber-Arp

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13, 14

Regina Cassolo Bracchi

Giannina Censi

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16, 17

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

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Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt

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Anna Coleman Ladd

Hannah Höch

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23, 24

Anu Põder

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Rebecca Horn

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Liliane Lijn

Louise Nevelson

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28–31

Kiki Kogelnik

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Kiki Kogelnik

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Marianne Brandt, Stilleben mit Bauhausstoff, Kugeln und Wellpappe (Selbstportrait). Bauhaus Dessau, 1928–1929. Black-and-white photograph, 17.7 × 23.8 cm. Courtesy Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (I 11949 F) / © (Brandt, Marianne [geb. Liebe]) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / © (Gropius, Walter) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / Image by Google 2 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 3 Marianne Brandt, Selbstporträt mit Schmuck zum Metallischen Fest im Bauhaus Dessau, 1929. Black-and-white photograph, 23.6 × 17.7 cm. Courtesy Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (I 11952 F) / © (Brandt, Marianne [geb. Liebe]) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / Image by Google 4 Florence Henri, Autoportrait, 1928. Photographic gelatin silver print. Courtesy Archives Florence Henri © Martini & Ronchetti 5 Alexandra Exter, Costume design for Aelita for the movie Aelita, the Queen of Mars and the play Aelita, staged by Yakov Protazanov. Mezhrabprom-Rus’ Film Company, USSR, Moscow, 1924. Ink, gouache, pencil on paper, 69.3 × 46 cm. © St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music. Gift of International Charitable Fund “Constantinovsky.” Collection of Nina and Nikita Lobanov-Rostovsky 6 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 7 Marie Vassilieff, Costume Arlequine pour le Bal banal, 1924. Gelatin silver print, 22 × 17 cm. Photo P. Delbo. Collection Claude Bernès. © Marie Vassilieff 8 Marie Vassilieff, Mask and doll portrait, c. 1928. Gelatin silver print, 23.8 × 17.8 cm. Photo Nicolas Brasseur. Private Collection. © Marie Vassilieff 9 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 10 Glastanz, by Oskar Schlemmer, 1929. Black-and-white photograph, 17.4 × 11.4 cm. Photo Robert Binnemann. Courtesy BauhausArchiv, Berlin 11 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

Giannina Censi, Danza aerofuturista, 1931. Black-and-white photograph, 24 × 18 cm. Foto Santacroce, Milano, 1931. Courtesy Mart, Archivio del ‘900, Fondo Censi 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 Regina Cassolo Bracchi, L’amante dell’aviatore, 1935. Aluminium, 60 × 48.8 × 9.5 cm. Photo © Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia - DSL Studio. Museo Regina Cassolo, Castello Sangiuliani - Comune di Mede. Courtesy GAMeC - Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven Working as a Model, December 1915. Photograph, gelatin silver print, 32.34 × 26. Photo Bettmann via Getty Images Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, photographed by Charles Sheeler, 1920. Gelatin silver print, 20.32 × 15.24 cm. Photo Ben Blackwell. The Bluff Collection Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg, God, photographed by Morton Schamberg, c. 1917. Gelatin silver print, 24.1 × 19.2 cm. Photo Sepia Times via Getty Images Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, Maskenfigur “Toboggan Frau”, 1924 (replica 2005–2006). Linen, wires, 188 × 135 × 107 cm. Photo Maria Thrun. Collection Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, Maskenfigur “Bertchen” A (schwarz), 1924 (replica 2005–2006). Textile material, quilted, 163 × 115 × 110 cm. Photo Joachim Hiltmann. Collection Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Anna Coleman Ladd, Painted metal facial prosthesis, 1917–1920. Galvanised copper, glass spectacles, 10 × 15.5 × 12 cm. Collection The British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons. © BAPRAS 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 Photographs documenting Anna Coleman Ladd’s creation of cosmetic masks to be worn 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

23 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 24 Anu Põder, Composition with a Male Head, 1984. Textile, wire net, plastic, 20 × 28 × 58 cm. Photo Hedi Jaansoo. Collection Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn / Eesti Kunstimuuseum. Courtesy Maarja Kask. © Anu Põder 25 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 26 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 27 Louise Nevelson, Homage to the Universe, 1968. Black painted wood, 284.5 × 862.5 × 30.5 cm. Courtesy Gió Marconi, Milan. © SIAE 28 Top left: Kiki Kogelnik, Artificial Man in Four Parts 1, 1967. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 126.5 × 177 cm. Collection and courtesy Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. © 1967 Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. All rights reserved 29 Bottom left: Kiki Kogelnik, Artificial Man in Four Parts 2, 1967. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 126.5 × 177 cm. Collection and courtesy Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. © 1967 Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. All rights reserved 30 Top right: Kiki Kogelnik, Artificial Man in Four Parts 3, 1967. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 126.5 × 177 cm. Collection and courtesy Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. © 1967 Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. All rights reserved 31 Bottom right: Kiki Kogelnik, Artificial Man in Four Parts 4, 1967. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 126.5 × 177 cm. Collection and courtesy Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. © 1967 Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. All rights reserved 32 Kiki Kogelnik, Broken Robots, 1966. India ink, ink and color pencil on paper, 59 × 74 cm. Kiki Collection and courtesy Kogelnik Foundation. © 1966 Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. All rights reserved 33 Kiki Kogelnik, Liquid Injection Thrust, 1965, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 139.5 × 93.5 cm. Collection and courtesy Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. © 1965 Kiki Kogelnik Foundation. All rights reserved

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ARTISTS’ BIO GRAPHIES

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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. Though not as well-known as her household objects, these works marked the beginning of a visual practice that the artist pursued for at least a decade, and which remained unseen for the next thirty years. Collages and photos offer an invaluable key to understanding Brandt’s artistic sensibility: the former as fragmentary visions, the latter as clear-eyed chronicles of private life, offering a key perspective on various aspects of modern German life. 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 newspapers and magazine cuttings to create a blend of black-and-white, sepia, and colour images. Whether they celebrate or criticise modernity, highlight certain facets or simply describe social mores, these collages all feature female figures that show the artist’s attitude towards the changing role of women, while depicting the key traits of the German feminist movement known as Neue Frau (New Woman). The naked, crossed legs at the centre of Pariser Impressiones (1926), or the provocative gaze of the pipe-smoking woman in Helfen sie mit! (Die Frauenbewegte) (1926) present a female figure who seems to be right at the centre of all the great modern revolutions. In a group of photos showing Brandt in her

studio, her image reflected by the objects she has designed, the artist shows 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

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REGINA CASSOLO BRACCHI 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. Like other members of the movement, the artist had a general fascination with industrial techniques and materials; 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 Aerosensibilità (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, bearing a dreamy, deeply absorbed

expression. Her body is what Regina described as a “space box,” and though her image is inscribed on two sharp-edged, superimposed sheets of aluminium, it houses a delicate energy that is clearly spiritual in nature, much more psychological than physical. In 1948, after about a decade of exhibiting alongside Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Benedetta, 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. Her Strutture, as Regina called all her works from this period, were assemblages of geometric shapes made from acrylic glass, nylon, cellulose acetate, and wire, and resemble scale models of strange alien landscapes. While the industrial materials preserve a continuity with the technological imagery of Futurism, the transparent surfaces create new visual effects that feel quite contemplative. Especially in the last few years of her career, Regina’s work shows how her avant-garde temperament is grounded in mental resolve; flexible and versatile, it has a spiritual shading that at times becomes cosmic in scope. – SM

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GIANNINA CENSI 1913, Milan, Italy – 1995, Voghera, Italy In July 1917, on the front page of the well-known journal L’Italia futurista, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti presented the Italian avant-garde’s new manifesto on dance, proclaiming the urgent need to introduce jarring, asymmetrical, dynamic, awkward movements inspired by those of machines. Although this ushered in a series of investigations that would yield, among other things, the famous Danza dell’elica

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(1924), Futurism achieved its most fulfilling results in the field only in the 1930s, thanks to the pioneering spirit of seventeen-year-old Giannina Censi. Censi was not only the first to perform a new kind of “aero-aesthetic” choreography, but as a trained ballerina, was capable of tying to previous traditions. As Marinetti’s manifesto had suggested, 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), for instance, 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, captured in an extensive series of photographs that seem to express the emotion of flight, or the athletic ideal upheld by the Futurists. In more radical experiments called Tereodanze, Giannina 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

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ANNA COLEMAN LADD 1878, Bryn Mawr, USA – 1939, Santa Barbara, USA When the American artist Anna Coleman Ladd returned in 1917 to Paris, where she had grown up in the late 19th century, France had been devastated by the Great War. Although it would be counted among the victors the following year, the social and economic repercussions the nation was struggling with were grievous. Ladd herself, who at the time of her move was well known in upper-crust American circles as a Neoclassical sculptor, enlisted as a Red Cross volunteer. As soon as she reached Paris, she saw the urgency of providing care to veterans – who were coming back from the front not only with injuries, amputations, and permanent disabilities, but often seriously disfigured. Having heard of a London workshop that

was trying to address this problem by creating facial prostheses for British soldiers, Coleman Ladd persuaded the Red Cross to set up a similar department in France, and, in the year she devoted to the project, produced about a hundred masks for veterans. This was an astonishing number, considering that each was made by hand, with the aid of just four people, and took about a month’s work. After studying the mutilation left by scarring, Ladd would analyse the patient’s features, then work from pre-war photos to mould an initial plaster cast. This was then used to make a latex and copper or silver mask, which was painted with oils, in several sittings, and finished off with details such as glasses, whiskers, or slight flaws that added realism to the new face. The studio not only achieved much better aesthetic and practical results than its counterpart in England, but 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.

of a nursery rhyme like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or “Hickory Dickory Dock,” recited by one of eighteen different workers at the Edison Company. Journalists were enthusiastic, rhapsodising over Edison’s invention and turning it into an instant hit, but this success was shortlived. Within a month, many dolls had been returned to the manufacturer because they were considered defective, or in any case, highly unpleasant to most ears. The voices, recorded in conditions that were less than ideal, were distorted even more by the metal body, becoming shrill, almost demonic shrieks. Rather than toys, the dolls seem like definitive examples of the eerie automatons that are a theme of the modern era, inspiring both fascination and repulsion. After several attempts to improve the product and great reluctance to admit failure, Edison himself came to describe his creations as “little monsters” and pulled them from shelves, scrapping those left unsold. –SM (p. 508)

In contrast to the bizarre and provocative uses that avant-garde artists invented for them at the time, Anna Coleman Ladd employed masks as a precious tool, showing that science and art could collaborate with a shared objective: aiding and repairing the body of the modern individual. – SM

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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 simple cylinder, wrapped in tinfoil, that could be turned with a crank to record and play back − for the first time in history − snippets of speech. Though the device was still rudimentary and the sound quality was poor, the technology of this talking machine lent itself to all kinds of applications, and in just a few years it had not only become a valuable tool, but a form of entertainment. Driven by a blind faith in progress and guessing the impact his gadgets could have on the new mass culture, Edison initially distributed his invention in settings like fairs and carnivals, then got the idea of inserting a miniature phonograph into toys to make them talk. He thus founded the Edison Phonograph Toy Manufacturing Company in 1887, marketing the first lot of 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 and a metal body. The chest, which is perforated to let the sound through, houses a removeable phonograph. Each cylinder holds a one-of-a-kind recording

ALEXANDRA EXTER 1882, Białystok, Russian Empire (present-day Poland) – 1949, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France It is hard to say whether Alexandra Exter’s artistic sensibility is closer to Constructivism, Cubism, or Futurism: her works draw on all three aesthetics interchangeably, offering a perfect fusion based on their shared fascination with technology. After studying in Kiev and travelling widely between Moscow, Paris, and Rome, Exter began painting geometric figures that broke with the monumental, static quality favoured in academic painting, and took on a radical, Futurist energy. In the artist’s extensive work as a stage designer starting in the 1920s, each costume, object, or detail is conceived as a mobile element developed in perfect continuity with the set, transporting the story into fanciful, utopian dreamworlds, even for classic plays such as Othello or Romeo and Juliet. Not coincidentally, in 1924, Exter worked on her first major film project, designing the costumes and sets for the first big-budget Soviet sci-fi movie: Aelita. Based on the Aleksey Tolstoy novel of 1922 and directed by Yakov Alexandrovich Protazanov, the film seems to foreshadow the fascination with technology that three years later, in 1927, would make Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis so famous. The silent picture tells the story of a Russian engineer who travels to a dystopian Mars and falls in love with its queen, the title character; when he realises she is a tyrant, however, he rebels against her. Both in her sketches and in the film itself, Alexandra Exter created a setting true to the sci-fi spirit of the novel, aesthetically

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linking the alien world to the industrial one. The Martians are distinguished from humans by a series of 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 is particularly magnificent, sporting a crown of thin spoking rods and a long petroleum-green dress that swirls dizzyingly around her half-naked body, turning into a sort of bolted bustier. She is a stern, striking amazon that Exter imbues with power and danger by dressing her in – or making her resemble – technology. – SM

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E L S A V O N F R E Y TA G L O R I N G H OV E N 1874, Swinemünde (Świnoujście), German Empire (present-day Poland) – 1927, Paris, France Even to Greenwich Villagers accustomed to thinking of their New York neighbourhood as a magnet for outrageous bohemians, Elsa Plötz, better known as Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, must have seemed like madness incarnate. Having moved to America in the early 1910s after many romantic adventures and peregrinations between Berlin, Italy, and Canada, the Baroness earned her title by marrying the heir to an impoverished German family of nobles. Lacking all financial support, she was forced to pose for young artists, perform as a soubrette in Village clubs, and indulge in unbridled kleptomania. The photos that capture these moments – and her time in New York overall – show a middle-aged woman, sometimes halfnaked, striking strange poses, her body adorned with objects that were stolen or found in the garbage. In one picture, for instance, the Baroness is in a messy apartment with her arms stretched back as if about to leap, wearing a feathered helmet and a striped leotard that seems to wrap her belly in cogwheels. 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. Although her personality overshadowed her work, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven wrote a series of poems published in The Little Review and created sculptural objects similar to the readymades of her beloved friend Marcel Duchamp, earning her the moniker “Mother of Dada.” Starting in 1917 – and perhaps until she returned to Europe in 1926 – the Baroness made strange assemblages from the same kinds of materials she usually donned; one of them portrays Duchamp himself as a wine glass with a marvellous

bouquet of feathers blossoming from it. This Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1920) – like the tangle of pipes irreverently titled God (c. 1917), made with Dada artist Morton Livingston Schamberg – has the same wryly sensual, solemn air as the Baroness’ decorations of her own body, and likewise becomes the simulacrum of a complex, contradictory, shapeshifting modern identity. – SM

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FLORENCE HENRI 1893, New York City, USA – 1982, Compiègne, France This artist is also part of The Witch’s Cradle. To read the artist biography, see p. 116.

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KA R LA G RO S C H 1904, Weimar, Germany – 1933, Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine (present-day Israel) Despite gaps in what is known about her life, research into the German dancer and athlete Karla Grosch suggests an artist perfectly attuned to the cultural ferment of the Weimar Republic, especially the creative investigations spearheaded by the Bauhaus. Having studied under the famous Gret Palucca, with a training grounded in the principles of Expressionist dance, Grosch adopted a rhythmic, dynamic style based on dramatic movements and geometric poses, applying it at the Dessau school where she taught gymnastics for several years after 1928. The few photos that document her approach were taken by the painter and photographer T. Lux Feininger, and are from 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 sheetmetal 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 over her black leotard. A transparent bubble encloses her head, her hands brandish glass clubs, and the dazzling light behind her glints off the material, creating the sense of a strange, divine being, half-human and half-robot. In perfect Futurist style, and showing the fascination with technology that Schlemmer shared with the European avant-gardes, 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. Yet the positive effects of this posthuman evolution do not seem to have been lasting, at least not for the dancer. In 1933, shortly after leaving the Bauhaus and moving to Tel Aviv, Karla Grosch suffered a heart attack while swimming in the sea and died at the age of just twenty-nine. – SM

HANNAH HÖCH 1889, Gotha, Germany – 1978, Berlin, Germany One of Hannah Höch’s earliest and most famous photo collages, Das schöne Mädchen (1920), shows the deconstructed image of a young woman: seated at the centre of a chaotic composition of newspaper clippings, with a lightbulb in place of her head and a series of mechanical objects around her, she is topped by a voluminous female hairdo, wildly out of proportion. Disjointed by this montage of human and technological features, her body seems hybrid, robotic, even bestial, in keeping with the spirit of Dada. And indeed, at the time that this work was made, Höch was the only official female member of the Berlin group. Though her male associates – starting with her partner, Raoul Hausmann – downplayed the importance of her work, she took an innovative, ambiguously feminist approach to the movement’s visual language. The photomontages she made up into the 1930s, when the Nazis dubbed them “degenerate,” brim with grotesque, bizarre characters; even when they seem powerful, like the technological girl in Das schöne Mädchen, they are the victims of fragmentation. In Deutsches Mädchen (1930) – a collage where two disproportionately small eyes and a dark fringe are pasted over a young woman’s delicate features –, the monstrously deformed female figure 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 her images from magazines that celebrated it, she presents an instable identity that more closely reflects the complexities of modern women, the better to combat the stereotypes plaguing them. The same critical stance can also be seen in her collages from the series Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (1924–1930). Combining pictures of fashionable bodies with imagery from various non-European traditions, the artist creates hybrid figures that seem to challenge the perceived cultural supremacy of colonial powers. In Der heilige Berg (1927) – a collage in which two mountain climbers have large Asian sculptures where their heads should be –, for instance, Höch

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shows that her grotesque figures are not mere whimsy, but offer an original, perhaps cynical, view of progress. –SM

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REBECCA HORN 1944, Michelstadt, Germany. Lives in Odenwald, Germany “Art is anarchy for me,” says Rebecca Horn, an artist who refuses confinement, constantly testing the limits of the body, objects, architecture, and artistic media. In the early 1970s, 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, including Der Eintänzer (1978), La Ferdinanda: Sonate für eine MediciVilla (1981), and Buster’s Bedroom (1990), starring the Canadian actor Donald Sutherland. Notable kinetic sculptures include The Feathered Prison Fan (1978), an inhabitable cocoon fan of feathers; Concert for Anarchy (1990), a piano hanging upside down from the ceiling that intermittently expels its own keys; and Tower of the Nameless (1994), an installation of mechanically playing violins. In all her works, a tension resides at the edges of the body and in the space just before the moment of touch. In 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. Kiss of the Rhinoceros was included in the 1989 show Magiciens de la Terre, held in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and La Grande Halle de La Villette, an exhibition widely considered to be the first global exhibition of contemporary art. 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

( p p . 5 1 8 –5 1 9 )

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K I K I KO G E L N I K

LILIANE LIJN

1935, Graz, Austria – 1997, Vienna, Austria

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

Even six decades after its inception, Pop Art instantly conjures images of post-war consumer culture in the public imagination: outsized depictions of off-the-shelf merchandise, movie stars, comic book illustrations. A few months after Kiki Kogelnik first arrived in New York City, in April of 1961, her friend Claes Oldenburg set up his exhibition-cum-storefront, The Store, where he sold crude plaster versions of everyday items available in corner shops around the Lower East Side neighbourhood; within the next half-year after The Store opened, Andy Warhol would debut his legendary Campbell’s soup can paintings. But Kogelnik, while also inspired by the implicit fantasy of multiplicity in the emerging mass culture mediascape, was as much enthralled with the utopia of Pop Art as she was at odds with it. “I’m not involved with Coca-Cola… I’m involved in the technical beauty of rockets, people flying in space, and people becoming robots,” she once said.1 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, which shaped femininity and desire. She is best known for her paintings of flattened human forms, typically constructed from cut-out images and rendered in bright overlapping colours with an X-ray effect. Inspired by 1960s-era conjecturing around the confluence of art and technology, Kogelnik 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 key parts of the optimised being – the brain, the heart, the hand, the sexual organs – the body appears generative, an agent of feminist militancy instead of gendered regulation. –MW 1

Kiki Kogelnik, quoted in “The Fashions: Kiki is Kicks,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 22, 1966, 12.

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 concepts of Surrealism, mythology, feminist thought, and language. When Lijn emerged as an artist in Paris at the end of the 1950s, technology had a reputation in the post-war Western popular imagination as a tool of cold calculation: one of knobs and flashing buttons; a fantasy of precision and order; a human creation but with no mark of the feeling body. Despite the persistence of this image, for many young artists like Lijn, new technological devices and machines – and their capacity for movement, for understanding the brain and bodily phenomena, for creating utopian worlds – inspired new formal pathways and a fresh toolbox of media and materials. In her early years, Lijn 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. Drawing from Surrealist ideas around automatic writing, cut-up techniques popularised by Beat poets, and interference patterns she observed at the Palais de la Découverte in Paris, these machines undermined the myth of the poet’s unique and subjective relationship to speech as if in cinematic time. As they whirred on, their motorised functions took control from the artist’s hands, thus forging a type of kinetic sculpture that self-reflexively considered the implications of its own status as a moving piece of art. 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 adopts an anthropomorphic approach that 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 again embraces contrasting elements, this time using the functions of tension and release characteristic of metal springs as a kinetic formal device, furthering her search of a new feminine form. – MW

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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. While drawn to rejected wood scraps for the meaning imbued in their material memory and for their innate potential for re-use, her knowledge of wood was personal, too. Prior to and following Nevelson’s family’s escape to Rockland, Maine from Russia at the turn of the 20th century – where the then-Tsarist Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire sanctioned untenable and violently repressive strictures on Jewish families –, her father worked as a woodcutter and lumber merchant, and later opened a junkyard. As such, her compositions of street throwaways take on a deeper tenor: they are formal constructions but are also linked to her own fabrications of her complex past. When viewed from the front, Nevelson’s 1968 sculpture Homage to the Universe embodies many of the qualities of abstract paintings made throughout the 1950s, the decade she first began constructing her signature wooden stacked-grid wall reliefs. Echoing Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting’s fascination with colossal scale, the use of non-traditional materials, and experimentation with bold formal gestures, her innovative sculpture creates a richly sensuous environment, engulfing viewers in a boundless space of shadow, depth, mystery, and complexity. 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 a number of her large-scale wall works with the name “Homage,” reflecting social, religious, and personal issues, including the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust in her famous sculptures Homage to 6,000,000 I and II (both 1964). In some of these works, she pays homage to broader concepts – the moon, the world. With

Homage to the Universe, this tribute is used to celestial effect, expressing awe at the depth and endlessness of the universe. – MW

abstracted forms read interchangeably as parts of instruments, limbs, or architectural tubing – a doppelgänger of a human, registering the body’s vulnerability and malleability. – MW

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ANU PÕDER (p. 513)

1947, Kanepi, Estonia – 2013, Tallinn, Estonia When the sculptor Anu Põder began her education at Tartu Art College in Sovietoccupied Estonia in 1970, the visual banalities of Socialist Realism – monuments glorifying Lenin, solid bronze busts of politicians, and affectedly optimistic paintings lauding the successes of endeavours like collective farming – dominated contemporary artmaking. But in Põder’s radically reconceptualised form of sculpture, the brutal permanence of bronze gives way to the fleeting nature of textiles, wood, burlap, wax, soap, glue, and plaster, the propagandist power of the faces of harsh leaders to fragmented and sensual bodies, and State-sanctioned ideology to evocative relationships between the personal and the political. With a life spanning one of the most rich and complex periods in 20thcentury Eastern Europe, from the 1940s Soviet reoccupation of Estonia to the nation’s reclamation of sovereignty in 1988 and eventual independence in 1991, Põder’s oeuvre responds to dramatic cultural change, especially in the context of women’s lives, and desires, and attendant expectations for their responsibilities and roles as mothers, caretakers, and idealised figures in a rapidly changing society. During the 1980s and 1990s, Põder 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. The early sculpture 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 later sculptures like With a Trombone from the Gill of Lasnamäe (Pink Bird) (1988), the body is pushed further into the realm of the humanmachine. Fashioned again in medicinal pink fragments of plastic to stand in for skin,

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, dance took on a new role within the avant-garde and Lavinia Schulz was a key example of a new type of dancer. 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 across the performance space, with both arms thrusting or grasping… occasionally punctuated by pauses.” 1 This dramatic technique was significantly indebted to the Expressionist dancer and choreographer Mary Wigman, who pioneered an often improvisational and tempestuous style of bodily movement independent of narrative scenarios. Considered an accessible form of expression for women at the time, dance had fast become a component in the repertoire for modern living. Together, Schulz and Holdt created a series of fantastical and futuristic costumes, which when worn on the Hamburg stage, transformed the dancers into a type of hybrid artwork synthesising dance, fashion, and music. Reminiscent of the costumes made at the Bauhaus by Oskar Schlemmer and Xanti Schawinsky in the 1920s, these garments often bore strange reptilian or robotic heads and eccentric names, but in contrast to the couple’s Bauhaus counterparts, their costumes were characterised to a great extent by forms drawn from nature and the animal world. Constructed out of materials like wood, leather, rope, metal, and cardboard, works such as the insect-like Maskenfigur “Toboggan Mann” (1924) don outlandish split red and multicoloured patterned suits, topped by large masks shaped like a bug’s head; the blobby, cartoonish Tanzmaske “Technik” (1924), has googly eyes that pop from its triangular face. While many wearable objects from this era do not survive today, twenty of Schulz and Holdt’s creations entered the collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg in 1924, shortly after Schulz, tragically driven by financial ruin, shot her

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husband and then herself. Rediscovered by the museum in their original boxes in the 1980s, the costumes, as well as a series of studio photographs taken by Minya DiézDührkoop in 1924 of costumed, masked dancers wearing the garments, reveal Schulz’s work to be a significant testimony to the fantastic creativity and artistry of Weimar-era dance culture. – MW

she would die from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of fifty-three. –MK

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

Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 215–216.

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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 and consequential Modernist artist 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. A true polymath, Taeuber-Arp worked across painting, sculpture, textile design, dance, puppetry, illustration, interior design, and architecture. She 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, TaeuberArp 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, Taeuber-Arp began making textile works and geometric non-representational 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. In Zürich, she joined a circle of artists that included Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, and Hugo Ball. 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 puppets. In 1926, Taeuber-Arp moved to France, splitting time between Strasbourg and Paris. Here, she was a member of the non-figurative artist groups Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création and founded and edited the Constructivist review magazine Plastique. In 1940, Taeuber-Arp left Paris in advance of the Nazi occupation and began an artist commune with Sonia Delaunay, Susi Gerson, and others in Grasse, France. In 1942, she returned to Switzerland, where

This artist is also part of A Leaf a Gourd a Shell a Net a Bag a Sling a Sack a Bottle a Pot a Box a Container; see p. 375.

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

Among the few pictures we have of the artist Marie Vassilieff, one in particular 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, the pose makes Vassilieff look like a robot, dramatically 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 – which became a gathering place for all the leading figures on the Parisian scene, and was soon dubbed the “Académie Vassilieff” – the artist began making a series of handcrafted marionettes. Unlike the Dada puppets being made around the same time by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Emmy Hennings, or Hannah Höch, these dolls served no theatrical purpose, and instead expressed the general avant-garde fascination with dummies as sculptural objects, bizarre replicas of the human body. Vassilieff produced just over a hundred of them, and although they are all crafted in a similar way, 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 unquestionably inspired by the growing fascination with exoticism then common among the intellectuals of colonial France; the other, more numerous group of portraits de poupées are full-body manikins that use a few carefully chosen details to create caricatures of the many figures who gravitated around the Académie. Though there are now only a few surviving examples of either kind, a large number of photographs by Pierre Delbo still allow us to admire them. Delbo’s pictures present the dolls as if they were the actual celebrities they depict, letting us easily pick out figures like Le Corbusier, Josephine Baker, or Jean Cocteau, and offering a precious, whimsical record of the Parisian community’s social and intellectual life. – SM

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

1978, Hamilton, Canada Lives in Paris, France

Paris-based Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga draws from her training in anthropology to engage in a myriad of subjects such as marginalised histories and the global impact of imperialism. In her research-based practice, which spans film, sculpture, performance, and installation, both the anti-colonial struggle and attention to systems of power are signalled through a combination of conceptual, architectural, and formal strategies. The artist’s work has been described as mixing the past, the present, and the future as a means to open a vision of possibility from within the fractured world. In recent projects such as Plot (2020), a site-specific installation made for Munich’s Haus der Kunst, Kiwanga bridges archival research and botany with spatial interventions. In the piece, three large-scale, semitransparent paintings on fabric were hung throughout the museum’s central hall in gradients of green, orange, blue, and violet, all of which evoke colours found in the neighbouring Englischer Garten. Dissecting the monumental barriers of the built environment while referencing local idyllic spaces, the curtains also function as containers for hybrid metal sculptures, inflatable volumes, and living plants. Referencing 19th-century Wardian cases – glass containers used to import foreign plants to Europe over long distances –, the sculptures complexify the installation, pointing to the ways in which architecture and nature have been manipulated throughout history to serve human desires and ideology. In other works, like Dune (2021), Kiwanga makes art from another organic ingredient of human exploitation: sand used for fracking. Creating an installation with sand from southern Texas, a product used in the extraction of oil and gas from shale rock, Dune suggests how organic materials can be used to detrimental effect on both nature and on people. A new installation for The Milk of Dreams fuses spatial, material, and conceptual concerns of these past projects. In it, Kiwanga creates an environment with a desert sunset palette, comprising large semitransparent paintings on fabric with a series of glass sculptures containing sand. Once again referencing glass Wardian cases and the process of fracking, Kiwanga imagines sand as a political material – variously symbolic as a harmful product of the oil industry, the raw material for glass, and a reminder of an increasingly arid planet. – MW

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Kapwani Kiwanga, Vivarium: Apomixis, 2020. PVC, steel, paint, 295 × 238 × 300 cm. Exhibition view, Plot, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2020. Photo Dominik Gigler. Courtesy the Artist; galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin. © Kapwani Kiwanga Next pages: 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 and Maastricht, the Netherlands

In video, performance, publication, and text, Palestinian artist Noor Abuarafeh has built a complex body of work that attests to how history is constructed, documented, and interpreted – especially within the context of the multifaceted cultural and political conditions in Palestine. Abuarafeh’s art captures a world that emerges from stories, memories, and archives; seen through their replications, repetitions, and gaps, she imagines poetic alternative mythologies and materials for the future. In recent years, Abuarafeh has looked at history’s manufacture through the processes of preserving objects, artworks, and images that occur in the museums and exhibitions, in some cases focusing on examples that are in motion, such as the first Palestinian Museum. 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 or never kept at all. Abuarafeh’s video Am I the Ageless Object at the Museum? (2018) is part of a long-term project that draws parallels between various repositories for preservation and display: museums, zoos, and cemeteries. Accompanied by a voiceover, viewers are led through zoos in Palestine, Switzerland, and Egypt, which, much like museums, conform to a standard in which animals are collected, caged, put on view for the public’s consumption, and subjected to an uneven power dynamic between those viewing and those being watched. Spliced with images from natural history museums, in which mammals are stuffed and bugs are pinned in glass cases, live animals are similarly made to appear like objects. While implicitly suggesting a critique of collecting practices and their associations with nationalism and colonialism, Abuarafeh also presents fantastical associations with zoos that extend beyond what is explicitly made available to the public. 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

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Noor Abuarafeh, Am I the Ageless Object at the Museum? (stills), 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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TAT S U O I K E D A

1928, Saga, Japan – 2020, Tokyo, Japan

Working in close 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 using inexpensive materials like conté, ink, pen, crayon, and watercolour, Ikeda created surreal scenes where mutated bodies morph with nearly unrecognisable architecture set on backgrounds of swirling, celestial, abstract line drawings, or empty gradients. The body Ikeda depicts is the body entering and exiting a black hole, or perhaps simply existing in a postnuclear landscape. Disembodied eyes stare out, empty and confused, and rippling orifices create the illusion of passages to another state of being. Ikeda lived for almost a century and shaped his art career around the tumults that he personally experienced as a result of US and Japanese political affairs, like being drafted as a kamikaze pilot at age fifteen (the war ended before he was sent on a suicide flight), the aftermath of atomic warfare including the US’ continued bomb testing in the Pacific, and Japan’s rapid and toxic reindustrialisation. After the war, Ikeda moved to Tokyo and enrolled in the Tama Art and Design School, where he became affiliated with avant-garde groups. He joined 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. Ikeda had many chapters to his artistic production, often working on series that spanned multiple years, and always in response or relation to current events. One such body of work is called Elliptical Space, created between 1963–1965 after the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security was signed between the US and Japan, committing the two nations to defend one another if attacked and allowing for continued US military presence in Japan. This demoralised Ikeda, and he turned his focus away from the larger social landscape to explore 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. Across Ikeda’s expansive oeuvre, the works express the artist’s unique sensibility and perception of natural order. – IA

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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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Tatsuo Ikeda, Elliptical Space 2, 1964. Ink, oil paint, watercolour on paper, 33 × 41.9 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Fergus McCaffrey, New York, Tokyo. © The Estate of Tatsuo Ikeda Tatsuo Ikeda, BRAHMAN: Chapter 2: Space Egg-2, 1976. Acrylic on paper, 39.5 × 39.5 cm. Courtesy Fergus McCaffrey, New York, Tokyo. © The Estate of Tatsuo Ikeda Tatsuo Ikeda, Untitled, 1963. Conté, pen on paper, 39 × 30.5 cm. Courtesy Fergus McCaffrey, New York, Tokyo. © The Estate of Tatsuo Ikeda

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LIV BUGGE

1974, Oslo Lives in Oslo, Norway

Since she was a child, the Norwegian artist Liv Bugge has been particularly attuned to the magic of living alongside animal life. Growing up in a family that participated in sled dog racing, she spent frequent time in a dog yard, where she describes having upwards of sixty huskies as peers and friends. Through these animals, as Bugge expounds, she learned a way of living based on collaboration, nonverbal communication, and an interest in the complexity of overlapping life cycles, all of which she tests the bounds of in her art, often in the form of moving images in combination with sculptural elements. 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. By expanding on touch, in particular, situations that might feel vulnerable or confrontational do not necessarily presuppose violence; rather, tactile sensory experience points to a direct refusal of the human as the foremost object and subject of knowledge and feeling. Bugge’s video installation PLAY (2019) presents 16mm film footage recorded with a pack of Siberian huskies, exhibited in wood boxes retrofitted with projections. Taking the form of dog houses, these wooden structures are dispersed across the floor, yet they do not determine the narrative logic of the films they display. Rather, they function independently of the dogs’ movements, which in themselves are resistant to the pre-determined confinement of the screen. 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. They bite each other and stare off from wire-fenced enclosures. They wander freely in and out of frame. Shown in undramatic and everyday fashion, the lives of these huskies suggest a different model of survival than that of aggression and strength. Instead, an unspoken collaborative relationship between humans and animals becomes the determinant of content and composition in the work. – MW

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

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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. Sime’s experimentation with reclaimed materials is consistent in his art. Accustomed to working with organic building materials like mud or straw, and stitching synthetic yarn on canvases, collaging bottle caps, plastic, animal hide, and other materials he collects from various sources over many years, the artist incorporates obsolete technological equipment as a natural extension of his materially-driven practice, utilising castaway objects that surround daily life. Sime is interested in the web of stories and human lives that inadvertently touch and shape his works. The three new compositions made for the Biennale Arte 2022 (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 input/output cords. Small three-dimensional forms extend off some of the panels. Sime’s use of colour, pattern, and grids often reference aerial landscapes – distinct swaths of field, road, and architecture seen from a plane or satellite. Natural vistas imprinted by human labour and advancement become part of the cycle that Sime’s work speaks to: earth’s resources changing form, from one hand to the next. 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 mass-produced objects that also hold many layers of information, from their physical handling to their literal metadata. Sime’s multimedia assemblages put human refuse into macro view, but do so through immensely time-consuming, skilled handcraft. The artist does not force an environmental agenda, but shares his sincere fascination with the interweavings of natural and synthetic production and materials. In doing so, 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

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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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This page and p. 544: TIGHTROPE: ECHO!?, 2020 (details) Right page: Elias Sime, TIGHTROPE: ECHO!?, 2020. Reclaimed electrical wire and components, 365.8 × 320 × 3.2 cm. Photo Phoebe d’Heurle. Courtesy the Artist; James Cohan, New York. © Elias Sime

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M E D I TAT I O N O N T H E S E C O N D C R E AT I O N Achille Mbembe

What does human nature consist in and, beyond it, what is life? What makes us moral beings? What is our destiny on Earth? For a very long time, only theologians, metaphysicians, and philosophers of existence seemed to concern themselves with such questions. Odd as it may seem, today they are back, including and especially among scientists. The meditation on how life ends has only increased in intensity in the context of the Coronavirus lockdowns and the ever-rising death toll. But whereas in the past it was a matter of determining whether the human was above all body or mind, today the debate is about whether it is matter and matter alone, or if, in the end, it is merely a sum of physical and chemical processes. The discussion is also about what the futures of life can be in the age of extremes, and the conditions under which life ends. Body, matter, and life are three very distinct concepts. One need not embrace Christianity to understand that, in every human body, in its organic unity, there is something that is not solely matter. To this something, several names have been given by different cultures and in different eras. But whatever the cultural differences, the truth of the human body will have been to resist any reductionism. The same is true of what could be called the body of the Earth, and even its flesh. The body of the Earth is recognizable in its profusion. Typical of this is the viral eruption that we are currently experiencing on a planetary scale.

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In the eyes of many, this virus is a demonstration of nature’s virtually infinite power. They see in it an event of cosmic portent, a harbinger of disasters to come. For others, it is the logical outcome of the project of a Godless world, which they accuse modernity of having initiated. For them, this world, supposedly free but in actuality left to its own devices and with no recourse, has done nothing but subjugate humans under the constraint of a nature that is now converted into an arbitrary power. In fact, God’s absence is hardly what characterizes today’s world. Neither is God’s virulent and vengeful presence, in the form of the violence of a virus or other natural calamities, the distinctive feature of our times. The hallmark of the beginning of the 21st century is the swing into animism. Coupled with technological escalation, the transformations of capitalism have led to a twofold excess: an excess of pneuma (breath) and an excess of artifacts, the transformation of artifacts into pneuma (in the theological sense of the term). Nothing translates this excess better than the techno-digital universe that has become the double of our world, the objectal embodiment of the pneuma. The distinctive characteristic of contemporary humanity is to constantly traverse screens and be immersed in image machines that are at the same time dream machines. Most of these images are animated. They produce all kinds of illusions and fantasies, starting with the fantasy of self-generation. But above all they enable new forms of presence and circulation, incarnation, reincarnation, and even resurrection. Not only has technology become theology, it has become eschatology. In this universe, it is not only possible to split oneself into two or to exist in more than one place at a time, and in more than one body or in more than one flesh. In fact, it is also possible to have doubles, i.e., other selves, a cross between the person’s own body and the image of the person’s body on the screen. Moreover, traversing screens has become the primary activity of contemporary humanity. It authorizes us to exit bodily boundaries and inaugurates the plunge into all sorts of parallel worlds, including the beyond, without a safety net. In being transported to the other side of the screen, humanity can be present to itself while simultaneously keeping a distance from itself. Contemporary animism is, moreover, the result of a vast reconfiguration of the human and its relationship with the living. The era of the second creation has thus begun. It is now a matter of technologically capturing the energy of the living and downloading it into the human, in a process that calls to mind the first creation. This time, however, the project is to transfer all the attributes of the living into organo-artificial components endowed essentially with the characteristics of the human person. These components are called upon to operate as human doubles. While in the past animism was considered a relic of the obscurantism of so-called primitive societies, now it is compatible with artificial intelligence, supercomputers, nanorobots, artificial neurons, RFID chips, and telepathic brains. This second creation, however, is basically profane. It proceeds via a threefold process of decorporation, recorporation, and transcorporation that instrumentalizes the human body in an attempt to turn it into a vehicle of hybridization and symbiosis. This threefold process is sacramental. It is the cornerstone of the new technological religions. It appropriates the fundamental categories of the Christian mystery, the better to destabilize them, beginning with creation itself, the incarnation, the transfiguration, the resurrection, the ascension, and even the Eucharist (this is my body).

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With the cybernetization of the world, both the human and the divine are downloaded into a multitude of tech objects, interactive screens, and physical machines. These objects have become genuine crucibles in which visions and beliefs, the contemporary metamorphoses of faith, are forged. From this standpoint, contemporary technological religions are expressions of animism. But they also differ from it inasmuch as they are governed by the principle of artifice, whereas ancestral animism was governed by that of vital force. Indeed, in ancestral animism, neither body nor life existed without air, without water, and without a common ground. In African precolonial systems of thought, for instance, life and body, and consequently the human, were fundamentally open to air and to breath, to water and to fire, to dust and to wind, to trees and to their vegetation, to animals and to the nocturnal world. Everything was alive, at the intersection of languages. This essential porosity was what made for its essential fragility. It was thought that the human adventure on Earth was played out in the reality of air and breath. This could only last if a place was made for the regeneration of vital cycles. Life consisted in assembling together absolutely everything. It was a matter of composition and not excessiveness. As the birthplace of humanity, Africa has perhaps experienced more catastrophic forces than other parts of the globe. It has learned from this that catastrophe is not an event that happens once and for all, and then goes away after having accomplished its gruesome work, leaving a world of ruins in its wake. For many peoples, it has been a never-ending process, which accumulates and sediments. Under these conditions, opening channels for a more breathable world could be the foundation of a new ethic in the viral age. For the viral age is the corollary of the Anthropocene, the irreversible transformation of environments and the expansion of a new form of colonialism: techno-molecular colonialism. The age of brutalism – that is, of forced entry – it is an age in which dream machines and catastrophic forces will become increasingly visible actors of history. The air we breathe will be more and more laden with dust, toxic gases, substances and waste, particles and granulations – in short, with all kinds of emanations. Instead of exiting the body thanks to immersive visualization technologies, the point will then be to return to it, especially through the organs that are most exposed to asphyxiation and suffocation. To return to the body is also to come back to earth, understood not as a land, but as an event that, in the end, fundamentally defies the boundaries of States. Understood in this way, the Earth belongs to all its inhabitants, without distinction of race, origin, ethnicity, religion, or even species. It pays no attention to the blind individual or to the naked singularity. It reminds us how much each body, human or otherwise, however singular it may be, bears on and in itself, in its essential porosity, the marks not of the diaphanous universal, but of commonality and incalculability.

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Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) and Researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER). Winner of the Ernst Bloch Prize in 2018, he is the author of Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (2010), Critique de la raison nègre (2013), Politiques de l’enimitié (2016), and Brutalisme (2020), all published by La Découverte. His works have been translated in thirteen languages, including On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001), Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press, 2017), Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019), and Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (Columbia University Press, 2021).

“Meditation on the Second Creation” is reprinted from e-flux journal, 114, 2020 (www.e-flux.com/journal/114/364960/ meditation-on-the-second-creation). Reprinted by permission of the publisher and author. Copyright © 2020 e-flux and the author.

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NOVEL CORONA: POSTHUMAN VIRUS N. Katherine Hayles 17 April 2020

The novel Coronavirus is posthuman in at least two senses. First, and most obviously, because it is oblivious to human intentions, desires, and motives. In the US, this has led to the spectacle, refreshing despite the virus’ appalling toll The second sense is more technical, although not on human lives, of politicians unable to spin difficult to grasp. In evolutionary terms, humans “alternative facts” beyond a certain point – the and viruses have adopted diametrically opposed point marked by bodies piling up in morgues. strategies. Humans have achieved dominance As many have observed, the virus does not within their evolutionary niche by evolving toward distinguish between Democrats and Republicans, increased cognitive complexity, developing liberals and conservatives, Christians and Jews, language with associated changes in brain Evangelicals and Muslims. In a country as deeply and body, evolving elaborate social strucpartisan as the US, this has opened new possibilities tures, and, in very recent human history, for dialogue. Canny governors, for example Gavin augmenting their capacities with advanced Newsom of California, are realizing the advantages of technical devices, including artificial putting policies ahead of politics, abstaining from criticism intelligence. Viruses, by contrast, have of Donald Trump even when deserved. The US Congress evolved toward increased simplicity. has come together with remarkable speed to pass stimulus Viruses replicate by hijacking a cell’s legislation, and even Trump has had to tone down his early machinery and using it to proliferate, claims of the virus as a “Democratic hoax” into a more factwhich allows them to have a much based approach (although never without some propaganda). smaller genome than the cell itself, a characteristic favoring rapid replication.

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In broad scope, then, these two strategies appear completely opposed. However, recent research is painting a more complex picture. As Annu Dahiya argues, the idea that viruses cannot replicate without cells (because they use the cell’s machinery to turn out copies of themselves) is now being questioned.1 She recounts a series of experiments by Sol Spiegelman’s lab at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign in the early 1970s that show this with elegant simplicity. After demonstrating that viral RNA could indeed self-replicate, albeit in vitro rather than in vivo, Spiegelman combined in a test tube viral Qß phage RNA, the enzyme RNA replicase and salts. After viral replication, he then diluted the solution multiple times by discarding most of the test medium and adding more medium enriched with RNA replicase and nutrients. This was equivalent to creating an environment in which, to use a human analogy, 90 percent of the population dies and the remainder spreads out over the previously crowded terrain, then 90 percent of them die, and so on. This creates an intense selective pressure favoring those entities that can replicate the fastest. As Dahiya summarizes, “the most successful replicating viral RNAs successively shortened their sequences through each serial transfer. This resulted in them losing almost all genetic information that did not relate to the binding of RNA replicase. While the initial Qß phage had 3600 nucleotides, the RNA phage at the end of the experiment possessed only 218.”2 Similar results were obtained by Thomas Ray in his Tierra experiment, designed to create similar competitive conditions in a simulated environment within the computer, where artificial species competed for CPU time in which to replicate. Ray found that within twenty-four hours, an entire complex ecology had evolved, including species that (like viruses) had lost the portion of their genome coding for replication and instead were using the code of other species to carry out the task. The shortened genome allowed them to replicate at an increased speed, giving them a selective advantage over species with longer codes. Moreover, these were then parasited in turn by other species that had lost even more of their code and used that of the viral-like replicators to carry out their replication (which in turn relied on the longer codes of the species they had parasited), a strategy that Ray called hyperparasitism. These results encourage us to understand the present situation as a pitched battle between different evolutionary strategies. On the human side are the advantages of advanced cognition, including ventilators, PPE, and, of course, the race to find a vaccine. On the novel Coronavirus side are the advantages of rapid replication enabled by a very short genome and an extreme contagion through its ability to disperse through the air and to live for many hours on a variety of surfaces. Recent research has indicated that people may be most contagious before they show symptoms, which has led to novel Corona being labeled a stealth virus. (Perhaps the stealth strategy evolved to ensure maximum spread through a population before individuals became too sick to move about). In evolutionary terms, the novel Coronavirus has hit the jackpot, having successfully made the leap from bats to the planet’s most populous large mammal, humans. Comparing the two strategies so far, the score is staggeringly one-sided: Coronavirus, 140,000 and counting; humans, 0. Amidst all the pain, suffering, and grief that this virus has caused humans, are there any lessons we might learn, any scrap of silver lining that we can snatch from the global chaos and wreckage? In addition to imposing reality-based constraints on political discourse, the virus is like being hit across the head by a 2×4; it reminds us with horrific force that although humans are dominant within our ecological niche, many other niches exist that may overlap with ours and that operate by entirely different rules. It screams at jet-engine volume that we are interdependent not only with each other but also with the entire ecology of the Earth. And finally, it makes devastatingly clear how unprepared we are: unprepared to cope with

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the virus’ effects, of course, but equally important, unprepared to meet the philosophical challenges of reconceptualizing our situation in terms that do justice both to the unique abilities of humans and to the limitations and interdependencies upon which those abilities depend. This interdependence is illustrated through the new kinds of origin stories being written about the emergence of life on Earth. The recent discoveries of ancient giant viruses with genomes almost as large as bacteria, suggest that they may have played a crucial role. These giants contain genes that encode for translation machinery, something previously believed to exist only in cellular organisms. Moreover, they include multiple genes that encode for enzymes catalyzing specific amino acids, another task that cells perform. Investigating these complexities, recent research is accumulating evidence that virus-like elements may have catalyzed some of life’s critical stages, including the evolution of DNA, the formation of the first cells, and the evolutionary split into the three domains of Archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes. Modern viruses may have evolved from the ancient giants through stripping-down processes similar to those described above, jettisoning parts of their genome to facilitate faster replication. In addition to the participation of viruses in life’s beginnings, another kind of interdependence has been the discovery of ancient virus DNA within human stem cells. Stem cells are crucial to human reproduction because they are pluripotent, having the ability to transform into all the different kinds of cells in the body as the fetus grows. Recent studies have found that one class of endogenous retroviruses, known as HERV-H, has DNA that is active in human embryonic stem cells but not in other types of human cells. Moreover, researchers have discovered that if this activity is suppressed by adding bits of RNA, the treated cells cease to act like stem cells and instead begin to act like fibroblasts, cells common in animal connective tissues. Without the pluripotency provided by stem cells, human reproduction could not work. Ironically then, the viral contamination that is posing a deadly threat to contemporary humans is also, in another guise, critical for human reproduction. These complexities suggest that a simple binary of us versus them / humans versus viruses, is far too simple to be an adequate formulation for understanding our relation to each other and to the larger ecologies within which we are immersed. If the novel Coronavirus is posthuman, other viruses, such as those in stem cells, are human at their/our core. We need a thorough reconceptualization of the concepts and vocabularies with which to describe and analyze these complex interdependencies, as well as the ways in which humans, as a species, are interdependent with one another as well. The pandemic offers an opportunity to rethink the ways in which we can identify with each other and with life forms radically different from us. As a start, I would like to suggest three terms for consideration.3 The first is humans as species-in-common, an idea emphasizing the commonalities that all humans share with one another, notwithstanding all the ethnic, racial, geopolitical, and other differences that exist among us. We can see flashes of this idea throughout history, including in the present pandemic, a situation that overruns all borders and geopolitical differences to strike at humans everywhere. The second term is speciesin-biosymbiosis, an idea recognizing the ways in which different species interpenetrate, for example in the human biome. The third is species-in-cybersymbiosis, emphasizing the ways in which artificial agents, especially artificial intelligences, are actively collaborating with humans to shape our shared world. I offer these brief sketches as a first pass at what a more adequate framework might look like. Notwithstanding its devastating effects, the pandemic invites us to think new thoughts, try out novel ideas, and suggest formulations that can lead to better futures for us and for the more-than-human organisms with which we share the planet.

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N. Katherine Hayles, the James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at Duke University and Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science, and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has published ten books and over one hundred peer-reviewed articles, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent book is Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

“Novel Corona: Posthuman Virus” is reprinted from Critical Inquiry, 47(S2), Winter 2021, 68–72. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and author. Copyright © 2021 The University of Chicago Press. We acknowledge the special issue “Posts from the Pandemic,” edited by Hank Scotch. Available on: www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ ci/2021/47/S2. 1

2 3

See Annu Dahiya, The Conditions of Emergence: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of the Origins of Life (Dissertation, Duke University, 2020). Retrieved from https://hdl. handle.net/10161/20951. Ibid., 166. I am developing these terms in more depth in a forthcoming book.

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ON TECHNODIVERSITY A Conversation between Yuk Hui and Anders Dunker 9 June 2020

Philosopher Yuk Hui refuses to give in to a deterministic view of technological evolution. He urges to “recosmicize the Earth,” which entails resisting and overcoming the Western planetary paradigm of promethean technology and monotechnological culture; rediscovering, instead, a “techno-diversity” 1 – that is, a multiplicity of cosmotechnics “characterized by different dynamics between the cosmos, the moral and the technical.” 2 For Hui, multiple localities and communities, through the organizing of collective projects, hold the capacity to re-invent their own technological and philosophical thought and future. AD

Is there any viable alternative to the planetarization of technology –

what you call a “synchronization” of the history of technology? YH Instead of a universal history describing one technology with various stages of development, we can step back for a moment and describe technological development as involving different cosmotechnics. I call this “technodiversity.” Here, we must revisit the question of locality. We must think of locality in terms of systems of knowledge. Michel Foucault called knowledge systems “epistemes” and understood them as ways of life – ways of sensing and ordering experience, producing in turn certain forms of knowledge.

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In other words, different places and times have their own

epistemes. What would it take for this diversity not to be effaced by the complete synchronization of cultural development? YH First, we must recognize the diversity; then we must develop it further. Let me give you an example. I grew up in Hong Kong. My father runs a Chinese pharmacy where he sells plants and herbs. Chinese pharmacists walk mountain paths collecting herbs to be made into medicines. Chinese medicine is based on Daoist cosmology, with Yin, Yang, and five elements/movements or Qi. If, from a Western perspective, you approach a Chinese doctor and ask, “Can you please show me your Qi and prove that it exists?,” the answer would have to be no. If you can’t prove the existence of the energy at the base of your practice, how can you say that you practice a science? Here lies the problem. But this doesn’t mean that Chinese medicine isn’t scientific. As an empirical science, it has functioned for 2,000 years based on a different epistemology. Previously in Hong Kong, if you went to a Chinese doctor, you were not covered by your health insurance because Chinese medicine is seen as unscientific.

Is this how Western technology establishes itself as universal,

by monopolizing credibility and marginalizing what is different?

I am not aiming to pit the relative against the universal, or see the particular in contrast to the universal, as how the history of philosophy has been written. I would rather point out that the universal is just one dimension of what is. You and I are both humans, but we are individual and different humans. In the same way, technology has some universal traits: from an anthropological perspective, technology is an extension of the body and an externalization of memory. But these gestures don’t work in the same way in all cultures. Chinese writing and the Latin alphabet are both externalizations of memory, but they have different philosophical foundations. Writing is a system for both memory and education of sensibility, and it can also be seen as a technology to preserve the distinctiveness of our culture. We cannot say that phonogram is better than pictogram or vice versa.

Even granting that technological diversity has its advantages,

is simply promoting diversity enough to combat the impending and fatal ecological disaster that you think synchronous technological development is causing? Isn’t it also necessary to change our technologies en bloc on a global scale?

Western thinking always draws a distinction between good and bad and seeks to remove what is deemed bad. Following Plato and Derrida, Bernard Stiegler claims that technology is always both a poison and a cure, and he wants to separate the good pharmakon from the bad pharmakon. For me, this is all very problematic. I don’t think we can come to a global agreement as to what is good and what is bad. Even if we have common problems we are trying

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to solve, there is no single way to respond to the collapse of ecosystems. We must understand that variation is a consequence of local adaptation. Biodiversity develops because of climatic variations, biological niches, and relations between particular plants, animals, and micro-organisms. Something similar should hold for technologies. AD

What is cosmotechnics, exactly? YH For the Greeks, “cosmos” means an ordered world. At the same time, the concept points to what lies beyond the Earth. Morality is first and foremost something that concerns the human realm. Cosmotechnics, as I define it, is the unification of the moral order and cosmic order through technical activities. If we compare Greece and China in ancient times, we discover that they have very different understandings of the cosmos, and very different conceptions of morality as well. The arbitration between them also takes place in different ways, with different technologies.

In Recursivity and Contingency, you speak about the need

to “recosmicize the world.” You borrow this term from Augustin Berque, who pointed out that the modern world no longer has a cosmos, understood as a moral and meaningful order, and that colonization by the West has robbed other cultures of their distinctive conceptions of the cosmos. He says that the universe, as it is described in science, has nothing to do with the classical cosmos, since scientific explanation has no moral significance whatsoever. Does this mean that we are faced with the task of recosmicizing not only our world, but the universe itself? Is the universe, discovered by astronomy, still waiting to be given a proper moral significance? YH When we think of astrophysics, we see the universe as a thermodynamic system that inexorably moves toward destruction and heat-death, where stars have nothing to do with us. In this sense, it seems absurd to recosmicize the Earth and the universe; it can’t lead to anything but superficial mysticism and naïveté. Astrophysics only informs us of certain facts about the universe. It has no ambitions of telling us how to live in light of recent astrophysical discoveries.

“Recosmicizing” doesn’t mean giving some mystique back to the stars and cosmos, or giving technology a mystical meaning, but rather understanding that we must develop ways of life that solve the conflict between modern science and tradition, between technology and mysticism – whether we choose to talk about the Laozi’s Dao or Heidegger’s Sein. We must give the non-rational a place in a culture that is otherwise rational or irrational – the way, for example, that poetry gives the unknown a place in communication through an unconventional and paradoxical use of language. AD

What about people who want to develop new technologies in

order to establish a new life in outer space? Does this also represent

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a cosmotechnics? For instance, the rocket billionaires, Bezos and Musk, who dream of colonies in space and a colonization of Mars? YH There is a great passage in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882), where he talks about “the horizon of the infinite.” It describes the moderns who have abandoned land for the pursuit of the infinite, yet, when they are in the middle of the ocean, there is nothing more fearful than the infinite – there is no more home to return to. The longing for the infinite transports us toward the inhuman.

For Jean-François Lyotard, there are both positive and negative infinities, which are connected to different forms of rationality. Positive inhumanity captures us in rigid technological systems, like the social credit system being implemented in China. The positive inhuman is one that is “more interior in myself than me” – for example, God for St. Augustine. We humans carry something inhuman in us, which is irreducible to the human and which maintains the highest intimacy with us. Rocket billionaires, who are all transhumanists, want to overcome finitude: the finitude of human life and of life as such. This longing for eternal life also implies an infinite market. In a way, the same happens in space exploration: investors want to profit from the Earth losing its meaning, as if leaving the planet were a matter of leaving one spaceship to enter another. This doesn’t mean that I see travel in outer space as irrelevant or dangerous in itself, or that it is wrong to try to understand the universe, but the conquest we see today seems to me to be merely a preparation for tomorrow’s consumerism. AD

In Recursivity and Contingency, you explicitly read Kant’s

organic thinking as an early form of cybernetic theory. Heidegger famously pointed out that cybernetics was about to take over our thinking, or at least the philosophical form of thought that seeks to reflect upon the world and play an active role in history. How could the idea of organic self-regulating systems look so promising and inclusive at first, and yet end up becoming such a threat to philosophy? YH Cybernetics was promoted as an attempt to transcend the many contradictions of science. Hans Jonas, a pupil of Heidegger, discusses this in his book The Phenomenon of Life (1966). He said that with cybernetics we have, for the first time, a unified theory that is not dualistic. Instead of thinking in terms of logical contradictions, we think in terms of processes: inputs, outputs, and feedback loops. In the 20th century, organicist thinking was further elaborated in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, but it also became a part of the practical development of technology. Two centuries after Kant wanted to save philosophy from the mechanical by recourse to the organic, this way of thinking has become a part of technology. Using organic thinking, based on technology, to criticize modern technology becomes a fallacy

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– a misplaced fallacy, as Whitehead would say. When the organic already has merged with technology, cybernetic thinking has come to an end. AD

Do we end up in a position where a critique of technology

functions as part of the same technological system – i.e., where criticism becomes just another piece of input, another feedback loop programmed into the machinery? If we really think cybernetically, when we repair or upgrade a machine, program, or mechanism, are we not also becoming a part of the machinery, an instrument for its improvement? YH Yes, according to what we call “second-order cybernetics,” humans and machines are connected in a recursive movement, which becomes an instance of what Hegel calls a “master-slave dialectic.”

For Hegel, this dialectic was about power, knowledge, and

recognition. The master exploits the slave for work and services. But who is the master and who is the slave here?

Machines are slaves but at the same time masters because human beings have to service them and come to depend on them. Once we look at ourselves as servants of machines, we arrive at what Hegel calls “unhappy consciousness.” To overcome unhappy consciousness, we need either a Hegelian reconciliation or a Nietzschean will to power. At the moment, however, there is difficulty in gaining recognition from machines unless we hardcode them to unconditionally subordinate themselves to us; this is what has been proposed in so-called “AI-ethics.” YH

For us to have a real choice with respect to the growing influence

of new technologies, we also need to assume that technological evolution isn’t determined – that is, that we could have developed radically different technologies than those we have today. Are we really free to choose and shape tomorrow’s technologies? YH History is contingent, which means simply that it could have been otherwise. If the Mongols had conquered the whole world, we would have a different world history, and probably another understanding of history as such. In light of this, it’s important to be open to different futures, to see numerous possibilities.

Isn’t technological determinism, so ubiquitous in Silicon Valley,

just a lot of hype, as if to say: “These disruptions are on their way, so it’s better to get ahead of things than to bother resisting?” YH This rhetoric is the reason why all these tech companies employ futurists. The worst is Ray Kurzweil, of course, who says that that the so-called “singularity” is near and by 2025 we will become immortal. I say it in all my books: we must not give in to this kind of deterministic propaganda from Silicon Valley. We must actively resist them.

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What about Elon Musk’s research program, Neuralink, which

aims to connect computers to the brain? What do you say to his argument that humans should upgrade themselves to stay relevant when artificial intelligence starts outperforming us? YH It is very vague, if not illogical, to say that we need to be ahead of technology, since if the “we” is humanity, then it is constituted by technology itself. “We” will only find ourselves always being late; we can only try not to be too late. Humanmachine interface research has existed for a long time, and the desire to perfect the human being has been a major motivation for that research, also known as transhumanism. In the past, perfecting the human being was done through education. In Musk’s vision, education will be replaced by a brain-microchip apparatus.

So where do we go from here? YH Human beings have created a problematic decision for themselves: “to cut” or “to connect.” Biotechnology is introducing a new eugenics, which is at the core of 21stcentury biopolitics. Enhancement of intelligence suggests better chances for employment and success. If you remember the famous Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell (1995), the anarchists who decided to cut from the network were finally raided and transformed into cyborgs.

So, what is the message here – is the general idea that we don’t

have a choice to disconnect from these biopolitical networks and impending updates to our bodies and our lives? YH Precisely because our idea of “progress” implies a historical movement toward a unified goal, it resists all fragmentation and diversity in evolution. As a consequence, freedom and democracy are placed under threat. On top of this, the ideology of Silicon Valley increasingly sees freedom and democracy as irreconcilable goals. The enormous investments in biotech are a preparation for a time when ethical limitations will be overcome or set aside so that technologies of biological intervention can freely circulate in the market. This is a gigantic force that everyone feels, but nobody knows how it will manifest or how people will react. To me, this is the point where technodiversity becomes important and decisive. If we don’t manage to demonstrate that there are other alternatives, the transhumanist ideology will conquer the whole world.

Do globalization and the synchronization of technology

represent a world-historical level of risk? Are these factors present in the climate crisis, given that Earth’s atmosphere absorbs the by-products of modern technology? Can we call global warming a negative universality, as Dipesh Chakrabarty does, defining humanity by means of a common, grand-scale problem-complex?

What we now call the “Anthropocene” is a consequence of technological and industrial expansion after World YH

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War II. Industrialization over the last seventy years is the direct cause of global warming and the dawning of the Anthropocene. But that doesn’t imply that we can or should attempt to remove industry to solve our problems. We have become dependent on an industrial form of life, so the only conceivable solution is to change our industries. AD

Even those who promote organic agriculture emphasize that

overproduction is harmful due to the development of monoculture and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, all of which contribute to the destruction of biological and cultural diversity. Would you consider a variety of local farming techniques to be an example of technodiversity? YH Absolutely. If you want to avoid using pesticides, you will soon discover that there are a number of alternative approaches, including rotations of particular combinations of crops. There are also, for instance, specialized techniques of breeding certain insects that will eat harmful insects. This is one phenomenon of technodiversity. My suggestion is that we organize a collective project to deliberate and discuss questions concerning technodiversity and the future of philosophy. And this is not a task for a single person – it is a task for a whole community.

In your book about cybernetics, you also discuss James

Lovelock and his Gaia theory. What is the relationship between your reconsideration of modern technologies and a planetary cybernetics? YH Lovelock was a former NASA employee. He had worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory doing research on the atmosphere of Mars. Comparing the lifeless desert environment of Mars to the living Earth inspired him to develop his Gaia theory, which says that our planet works like a cybernetic system stabilizing itself through organic processes. He added another point: through technology we can “wake up Gaia.” Satellites and antennas, for instance, are technical extensions giving Gaia new senses and technological unity – the early Lovelock was a cybernetician. Yet, even with all of our satellites and antennae, we have yet to wake up Gaia. We have only just begun the technification of the Earth. Since cybernetics seems to transcend the divide between technology and nature, it is tempting to see it as a universal solution – a new universalism. If we really were to understand the Earth cybernetically, we would need to experiment with it, like a black box, where we find out, through trial and error, what works and what doesn’t. But how many times can we flirt with destroying the Earth in an effort to make that work? When we think of humans and the Earth as a cybernetic system, we have already lost the world.

How so? YH Because reducing the world is losing the world. This is what Heidegger calls “forgetfulness of Being.” Forgetfulness

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is not something that happens because we overlook Being, or because we fail to give Being a place in our understanding of the world, but rather because we think that the whole world is transparent and penetrable to our understanding – we think that everything can be calculated. The first thing we need to do is to reconsider the distinction between what is calculable and what is incalculable. Then we must learn anew how to approach the world as the Unknown. Anders Dunker is a Norwegian writer and journalist, currently living in Los Angeles. His latest book is a series of interviews, Rediscovering Earth: Ten Dialogues on the Future of Nature (O/R Books, 2021). Yuk Hui is author of On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2016–2019), Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019), and Art and Cosmotechnics (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

The original interview was commissioned by the pan-Scandinavian journal Vagant and was published in Norwegian in Vagant, April 2019, as “Spørsmålet om teknologien i Kina” (www.vagant.no). The English translation, “On Technodiversity: A Conversation with Yuk Hui,” was done by Anders Dunker and first published in Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 June 2020 (https://lareviewofbooks.org). Reprinted and edited by permission of the publishers and the author. Original Copyright © 2019 Vagant and Anders Dunker. Translation copyright © 2020 Los Angeles Review of Books. 1 2

Yuk Hui, “Machine and Ecology,” Angelaki, 25(4), 2020, 65. Ibid., 54.

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Teresa Solar, Flotation Line, 2018. Fabric, resin, ceramics, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo Guadalupe Ruiz. Courtesy the Artist; DER TANK, Institut Kunst Basel

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TERESA SOLAR

1985, Madrid Lives in Madrid, Spain

Through her use of corporeal forms, the recording of movements, and a preference for sensorial experiences, 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; together, these variable entities function as ecosystems of thought, wherein meaning is created through the transition of one material element to another. 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. For many of Solar’s recent projects, she explores these concerns through sculptures that take on zoomorphic shapes or resemble bodily appendages. In her exhibition Flotation Line (2018) at der TANK in Basel, Switzerland, zoomorphic hanging sculptures draw from literary references, including Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Hanging like pendulums, these appendages suggest a latent mythology as well as an animal or carcass. In others works, such as Solar’s ambitious project Osteoclast (I Do Not Know How I Came to Be on Board This Ship, This Navel of My Ark) (2021), staged as part of the 2021 Liverpool Biennial, she created a fleet of five six-metre-long red kayaks, designed to resemble specimens of human bones. Hermaphrodite (2021) evokes a growing reproductive organ, seemingly just unearthed from the ground; the incongruity between its fossil-like exterior and its highly polished, bright red insides suggests a re-imagination of geological tradition, as the object is situated between engineered space and bodily form. Similarly, 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 – a stark contrast with the murkily abstract mud from which these neatly designed creatures ascend –, these works speak to a conception of abstracted time: they are inventions of fiction and simulation, compositions of a long hidden earthly skin. –MW

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Teresa Solar, Tunnel boring machine, 2021. Ceramics, metal, resin, 50 × 200 × 80 cm. Photo Marta de Muga. Courtesy the Artist; Joan Prats Gallery, Barcelona Next pages: Teresa Solar, Tunnel boring machine, 2021. Clay, resin, 173 × 124 cm. Supported by 1646. Photo Jhoeko. Courtesy Travesia Cuatro Gallery

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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 multilayered collages and site-specific installations. Often intuitively or associatively compiled, these photographic images appear dynamically contextualised in her works in fragments, frequently cut up, reworked, and emerging from beneath layers of ink or paint. While Altın references visual strategies of appropriation and recombination of images and text from mass media used throughout 20th-century art history as a critique of popular culture, 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.” In many cases, these bodily symbols belong not only to humans but to animals and mythical figures like mermaids, herons, fish, and snakes, who together express a state of hybridity: they manifest as part human, part animal, an amalgamation of fragmented gestures and postures linked together. For The Milk of Dreams, Altın’s artistic research surrounds the mythologies around birth and the ways it alters the body both chemically and sensorially. Many of Altın’s other recent works evoke the mythical qualities of bodily forms, too. Portal (Highpriestess) (2019) juxtaposes a woman’s body with a heron’s slim beak, conjuring associations with the sacred deities of Ancient Egyptian mythology. In other works, these elements come together in grand photographic montages. For the large-scale Topography (Of Time, of Body) (2019), Altın’s research draws from the archives of museums, which she combines with original images or pictures from her own collection. Beginning with photographs of objects stored in the photography archive of the Göteborgs naturhistoriska museum, Gothenburg, Sweden, disparate images of bodies – a pregnant woman, a man’s back, animal forms – appear printed on canvas, which the artist then directly paints on as to cover to certain elements of the composition. Together, these animate bodies intermingle and emerge from beneath a layer of fleshly ink with inanimate objects like stones and ornaments; seen entangled, these various forms become their own hybrid beings, at once corporeal and lifeless. – MW

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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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Özlem Altın, Untitled (grow in the dark I), 2019. Ink on photo print, 100 × 91.4 cm. Photo Ivo Corrà. Courtesy the Artist. © Özlem Altın

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Özlem Altın, Portal (Highpriestess), 2019. Mixed media on photo print. Installation view, 16th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, 2019. Photo Sahir Ugur Eren. Courtesy the Artist. © Özlem Altın

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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 distinct curiosity about the everyday, through which she expresses an irreverent wit, coupled with a virtuosic grasp of the properties of her materials. Freely experimenting with the conventions of painting, Katz describes her work in relation to “voice” rather than to “style.” Voice, as she says, is “a more apt qualifier for terms like sensibility, style, temper, because it implies dialogue, exchange, and influence.”1 Indeed, many of her paintings allude to portraiture or use fragmented body parts; others include cocks, monkeys, cars, flowers, fairies or other imaginary creatures, whose visages vary in tone, representational effect, or method. As a graduate student, Katz studied under influential painters including Charline von Heyl, Amy Sillman, and Jutta Koether, a group celebrated for bringing the medium into progressive and experimental territories. Viewed in relation to these artists, Katz, too, draws from a diverse array of references, blurring calcified distinctions associated with painting in art history, to some degree in response to the breakneck speed of image production and dissemination in the age of social media. Katz’s new works for The Milk of Dreams (all 2022) draw on clichés that have been associated with Venice since its inception: water, doubling, refraction, and mirroring. Birth Canal depicts a canal in Montreal – Katz’s birth city – as a substitute for Venice’s famous waterways. In Milk glass, the image of two octopuses made in Venetian Murano glass is 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. The figure in Night Philosophy simultaneously references William Blake’s depiction of the biblical king Nebuchadnezzar – who symbolises tragic hubris – and Edgar Degas’ painting Young Spartans Exercising (c. 1860), which shows a group of teenage wrestlers. Portrait of the artist as a young girl(s), meanwhile, is sourced from a multiple-exposure photograph of Katz taken by a friend of her grandmother that incidentally evokes both the fable of Little Red Riding Hood and the elusive central character in the classic Venice-set horror thriller Don’t Look Now. Together, these works present an autofictional and psychologically charged index of images and motifs associated with the Venetian setting. – MW & IW

Allison Katz, quoted in Frances Loeffler, “Interview with Allison Katz,” The White Review, September 2015 (www.thewhitereview.org/feature/ interview-with-allison-katz).

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Allison Katz, The Dining Room at Monkton (Mae West Lips), 2021. Oil on silkscreen, 160 × 145 cm. Photo Zhang Hong. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Antenna Space, Shanghai, China. © Allison Katz

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Allison Katz, Noli Me Tangere!, 2021. Oil, acrylic, rice on canvas, 200 × 220 cm. Photo Farzad Owrang. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Luhring Augustine, New York. © Allison Katz 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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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

Jamian Juliano-Villani says that she treats her paintings like TV. Expansive, bright, chaotic, and bawdy, they beckon you in with their recognisable cartoonish punchiness, but beneath them – like so much of American popular culture –, humour and eroticism run in parallel to vulnerability and trauma. Testifying to conditions of speed and disorder, her lurid psychological narratives filter the history of painting through the deranged sensibility of the 21st century’s image-based culture. Composed intuitively 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 printed matter collected since the artist was in high school, her acrylic airbrushed canvases, while chaotic, serve as meticulously crafted mirrors to the anarchy of everyday life. Peppered with unconventional and often purposefully crude juxtapositions, recent paintings like Chef Mike and Origin of the World (both 2020) comically reference famous works from art history, Norman Rockwell’s 1942 Thanksgiving family portrait Freedom from Want and Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du monde, which scandalised French audiences when it was first made. In Chef Mike, Juliano-Villani disturbs the idealised holiday meal with a microwave that opens every ten seconds and play loud dance music. For her version of Origin of the World, the artist paints a cartoonish tadpole with human penis; through Juliano-Villani’s winkingly surreal extravagance, the heady, prolonged discussions of gender, sexuality, and voyeurism associated with the original are seen in a simultaneously ridiculous and disturbing light. 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 – which provides 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 Juliano-Villani, the malleability of cinematic tropes (the “shadows left over after your eye looks away,” as the artist describes them) are indicative of the frustrated temporality of the Covid-19 pandemic, wherein the accessibility of images from across history clashes with the relentless presentness of the here and now. – MW & IW

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Jamian Juliano-Villani, Chef Mike, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, microwave, 228.6 × 177.8 cm. Photo Charles Benton. Courtesy the Artist; JTT, New York; MASSIMODECARLO

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Jamian Juliano-Villani, Little Girls Stretching, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 218.44 × 325.12 cm. Photo Charles Benton. Courtesy the Artist; JTT, New York; MASSIMODECARLO

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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

The wide-ranging practice of Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo addresses the impact of mass consumerism, environmental degradation, and the rise of technology on the human experience. Born to two art teachers in Osaka in 1935, Kudo was part of a generation that was highly skeptical of traditional society in the wake of the events of World War II. In the 1950s, as a student at the Tokyo University of the Arts, Kudo maintained a contrary attitude towards traditional education and pedagogy, turning to self-directed readings in astrophysics, set theory, and quantum mechanics while organising independent art shows with his fellow students. An essential figure in the development of “Anti-Art” in Tokyo, Kudo was a regular participant in the freewheeling annual Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition – at the time, Japan’s most significant venue for contemporary art –, showing work that expressed a sharp critique of the rampant consumerism and political orthodoxy of Japan’s post-war recovery. In 1962 Kudo moved to Paris, where he intersected with the neo-avantgarde Nouveau Réalisme movement. In Paris, Kudo began creating series of works that incorporate store-bought items – dolls, kitchen utensils, transistors, circuit boards, and terrariums, among other consumer and technological objects – 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 guiding ethos is evident in two works, both titled Your Portrait (1966 and 1970–1979): in the earlier, an eye constructed from painted polyester resin affixed to the door of a pegboard box demonstrates the impossibility of looking inward and outward at the same time; in the latter, control over a well-tended aquarium’s contents is ironically exercised by a corpse-like, desiccated human. Cultivation (1972) presents a well-maintained garden of cactuses that is wryly imprisoned in a cheery, DayGlo-pink cage. Kudo often employed fluorescent colours to grant natural forms an uncannily high-tech aura, as in the luminous Flowers (1967–1968) from his Garden of the Metamorphosis in the Space Capsule (1968), or the acidic tones of the phallic apparatus, suggestive of a radiation monitor, depicted in Pollution-cultivationnouvelle écologie (1971). His visions of a postnatural world are neither celebratory nor ominous; rather, they capture the ambiguous detachment of a world reshaped by human desire. –IW

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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 Tetsumi Kudo, Cultivation, 1972. Painted cage, wood, plastic, cotton, paint, snail shells, spray paint, artificial soil, hair, resin, thermometer, 27.9 × 34.6 × 19.4 cm. Photo Pierre Le Hors. Courtesy Hiroko Kudo; the Estate of Tetsumi Kudo; Hauser & Wirth. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

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MARIANNA SIMNETT

1986, London, UK Lives in Berlin, Germany

Like a story pulled from Grimm’s fairy tales, the work of the BritishCroatian artist Marianna Simnett contains the most thrilling aspects 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, often replete with children and animals, her works also play with biomedical aesthetics, which often manifest themselves in gruesome, jarring events. In the film The Needle and the Larynx (2016) – which is indebted to provocative works of performance and Body Art from the 1970s by figures including VALIE EXPORT, Marina Abramović, and ORLAN –, Simnett visits a surgeon, who injects her larynx with botox, a procedure undergone by those who wish to lower their voices. Filmed in brutal slow motion, viewers watch as the doctor’s needle enters, probes, and exits her throat; the anxiety experienced by the audience is prolonged as Simnett speaks fortyeight hours later in her newly deepened voice about the trauma of the procedure. In other films like The Bird Game (2019), which pieces together elements borrowed from Sleeping Beauty and Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the vulnerable body is further explored as a site of metamorphosis for humans and animals alike, especially as it is subject to control, violation, and contamination. At the centre of The Bird Game is a wicked and cunning crow, who traps children dressed in Disneycartoon garb and initiates them into a disturbing and intricate game that results in their deaths. A story of suffering and transformation, the crow’s hold on the children is parallel to its hold on us as viewers, who watch the film in a state of panic. 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

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Marianna Simnett, The Udder (still), 2014. digital HD video, sound, 15 mins 30 sec (looped). Courtesy the Artist; Jerwood/ FVU Awards. © Marianna Simnett Marianna Simnett, The Bird Game (still), 2019. Digital HD video with 5.1 surround sound transferred from 16mm film, 20 mins. Courtesy the Artist; FVU; the Rothschild Foundation; the Frans Hals Museum. © Marianna Simnett Next pages: 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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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 interactions of intimacy, violence, control, and self-protection. Through the subversion of societal norms, 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), the artist invites her subjects to construct makeshift shelters in their own homes out of readily available domestic objects. Although the activity might be reminiscent of the innocent children’s activity of fort-building, it also exposes the home as a space loaded with complex emotions and embodied memory. The vulnerability of the installations suggests the precarious reality of homelessness, and the fragile assemblages’ failure to offer protection implies a critique of capitalist consumerism. The makeshift structures’ dwellers are captured in ambiguous poses, as if trapped, or in states of lethargy, their bodies transformed into inanimate objects. 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. In the Self-Defense series (2014–2015), Piotrowska’s subjects assume cryptic poses that are not immediately decipherable. These black-andwhite photographs depict young women, most often in their bedrooms, performing gestures and actions taken from self-defense manuals. One woman holds her clenched fists up towards her face, while another crawls towards the viewer across the ground in a contorted position, as if possessed. By centring self-defense in the domestic context, the series implies 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

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Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled, 2017. Silver-gelatin hand print. Courtesy Southard Reid; Galeria Madragoa; Galerie Thomas Zander; Galeria Dawid Radziszewski

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Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled, 2016–2018. Silver-gelatin hand print, 120 × 95 cm. Courtesy Southard Reid; Galeria Madragoa; Galerie Thomas Zander; Galeria Dawid Radziszewski Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled, 2013–2022. Silver-gelatin hand print, 130 × 160 cm. Courtesy Southard Reid; Galeria Madragoa; Galerie Thomas Zander; Galeria Dawid Radziszewski Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled, 2017. Silver-gelatin hand print, 51 × 41 cm. Courtesy Southard Reid; Galeria Madragoa; Galerie Thomas Zander; Galeria Dawid Radziszewski

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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

Over the course of ten minutes in artist and writer Carolyn Lazard’s video Crip Time (2018), a set of hands deposits dozens of pills – small white disks; red and oblong orbs, probably filled with powder; chalky beiges, the big kind that are hard to swallow – into a seven-day-a-week pill organiser, their “morning,” “noon,” “evening,” and “bedtime,” labels worn from use. Filmed from overhead and accompanied by the sound of pills spilling out 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, and performances, as well as affecting autotheoretical texts like How to Be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity (2013) and The World Is Unknown (2019). Drawing from the intimate relay between sculpture and moving image, Lazard’s artworks focus on the body’s inherent resistance to the rhythms and expectations of capitalist economy. Presented in The Milk of Dreams are works developed from the exhibition SYNC, a continued exploration of the relationship between time, labour, and debility. The mode of action in these works is of viewing and waiting, habitual bedfellows. Sinks are installed as TVs, reframing our conceptions of domestic space. Workers’ Comp (2021) is a power lift recliner chair in active state of adjustment and support; an object primarily associated with injury recovery and television viewership. The work Privatization (2020) requires that enough HEPA air purifiers be allotted to the proportions of the exhibition space. Cinema 1, Cinema 2 (2020) is the heart and hearth of the home. The illusion of fire is produced as a flickering loop through the techniques of cinema: a screen made from steam and the projection of light. At the centre of the installation is Half Life (2021): an hourglass from a different time passing at a different rate. The hands of time here are the toxic dust from one of an endless number of industrial sites, slowly undermining the bodily autonomy of adjacent Black communities across the globe. Seen with the drawing Carolyn Working (2020), a tender illustration of the artist in bed staring at a laptop, viewers are pointed back to some of labour that produced this body of work. – MW

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Carolyn Lazard, Lazy Boi, 2020. Power lift recliner, 101.60 × 85.09 × 93.98 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York. © Carolyn Lazard

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Carolyn Lazard, installation view, SYNC, Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York City, 2020. Courtesy the Artist; Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York. © Carolyn Lazard Carolyn Lazard, TV1 (Dead Time), 2020. Stainless steel, 55.88 × 63.50 × 17.78 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York. © Carolyn Lazard Carolyn Lazard, Cinema 1, Cinema 2, 2020. Fire, infinite duration. Private Collection. 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, which exist between sculpture, video, and the readymade. Alongside her flayed animal forms, 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 these works, Vogel presents a kind of fable for her viewers: in creating her obscure and enigmatic worlds, her environments suggest myths, relics, and ritual sacrifice, drawn both from art history, literature, and the viewer’s imagination. In ghostly works like Clown Grock gefangen von Andromeda (2020), an installation comprising lime green and grey animal hide paintings and a video projection on a delicate wire birdcage, Vogel reproduces forms borrowed from Giuseppe Cesari’s 1602 painting Perseus and Andromeda, punctuated by Medusa’s wriggling, severed head. Other pieces, such as those presented in her 2018 exhibition Gregor’s Loch at Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zürich, nod, in part, to Gregor Samsa from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and to her gallerist’ first name. Here, animal skins are affixed with tail-like appendages or are painted with the faces of other living creatures, constituting their own kind of metamorphosis. This manner of experimentation with the transfigured body appears again 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

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Raphaela Vogel, The (Missed) Education of Miss Vogel, 2021. Multi-part installation, 17 animal skins, pen, oil chalk, oil paint, leather glue, goat leather, sheep leather, elk leather, cord. Courtesy the Artist; BQ, Berlin Next pages: 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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LOUISE BONNET

1970, Geneva, Switzerland Lives in Los Angeles, USA

Louise Bonnet began her creative career working in illustration and graphic design. In 1994, she moved to Los Angeles from Geneva for “a year off” and never looked back. Bonnet shifted into the realm of painting in 2008, making acrylic paintings on paper of people such as Yoko Ono, or characters from films such as The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. Five years later, at the encouragement of artist friends, Bonnet picked up oil painting, a move she says changed everything. Oil paint enables Bonnet 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, crouch, and balance within their edges. She cites influences ranging from Cubist Pablo Picasso to cartoonist Robert Crumb, as well as Medieval and Renaissance painting. While physical gender markers such as breasts and nipples announce themselves loudly in her paintings, Bonnet explains that her interest is less the subject of gender itself, but rather the ways that our bodies get the best of us. Bonnet explains that we may believe that we’re in control of our bodies, but in fact they 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 the consumption and excretion cycles humans undertake with the Earth – 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 control and our actual capacity for control of our own bodies, our own behaviours, and our own excretions. In this work, urine shapeshifts, symbolising health and prosperity; semen and holy water, the devastation we inflict on the things we rely on for survival, and – perhaps most importantly – the absurdity of our own disgust and shame at our own bodies. – MK

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Louise Bonnet, Kneeling Sphinx 2, 2021. Oil on linen, 76.2 × 101.6. Private Collection. Photo Jeff McLane. Courtesy the Artist; Gagosian. © Louise Bonnet Next pages: Louise Bonnet, Pisser Triptych (detail), 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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L U YA N G

1984, Shanghai Lives in Shanghai, China

New media artist LuYang creates tech-forward immersive installations that drop viewers into his videogame-like material worlds using video, sculpture, lighting, and sound. The installations are visually loud – deploying a mixture of Japanese anime aesthetics, make-believe and real scientific explorations, religious iconography, and humorous, sardonic imagery of contemporary tech culture. LuYang’s installations put the full RGB colour spectrum on view, often backlit, with many screens flashing at once, and across full wall vinyls, sculptural elements, maquettes, and massive inflatables. High-energy soundtracks infiltrate the space, with techno, opera, or death metal reverberating through the galleries. For LuYang, maximalism is an understatement. LuYang is on a quest to understand the world around us, with specific interest in science, religion, and technology, and how they get filtered and often commodified through cultural practices. Humor is essential to his work, utilised to satirise the human experience in all its entanglements with theory, dogma, ritual, and consumption. In his new anime for the 59th International Art Exhibition, titled DOKU – Digital Descending (2020–ongoing), LuYang created a fictional storyline marked by the insertion – and the irony – of many real-life current events and historical details. 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. While LuYang’s environments tend toward dystopia, his inspiration comes from landscapes and ruins encountered throughout history. LuYang likes to twists his references, making them into heavily branded, digi-fied, end-of-the-world elements or scenes – often returning to his own interpretation of the Buddhist concept of the “material world” as it links to the destruction of the universe. 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 LuYang’s mind. His world reflects the dynamism of the current historical moment of China and its influences and interpretations within a globalised culture. –IA

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

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LuYang, Material World Knight, 2018. Three-channel video, 22 mins 15 sec. Courtesy the Artist

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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 paints in an extended field to explore the ways the body can be expressed psychologically, psychically, 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. Consistent throughout the artist’s work is a desire to unmoor the brushstroke itself, inviting gestural glyphs to wander freely in space through varied media. Brätsch uses psychics and mediums to question her own belief in painting, examining paintings’ mystical dimensions through their infinite potential readings: oozing geological strata, radiating crystals, or abstract faces of creatures or characters grinning amid a swirling abyss. Collaboration is core to Brätsch’s shapeshifting practice that dematerialises canonical painting histories. Questioning the subjectivity ascribed to the “painter,” through collaboration, the artist subverts the Modernist notion of art making as a solitary, predominately masculine act. Important collaborations include DAS INSTITUT with Adele Röder and KAYA with Debo Eilers. In her constant pursuit of new materials, Brätsch has worked with artisans including Swiss stained-glass master Urs Rickenbach, Italian stucco marmo master Walter Cipriani, and German master marbler Dirk Lange. Within plainly visible support structures such as aluminium or steel frames, the artist mobilises sophisticated material technologies to mesmerising ends. Stone Mimicry (2021–2022) comprises stained glass, stucco marmo, and a large-scale site-specific mosaic bench that becomes a “stone painting.” The stained glass works utilise fragments of materials from different sources such as church windows and coats-of-arms, into which Brätsch embeds glass jewels, sliced agate crystals, and drawn glass. In Fossil Psychic for Christa (2019) and Brushstroke Fossil for Christa (both 2019–2021), the painting gesture becomes a body of fossilised fragments as if the result of geologic phenomena. The work’s bright colours induce prescient monsters, enshrining the past into the present – like runes, or a fly trapped in amber. 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

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Kerstin Brätsch, Brushstroke Fossils for Christa (Stucco Marmo) MAN, 2019–2021. Photo Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the Artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York/Brussels

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

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Kerstin Brätsch, Ectoplasmic Ash, 2021. Glass jewels, sliced Agates, drawn glass, antique glass shards, church window bordering, lead on antique glass, 90 × 60 cm. Photo Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the Artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York/ Brussels; Gió Marconi, Milan Kerstin Brätsch, Sunswallower (Pharmakeia), 2012–2021. Luster, enamel, glass jewels, drawn glass, church window bordering, lead on antique glass, 90 × 60 cm. Photo Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the Artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York/ Brussels; Gió Marconi, Milan

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MIRE LEE

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

In her installation work, Mire Lee makes kinetic sculptures that suggest the tension of states of aliveness, in which organic and synthetic materials collide, fuse, and self-destruct. 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. They spurt, burp, gurgle, drip, and dribble. They twist and crawl around themselves, convulse and flop around on the ground, and expel viscous liquids, which sputter noisily, making sounds that are all too human. For Lee, the process of creating these sensory objects is itself an activity tied to the body and touch; 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.” In a recent suite of sculptures entitled Carriers (2020), Lee further emphasises the haptic quality of her materials and the kinds of psychological tensions that they reveal, ranging from tenderness and violence, to domination and submission, or temptation and revulsion. Inspired by the concept of vorarephilia or “vore” – the fetish of being swallowed or swallowing another alive, in which devouring is perceived as a union between beings –, Lee creates situations in which disparate physical materials feed on one another. Carriers, which resembles a digestive tract, functions by sucking up liquid matter through a hose pump and messily cycling it through the sculpture’s structure. For The Milk of Dreams, Lee realises a new work that extends the concept of the carrier – or the vessel that contains life – 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. In emphasising the infinite, open status of holes as a system, these works insinuate actions that happen both inside the body and out: the pumping of blood, the secretion of sweat onto the surface of skin, the movement of fluid through organs. 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

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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 Mire Lee, Horizontal Forms, 2020. Fragments from an old work, resin, metal, glycerine, other mixed media, c. 50 × 60 × 230 cm. Photo Yonje Kim. Courtesy the Artist. © Mire Lee

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SANDRA MUJINGA

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

Encompassing sculpture, video, performance, and music, 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: although hypervisible as forms – frequently bathed in sickly fluorescent light – their actual bodies are typically obscured or made invisible; instead, their presence is connoted by little more than their exterior, whether shell, skin, or garment. Taking inspiration from animal survival strategies such as camouflage and nocturnality, science-fiction’s concept of “world-building,” posthumanist thought, Afro-Futurism, and the radical writings of speculative thinkers such as Octavia E. Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing, Mujinga proposes an imaginary world in which 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 four larger-than-life hooded figures, titled in the Bantu language Lingala, are comprised solely of human-shaped cloaks without bodies to drape. With textile limbs that evoke tentacles and trunks, appendages that help octopuses and elephants protect and feed themselves, these humanoid beings have evolved to meet the reality of our era of slow-motion environmental calamity. In the 2020 tulle sculptures Míbalé, Mísató, Mínei, and Mítáno, futuristic representations of bodies likewise loom above viewers. Taking on the powerful presence of guards, these long-armed figures stand watch, their animalistic forms a symbol of self-sufficiency, in which mutability make new worlds possible. The sculptures in Reworlding Remains and Sentinels of Change (both 2021) point to the vulnerability of such a position. Here Mujinga’s signature figures, woven from upcycled textiles, take inspiration from dinosaur fossils, which the artist perceives in relation to the construction and destruction of architecture. Connoting a speculative body, built from the imagined remains of an extinct species, these sculptures are positioned in a liminal space, in which decay and rebuilding exist on the same timeline. – MW

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Sandra Mujinga, Ghosting, 2019. Soft PVC, denim, acrylic paint, oil paint, glycerin, threaded rods, rod coupling, 600 × 700 cm. Photo David Stjernholm. Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. Courtesy the Artist; Croy Nielsen, Vienna; The Approach, London. © Sandra Mujinga Next pages: 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

Seen from one perspective, the French artist 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. But viewed from another vantage point, the distinction between her eerily smooth synthetic creatures and the swollen bodies of primordial beings is hard to deduce. Insomuch as the artist conceives of her large-scale installations as time machines, she has called them “space machines” as well: they map a primeval past and a far-off future, throughout which bodies are subsumed or replaced by those of other species, whether animal, mineral, or otherwise. Such 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 in frequent consultation with researchers in the fields of zoology, biology, and paleontology, Humeau has dyed carpets with every chemical in the human body; she has made soundscapes conjuring noises made by prehistoric animals; she has created contemporary versions of Paleolithic-era “Venus” statuettes; she has directed pink hippopotamus milk through simulated veins. In some recent works, including the futuristic polystyrene sculptures with a pink and grey surface, The Dancer I, The Dancer II, The Dancers III & IV (all 2019), as in new pieces made from aluminium, salt, ocean plastic waste, and algae for the Biennale Arte 2022, 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, thus suggesting a degree of bodily self-awareness that we often do not associate with animals. In grasping at questions of life or death, a type of sublime understanding of mortality that may exist beyond the domain of humans emerges, variably informed by ancient memories surfacing from millennia past or by a future ruled by pollution and rising sea levels, as much as the experience of the present moment. – MW

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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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Marguerite Humeau, The Dancers III & IV, Two marine mammals invoking higher spirits (detail), 2019. Polystyrene, polyurethane resin, fibreglass, steel skeleton, pollution particles. Photo Julia Andréone. Courtesy the Artist; C L E A R I N G, New York, Brussels; White Cube, London, Hong Kong. © Marguerite Humeau Marguerite Humeau, The Prayer, A marine mammal invoking higher spirits, 2019. Polystyrene, polyurethane resin, fiberglass, steel skeleton, 295 × 100 × 204 cm. Exhibition view, Mist, C L E A R I N G, Brussels, 2019. Photo Eden Krsmanovic. 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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Z H E N YA M A C H N E VA

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

Crumbling factory smokestacks, twists of unused power lines, fossilised machine gadgetry, derelict political statuary: Zhenya Machneva’s delicate, small-scale tapestries woven in cotton, linen, and synthetic threads transform the ghosts of the gleaming steel fantasy on which the Soviet Union’s economic fortune was to be built into a world of the uncanny. Born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) just before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Machneva challenges a predominant aesthetic that casts post-industrial zones – in the former Soviet Union, the US, or otherwise – as languishing, yet romantic spaces, without acknowledging the political and social forces that impeded their survival. Inspired by a visit to the Leningrad telephone equipment factory where the artist’s grandfather worked for forty years, Machneva inserts her family into a narrative about deindustrialisation, intertwining images of obsolete factories, industrial landscapes, and mechanical objects with the digital present. Created on manual looms, a practice characterised by rigorous handwork, Machneva’s tapestries stand in contrast to the speed and efficiency of contemporary technologies, yet also mirror the work ethic that made the industrial labour possible in the first place. Denizens of canonical Modernism, working at the juncture of Futurism, Surrealism, and Dada, contended with the internal and psychological effects of the dawning Industrial Age by visualising their mechanical obsessions. Similarly, the machines and objects that Machneva depicts are subtly anthropomorphised, an aspect that is further enhanced by the often-metaphorical titles that accompany each of the artist’s weavings, many of which express overt or sublimated states of aliveness. In works like Elephant Head, Portrait, Totem (all 2020), or A Dog (2021), human and animal analogues complicate the idea of the technology as a purely logical domain. A girl (2022) suggests a reprisal of the human-machine hybrids envisioned in by the early 20th-century avant-gardes, with a conspicuous lack of identifiably humanoid details in its approximately anthropomorphic compositions. Echo (2021), which was 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

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

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Zhenya Machneva, Elephant head, 2020. Hand woven tapestry (cotton, synthetic), 121 × 116 cm. Photo Gui Gomes. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist. © Zhenya Machneva Zhenya Machneva, Totem, 2020. Hand woven tapestry (cotton, linen, synthetic), 187 × 192 × 4 cm. Photo Aurélien Mole. Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris. © Zhenya Machneva

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D ORA BUD OR

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

Dora Budor received formal training as an architect in her native city of Zagreb, yet she does not practice architecture in the traditional sense; instead, her work challenges the idea of architecture as an affixed, enclosed, and inanimate system. In her immersive artworks, she uses the language of “minor” architecture: against the aesthetic pursuit of making buildings, she commits to a politics of selectively taking them apart. In site-specific installations and interventions, which often adapt readymades ranging from objects to infrastructures, space is animated to a disorienting effect. In attempting to detour the primacy of the visual, the production of space is addressed as an ideological and gendered project. Through this process, complex and psychologically resonant systems, built structures, interiors, and exhibitions become elements of counternarratives. 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. Conceived as a visual, spatial, and sonic experience, Autophones is an extension of a project initiated for a solo exhibition scheduled in 2022 at Kunsthaus Bregenz. In the presentation in Kunsthaus’ Brutalist-inspired building, vibrating sex toys are inserted into the air ducts hidden in the walls; their reverberations are carried via air circulation system into the gallery spaces. Through the transformation of the building’s underlying infrastructure into an instrument, the air itself becomes a medium. For the 59th International Art Exhibition, 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, with their enclosures 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, in part, 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

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

1983, Dakar, Senegal Lives in Berlin, Germany

For Monira Al Qadiri, the boon of modernisation in the Persian Gulf states is a zero-sum game, a parasitic manifestation of capitalism in which the earth’s resources are thoughtlessly drained at an everincreasing, unsustainable rate. Born in Senegal but raised in Kuwait, Al Qadiri has spent the last decade finding artistic means to describe 21st-century life in the Gulf with sculptures and video works, through which she assumes a range of visionary strategies to explain the stunning urban and economic development in the region over the last decades. Visualising the impact of the petroleum industry, and the environmental damage and historical amnesia that have accompanied it, as something alien but also frighteningly entrancing, Al Qadiri’s interpretation of 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. Poised between destruction, fetishism, and the uncanny, Al Qadiri’s objects extract understandings of the present through the manifold contradictions of consumption and desire. In recent years, 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. Linking the shine of petroleum with that of a pearl, Holy Quarter (2020), a video shot in the Empty Quarter – the arid desert found in the border region of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Oman – is accompanied by globular glass sculptures, splayed on the floor like alien droplets of oil. 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 levitation module, inserted into the base of each of them. Al Qadiri’s new installation, 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; as representations of machines used to bore into the Earth’s crust to access oil deposits, they become terrifying symbols of environmental devastation. – MW

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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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J E S FA N

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

Jes Fan’s sculptures often combine ephemeral substances, from hand-blown glass globules injected with melanin, black mould, and capsules filled with soybeans to testosterone-laden soap, oestrogenrich cosmetics, and his own mother’s urine. Through these evocative materials, Fan offers a critical means to explore properties that he describes as both politically contested and utterly absurd, even banal. 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. Despite the organic nature of Fan’s materials, his work is also deeply invested in the status of the object. Trained as a glassmaker, Fan frequently creates bulging hand-blown glass orbs, which he injects with hormonal substances. Known as a transformative material, 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. While functioning as vessels for their injections, they also resemble orifices and organs, interior structures of another kind. In Fan’s new work for The Milk of Dreams, casts of human bodies are draped over an armature of architectural lines. The casts – mimicking inverted breasts or belly button-like indents – hold glass forms that appear to be oozing from their crevices. The forms are organic, appearing to be anthropomorphic but at the same time slipping away from any static definition. Conceived as an accumulation of the themes and forms that have characterised Fan’s previous work to date, the new sculpture addresses the glands and interiority of life through an animistic approach to objects and a sculptural exploration of the body’s networked entanglement with technology. – MW

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Jes Fan, Diagram XII, 2021. Resin, selenium glass, pigments, 38.1 × 40.6 × 17.8 cm. Photo Pierre Le Hors. Collection the Kadist Art Foundation. Courtesy the Artist; Empty Gallery, Hong Kong. © Jes Fan Next pages: 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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S O N D R A P E R RY

1986, Perth Amboy, USA Lives in Newark, USA

The artist Arthur Jafa once proposed that Sondra Perry’s art constitutes an “un-body of work.” This is to say, the body – specifically the Black body – in Perry’s vision is in a constant state of flux. Whether being fragmented and put back together, rendered invisible or made hypervisible, in her interdisciplinary “un-body of work,” Perry rigorously considers the dehumanisation of Black bodies from a historical and personal perspective, using visual strategies culled from digital production and computer-based media to reflect critically on the intricacies of experience and identity. Perry’s poetic installations and videos are replete with technologies of representation, including easyto-access tools like avatars, 3D modelling softwares, found footage from YouTube, and chroma-key blue screens (a colour used in videomaking as a placeholder for backgrounds placed in postproduction), 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. In the immersive installation Typhoon Coming On (2018), a digitally manipulated image of J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), which depicts the cruel drowning of 133 slaves by the captain of a British slave ship, done to collect insurance money to compensate for “lost goods,” is shown with projections of colourised ocean surfaces made through the software Blender’s Ocean Modifier tool. In Flesh Wall (2016–2020), recently displayed on the vast digital billboards of Times Square, Perry uses Blender’s Ocean Modifier tool again, but this time to animate pictures of her own skin, magnified to a point that the image is unrecognisable. Again formulating a connection between personal history and culture, memory and reality, Lineage for a Phantom Zone (2021–2022) centres around the Trade Winds hair salon, a business that used to operate in Perry’s studio building in Newark, and the artist’s futile search for the North Carolina land upon which her grandmother was born and worked as a sharecropper. Filmed using an anamorphic lens and presented in an immersive installation complete with a sofa modelled from the one found in Perry’s grandmother’s home, the dreamlike narrative reflects upon the ways in which the telling of history constructs lived experience and the collective imagination can hold transformative power. – MW

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

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TISHAN HSU

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

Known for richly evocative forms that conjure biological and virtual motifs, Tishan Hsu has described technology’s progressive integration with the body as the central preoccupation of his artistic research. As he said in recent times: “I consider myself a cyborg. Google is my memory.” Yet, when he began making his futuristic round-edged paintings and architectonic sculptures in the 1980s, many of the effects of such a cyborgian experience were still undetermined. In the early 1980s, Hsu had been working as a “word processor” at a Wall Street law firm, where he encountered computers before they were accessible to the wider public. Among his early works are bulging paintings and tiled sculptures that evoke the textural and physical effect of his hours spent immersed in such a technological orbit. Maintaining the essential corporeality of human encounters with proto-digitally mediated experiences, these works suggest not only the simulation engendered by technology, but its impact on the body: saturated with static, white noise, bits of digital data, scratchy surfaces, floating orifices, and fragmented body parts, these works dissolve the threshold between the screen and flesh. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Hsu began using silkscreen techniques to further emphasise the confluence of manual and digital life. In these pieces, close-ups of pastel drawings of flesh are integrated with images of fish mouths, ATM slots, thermostat dials, and pictures borrowed from biomedical textbooks, all registering a manual sensuousness in their galaxy of forms. Hsu’s most recent wall-based and sculptural works grapple with the emergent bio-technological paradigm. In Blue Interface (2019–2021) and signal.noise/membrane (2020), Hsu uses innovative fabrication techniques and materials – particularly silicone and alkyd, a durable synthetic resin – to create imagery that calls to mind bodily orifices, organic matter, or biotic growths. The psychedelic raster pattern of Watching 2 (2021) is embellished with a nipple, a belly button, the display screen of a digital thermometer gun, and distorted imagery related to emotional surveillance technologies, playing on the screen as a mesh between interior and exterior, digital and human. PhoneBreath-Bed and Breath 3 (both 2021) – both of which incorporate silicone casts of dormant human faces – 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 & IW

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Tishan Hsu, Blue Interface, 2019–2021. Dye-sublimation inkjet, stainless steel wire cloth, silicone on aluminium, 154.9 × 121.9 × 7.6 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. © Tishan Hsu / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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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 Tishan Hsu, Watching 2, 2021. UV cured inkjet, silicone on wood, 182.9 × 121.9 × 7.6 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, Miguel Abreu Gallery; New York. © Tishan Hsu

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GEUMHYUNG JEONG

1980, Seoul Lives in Seoul, South Korea

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 that she’s built from DIY parts to emphasise the uncanny relationships that have developed between people and machines. In her most extreme performances, Jeong performs sensual actions on and for her robots, confusing her own body with their prosthetic ones through physical, sensorial exhibits of affection. 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. Having taught herself the basics in programming and mechanisms, Jeong intentionally maintains an amateur, toy-like, experimental quality to her engineered beings. These are not slick, high-powered machines. They are clunky, but responsive, alluring, but humble. Their playfulness is foregrounded in the curious amalgamation of prosthetic parts. In a clinical, sterile, or even fetishistic form of display, Jeong forms lines and rows of objects that differ in each installation, but can include medical tools, or mechanical parts – the wheels, cables, anatomic models, and disassembled mannequins that are the lifeblood of her robots. Next to the object arrangements are informational videos that show Jeong’s building process, like a class tutorial. Film, object, robotic sculpture, and performance come together in Jeong’s fully realised installations, all accentuating the push and pull of animate and inanimate elements, and the stark reality of an ever-decreasing, yet still sincerely troubling, human-digital divide. The “toys” on view in Venice 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

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

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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

In the video need ideas!?!PLZ! (2011), Elisa Giardina Papa collects little-seen YouTube uploads featuring teenagers asking for advice on what they should make videos about. Drawing from Life (2011) presents a series of digital portraits of strangers who met on Chatroulette, an anonymous webcam-based chat site popular in the early 2010s. The video Technologies of Care (2016) presents conversations with online caregivers – an ASMR artist, an online dating coach, a fetish video performer – who provide immaterial labour over Internet platforms as freelance workers. Seen together, Giardina Papa’s darkly humorous research-based works frame the presentation and performance of gender, sexuality, and labour in the 21st-century digital economy, wherein fantasy, pleasure, and care exist in a continuum of self-optimisation, data extraction, and perpetual profit for unseen corporations. Giardina Papa’s new video installation “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale (2022) is built from what the artist calls a “socio-poetic and sociomagical” archive of rituals and stories passed between generations through oral tradition in Sicily and the southern Mediterranean region. Consisting of moving images and ceramics made in collaboration with Sicilian artisans, the video is set against the background of the postmodern city of Gibellina Nuova, an unfinished and depopulated “concrete utopia” built after a devastating earthquake in western Sicily in the 1960s and follows a fictionalised community of unruly teen girl bike tuners, outsiders who spend their time riding bikes customised with powerful sound systems. Modelled after Sicilian stories of donne di fora – loosely translated as “women from the outside and beside themselves” – “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale’s otherworldly visual narrative is woven together with narrative references to Sicilian fairy tales, chants of female healers known as inciarmatrici, the artist’s childhood memories of fables passed to her in Sicilian dialect by her grandmother, and the 16thand 17th-century Spanish Inquisition trials in Palermo, throughout which the tales of the donne di fora were often used as a means for persecution against the population who told them. Thus drawing from history, folklore, and oral tradition, this magical digital collage poses the fantastical alongside the real consequences of their telling, creating a tale that generates an imaginative space beyond predetermined categories of humanness and womanhood. – MW

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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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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, in which she places people in relation to non-human beings – animals, plant life, both alive and dead. Occupied by stray dogs, dead pigeons, wandering chickens, roadkill, and hunted game, neglected ruins, empty palatial estates, industrial towns, and eerie ex-urban communities appear in a state of suspended time, seemingly located at once in a distant past and a dystopic future. Together, these dreamlike or otherwise allegorical atmospheres are permeated by physical abandonment and symbolic reminders of the inevitability of death. Common to her highly choreographed narratives are ritual forms of parting with or coming into proximity with dead beings, including burial, cremation, digging, and archaeology. For Rafa, this approach becomes a circular narrative device, expressing the primacy of animal agency and unearthing the subjectivities that exist beyond solely human life in the context of our increasingly precarious environmental situation. Her films may be fantastical, but they fall far from an escapist fantasy. Appearing like a scene from a memento mori painting come to life, Rafa’s 2020 short film Lacerate – 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 – 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. Bathed in pools of natural light, 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 out 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 work Judith Beheading Holofernes, popularly interpreted as a proto-feminist revenge tale, Lacerate, too, creates an allegory of self-defense against gendered violence, combining art historical symbolism with distressing, nightmarish imagery. Presented in the aftermath of violence, the work focuses primarily on the actions of dogs, rather than of humans. Here, animals are envisioned as both protectors and as conduits to the untamed parts of the self. – MW

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Janis Rafa, Lacerate (stills), 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

For over fifty years, Lynn Hershman Leeson has been creating provocative, conceptually prescient innovations in technology, which rigorously address structures of power. Her work spans installation, performance, photography, video, interactive media, and Net Art, themes of surveillance, privacy, artificial intelligence, the cyborg, and genetic engineering. In many of her trailblazing early pieces, Hershman Leeson positioned herself as the subject of an ongoing performance, which served as both a reflection of and defense against the culture in which she was produced. From 1972 until 1979, Hershman Leeson inhabited a fictional persona in a performance known as Roberta Breitmore, a character whom she not only dressed and groomed, but also fully inhabited and lived as, even going so far as to acquire a driver’s license and visiting a psychiatrist. As Hershman Leeson used characters like Roberta Breitmore to inventively explore the construction of identity, her work on the cyborg and artificial intelligence similarly probes the ways we represent ourselves. In video pieces made throughout the 1990s and early 2000s – such as Seduction of a Cyborg (1994), an allegory for technology’s annexation of the body, in which a blind woman agrees to a treatment that allows her to see images via a computer screen, or Teknolust (2002), a genre-bending sci-fi comedy chronicling 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, vision and perception, but it can also be conceived of as instrument for empowerment. Hershman Leeson’s mirror-printed series Missing Person extends the valence of cyborg identity into the realm of digital extinction, this time presenting photographic portraits of people who do not exist. Created from AI technologies, Missing Person, Cyborg (2021) captures a lifelike blonde woman placidly staring at the camera. The small, barely visible figures next to the eyes and on the neck, however, reveal the flaws of the AI system, wherein the constructed character of her naturalistic features human becomes most obvious. The video Logic Paralyzes the Heart (2021), narrated by a 61-year-old cyborg, too, opines on the body’s integration with ever-growing digital and military-based systems of control. In it, cyborgs are portrayed as complicit software, dependant on human interaction to survive. Within this system, individuals are hauntingly transformed into their data, which in the age of surveillance is little more than an analogue for who they are. – MW

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Lynn Hershman Leeson, Missing Person, Cyborg, 2021. Archival digital print on Plexiglas in reverse against mirror, people generated completely by an Artificial Intelligence system on the website “Generated Photos,” 76.2 × 76.2 cm. Photo Hotwire Productions LLC. Courtesy the Artist; Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York; Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco; Waldburger Wouters Gallery, Basel; ShanghArt China. © Lynn Hershman Leeson

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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

Within the galaxy of artists’ experiments with language throughout the 20th century – in Futurist manifestos, Concrete Poetry, Fluxus instructions, and Conceptualist magazine interventions –, Barbara Kruger’s daring image and text work is renowned for its rhetorical power and visual urgency. Throughout her early career in the 1960s and 1970s, Kruger, who studied with Diane Arbus at the Parsons School of Design in New York, worked as a graphic designer and picture editor for magazines, including Mademoiselle, Vogue, House & Garden, and Aperture. There she developed her graphic sensibility, which she would later instrumentalise in her critical art practice, employing cropped, large-scale black-and-white photographs overlaid with pithy aphorisms, which she typesets in Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed and sets against red or black bars – a now-iconic design schema. Kruger started to make artworks that investigate the ideology behind mass media with a feminist perspective in the late 1970s, crafting works that engaged with emerging tactics of postmodern cultural theory and self-reflexive critiques of representation associated with the group broadly known as the Pictures Generation. For Kruger, the legacy of Conceptualism’s use of language coincided with her own interests in the media’s execution of words and images to construct desire and identity. The phrases in her works often include direct forms of address and personal pronouns like “I” and “you”: “Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face”; “I shop therefore I am”; “Your body is a battleground” – implicating both herself and the viewer into the purview of her critiques. Over the decades, these methodologies have expanded to include the up-scaling and spatialising of her visual practice through the engagement of both still and moving images. Kruger’s new installation for The Milk of Dreams positions her image/ text work across walls, floor, and columns and includes a trio of singlechannel videos. Located at the very end of the Corderie building, the work is mapped out to fit the spatial parameters of the site. The text’s imploring phrases of command (“PLEASE CARE,” “PLEASE MOURN”) implicate the viewer in a direct encounter – or even confrontation – with the work of art, using the ironically disembodied mode of address that is characteristic of Kruger’s practice to call attention to our own bodies’ viscera and excreta. – MW

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Barbara Kruger, Untitled (No puedes vivir sin nosotras / You can’t live without us), 2018. Installation view, Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires, Silos de la Antigua Junta Nacional de Granos, Puerto Madero, Argentina, 2018. Courtesy the Artist; Sprüth Magers

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Barbara Kruger, installation view, FOREVER, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2017-2018. Photo Timo Ohler. Courtesy the Artist; Sprüth Magers

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Barbara Kruger, installation view, Belief + Doubt, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2012–ongoing. Photo Cathy Carver. Courtesy the Artist; Sprüth Magers

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OF OWLS AND THINGS Jack Halberstam

“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling dusk.” – Hegel

Dark night, stars out, visible even from the city. I ride hard through the twilight to try to make my appointment with the wild. For the first time in over a century, a snowy owl has been spotted in Central Park. I am the most casual of birdwatchers, but owls, hawks, and feral birds of prey will draw me out of my urban lair and into a ramble. Of course, mostly, the wild cannot be tracked or summoned and so I must hope for occasional, accidental sightings – an amateur like me cannot “find” a bird to watch. I just have to be lucky enough to be in place when the bird arrives. One such arrival marks one of my most treasured memories of my mostly not so happy decade in Los Angeles. My partner had been telling me that, from our bedroom in Mount Washington, a hilly neighbourhood on the east side of the city, she heard an owl calling in the middle of the night. I scoffed that this was impossible and thought no more about it. But one night, at the deepest, darkest hour, an unmistakable hooting was audible outside our window. I rushed to the window and pulled open the blind to find myself face to face with a great horned owl, sitting on a power line just outside the window and looking as surprised as I was. Perhaps I was the wild to him, a rare, and not so sought-after, encounter for the bird with a startled human, an encounter that the creature was smart enough to flee from. As quickly as I registered his presence he was gone.

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In the extended shut downs that have punctuated the last year, the non-human world has found peace and quiet, and, revelling in the sudden cessation of constant, catastrophic pollution, creatures that were quietly fading out of existence have crept back into life, tiptoeing to the edge of possibility, and then, grandiosely, taking flight into the air emptied of planes, gliding through waters that lack the usual massive, sewage spewing cruise ships, creeping through woods without human trespassers. Registering a lowered volume and a smaller footprint, the world beyond the human gingerly steps forward. Wildness, after the pandemic, is not simply the reappearance of nonhuman creatures, it is an opening in space and time forced upon humans by non-human entities, in this case, an invisible and deadly virus, one of many to come, no doubt. Halting the flow of everyday life under capital, Covid has articulated itself through our bodies as a question – namely, what comes next? I cannot answer that question, no one can. But, like the non-human animals with whom we share space, we too might want to take flight at the first signs that the world is “opening back up.” The question of what comes next might, after all, be nothing.

Nicole Eisenman, From Success to Obscurity, 2004. Courtesy the Artist; Hauser & Wirth. © Nicole Eisenman

In other words, we are the environmental disaster we have been waiting for. Let’s not ask now whether the human can survive Covid but whether the world can survive the re-emergence of the human. The human is a vexed and dangerous conceit and it is one that we should surely be learning to live without. The other to the human has been expressed as wildness, as monstrosity, as cyborg, as racialised disposability, and as vegetal forms of life. Can we find our way beyond the human at this crucial moment in planetary fragility? Some artists show us how to do so by conjuring queer and feminist dreams of mutation. While Coronaviruses mutate around us finding chinks in the human armour and producing variants as they pass through millions of immune systems, the human too must mutate and spiral away from the form that has imposed such havoc. The human cannot resolve the disaster that the human has wreaked. It is time to collaborate with the wild, to become thingly, to demand quiet and stillness and to see frenzied activity as a symptom of racial capital. Just as in the past I have been drawn to abstract representations of queerness and transness because they avoid the bind of identity, now I want to break away from the human by finding queer and feminist images of thingliness. Take this painting by Nicole Eisenman, From Success to Obscurity (2004). Here, Eisenman depicts The Thing, a Marvel comix tragic superhero, as a symbol of the burden of mutation. Like many superheroes, The Thing’s super powers are both a miracle and a liability. The Thing, in Marvel comix, was a test pilot who was exposed to radiation which gives him a thick skin, super human strength but also a sense of being trapped in his own body, walled in and stuck behind his own façade. While The Thing’s transformation has been read as a symptom of masculine pathos, the formulation of “trapped in the wrong body” gestures towards a trans* reading of material enclosure. This notion of one body trapped in another may no longer function as a conventional trope in trans* narrative but it lingers as a more general sense of wrongness, a sense that attaches to a definition of the human that spins away from thingliness. Heteronormative and gender normative formulations of the human understand the body as legible, available, naked, and fluid. In response, Eisenman offers the human form as frozen, stuck, sequestered, and blocked. Rather than seeking recognition in the form of rights or approval, this walled in figure is obscurity itself, unavailable

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for inscription or rescue. The painting is titled From Success to Obscurity and The Thing holds in his hand a letter that begins “Dear Obscurity.” The Thing has not simply tumbled out of success, he is the very embodiment of a failure that cannot be reversed. Eisenman captures the agony of falling from success to obscurity but also, along the way, makes clear that we cannot escape the trap of the body – not through drugs, nor medicine, not through will nor imagination – the body is a drag, a weight as much as it may be a vehicle and a vessel. Here, The Thing learns with sorrow that his transformation has delivered him to obscurity but this transformation, as Ramzi Fawaz’s brilliant book on Marvel comix makes clear, also removes him from the orbit of the nuclear family, from normativity, from legibility – his super powers and his ability to help, to transform, to survive rely on his monstrous surface.1 His thingness is his queerness. The Thing reads a letter. The creature’s readerliness reminds the viewer of Frankenstein’s monster who, in Mary Shelley’s timeless story, sat sequestered behind a wall in a cottage and watched a child learning to read, and so learned to read himself. While the acquisition of literacy was supposed to humanise the monster in Shelley’s story, it only made him even more isolated, more aware of his difference, his inassimilable monstrosity. The image with which Shelley’s novel closes, of the monster chasing his human maker across a frozen landscape, frames the human condition as a flight from a nightmare of our own making but also as a failure to see, in the monster’s non-human form, a possibility for change. As the monster chases the human, and as the human flees from the damage it has done, an allegory takes shape. Shelley’s novel and the many monsters it has spawned, including Eisenman’s painting, offered the early 19th century and offers now again an image of the end of the human. While not a cause for rejoicing in the novel, it offers, at any rate, a new logic of temporality. The human, in the era of collapse, will forever be “after.” And all that remains for art is to look back because ahead is just ice and darkness. Frankenstein, The Thing, zombies, vampires, and so many other monsters crafted from human frailty all evolve out of racial taxonomies within which gendered illegibility (what is it?) merges with racial distinctiveness to form hybrid nightmares out of the fears of white people. Those nightmares reappear as art, as Black art, as art that forms around night, around Blackness, around monstrosity and around nothingness. Untitled (WE ARE NOT) (2019–2020) by Adam Pendleton, for example, uses a sculpted alphabet to issue a resounding refusal to the white world of propulsive being, to the world that says “we are the world,” to the “we” who imagine worldedness and give it form and assign all else to darkness.

Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2019–2020. Courtesy the Artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

“When you break something,” writes Akwaeke Emezi in their extraordinary novel Freshwater, “you must study the pattern of shattering before you can piece it back together.”2 This novel about multitudinous being builds upon Nigerian cosmologies of selfhood to push away from Western aetiologies of transgender identity and to offer transition as a part spiritual and part physical exploration of body. The brokenness of self is not its undoing in this novel but its steady state and the “pattern of shattering” must be studied not with the goal of reassembly simply but as a way of understanding what it means to break. The breaking apart of world – (WE ARE NOT) – that might stand as one articulation of what Fred Moten terms “the Black aesthetic,” echoes through Emezi’s novel where various avatars jostle for space in the

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vestibular spaces of their mind and body. The body breaks, the body breaks down, the body reassembles differently and finds only some of the pieces of Blackness, brokenness, spirit, and flesh. Reassembled bodies, cast as monstrous or mad or broken by the “world,” are actually gateways to other understandings of human/ non-human relations. Covid both broke world and worldedness and, at the same time, confirmed well-worn oppositions between protected and disposal populations. The wealthy continued to save the wealthy while abandoning multitudes to sickness, eviction, destitution, and despair. That some portion of the animal world tiptoed into the light was the smallest of consolations in a period of devastation. Still, when I arrived at Central Park on a snowy night deep into the Covid winter and saw a small crowd standing gazing into the gloom, I felt compelled to join them. I too hoped for a glimpse of wonder in the bleak heart of worlded violence. I joined the group on the path and I too stared into the night. Someone passed me her binoculars and I picked out a white shape perching on the fence. Then suddenly the owl took flight and we saw it flit into the visual field like a ghost, like a harbinger of something. It was dusk, the owl seemed out of place in the urban park but its flight took me, took us all off guard. Was the owl a warning? A reminder that wisdom always comes too late? With a low hoot, the owl signalled its departure and as it flew low across a field, its human audience dispersed and turned back to the business of survival. Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including, among others: Female Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998), In a Queer Time and Place (New York University Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011), a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press, 2018) and Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke University Press, 2020). Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: The Wild Beyond: Music, Architecture and Anarchy.

See Ramzi Fawaz, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comix (New York: New York University Press, 2016). Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater (New York: Grove, 2018).

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GLOSSARY incomplete and in order of appearance, from 9 March 2020 to 26 April 2021, partial and emotional, like memory

Chiara Valerio

The body is our first device. It is our means of exchanging information with our surroundings, of occupying space and perceiving it. As I listen to the radio, the measures conceived and put in place to limit contagion remind me that one of the most common disorders among the incarcerated is myopia. Due to the lack of a distant horizon. I wonder if sensations will still exist when these lockdowns are over, or if only memories of sensations will be left. It’s just begun, I’ve just turned forty-two, and looking at the lagoon in Venice, I wonder if, like every process from thermodynamics on, this too will prove irreversible. I think of my cat who, when there are no birds outside the window to greet with shrill battle cries, turns to the photo of a crow seizing a dove and addresses the same shrill battle cries to that. I place an order online for a New Age poster of a vast archipelago (the Andaman Islands, maybe, I will never put it up) and regain my composure. I look, smell, touch, taste, listen (it’s raining) and trust in the body. The body is our first device.

H O R IZO N

DA N T ÈS I read for a living. I read even when I write. On 9 March, as Italy is shutting down, I take a train from Venice back to Rome, cat in tow, to rejoin my partner, and the first thing I lose interest in is reading manuscripts. Their pages contain no trace of the relational, collective apocalypse that now engrosses me. Naturally so, because before any reflection, concern, analysis, the first reaction is sheer wonder at a thing never previously seen or imagined. The world is once again manifest in all its unpredictability. The world, in all its incomprehensibility, has once again become “broad and wide.” Ever since I learned to read, I’ve always read. I can’t remember a day without reading anything, and yet up to the end of March, manuscripts, and even printed books, made me restless. Then I realised that books yet to be published are relational objects that one reads, discusses, chooses whether to publish or not, and so when there is no interaction – no human beings with their bodies and arguments, prejudices and enthusiasms – when there is no interaction, there’s only the canon. And so, I picked up The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, which I hadn’t read since I was sixteen. I pulled it off the shelf because I remembered that Dantès is good at waiting. In his fourteen years locked up in the darkness, or dim light, of the Château d’If, before learning, with Abbot Faria’s help, the mathematics, geometry, chemistry, literature, and anatomy that will bolster him when he comes into a vast fortune, Dantès learns, on his own, to wait. Waiting is a preparation for the adventure of Monte Cristo. Waiting, when wealth might dull his wits, gives him the discipline to wait for something else: revenge. The Count of Monte Cristo suddenly gave me back my adolescence: pages you must read because your welfare as a living creature depends on it.

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In the first month of the lockdown, Monte Cristo reminded me that waiting is a preparatory state and an exercise that may last longer than expected. Or rather, the length of your wait cannot be foreseen, it doesn’t just depend on you. Waiting is therefore a synonym for, or even a form of, interaction, and losing heart can never be adventurous. Optimism, even when it seems obtuse, ensures adventure, and is not a character trait, but a practice. Marking a notch on the wall every day, to keep time from clumping days into the archetype of a day and forgetting them. The notch is there to remind us to count. Counting itself, with symbols more complex than notches, became a repeated, repetitive action. Scientific illiteracy and the Italian aversion for numbers exploded into a religious faith in graphs, curves, histograms. Graphs were commented on like photos of landscapes, where the only discernible information was the extinction of the species. ZO O M Of all the platforms that came into widespread use starting in late April 2020, Zoom is the one whose name troubled me the most. Or at least made me wonder. In a world where the resolution of images has become so low that emotions and memories can be evoked even in Instagram format, Zoom – with the magnification inherent in its name – forced one to reflect on the body, and on the representation of self. While Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus that the world is the totality of facts and pictures, Zoom showed to what degree the private sphere plays a major role in the representation of self. The private space. Google Meet or Houseparty or Microsoft Teams, or other platforms whose brands and logos I don’t know, may have done the same thing, but not starting with their names. We became pictures of ourselves, in our own rooms. The body is a bearer of truth, it always has been. I watch myself talk, reflected on the screen, and think of those spy movies with lie detector tests. Interrogations where people are hooked up to electrodes measuring the truthfulness and plausibility of their answers, based on electrical impulses emitted by the body. I watch myself talk onscreen and think that we are not capable of measuring the truth or plausibility of our words without the body. It can be done, but we don’t yet know how to do it. It can be done, but we haven’t done it yet. There is a proxemics to our truths. We can judge fairly well whether someone is lying or not when they’re physically in front of us. Our rational mind is as old as we are, but our instinct is older, as old as our species, and thus faster. A thought process so fast we call it instinct. I watch myself talking onscreen and think that mathematics is the only language I know in which truth has no body to sustain it, support it, incarnate it. Insofar as truth is an interaction, we are on the verge, deprived of our bodies, deprived of our other senses, of no longer being able to gauge it. In a poem from a few years ago, Patrizia Cavalli wrote: “I don’t trust anyone who has no sense of smell.”1 Deprived of my senses, except for sight and hearing, with no smell, taste, or touch, I get frightened, I think I don’t understand and maybe I don’t.

I hear the noun “model” next to the adjective “mathematical” and think of those who have tried, from Pythagoras on, frightening themselves at times, to fathom the world through symbols, and have realised it is the principle of cause and effect that made us evolve, and not evolution that has forced us to think in terms of cause and effect. At one point in the Italian Wikipedia entry for “mathematical model” I read: “The model is often a picture of reality that is not perfect, yet faithful.”2 And I ask myself what pictures, if any, are perfect. I watch myself onscreen, in a Zoom meeting, and think, “not perfect, yet faithful.” Perfect can be used for bodies, faithful for relationships or ideas. Perfection is not relational, faithfulness is. I look at myself and think I would like to be faithful. Except that being faithful requires memory. Compressed images that speed along from device to device cannot be faithful. Technically. Our picture is an impression, nothing else. The world is a totality of facts and impressions, that’s what I’d like to tell Wittgenstein, hoping he will prove me wrong. M O DEL

I don’t think the virus can be fought with books, but I know that in The Truce Primo Levi describes how he survived dehumanisation through the rituals of life from before, like washing and shaving, even though he had only dirty water. P R IMO L E VI

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I believe Primo Levi. And so – like almost everyone – I agree to follow the rules put out by doctors and researchers to slow and avoid contagion. You can’t find the solution in books, but you can find other ways of life, across time and space. And the idea that your own way of life and consumption is not the only one is the beginning of a solution. In mathematical models describing the spread of epidemics, and in general when speaking of solutions, one must look at the boundary conditions. A solution does not exist in and of itself, it depends on the boundary conditions. So even in mathematics, the solution is relational. Depending on certain characteristics, the same equation may have or not have a solution. Primo Levi described how he managed, from the practical and emotional standpoint, to survive a societal plague by relying in part on a practice. He was lucky, but he also had a practice. And so I wash my hands, I keep doing it. Even though after a year and a half I feel like Lady Macbeth. In the lady’s case, the handwashing was triggered by an indelible bloodstain from an indelible crime. And in mine? I’m a white Western woman born in the late 1970s. From a social standpoint, I’m probably more like my grandparents than my parents. Born in the early 1950s, my parents belong to the generation of Italians that fought for and obtained legal divorce, healthcare, and a social safety net. I’m a freelancer and have the bare minimum of that safety net, when I have it. To me the words “paid holidays” and “thirteenth-month bonus” are the flip side of the Dowager Countess’ question in Downton Abbey: “What is a weekend?” The virus has spread, in part due to relational and democratic shortcomings, to a lack of healthcare access and social justice. “There is, in helping others, a vague homicidal passion hard to contain in less bloody impulses.”3 The government helps us, offers us tax relief. I help, we help. We can’t free ourselves of other people, vectors of disease, so we help them. Other people can’t free themselves of us, vectors of disease, so they help us. F LEU R JA E G GY

By the end of May, in a flat overlooking a square that is treeless, although the plane trees lining the banks of the Tiber can be glimpsed from one window, I am missing something. I am missing green. Parsley wilts in a glass of water, so does basil, mint survives. So as soon as we’re allowed to leave the house, my partner and I go to a nursery. Behind a wall of Kentia palms and ficus trees we see a plant that looks like a papyrus. I think of Egyptian scrolls and smile. The papyrus is not only green, but it reminds me of something, it brightens rooms and memory. We come closer and it’s not a papyrus, it’s a palm. I enquire, do a search, find a picture – an impression. A Victorian palm. For the parlour.

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SA K E M U LE Since we can’t go out, my partner and I cook foods from a different country every evening. To her it’s an adventure, she’s never cooked before. She is the only person I know who likes to eat but has no curiosity about how food is prepared. Cooking bores her, or rather used to bore her. When she starts cooking, she notices mythifications, braggadocio. One evening, when we’re in Mexico, Marcella prepares Margaritas using Carlos Herrera’s proportions (½ tequila, ¼ triple sec, ¼ lime juice) and a shaker. She tastes it and her eyes light up. She protests against whoever boastfully claimed to make the best Margarita in Rome, maybe Europe, maybe the world. Maybe even Mars, after Ridley Scott’s The Martian. I’m reminded of Albert Speer, the architect of the Reich, locked up in Spandau Prison in Berlin. When they went to get him for the trial, they found him in Córdoba. Every day, when he was let out for exercise, he would choose the map of a city and rescale it to the courtyard he was allowed to walk around in. We’re doing the same thing in the kitchen. We’re getting used to it. Although by September 2020 everything seems more open, and is, I keep moving around as if I were at home, in front of a screen. I rescale everything. In short, I’m doing the opposite of what Speer did and I don’t feel like a better human being than him.

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When it starts getting hot, the ants come back. I follow them along the walls. The spiders, too. The plant has changed our microclimate. The parlour palm, a relational palm. There are more insects. In the cupboard, too, the moths in the rice and pasta seem happier. One day, a ripped screen lets in a wasp that’s as long as the intermediate phalanx and plus the distal phalanx of my right index finger. I discover it when I put my hand on the sill where it’s hobbling around. The cat keeps its distance. I’m reminded of Giorgio Vallortigara’s studies of wasps, how they’re capable of recognising the faces of other wasps. Recognising a face has to do with consciousness, I know that much. I go to the kitchen, get a glass, come back and catch the wasp under it. I observe it inside its glass case. I don’t know how its eyes work, but I know the aberrations of my own, exacerbated by long weeks of no horizon. I stand there motionless, I want it to learn my face. The cat continues to keep its distance. I have more neurons than the wasp, so I can store more information. This means that if I move out of the centre, this centre from which the virus emanates, this noxious humanism, I can remember the face of the wasp. And if I can, I want to. Not want as in a demand, wish as in a prayer. A NTS

P LAST I C On 18 April, in Marine Pollution Bulletin, I read about what happens when plastic ends up in the ocean. What is plastic supposed to do? I wonder. Plastic floats, fully or partially. I picture an Archimedean volume of plastic, which at first resembles a physics experiment, then slowly decays into microplastics, then is eaten by fish. Every so often, when I broil fish in the oven, I smell burnt plastic and get worried. But then I remember that “microplastic” isn’t an expression, it refers to a unit of measurement. Ever since the General Conference on Weights and Measures of 1960, the prefix “micro,” in the International System of Units, has indicated a millionth of a part, 10–6. 10–6 is very small, so it’s irrational to think I could see or smell it. I prefer to think that the fish in the oven has not swallowed microplastics. Ryota Nakajima, a marine biologist with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, has estimated that over ten million tonnes of plastic end up in the sea every year, and the floating portion of it is small compared to what is submerged. Ten million tonnes. A tonne is 1000 kg, 103, ten million tonnes are 10 times 106 times 103 kg, that is, 10 gigagrammes. I can’t picture that amount, so I think of my phone memory, 128 gigabytes. It seems innocuous, but I can’t fool myself. I suddenly think of icebergs, whose visible surface is tiny compared to the volume underwater and realise that nature transforms everything into nature. Plastic behaves like icebergs. Nature deanthropises the products of anthropisation, making them part of a larger cycle, appropriating them. Ashes to ashes, plastic to iceberg. When I asked the astrophysicist Sandra Savaglio about our obsession with finding life forms similar to our own in outer space, she said the reason we haven’t found them may be that, just like us, they develop a death drive before developing the technical and cultural capacity to send messages out into the universe. Both micros and gigas are units of measurement that entered the International System in 1960, which already existed, but had not been standardised; until then, I suppose, millimetres and millions had been enough to describe the world. Then everything got bigger and smaller. And now we’re still here. Where? In human nature.

Chiara Valerio (Scauri, Italy, 1978) is a writer, editor, and radio host. She has written novels, short stories, essays, literary criticism, and has translated Virginia Woolf. She writes for la Repubblica, L’Espresso, and Vanity Fair, and works with Rai Radio 3 on the programme Ad alta voce and on L’isola deserta, which she hosts weekly. Since 2017 she has headed the Italian fiction division at Marsilio Editori. She has a PhD in mathematics, and her most recent book is titled La matematica è politica. Her books are published by Einaudi. 1 2 3

Patrizia Cavalli, La patria (Rome: nottetempo, 2011). See https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Modello_matematico. Fleur Jaeggy, Water Statues (New York: New Directions, 2021), 60.

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T H E L ONG JOU R N E Y OF M I S S C L A R A (Quasi-Theatrical Monologue of a Captive Rhinoceros) Igiaba Scego

I first came across Clara’s story at Ca’ Rezzonico, a museum of 18th-century Venetian art. I was there to work on a project about the city’s Jewish ghetto, led by Professor Shaul Bassi of Ca’ Foscari University and Beit Venezia. Called “Re-Imagining the Ghetto,” it encouraged artists from around the world to reflect on this place, to which Jews were once confined, as a space of contemporary thought. The ghetto was a prison, but it was also a place where cultures mingled and blossomed into art, ideas, creativity. The word “ghetto” later spread from Venice and was applied to other places of imprisonment (the slums of Nairobi, the ghettos of Los Angeles, the Warsaw Ghetto) that nonetheless, due precisely to their forced isolation, became spaces where what was marginal became an entire world, of art, life, resistance, martyrdom. I was one of the artists invited to think about the ghetto. So when at Ca’ Rezzonico I saw Pietro Longhi’s painting of masked figures with a rhinoceros at the centre – our Clara – I got the idea of writing about how a body can become a ghetto. Clara, a gift of colonialism, a prisoner, whom I, the daughter of refugees, wanted to free through art. I wrote a children’s book about Clara. But my obsession with her refused to fade. And almost on its own, it grew into a monologue for an adult audience, presented here in an abridged version: a work-in-progress that will lead me who knows where. In it, Clara tells us about her wretched life as a prisoner and about how colonialism has shaped the planet – as it still does, through neocolonialism – in toxic ways. As I see it, Clara is the victim of a system that hates our planet.

Pietro Longhi, Il rinoceronte, 1751 © Archivio Fotografico – Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia

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The most eagerly awaited guest at the Carnival of Venice in 1751 was named Clara. She was an Indian rhinoceros. Rhinoceros unicornis. A female.

Now I’m gigantic. Now I’m huge. Full of lard. Now I’m a full-grown rhino – almost full-grown – and I break carnation-patterned china. Lord Sichterman’s favourite set. I heard him telling the housekeeper: “The lass can’t live with us anymore. We’ll have to find another home for baby.” He looked at me with benevolence. His usual benevolence. He smiled. But it was a different smile from usual. It looked like goodbye. It was goodbye.

I wasn’t supposed to grow. I wasn’t supposed to grow so big. Yesterday I broke Lord Sichterman’s china. The set with a carnation in the middle. Red carnations. I like carnations. Although I’ve never seen real ones. They must smell good. Our garden only has lotus flowers. Ordinary lotus flowers. A pungent aroma. Rat-like. But it’s a smell I don’t mind in the end. It reminds me of mama. Oh mama... I was so very small when mama was killed by poachers. §

Lord Sichterman was a handsome man. Women liked him. Men liked him. Everyone was all smiles and bows. Everyone was afraid of his icy gaze. Everyone showed him respect. He was a powerful man. He was with the Dutch East India Company, director of the Bengal district. He governed the sea, the land, the winds. He was master of dreams, desires, little whims. He had lovers, slaves, rubies, emeralds. He had money and mansions. He had the stars, the moon, and the first ray of morning sun was his (his alone!). My Lord Sichterman, he had everything, including me. He’d taken me in, loved me, petted me, spoiled me.

He let me eat off his plate. I would lick it ever so slowly, that marvellous decorated plate. I wanted that moment to go on forever. I would sniff the furniture, breathe in the cigar smoke, gaze in rapture at the lush grass of the garden and then the majestic trees looming far above my small figure. Small... When Lord Sichterman found me I was just a little bundle. And I was scared to death. He was the one who took me away from the house of that wicked king who had ordered the poachers to kill my mother. I remember everything... But I pretend to myself that I don’t. I was alone that day.

Alone with the warm body of she who had borne me. Ah mama, I miss you so much! Your rough skin smelled of the river. And I still smelled of your womb. I was full of you and you of me. But then the poachers came. They killed you. They tortured you. Your body pierced with poisoned arrows. I remember little about that terrible day. I remember they took you away from me. They dragged you by the leg. You were dripping blood, mama. Dripping fear. I still carry your staring eyes within me. You were beautiful, mama. You were my mama.

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“We’ll give this one away as a present,” he said scornfully. “As you wish,” his lackeys answered in chorus. When Lord Sichterman appeared with his baroque wig and sky-blue waistcoat, I knew I had found a new mama, some kind of future. And I made do.

You were everything to me. I smelled of your womb. I was full of you and you of me. That was when the murderers, your murderers mama, caught me and took me to their king. The king had a face full of sores. Blue sores that refused to heal. §

I’ve forced myself to forget my mother. She no longer exists and even her womb seems to me like someone else’s home. Since I don’t remember, I don’t want to remember, I can’t say what I did after they killed her. Perhaps I hid. Or perhaps Lord Sichterman found me right away and saved me. No, the Lord came later... first came the dirty hands of the king’s lackeys. The hands that tore me from my mother.

Did they tear her horn off right away? They hunt us for that accursed horn. There’s a legend, a stupid legend, that the horn boosts the virility of male humans. They kill us just to fuck a little longer. To avoid putting up a poor show. In a word, they kill us for nothing.

It’s all so muddled in my mind. Mama didn’t cry out, though. She died in silence. I know that much. That silence was so loud. Ear-splitting. That silence held all the rage we couldn’t see. All of my mother’s rage. And all the pain. §

Lord Sichterman, my new mama, lived in a sumptuous abode in Chinsurah. We were the India of marvels. The golden treasure chest of the globe. All around us an abundance of riches. Salt, spices, saltpetre, indigo, silk. And a muslin so sheer it was unforgettable. Lord Sichterman said the women in the Netherlands, his native Netherlands, were mad about that Chinsurah muslin. It was so soft as it mingled with their little dreams and the wispy sighs of bed linens. It was so white, our muslin, that it was hard to tell apart from the milk Lord Sichterman sipped greedily at breakfast.

And Chinsurah too was something like that muslin. It was light, almost a cloud. I had a good life in Chinsurah. Lord Sichterman, as I recall, always let me sleep in the house. I was one of the family. I too was in my way a Sichterman... a Sichterman from Groningen, the main city of the northern Dutch Republic. § “You eat enough to feed a regiment, baby girl!” my Lord told me. “You cost an arm and a leg, my fine rhino!” My vision was getting worse and worse. I’d always been short-sighted, like any

member of my species. My eyes had long slid into the folds of my rough skin. Lost amid tonnes of flesh and blood. I was slow to focus on the world around me.

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The time it took to travel down a hallway. I didn’t want to grow. I didn’t want to get big. But every minute my body filled with new lifeblood and new flesh. I was full of me. Too full. The room could no longer hold me. My days in Chinsurah were coming to an end.

I was also slow to move. Whereas the world raced by. The slaves raced, the children raced, even the slow ants raced faster than me. It was so frustrating to be so slow amid all that speed. I began to hate my body. My bulk. §

I want to be Dutch. I want to be like Jan Albert Sichterman, a pure-blooded Dutchman. Dutch down to his boots. But I’m a rhinoceros, my bulk does not obey my will. For a week now the Lord has stopped petting me. He barely looks at me. Yesterday I heard him consulting with the housekeeper. “They’ll come for her,” he said. See? The sentence has been handed down. The executioner is on his way.

I dream in Dutch. Every night. Sometimes even by day. Awake. Asleep. I’ve always dreamt in Dutch. Does that make me one of them? I don’t know the answer to that. I stick out my tongue. It’s thick. Spongy. I look at it. Repulsed. My tongue is dull. My tongue is Indian. Too Indian. I don’t want to be Indian. I don’t. §

Lord Sichterman doesn’t know. He doesn’t know I speak Dutch. He sees the Indian, the savage, the subject. I can see in his eyes that he’s grown tired of me. Tired of having an Indian in his house. § He has sold me. My Lord has sold me. In the end what I feared most has come about. § My new owner smells like fish. I too smell like fish. Every day three men grease me with a strange, thick oil that eases my torment. The first two days on this ship were horrible. I ate almost nothing. My new owner had them give me bread and hay. But I’ve barely touched it. I don’t want to go to Europe. Let me off this ship, out of this prison, out of this floating ghetto. I’m hungry now. Homesickness makes you hungry. I want to reach the bread, the hay. But my stomach rumbles. My head spins. I feel light and heavy at the same time. The armour that covers me is splitting open. “I want her to reach Europe alive!” the Captain shouted in a rage.

“If she dies I’ll hold you personally responsible and you will pay dearly.” The men began to sweat, to tremble. “Sir, I have an idea,” said one of them, the shortest, with sandy hair. “Spit it out, you stupid beast,” replied the Captain. “We should give her a little beer, it eases seasickness... beer worked for me on my first voyage.” “Beer? To a rhinoceros?” replied the Captain, sceptical. But despite his doubts, he decided to listen to the boy... who was indeed just a boy. That was my introduction to beer. I liked it. And by getting drunk, I embarked on my new life.

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§ Europe is cold. It rains all the time. I shiver. To avoid thinking about the cold I eat. Hay, bread, orange peels, grass. And all the barrels of water I can hold. My throat burns. When water isn’t enough I gulp down beer and go into a stupor. I act up unless they give me beer. I swing my head around. I grunt like a common hog. And so they give me beer. By the gallon. § longer. I’ve been sitting here for two years. It’s been two years since I came back from India with the beast. I miss the sea. The deep blue sea.” “So Amsterdam can no longer hold you?” “No, it can’t hold me, it’s never held me. Amsterdam is a tomb. A tomb for my ambitions.” “But the rhinoceros... how will you manage?” “I’ve got a plan,” the Captain answered with a laugh. It was a frightening laugh. “The filthy beast will make me richer than Croesus,” he added, “we’ve been sitting around too long. The time has come to move, to rake in the sesterces.”

The Captain rarely comes to see me. He isn’t fond of me. He doesn’t believe I’ll be good. Every so often the worthy doctor comes, the veterinarian. Everyone is all smiles and scraping bows. The Captain especially holds him in high regard. Yesterday I heard him ask, “So will our beast be fit for the voyage?” “And where, may I ask, do you want to take her?” asked the worthy veterinarian, perplexed. “Around the world, that’s where I want to take her. To Paris. To Venice. To the Pope, to foggy England.” “Are you out of your mind?” “I may be... but I can’t stand to sit here any §

I’m confused. Muddled. Where am I? Am I in Hanover? In Vienna? Munich? Frankfurt? Tell me where I am. § Each city seems the same. People yell. When they see me they yell. “There it is,” and point. Or “there he is.” Don’t they know that I’m female? My armour doesn’t like the cold. And it splits. It splits all over.

I look around. I see only pine trees and stone paths. They carry me in a wagon. I’m pulled by horses and mules. At every stopping place the horses and mules are replaced with fresh ones. I’m heavy. They can only pull me so far. Sometimes the men help the animals. They all sweat. They stink. They addle me with their home-brewed odours.

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I envy the horses. They flirt with each other despite their fatigue, they exchange knowing glances. They’re with their own kind. They understand each other. Whereas I am alone in a wagon full of hay and shit, my own shit, the horses’, the humans’. Aside from my poor mama, I’ve never seen another of my kind in my whole life. I have no friends with my own face. I will have no lovers. § “So Clara shits a lot?” he asked at last after the tide of laughter had ebbed. “A fair amount. The damsel holds her own in that department.” And more laughter. “She’s pretty, though,” and he came closer. “Careful, Sire,” someone behind him said in alarm. But Louis XV was too taken with me. “I want to touch her. I want to touch her horn. Captain, help me, if you will. Hurry.” And when he touched me, I saw him quiver like a harpstring. He was tense. Excited. Amused. “Clara is lovely. Quite lovely.” And then to his lackeys: “Don’t you think that Clara is lovely, splendid, a ray of sunshine?” The court nodded, surprised. “I want her, Captain, what is your price?” “She isn’t for sale.” “I am the king of France and I want her! Tell me how much and I will give it to you on the spot!” “As I said, Clara is not for sale.” Why didn’t the Captain want to sell me? Why so reluctant? “Don’t make me lose my patience, Captain.” “Very well, Sire, I want 100,000 écus, no less and no more. A round sum. And I would call it fair for such a fine rhinoceros.” “But no one, not even the king of France, has such a sum.” “That is the price, Sire. Take it or leave it.” Ruefully, he left me. The king of France... my bridegroom.

Now I’m in France. The king has come with his train of bootlickers. The king himself came to pay me homage. I should be happy. But I’m not. The king of France is of no interest to me. Whereas he is genuinely interested in my huge body. He’s like a bridegroom. He’s spared no expense to see me. These wretched nobles never spare any expense. They pay the Captain anything he asks for. And he asks, asks... He asks more and more... Do you want the rhinoceros? Then out with your purse. And all of them, rich and poor, to the extent they can, fork over a copper coin, a silver one, a yard of cloth, a bit of pussy. Frederick the Great paid 12 ducats, 12 whole ducats, for half an hour with me. And the next day he wanted more. He needed more. But he told the Captain: “I will not give you more than six ducats. I am generous only once a week.” The king had a long white wig, bow legs and a soft belly. He had an iron gaze that frightened me a little. He looked around a little, and asked with some disgust: “And what is that stuff?” “Clara shits a lot,” the Captain told him. “Its name is Clara?” he was truly stunned. My name must have seemed quite odd to him. “A group of Prussian lads gave her the name and it stuck, that’s how it goes.” “It’s not a bad name, but frankly a bit ridiculous for a rhinoceros, don’t you think?” and then he laughed. To himself. For hours. I made him laugh. My huge bulk. My delicate name. §

In France I never caught my breath. I had become a fad in France. So I was turned into jewellery boxes, watches, wigs. Yes, even wigs! French people care a lot about fashion. The rich ones, anyway. But from my wagon I saw the poverty in France. Power is in the hands of the few. The rest of the population is dying of hunger. They are thin, tired, angry. Skeletons roaming Paris in search of dignity and a crust of bread.

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The people are hungry in France. The people will get angry someday. Ah, how I would love to get angry too. § They say Venice is beautiful. But I haven’t seen anything yet. Not even the lagoon. § The Captain is always drunk these days. To make it through the stops on this obligatory tour he has to drink a lot. To help him forget his fatigue. He can hardly stand me anymore. Every chance he gets he insults me. Calling me a dirty beast or dirty bitch. If I weren’t an investment he would beat me mercilessly, kill me maybe. To let off steam he mistreats his servants. The servants are always changing. Never the same ones. It’s not easy to follow this caravan of pain. § The Venetian girl took her mask off. “Ciao,” she told me. She smiled. She caressed my whole body. “How beautiful you are. I knew you would be breathtakingly beautiful.” Beautiful, me? She was beautiful. She had silken hair and round cheeks. Deep eyes and a voice that reminded me of Chinsurah. “I’ve run away from home,” she told me. “Run away from the ghetto.” And then she started laughing. “They won’t notice, anyway. I’ll be back in time. The main thing is not to be caught by the Christians... by the Venetians.” Her face darkened for a moment at the thought of being caught. But then a natural gaiety brightened it again. “You know, it’s my first time in Venice,” she told me. “Me too,” I wanted to tell her. But I couldn’t speak her tongue. I just looked at her, placidly, waiting. “At home in the Jewish ghetto you can’t see Venice at all. The buildings are too tall, they block the view.” Venice... Venice must be beautiful. What a shame not to see it. The only pleasure I have left is looking at cities, it gives some meaning to my endless wandering. And so Leipzig’s Gothic mingles with Parisian wigs, the Colosseum in Rome with the live nativity scenes in Naples. In my head I note down all

the details, the crumbs, the nuances. Every city has its smell. Rome stinks of something burnt, Paris of piss, whereas Naples is a red rose that smells of the sea. Whereas Venice has the same smell as this girl. The smell of saffron. The smell of dreams. It must be her blond hair. It must be her laugh. “Poor creature...” she exclaimed, dismayed. “Are you ill? What’s happened to your nose?” She’s seen the pus, the missing horn. “But there’s some water here, what luck!” And in a flash she’s taken off her skirt and begun to clean me. “What wicked people to leave you in this state.” Then she crouched down, huddled next to me like a baby with its mama. “You haven’t ever seen Venice either, have you, old lady.” She used a casual tone that almost no one had ever used with me before. I’m just a machine for making money. I’m just sesterces for that filthy Captain. And the others, all the others, either mock me or look at me with too much awe. No one encounters my gaze. Encounters my desires. They’ve taken me from my land without giving me another. But this girl is different, I matter to her. She treats me like an old friend. “Then let me tell you about Venice. Close your eyes now.” And in a flash, her hand has covered my eyes. “You can see Venice even in dreams,” she told me. “In the ghetto, where they’ve locked us Jews away, I can see Venice any time I want. You just shut your eyes. I’ll teach you how.”

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Will she really teach me how to dream? “It’ll be easy, old lady. You just have to believe.” And for a moment I too was happy. I closed my eyes and went home to Chinsurah. Clara died in London in 1758. She was only twenty. She died young. The average lifespan of a rhinoceros is about fifty years. Igiaba Scego is a writer and freelance researcher born in Rome in 1974. Daughter of Somali parents fleeing from the dictatorial regime of Siad Barre, she has always dealt with colonialism and postcolonialism. Her books include the novels Oltre Babilonia (Donzelli, 2008; English edition Beyond Babylon [Two Lines Press, 2019]) and Adua (Giunti, 2015; English edition Adua [New Vessel Press, 2017]); the memoir La mia casa è dove sono (Rizzoli, 2010), winner of the Premio Mondello; the essay Roma Negata (Ediesse, 2014) and the children’s book Prestami le ali. Storia di Clara la rinoceronte (Rrose Sélavy, 2017). Her latest novel, La linea del colore (Bompiani; English edition The Color Line [Other Press, 2021]), winner of the Premio Napoli, was published in 2020. In 2021 she was awarded the Premio letterario Matilde Serao by Il Mattino and the Premio internazionale Viareggio Rèpaci.

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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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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 perfect loop, with its beginning and end marked by a computer-generated blackbird swooping down onto a snowy windowsill. The bird starts its song and the scene moves through the window into a room where a man sits on the edge of an unmade bed and a woman lies beside him. The man begins his choir-backed monologue, in which he shares the story of his murder spree and suicide. The victims, who enter the scene one-by-one, were his wife, daughter, and son. Through narration and many layers of replication, 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. Marcon is meticulous in all areas of the production, to a self-described maniacal and compulsive degree. The film is reminiscent of stop-motion animation, but Marcon creates this effect with live actors, moving away from the glitch and towards realism. To complicate the movements and appearance of his characters, Marcon painstakingly created synthetic masks for the actors to wear over all unclothed parts of their bodies, like a second, doll-like layer of rubbery skin. Made from casts of the actors themselves, these prostheses become eerie, inanimate doubles, such that there is something off about the animated figures – more corpse-like than living. Marcon’s work enters the “uncanny valley,” which is theorised by pioneering robotics scholar Masahiro Mori as a dimension that emerges when extreme representative realism and anthropomorphism suddenly become uncomfortable and evoke an emotional response of repulsion and restlessness. This sensation is particularly present in the fields of robotics and animation. Marcon channels the uncanny valley along with verisimilitude, or the appearance that something is real, in many of his video works, like The Parents’ Room, Monelle (2017), and Ludwig (2018). Manipulating every element of the set, lighting, costume, sound, and script, Marcon’s characters, on which his films always centre, give the viewer goosebumps with simultaneous feelings of aversion and unsettling familiarity. – IA

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Diego Marcon, The Parents’ Room (stills), 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, the artist 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. Although his work was included in seminal group exhibitions such as Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966 and Minimal Art at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands in 1968, which helped to canonise Minimalist sculpture, his practice deviated from the movement, and has resisted neat categorisation since. Notable among his early peers, who theorised the use of industrial materials and fabrication processes, Grosvenor is known for largely making his sculptures by hand from inexpensive materials, even when they appear industrially produced. There is indeed a sensuousness to Grosvenor’s approach, together compounded by an eccentricity that suggests the Space Age fantasies of his early years, as well as a darker future. Untitled (1987–1988), a structure made from corrugated iron, appears as an empty shell, as if a vestige from a potentially apocalyptic event. Formed by the sides of the trailer where Grosvenor stores tools in his studio with metal casing, the sculpture contains no ceiling, floor, nor wheels. Signalling architecture without providing essential elements for its functionality, Untitled stages an environment seemingly imaginary, even while occupying physical space. In the more recent works, such as Untitled (2018) and Block of Water (2019), Grosvenor continues his investigation of built systems, here, instead, creating uncanny structures that participate in the act of holding, containing, or protecting. Untitled, 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, an improvised rectangular pool made from concrete blocks, is filled up with water, serving as protection but nonetheless ephemeral. While buoyed by an economy of form, Grosvenor’s structures 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

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Robert Grosvenor, Untitled, 1987–1988. Steel, plastic, 190.5 × 243.8 × 622.3 cm. Photo Rita Burmester. Courtesy the Artist; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Fundação de Serralves, Porto. © Robert Grosvenor

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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 Robert Grosvenor, Block of Water, 2019. 108 concrete blocks, rubber liner, water, 91.4 × 304.8 × 548.6 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Karma, 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 dirt, rock, water, wildflowers, snails, and vines. Transformation is enacted through their constantly shifting landscapes, and further portrayed through the complex cultural resonances steeped in elements borrowed from nature, a field which for Okoyomon is itself inseparable from the historical marks of colonisation and enslavement. For Okoyomon’s 2020 exhibition Earthseed at the MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt, they populated an entire room with young kudzu vines – an invasive species whose cultivation is illegal throughout most of the United States – which grew massively among life-sized effigies made of raw lambswool, yarn, and dirt. Kudzu, which originally comes from Japan and other areas throughout Asia and was first introduced by the US government to farms in Mississippi in 1876, and was planted widely in the 1930s and 1940s as a means to fortify widespread erosion of local soil, which had been degraded by the over-cultivation of cotton throughout the era of chattel slavery. When planted across the world, however, kudzu became an uncontrollably invasive species, suffocating other plants. It is now widely known as “the vine that ate the South.” Through their work, Okoyomon complicates the story of kudzu, whose removal from the US South today would conversely cause devastating erosion. For the artist, the plant becomes a metaphor for the entanglement of slavery, racialisation, and diaspora with nature, as well as an embodiment of what society deems “invasive,” but nonetheless holds 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 effigies 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 also a plant whose very essence is saturated with the economic and historical circumstances of the transatlantic slave trade. Following the work of Édouard Glissant in his play Monsieur Toussaint, and 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

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This page and next pages: 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, which are obtained through mannequins, 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, which point towards the excess of the capitalist mode of production. The materials are then coated with organic components such as graphite powder, marble dust, and ashes, creating a cartilaginous effect that makes the interior visible. By superimposing numerous outer layers, the stratification evokes layers of skin and the human body. Derived from pre-existing structures, the components are rendered into unrecognisable organic masses, removing them from their original function and resisting seriality. At times the sculptures are linked by rods or splints creating horizontal and vertical lines of suspension. Disassembled to be reassembled, the sections reflect tensions of the body. Within the composed cluster of constructed fragments, there remains a sense of incompleteness with the possibility for elements to be added or subtracted; a vast landscape presenting the potential for metamorphosis. Covered in resins and materials with a grey colouring, the dismembered parts convey a sense of the morbid, appearing to be in the process of decay or as tortured and skinned. A temporal ambiguity imbues the works, conflating the archaeological prehuman with a posthuman site of destruction and construction. 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 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

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Giulia Cenci, archipelago (detail), 2018. Foam, rubber, black bones, dimensions variable. Photo Davide Battista. Courtesy the Artist; INCURVA, Favi-gnana (IT). © Giulia Cenci

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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 Giulia Cenci, figura che divora sé stessa (detail), 2021. Metal, acrylcast, studio dust, ash from the artist’s stove, 310 × 103 × 44 cm. Photo Serge Domingie. Courtesy the Artist; SpazioA, Pistoia; Museo Novecento, Firenze. © 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 is known for site-specific sculptural installations that explore the untapped potentialities of objects associated with industrial and infrastructural production. In her practice, there are no hierarchical distinctions among materials, processes, or sites. Overton recontextualises everyday, remnant, or discarded objects to reach a poetic transcendentalism through the materiality from which they are sourced. 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. Alongside industrial resources, the artist investigates the layered histories of a site, integrating these elements with chosen material, often to fleeting or lyrical phenomenological effect. Her materials frequently behave performatively – modifying a site by obstructing, bisecting or echoing its inherent qualities. Raised on a working farm in Tennessee, the artist possesses a deep familiarity with the coexistence of nature and industry: they are interrelated with neither purporting a greater use-value, each playing integral roles in their symbiosis. For The Milk of Dreams, Overton presents two sculptural works for the Arsenale, the heart of the naval industry in Venice since the early 12th century, known also for its manufacturing of rope. From a historical crane on site, Overton suspends a sphere reminiscent of glass floats used by seamen to keep fishnets, longlines and droplines adrift, in the luminous pink hue of Venetian streetlamps found citywide. Encased within hand-knotted rope netting recalling traditional tying methods for maritime floats, Overton’s buoy rises and falls with the tides, highlighting the variability of the lagoon. Not far from the undulating float, a second sculpture comprises a large-scale tulip-like form, cast in concrete with perforated openings. Three vertically interlocked segments create an upright structure, dotted with circular pink glass “windows.” Cast from pre-existing molds typically used for architectural tunnels, the arcs form a triangular aperture to the sky. Additional modular elements sit along the waterfront like windswept petals. These objects function as benches, offering viewers a moment of repose amidst the physically and psychically layered historical strata embedded within the architecture of the Arsenale. Overton’s interactive sculptural tableau transforms conventional material use, enacting potential for these structures to be experienced afresh. – MW

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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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This page and left page: Virginia Overton, Sculpture Garden, 2016. Powder coated galvanized steel windmill aeration systems, painted galvanized steel tanks, wood benches, water, rubber cable protectors, polyurethane air hose, aquatic plants, underwater lights, dimensions variable. Installation view, Virginia Overton: Sculpture Gardens, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, 2016. Photo Ron Amstutz. Courtesy the Artist; Whitney Museum of American Art, 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; the hybridity of such an approach forms the very core of her practice. Over the last ten years, Tsang has been making films, immersive installations, and performances which surface from a visual language that the artist describes as “in-betweenness” – states of inseparability and flux that cannot be reduced to fixed notions of identity, experience or binary understanding. This relationship is marked broadly across formal and conceptual conceits: through compositional motifs that emphasise layering and mirroring; through the fusion of the genres of documentary and fiction; and through the pairing of performance with film and video, a blending of liveness and moving images. This fluidity also manifests itself practically in the status of the works’ often-collaborative authorship. Frequently created in tandem with figures involved in art, music, dance, and 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, as well as the radical potential of such everyday concepts as communication, improvisation, participation, and play. For the 59th International Art Exhibition, Tsang presents Of Whales (2022), a multi-channel sound and moving image installation based on her feature-length film adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and psychedelic ocean environments generated from XR (extended reality) technologies. Manifesting the dark surrealism and magic of the 1851 classic, Of Whales refocuses the source material’s profound meditation on knowledge, storytelling, perspective, exoticism, and eroticism through a postcolonial lens, re-framing its central characters and historical valence via cinematic strategies of illusion and metaphor. 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. In this context, the immensity and chaos of the ocean becomes a symbol of the unknown; reflections, as seen in the installation and across Venice itself, gesture to the presence of oblique perspectives and complexify the idea that any point of view is singular or straightforward. – MW

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This page and next pages: Wu Tsang, Moby Dick (stills), 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. Combining beguiling storytelling, dreamlike scenery, and lush cinematography, her films think through the gaps in history, weaving 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 gay liberation and transgender rights 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. Championed by the scholar Saidiya Hartman, this speculative approach, which she calls “critical fabulation,” necessarily critiques the way history is created and who is elided from its overarching narrative, using contesting points and counter-histories to reflect upon “what might have been.” Tourmaline herself describes this tactic as “tapping into the current of what’s already here.” Combining historical fact with fantasy, Mary of Ill Fame (2020–2021) shapes a fictional story around Mary Jones (played by Rowin Amone), a real-life Black trans woman and sex worker, who was part of a community of “girls of ill fame” and eventually incarcerated in New York’s famous Sing Sing prison in the 1830s for stealing a man’s wallet. Building off Tourmaline’s 2019 short film Salacia, Mary of Ill Fame imagines Jones in Seneca Village, an autonomous New York City community of free Black and Irish immigrant landowners, located on the land occupied today by Central Park between West 82nd and 89th Streets, which was destroyed by the city through eminent domain to make way for the park. Splicing between images of Jones in brutal confinement and in a gracious, picturesque Seneca Village home, against the scenic banks of the then-rural Hudson River, Tourmaline builds a fantasy space of power, freedom, and pleasure that the actual Jones deserved. – MW

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Tourmaline, Salacia (still), 2019. Digital video transferred from 16mm film, sound, 6 mins 4 sec. Courtesy the Artist; Chapter NY, New York 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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SIMNIKIWE BUHLUNGU

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

Simnikiwe Buhlungu is one of the four recipients of the grant for the inaugural edition of Biennale College Arte, launched in 2021. This work is out of competition.

Simnikiwe Buhlungu researches the production of knowledge, how it is disseminated, and by whom. Through film, sound, installation, and text, Buhlungu uses narratives and everyday phenomena to transport viewers into metaphorical and theoretical considerations of the ways we come to know and be in the world. For example, for the sound installation What We Put in the Skafthini (2021), the artist recorded to audio cassette her considerations of the skafthini – also known as a plastic lunchbox or Tupperware – as a “future archival body,” an object that incorporates both a future desire and a utilitarian purpose. Her recent video work My Dear Kite (You Can But You Can’t) – Late Yawnings 01h43 (2020) follows the up-close fluttering of a white kite while Buhlungu mesmerizingly muses on the possibility of flying the kite while in her studio in Amsterdam during the first Covid-19 quarantine in 2020. For The Milk of Dreams, Buhlungu realises And the Other Thing I Was Saying Was: A Conver-Something (2022), an installation of theremins (analogue electronic synthesisers) that explores how dreaming manifests in myriad incalculable ways. For the artist, dreams can exist as historical references, as mundane occurrences, and as varied linguistic articulations and slippages that initiate an altered bodily state. Theremins are significant for Buhlungu as they are instruments that synthesise sound without physical touch of the body. They generate tones, narratives, and pauses through interactions between our bodies’ electromagnetic fields and those of the theremin. Activated by the viewer when standing close by, some of the theremins in the installation embody narratives connected to Buhlungu’s broader thinking around dreams, while others hold referential soundscapes. The narratives include: South African musician Miriam Makeba’s commentary on being exiled from her home country; a voiceover reading of American-Nigerian novelist Sefi Atta recalling how daydreaming enabled her to become an author; the sound of water puddles; and interstitial noises excerpted from Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina’s 2015 Ted Talk. The soundscapes comprise field recordings of Hadeda birds, samples from a Fender Rhodes electric piano, pink noise, and percussive elements, all opening up for a “conversomething” existing incongruously beyond spoken language. – MK

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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

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A N D RO E RA DZ E

1993, Tbilisi Lives in Tbilisi, Georgia

Andro Eradze is an artist working in film, photography, and installation, often introducing his lens-based works in surprising exhibition contexts. Inspired by the contemporary theories on interspecies relations of Donna Haraway and John Berger, Eradze fills the frames of his works with plants and animals poised to exceed their boundaries. For Mouth of Darkness (2020), Eradze installed distinctively green-tinted nightvision photographs of a taxidermy coyote and bat among fake plants in metal and plastic in a crumbling outdoor space in Tbilisi. In Wave (Gesture) (2018), for the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, Eradze introduced a video projection of the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia to a family’s humble living room, accompanied by a remote-controlled inflatable shark. Eradze’s films take place between the human and the non-human, surveying myriad forms of animate life. His slowly panning 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 all the in-between, transitional moments of a feature film, leaving the viewer with a sense of expansive anticipation. In this way, Eradze plays with our expectations of the way narratives are built in film, television, and even photography, creating an affective narrative with no clearly defined subject. For The Milk of Dreams, Eradze presents a new video installation titled Raised in the dust (2022). The work 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, focusing on the lush enveloping plant life. Taxidermied animals appear one by one, suddenly disturbed by an uproar of New Year’s Eve fireworks. Critical of the human carnival that is disruptive, toxic, and fatal for birds and other 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. This work is out of competition.

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

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AKI SASAMOTO

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

Using sculpture, sound, video, and drawing, Aki Sasamoto’s “performance/ 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. “My process resembles fishing,” the artist has said. “I cast a net and wait for a perfect alignment of events. I hold multiple things floating around and somehow seize the connections by putting them in line with other seemingly foreign references.” Like fish gathering in a net at sea, 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, but it is through the body moving in time and space that stories unfold and interconnections form. Thus wrestling with the relationship between chaos and control, Sasamoto’s art shares concerns and process with art movements including Neo-Dada and Gutai, but in ways that are entirely her own. On view at the Giardino delle Vergini inside a self-standing building, the components of Sasamoto’s piece Sink or Float (2022) appear to be levitating. On top of a series of tables constructed from stainlesssteel 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 enact a chaotic, improvised set of movements, determined in real time. 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. Presenting her constructed environment as an all-encompassing machine, Sasamoto 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

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Aki Sasamoto, random memo random, 2017. Performance, mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the Artist; Take Ninagawa, Tokyo Next pages: Aki Sasamoto, Spirits Cubed, 2020. Performance, mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Photo Naoya Hatakeyama. Collection Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art. Courtesy the Artist; Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art

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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. In her breakout video work Patron (2009), exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York City in 2010, Vitale spits military-style poetic commands at the audience, addressing the room as “patrons!” and demanding we open our mouths to be force-fed our medicine – a call to arms against “Neutralism” and complacency. Vitale’s artworks are immense, brutal, and unapologetic. For fifteen years, she has been burning bridges, first constructing scale models of bridges found across North America in her studio, then taking them outdoors to burn them, eventually exhibiting their charred skeletons. In a 2019 performance, she torched a bridge atop a snow-covered mountain in Gstaad, Switzerland. Thought Field (2016) comprised ninety factory-length railroad tracks, weighing over sixty tons, creating an imposing landscape with a nod to the codes of Minimalism. Vitale’s recent residency in Savenay, France, which similarly redeployed the detritus of transport into a constellation of sculptures, resulted in a permanent outdoor installation set at the site of a World War I Americanmade dam, entitled The World, the Flesh and the Devil (2019). For The Milk of Dreams, Vitale presents three series of works in a secluded garden part of the Giardino delle Vergini. Installed are seven of her now-iconic burned bridges cast in bronze, architectural ruins embedded in the landscape. If the bridges portray the ruptured connection nodes of a climate-ravaged future, The Bottle People (2020–2021), a series of liquor bottles swaddled in fabric and cast in bronze, represent a transgressive 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, like characters from a Rabelaisian morality play. Caught in the midst of riotous motion, and arranged in a grid, they could be seen as on display for museological study. Finally, Cubes (2018) shows the charred orange remnants of a freight train the artist sliced and cropped into perfect steel cubes. These spare forms serve as weighted posts or signals along the path guiding viewers through the hauntology of the garden. –MK

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Marianne Vitale, Bottle People, 2020. Glass, plaster, metal, dimensions variable. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist

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Marianne Vitale, Harlem River, 2018. Bronze, 177 × 202 × 55 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist

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Marianne Vitale, Goat Canyon, 2019. Bronze, 162 × 401 × 96 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist

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VILION A P APP OF LI ED ARTS

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PAV I L I O N O F A P P L I E D A R T S S O P H I A A L- M A R I A , T I G E R S T R I K E R E D

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 contemporary relationship between humans via the inherent biases of our algorithms and machines. Al-Maria’s work raises questions around the alienation and dysfunction arising from a culture of “alternative facts” and whitewashed history, identifying colonialism’s remnants in the frontier fields of quantum computing, virtual space, and artificial intelligence. 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, and the third in an ongoing series that includes Al-Maria’s previous works BEAST TYPE SONG (2019) and Tender Point Ruin (2021). Taking inspiration from the collection of automata at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Al-Maria was drawn to the peculiar eroticism of the automaton known as “Tippoo’s Tiger.” Made for Tipu Sultan, an 18th-century ruler of Mysore in South India, the mechanical sculpture depicts a tiger mauling a British soldier. In Al-Maria’s eyes, 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, guiding spirit, heard in voiceover, who haunts the halls of the museum. From the Victoria and Albert Museum’s galleries to the dungeon of a London dominatrix and a junk shop selling remnants from a David Attenborough-narrated television program about tigers in India, performance and writing are conceived as literal swords in the theatres of the ongoing “info wars.” Tiger Strike Red proposes that the non-consensual projection of Orientalism’s (white male) gaze is once again at work in our collective visions of the future, suggesting that the imaginary monsters conjured by Britain colonialism – whether the tiger of Mysore or the image of women wearing niqabs – are still deeply entangled in our present-day machines and technologies. – IW

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Sophia Al-Maria, BEAST TYPE SONG (still), 2019. Single-channel HD video, 38 mins 3 sec. Courtesy the Artist; Anna Lena Films, Paris; Project Native Informant, London

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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 “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 19thcentury gunpowder store built to protect the city of Venice from its explosive contents –, the installation proposes the combustible power hidden in suppressed histories. –IW

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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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LIST

F W RKS O

LIST OF WORKS

All works are Courtesy the Artist, unless otherwise stated. Dimensions are given in centimetres, height × width × depth. If exhibition copies, the dimensions of the original are given. The list was complete and finalised as of 20 February 2022. The captions and credits of the images in this publication have been compiled with the utmost care. Any errors or omissions are unintentional, and we will be glad to include appropriate captions and credits in future editions if new information comes to the attention of La Biennale.

NO OR ABUARAFEH Am I the Ageless Object at the Museum?, 2018 Video 14 mins 59 sec With the additional support of A.M Qattan Foundation

C A R LA AC C A R D I Verdi azzurro, 1962 Casein tempera on paper laid on canvas 70 × 100 cm Private Collection, Florence Assedio rosso n. 3, 1956 Enamel on casein on canvas 97 × 162 cm Private Collection, Florence Senza titolo, 1967 Varnish on sicofoil 100 × 380 cm Private Collection, Florence Collisione dei tempi, 2011 Vinyl on canvas 80 × 100 cm Collection Massimo De Carlo

I G S H AA N A DA M S Bonteheuwel / Epping, 2021 Woven tapestry with sculptural installation Wood, painted wood, plastic, bone, stone and glass beads, seashells, polyester and nylon rope, cotton rope, link chain, wire (galvanised steel) and cotton twine 495 × 1170 × 325 cm With the additional support of blank projects; Casey Kaplan; The National Arts Council of South Africa

E I L E E N AGA R Wisdom Tooth, c. 1960s Acrylic on board 58 × 69 cm Courtesy The Estate of Eileen Agar c/o The Redfern Gallery Sculpture consisting of a shell stuck on top of sea urchin mounted on a base made out of woven bark, n.d. Shell and wood 14.5 × 10 × 10 cm Courtesy Tate Archive Sculpture consisting of a stone coloured orange and wrapped in small vertebrae strung on thick string, n.d.

Acrylic paint or felt-tip pen on stone, bone and string 15.2 × 7 × 5.5 cm Courtesy Tate Archive Photograph of rocks in Ploumanac’h, July 1936 Modern print of black-and-white negative 15 × 15 cm. Negative: 6.2 × 5.9 cm Courtesy Tate Archive Photograph of rocks in Ploumanac’h, July 1936 Modern print of black-and-white negative 15 × 15 cm. Negative: 6.2 × 5.9 cm: Courtesy Tate Archive Photograph of “Le Lapin” rock in Ploumanac’h, July 1936 Modern print of black-and-white negative 15 × 15 cm. Negative: 6.2 × 5.9 cm Courtesy Tate Archive

G E RT RU D A R N D T Maskenselbstbildnis, 1930 / 1996 8 photographs from portfolio Maskenselbstbildnisse: Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 4 Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 8 Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 13 Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 16 Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 28 Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 32 Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 33 Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 36 Bromide silver gelatine prints Approx. 24.1 × 19.3 cm each All works Museum Folkwang, Essen

R U T H A S AWA

Photograph of “Bum and Thumb Rock” in Ploumanac’h, July 1936 Modern print of black-and-white negative 15 × 15 cm. Negative: 6.2 × 5.9 cm Courtesy Tate Archive

Untitled (S.030, Hanging Eight Separate Cones Suspended through Their Centers), c. 1952 Iron wire 193.04 × 60.96 × 60.96 cm Private Collection

Untitled (S.273, Hanging Nine-Lobed, Single-Layered Continuous Form), c. 1959 Nickel-plated copper wire 238.76 × 45.72 × 45.72 cm Private Collection

M O N I RA A L QA D I R I Orbital, 2022 3D printed plastic, automotive paint, levitation module 3 elements, approx. 100 × 100 × 100 cm each With the additional support of the Aga Khan Museum

S O P H I A A L- M A R I A Tiger Strike Red, 2022 Video installation Special Project, Pavilion of Applied Arts La Biennale di Venezia with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Ö Z L E M A LT I N Translucent shield (calling), 2022 Archival print and ink on canvas 111.7 × 600 cm © Özlem Altın With the additional support of SAHA Association; Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa

MARINA APOLLONIO Rilievo 703, 1964–1970 Aluminium, red fluorescent, Plexiglas 50 × 50 × 5 cm Private Collection Rilievo 902, 1964–1969 Aluminium, green fluorescent, Plexiglas 49.5 × 49.5 × 6 cm Collezione Prof. Ernesto L. Francalanci

Untitled (S.106, Hanging Five-and-a-Half Open Hyperbolic Shapes that Penetrate Each Other), c. 1958 Brass wire 97.79 × 27.94 × 27.94 cm Private Collection Untitled (S.182, Hanging Single-Section, Open-Window Form), c. 1962 Brass wire 60.96 × 76.20 × 76.20 cm Private Collection Untitled (S.096, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), c. 1960s early Copper wire 55.88 × 59.69 × 58.42 cm Private Collection Untitled (S.101, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), c. 1962 Brass wire 58.42 × 91.44 × 91.44 cm Private Collection Untitled (S.322, Hanging Two Interlocking Cones), c. 1951–1952 Iron wire 33.02 × 45.72 × 43.18 cm Private Collection All works with the additional support of David Zwirner

SHUVINAI ASHOONA Untitled, 2008 / 2009 Colour pencil and ink on paper 56 × 76 cm Untitled, 2008 / 2009 Colour pencil and ink on paper 56 × 76 cm

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A teenage magic magical magician and a male holding a drawing, 2012 Colour pencil and ink on paper 49.8 × 65 cm

Triptych, part 3. 225 × 300 cm Courtesy The State Russian Museum © The State Russian Museum 2022

Untitled, 2019 Colour pencil and ink on paper 58.5 × 76 cm

FIRELEI BÁEZ

Untitled, 2021 Graphite, colour pencil and ink on paper 128 × 249.5 cm Untitled, 2021 Graphite, colour pencil and ink on paper 127 × 244.5 cm All works with the additional support of West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative

B E L K I S AY Ó N Perfidia, 1998 Collography on paper, 7 sheets 200 × 252 cm Courtesy Watch Hill Foundation and von Christierson Family Nuestro deber, 1993 Collography on paper 94 × 68 cm Courtesy Watch Hill Foundation and von Christierson Family Abasí, sálvanos!, 1989 Collography on paper 70 × 50 cm Courtesy Watch Hill Foundation and von Christierson Family Sin título (La Soga Y el Fuego), 1996 Collography on paper 71 × 94 cm Courtesy Watch Hill Foundation and von Christierson Family La pesca, 1989 200 × 140 cm Collography on paper illuminated on blue, 4 sheets Courtesy Watch Hill Foundation and von Christierson Family Nlloro, 1991 Collography on paper, 9 sheets 215 × 300 cm Courtesy Watch Hill Foundation and von Christierson Family Resurrección, 1998 Collography on paper, 9 sheets 263 × 212 cm Courtesy Watch Hill Foundation and von Christierson Family Acecho, 1989 Collography on paper 102.5 × 55 cm Courtesy Watch Hill Foundation and von Christierson Family Añoranza, 1998 Collography on paper 200 × 142 cm Courtesy Laura Blanco and Robert F. Shainheit La consagración I, 1991 Monotype on paper, 12 parts Triptych, part 1. 223.5 × 300 cm Courtesy The State Russian Museum © The State Russian Museum 2022 La consagración II, 1991 Monotype on paper, 12 parts Triptych, part 2. 224 × 300 cm Courtesy The State Russian Museum © The State Russian Museum 2022 La consagración III, 1991 Monotype on paper, 12 parts

something ephemeral and beautifully whole, when seen from the edge of one’s vision, too full when taken head on, 2022 Oil on canvas 249.4 × 587.12 cm With the additional support of James Cohan, New York A geo and temporal anchor, a time capsule, a map (more so than the traced outline of a fabulated chart created for the consumption of a collective desire), 2022 Oil on canvas 249.4 × 637.4 cm With the additional support of James Cohan, New York

FELIPE BAEZA Encuentro Mágico, 2022 Ink, embroidery, acrylic, graphite, varnish and cut paper collaged on panel 35.56 × 27.94 cm With additional support of Maureen Paley, London Fragments, refusing totality and wholeness, 2021 Ink, embroidery, acrylic, graphite, varnish, and cut paper collaged on panel 40.64 × 30.48 cm With additional support of Maureen Paley, London

DJUNA BARNES Illustrations from Ladies Almanack, 1928 Published by Edward W. Titus, Paris, 1928 Exhibition copies Courtesy Djuna Barnes papers. Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries Ladies Almanack, 1972 Illustrated book Re-edition of original published in 1928

M Á R I A B A R T U S Z O VÁ Untitled, 1984–1985 Plaster 11 × 11 × 12 cm Courtesy The Estate of Maria Bartuszová, Košice Untitled, 1984–1985 Plaster 17.5 × 17.5 × 20 cm Courtesy The Estate of Maria Bartuszová, Košice Untitled (from the series Endless Egg), 1985 Plaster 30.5 × 14.5 × 11 cm Courtesy The Estate of Maria Bartuszová, Košice Untitled, 1986 Plaster 15 × 13 × 11 cm Courtesy The Estate of Maria Bartuszová, Košice

B E N E D E T TA

As bare as open flesh, 2022 Ink, watercolour, acrylic, and cut paper collaged on panel 40.64 × 30.48 cm With additional support of Maureen Paley, London

5 plates from Le forze umane. Romanzo astratto con sintesi grafiche, 1924 Ink on paper 28 × 20 cm Collezione Marinetti

Don’t draw attention to yourself you’re already…, 2022 Ink, embroidery, twine, acrylic, and cut paper collaged on canvas 91.14 × 76.2 cm With additional support of Maureen Paley, London

Le forze umane. Romanzo astratto con sintesi grafiche Book cover Foligno, Franco Campitelli Editore, 1924 Facsimile Courtesy Biblioteca comunale Augusta di Perugia

Emerging in difference, 2022 Ink, graphite, glitter, interference powder, twine, acrylic, and cut paper collaged on paper 200 × 130.81 cm With additional support of Maureen Paley, London

M I R E L LA B E N T I VO G L I O I N C O L L A B O R AT I O N W I T H A N N A L I S A A L L O AT T I

Wayward, 2021 Ink, cut paper, graphite, twine, and acrylic collaged on paper 167.64 × 121.92 cm Collection Allison and Larry Berg With additional support of Maureen Paley, London; Allison Berg and Larry Berg Por caminos ignorados, por hendiduras secretas, por las misteriosas vetas de troncos recién cortados, 2020 Ink, flashe, acrylic, varnish, twine, egg tempera, and cut paper collaged on paper 35.2 × 43.5 cm Collection Thelma and AC Hudgins With additional support of Maureen Paley, London; Thelma and AC Hudgins; Allison and Larry Berg; Debi and Steven Wisch

JOSEPHINE BAKER Dans Revue des Folies Bergère, danse avec plumes..., 1925 Digital video transferred from film 56 sec Collection Gaumont Actualité Courtesy GP archives

Storia del monumento Portfolio containing 6 lithographs 35 × 25 cm De Luca Editore, 1968 Archivio Mirella Bentivoglio; Collection Paolo Cortese

M E R I KO K E B B E R H A N U Untitled LXIX, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 182.9 × 121.9 cm Untitled LXX, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 121.9 × 144.8 cm Untitled LXXI, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 182.9 × 91.4 cm Untitled LXXII, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 121.9 × 144.8 cm Untitled LXXIII, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 182.9 × 91.4 cm Untitled LXXIV, 2022 Acrylic on canvas 121.9 × 198.1 cm

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List of Works

TOMASO BINGA Dattilocodice (plate 7), 1978 Typewritten text, ink on paper 55 × 50 cm With the additional support of Galleria Tiziana Di Caro Dattilocodice (plate 10), 1978 Typewritten text, ink on paper 55 × 50 cm Dattilocodice (plate 11), 1978 Typewritten text, ink on paper 55 × 50 cm Collection G. Colombo With the additional support of Galleria Tiziana Di Caro Dattilocodice (plate 12), 1978 Typewritten text, ink on paper 55 × 50 cm With the additional support of Galleria Tiziana Di Caro

C O S I M A VO N B O N I N WHAT IF THEY BARK 01-07, 2022 Glass reinforced plastic (GRP), wool fabric, scarfs, steel base, ukulele, chains, Variable dimensions: 2 sharks with rockets, 100 × 100 × 70 cm each. 3 large mackerels, 190 × 130 × 120 cm each. 2 small mackerels, 110 × 60 × 50 cm each VENICE 1984, 2022 Painted steel, boat motor, glass reinforced plastic, steel 250 × 300 × 75 cm HERMIT CRAB (GLASS VERSION), 2022 Steel cement mixer, epoxy resin, rubber 140 × 140 × 100 cm SCALLOPS (GLASS VERSION), 2022 Epoxy resin, wood, lacquer, hemp rope, glittering garland 60 × 100 × 80 cm AXE, 2022 Wood, steel, synthetic resin varnish 100 × 45 × 9 cm All works with the additional support of Petzel Gallery, New York; Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa

LOUISE BONNET Pisser Triptych, 2021–2022 Oil on linen Overall dimensions variable Triptych. Left panel: 213.36 × 177.8. Centre panel: 213.36 × 365.76. Right panel: 213.36 × 177.8 cm With the additional support of Gagosian

MARIANNE BRANDT Stilleben mit Bauhausstoff, Kugeln und Wellpappe (Selbstportrait). Bauhaus Dessau, 1928–1929 Black-and-white photograph 17.7 × 23.8 cm Exhibition copy Courtesy Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (I 11949 F) / © (Brandt, Marianne [geb. Liebe]) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / © (Gropius, Walter) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / Image by Google Das Atelier in der Kugel II (Selbstportrait). Bauhaus Dessau, 1928–1929 Black-and-white photograph 17.7 × 23.7 cm Exhibition copy 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

Selbstportrait, in der Kugel gespiegelt. Bauhaus Dessau, 1928–1929 Black-and-white photograph 23.7 × 17.7 cm Exhibition copy Courtesy Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (I 11948 F) / © (Brandt, Marianne [geb. Liebe]) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / © (Gropius, Walter) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / Image by Google Das Atelier in der Kugel I (Selbstportrait). Bauhaus Dessau, 1928–1929 Black-and-white photograph 23.7 × 17.7 cm Exhibition copy Courtesy Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (I 11950 F) / © (Brandt, Marianne [geb. Liebe]) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / © (Gropius, Walter) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / Image by Google

Hugin (Gedanke), 2012–2021 Schwarzlot, luster, glass jewels, church window bordering, lead and drawn glass on antique glass, steel Glass: approx. 90 × 60 cm. Steel: 490.2 × 3.6 cm Nammu (Mutter), 2012–2021 Schwarzlot, luster, enamel, glass jewels, sliced agates, church window bordering, lead and drawn glass on antique glass, steel Glass: approx. 90 × 60 cm. Steel: 490.2 × 3.6 cm Private Collection Secreta_Secretorum_Seele (Seitenstechen), 2012–2021 Luster, enamel, glass jewels, sliced agates, church window bordering, drawn glass, lead on antique glass, with artist-made steel armature Glass: approx. 90 × 60 cm. Steel: 490.2 × 3.6 cm

Selbstporträt mit Schmuck zum Metallischen Fest im Bauhaus Dessau, 1929 Black-and-white photograph 23.6 × 17.7 cm Exhibition copy Courtesy Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (I 11952 F) / © (Brandt, Marianne [geb. Liebe]) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / Image by Google

Wächter (life is Beautifool heiliger Johannes), 2012–2021 Schwarzlot, glass jewels, sliced agates, church window bordering, crown glass, antique glass shards, drawn glass, lead on antique glass, with artist-made steel armature Glass: approx. 90 × 60 cm. Steel: 490.2 × 3.6 cm Defares Collection

Spiegelungen (Stilleben aus Metall und Glas). Bauhaus Dessau, 1928–1929 Black-and-white photograph 23.7 × 17.8 cm Exhibition copy Courtesy Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (I 11953 F) / © (Brandt, Marianne [geb. Liebe]) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / Image by Google

Fossil Psychic for Christa (Stucco Marmo, with gratitude to Walter Cipriani), 2020 Plaster, pigments, glue, wax and oil on honeycomb, felt 110 × 140 × 4.8 cm

Marianne Brandt and Hans-Joachim Rose, Marianne Brandt (Selbst in einer Kugel spiegelnd), 1920–1929 Black-and-white photograph 25.4 × 24.8 cm Exhibition copy Courtesy Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (I 43086) / © (Brandt, Marianne [geb. Liebe]) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / © (Rose, Hans-Joachim [Hajo]) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr) / © (Gropius, Walter) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Jahr)

K E R S T I N B R ÄT S C H ave Giotto_muro (with gratitude to Walter Cipriani), 2022 Hand painted tempera wall (pigments, binder, water) Dimensions variable ave Piero_muro (with gratitude to Walter Cipriani), 2022 Hand painted tempera wall (pigments, binder, water) Dimensions variable ave Pontormo_muro (with gratitude to Walter Cipriani), 2022 Hand painted tempera wall (pigments, binder, water) Dimensions variable Lightchanger (AM), 2022 Oracal 8300 Transparent Cal 089 plotter film Dimensions variable Ectoplasmic Ash, 2021 Glass jewels, sliced agates, drawn glass, antique glass shards, church window bordering, lead on antique glass, steel Glass: approx. 90 × 60 cm. Steel: 490.2 × 3.6 cm Enki (Sohn), 2012–2021 Schwarzlot, luster, glass jewels, sliced agates, drawn glass , lead on antique glass, with artist-made steel armature Glass: approx. 90 × 60 cm. Steel: 490.2 × 3.6 cm Collection Eleanor and Bobby Cayre, New York

Fossil Psychic for Christa (Stucco Marmo, with gratitude to Walter Cipriani), 2019–2021 Plaster, pigments, glue, wax and oil on honeycomb, felt 153 × 96 cm Brushstroke Fossil for Christa (Stucco Marmo, with gratitude to Walter Cipriani) _?, 2019–2020 Plaster, pigments, glue, wax and oil on honeycomb, felt approx. 189 × 65 cm Brushstroke Fossil for Christa (Stucco Marmo, with gratitude to Walter Cipriani) _L, 2019–2021 Plaster, pigments, glue, wax and oil on honeycomb, felt 65 × 47 cm Brushstroke Fossil for Christa (Stucco Marmo, with gratitude to Walter Cipriani) _Y, 2019–2021 Plaster, pigments, glue, wax and oil on honeycomb, felt 37 × 128 cm Fossil Psychic for Christa (Stucco Marmo, with gratitude to Walter Cipriani), 2020–2021 Plaster, pigments, glue, wax and oil on honeycomb, felt 112 × 149 cm Private Collection, Vienna Brushstroke Fossils for Christa (Stucco Marmo, with gratitude to Walter Cipriani)_FACE, 2019–2021 Plaster, pigments, glue, wax and oil on honeycomb, felt 9 parts: approx. 300 × 300 cm overall Brushstroke Fossils for Christa (Stucco Marmo, with gratitude to Walter Cipriani)_MAN, 2019–2021 Plaster, pigments, glue, wax and oil on honeycomb, felt 17 parts: approx. 325 × 240 cm overall Fossil Psychic Stone Mimicry (Palladiana, Mosaico), 2021–2022 Glass, concrete, marbles and stones Approx. 50 × 340 × 260 cm All works with the additional support of Gladstone Gallery; Gió Marconi, Milan; Walter Cipriani; Bernd Euler, Berlin; Glas Mäder, Rüschlikon; Mayersche Hofkunstanstalt, Munich; Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa

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D ORA BUD OR Autophones, 2022 Tonewood, goatskin, steel, and sex toys 4 sculptures: 93 × 29 × 39 cm; 38 × 42 × 25 cm; 51 × 48.5 × 80 cm; 18 × 38 × 11 cm. Plinths: 200 × 358 × 17 cm each Developed in cooperation with Klang-Holz e.V., Berlin With the additional support of Antenna Space, Shanghai; Ammodo

E G L Ė B U DV Y T Y T Ė I N C O L L A B O R AT I O N WITH MARIJA OLŠAUSKAITĖ AND JULIJA STEPONAITYTĖ Songs from the Compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars, 2020 4K video, 30 mins Commissioned by Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts within the framework of 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture and Riga International biennial of Contemporary art (RIBOCA) With the additional support of Mondriaan Fund; Lithuanian Council for Culture; Creative Europe Programme of the EU

LIV BUGGE PLAY, 2019 Video installation. HD video transferred from 16mm film, doghouses, and euro-pallets With the additional support of Norwegian Visual Artists Fund, and Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA)

Self portrait (with Nazi badge between her teeth), 1945 Photograph 13.3 × 8.3 cm Exhibition copy Self portrait (reflected image in mirror, chequered jacket), 1928 Monochrome negative 11.8 × 9.4 cm Exhibition copy

MIRIAM CAHN unser süden sommer 2021, 5.8.2021, 2021 Room installation composed of 28 paintings and works on paper Mixed techniques Dimensions variable With the additional support of Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

CLAUDE CAHUN Je tends les bras, 1931 Monochrome negative with a pink tinge 11 × 9 cm Exhibition copy Self portrait (in robe with masks attached), 1928 Monochrome negative 12 cm × 9.4 cm Exhibition copy Self portrait (in cloak with cloaked figure), 1939 Photograph 11 × 8 cm Exhibition copy Keepsake, 1932 4 photographs Monochrome negatives 11 × 8 cm Exhibition copies Hands and Table (untitled), 1936 Monochrome print 11 × 8 cm Exhibition copy

Portrait of the Late Mrs Partridge, 1947 Oil on board 100.3 × 69.9 cm Private Collection, Chicago Portrait of Madame Dupin, 1949 Oil on board 44.45 × 15.24 cm Gertrud V. Parker Collection

Je donnerais ma Vie from Le Cœur de Pic, 1936 Monochrome print with white border 24 × 18 cm Exhibition copy

Ulu’s Pants, 1952 Oil and tempera on panel 54.5 × 91.5 cm Private Collection

Plate VII from Le Cœur de Pic, 1936 Monochrome negative 10 × 8 cm Exhibition copy

Leche del sueño, 2016 Illustrated book Fondo de Cultura Económica, re-edition of original published in 2013

Feathers, Branch and Pen Nibs (untitled, from Le Cœur de Pic), 1937 Monochrome print with border of very thin black line 16 × 13 cm Exhibition copy

Plate XIX from Le Cœur de Pic, 1937 Monochrome negative 10.5 × 8 cm Exhibition copy All works above courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections Claude Cahun and Lise Deharme, Le Cœur de Pic, 2004 Illustrated book Éditions MeMo, re-edition of original published in 1937

SIMNIKIWE BUHLUNGU And the Other Thing I Was Saying Was: A Conver-something, 2022 Sound installation, mixed media Dimensions variable Biennale College Arte, La Biennale di Venezia

LEONORA CARRINGTON

E LA I N E C A M E RO N -W E I R Low Relief Icon (Figure 1) and Low Relief Icon (Figure 2), 2021 US military body transfer cases, aluminium, flicker bulbs, electrical wiring, conveyor belt, pewter, chain, pulleys, aircraft cable, hardware Dimensions variable With the additional support of JTT, New York; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles Right Hand Left Hand, Grinds a Fantasizer’s Dust, 2021 Concrete textile, funerary backdrop stand, neon tubing, transformers, spotlights, silk gauze 217.17 × 284.48 × 60.96 cm With the additional support of JTT, New York; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles Thanks to donations to the Canadian Friends Fund of La Biennale, at KBF CANADA

M I L LY C A N AV E R O Untitled, 1982 Marker on paper 46.5 × 65 cm Untitled, 1985 Marker on paper 46.5 × 65 cm Untitled, 1985 Marker on paper 46.5 × 65 cm Untitled, 1986 Marker on paper 46.5 × 65 cm

R E G I NA C A S S O L O B RAC C H I Danzatrice, 1930 Aluminium 45 × 30 × 15 cm Collezione Archivio Gaetano e Zoe Fermani Bambina, 1930 Tin 47 × 17 × 17 cm Collezione Archivio Gaetano e Zoe Fermani L’amante dell’aviatore, 1935 Aluminium 60 × 48.8 × 9.5 cm Museo Regina Cassolo, Castello Sangiuliani – Comune di Mede La signora provinciale (Signora dell’800), 1930–1935 Aluminium and wire 60 × 48.8 × 9.5 cm Museo Regina Cassolo, Castello Sangiuliani – Comune di Mede Ritratto di ragazza, 1931–1932 Aluminium 42 × 42 × 7.5 cm Museo Regina Cassolo, Castello Sangiuliani – Comune di Mede Piccola italiana, 1935 Aluminium 74 × 31 × 15.5 cm Museo Regina Cassolo, Castello Sangiuliani – Comune di Mede Fanciulla con trecce, 1932–1933 Aluminium 47.7 × 36.5 × 5 cm Museo Regina Cassolo, Castello Sangiuliani - Comune di Mede Aerosensibilità, 1935 Aluminium 69.5 × 36.5 × 26 cm Museo Regina Cassolo, Castello Sangiuliani – Comune di Mede

A M B R A C A S TA G N E T T I Dependency, 2022 Installation Mixed media (fabric, chains, ropes, ceramics, clothing) Biennale College Arte, La Biennale di Venezia

All works The Elmar R. Gruber Collection of Mediumistic Art

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List of Works

GIULIA CENCI

GABRIEL CHAILE

dead dance, 2021–2022 Installation composed of the following 12 works:

Rosario Liendro, 2022 Metal structure, adobe 600 × 150 × 600 cm

cosmogonia, 2021–2022 Metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint 200 × 300 × 200 cm scalata, 2021–2022 Metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint, metal chain 450 × 300 × 80 cm

Irene Duran, 2022 Metal structure, adobe, and bricks 300 × 150 × 150 cm Jose Pascual Chaile, 2022 Metal structure, adobe, and bricks 300 × 150 × 150 cm

bolgia - ancore, 2022 Metal, aluminium 200 × 70 × 400 cm

Sebastiana Martínez, 2022 Metal structure, adobe, and bricks 300 × 150 × 150 cm

bolgia - mangiatoia, 2022 Metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint 200 × 440 × 90 cm

Francisco Chaile, 2022 Metal structure, adobe, and bricks 300 × 150 × 150 cm

bolgia, 2022 Metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint 400 × 200 × 600 cm

All works with the additional support of Barro Gallery, Buenos Aires; ChertLüdde, Berlin; Ammodo

bolgia - mangiatoia #2, 2022 Metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint 200 × 440 × 90 cm

ALI CHERRI

bolgia - ancore #2, 2022 Metal, aluminium 200 × 70 × 300 cm bolgia - guardiano, 2022 Metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint, aluminium 160 × 200 × 50 cm bolgia - guardiano #2, 2022 Metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint, aluminium 160 × 200 × 50 cm progresso scorsoio, 2021–2022 Metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint 200 × 440 × 2550 cm still life, 2022 Metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint Dimensions variable cosmoagonia, 2022 Metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint Dimensions variable All works with the additional support of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Mondriaan Fund; SpazioA; Ammodo

GIANNINA CENSI Danza aerofuturista, 1931 Black-and-white photograph 24 × 18 cm Exhibition copy Foto Santacroce, Milano, 1931 Danza aerofuturista, 1931 Black-and-white photograph 24 × 18 Exhibition copy Foto Santacroce, Milano, 1931 Danza aerofuturista, 1931 Black-and-white photograph 17.5 × 12.5 cm Exhibition copy Foto Santacroce, Milano, 1931 Danza aerofuturista, 1931 Black-and-white photograph 15 × 10 cm Exhibition copy Foto Santacroce, Milano, 1931 All works courtesy Mart, Archivio del ’900, Fondo Censi

Of Men and Gods and Mud, 2022 Three-channel video installation 20 mins With the additional support of Robert A. Matta Arts & Culture Association, [N.A!] Project; Galerie Imane Farès - Paris; Institut français Titans, 2022 3 sculptures (terracotta; wood; metal) and 6 watercolour drawings Sculptures base size: 60 × 60 cm Height: 180 cm each Drawings: 30 × 40 cm each With the additional support of Robert A. Matta Arts & Culture Association, [N.A!] Project; Galerie Imane Farès - Paris; Institut français

ANNA COLEMAN LADD Painted metal facial prosthesis, 1917–1920 Galvanised copper, glass spectacles 10 × 15.5 × 12 cm Collection of The British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons Anna Coleman Ladd’s Studio for Portrait Masks in Paris, 1918–1919 Digital video transferred from film 6 mins 22 sec Courtesy The Collection of The British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons Caudron and Cavallier playing cards, 1919 Glass negative 12.7 × 17.78 cm Exhibition copy Retrieved from the Library of Congress, American National Red Cross photograph collection Mrs. Anna Coleman Ladd and Mr. Caudron. Mrs. A. Coleman Ladd working on portrait mask, 1918 Glass negative 12.7 × 17.78 cm Exhibition copy Retrieved from the Library of Congress, American National Red Cross photograph collection Three masks made by Mrs. Ladd for men with facial mutilations, 1918 Black-and-white photographic print 11 × 16 cm Exhibition copy Retrieved from the Library of Congress, American Red Cross Collection Caudron (front view), 1918 Black-and-white photographic print 22 × 16 cm Exhibition copy Retrieved from the Library of Congress, American Red Cross Collection

Mutile before having mask made by Mrs. Anna Coleman Ladd, 1918 Glass negative 17.78 × 12.7 cm Exhibition copy Retrieved from the Library of Congress, American National Red Cross photograph collection Mutiles wearing a mask made by Mrs. Anna Coleman Ladd, 1918 Glass negative 17.78 × 12.7 cm Exhibition copy Retrieved from the Library of Congress, American National Red Cross photograph collection Masks by Anna Coleman Ladd, 1917–1919 Glass negative 12.7 × 17.78 cm Exhibition copy Retrieved from the Library of Congress, American National Red Cross photograph collection Paris. Mutile before wearing mask made by Mrs. Anna Coleman Ladd, of the American Red Cross, 1919 Glass negative 17.78 × 12.7 cm Exhibition copy Retrieved from the Library of Congress, American National Red Cross photograph collection Paris. Mutile [after] wearing mask made by Mrs. Anna Coleman Ladd, of the American Red Cross, 1919 Glass negative 17.78 × 12.7 cm Exhibition copy Retrieved from the Library of Congress, American National Red Cross photograph collection WWI soldier facial reconstruction documentation photograph, 1918 Photographic gelatin silver print 12 × 18 cm Exhibition copy Anna Coleman Ladd papers, 1881–1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution WWI soldier facial reconstruction documentation photograph, 1920 Black-and-white photographic print 17 × 13 cm Exhibition copy Anna Coleman Ladd papers, 1881–1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution WWI soldier facial reconstruction documentation photograph, 1920 Black-and-white photographic print 17 × 13 cm Exhibition copy Anna Coleman Ladd papers, 1881–1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution WWI soldier facial reconstruction documentation photograph, 1918 Photographic gelatin silver print 12 × 18 cm Exhibition copy Anna Coleman Ladd papers, 1881–1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution WWI soldier facial reconstruction documentation photograph, 1918 Black-and-white photographic print 10 × 13 cm Exhibition copy Anna Coleman Ladd papers, 1881–1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution WWI soldier facial reconstruction documentation photograph, 1920 Black-and-white photographic print 14 × 11 cm Exhibition copy Anna Coleman Ladd papers, 1881–1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

724

WWI soldier facial reconstruction documentation photograph, 1920 Photographic gelatin silver print 14 × 11 cm Exhibition copy Anna Coleman Ladd papers, 1881-1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

ITHELL COLQUHOUN The Pine Family, 1940 Oil on canvas 46 × 54 cm The Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art in the Israel Museum

M Y R L A N D E C O N S TA N T Sirenes, 2020 Sequins, glass beads, silk tassels on canvas 208 × 261 cm GUEDE (Baron), 2020 Sequins, glass beads, silk tassels on cotton 224 × 216 × 10.5 cm Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, 21c Museum Hotels Rasanbleman soupe tout eskòt yo, 2019 Sequins, glass beads, and silk on fabric 236.22 × 314.96 cm Collection Alan Faena

JUNE CRESPO HELMETS (IX), 2022 Stainless steel, ceramic coat 45 × 64 × 36 cm. Steel support: 95 × 115 × 72 cm HELMETS (X), 2022 Stainless steel, ceramic coat 38 × 90 × 60 cm. Steel support: 95 × 115 × 72 cm HELMETS (XI), 2022 Bronze, ceramic coat, textile 26 × 48 × 32 cm. Steel support: 95 × 115 × 72 cm All works with the additional support of P420 Gallery; CarrerasMugica Gallery; Acción Cultural Española (AC/E); Etxepare Basque Institute

DA DA M A I N O Cromorilievo, inclinazione 5° - bianco + 14 varianti grigio, 1974 Wooden dowels on board 50 × 50 × 10 cm Courtesy Archivio Dadamaino on behalf of Nicoletta Saporiti Cromorilievo, inclinazione 10° - grigio dal 16 al 30, 1974 Wooden dowels on board 50 × 50 × 10 cm Courtesy Archivio Dadamaino on behalf of Nicoletta Saporiti Cromorilievo, inclinazione 30° - dal grigio 76 al 90, 1974 Wooden dowels on board 50 × 50 × 10 cm Courtesy Archivio Dadamaino on behalf of Nicoletta Saporiti Oggetto ottico dinamico, 1960–1961 Milled aluminium plates on nylon threads on wooden structure 67 × 67 cm (96 × 96 cm diagonal) Private Collection, Florence Oggetto ottico dinamico indeterminato, 1963–1965 Milled aluminium plates on wooden structure 35 × 35 cm (50 × 50 cm diagonal) Private Collection, Florence

N O A H D AV I S 40 Acres and a Unicorn, 2007 Acrylic and gouache on canvas 76.2 × 66 cm Private Collection Untitled (Birch Trees), 2010 Oil and acrylic on linen with rabbit skin glue 138 × 92.7 cm Private Collection Isis, 2009 Oil and acrylic on linen 121.9 × 121.9 cm Private Collection The Conductor, 2014 Oil on canvas 175.3 × 193 cm The Estate of Noah Davis The Future’s Future, 2010 Oil on canvas 152.4 × 188 cm Private Collection All works with the additional support of David Zwirner

L E N O RA D E BA R RO S POEMA (POEM), 1979 / 2014 Black-and-white inkjet print on cotton paper Photography Fabiana de Barros Overall: 139.7 × 29.8 cm Exhibition copy

VA L E N T I N E D E S A I N T - P O I N T Metachoric Gestures (Gestes Métachoriques), 1914–1923 Ten original woodcuts, limited edition on Lafuma Pur Fil paper 19 × 14 cm each Adrien Sina, Feminine Futures

LISE DEHARME Oh! Violette, ou La Politesse des végétaux, 1969 Book and 35 signed engravings Published by Eric Losefeld, Paris

S O N I A D E L A U N AY Senza titolo. Gouache F 5202, 1925 gouache on tracing paper 18 × 25 cm Senza titolo, 1925 Gouache on paper 10.5 × 9 cm Senza titolo, 1928 Gouache on paper 14 × 14 cm Senza titolo, 1928 Gouache on paper 11.2 × 9.3 cm Senza titolo, 1929 Gouache on paper 9.2 × 8.5 cm Senza titolo, 1929 Gouache on paper 10 × 10 cm Senza titolo. Gouache n°382, 1929 Gouache on paper 11 × 12 cm

Senza titolo, 1929 Gouache on paper 13 × 10.5 cm Senza titolo, 1929 Gouache on paper 16.2 × 19 cm Senza titolo, 1929 Gouache on paper 26.8 × 21 cm Senza titolo, 1929 Gouache on paper 10 × 10 cm Senza titolo, 1929 Gouache on paper 20 × 16 cm Senza titolo, 1929–1930 Gouache on paper 13.2 × 11.6 cm Senza titolo. Variante del n°953 bis, “Libro nero VIII”, 1930 Gouache on paper 20.5 × 16.5 cm Senza titolo. Gouache n°362, 1930 Gouache on paper 27 × 21 cm Senza titolo, 1930 Gouache on paper 20 × 16.5 cm Senza titolo, 1930 Gouache on paper 14.5 × 11.6 cm Senza titolo. Gouache n°17, 1932 Gouache on paper 15 × 11 cm Senza titolo, 1933 Gouache on paper 11.2 × 10 cm Senza titolo, 1933 Gouache on paper 11.9 × 10.6 cm Senza titolo, 1933 Gouache on paper 21 × 27 cm

AG N E S D E N E S Introspection I—Evolution, 1968–1971 Monoprint 107.63 × 542.29 cm Introspection I—Evolution portrays evolutionary developments from the Psychozoic Era and the separation of man and ape to the development of intelligence and the beginnings of knowledge, science and art. It investigates comparative anatomy, genetics, physics, biology, cytology, heredity, anatomy, mutation, environmental awareness, logical and social relations, analogous surfaces, genealogy, cartography, communication, astronomy, time studies, linguistics, X-ray technology, time measurements, and art. Introspection II—Machines, Tools & Weapons, 1969–1972 Monoprint 101.6 × 626.75 cm Introspection II—Machines, Tools & Weapons maps the growth of technology through the ages from the first manmade tools to the technical sophistication of the twentieth century and concludes with the Human Hang-Up Machine.

Senza titolo, 1929 Gouache on paper 16.5 × 16.5 cm

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List of Works

M AYA D E R E N The Witch’s Cradle, 1943 Digital video transferred from 16mm film 12 mins 40 sec Courtesy The New American Cinema Group, Inc./The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

LUCIA DI LUCIANO Irradiazioni N.7, 1965 Morgan’s paint on masonite 80 × 80 × 3 cm Irradiazioni N.9, 1965 Morgan’s paint on masonite 80 × 80 × 3 cm Irradiazioni N.11, 1965 Morgan’s paint on masonite 80 × 80 × 3 cm

EDISON’S DOLLS Unknown photographer, c. 1890–1899 Black-and-white photograph of Thomas Edison’s Talking Doll Exhibition copy 25.4 × 20.32 cm “Mr. Edison Exhibits the Mechanism of the Talking Doll,” c. 1890 Engraving, originally published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (New York: Frank Leslie), October 1890 Private Collection Newspaper advertisement for “Speaking Doll”, c. 1890 Private Collection 2 page report on Thomas Edison’s Phonographic Dolls, c. 1890 Originally published in La Nature, Revue des sciences et de leur application à l’art et à l’industrie, 885 (Paris: Libraires de l’Académie de médicine), 17 May 1890 Private Collection

I B RA H I M E L- S A L A H I Behind the Mask, 2020–2021 99 drawings Pen and ink on the back of medicine packets Dimensions variable With the additional support of British Council

SARA ENRICO The Jumpsuit Theme, 2022 Concrete, pigment 33 × 125 × 35 cm The Jumpsuit Theme, 2022 Concrete, pigment 37 × 228 × 50 cm The Jumpsuit Theme, 2022 Concrete, pigment 45 × 190 × 50 cm The Jumpsuit Theme, 2022 Concrete, pigment 30 × 167 × 75 cm All works with the additional support of Ruben Levi

CHIARA ENZO Sterno, 2018 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 10.2 × 10.8 cm Private Collection

Palmo, 2018 Watercolour and colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 10.8 × 10.75 cm Collection Neri Pagnan Pareti, 2018 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 10.9 × 10.9 cm A me stessa, 2019 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 24 × 16.8 cm Senza titolo (doccia), 2019 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 17.7 × 15 cm Senza titolo (pelle), 2019 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 17.7 × 15 cm Due letti, 2020 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 16 × 12.3 cm Lenzuolo II, 2020 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 16.4 × 11.7 cm Dietro II, 2020, Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 16.4 × 11.7 cm Private Collection, Milan Passo, 2020 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 19 × 19 cm Senza titolo (sorella), 2020 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 14.8 × 17.7 cm Lenzuolo III, 2020 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 15.1 × 35.1 cm L’abisso, 2020 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 29.1 × 15.1 cm Nuca, B., 2021 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 19 × 19 cm Collection Sandra and Giancarlo Bonollo Senza titolo (spots), 2021 Tempera, watercolour, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 10.1 × 10.1 cm Il prurito, 2021 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 14.8 × 17.7 cm Senza titolo (piedi), 2021 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 15 × 20 cm Sul bordo, 2021 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 24 × 16.8 cm

Dorso, M., 2022 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 23 × 22 cm Lettiga, 2022 Tempera, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 23 × 22 cm Camera, 2022 Watercolour, pastel, colour pencils on cardboard applied on wooden board 14.9 × 17.5 cm

A N D RO E RA DZ E Raised in the dust, 2021 Video 4K Biennale College Arte, La Biennale di Venezia

JAIDER ESBELL 17 paintings from the series Transmakunaimî: o buraco é mais embaixo: Transformação/Ressurgência de Makunaimî, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 89 × 90 cm Transformação/Ressurgência de Makunaimî, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 89 × 90 cm Transformação/Ressurgência de Makunaimî, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 89 × 90 cm Transformação/Ressurgência de Makunaimî, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 89 × 90 cm Makunaimî Parixara, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 90 × 90 cm Espírito dos Caxiris, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 89 × 90 cm Pajés, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 89 × 89 cm Muiraquitãs, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 89 × 90 cm A cura dos sapos, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 90 × 90 cm Roças de Makunaimî, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 90 × 90 cm A origem das lagartas de fogo, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 89 × 90 cm A luta do boi com Makunaimî, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 89 × 90 cm A vaca, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 89 × 90 cm Kanaimé, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 90 × 90 cm Pajés comendo tanajura, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 90 × 91 cm Latinoamérica, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 90 × 90 cm

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Makunaímî deitado na rede universal, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 89 × 90 cm All works courtesy Jaider Esbell Estate With the additional support of Galeria Jaider Esbell de Arte Indígena Contemporânea and Galeria Millan

JANA EULER great white fear, 2021 111 glazed ceramics on plinth Overall: 67 × 400 × 310 cm Fly (eternity), 2021 Oil on linen 260 × 240 cm Fly (moment), 2021 Oil on linen 240 × 260 cm Venice void, 2022 Oil on linen 205 × 400 cm All works with the additional support of Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa

M I N N I E E VA N S untitled, 1943 Colour pencil on paper 20.5 × 13 cm untitled, n.d. Pen and pencil on paper 29.5 × 22.5 cm untitled, 1946, 1962–1963, 1968 Oil pastel, pencil, and paper mounted on board 52 × 66.5 cm untitled, 1967 Oil, ink, and paper on board 36.83 × 49.53 cm untitled, c. 1960 Oil, pencil, and colour pencil on board 48.5 × 59 cm All works The Museum + The Gallery of Everything

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 Facsimile Gift of The Tobin Endowment, TL2001.61. McNay Art Museum. © 2021 McNay Art Museum/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Firenze Costume design for the Martian for the movie Aelita, the Queen of Mars and the play Aelita, staged by Yakov Protazanov. Mezhrabprom-Rus’ Film Company, USSR, Moscow, 1924 Paper, ink, bronze paint, gouache 53 × 34.5 cm Facsimile © St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music. Gift of International Charitable Foundation “Constantine.” Collection of Nina and Nikita Lobanov-Rostovsky Costume design for Aelita for the movie Aelita, the Queen of Mars and the play Aelita, staged by Yakov Protazanov. Mezhrabprom-Rus’ Film Company, USSR, Moscow, 1924 Paper, ink, bronze paint, gouache 69.3 × 46 cm Facsimile © St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music. Gift of International Charitable Foundation “Constantine.” Collection of Nina and Nikita Lobanov-Rostovsky

Costume design for Gor, guardian of energy on Mars for the movie Aelita, the Queen of Mars and the play Aelita, staged by Yakov Protazanov. Mezhrabprom-Rus’ Film Company, USSR, Moscow, 1924 Paper, ink, pencil, lacquer 53 × 46 cm Facsimile © St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music. Gift of International Charitable Foundation “Constantine.” Collection of Nina and Nikita Lobanov-Rostovsky

S A F I A FA R H AT

Costume design for the Chief of Atomic Power in Aelita, the Queen of Mars, 1924 Gouache, ink, and graphite on paper 48.58 × 31.43 cm Facsimile Gift of The Tobin Endowment, TL2001.57. McNay Art Museum. © 2021 McNay Art Museum/ Art Resource, NY/Scala, Firenze

By the Tigris (II), 2022 Stoneware 100 × 24 cm diam.

Guardian of Energy (costume design for the film Aelita by Yakov Protazanov), 1924 Ink, gouache, and pencil on paper 54 × 36.2 cm Facsimile The J. M. Kaplan Fund, Inc. Inv.: 341.1977, Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence Costume design for a male character in Aelita, the Queen of Mars, 1924 Gouache, ink, and graphite on paper 48.26 × 32.7 cm Facsimile Gift of The Tobin Endowment, TL2001.62. McNay Art Museum. © 2021 McNay Art Museum/ Art Resource, NY/Scala, Firenze Yakov Protazanov, Aelita, 1924 Sets and costumes by Alexandra Exter 2K digital video transferred from 16mm film Excerpt from 80 mins 37 sec Courtesy Lobster Films Collection

J A D É FA D O J U T I M I The Prolific Beauty of Our Panicked Landscape, 2022 Acrylic, oil and oil bar on canvas 300 × 500 cm And that day, she remembered how to purr, 2022 Acrylic, oil and oil bar on canvas 300 × 500 cm Rebirth, 2022 Acrylic, oil and oil bar on canvas 250 × 400 cm All works with the additional support of Galerie Gisela Capitain; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery; Taka Ishii Gallery

J E S FA N yet to be titled, 2022 Aqua resin, fibreglass, glass, pigments, incense containing agarwood, sandalwood and makko powder 234 × 81 × 122 cm yet to be titled, 2022 Aqua resin, fibreglass, glass, pigments, incense containing agarwood, sandalwood and makko powder 142 × 105 × 88 cm

Diptyque Gafsa & ailleurs, 1983 Tapestry Diptych. 320 × 294 × 15 cm; 293 × 167 × 15 cm Private Collection

S I M O N E FAT TA L By the Tigris (I), 2022 Stoneware 110 × 27 cm diam.

Ishtar, 2022 Bronze 90 × 22 cm diam. With the additional support of Balice Hertling, Paris; Karma International, Zurich; kaufmann repetto, Milan/New York; Tanit gallery, Beirut/Munich; Hubert Winter, Vienna Adam and Eve, 2021 Bronze 190 × 78 × 82 cm Private Collection, Switzerland With the additional support of kaufmann repetto, Milan / New York All works with the additional support of Institut français

C É L E S T I N FA U S T I N Pourtant ma Maison est Vide, 1979 Oil on canvas 30.48 × 40.64 cm Collection Marcus Rediker Respectez ce contrat, 1981 Oil on canvas 40.64 × 60.96 cm Collection Marcus Rediker Jardin d’Eden, 1979 Oil on canvas 101.6 × 152.4 cm Collection Marcus Rediker

LEONOR FINI L’Alcove, 1941 Oil on canvas 73 × 97.8 × 5.08 cm Femme assise sur un homme nu, 1942 Oil on canvas 33 × 46 cm Private Collection Les Cornes, 1973 Gold sculpture 15 × 14.5 × 4 cm Geneviève Sevin-Doering and Leonor Fini, Gold dress, 1965 170 × 40–170 × 40 cm Courtesy The Estate of Leonor Fini M6 Black pseudo-primitive surrealist mask, c. 1960 Black cotton double-gauze fabric, mould, imitation pearls, beads 17 × 24 × 22 cm Courtesy The Estate of Leonor Fini

Fragrant Harbour, 2022 Aqua resin, fibreglass, glass, pigments, incense containing agarwood, sandalwood and makko powder 190 × 127 × 67 cm All works with the additional support of Empty Gallery, Hong Kong Thanks to donations to the Canadian Friends Fund of La Biennale, at KBF CANADA

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List of Works

E L SA VO N F R E Y TA G - L O R I N G H O V E N Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, c. 1920–1925 Glass negative 17.78 × 12.7 cm Exhibition copy Photography Bain News Service, Publisher Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Working as a Model, 1915 3 gelatin silver prints Exhibition copies Photos Bettmann via Getty Images Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg, God, photographed by Morton Schamberg, c. 1917 Gelatin silver print 24.1 × 19.2 cm Exhibition copy Photo Sepia Times via Getty Images Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, photographed by Charles Sheeler, 1920 Gelatin silver print 20.32 × 15.24 cm The Bluff Collection Limbswish, 1918–1920 Mixed media assemblage 55 × 35 × 19 cm Collection Mark Kelman, New York

K AT H A R I N A F R I T S C H Elefant / Elephant, 1987 Polyester, wood, paint 420 × 160 × 380 cm With the additional support of Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa

City with a River Running Through, 2011 Acrylic on unstretched canvas 185.4 × 563.2 cm Private Collection Seated Musician with Feathered Wing, 2011 Acrylic on canvas Diptych. 61 × 121.9 cm each Overall: 130.6 × 128.3 cm Private Collection Figure with Trees and Horse Head, c. 2011 Acrylic on canvas Diptych. 61 × 121.9 cm each Overall: 128.5 × 127.3 cm Private Collection All works with the additional support of Galerie Lelong & Co., New York

E L I S A G I A R D I N A PA PA “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, 2022 Video and ceramic installation Dimensions variable With the additional support of Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), Graffiti Art in Prison (GAP), Meyer Sound, Savant Studios, School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, 2022 Video and ceramic installation Dimensions variable Forte Marghera Special Project, La Biennale di Venezia

RO B E RT O G I L D E M ON T E S UP, 2021 Oil on canvas 116.5 × 85.5 × 4.5 cm Collection Beth Rudin DeWoody

ILSE GARNIER

El Pescador, 2020 Oil on linen 196 × 257 × 4.5 cm Collection Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China

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

Endangered Species, 2021 Oil on linen 148.8 × 149.5 × 4 cm Collection × Museum, Beijing

AAG E GAU P

Los poetas en el mar, 2021 Oil on linen 120 × 250 × 4 cm Collection × Museum, Beijing

Sculpture I & II, 1979 Wood, paint, screws, and wires 62 × 78 × 274 cm and 65 × 75 × 298 cm Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Tromsø, Norway With the additional support of Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA)

L I N DA GA ZZ E RA Enrico Imoda, Album, 1909 Photographs of seances held in Turin between 1908 and 1909 with the medium Linda Gazzera. 18 gelatin silver prints and one albumen print, in different sizes, in a cardboard album 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

FICRE GHEBREYESUS Fish, c. 2008–2011 Acrylic on canvas 182.9 × 213.4 cm Courtesy The Estate of Ficre Ghebreyesus Nude with Bottle Tree, c. 2011 Acrylic on canvas 182.9 × 213.4 cm Private Collection

El monje, 2021 Oil on canvas 116.5 × 85.5 × 4.5 cm Private Collection

Sunset Light, 1967 Neon, Plexiglas, and steel 52 × 16 × 16 cm Sunset Light, 1967 Neon, Plexiglas, and steel 52 × 16 × 16 cm All works with the additional support of P420 Gallery

KA R LA G RO S C H Glastanz, by Oskar Schlemmer, 1929 Black-and-white photograph 12 × 16 cm Exhibition copy Photo T. Lux Feininger © Estate of T. Lux Feininger Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin Glastanz, by Oskar Schlemmer, 1929 Black-and-white photograph 12.9 × 9 cm Exhibition copy Photo Robert Binnemann Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin Glastanz, by Oskar Schlemmer, 1929 Black-and-white photograph 17.4 × 11.4 cm Exhibition copy Photo Robert Binnemann Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin

RO B E RT G RO S V E N O R Untitled, 2018 One scooter and stand. Steel, wood, rubber, gold wall paint 259 × 243.8 × 609.6 cm Untitled, 1987–1988 Steel and plastic 190.5 × 243.8 × 622.3 cm Block of Water, 2019 108 concrete blocks, rubber liner, water 91.4 × 304.8 × 548.6 cm All works with the additional support of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Paris, London

A N E TA G R Z E S Z Y K O W S K A From Mama series, 2018 20 photographs 51.2 × 36.3 × 3.3 cm each

All works with the additional support of Kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York

Mama # 3; Mama # 5; Mama # 6; Mama # 13; Mama # 14; Mama # 17; Mama # 22; Mama # 32; Mama # 33; Mama # 35; Mama # 36; Mama # 38; Mama # 45; Mama # 50

NAN GOLDIN

Mama # 25; Mama # 44 Collection Adrian Slupski (CAS collection)

Sirens, 2019–2021 Single-channel video 16 mins 1 sec With the additional support of Marian Goodman Gallery

J A N E G R AV E R O L L’École de la Vanité, 1967 Oil and collage on cardboard 70.5 × 106.5 × 5 cm Collection Anne Boschmans

Mama # 29 Collection Siggi Seewald Mama # 31 Private Collection Mama # 40 Collection Anna Zacharzewska Mama # 47 Private Collection All works with the additional support of Raster Gallery, Warsaw

LAURA GRISI Sunset Light, 1967 Neon, Plexiglas, and steel 219 × 30 × 30 cm

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S H E R O A N AW E H A K I H I I W E Hahoshi, 2021 Monoprint on mulberry paper 76 × 144 cm Ira mamiki, 2021 Monoprint on mulberry paper 76 × 144 cm Mapuu thoki, 2021 Monoprint on mulberry paper 76 × 144 cm Omawe, 2021 Monoprint on mulberry paper 76 × 144 cm Omayari misi, 2021 Monoprint on mulberry paper 76 × 144 cm Pasho Shina, 2021 Monoprint on mulberry paper 76 × 144 cm Pukupukumi, 2021 Monoprint on mulberry paper 76 × 144 cm Rerekewe, 2021 Monoprint on mulberry paper 76 × 144 cm Titiri, 2021 Monoprint on mulberry paper 76 × 144 cm Yaro shinaki ishi ishi, 2021 Monoprint on mulberry paper 76 × 144 cm Yaro shinaki wake wake, 2021 Monoprint on mulberry paper 76 × 144 cm Yaro shinaki, 2021 Monoprint on mulberry paper 76 × 144 cm Raeshi, 2019 Acrylic on cotton paper 70 × 50 cm

Portrait Composition, 1930 / 2014 Photographic gelatin silver print 30.2 × 40.5 cm

Ninfa, 2021 Acrylic on linen 208.3 × 218.44 cm

Rome, 1933–1934 / 2014 Photographic gelatin silver print 50.5 × 40.5 cm

Pagan Prophet, 2021 Acrylic on linen 208.3 × 187.96 cm

Rome, 1933–1934 / 2014 Photographic gelatin silver print 50.5 × 40.5 cm

The Garden of Cyrus, 2021 Oil and acrylic on linen 208.3 × 187.96 cm

Autoportrait, 1928 / 2014 Photographic gelatin silver print 30 × 24 cm

The Nymphs, 2020 Acrylic on linen 208.3 × 182.88 cm

Autoportrait, 1938 / 2014 Photographic gelatin silver print 40 × 30 cm

Charline von Heyl for Matt Haimovitz and Jeffrianne Young of the Primavera Project Primavera 2020, 2020 Acrylic and charcoal on linen Triptych. Panel #1: 208.3 × 187.96 cm. Panel #2: 208.3 × 187.96 cm. Panel #3: 208.3 × 182.9 cm. Overall: 208.3 × 558.8 cm

Composition abstraite, 1928 / 1974 Photographic gelatin silver print 17 × 24 cm Composition abstraite, 1932 / 2014 Photographic gelatin silver print 30 × 40 cm Autoportrait, 1928 / 2014 Photographic gelatin silver print 30.5 × 24 cm All works courtesy Archives Florence Henri

LY N N H E R S H M A N L E E S O N Logic Paralyzes the Heart, 2021 Digital video 13 mins 35 sec Commissioned by V-A-C Foundation, Venice, IT With the additional support of Hotwire Productions LLC; Altman Siegel, San Francisco Logic Paralyzes the Heart (A Community of Missing People), 2021 Wallpaper. Archival digital print of people generated completely by an Artificial Intelligence system on the website “Generated Photos” Dimensions variable With the additional support of Altman Siegel, San Francisco

Titiri nahi, 2018 Acrylic on cane primed paper 70 × 50 cm

Seeing Inside, 1964 Collage, tracing paper, graphite and acrylic on paper 109.22 × 77.47 cm

Hii nomawe hipa / Árboles muertos, 2018 Acrylic on cane primed paper 70 × 50 cm

X-Ray Woman in Bathing Cap, 1966 Acrylic on plywood 73.66 × 58.42 cm

All works with the additional support of ABRA Gallery

Missing Child, Cyborg, 2021 Archival digital print on Plexiglas in reverse against mirror, people generated completely by an Artificial Intelligence system on the website “Generated Photos” 76.2 × 76.2 cm

FLORENCE HENRI Portrait Composition. Petro (Nelly) van Doesburg, c. 1930 / 2014 Photographic gelatin silver print 40.5 × 30 cm Portrait de Sonia Delaunay, 1931 / 2014 Photographic gelatin silver print 40 × 30 cm Portrait Composition, c. 1930 / 2014 Photographic gelatin silver print 40.5 × 30 cm Portrait Composition, c. 1930 / 2014 Photographic gelatin silver print 40.5 × 30 cm Composition. The glory that was Greece, c. 1933 / 2014 Photographic gelatin silver print 40.5 × 50.5 cm

Missing Person, Cyborg, 2021 Archival digital print on Plexiglas in reverse against mirror, people generated completely by an Artificial Intelligence system on the website “Generated Photos” 76.2 × 76.2 cm

C H A R L I N E VO N H E Y L The August Complex, 2020 Acrylic on linen 208.3 × 198.1 cm Acidalia, 2021 Oil and acrylic on linen 218.44 × 198.12 cm Emblemata Nova, 2021 Acrylic on linen 208.3 × 198.1 cm

All works with the additional support of Petzel Gallery, New York; Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa

HANNAH HÖCH Der heilige Berg, from the series Aus einem ethnographischen Museum Nr. XI Facsimile, original from 1927 Collage on cardboard 33.5 × 22.5 cm Berlinische Galerie - Museum for Modern Art, Photography and Architecture Deutsches Mädchen Facsimile, original from 1930 Collage on cardboard 21.6 × 11.6 cm Berlinische Galerie - Museum for Modern Art, Photography and Architecture

JESSIE HOMER FRENCH Winter Eden, Chernobyl, 2018 Oil on canvas 55.88 × 71.12 cm Collection Judi Roaman and Carla Chammas Bridgeport Cemetery, 2020 Oil on canvas 76.2 × 101.6 cm Private Collection Mojave Stealth Bombers, 2013 Oil on canvas 33 × 123 × 4 cm Private Collection Oil Platform Fire, 2020 Oil on canvas 60.96 × 60.96 cm Private Collection Island Deer, 2020 Oil on canvas 61 × 76.2 cm Private Collection Burning, 2020 Oil on masonite 30.5 × 55.2 cm Private Collection ON FIRE, 2020 Oil on plywood 29.2 × 81.3 cm Private Collection All works with the additional support of VARIOUS SMALL FIRES, Los Angeles; MASSIMODECARLO

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List of Works

REBECCA HORN Kiss of the Rhinoceros, 1989 Steel construction, aluminium, motors, and electronic device 250 × 540 × 28 cm With the additional support of Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa

G E O RG I A NA H O U G H T ON The Flower of William Stringer, 1866 Watercolour on paper and ink on mount board, recto and verso 49 × 42 cm The College of Psychic Studies, London With the additional support of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) The Spiritual Crown of Annie Mary Howitt Watts, 1867 Watercolour on paper and ink on mount board 33 × 23 cm Collection Vivienne Roberts With the additional support of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)

S H E R E E H OVS E P I A N Deserted Body, 2022 Silver gelatin photographs, ceramic, string, nails, walnut artist frame 80.1 × 64.7 × 8.9 cm Corporeal Nature, 2022 Silver gelatin photograph, ceramic, string, nails, walnut artist frame 80.1 × 64.7 × 8.9 cm Life Study, 2022 Silver gelatin photographs, ceramic, string, nails, walnut artist frame 95.25 × 49.5 × 8.9 cm Still Life, 2022 Silver gelatin photographs, ceramic, string, nails, walnut artist frame 54.6 × 44.5 × 8.9 cm Virigule, 2022 Silver gelatin photographs, ceramic, nails, walnut artist frame 54.6 × 44.5 × 8.9 cm Mollusca, 2022 Silver gelatin photograph, ceramic, wood, nails, walnut artist frame 54.6 × 44.5 × 8.9 cm Euclidean Space, 2022 Silver gelatin photograph, wood, string, nails, walnut artist frame 54.6 × 44.5 × 8.9 cm All works with the additional support of Rachel Uffner Gallery

TISHAN HSU Phone-Breath-Bed 1, 2021 Polycarbonate, silicone, stainless steel wire cloth, UV cured inkjet, silicone on wood, steel, plastic Overall: 115.6 × 195.6 × 121.9 cm Phone-Breath-Bed 2, 2021 Polycarbonate, silicone, stainless steel wire cloth, UV cured inkjet, silicone on wood, steel, plastic Overall: 115.6 × 195.6 × 121.9 cm Watching 3, 2022 UV cured inkjet, silicone on wood 182.9 × 121.9 × 10.2 cm Breath 7, 2022 UV cured inkjet, acrylic, silicone on wood 121.9 × 157.5 × 12.7 cm

Grass-Screen-Skin 2, 2022 UV cured inkjet, stainless steel wire cloth, silicone on wood 121.9 × 228.6 × 12.7 cm Blue Interface, 2019–2021 Dye-sublimation inkjet, stainless steel wire cloth, silicone on aluminium 154.9 × 121.9 × 7.6 cm The Jared and Jani Stone Collection

TAT S U O I K E D A The Eye(s) Inside the Mouth, 1956 Ink, watercolour, oil and crayon on paper 37 × 28.8 cm Hundred Masks, an Extra Edition: Peep, 1960–2008 Pen, Conté and watercolour on paper 35.7 × 24.5 cm

All works with the additional support of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

Untitled, 1963 Conté and pen on paper 39 × 30.5 cm

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

Elliptical Space 1, 1964 Ink, oil paint and watercolour on paper 37.8 × 26.8 cm

Migrations, 2022 Installation composed of the following 3 works: El Niño, 2022 Biological and synthetic resin and polymers, salt, algae, seaweed, bone, pigments, mineral dust, ocean plastic, glass, stainless steel structure 216.1 × 208.7 × 226.2 cm La Niña, 2022 Biological and synthetic resin and polymers, salt, algae, seaweed, bone, pigments, mineral dust, ocean plastic, glass, stainless steel structure 3440 × 136.9 × 217.3 cm Kuroshio, 2022 Biological and synthetic resin and polymers, salt, algae, seaweed, bone, pigments, mineral dust, ocean plastic, glass, stainless steel structure 283.1 × 281.2 × 327.3 cm All works with the additional support of C L E A R I N G New York/Brussels; White Cube, London and Hong Kong; British Council; Institut français; the Henry Moore Foundation

JAC Q U E L I N E H U M P H R I E S omega:), 2022 Oil on linen 4 panels: 281.9 × 254 cm each With the additional support of Greene Naftali Gallery, New York xxx*x, 2019 Oil on linen 289.6 × 322.6 cm With the additional support of the Perić Collection

Elliptical Space 2, 1964 Ink, oil paint and watercolour on paper 33 × 41.9 cm Elliptical Space, an Extra Edition, c. 1965 Conté and watercolour on paper 40.6 × 32.4 cm Dissection Archaeology, 1969 Watercolour, oil and ink on paper 52.2 × 38.3 cm Dissection Archaeology: Mandate, 1969 Oil, watercolour and ink on paper 50 × 34.5 cm Dissection Archaeology: A Machine, 1969 Ink and watercolour on paper 42 × 32 cm BRAHMAN: Chapter 2: Space Egg-2 , 1976 Acrylic on paper 39.5 × 39.5 cm BRAHMAN: Chapter 2: Space Egg-5 , 1976 Acrylic on paper 39.5 × 39.5 cm BRAHMAN: Chapter 3: Floating Sphere-2, 1977 Acrylic on paper 39.5 × 39.5 cm BRAHMAN: Chapter 3: Floating Sphere-6, 1978 Acrylic on paper 39.5 × 39.5 cm BRAHMAN: Chapter 4: Helix Granular Movement-4, 1979 Acrylic on paper 39.5 × 39.5 cm

:|:), 2020 Oil on linen 152.4 × 144.8 cm Private Collection, London

All works courtesy The Estate of Tatsuo Ikeda With the additional support of Fergus McCaffrey, New York, Tokyo

All works with the additional support of Galerie Gisela Capitain

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

K U D Z A N A I -V I O L E T H WA M I The wedding of the astronauts 1, 2022 acrylic and oil on canvas 180 × 140 × 3.5 cm The wedding of the astronauts 2, 2022 acrylic and oil on canvas 180 × 140 × 3.5 cm The wedding of the astronauts 3, 2022 acrylic and oil on canvas 180 × 140 × 3.5 cm The wedding of the astronauts 4, 2022 acrylic and oil on canvas 180 × 140 × 3.5 cm Additional works will be on view Biennale College Arte, La Biennale di Venezia

Chillahona, 2022 Three-channel video and embroidery with a projection Approx. 30 mins With the additional support of Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture; Institut français

A L E T TA J A C O B S Womb models by the Ateliers Auzoux, 1840 Five papier-mâché models 25 × 25 × 25 cm each University Museum Groningen De Vrouw. Haar bouw en haar inwendige organen, 1898 Printed book Published by Kluwer, Deventer, 1898 University Museum Groningen

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GEUMHYUNG JEONG

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

Toy Prototype, 2021 Sculptures and video installation. Various materials including aluminium profiles, medical simulators, DC motors, Arduino boards, joysticks Dimensions variable Commissioned and produced by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea With the additional support of Arts Council Korea; Korea Foundation

Tannersville, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 304.8 × 243.84 cm

CHARLOTTE JOHANNESSON Our World, 1983 Original plotter print 42 × 52 cm Peace, 1981–1986 Plotter print 42 × 52 cm Self-portrait, 1981–1986 Plotter print 42 × 52 cm Computer mind, 1981–1986 Plotter print 42 × 52 cm Pixel dream, 1981–1986 Plotter print 42 × 52 cm Walk, 1981–1986 Plotter print 42 × 52 cm Digital Human, 1981–1986 Plotter print 42 × 52 cm Take me to another world, 1981–1986 Plotter print 42 × 52 cm Antique, 1981–1986 Plotter print 42 × 52 cm Pray, 1981–1986 Plotter print 42 × 52 cm A note in space, 1981–1986 Plotter print 42 × 52 cm Black hole (purple blue), 1981–1986 Plotter print 42 × 52 cm Apple, 2019 Textile weave 102 × 56 cm The Brain is wider than the sky, 2019 Textile weave 125 × 58 cm Take me to another world, 2019 Textile weave 107 × 59 cm The target is destroyed, 2019 Textile weave 102 × 60 cm All works with the additional support of IASPIS

LOÏS MAILOU JONES Africa, 1935 Oil on canvas on board 61 × 51 cm The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina

Windham, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 304.8 × 243.84 cm Marquel, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 304.8 × 243.84 cm W’re getting married, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 182.88 × 243.84 cm Visiting Dr. Natasha, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 182.88 × 243.84 cm The Gay Ghost, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 213.4 × 243.8 × 3.8 cm

James 3:1-18 “The Tongue A Restless Evil” No. 7003, 1971 Colour pencil on handmade paper 62 × 44 cm Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen Seven Mortal Sins, 1971 Colour pencil on handmade paper 62.2 × 43.6 cm Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen All works with the additional support of Phileas – A Fund for Contemporary Art

I DA KA R Surreal Study, c. 1947 / 2016 Photograph, modern bromide print 25.4 × 20.6 cm Lent by the National Portrait Gallery, London

All works with the additional support of MASSIMODECARLO

L’Étreinte, 1940 Photograph 52 × 41 cm Exhibition copy Private Collection

B I RG I T J Ü RG E N S S E N

A L L I S O N K AT Z

Strange Couple, 1973 Colour pencil on paper 81 × 62 cm Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen

Birth Canal, 2022 Oil on linen 95 × 90 cm

Frog Shoulder Belt (Addition to Human Motion Apparatus), 1974 Colour pencil on handmade paper 45 × 62.5 cm Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen Fehlende Glieder (Missing Limbs), 1974 Colour pencil on handmade paper 62.5 × 43.5 cm The VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna

Milk glass, 2022 170 × 220 cm Oil and acrylic on linen Be nice, 2022 170 × 220 cm Oil, acrylic and rice on canvas Night Philosophy, 2022 Oil, acrylic and sand on linen 110 × 105 cm

Verwelkte Blümchen (Withered Little Flowers), 1974 Colour pencil on handmade paper 62.2 × 44 cm The VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna

Portrait of the artist as a young girl(s), 2022 230 × 150 cm Oil, acrylic on linen

Untitled, 1974 Colour pencil on handmade paper 62.3 × 43.6 cm Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen

Gõegõe, 2022 Salvaged bedsprings, wire, pot scoures, spirits of salt and rust 80 × 600 × 200 cm

Untitled, 1974 Colour pencil on handmade paper 43.6 × 62.2 cm Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen

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

Coconut Crab Fight, 1971 Colour pencil on handmade paper 44 × 62.4 cm Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen Untitled, 1977 Colour pencil on handmade paper 56 × 39.5 cm Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen Untitled, 1974 Colour pencil on handmade paper 62.4 × 87.5 cm Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen Untitled, 1970 Colour pencil on handmade paper 32.8 × 24.8 cm Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen Untitled (To Vault Over the Buck), 1979 Colour pencil on handmade paper, heightened with white 45 × 62.5 cm Courtesy Estate Birgit Jürgenssen

B R O N W Y N K AT Z

Sunset Horizon (phase I), 2022 Fabric, textile paint Dimensions variable Sunset Horizon (phase II), 2022 Fabric, textile paint Dimensions variable Sunset Horizon (phase III), 2022 Fabric, textile paint Dimensions variable Sunset Horizon (phase IV), 2022 Fabric, textile paint Dimensions variable All Sunset Horizon works with the additional support of Global Affairs Canada/Affaires mondiales Canada, Embassy of Canada to Italy/ Ambassade du Canada en Italie Hour glass #1, 2022 Glass, silica sand 165 × 50 × 40 cm Hour glass #2, 2022 Glass, silica sand 200 × 60 × 50 cm

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List of Works

Hour glass #3, 2022 Glass, silica sand 180 × 55 × 30 cm

Moon, 1967 Acrylic, enamel, and ink on paper 62 × 44.5 cm

All Hour glass works with the additional support of The Shifting Foundation

Untitled (Torso with Heart), 1967 Acrylic, felt tip pen, colour pencil, and ink on paper 39 × 34 cm

All works with the additional support of Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin; LUMA Foundation; Institut français Thanks to donations to the Canadian Friends Fund of La Biennale, at KBF CANADA

K I K I KO G E L N I K Ikarus, 1965 Oil and acrylic on canvas 129 × 104 cm Transparent Angel, 1965 Acrylic, enamel, and Indian ink on paper 73 × 55 cm Mechanical Woman IV, 1965 Enamel and Indian ink on paper 73 × 58 cm Liquid Injection Thrust, 1965 Oil and acrylic on canvas 139.5 × 93.5 cm Female Robot, 1964 Acrylic, enamel and Indian ink on paper 73 × 55 cm Robots, 1966 Indian ink, ink, and colour pencil on paper 57 × 75 cm M, 1964 Oil and acrylic on canvas 203 × 142.5 cm Bomb for Alfonso, 1962 Oil on canvas 183 × 151 cm Cold Passage, 1964 Oil and acrylic on canvas 152 × 122 cm

All works collection and courtesy Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, New York All works with the additional support of Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, New York; Phileas – A Fund for Contemporary Art

BA R BA RA K RU G E R Untitled (Beginning/Middle/End), 2022 Site-specific installation, print on vinyl Three-channel video installation (on 3 flatscreen monitors), sound Dimensions variable 5 mins. 35 sec. With the additional support of Sprüth Magers; Maharam

T E T S U M I KU D O Garden of the Metamorphosis in the Space Capsule, 1968 Painted wood, artificial flowers, fabric, black light 350.5 × 350.5 × 350.5 cm Cultivation, 1972 Painted cage, wood, plastic, cotton, paint, snail shells, spray paint, artificial soil, hair, resin, thermometer 27.9 × 34.6 × 19.4 cm Your Portrait, 1966 Painted wood and pegboard case, cotton, plastic, polyester, resin, paint 30 × 30 × 30 cm Pollution - cultivation - nouvelle écologie, 1974 Screenprint on paper 90 × 56.3 cm Courtesy Estate of Tetsumi Kudo

Mechanical Woman II, 1965 Enamel and Indian ink on paper 73 × 58 cm

All works with the additional support of Hauser & Wirth

Robots, 1966 Ink and colored pencil on paper 56 × 38 cm

GA B R I E L L E L’ H I RO N D E L L E H I L L

Broken Robots, 1966 Indian ink, ink, and colour pencil on paper 59 × 74 cm Robots, 1966 Acrylic, watercolour, and ink on paper 58.5 × 39.5 cm Robots, 1966–1967 Ink on paper 32.5 × 27.5 cm Untitled (Robots), 1967 Acrylic, enamel and ink on paper 73 × 58 cm Artificial Man in Four Parts I , 1967 Oil and acrylic on canvas 126.5 × 177 cm Artificial Man in Four Parts II, 1967 Oil and acrylic on canvas 126.5 × 177 cm Artificial Man in Four Parts III, 1967 Oil and acrylic on canvas 126.5 × 177 cm Artificial Man in Four Parts IV, 1967 Oil and acrylic on canvas 126.5 × 177 cm

Spell #12, caves, 2020 Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paint, and other materials 43 × 37 × 4 cm Spell #13, for vomiting anger, 2020 Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paint, and other materials 30.5 × 22.9 cm Gochman Family Collection and Forge Project

Disintegration, 2019 Virginia tobacco, perique tobacco, seed pods, thread, wood, found pole 109.2 × 46.41 × 3 cm Private Collection

L O U I S E L AW L E R No Exit, 2022 Installation composed of following works: Hair (adjusted to fit), 2005 / 2019 / 2021 Adhesive wall material Dimensions variable to match proportions of a given wall at any scale determined by exhibitor With additional support of Maharam Untitled (Ambient), 2021 Dye sublimation print on museum box 121.9 × 194 cm Untitled (Brass and Blue), 2021 Dye sublimation print on museum box 121.9 × 180.3 cm Untitled (Skylight), 2021 Dye sublimation print on museum box 121.9 × 200 cm Untitled (Second Night), 2021 Dye sublimation print on museum box 121.9 × 182.2 cm Untitled (Reflection), 2021 Dye sublimation print on museum box 121.9 × 176.8 cm Untitled (Sfumato), 2021 Dye sublimation print on museum box 121.9 × 182.9 cm Untitled (Intervals), 2021 Dye sublimation print on museum box 121.9 × 187.6 cm Untitled (First Night), 2021 Dye sublimation print on museum box 121.9 × 182.9 cm Untitled (Bullnose), 2021 Dye sublimation print on museum box 121.9 × 172.1 cm Untitled (Cadmium), 2021 Dye sublimation print on museum box 121.9 × 181.6 cm All works with additional support of Sprüth Magers

C A R O LY N L A Z A R D TV5 (Videodrome), 2021 Stainless steel 55.8 × 83.8 × 25.4 cm Private Collection

Spell #8, sunset on clark, 2019 Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paint, wildflowers, beer can tab, tape 33 × 24.8 cm Collection Chris and Petroula Asimakis

TV7 (Cliffhanger), 2021 Granite 55.8 × 83.8 × 22.8 cm Collection Maxwell Graham and Mackenzie Lew Graham, New York

Spell #1, 2018 Paper, crisco, oil paint, tobacco flowers, snake pendant, beer can tab, magazine cutout 26.7 × 17.1 cm Collection Tave Cole

TV10 (Channel 4), 2021 Ceramic, television cart 91.4 × 76.2 × 50.80 cm

Counterblaste, 2021 Pantyhose, tobacco, beer can tabs, wildflowers, thread, charms 24 × 200 × 66 cm Dispersal, 2019 Virginia tobacco, perique tobacco, seed pods, thread, wood, found pole 109.2 × 46.41 × 3 cm Private Collection

Carolyn Working, 2020 Pen on paper 30 × 35 cm Collection Eleanor and Bobby Cayre, New York Cinema 1, Cinema 2, 2020 Fire Infinite duration Workers’ comp, 2021 Power lift recliner 101.6 × 85.1 × 93.9 cm

732

Privatization, 2020 HEPA filter purified air Dimensions variable per space (each device purifies 17.56 sq. metres of air) The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchase with funds provided by the Emerging Art Fund Half Life, 2021 Hourglass, granite dust from McCoy Quarry, Glasgow Inc., King of Prussia, Pennsylvania 31.75 × 15.88 × 15.88 cm

MIRE LEE Endless House: Holes and Drips, 2022 Multiple ceramic sculptures on a scaffold, lithium carbonate and iron oxide glaze liquid, pump, motor and other mixed media 1.8 × 2 × 4 m. With the additional support of Sundaymorning@ekwc

Angelus Mortem, 2021 Recycled fur (mink, beaver, fox, rabbit, lamb, and sable), coated nylon, steel armature 330 cm × 355.6 cm × 116.8 cm Vena Cava, 2021 Recycled leather, acrylic paint, coated nylon, steel armature 330 cm × 310 cm × 122 cm All works with the additional support of Stephen Friedman Gallery Thanks to donations to the Canadian Friends Fund of La Biennale, at KBF CANADA

SHUANG LI ÆTHER (Poor Objects), 2021 Video 18 mins 28 sec Commissioned by Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai With the additional support of Peres Projects, Berlin

Endless House: Holes and Drips (Sculpture #1), 2022 Pigmented concrete and plaster wet with glycerine 44 × 55 × 107 cm

LILIANE LIJN

Endless House: Holes and Drips (Sculpture #2), 2022 Pigmented concrete and plaster wet with glycerine 40 × 46 × 94 cm

Gemini , 1984 Stainless steel, optical glass prism, piano wire, glass beads, chromed steel springs 190 × 100 × 60 cm

Endless House: Holes and Drips (Sculpture #3), 2022 Pigmented concrete, resin, motor, pump, glycerin and other mixed media 28 × 80 × 95 cm

Heshe, 1980 Chromed steel, synthetic fibres, optical glass prism 196 × 72 × 63 cm

Endless House: Holes and Drips (Sculpture #4), 2022 Pigmented concrete, resin, motor, pump, pigmented glycerin and other mixed media 30 × 64 × 85 cm Endless House: Holes and Drips (Bench), 2022 Pigmented concrete and plaster 44 × 54 × 200 cm All works with the additional support of Tina Kim Gallery; Mondriaan Fund, Korean Arts Management Service (KAMS); Ammodo

SIMONE LEIGH Brick House, 2019 Bronze 487.7 × 279.4 × 279.4 cm Commissioned by High Line Art, presented by the High Line and NYC Parks Private Collection With the support of Hauser & Wirth

HANNAH LEVY Untitled, 2022 Glass, stainless steel 260 × 300 × 208 cm Untitled, 2022 Silicone, nickel plated steel 183 × 195 × 320 cm Untitled, 2022 Marble 54 × 67.5 × 107 cm All works with the additional support of Casey Kaplan, New York; Mother’s Tankstation Limited, Dublin

TA U L E W I S 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

Feathered Lady, 1979 Anodised aluminium angle, feather dusters, piano wire, glass beads, optical glass prism 203 × 27 × 27.5 cm

CANDICE LIN Xternesta, 2022 Installation Glazed ceramic, reverse painted bound artist’s recipe book, reverse glass painted tabletops with collaged paper elements, ceramic and porcelain objects, cast bronze, aluminium, and pewter, glass jars and bottles with pewter solder, silver talismans, and paper collage, various tinctures including abortifacients, indigo leaf, milky oat tops, and Clairvoyant Testosterone, subitism incense burner with ume, spice, and resin incense, copper sulphate crystalliser, taxidermied iguana with Chromium (III) Potassium Sulphate crystals, crystallised copper sulphate, blown glass terrarium, dead silkworms, scented lard, papier-mâché, dried, resin-coated, and wax-sculpted plant material, copper electroplated Chinese herbs and mushrooms, kudzu bioplastic, kudzu root, dried reishi, alcohol, white urushi lacquer, fermented rice liquid, kombucha (black tea, sugar, yeast), Saint Malo mud, fermenting hardware, rocks, minerals, herbs, oak gall, poison 213.5 × 472.5 × 543.5 cm With the additional support from François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; the UCLA Faculty Career Development Award

M I N A L OY Househunting, c. 1950 Mixed media assemblage 90 × 105.5 cm Collection Carolyn Burke

L U YA N G DOKU - Digital Descending, 2020–ongoing 4K 3D animation 25 mins With the additional support of ARoS Aarhus Art Museum; Kunstpalais Erlangen; BMW Art Journey

ANTOINET TE LUBAKI Untitled (three characters under a tree), c. 1929 Watercolour on paper 52 × 66 cm Private Collection Untitled (crocodile, fish, bird), c. 1929 Watercolour on paper 52 × 73.5 cm

Z H E N YA M A C H N E VA Totem, 2020 Hand-woven tapestry 97 × 192 × 4 Echo, 2021 Hand-woven tapestry 165 × 125 × 4 cm A girl, 2022 Hand-woven tapestry 147 × 97 × 4 cm All works with the additional support of Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois

B AYA M A H I E D D I N E Femme robe jaune cheveux bleus, 1947 Gouache on board 70 × 54 cm Collection Jules Maeght, Paris Femme au panier et coq rouge, 1947 Gouache on board 73 × 91.5 cm Collection Adrien Maeght, Saint Paul Femme robe à chevrons, 1947 Gouache on board 63 × 48 cm Collection Adrien Maeght, Saint Paul

M A RU JA M A L L O Naturaleza viva VII, 1942 Oil on masonite 43.2 × 31.1 × 1.3 cm Private Collection, Miami Naturaleza viva VIII, 1942 Oil on masonite 42.9 × 30.5 cm Collection Carol Weisman Naturaleza viva XIV, 1943 Oil on masonite 42.9 × 30.5 cm Colección Leandro Navarro, Madrid All works with the additional support of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)

J OYC E M A N S O U R Les Damnations, 1966 Illustrated book with 11 colour gravure prints by Roberto Matta Published by Visat, Paris, 1966 Private Collection

B R I T TA M A R A K AT T - L A B B A Hurricane, 2021 Embroidery and appliqué 50 × 180 cm Finished drilled, 2021 Embroidery and appliqué 50 × 180 cm Milky way, 2021 Embroidery and appliqué 55 × 52 cm

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List of Works

In the footsteps of the stars, 2021 Embroidery and appliqué 55 × 47 cm Global upwarms, 2021 Embroidery and appliqué 120 × 135 cm Summer, 1987 Embroidery 42 × 42 cm Čokču/Name on one mountain, 2021 Embroidery and appliqué 40 × 46 cm One day in November, 2021 Embroidery and appliqué 40 × 46 cm Between the trees, 1986 Embroidery 40 × 46 cm All works with the additional support of IASPIS

D I E G O M A RC ON The Parents’ Room, 2021 Digital video transferred from 35mm film, CGI animation, colour, sound 6 mins 23 sec Produced by INCURVA, Museo Madre - Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee, Primitive Film Supported by Italian Council (2019) With the additional support of ERMES ERMES, FIDLab, Fondazione In Between Art Film Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee, Naples

SIDSEL MEINECHE HANSEN Maintenancer, 2018 Digital video, sound 13 mins 5 sec In collaboration with Therese Henningsen Untitled (blueprint for sex robot), 2018 Technical drawing printed on paper, pen and pencil, custom made beech box frame, acid free / reversible mounting 207 × 144 cm Daddy Mould, 2018 Industrial cast in two parts made from fibreglass, resin and vaseline 149 × 37 × 92 cm; 149 × 48 × 89 cm Untitled (Sex Robot), 2018–2019 Ball jointed wooden doll 176 × 25 × 40 cm Statens Museum for Kunst / National Gallery of Denmark home vs owner, 2020 Cutlery cast in silver, fabric support made by Louis Backhouse 25 × 43 cm All works with the additional support of Danish Arts Foundation; the Henry Moore Foundation

M A R I A S I BY L L A M E R I A N Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, Plate 1, 1719 Hand-coloured engraving on paper 52.07 × 36.83 cm Facsimile Photo Lee Stalsworth Courtesy the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay

Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, Plate 5, 1719 Hand-coloured engraving on paper 52.07 × 36.83 cm Facsimile Photo Lee Stalsworth Courtesy the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay

Transformation de carrés concentriques (76.101.12.25.00), 1976 Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper 36 × 54 cm

Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, Plate 47, 1719 Hand-coloured engraving on paper 52.07 × 36.83 cm Facsimile Photo Lee Stalsworth Courtesy the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay

Transformation de carrés concentriques (ref. 76A), 1976 Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper 36 × 54 cm

Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, Plate 11, 1702–1703 Watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic on vellum 35.09 × 28.5 cm Facsimile Courtesy Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021 Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, Plate 19, 1702–1703 Watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic over lightly etched outlines on vellum 37.5 × 30.1 cm Facsimile Courtesy Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021 Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, Plate 48, 1702–1703 Watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic over lightly etched outlines on vellum 38.4 × 27.7 cm Facsimile Courtesy Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021

VERA MOLNÁR Histoire d’I (réf. B), 1977 Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper 30 × 30 cm

Transformation de carrés concentriques (76.101.12.29.53), 1976 Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper 36 × 54 cm

Transformation de carrés concentriques (ref. 76C), 1976 Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper 36 × 54 cm Transformation de carrés concentriques (74.338.15.53.16), 1974 Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper 36 × 54 cm Transformation de carrés concentriques (75.137.12.27.42), 1975 Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper 36 × 54 cm 9 quasi-carrés (réf. 85C), 1985 Computer plotter drawing on paper 29 × 29 cm Repentirs (ref. B), 1985 Computer plotter drawing on paper 29 × 29 cm Repentirs (ref. 85A), 1985 Computer plotter drawing on paper 29 × 29 cm All works with the additional support of Galerie Oniris, Rennes; Institut français

DELCY MORELOS Earthly Paradise, 2022 Site-specific installation Mixed media: soil, clay, cinnamon, powder cloves, cocoa powder, cassava starch, tobacco, copaiba, baking soda and powdered charcoal Dimensions variable With the additional support of Ammodo

Histoire d’I (réf. C), 1977 Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper 30 × 30 cm

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

Histoire d’I (réf. D), 1977 Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper 30 × 30 cm

untitled (New Jerusalem), c. 1960 / 1970 Pencil, pen, acrylic on card 27 × 36.4 cm

Histoire d’I (réf. E), 1977 Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper 30 × 30 cm

THE ROSEHILL MEMORiAL BAPTiST CHURCH, Columbus Ga., n.d. Acrylic, ink on card 28.6 × 42.9 cm

Saccades (Ref. A77), 1977 Computer plotter drawing on paper 27.5 × 42 cm Saccades (Ref. B77), 1977 Computer plotter drawing on paper 27.5 × 42 cm Saccades (Ref. C77), 1977 Computer plotter drawing on paper 27.5 × 42 cm Saccades (Ref. E77), 1977 Computer plotter drawing on paper 27.5 × 42 cm Transformation de carré concentrique (74.338-16.11.10), 1974 Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper 50 × 35.5 cm Hypertransformation (74.282.17.04.56), 1974 Computer plotter drawing on Benson paper 44 × 33 cm

Revelation I JOHN, c. 1970 Acrylic, pencil, and ink on two cardboard panels 55.6 × 76.2 cm CHRiST IS THE HEAD OF THiS HOUSE, 1970 Acrylic on paper 19.4 × 45.2 cm untitled (SABBATH DAY Poem), n.d. Paint on card 30.5 × 22 cm untitled (Revelation 7. chap), c. 1970 Paint on wood 82 × 39 cm New Jerusalem from the Prayer Room, c. 1970 Acrylic, pen, and pencil on cardboard 55.8 × 71.2 cm All works The Museum + The Gallery of Everything, London

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SANDRA MUJINGA

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

O VA R TA C I

Sentinels of Change, 2021 Installation 301.3 × 255 × 798.6 cm and 270 × 100 × 35 cm With the additional support of Freunde der Nationalgalerie and Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA)

Untitled Vessel, 2020–2021 Ceramics 57 × 32 cm Wakefield Council Permanent Art Collection (The Hepworth Wakefield). Acquired through grants from Art Fund, Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, Henry Moore Foundation and The Hepworth’s Collection Circle, 2021

Helicopter model wood, n.d Wood 30 × 27 × 20 cm

Reworlding Remains, 2021 Installation 3 elements. 270 × 100 × 35 cm each With the additional support of Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA)

MRINALINI MUKHERJEE Vanshree, 1994 Woven, dyed fibre 248.9 × 129.5 × 88.9 Collection Jayashree Bhartia Pakshi, 1985 Woven, dyed hemp 260 × 95 × 70 cm Collection The Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru Rudra, 1982 Hemp fibre 297 × 125 × 88 cm National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. Ministry of Culture. Government of India Devi, 1982 Fibre 217 × 142 × 116 cm National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. Ministry of Culture. Government of India

NADJA C’est moi, c’est encore moi, 1926 Lipstick and pencil on paper; two drawings (recto and verso) and prints of Nadja’s lips, dating from 1926 and addressed to André Breton 9.2 × 11.6 cm La fleur des amants, par Nadja, 1926 Pencil on paper; original drawing signed on recto; on verso, handwritten poem dedicated to André Breton 19.9 × 24 cm Autoportrait de Nadja , c. 1926 Ink on paper tablecloth 23 × 16 cm Mazda, Esquisse raturée, L’âme du blé, c. 1926 Graphite 34.5 × 47.5 cm Le baiser qui tue, 1926 Pencil on tracing paper 36.5 × 25 cm All works Chancellerie des Universités de Paris, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris

LOUISE NEVELSON Homage to the Universe, 1968 Black painted wood 284.5 × 862.5 × 30.5 cm With the additional support of Gió Marconi, Milan

AMY NIMR Untitled (Fish and Skeletons), 1936 Watercolour on paper 55 × 42.5 × 3 cm Collection Sheikh Hassan M. A. Al-Thani Untitled (Underwater Skeleton), 1942 Gouache on wood 63 × 54.5 × 5 cm Collection Sheikh Hassan M. A. Al-Thani

Untitled Vessel, Symmetrical Series, 2017 Ceramics 63 × 34 cm Private Collection Untitled Vessel, Symmetrical Series, 2017 Ceramics 63.5 × 33.3 cm Private Collection Kikango II, 2013 Ceramic black with hues of iridescent black-lustre and ochre/terracotta 60 × 24 cm Private Collection Untitled Vessel, Symmetrical Series, 2009 Ceramics 51 × 23 cm Private Collection All works with the additional support of the Henry Moore Foundation

P R E C I O U S O KOYO M O N To See The Earth Before the End of the World, 2022 Installation composed of the following works: Ikuenebe, I will Never Succumb to Evil, 2022 Raw wool, yarn, dirt, blood 170 × 120 × 126 cm Omoehi, Child of Destiny I am Blood, 2022 Raw wool, yarn, dirt, blood 175 × 95 × 100 cm Oseaghe, A Tree With No Wind Looking to God, 2022 Raw wool, yarn, dirt, blood 170 × 100 × 100 cm Ihoemoegbe, Memory Has Forsaken Me, All The Ties Untangle in my Silence, 2022 Raw wool, yarn, dirt, blood 168 × 98 × 104 cm Ehidiamen, Heaven Has Refused Me, Roots of Errant Fire, 2022 Raw wool, yarn, dirt, blood 159 × 100 × 95 cm Efua, The Sun is my Own Darkness Swallowed in Flames an Angel Reborn, 2022 Raw wool, yarn, dirt, blood 180 × 110 × 105 cm resistance is an atmospheric condition, 2020–2022 Kudzu plants Dimensions variable

Smoking phantoms, n.d. Papier-mâché, metal and wood 40 × 4 × 3 cm Untitled, n.d. Sculpture 40 × 10 × 8 cm Four smoking phantoms and two smoking heads, n.d. Papier-mâché, metal and wood 43 × 35 × 8 cm Construction, n.d. Cardboard and paper 35 × 40 × 20 cm Louise, n.d. Painted papier-mâché, textile and wood 90 × 20 × 16 cm Verda, n.d. Painted papier-mâché, textile and wood 165 × 35 × 11 cm Female figure in sarcophagus, n.d. Painted cardboard and painted papier-mâché 56 × 11 × 18 cm Smoking phantom, n.d. Papier-mâché, metal and wood 41 × 6 × 9 cm Untitled, n.d. Gouache and crayon on canvas/textile 127 × 15.5 × 4 cm Untitled, n.d. 2-dimensional lifesize doll. Gouache and crayon on canvas/textile 115 × 15 × 4 cm Untitled, n.d. 2-dimensional lifesize doll. Gouache and crayon on canvas/textile 130 × 30 × 4 cm Untitled, n.d. 2-dimensional lifesize doll. Gouache and crayon on canvas/textile 150 × 21 × 4 cm Untitled, n.d. Watercolour on paper 22 × 27.5 × 3 cm Frøken Ovartaci, n.d. Gouache and crayon on canvas and linen 97 × 168 × 5 cm Helicopter sketch, n.d. Watercolour on paper 40.5 × 43 × 3 cm Women in music, n.d. n/a Gouache and crayon on paper 45 × 29 × 3 cm

suns of consciousness, 2022 Sugar cane fields Dimensions variable

Main Building of the former psychiatric hospital in Risskov, n.d. Colourprint on cardboard 97 × 67 × 3 cm

the sky is always black, Fort Mose, 2022 Butterflies Dimensions variable

Dragon boat Rodecia por Rodecianes, n.d. Gouache and crayon on paper 41 × 55 × 3 cm

All works with the additional support of LUMA Foundation; Ammodo

Untitled, n.d. Painting 41 × 55 × 3 cm

MERET OPPENHEIM

Untitled, n.d. Watercolour on paper 22 × 27.5 × 3 cm

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

735

List of Works

Untitled, n.d. 2-dimensional lifesize doll. Gouache and crayon on canvas/textile 125 × 22 × 4 cm Untitled, n.d. 2-dimensional lifesize doll. Gouache and crayon on canvas/textile 139 × 50 × 4 cm Untitled, n.d. 2-dimensional lifesize doll. Gouache and crayon on canvas/textile 166 × 28 × 4 cm Untitled, n.d. 2-dimensional lifesize doll. Gouache and crayon on canvas/textile 162 × 44 × 6 cm Untitled, n.d. 2-dimensional lifesize doll. Gouache and crayon on canvas/textile 148 × 13 × 4 cm All works Collection Museum Ovartaci With the additional support of Danish Arts Foundation

V I RG I N I A OV E RT ON Untitled (tulip), 2022 Site-specific installation. Reinforced concrete, brass and glass 620 cm × 540 cm With the additional support of Bortolami Gallery, New York; Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich; White Cube, London and Hong Kong; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York; Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen, Switzerland Untitled (pink buoy), 2022 Glass, rope 50.8 cm circumference each With the additional support of Bortolami Gallery, New York; Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich; White Cube, London and Hong Kong; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York; Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen, Switzerland

Eugenio Gellona (attributed to), photographic postcards, 1906–1907 5 photographs of plaster models obtained from moulds realised by Eusapia Palladino during séances held in 1906 and 1907 in Genoa at the presence of the spiritualist Eugenio Gellona: Plaster model, recto and verso, 1906 (8.8 × 14 cm); 2 Medianic casts, recto and verso, 1906 (9 × 14 cm each); Medianic cast, John o Gion King, recto and verso, 1907 (9 × 14 cm); Calco Medianico, John o meglio Gion King, recto and verso, 1907 (9 × 14 cm) Gelatin silver prints Eugenio Gellona (attributed to), Medianic cast, recto and verso, 1906 Photograph of plaster model, inscription on verso Gelatin silver print 17.5 × 12.5 cm Unidentified photographer, Séance with Palladino, 1909 Gelatin silver print (recto) 12 × 16.8 cm Unidentified photographer, Séance with Palladino, 1909 Stereoscopic photograph Aristotype print on card (recto) 18 × 8.8 cm All works above “Cesare Lombroso” Museum of Criminal Anthropology, University of Turin. © “Cesare Lombroso” Museum Unidentified photographer, Table levitation. Psychic and several observers performing a table levitation, c. 1890 2 black-and-white photographs Exhibition copies Unidentified photographer, Psychic face, 1897 Black-and-white photograph Exhibition copy Unidentified photographer, Palladino levitates a table, 1907–1908 Black-and-white photograph Exhibition copy All works above courtesy Foto Scala/SPL History

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

V I O L E TA PA R R A

Kwaku Ananse, 2013 Video 26 mins With the additional support of Focus Features Africa First; IMCINE; Cortes Films, Obibini Pictures

Combate Naval I, 1964 Jute fabric with lanigraphy 165 × 214 × 6 cm Fundación Museo Violeta Parra

P R A B H A K A R PA C H P U T E Unfolding of the remains-II, 2022 Acrylic and charcoal pencil on canvas Diptych: 213 × 487 cm each Overall: 213 × 975 cm With the additional support of EXPERIMENTER, Kolkata The underground nest over the dune-II, 2022 Stone powder, paper pulp, red clay, gum arabic, tamarind seed powder, wood, found objects and metal 182 × 121 × 274 cm With the additional support of EXPERIMENTER, Kolkata

E U S A P I A PA L L A D I N O Unknown, c. 1906–1909 5 plaster models and casts obtained from moulds realised during séances held in the beginning of the 20th century: Plaster model of unidentified anatomical part; Medianic plaster cast (relief of human face); Medianic plaster cast (negative cast with handprint); Medianic plaster cast (relief cast with unidentifiable convexity); Medianic plaster cast (negative cast with unidentifiable concavity)

El Circo, 1961 Jute fabric with lanigraphy 153 × 240.5 × 6 cm Fundación Museo Violeta Parra Árbol de la vida, 1963 Jute fabric with lanigraphy 166 × 127 × 6 cm Fundación Museo Violeta Parra

R O S A N A PA U L I N O from Wet Nurse series, 2005 Acrylic and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm from Wet Nurse series, 2005 Acrylic and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm Todos os fios que tecem o mundo, 2014 Watercolour and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm Ninfa preparando o casulo, 2014 Watercolour and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm Preparação do casulo, 2014 Watercolour and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm

Os fios que suportam o mundo, 2014 Watercolour and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm from Carapace of Protection series, 2004 Graphite, water-soluble pastel and acrylic on paper 32.5 × 25 cm from Wet Nurse series, 2005 Acrylic and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm Extreme protection against pain and suffering 2, 2011 Graphite and watercolour on paper 42.5 × 32.5 cm from Senhora das Plantas series, 2021 graphite and watercolour on canvas 153 × 90 cm Collection Frances Reynolds from Senhora das Plantas series, 2015 Watercolour and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm Collection Sofia Gotti from Carapace of Protection series, 2004 Graphite, water-soluble pastel and acrylic on paper 32.5 × 25 cm from Senhora das Plantas series, 2019 watercolour and graphite on paper 37.5 × 27.5 cm Collection Green Line Foundation from Senhora das Plantas series, 2019 watercolour and graphite on paper 37.5 × 27.5 cm Collection Green Line Foundation from Jatobá series, 2019 Watercolour and graphite on paper 65 × 50 cm Collection Frances Reynolds from Jatobá series, 2019 Watercolour and graphite on paper 65 × 50 cm Collection Frances Reynolds from Jatobá series, 2019 Watercolour and graphite on paper 65 × 50 cm Collection Frances Reynolds from Jatobá series, 2019 Watercolour and graphite on paper 65 × 50 cm Collection Inhotim Institute from Jatobá series, 2019 Watercolour and graphite on paper 65 × 50 cm from Jatobá series, 2019 Watercolour and graphite on paper 65 × 50 cm Kali, from Tecelãs series, 2003 Acrylic and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm from Carapace of Protection series, 2004 Watercolour, acrylic and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm from Carapace of Protection series, 2004 Watercolour, acrylic and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm from Senhora das Plantas series, 2015 Watercolour and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm from Senhora das Plantas series, 2015 Watercolour and graphite on paper 32.5 × 25 cm All works with the additional support of Mendes Wood DM

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

JULIA PHILLIPS

ANU PÕDER

Le Fils du petit soldat, 1934 Collage on paper 31.4 × 44 × 2.2 cm The Penrose Collection and the Lee Miller Archives

Veiled Purifier, 2021–2022 Ceramic, silk, bronze, marble Dimensions variable

With a Trombone from the Gill of Lasnamäe (Pink Bird), 1988 Plastic, metal, and textile 83 × 53.4 × 54 cm

Le Home Guard, le fin de la guerre, les frères Papillon, 1938 Collage on paper 31.4 × 44.2 × 2.2 cm The Penrose Collection and the Lee Miller Archives Le Saut de la servant, 1934 Collage on paper 31.2 × 44.2 × 2.2 cm The Penrose Collection and the Lee Miller Archives Les Fées 1, 1934 Collage on paper 31.3 × 44 × 2.1 cm The Penrose Collection and the Lee Miller Archives Ariane, 1934 Collage on paper 31.2 × 43.9 × 2.1 cm The Penrose Collection and the Lee Miller Archives La Stratégie militaire, 1934 Collage on paper 38.3 × 31.3 × 1.4 cm The Penrose Collection and the Lee Miller Archives Dons des Féminines, 1951 Printed book 33.5 × 25.5 × .8 cm Published by Librairie Les Pas Perdus, Paris, 1951

ELLE PÉREZ Yet to be titled, 2022 Installation of photographs Archival pigment prints and digital silver gelatin prints Dimensions variable With the additional support of 47 Canal

S O N D R A P E R RY Lineage for a Phantom Zone, 2021–2022 Installation. Sofa with video screen, curtain, video, sound Dimensions variable With the additional support of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Ltd

Bower, 2021–2022 Ceramic, bronze, granite, nylon hardware Dimensions variable Stabilizer, 2021–2022 Ceramic, bronze, glass case 137 × 61 × 28 cm All works with the additional support of Matthew Marks Gallery; Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa

J OA N NA P I O T ROWS KA Untitled, 2022 Silver gelatin hand print 160 × 200 cm Untitled, 2013–2022 Silver gelatin hand print 130 × 160 cm Untitled, 2015 Silver gelatin hand print 130 × 160 cm Untitled, 2016 Silver gelatin hand print 130 × 160 cm Untitled, 2016 Silver gelatin hand print 21.6 × 27.2 cm Untitled, 2022 Silver gelatin hand print 21.6 × 27.2 cm Untitled, 2017 Silver gelatin hand print 21.6 × 27.2 cm

GISÈLE PRASSINOS Portrait de famille, 1975 Textile, cotton, felt, and buttons on jute backing 77 × 105 cm Les Fiancés, 1975 Textile, cotton, felt, golden thread, and buttons 56 × 48 cm La Mère et l’enfant, 1975 Textile, cotton, felt, and buttons on jute backing 64 × 50 cm Portrait idéal de l’artiste, 1975 Textile, cotton, felt, and buttons on jute backing 103 × 58 cm All works Collection Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris Brelin le frou ou le Portrait de famille, 1975 Book Published by P. Belfond, Paris, 1975

CHRISTINA QUARLES Hangin’ There Baby, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 196 × 244 × 5 cm

Untitled, 2017 Silver gelatin hand print 21.6 × 27.2 cm

(Who Could Say) We’re Not Jus’ as We Were, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 178 × 330 × 5 cm

Untitled, 2022 Silver gelatin hand print collage 70 × 60 cm Untitled, 2022 Silver gelatin hand print collage 40 × 40 cm

Sonhíferas, 2020–2021 Oil on canvas 14 elements. 158 × 150 × 5 cm each With the additional support of Mendes Wood DM

All works with the additional support of Southard Reid; Galeria Madragoa; Galerie Thomas Zander; Galeria Dawid Radziszewski

First rain, Brise-soleil, 2021–ongoing Three-channel video installation, colour, sound 16 mins With the support of Han Nefkens Art Foundation and Tate St Ives

All works Art Museum of Estonia / Eesti Kunstimuuseum With the additional support of Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art, financed by Estonian Ministry of Culture

Untitled, 2017 Silver gelatin hand print 21.6 × 27.2 cm

Untitled, 2022 Silver gelatin hand print collage 60 × 30 cm

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

Before Performance, 1981 Readymade objects, textile, and metal 160 × 50 × 50 cm

Untitled, 2017 Silver gelatin hand print 21.6 × 27.2 cm

S O LA N G E P E S S OA

Nihil Novi Sub Sole, 2019–2021 Carved soapstone Dimensions variable With the additional support of Mendes Wood DM

Composition with a Male Head, 1984 Textile, wire, net, and plastic 20 × 28 × 58 cm

ALEXANDRA PIRICI Encyclopedia of Relations, 2022 Ongoing performative action Performers: Céline Bellut, Matilda Bjarum, Liliana Ferri, Daouda Keita, Raymond Liew Jin Pin, Melanie Lopez, Jared Marks, Emily Ranford, Valentina Restrepo, Robert Schulz, Jennifer Tchiakpe, Xiao Huang, Patrick Ziza Masks design: Andrei Dinu

Had a Gud Time Now (Who Could Say), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 178 × 330 × 5 cm Gone on Too Long, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 152 × 183 × 5 cm Don’t Let It Bring Yew Down (It’s Only Castles Burnin’), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 213 × 244 × 5 cm Just a Lil’ Longer, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 178 × 203 × 5 cm All works with the additional support of Hauser & Wirth

RAC H I L D E Monsieur Vénus, 1972 Book with 35 signed engravings by Leonor Fini Published by Éditions d’art Agori, Paris, 1972 (first edition 1884)

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

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List of Works

J A N I S R A FA Lacerate, 2020 Single-channel video, sound 16 mins Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film With the additional support of Mondriaan Fund

ALICE RAHON Thunderbird, 1946 Oil on canvas 32.1 × 99.1 × 3.8 cm Untitled, n.d. Assemblage with painted wood, olive snail shells, natural fibres, feathers, sand, beads, and iron alloy tacks 55.9 × 29.2 × 10.2 Private Collection The Juggler, 1946 Wire marionette 58.42 × 38.1 × 12 cm Collection Francisco Magaña and Carlos Santos

C A RO L RA M A Appassionata, 1941 Watercolour on paper 33 × 23 cm Private Collection

PA U L A R E G O Sleeper, 1994 Pastel on paper on aluminium 120 × 160 × 5 cm Private Collection Metamorphosing after Kafka, 2002 Pastel on paper on aluminium 110 × 140 × 5 cm Kistefos museum, courtesy Christen Sveaas Art Foundation

Jack and Jill, 1989 Etching and aquatint Image: 32.3 × 21.5 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50 Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, 1989 Etching and aquatint Image: 32.2 × 21.6 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50 Little Miss Muffet I, 1989 Etching and aquatint Image: 22.6 × 21.3 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50 Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary I, 1989 Etching and aquatint Image: 22.3 × 21.3 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50 Who Killed Cock Robin? II, 1989 Etching and aquatint Image: 32.3 × 21.3 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50 Hey diddle diddle, 1989 Etching and aquatint Image: 32.5 × 21.4 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50 Three Blind Mice II, 1989 Etching and aquatint Image: 21.1 × 22.6 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50 Old Mother Goose, 1989 Hand-coloured etching and aquatint Image: 32.4 × 21.3 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50 Ladybird, Ladybird, 1989 Hand-coloured etching and aquatint Image: 21.1 × 22.6 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50 How many Miles to Babylon?, 1989 Etching and aquatint Image: 32.2 × 21.1 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50

Sit, 1994 Pastel on paper on aluminium 160 × 120 × 4.5 cm Private Collection

Hickety Pickety, 1989 Etching and aquatint Image: 22.3 × 21.4 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50

Geppetto Washing Pinocchio, 1996 Pastel on paper on aluminium 170 × 150 × 6 cm Private Collection

A Frog he would a-wooing go I, 1989 Etching and aquatint Image: 22.3 × 21.6 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50

Oratorio, 2009 Wood cabinet with side panels comprising of 8 paintings (conté pencil on paper) and 8 figures 255 × 300 cm Collection Ostrich Arts

Ring-a-ring o’ Roses, 1989 Hand-coloured etching and aquatint on pink chine collé Image: 21.2 × 22.6 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50

Gluttony, 2019 Papier-mâché, gouache, wood, PVC, metal, cotton, tulle and fabric 150 × 110 × 175 cm Collection Ostrich Arts

Nursery Rhymes Illustrated Book Thames & Hudson, London, 2019 Re-edition of original 1994 publication

Snow White and her Stepmother, 1996 Pastel on paper on aluminium 177.8 × 149.8 cm The Whitworth, The University of Manchester The Blue Fairy Whispering to Pinocchio, 1996 Pastel on paper on aluminium 170 × 150 cm LaMA (Laurent and Margarida Saglio Private Collection) Children and their Stories, 1989 Etching and aquatint Image: 33.9 × 52.3 cm. Paper: 56.9 × 75.7 cm Edition of 75 Humpty Dumpty, 1989 Etching and aquatint Image: 32.6 × 21.2 cm. Paper: 52.0 × 38.0 cm Edition of 50

All works with the additional support of Victoria Miro

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

E N I F RO B E RT

Malattia + infezione, 1917 Article published in L’Italia futurista (Milan), 19, 1917, p. 3 16 × 14 cm Facsimile Un ventre di donna. Romanzo chirurgico, 1919 Book cover Published by Facchi, Milan, 1919 Facsimile

LU I Z RO Q U E Urubu, 2020 Full HD video transferred from Super8 film With the additional support of VAC at University of Texas, Austin XXI, 2022 4K video With the additional support of Isla Flotante; Mendes Wood DM

RO SA RO SÀ Le donne del posdomani, 1917 Article published in L’Italia futurista (Milan), 18, 1917, p. 1 20.5 × 12.5 cm Facsimile Come si seducono le donne, 1917 Illustration published in L’Italia futurista (Milan), 30, 1917, p. 1 16.8 × 25.1 cm Facsimile Le donne cambiano finalmente, 1917 Article published in L’Italia futurista (Milan), 27, 1917, p. 2 21 × 6.5 cm Facsimile

NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE Gwendolyn, 1966 / 1990 Painted polyester resin on a metal base 262.3 × 200.3 × 125.1 cm Courtesy Niki Charitable Art Foundation With the additional support of Salon 94

G I O VA N N A S A N D R I Costellazione di lettere, 1977 Serigraph on cardboard 48.5 × 69.5 cm Private Collection

P I N A R E E S A N P I TA K Offering Vessel, 2021 Acrylic, pencil on canvas 250 × 250 cm Breast Vessel in the Reds, 2021 Acrylic, pencil, feathers on canvas 250 × 250 cm The Body and The Gold Breast, 2021 Acrylic, gold leaves on canvas 250 × 220 cm Body Lyrics III, 2020 Acrylic on canvas 200 × 150 cm Offering Vessel II, 2021 Acrylic, paper on canvas 250 × 250 cm All works with the additional support of Yavuz Gallery

Sensazioni chirurgiche, 1917 Article published in L’Italia futurista (Milan), 11, 1917, p. 3 35.5 × 19.5 cm Facsimile

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AKI SASAMOTO Sink or Float, 2022 Mixed-media installation Dimensions variable With the additional support of The Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan (Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan); Take Ninagawa, Tokyo; Bortolami, New York

A U G U S TA S AVA G E Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp), 1939 Bronze 27.3 × 24.13 × 10.2 cm Thomas G. Carpenter Library, Special Collections and University Archives. Jacksonville, FL: University of North Florida

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

Tanzmaske “Bibo”, 1924, photographed by Minya Diez-Dührkoop Gelatin silver paper 51.8 × 36.8 × 3.2 cm Exhibition copy Tanzmaske “Springvieh”, 1924, photographed by Minya Diez-Dührkoop Gelatin silver paper 51.8 × 36.8 × 3.2 cm Exhibition copy Tanzmaske “Insektentänzer”, 1924, photographed by Minya Diez-Dührkoop Gelatin silver paper 51.8 × 36.8 × 3.2 cm Exhibition copy Tanzmaske “Toboggan Mann”, 1924, photographed by Minya Diez-Dührkoop Gelatin silver paper 51.8 × 36.8 × 3.2 cm Exhibition copy

Maskenfigur “Toboggan Mann”, 1924 Replica 2005–2006 Linen, wires 180 × 137 × 90 cm

Tanzmaske “Toboggan Frau”, 1924, photographed by Minya Diez-Dührkoop Gelatin silver paper 51.8 × 36.8 × 3.2 cm Exhibition copy

Maskenfigur “Toboggan Frau”, 1924 Replica 2005–2006 Linen, wires 188 × 135 × 107 cm

All works Collection Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg

Maskenfigur “Bibo”, 1924 Replica 2005–2006 Sackcloth, package tape, wires, wax, wood, velvet 170 × 105 × 90 cm Maskenfigur “Springvieh” A, 1924 Replica 2005–2006 Sackcloth, cardboard, gypsum, leather, closure buckle 200 × 160 × 85 cm Maskenfigur “Bertchen” A (schwarz), 1924 Replica 2005–2006 Textile material, quilted 163 × 115 × 110 cm Maskenfigur “Bertchen” B (weiß), 1924 Replica 2005–2006 Textile material, quilted 170 × 108 × 110 cm Tanzmaske “Technik”, 1924, photographed by Minya Diez-Dührkoop Gelatin silver paper 51.8 × 36.8 × 3.2 cm Exhibition copy Tanzmaske “Toboggan Frau” and “Toboggan Mann”, 1924, photographed by Minya Diez-Dührkoop Gelatin silver paper 51.8 × 36.8 × 3.2 cm Exhibition copy Tanzmaske “Toboggan Frau”, 1924, photographed by Minya Diez-Dührkoop Gelatin silver paper 51.8 × 36.8 × 3.2 cm Exhibition copy Tanzmaske “Springvieh”, 1924, photographed by Minya Diez-Dührkoop Gelatin silver paper 51.8 × 36.8 × 3.2 cm Exhibition copy Tanzmaske “Insektentänzer”, 1924, photographed by Minya Diez-Dührkoop Gelatin silver paper 51.8 × 36.8 × 3.2 cm Exhibition copy Tanzmaske “Skirnir”, 1924, photographed by Minya Diez-Dührkoop Gelatin silver paper 51.8 × 36.8 × 3.2 cm Exhibition copy

L I L L I A N S C H WA R T Z Googolplex, 1972 Digital video transferred from 35mm film 4 mins 53 sec Moving image from the Collections of The Henry Ford Enigma, 1972 Digital video transferred from 35mm film 4 mins 5 sec Moving image from the Collections of The Henry Ford Mis-Takes, 1972 Digital video transferred from 35mm film 3 mins 30 sec Moving image from the Collections of The Henry Ford

AMY SILLMAN Untitled (Frieze for Venice), 2021 32 drawings Acrylic, ink, and silkscreen Each 152.4 × 101.6 cm (dimensions slightly variable) With the additional support of Gladstone Gallery Untitled (Frieze for Venice), 2021 71 drawings Acrylic, ink, watercolour and pencil, mounted on 19 panels of varying dimensions Each 30.48 × 35.56 cm (dimensions slightly variable) With the additional support of Gladstone Gallery

ELIAS SIME Red Leaves, 2021 Woven electrical wires and other components on wood panels 205.7 × 602 × 17.8 cm Veiled Whispers, 2021 Woven electrical wires and other components on wood panels 279.4 × 200.7 × 20.3 cm Veiled Whispers, 2021 Woven electrical wires and other components on wood panels 200.7 × 317.5 × 17.8 cm

MARIANNA SIMNETT The Severed Tail, 2022 Three-channel video installation With the additional support of Société, Berlin; Zabludowicz Collection; British Council

HÉLÈNE SMITH La Maison d’Astané, c. 1896–1899 Gouache on paper 17 × 11.3 cm Facsimile Astané, c. 1896–1899 Gouache on paper 11.5 × 18.3 cm Facsimile La Vilaine bête d’Astané, c. 1896–1899 Gouache on paper 11.5 × 18.5 cm Facsimile Paysage martien, c. 1896–1899 Gouache on paper 25.8 × 21 cm Facsimile Plante d’ornement martienne, c. 1896–1899 Gouache on paper 11 × 18.5 cm Facsimile All works Bibliothèque de Genève. Ms. fr. 7843/3

S A B L E E LY S E S M I T H Landscape VI, 2022 Neon 220.98 × 506.73 cm With the additional support of JTT, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Carlos / Ishikawa, London

TERESA SOLAR Tunnel Boring Machine, 2022 Clay, resin 460 × 120 × 80 cm Tunnel Boring Machine, 2022 Clay, resin 140 × 400 × 80 cm Tunnel Boring Machine, 2022 Clay, resin 380 × 80 × 80 cm All works with the additional support of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary; Travesía Cuatro Gallery; Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)

M A RY E L L E N S O LT Zinnia, 1966 Ink on paper 29 × 21 cm Forsythia, 1966 Ink on paper 29 × 21 cm Geranium, 1966 Ink on paper 29 × 21 cm Lilac, 1966 Ink on paper 29 × 21 cm Crab, 1966 Ink on paper 29 × 21 cm

All works with the additional support of James Cohan, New York

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List of Works

Wild Crab, 1966 Ink on paper 29 × 21 cm All works Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp / donation, Wilfried Wynants

P. S TA F F

T O S H I K O TA K A E Z U Tamarind, c. 1962 Glazed stoneware 88.9 × 25.4 × 25.5 cm Anagama Closed Form, c. 1980s Glazed porcelain 44.5 × 21.5 × 21.5 cm

On Venus, 2019 Video installation 13 mins 6 sec With the additional support of Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; LUMA Foundation; British Council; the Henry Moore Foundation

Pink Lady, c. 1980s Glazed porcelain 55 × 21 × 19 cm

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

Untitled Closed Form, 1960 Glazed stoneware 17.5 × 16.5 × 16.5 cm

Formes géométriques et lettres (Pompadour), 1920 Glass beads, thread, courd, and fabric 17.3 × 13 × 0.3 cm Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth Ohne Titel (Kissenbezug), 1921–1924 Cotton on canvas 66.3 × 94.4 × 2.7 cm Stiftung Arp e,V., Berlin/Rolandswerth Marionette Guard after a design by Sophie Taeuber for the play “King Stag”, 1918, photographed by Ernst Linck Black-and-white photograph 15.6 × 11.5 cm Exhibition Copy Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth. © Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth Marionette, Freud Analyticus after a design by Sophie Taeuber for the play “King Stag”, 1918, photographed by Ernst Linck Black-and-white photograph 15.9 x12 cm Exhibition Copy Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth. © Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth Marionettes Truffaldino, Brighella, Smeraldina, and Dr. Complex after a design by Sophie Taeuber for the play “King Stag”, 1918, photographed by Ernst Linck Black-and-white photograph 11.9 × 17 cm Exhibition Copy Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth. © Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth Marionette, Truffaldino after a design by Sophie Taeuber for the play “King Stag”, 1918 Black-and-white photograph, photographed by Ernst Linck 16.9 × 11.5 cm Exhibition Copy Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth. © Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth Marionettes, stage set (in the palace of the king): Angela and King Deramo, Freud Analyticus, and Minister Tartaglia; seated, Minister Pantalone and his son Leandro with Clarissa, Tartaglia‘s Daughter by Sophie Taeuber for the play “King Stag”, 1918, photographed by Ernst Linck Black-and-white photograph 16.3 × 22 cm Exhibition Copy Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth. © Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth Marionettes, stage set (in the palace of the king): King Deramo, Statue, and Angela by Sophie Taeuber for the play “King Stag”, 1918, photographed by Ernst Linck Black-and-white photograph 13.9 × 22.5 cm Exhibition Copy Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth. © Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth

Cherry Blossom / Sakura, c. 2000s Glazed Stoneware 132 × 59 × 59 cm

Untitled (Red Spotted Closed Form), 1982 Glazed porcelain 19 × 15.2 × 15.2 cm Untitled (Ocean Edge), 1992 Glazed porcelain 19 × 12.7 × 12.7 cm Thistle Blue, c. 1980 Glazed porcelain 48 × 20 × 20 cm All works Private Collection Courtesy Toshiko Takaezu Foundation

E M M A TA L B O T Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 2021 Acrylic on silk 310 × 1400 cm Why Do We Think We Can Outwit Nature?, 2021 Installation. Mixed media Dimensions variable All works with the additional support of Max Mara; British Council; the Henry Moore Foundation

D O R O T H E A TA N N I N G Deirdre, 1940 Oil on canvas 50.8 × 40.6 cm Private Collection Avatar, 1947 Oil on canvas 35.6 × 27.9 cm cm Private Collection, Chicago

BRIDGET TICHENOR Tarde Alegre, 1955 Oil on masonite 40 × 30 cm Private Collection Dueto Solitario, 1964 Oil on masonite 40.3 × 25.5 cm Private Collection La Espera (The Wait), 1961 Oil on masonite 25 × 38 cm Private Collection

T E C L A T O FA N O On the Way to Liberation (from the series Of the Female Gender), 1975 Clay and enamel ceramic 30 × 20 × 12 cm Collection Luis Felipe Farias

Vessel with Hands (from the series The Canned), 1969 Clay and enamel ceramic 26 × 18 × 18 cm Collection Luis Felipe Farias Women in History (from the series Of the Female Gender), 1975 Clay and enamel ceramic 23 × 18 × 10 cm Collection Luis Felipe Farias Vessel with Personage (from the series The Canned), 1969 Clay and enamel ceramic 40 × 24 × 24 cm Collection Luis Felipe Farias Totem Tongue, 1966 Clay and enamel ceramic 28 × 10 × 4 cm Collection Mrs. Cota Cohen Knobloch Green Dragon Habitat (from the series Habitat and Inhabitants), 1967 Hand-modeled and glazed stoneware 28 × 13 × 13 cm Collection Mrs. Cota Cohen Knobloch Wagon-Lits (from the series The Bed and its possibilities), 1971 Clay and enamel ceramic 14 × 22 × 11 cm Collection Mrs. Cota Cohen Knobloch

J O S E FA T O L R À Dibujo escritura fluídica, 1954 Ink and marker on paper 28 × 36.6 cm Private Collection Courtesy Associaciò Cultural Josefa Tolrà Figura amb mantó bordado, 1946 Ink and watercolour on paper 103 × 69.5 Private Collection Courtesy Associaciò Cultural Josefa Tolrà Dibujo que marca los progresos del cualificativo astral, 1956 Blue pen on paper 27.4 × 36.6 cm Private Collection Courtesy Associaciò Cultural Josefa Tolrà Cuaderno Primavera, 1946 Notebook, marker, ink, and pencil on paper 20 × 27 cm Private Collection Courtesy Associaciò Cultural Josefa Tolrà All works with the additional support of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E); Institut Ramon Llull

TOURMALINE Mary of Ill Fame, 2020–2021 Video installation 17 mins 4 sec

T OY E N The Shooting Gallery (Střelnice), 1939–1940 Portfolio of 12 photo-lithographic prints Published by Fr. Borový, Prague, 1946 32 × 44 cm each Private Collection

RO S E M A R I E T RO C K E L Fraction Bars, 2021 Acrylic wool on canvas 50.2 × 100.8 × 2.2 cm

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Day Release, 2017 Acrylic wool on canvas, framed in Plexiglas 83.5 × 83.5 × 5.6 cm (framed) Cloud Gap, 2013 Acrylic wool on canvas, framed in Plexiglas 70 × 80 × 2 cm Private Collection Room With a Thread, 2014 Acrylic wool on canvas, framed in Plexiglas 85 × 70 × 2 cm Open Umbrella, 2015 Acrylic wool on canvas, framed in Plexiglas 50 × 50 × 2 cm Collection Marguerite Steed Hoffman Pinstripe 1, 2016 Acrylic wool on canvas, framed in Plexiglas 50 × 50 × 2 cm Untitled, 1985 Beige and black wool on canvas, framed in Plexiglas 65.4 × 65.5 × 3 cm Private Collection TV / SAG, 1994 Wool on canvas, framed in Plexiglas 59.8 × 59.8 cm Till the Cows come Home, 2016 Dark blue wool on canvas, wood 296 × 296 × 5 cm Study for Till the Cows come Home, 2016 Dark blue wool on canvas, wood 100 × 100 × 5 cm The Same Different, 2013 Yellow wool on canvas, wood 296 × 296 × 5 cm

Portrait (Vain German), 2020–2021 Urethane, resin, Aqua-resin, pigment, fibreglass and aluminium 74.3 × 58.4 × 7 cm Courtesy The Kaari Upson Trust Portrait (Vain German), 2020–2021 Urethane, resin, Aqua-resin, pigment, fibreglass and aluminium 74.3 × 58.4 × 7 cm Courtesy The Kaari Upson Trust Portrait (Vain German), 2020–2021 Urethane, resin, Aqua-resin, pigment, fibreglass and aluminium 74.3 × 58.4 × 7 cm Courtesy The Kaari Upson Trust Portrait (Vain German), 2020–2021 Urethane, resin, Aqua-resin, pigment, fibreglass and aluminium 74.3 × 58.4 × 7 cm Courtesy The Kaari Upson Trust Portrait (Vain German), 2020–2021 Urethane, resin, Aqua-resin, pigment, fibreglass and aluminium 74.3 × 58.4 × 7 cm Courtesy The Kaari Upson Trust Portrait (Vain German), 2020–2021 Urethane, resin, Aqua-resin, pigment, fibreglass and aluminium 74.3 × 58.4 × 7 cm Courtesy The Kaari Upson Trust Portrait (Vain German), 2020–2021 Urethane, resin, Aqua-resin, pigment, fibreglass and aluminium 74.3 × 58.4 × 7 cm Courtesy The Kaari Upson Trust

Study for The Same Different, 2013 Yellow wool on canvas, wood 100 × 100 × 5 cm

Portrait (Vain German), 2020–2021 Urethane, resin, Aqua-resin, pigment, fibreglass and aluminium 74.3 × 58.4 × 7 cm Private Collection, Los Angeles

Color Assistant, 2018 Light blue wool, wood, framed in orange Plexiglas 100 × 100 × 5 cm Private Collection

All works with the additional support of Sprüth Magers

Additional works will be on view All works with the additional support of Sprüth Magers; Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa

T RO P I Q U E S Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil (eds.), Tropiques n. 2 (July 1941), 1941 Magazine cover Facsimile 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

WU TSANG Of Whales, 2022 VR video installation With the additional support of VIVE Arts; VIA Art Fund; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi; Antenna Space; Albyon Studio; LUMA Foundation

KAA R I U PS O N Portrait (Vain German), 2020–2021 Urethane, resin, Aqua-resin, pigment, charcoal, fibreglass and aluminium 74.3 × 58.4 × 7 cm Courtesy The Kaari Upson Trust Portrait (Vain German), 2020–2021 Urethane, resin, Aqua-resin, pigment, fibreglass and aluminium 74.3 × 58.4 × 7 cm Courtesy The Kaari Upson Trust

A N D R A U R S U ŢA Canopic Demijohn, 2021 Lead crystal 77.5 × 40.3 × 40.6 cm Impersonal Growth, 2020 Lead crystal 67 × 54.6 × 17.8 cm Private Collection Yoga Don’t Help, 2019 Lead crystal 134.6 × 53.3 × 62.2 cm Dr. Joselito Cariño Cabaccan Succubustin’ Loose, 2020 Lead crystal 113 × 49.5 × 30.5 cm Collection Raf Simons, Antwerp Terminal Figure, 2021 Lead crystal 103.5 × 48.3 × 29.2 cm Canopic Jerrycan, 2021 Lead crystal 78.7 × 34.9 × 5.4 cm Private Collection

Half-Drunk Mummy, 2020 Lead crystal 160 × 85.1 × 48.3 cm Collection Raf Simons, Antwerp With the additional support of Ramiken; David Zwirner Predators ’R Us, 2019 Lead crystal 74 × 132 × 69 cm Private Collection With the additional support of MASSIMODECARLO

G R A Z I A VA R I S C O 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 Courtesy Archivio Grazia Varisco Schema luminoso variabile R. VOD DOM., 1964 Kinetic light object, black wooden box, blue Perspex (methacrylate), electric motor 3/2 rpm, neon lamp 91 × 91 × 12.5 cm Courtesy Archivio Grazia Varisco

R E M E D I O S VA R O La creación de las aves, 1959 Oil on masonite 54 × 64 cm Museo de Arte Moderno. INBAL-Secretería de Cultura Armonía (Autorretrato sugerente), 1956 Oil on masonite 75 × 92.7 cm Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires Simpatía (La rabia del gato), 1955 Oil on masonite 95.9 × 85.1 cm Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires La mujer Libélula (Dragonfly Woman), 1961 Oil, gouache, and ink on paper mounted on masonite 65.7 × 20 cm Private Collection All works with the additional support of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)

S A N D RA VÁ S Q U E Z D E L A H O R RA Las Cordilleras Encontradas, 2017–2021 Installation composed of the following works: América sin Fronteras, 2017 Graphite, watercolour and wax on paper 213 × 157 cm Saludo a Olorun, 2021 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 214 × 156 cm Janus, 2021 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 203 × 133 cm Soy energía, 2021 Graphite and wax on paper 213 × 157 cm

Phantom Mass, 2021 Lead crystal 76.8 × 61 × 48.3 cm

No pasarán, los venceremos mi Amor, 2020 Graphite and wax on paper 204.5 × 134 cm

All works above with the additional support of David Zwirner

La Voz de un Pueblo que lucha, 2019 Graphite, watercolour and wax on paper 236.2 × 108.6 cm

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List of Works

Cosmic Matroshka, 2020 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 200 × 101 cm

Jenu, 1920 Gelatin silver print Photographed by P. Delbo 22 × 17 cm

El Despertar de un Volcán, 2019 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 133 × 103 cm

Toti, 1920 Gelatin silver print Photographed by P. Delbo 22 × 17 cm

Todo tuyo, todo mio, 2020 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 134 × 102.5 cm

Alfred Flechtheim, 1920 Gelatin silver print Photographed by P. Delbo 22 × 17 cm

El amanecer y el atardecer de las civilizaciones, 2021 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 49 × 74.3 × 41 cm

Jeanne Duc (modiste), 1922 Gelatin silver print Photographed by P. Delbo 22 × 17 cm

Detrás de esa Nube hay un OVNI, 2021 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 105.5 × 77.8 × 10 cm

Danseuse américaine (d’après les traits d’Isadora Duncan), 1920 Gelatin silver print Photographed by P. Delbo 22 × 17 cm

Eclipse Solar, 2021 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 105.5 × 69.5 × 10 cm Pachita, 2021 Graphite, watercolour and wax on paper 121.5 × 72.5 × 10 cm Las cordilleras encontradas, 2021 Graphite, watercolour and wax on paper 220 × 76 × 10 cm Flotante y su genealogía, 2020 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 76.5 × 56.5 cm Los Gemelos Mitológicos, 2020 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 76.5 × 57.5 cm Erupciones, 2019 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 70.5 × 49.7 cm La Dormida, 2021 Graphite and wax on paper 216 × 73.5 × 14 cm Pacha-Mama, 2021 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 220 × 113.5 × 14 cm Atravesando el Aura, 2020 Graphite, watercolour, gouache and wax on paper 63 × 48.2 cm All works with the additional support of Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa

M A R I E VA S S I L I E F F Costume Arlequine pour le Bal banal, 1924 Gelatin silver print 22 × 17 cm

Mlle Lane, 1925 Photography unknown Gelatin silver print 23 × 12 cm

NAUfraga, 2022 Site-specific installation Basuritas (debris), twigs, plastic, metal, threads, sticks, improvisational materials, and tiny precarios Dimensions variable All works with the additional support of Lehmann Maupin

NA N DA V I G O Cronotopo, 1964 Glass and aluminium 60 × 60 × 20 cm Courtesy Archivio Nanda Vigo Diaframma, 1968 Glass, aluminium, and neon light 100 × 100 × 25 cm Courtesy Archivio Nanda Vigo Cronotopo, 1964 Glass and aluminium 60 × 60 × 20 cm Private Collection

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

Alex Dianou, 1920 Gelatin silver print 17 × 11 cm

Bottles and Bridges: Advances in Collective Obliteration, 2021 Bronze, steel, concrete installation Dimensions variable

Jean Cocteau & Dianou, 1920 Gelatin silver print Photographed by P. Delbo 22 × 17 cm

RA P H A E LA VO G E L

Sans titre (Costume pour le spectacle Les Voyelles, Exposition des Arts et Techniques, 1937), 1937 Gelatin silver print 24 × 17.7 cm All works above Collection Claude Bernés Mask and doll portrait, 1928 Gelatin silver print 23.8 × 17. cm Private Collection

CECILIA VICUÑA Leoparda de Ojitos, 1977 Oil on cotton canvas 140.7 × 90.2 cm Collection Beth Rudin DeWoody Paro Nacional, 1977–1978 Oil and pastel on paper 82.6 × 112.4 cm Private Collection Llaverito (Blue), 2019 (after the lost original 1979) Oil on canvas 109.2 × 91.4 cm Private Collection La Comegente (The People Eater), 2019 (after the lost original 1971) Oil on canvas 165.1 × 116.8 cm Private Collection

Jean Borlin, c. 1920 Gelatin silver print 22 × 17 cm

Martillo y Repollo, 1973 Oil on canvas 90.81 × 71.12 Juan Yarur Torres Collection - Fundación AMA

Blaise Cendrars, 1923 Gelatin silver print Photographed by P. Delbo 22 × 17 cm

Bendígame Mamita, 1977 Oil on canvas 140 × 120 cm Private Collection

Charlotta Montcay de Montaray, c. 1920 Gelatin silver print Photographed by P. Delbo 22 × 17 cm

Virgen Puta, 2021 Oil on canvas 157.48 × 132.08 cm

Können und Müssen (Ability and Necessity), 2022 Polyurethane elastomer, steel, brass, anatomical model 220 × 135 × 1030 cm With additional support of BQ, Berlin; MEYER*KAINER, Vienna; Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich; Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa Psychogräfin, 2022 Oil, oil crayon, charcoal, leather glue on deer and cow leather 377 × 325 cm With the additional support of BQ, Berlin; Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa

M E TA VA U X WA R R I C K F U L L E R Maquette for Ethiopia Awakening, 1921 Painted plaster 35.3 × 8.25 × 12.7 cm Danforth Art Museum at Framingham State University. Gift of the Meta V. W. Fuller Trust

L A U R A W H E E L E R WA R I N G Cover illustrations for The Crisis (New York: NAACP): April 1923, February 1924, September 1924, April 1926, April 1927, Christmas 1928 Facsimiles Courtesy Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library

ULLA WIGGEN Trask, 1967 Acrylic on masonite 150 × 80 cm Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Purchase 1968 Förstärkare, 1964 Gouache on wood panel and gauze 38 × 25 × 0.6 cm Private Collection, Sweden Oändligt variabel, 1968 Acrylic on wood panel 54 × 61 × 3 cm Private Collection, Sweden

742

Minnescentrum – gott minne, 1967 Acrylic on masonite 90 × 78.70 cm Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden Kretsfamilj, 1964 Gouache on panel and gauze 36 × 31 × 2 cm The Bonnier Group, Stockholm, Sweden The Translator / Oversattaren, 1967 Acrylic on panel 118 × 44 × 2 cm The Bonnier Group, Stockholm, Sweden Pulsgivare, 1967 Acrylic on wooden panel 80,5 × 75 × 2,5 Stockholm City Art Collection Radar, 1968 Acrylic on panel 80 × 112.7 × 3 cm The Cultural Administration, Region Stockholm Spegelförstärkare, 1967 Acrylic on panel 80 × 80 × 4.5 cm Private Collection Iris XVIII Line, 2020 Acrylic on panel 113.5 × 119 × 2.5 cm Iris XX Daniel, 2021 Acrylic on panel 135 × 140 × 2.5 cm Iris XXI Christopher, 2021 Acrylic on panel 113.5 × 119 × 2.5 cm Iris XXIII Katarina, 2021 Acrylic on panel 70 × 72 × 2.5 cm Iris XXIV Maja, 2021 Acrylic on panel 71 × 74 × 2.5 cm

ZHENG BO Le Sacre du printemps (Tandvärkstallen), 2021 4K digital video, colour, sound 16 mins With the additional support of Hong Kong Arts Development Council; DACE - Dance Art Critical Ecology; Finnish Cultural Foundation; Frame; Swedish Arts Council; Swedish Arts Grants Committee; Nordic Culture Fund; Nordic Culture Point; Färgfabriken; SKH

UNICA ZÜRN Untitled (interwoven double and multiple portraits showing Hans Bellmer), 1965 Ink and gouache on paper 65 × 50 cm Private Collection La Mort de Kennedy, 1964 Chinese ink on paper 90 × 74 × 2.4 cm Collection Karin and Gerhard Dammann, Switzerland

P O R T I A Z VAVA H E R A Kudonhedzwa kwemazizi (Fallen owls), 2022 Oil-based printing ink and oil bar on linen Approx. 254.5 × 208.5 cm Kudonhedzwa kwevanhu (Fallen people), 2022 Oil-based printing ink and oil bar on linen Approx. 212 × 298 cm Kubatwa kwemazizi (Captured owls), 2022 Oil-based printing ink and oil bar on linen Approx. 310 × 210 cm Kusimudzwa kwevanhu (Uplifted), 2022 Oil-based printing ink and oil bar on linen Approx. 295 × 211 cm All works with the additional support of David Zwirner

All works with the additional support of Galerie Buchholz; IASPIS

M A RY W I G M A N Hexentanz (excerpt from the movie Mary Wigman Tanzt), 1930 Digital video transferred from film 2 mins 13 sec Collection Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin; Film: K164573-1 © Mary Wigman Stiftung / Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln

MÜGE YILMAZ The Adventures of Umay Ixa Kayakızı, 2022 Installation Variable dimensions With the additional support of SAHA Association

FRANTZ ZÉPHIRIN The Slave Ship Brooks, 2007 Oil on canvas 76.2 × 101.6 × 3.8 cm Collection Marcus Rediker Les Esprits Indien en face Colonisation, 2000 Oil on canvas 60 × 105 × 3.8 Collection Marcus Rediker

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List of Works

BIENNALE COLLEGE ARTE

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.

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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

WU TSANG

WHAT IF THEY BARK 01-07, 2022 VENICE 1984, 2022 HERMIT CRAB (GLASS VERSION), 2022 SCALLOPS (GLASS VERSION), 2022 AXE, 2022

Brick House, 2019

Of Whales, 2022

With the support of: Hauser & Wirth

With the additional support of: Petzel Gallery, New York Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – ifa

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

With the additional support of: VIVE Arts VIA Art Fund Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Antenna Space Albyon Studio LUMA Foundation

GIULIA CENCI

With the additional support of: LUMA Foundation Ammodo

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 Sunset Horizon (phase I), 2022 Sunset Horizon (phase II), 2022 Sunset Horizon (phase III), 2022 Sunset Horizon (phase IV), 2022 Hour glass #1, 2022 Hour glass #2, 2022 Hour glass #3, 2022

To See The Earth Before the End of the World, 2022

V I RG I N I A OV E RT ON Untitled (tulip), 2022 Untitled (pink buoy), 2022 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

ALEXANDRA PIRICI Encyclopedia of Relations, 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 additional 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 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

ANDRA URSUT 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

List updated to 20 February 2022

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

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INSTITUTIONS SUPPORTING THE ARTISTS

A C C I Ó N C U LT U R A L E S PA Ñ O L A ( AC / E )

H O N G KO N G A RT S DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL

LITHUANIAN COUNCIL 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 GRANTS COMMIT TEE

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

D A N I S H A R T S F O U N D AT I O N Sidsel Meineche Hansen Ovartaci

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

Charlotte Johannesson Britta Marakatt-Labba Ulla Wiggen

INSTITUT FÜR A U S L A N D S B E Z I E H U N G E N – I FA 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

INSTITUT FRANÇAIS Ali Cherri Simone Fattal Marguerite Humeau Saodat Ismailova Kapwani Kiwanga Vera Molnár

INSTITUT RAMON LLULL

Eglė Budvytytė Giulia Cenci Mire Lee Janis Rafa

N AT I O N A L A R T S C O U N C I L OF SOUTH AFRICA Igshaan Adams

O F F I C E F O R 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

Josefa Tolrà

SWISS ARTS COUNCIL P R O H E LV E T I A

KO R E A A RT S M A NAG E M E N T S E RV I C E ( K A M S )

Miriam Cahn

Mire Lee

List updated to 20 February 2022

Anu Põder

E T X E PA R E B A S Q U E I N S T I T U T E

K O R E A F O U N D AT I O N Geumhyung Jeong

June Crespo

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5 9 T H I N T E R N AT I O N A L ART EXHIBITION THE MILK OF DREAMS LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA Editorial Activities and Web Head

Flavia Fossa Margutti

VO LU M E 1

Managing Editor

Eileen Agar Marianne Brandt Leonora Carrington Ithell Colquhoun Katharina Fritsch Jane Graverol Hannah Höch Rebecca Horn Tishan Hsu Tetsumi Kudo Maruja Mallo André Masson Mrinalini Mukherjee Louise Nevelson Rosemarie Trockel Remedios Varo

Manuela Hansen Graphic Design and Layout

A Practice for Everyday Life, London Texts

Isabella Achenbach Liv Cuniberti Manuela Hansen Melanie Kress Stefano Mudu Ian Wallace Madeline Weisburg Texts pp. 87, 161, 255, 367, 499 by Ian Wallace Copyeditors

Nicola Giacobbo Supervisor Anna Albano Allison Grimaldi Donahue Camilla Mozzato Editorial Staff

Francesca Dolzani Ornella Mogno Translations from English to Italian

Teresa Albanese Translations from Italian to English

Johanna Bishop Translations

Stefano Turon, Liberink Coordinator

© 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.

Translations from English to Italian

Oriana Bonan, Giulia Galvan, Giuliana Schiavi for Alphaville Roberta Prandin Translations from Italian to English

Cover and slipcase images

Salvatore Mele for Alphaville

Translations copyediting

Rosanna Alberti Caterina Vettore

Photolith and Print

Graphicom Spa www.graphicom.it Viale dell’Industria 67, Vicenza

Printed on Munken Lynx Rough, a natural high-quality bulky paper, genuine to the touch, produced with cellulose from sustainable forests. Certified with the EU Ecolabel, FSC® and Cradle to Cradle® trade mark for a circular economy. The Munken range is distributed in Italy by Polyedra Spa. ISBN 9788898727629 La Biennale di Venezia First Edition April 2022

PA R T I C I PA T I N G C O U N T R I E S A N D C O L L A T E R A L E V E N T S

BIENNALE ARTE 2022

EXHIBITION PA R T I C I PA T I N G C O U N T R I E S A N D C O L L A T E R A L E V E N T S

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

Declaration by Roberto Cicutto Cecilia Alemani

8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50 52 54 56 58 60 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 80 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96

Albania Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Republic of Azerbaijan People’s Republic of Bangladesh Belgium Bolivia Brazil Bulgaria Republic of Cameroon Canada Chile People’s Republic of China Croatia Cuba Denmark Egypt Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Ghana Great Britain Greece Grenada Guatemala Hungary Iceland Ireland Israel Italy Ivory Coast Japan Republic of Kazakhstan Kenya Republic of Korea Republic of Kosovo Kyrgyz Republic Latvia Lebanon

98 100 102 104 106 108 110 112 114 116 118 120 122 124 126 128 130 132 134 136 138 140 142 144 146 148 150 152 154 156 158 160 162 164 166 168 170 172

Lithuania Grand Duchy of Luxembourg Republic of North Macedonia Malta Mexico Mongolia Montenegro Namibia Nepal The Netherlands New Zealand Nordic Countries (Norway, Finland, Sweden) Sultanate of Oman Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Russia Republic of San Marino Saudi Arabia Serbia Singapore Republic of Slovenia Republic of South Africa Spain Switzerland Syrian Arab Republic Turkey Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United States of America Uruguay Republic of Uzbekistan Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Republic of Zimbabwe Venice Pavilion

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

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Alberta Whittle: Deep Dive (Pause) Uncoiling Memory Angela Su: Arise, Hong Kong in Venice Angels Listening Apollo, Apollo Katharina Grosse Bosco Sodi at Palazzo Vendramin Grimani. What Goes Around Comes Around Catalonia in Venice_Llim Claire Tabouret: I am spacious, singing flesh Eugen Raportoru: The Abduction from the Seraglio Roma Women: Performative Strategies of Resistance Ewa Kuryluk I, White Kangaroo From Palestine With Art Future Generation Art Prize @ Venice 2022 Ha Chong-Hyun Heinz Mack – Vibration of Light Impossible Dreams Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence Lita Albuquerque: Liquid Light Louise Nevelson. Persistence Lucio Fontana / Antony Gormley Pera + Flora + Fauna The Story of Indigenousness and the Ownership of History Road of Faith Rony Plesl: Trees Grow From the Sky Stanley Whitney: the Italian Paintings Take Your Time Times Reimagined: Chun Kwang Young Tue Greenfort: Medusa Alga Laguna Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained Vera Molnár: Icône 2020 With Hands Signs Grow Without Women “YiiMa” Art Group: Allegory of Dreams

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List of Participants

178 180 182 184 186 188 190 192 194 196 198 200 202 204 206 208 210 212 214 216 218 220 222 224 226 228 230 232 234

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

PAR T I C I

TI A P

C OU N TR

ALBANIA

L U M T U R I B L L O S H M I . F R O M S C R AT C H

Commissioner

Lumturi Blloshmi (1944–2020) works in painting, photography, installation, and performance. Her works are characterised by a certain irony and a 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.

Ministry of Culture of Albania Curator

Adela Demetja Participant

Lumturi Blloshmi Assistant Curator

Eni Derhemi Filmmaker

Tin Dirdamal Exhibition Architect

Johanna Meyer-Grohbrügge Interactive Media Artist

Alexander Walmsley With the Support of

Ministry of Culture of Albania Gwärtler Foundation

By cultivating and readopting an approach that goes beyond feminism, nationality, and specific art styles, Blloshmi tirelessly resisted different regimes and developments by building a practice based on her personal experience, transiting from type (Albanian, female, politically persecuted, disabled) to individuation to become one of the most remarkable and innovative contemporary Albanian artists. Nevertheless, being still relatively unknown among the national and especially the international art world, her oeuvre has yet to be fully explored and examined. Lumturi Blloshmi. From Scratch is conceived as an exhibition project aiming at presenting and positioning the work and life of Lumturi Blloshmi anew within the context of national and international art history. 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 t he specific political and social context in which they were created. By remaining true to the unfiltered urge to express experience awareness, Blloshmi constantly pushed the boundaries of formal styles by experimenting with materials and combinations of media to achieve what she called “a distinct tangible universe”. Formally situated within the boundaries of figuration, her highly innovative and imaginative oeuvre at its core transmits and resonates a sense of universality and timelessness. The pavilion is conceived in such a way as to reflect Blloshmi’s tangible yet simultaneously ungraspable universe and its openness to interpretations. The artist sadly passed away in November 2020 due to an infection resulting from Covid-19. Two contributions in video and interactive media about her have been realised especially for the Biennale pavilion in a collaboration between curator Adela Demetja and invited artists Tin Dirdamal and Alexander Walmsley. Adela Demetja

Lumturi Blloshmi, Ithaca, 1992. Oil on canvas, 80 × 121 cm. Photo Albes Fusha. Courtesy Lumturi Blloshmi Estate Lumturi Blloshmi, The Medal, 2003. Oil on canvas, 112 × 259.5 cm. Photo Albes Fusha. Courtesy Lumturi Blloshmi Estate

Participating Countries

A RG E N T I NA

E L O R I G E N D E L A S U B S TA N C I A I M P O R TA R Á L A I M P O R TA N C I A D E L O R I G E N

Commissioner

Surrealism emerged as a life-sustaining reaction – a metabolic offspring of the crisis of conscience that loomed over the West after the First World War. Today’s crises of conscience branch out in such a way – endlessly varied, abysmally amplified and reproduced – that the ability of art to generate life-sustaining reactions seems to be a science lost in time or, at best, an esoteric lore that will only guarantee the affective survival of a micro-community.

Paula Vázquez Curator

Alejo Ponce de León Participant

Mónica Heller

Mónica Heller’s DIY ethos somehow finds itself at the opposite end of the Biennale’s highly scrutinised and professionalised setting, being more akin to the hermetic traditions. As a prominent contributor to Argentina’s inner and long-running discussions on amateurism and naïveté as cognitive antidotes against the aspirational sensibilities of art in an underdeveloped capitalist context, she molds software the hard way, pressing her acerbic lyricism into lo-res bits and polygons. The “vibrant density” that unfolds in the peripheries of the real and that served as the foundation for Surrealism might be related to her 3D animations and landscapes, as they’re both fitting channels for the development of a limbic resonance with life-sustaining properties. This, of course, is a nonconclusive notion: as contemporary art undoubtedly reinforces capitalist action, her digital work might also remind us of Hell, where the “movement is energetic but the figures are plastic and stiff in their agony, lit terrifyingly”. In El origen de la substancia importará la importancia del origen (The importance of the origin will be imported by the origin of the substance), she builds a distinct environment that is inspired both by the multisensory architectural design of Argentine suburban bingo halls and by the surrealist “free exuberance of time”. Distributed throughout the pavilion, screens and projections are home to a gallery of characters that dwell in absurd, cyclical narrations, echoing not only the *.gif format and its neurotic repetitive variation but, more importantly, the way modernist literature and postwar musical compositions – from Gertrude Stein to Leónidas Lamborghini, from Terry Riley to Mark E. Smith – found in repetition an emancipatory effect. Alejo Ponce de León

Mónica Heller, El origen de la substancia importará la importancia del origen [The importance of the origin will be imported by the origin of the substance], 2022. 3D animation video installation, dimensions and duration variable. Video still

Participating Countries

ARMENIA

GHARĪB ՂԱՐԻԲ

Commissioner

“One starts by merely imagining real things. Eventually, the real things themselves manifest.” G.I.G.

Arayik Khzmalyan (Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports of the Republic of Armenia) Curators

Anne Davidian Elena Sorokina Participant

Whisper in secret, disappear into the contradictory rumours, and remove your presence completely. Resonance, not the sound itself but its trace, lingers in the room behind you.

Andrius Arutiunian Coordinators

Gayané Khodaveerdi Astghik Marabyan Local Producer

Marco Scurati Appearances

Hallow Ground Hamed Ahmadi G.I. Gurdjieff Radik A Raimundas Malašauskas Urvakan Festival Graphic Design

Sophie Rentien Lando (Espace Ness) Communication

Silke Neumann and Zaida Violan, Bureau N Lilit Sokhakyan

Gharīb is a word that permeates the locales and temporalities of the Caucasus and Middle East. As a word shared between the Arabic, Armenian, and Farsi languages, it denotes a sense of belonging and estrangement, evoking modes of displacement and foreignness. Gharīb has long been associated with the underground, clandestine activities of music-making, illegal social clubs, early psychotropic substance trade, and the political margins. Songs between walls, conspirators behind curtains. Resonance as a subjugating body, sympathetic vibrations bowing to its forces. Alternate tuning systems, songs of illicit origin, instrument-making traditions, and gentle oscillations between mystic thought and charlatanism all find place in the Gharīb pavilion. Here, the gharīb presents itself as a form of dissonance with western-influenced understandings of time, rhythm, and attunement, both musical and political.

With the Support of

Boghossian Foundation Raffi and Taline Boladian Razmig and Ani Boladian Creative Industries Fund NL Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Performing Arts Fund NL Sartis Special Thanks to

Sona Dalalyan Adelina von Fürstenberg Miguel Magalhães Shogher Margossian Marianna Maruyama Gabrielė Mišeikytė Razmik Panossian Eliane Radigue Filipa Ramos Eloise Sweetman

Tuning, that glorious way of adjusting, making disappear, and reinforcing cherry-picked frequencies, narratives, and ways of being. Bend just a few ratios and a perfectly tuned system emerges, a perfectly pervasive power. The Gharīb cosmology plays through the modes of sonic dissent, vernacular knowledges, and messy systems of elusiveness. Oil extraction and Cher with her autotune tricks; Gurdjieff’s harmonious law of seven and divine systems of digestion; emancipated Tondrakian rebels; hallucinatory incantations. A certain musical score emerges, dotted by the hushed voices of the unheard, the disappeared, and the radical. Andrius Arutiunian

As well as to

AGBU Milan Fondazione Berengo The Honorary Consulate of Armenia in Venice

Andrius Arutiunian, Seven Common Ways of Disappearing, 2021. Score fragment. Courtesy the Artist

Participating Countries

AUSTRALIA

DESASTRES

Commissioner

M A R C O F U S I N AT O

Australia Council for the Arts Curator

Alexie Glass-Kantor Participant

Marco Fusinato Education Partner

University of Melbourne Exhibition Partners

Arup Artspace Denton Corker Marshall Biennale Delegates Program Partners

Biennale of Sydney documenta fifteen The Hawai‘i Triennial artsACT CreateNSW DLGSC WA ArtsNT Arts Queensland Arts South Australia Arts Tasmania Creative Victoria The Australia Council wishes to acknowledge Kerry Gardner AM as the Venice Council Chair and the generosity of the many “Australia at the Venice Biennale” philanthropists who have supported DESASTRES

Marco Fusinato is a contemporary artist and noise-musician whose work takes the form of installation, photographic reproduction, design, performance, and recording. As an artist, he conceives his work as a succession of interrelated projects, some of which continue across numerous iterations. Within these projects, the works are almost always serial and use specific frameworks for experimentation, as if demonstrating a thesis. Working across disciplines and cultural fields, Fusinato explores the tensions and contradictions of opposing forces: underground culture/institutions, noise/silence, minimalism/maximalism, purity/contamination. He creates dynamic situations in which these energies are captured by combining allegorical appropriation with an interest in the intensity of a gesture or event. As a musician, Fusinato explores the idea of noise as music, using the electric guitar and mass amplification to improvise intricate, wide-ranging, and physically affecting frequencies. DESASTRES is an experimental noise project that synchronises sound with image. The work takes the form of a durational solo performance as installation. The artist 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. There is no theme as such – rather the immersive encounter with sound and image is open for the audience to interpret and make sense of. The intent is to create some kind of hallucination, elation in disorientation, and exhaustion from confusion.

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

Participating Countries

AUSTRIA

I N V I TAT I O N O F T H E S O F T M A C H I N E A N D H E R A N G RY B O D Y PA R T S

Commissioner

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. These “spaces of desire” upset conventional notions of museum presentations and subvert the hierarchies of art and design, of high and low.

Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport Curator

Karola Kraus Participants

Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl Artistic Assistant

Markus Pires Mata Project and Production Management

section.a, Vienna Press and Media

Kathrin Luz Communication, Cologne Sponsoring and Fundraising

Karin Kirste, Kunstnetzwerk, Vienna

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, for example, appear to oscillate between the two presentations, duplicated and mirrored and translated into the preferred artistic practice in each case.

Graphic Design

Yvonne Quirmbach, Berlin Alexander Nussbaumer, Vienna Technical Support Venice

M+B Studio, Venice With the Support of

On behalf of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport Supported by

Land Niederösterreich Land Salzburg Stadt Salzburg Phileas Gallery Crone Georg Kargl Fine Arts Gallery Loevenbruck Dorotheum Tectus Insurance Brokers Zumtobel BIG Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft Porr Eva and Christoph Dichand In Kind Support

Geyer & Geyer Artbook Adrian and Toni Eternit Kohlmaier Adler Paliti Bio Kerzen Bioweingut Lenikus Stahl und Form SORAVIA Kunsttrans MAC Wiener Seife

Jakob Lena Knebl’s expansive installations elude clear-cut classifications, deliberately breaking with accustomed norms. The artist’s current interrogation of the 1970s, the sociopolitical issues and the history of art and design of that decade, reflects their potent influence on the present day. Key aspects in this context include identity and the possibilities of its transformation, the places of its staging, and the question of coproducers and mechanisms of exclusion. Ashley Hans Scheirl’s installation is a walk-in self-portrait as a painter. As in a theatre proscenium, we see a staggered arrangement of flat pieces of scenery that are at the same time the layers of this fold-out painting. This scenery is made up of architectural interventions, paintings, printed wallpapers, and objects of various materials. It is a walk-in, “accessible” painting and at the same time a theatre stage that is moved into and even under the auditorium. The installation is characterised by a dynamic juxtaposition and intertwining of different, seemingly paradoxical spaces, styles, and pictogram-style symbols. The visitors become protagonists in this piece, setting the scenery in motion with their bodies. Karola Kraus

Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl. Photo Christian Benesch

Participating Countries

REPUBLIC OF AZERBAIJAN

B O RN T O L OV E

Commissioner

DIVINE PERFECTION

Ambassador Mammad Ahmadzada Curator

Emin Mammadov

Are we living a real life, or is our world just a well-crafted simulation? Someone more intelligent than us, more advanced and technologically superior to our civilisation, has created the universe – by accident, as an experiment, or perhaps for fun.

Participants

Fidan Akhundova Agdes Baghirzade Infinity Sabiha Khankishiyeva Fidan Novruzova (Fidan Kim) Ramina Saadatkhan Zhuk (Narmin Israfilova) Executor

Heydar Aliyev Foundation, Baku, Azerbaijan Coordinators

Narmina Khalilova Farhad Boyukzada Paolo De Grandis Carlotta Scarpa, PDG Arte Communications

Born to Love is an exhibition of works by seven contemporary Azerbaijani female artists that draws on the phenomenon of the Infinite Consciousness of the Universe. The number of participants is by no means casual. Since the dawn of time, the number seven has had a special place as a particularly beneficial and protective symbol. It has something spiritual, eternal about it. Then there is the direct connection of the participants with the Seven Beauties by the Azerbaijani philosopher and thinker Nizami Ganjavi. The poem is based on the legend of the Sassanid Shah Bahram Ghur (420–439 CE) and tells the seven stories of Bahram’s seven wives, each in their own palace, each of which has its own colour and is dedicated to a planet and a day of the week. And every “palazzo” of each of the participants reflects the deep philosophy of this literature masterpiece. In her installation, Narmin Israfilova (Zhuk) uses water as the origin of birth, which begins in the womb. The art of Infinity plunges us into the ocean, where we can harvest the pearls of perception and wisdom, at one with the essence of nature and the world. Ramina Saadatkhan combines Pop Art techniques with elements of Abstract Expressionism. Fidan Novruzova (Fidan Kim)’s project reflects on the evolution of mankind, focusing on the fundamental principle of survival of the fittest and the essential priority of environmental protection. The sculpture figure by Fidan Akhundova reflects the different steps in a woman’s life, full of doubts and difficulties but more aware and freer. Sabiha Khankishiyeva works on repetition and symmetry, which generate harmony as in fractal geometry. There is a connection between the subconscious, the conscious and this world, which the human eye loves to find. Agdes Baghirzade tries to bring us closer to divine perfection with his images of life around us, hinting at hidden meanings that the camera cannot capture. Humans are constantly searching for themselves, experiencing and understanding the world through the senses, but can we be sure of what we feel? Are we sure that a dream is a dream, and that when we wake up we will find reality and not another dream?

Fidan Akhundova, Saltation, 2022. Sculpture installation. Photographic rendering Fidan Akhundova. Image courtesy Fidan Akhundova

Participating Countries

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF BANGLADESH

TIME: MASK AND UNMASK

Commissioner

The exhibition begins with the expression of the thought of the Indo-Bengali philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore focused on the harmonious belonging of humanity to nature, on their coexistence as a single entity. The exhibition itinerary starts from the representation of these concepts through a series of paintings that highlights the original harmony between the human being and the natural universe. The exhibition continues with the display of other works that underline the progressive breach of this balance. This concept begins to take shape in the second room where, through an extraordinary projection of images, the “kaleidoscopic cell”, an admirable artistic creation, summarises the transition from initial harmony to the dramatic distancing of man from the environment, partly caused by technological development and economic progress: the pandemic crisis is the result of this ecological disaster.

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 Co-Curator

Moinuddin Khalid Partnership

Schilpakala Academy Rossi Foundation WeStart With the Support of

Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh

The exhibition itinerary ends in the third room where the surrealist and abstract works are an authentic image of the contradiction that defines the present moment: the title Time: Mask and Unmask is intended to signify this dichotomy that has marked the life of humanity for more than two years, alternating between “masking” and “unmasking”, between fear and hope. The meaning of the exhibition is therefore linked to the ideology of Tagore in its metaphorical meaning: the time that in its rapid passing masks, that is, hides and surpasses, everything that is ephemeral and superficial, but unmasks, that is, leads to light, all that is true: the return to harmony between humanity and nature. Viviana Vannucci

Harun-Ar-Rashid, Let’s unmask the harsh reality through the spectrum of Kaleidoscope, 2021. Detail of kaleidoscopic video installation. 3 tilted mirrors. A projector and speaker will play by a media player for the videos and sound, 320 × 320 cm Mohammad Eunus, Journey Toward Unknown Destination – 2, 2021. Mixed media on canvas, 102 × 102 cm Jamal Uddin Ahmed, Winter, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 183 × 122 cm

Participating Countries

BELGIUM

T H E N AT U R E O F T H E G A M E

Commissioner

F R A N C I S A LŸ S A N D T H E G A M E S O F C H I L D H O O D

Jan Jambon, Minister-president of the Government of Flanders and Flemish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Culture, ICT and Facility Management Curator

Hilde Teerlinck Participant

It is surprising how little attention has been paid to children and childhood until recently by professional ethnographers. It fell to others – to writers, artists, folklorists, and filmmakers – to explore the experiential world of childhood. Francis Alÿs is one of these “others” who have taken children seriously. His children stand apart from adults and contradict the comfortable myths that adults frequently create about them.

Francis Alÿs Coordination on behalf of the Government of Flanders

Stan Van Pelt Project Manager

Alessandra Biscaro Institutional Partners

KASK – YCP (Young Curators Programme) WIELS, Brussels Pavilion Manager

Giulio Piovesan Text

David MacDougall Text Editor

Maria Isabel Conde Tchachenko With the main Support of

Nationale Loterij – Loterie Nationale Proximus Art Collection Willame Foundation With the Support of

Eeckman Art & Insurance, Vidi-Square AV Solutions The Friends of the Belgian Pavilion 2022

Harold & Clotilde Boël, Dirk Cavens, Michel & Virginie Cigrang, Jos & Kristine Claeys, Agustin & Isabel Coppel, Emilie De Pauw, Philippe & Béatrice le Hodey, Wolfgang & Martine de Limburg Stirum, Pieter & Olga Dreesmann, Filip Engelen & Ann Gillis, Yann & Pascale Gérardin, Catherine Lagrange, Luc & Carine Haenen-Van Aelst, Jean-Claude & Nicole Marian, Michel & Stéphanie Moortgat, Christian Strenger, Christophe & Patricia Tanghe-Van Thillo, Paul & Fabienne Thiers, Alexandre & Corinne Van Damme, Christian & Nathalie Van Thillo, Friedrich & Sylvia von Metzler, Jean & Chantal Vandemoortele, Antoine & Sylvie Winckler With the additional Support of

Many of Alÿs’s recent films of children’s games deal with the themes of those earlier in the series: the preoccupation with lines, of inclusion and exclusion, and the ways that children repurpose the ordinary objects they find around them. But now several new and darker themes appear. One example is Haram Football (or “forbidden football”) (2017) filmed in a Mosul only recently liberated from ISIS. Here a group of boys in the war-torn city play a game of football without a ball. It is an act of courage and perhaps of childhood risk-taking, for thirteen children were executed only two years earlier by ISIS for watching football on television. Children think differently from adults and organise themselves according to their own customs and beliefs, which are passed from one child to another. Children are connected to adults and dependent on them in many ways, but they are very good at keeping to themselves. Because of Alÿs’s interest in different cultures, Children’s Games brings this project closer to the concerns of anthropology. The reason ethnographic filmmaking is an art, and not just a method, is that it requires balancing multiple variables of intention, sensibility, and analysis. The variables may be personal, such as how one responds to another person, or analytical, such as how one interprets an event in one’s mind. Above all, there are the innumerable accidents of chance and circumstance that have brought one to a place and influenced what happens there. Part of Francis Alÿs’s art is that he has been adept at inventing his own accidents. But in making Children’s Games he has come up against the inventiveness of children, a capacity that challenges his own. This essay is an adapted version of the chapter “Francis Alÿs and the Games of Childhood” in Francis Alÿs – Children’s Games, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam and nai010 publishers Rotterdam, 2019. Children’s Games videos can be watched at francisalys.com. David MacDougall

Borzi contract, Cinquefoglie Vini, Duvel Moortgat, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Green Spin srl, INDYVIDEO, Jan Mot, Brussels, KPMG, KU Leuven, Mertens Frames, Samsung Climate Solutions, VERLATO+ZORDAN associati, David Zwirner 22

Francis Alÿs, Artist Notebook, Sharya Camp, Dohuk, Iraq, 2016. Pencil on paper, 13 × 42 cm. Courtesy the Artist Children’s Game #23: Step on a Crack – Hong Kong, 2020. Video still, 5’. In collaboration with Félix Blume, Julien Devaux, and Rafael Ortega. Courtesy the Artist

Participating Countries

BOLIVIA

WA R A WA R A J AW I R A

Commissioner

D I S C O V E R I N G WA R A WA R A J AW I R A

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

By placing ourselves in the complexity of Andean thought, we will address the cosmos and human nature. The basis of our work will bring together different arts rooted in the Andean cosmology of Wara Wara Jawira (“River of stars” in the Aymara language). This river or path of stars is made up of three levels: Alaxpacha (Infinite space), Akapacha (Earth), and Manqha Pacha (Time and space of the depths below the earth). The work, in all its exuberance, will build and deconstruct the idea of “assembly”, allowing visitors to immerse themselves in Andean cosmology with the ancient technique of weaving. We will weave into the intricate world of Andean cosmology. The Andean dweller who works the land, hunts, herds her/his animals, is permanently connected to the land and, at the end of the afternoon, rests and dreams. If time and work allow it, those dreams become threads that weave a “fabric of dreams”. This weaved fabric will be an aesthetic proposal of the combination of the arts, which allows the viewer to see not only the three levels already mentioned, but also to dream and weave in their mind their own dreams in Wara Wara Jawira.

Collective Warmichacha

Assistant Curator

Judith Cuba Organisation

Illimani Aguilar Jove, Luis Leonardo Calisaya Castillo, Fatima Choque, Luis Oscar Jiménez Torres, Andres Armin Kuljis Molina, Augusto Mendoza, Joaquin Salvador Molina Saavedra, Claudio Fabian Vargas Hernani Administrative Assistant

Kimberly Katherine Quiñonez Artists Assistant

Wara Eliana Carvajal Terrazas With the Support of

BACO (Bolivia Arte Contemporáneo) International fair by MIKO art Gallery

Collective Warmichacha, Yakana constelación de la llama de la noche, 2022. Mixed media. Photo Collective Warmichacha. Courtesy Collective Warmichacha

Participating Countries

BRAZIL

C O M O C O RAÇ ÃO SA I N D O P E LA B O C A

Commissioner

Jonathas de Andrade often bases his artworks on historical episodes and processes, using an approach that is sometimes free and poetic, sometimes ironic or nearly dreamlike, to reflect on the constitution and idiosyncrasies of a hypothetical “Brazilian people”. One of the artist’s longest-running projects, in this sense, is the set of works that he brought together in the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, a museum conceived as a possible counterpoint to the anthropological museum of the same name created in 1979 by Gilberto Freyre, in Recife. While the original museum revises the region’s identity and colonial history based on a gathering of artefacts and historical objects, De Andrade’s museum is focused on the people, revealing the way in which the relations of power and class bear the traces and consequences of history. In the installation the artist has once again based his work on this profound interest for an authentically popular culture – “popular” in all the possible senses of this intrinsically complex term – using as a common thread a wide-ranging set of idiomatic expressions and sayings that involve human body metaphors. Freely inspired by the aesthetics of “science fairs” and by his own life experience – recalled from his childhood, when he visited the Eva doll (a giant doll made of fibreglass and foam into which the public could enter to get an inside look at the human body) – the installation is linked together by an index of popular sayings along with a series of bi- and three-dimensional works 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 exhibition visitors to go “in one ear and out the other”, while an inflatable balloon, which invades the space at various moments over the course of the day, refers to another expression: Coração saindo pela boca (“the heart coming out of the mouth”).

José Olympio da Veiga Pereira (Fundação Bienal de São Paulo) Curator

Jacopo Crivelli Visconti Participant

Jonathas de Andrade Organisation

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo Ministry of Foreign Affairs / Embassy of Brazil in Rome Ministry of Tourism / Special Secretary of Culture

Other elements, coupled with works on the walls and a video – all inspired by popular sayings – complete a playful, interactive, poetic and current installation. Altogether, the works 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.

Development process of Entrar por um ouvido e sair pelo outro – the artist working with the sculptor Silvio Botelho in Olinda, Pernambuco, Brazil, 2022

Participating Countries

BULGARIA

T H E R E YO U A R E

Commissioner

The There You Are project explores the possibility of transforming physical space into a symbolic one, where a new meaning is given to the oppositions of exterior/interior, top/bottom, and in/out, in the context of the body and its interaction with its living environment. Following the geometry of the rooms in Spazio Ravà and the proportions of its furniture and interior details, Michail Michailov builds objects that construct an absurd minimalist stage on which the exhibition narrative unfolds. By enlisting the aid of various media (drawings, video, sculpture, performance), the artist creates meditative territories that focus on unexpected aspects of existence.

Iara Boubnova Curator

Irina Batkova Participant

Michail Michailov Organisation

National Gallery, Sofia Gergana Mudova, MUSIZ Foundation Collaborators

Hannes Anderle Donka Mishineva Kalin Trifonov Milena Kaneva With the Support of

Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Bulgaria

At the core of the exhibition installation lies a series of drawings, entitled Dust to Dust, capturing since 2014 the microscopic details of the not-so-visible accumulation of everyday human detritus. This artistic gesture symbolically measures time in a single human life. The sculptural objects included in the exhibition – white geometric figures with brushes attached to them, broom handles, parts resembling vacuum cleaners and suchlike – maintain a constant tension between presence and absence in the pavilion space. It is enhanced by the images and sounds in the Just Keep on Going video series, which presents Michail Michailov performing cyclical actions without a beginning or end. Waste material, drawn with virtuosity and turned into a work of art, and the surreal cleaning tools, metaphorically describe the lonely search for meaning in the narrative of everyday life. In the project, the pavilion window is obscured by a structure where the observer must place his head in a particular opening to allow a view of the gallery. This Headspacing installation separates the body that remains outside from the head, the place where thought fields arise. In this way, the viewer concentrates on a kind of laboratorial environment, examining the deep essential characteristics of things, where the instantaneous analysis provoked by one’s perception can hardly be verbalised. Thus, the exhibits both exist and do not exist, being on the border between thought and the probability of its being couched in words. Irina Batkova

Michail Michailov, detail from the series Dust to Dust, 2014–2022. Coloured pencil on paper. Photo Lisa Rastl. ©Michail Michailov

Participating Countries

REPUBLIC OF C A M E RO ON

THE TIME OF THE CHIMERAS

Commissioner

Cameroon is a country that is striving to escape its current internal divisions, where, after the end of colonialism – first German, then English and French – it is experiencing a phase of strong tensions, especially between anglophone and francophone areas. The country’s effort, in order not to remain on the sidelines of the technological and socioeconomic development underway in the world, provokes ever more decisive pushes to participate actively in international progress. Many Cameroonians are expatriates, many artists too, but all of them have preserved their national and African identity, while integrating into the countries in which they settled. Their values go beyond postcolonial claims and tend to reestablish their own culture to relate it to all others.

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 Organisation

Origini Being 3 Global Crypto Art DAO Special Thanks to

Marthe Beatrice Happi Paolo Mozzo Ji Xiaofeng Danesi SpA Professional Link Srl

Cameroonian artists are aware of this need for integration and their favourite themes are those that mediate the current condition with the international context. The pavilion compares four Cameroonian artists with four international artists, with the aim of creating a dialogue on the theme of chimeras and possible utopias. Comparison and dialogue that are expressed at 360 degrees with paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos. Particular attention has been 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 large, dedicated space has been reserved in a historic exhibition never seen before at the Biennale. From Africa, in fact, we must expect a new form of emancipation allowed by an increasingly democratic and widespread approach to the finance and the economy through new digital platforms. With the awareness of pursuing a dream, a possible utopia, the participating artists undertook to give shape, according to their own poetics and above all their imagination, to a shared interpretation of some problems that today grip the whole world, such as poverty, world hunger, justice, pandemics, ethnic divisions, and forced emigration. Sandro Orlandi Stagl

Exhibitors: A) Afran, B) Angéle E. Essamba, C) Justine Gaga, D) Salifou Lindou, E) Shay Frisch, F) Umberto Mariani, G) Matteo Mezzadri, H) Jorge R. Pombo, courtesy ARTantide Gallery NFT project, exhibitors: 1) K. Abosch, 2) J. Angelini, 3) M. Bertìn, 4) Cryptoart Driver, 5) L. Denina, 6) A. Echegaray Guevara, 7) Genesis People, 8) J. Hildebrand, 9) Meng Huang, 10) E. Kac, 11) G. Kosice, 12) J. Le Parc, 13) M. Nuñez, 14) M. Soler-Roig, 15) M.Á. Vidal, 16) B. von Harder, 17) G. Weis, 18) C. Winter, 19) S. Wong, 20) Wang Xing, 21) A. Zannier, 22) ZZH

Participating Countries

C A NA DA

2011 ≠ 1848

Commissioner

“All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice... the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”1 Karl Marx

National Gallery of Canada Curator

Reid Shier Participant

Stan Douglas Project Director

Jonathan Shaughnessy Presenting Sponsor

Royal Bank of Canada Partners

National Gallery of Canada Foundation Canada Council for the Arts Canada Pavilion Patron

Reesa Greenberg The Canadian Artists in Venice

Endowment Fund Donors Jackie Flanagan Reesa Greenberg Michael and Sonja Koerner Family Donald R. Sobey Family The Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation Supporters

Global Affairs Canada Numerous patrons and partners from across Canada and internationally With the Additional Support of

David Zwirner, New York/London/Paris/ Hong Kong Victoria Miro, London/Venice Stan Douglas Inc. Linda Chinfen Peter Courtemanche Brodie Smith

In 1848, continent-wide upheaval found European middle and working classes allied against a lack of democratic freedoms, restrictions on the press, and the continued dominance of an aristocratic elite. Most of the tenuous coalitions fell apart within a few years, hence Marx’s quip above about the installation of Louis Napoleon as the emperor of France in 1852, but even though the old powers were able to regroup, the “Bourgeois Revolutions” of 1848 represented a desire for structural reform of European democracy that would be partially realised in the 20th century. The events of 2011 were, arguably, an unconscious reaction to the economic and political status quo following the Great Recession of 2008 and included the Arab Spring protests, the London riots, Occupy movements in different regions of the world, and even the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver. The year 1848 was continental, with news of revolt spread by print media, but 2011 was global with its viral news spread by electronic media. Across Europe and North America, events were simply policed and ignored; in North Africa and the Middle East they were suppressed or subverted, with a few notable exceptions, and because their root causes were never addressed the ensuing decade has seen the rise of populist nationalism and the outbreak of civil war. 2011 ≠ 1848 explores various aspects of the events of 2011 through four large-scale hybrid documentary photographs that re-stage protests on Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis on 12 January; rioters in Vancouver on 15 June; clashes between youth and police in the Hackney borough of London on 9 August; and the arrest of Occupy Wall Street protesters on New York’s Brooklyn Bridge on 1 October. The photographs are accompanied by ISDN, a two-channel video installation whose fictive premise posits a real-time collaboration between musicians in London and Cairo.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 10.

Stan Douglas, New York City, 2011-10-01, 2021. Chromogenic print on Dibond, 150 × 300 cm. Courtesy the Artist, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner. ©Stan Douglas Production shot featuring Lady Sanity (left) and TrueMendous (right) for ISDN, 2022. Photo Alex Ward. Courtesy the Artist, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner. ©Stan Douglas

Participating Countries

CHILE

T U R BA T O L H O L- H O L T O L

Commissioner

In the Selk’nam language Hol-Hol Tol is the “heart of peatlands”. All over this increasingly hot and dry world, these peatlands are endangered. Their conservation is linked to the wellbeing of humankind and, in Patagonia, to the resurgence of the Selk’nam people. Peat bogs are clamouring to be represented as a living ecosystem, as the Selk’nam people are clamouring to be recognised as a living culture. The Selk’nam Fundación Hach Saye teaches us that its rights and those of the peatlands depend on each other. The Selk’nam inhabited Tierra del Fuego for eight thousand years before the arrival of genocidal colonial powers. Peatlands are ancestors and they, too, have been massacred. They help regulate the planet’s climate by capturing carbon and storing it in deep layers of unaltered organic matter (peat). Although this capacity places them “among the most valuable ecosystems on earth” (WCS Chile), peatlands are an overlooked type of wetland – in part due to their fundamentally “buried” structure. This condition increases their exposure to mining, extraction, and drainage for development and profit. Once drained and destroyed, peatlands go from being carbon sinks to emitting enormous amounts of greenhouse gasses.

Ximena Moreno Curator

Camila Marambio Participants

Ariel Bustamante Carla Macchiavello Dominga Sotomayor Alfredo Thiermann Organisation

Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage of Chile Cultural Affairs Directorate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile Producer

Juan Pablo Vergara Creative Collaborators

Hema’ny Molina (Selk’nam writing) Bárbara Saavedra (Ecology) Rosario (Ureta Design) Mateo Zlatar (Web design) Carola del Río (Web developer) Freja Carmichael, Caitlin Franzmann, Christy Gast, Randi Nygård, Renee Rossini, Karolin Tampere (Scent) Sebastián Cruz (Museography) Nicolás Arze (Art direction) Benjamín Echazarreta (Photo direction) Isabel Torres (Voice rumors) Constanza Güell (Catalogue) Fernanda Olivares (Selk’nam guide) Nicole Püschel (Climate change and biodiversity) Collaborating Institutions

Ensayos Wildlife Conservation Society, Chile Parque Karukinka, Tierra del Fuego Fundación Hach Saye Greifswald Mire Center ProChile

Peatlands challenge us to create a new, turbidk and multivocal aesthetic that highlights the stories of the healthy Patagonian peat bogs, emphasising their role as a Southern bastion in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss. Based on over a decade of eco-cultural cooperation in Tierra del Fuego, Turba Tol comes from the work of Ensayos, a collaborative transdisciplinary research practice that rethinks the role of art, creating growing communities oriented towards conservation and coherent environmental actions. All hands are needed on deck for the protection of Patagonian peatlands. Filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor, architect Alfredo Thiermann, sound artist Ariel Bustamante, art historian Carla Macchiavello, producer Juan Pablo Vergara, designers Rosario Ureta and Mateo Zlatar, art director Nicolás Arze, and custodians Fernanda Olivares and Isabel Torres have joined existing ensayistas who are beating to the drum of the Patagonian Peatland Initiative. Camila Marambio

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

Participating Countries

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

M E TA- S C A P E

Commissioner

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-technology-nature”. “Scape” is an evolving term in the discourse system of traditional Chinese culture. When the dialectical thinking of “Greatness” and “Smallness” rooted in traditional Taoism collided with the thoughts of “Anthropocene” and “Dehumanisation” in the present time, it was evident that the tense relationships between human beings and oneself, society as well as the environment had to be explored from the perspective of a “Deep Ecological Awareness”. Looking back to the rise of Chinese civilisation, our ancestors have already placed themselves in the systematic vision of “nature” through the interpretation of “Scape”, and realised the meaning of life via the inner dialectical consciousness.

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) Assistant Curator

Sun Dongdong Organisation

Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People’s Republic of China

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. The exhibition attempts to present the current human condition of “human-technologynature” in a civilised tone. Entering the exhibition hall, you will see Wang Yuyang’s sculpture work Wang Yuyang#: Quarterly hanging in the air, which is generated by self-learning and operation of a computer program based on a huge information database. The “tree” in this unique work is not just an image of a tree, it is “A Real Tree” required by the programmed brain, which is like a bridge between the real and the virtual, allowing us to think about the spirituality of life inherent in artificial intelligence from a macro perspective. Meta-Scape creates and presents a symbiotic cosmic consciousness. The starting point is completely different from the popular concept of “metaverse”. The purpose of “Scape Creation” is not to establish new divisions, but to transcend the boundaries of reality, to reestablish a universal way of looking at oneself, hereby exploring the possibility of constructing a common future for mankind. Zhang Zikang, Sun Dongdong

Wang Yuyang, Wang Yuyang#: Quarterly, 2021. Resin, flavone, copper, bronze, stainless steel, tree, 400 × 800 × 260 cm. ©Yuyang Wang Studio AT Group (Central Academy of Fine Arts [CAFA] Institute of Sci-Tech Arts+Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence [TLBI] Group Project), Jungle, 2021. Deep learning of Artificial Intelligence, mirror print, dimensions variable. ©Jiayuan Peng

Participating Countries

C R O AT I A

U N T I T L E D ( C R O AT I A N PAV I L I O N ) , 2 0 2 2

Commissioner

New viral infection rates, supposed election manipulations, a Kardashian divorce, ecological catastrophes, Brexit, and endless political corruption scandals: there is no escaping the news. We are in an age of communicative abundance, with global networked information flows shaping practically every aspect of daily life. But there is no such thing as “neutral” news – no unbiased reporting anywhere in our “post-truth” era.

Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia Curator

Elena Filipovic Participant

Tomo Savić-Gecan Organisation and Production

KONTEJNER | bureau of contemporary art praxis – Olga Majcen Linn, Tereza Teklić Collaborators

Irma Omerzo Tomislav Pokrajčić Jan Šnajder Ana Barić Sara Bakić With the Support of

Mato Perić and the Perić Collection Mondriaan Fonds Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia Zagreb Tourist Board The project was additionally supported through a residency with the Art Explora Foundation, Paris

For the last few decades, the singular conceptual practice of the Croatian-born, Netherlands-based artist Tomo Savić-Gecan has drawn attention to the unseen social, economic, and political machinations underlying and shaping contemporary society. For this year’s Croatian pavilion, Savić-Gecan conceives Untitled (Croatian Pavilion), 2022, a discreet but radical project that profoundly questions our relationship to information, technology, and control. It uses artificial intelligence to cull information from major daily news stories, run it through an algorithm, then script five performers who act out a series of spare, minimal movements in exhibition spaces across Venice. Where a visitor might encounter the piece, for how long, and what gestures comprise it that day will reflect what is going on in the world, who reports on it, and how. The artist’s actual subject is thus how we as citizens are informed about our present, and how we are literally formed by the stories we are told. Given that the media is arguably a machine for the disciplining of citizens, the organisation of perception, an articulation of politics and an ideological tool, it is only fitting that media outputs govern every aspect of the piece. Through bodies that incarnate shifts in the news in a society of control, Savić-Gecan raises vital questions about what it means to be human when digital technologies so profoundly influence relations between individuals. Elena Filipovic

Tomo Savić-Gecan, Untitled (Croatian Pavilion), 2022

Participating Countries

CUBA

T E R R A I G N O TA ( P RO P O SA L S FO R A N E W WO R L D )

Commissioner

The Cuba Republic pavilion takes its title from a Latin term used in cartography to refer to regions that have yet to be explored, mapped, or documented, unknown territories that are still waiting to be discovered. The expression is believed to appear for the first time in Ptolemy’s geography (Geōgraphikē hyphēgēsis), Guide to Drawing the Earth, c. 150 CE. The term was widely used during the Age of Discovery to describe the existence of unknown or unexplored areas on maps, either Terra ignota or Mare incognitum, Latin for “unknown land” and “unknown sea”, which represented both the limits of our knowledge and our aim to expand them. Terra ignota disappeared from maps during the 19th century, even before the advent of aerial photography and satellite imagery, yet the ocean bottoms remain largely unmapped. The term is now a metaphor for the “unknown”. However, now that we have begun to map other surfaces in the Solar System, the term is back in use to describe the unidentified areas of planets and moons.

Norma Rodriguez Derivet Curator

Nelson Ramirez de Arellano Conde Participants

Rafael Villares, Kcho Giuseppe Stampone

What do all life forms on the planet have in common? Water. We are all made of water; the rising and falling tides connect all living things to the universe in a choreographed dance; fluids form whimsical shapes in the geography of our bodies as they follow their course through valleys and plains, down mountains, canyons, and gorges. We may seem to have forgotten it, but we are one with the universe and this is one of the reasons we reproduce its forms. Life is a journey through the Mare incognitum, towards the Terra ignota. What is ultimately more important, to discover new territories to conquer outside our physical boundaries, on the Moon, or on Mars, or to find new forms of harmony and integration between humans and nature, freeing ourselves from a limited anthropocentric vision, to reach the shores of a new definition of humanity? Imagination is the most powerful source of inspiration; our minds explore innovative narratives that could steer our ship towards new territories where we could build a New World, focusing more on our similarities than on our differences. Nelson Ramirez de Arellano Conde

Rafael Villares, Fragments of the World, 2018–2022. Installation, variable dimensions. Courtesy the Artist. ©Rafael Villares Giuseppe Stampone, Welcome to Gransasso, 2021. Graphite on board, variable dimensions module. Photo Gino di Paolo. Courtesy the Artist. ©Giuseppe Stampone

Participating Countries

DENMARK

W E WA L K E D T H E E A R T H

Commissioner

With his total installation We Walked the Earth, artist Uffe Isolotto has transformed the Danish pavilion’s exhibition space into a strange hybrid between a traditional farmhouse and a home for the future inhabitants of a transhuman world. But the installation is nevertheless an image of the present. A present undergoing drastic change. A present marked by uncertainty and disorientation. A present concerned with finding answers and solutions to the many challenges faced. A present characterised by both longing for past innocence and hope of future redemption. An expanded and collapsed present in which formerly disparate entities are enfolded. Past and present. Utopia and dystopia. Biology and technology. Human and animal. A bastard present.

Danish Arts Foundation Curator

Jacob Lillemose Participant

Uffe Isolotto Head of Project

Anette Østerby Project Manager

Tine Vindfeld Funded by

Danish Arts Foundation With the Support of

New Carlsberg Foundation Augustinus Foundation Beckett-Fonden The Obel Family Foundation

We Walked the Earth uses speculative and theatrical effects to stage this present moment and a number of the social, ecological, and existential issues it encompasses, with a centaur family in the lead role. It invites the audience to delve into a world that is somewhat familiar, but no longer quite itself. An altered world we have not yet made sense of, and which therefore poses some fundamental questions to the way we live and work – questions that have become palpably real to the centaur family. Should we turn towards the past or the future to survive in a time that is incomprehensible and uncontrollable? Should we adapt to change or resist it? Should we hold on to our beliefs about who we are, or should we embrace the transformations flowing through our physiological and architectural bodies to become someone else? Can we only survive as someone else? And in that case, who? We Walked the Earth emerges out of Isolotto’s many years of work at the intersection of the body and the machine. This work explores human existence beyond romantic glorification of an original analogue world or utopian tribute to the potential of digital progress. It takes on the complexity of existence, pointing out that it only becomes manageable if we dare to challenge our common conceptions of the world and who we are. Jacob Lillemose

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

Participating Countries

EGYP T

E D E N - L I K E G A R D E N P R E S E RV E D FOR THE CHOSEN ONES

Commissioner

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...

Egyptian Ministry of Culture – Accademia d’Egitto, Rome Curator

Mohamed Shoukry Participants

Mohamed Shoukry Weaam El Masry Ahmed El Shaer Organisation

Egyptian Ministry of Culture – Accademia d’Egitto, Rome With the Support of

Commercial International Bank

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... Human being is raptured in an eternal war between instinctive and volitional nature. Instinct can be satisfied by finite things, but volition has no limits and is not satisfied with nothing less than the infinite... if the balance is not attained – and it will never will – thus comes the tragedy... The being would be a metamorphosed monster, a disordered dream like dragons tearing each other in the slime... The plenitude of being will be conjured up before you in all its most sacred majesty; you will crave it with all the infinite force of its nature. We are faced with a state of confusion. Turbulent thoughts sweeping us. Trying to understand and realise what the meaning and purpose of our lives is. Many questions rambling while our minds are incapable to find answers. The soul longs for a peaceful space and serenity. This can only be achieved by obtaining a satisfactory and firmly convincing answer... Perhaps salvation lies in the rebirth, from a womb where all things are formed, a new beginning, a space for purification and salvation for the wretched who has been exhausted by doubts of life, longing for eternal peacefulness... Perhaps surviving lies in a futuristic endeavour to obtain answers that are neutral and non-discriminatory. By feeding the algorithms with our dilemmas in the hope of interpreting what we have been unable to find definitive answers for, throughout the ages. We might be surprised by the visuals and sounds formed in the womb of the future. It will make us realise what our minds were unable to comprehend, hoping that the unplanned confrontation would make us realise the things around us in a different way. Weaam El Masry, Mohamed Shoukry, Ahmed El Shaer

Weaam El Masry, Mohamed Shoukry, Ahmed El Shaer, Eden-Like Garden 01, 2022. Media installation, 23 × 8 × 6 m, 3D simulation. ©Weaam El Masry, Mohamed Shoukry, Ahmed El Shaer, Egyptian Ministry of Culture Weaam El Masry, Mohamed Shoukry, Ahmed El Shaer, Eden-Like Garden 05, 2022. Media installation, 23 × 8 × 6 m, 3D simulation. ©Weaam El Masry, Mohamed Shoukry, Ahmed El Shaer, Egyptian Ministry of Culture

Participating Countries

ESTONIA

O RC H I D E L I R I U M . A N A P P E T I T E FO R A B U N DA N C E

Commissioner

Overshadowed by her husband’s career1, Emilie Rosalie Saal2 gained the power to become an artist of unique tropical orchids and rare flora. Once a colonial subject of the Russian Empire in Estonia, Saal became an elite member of the 19th century Dutch colonial society in Indonesia, relying on the labour of indigenous women to pursue her practice.

Maria Arusoo (Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art, CCA) Curator

Corina L. Apostol (Tallinn Art Hall, TAH) Participants

Kristina Norman Bita Razavi Graphic Designer

Laura Pappa Architects

Aet Ader and Arvi Anderson, b210 Technical Director

Tõnu Narro with

Mihkel Lember Villem Säre Aleksander Meresaar Erik Liiv Production Manager

Sten Ojavee, CCA

Orchidelirium highlights disjunctures between the impulse to collect, consume, and commodify ecologies and their corresponding violent realities. Artists Kristina Norman and Bita Razavi produced an immersive exhibition environment, connecting past and present. Norman’s films explore the manor as a place of cultural transfer between women of different classes, the cage as a liminal space of transformation between the inside and outside gaze, and the orchid nursery as a site of circulation of capital and natural resources. Razavi’s spatial intervention and durational on-site performance reenacts class divisions inscribed in architecture, engaging the viewer to reflect on hierarchy and privilege through performance and addressing historical erasures and incomplete narratives.

Communication

Kaarin Kivirähk, CCA Alexia Menikou Creative Collaborators and Advisors to the Project

Kristaps Ancāns, Sadiah Boonstra, Linda Kaljundi, Maija Karhunen, David Kozma, Saku Kämäräinen and Pietu Pietiäinen (Post Theatre Collective), Märt-Matis Lill, Àngels Miralda, Meelis Muhu, Mari Mägi, Behzad Khosravi Noori, Erik Norkroos (Rühm Pluss Null), Tammo Sumera, Iris Oja, Cärol Ott, Tuuliki Peil, Ulrike Plath, Karolin Poska, Teresa Silva, Eko Supriyanto Commissioned and Produced by

Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art

How do artists reflect on their cultural heritage while engaging with colonial histories and neo-colonial discourses in Estonia today? Choreographer Eko Supriyanto has developed a site-specific performance that also asks: to what extent has coloniality actually ended? The performance will uncover the coloniality of botanical knowledge, seeking continuities with nature, gender, and race. The opportunity to address these topical issues in the Dutch Rietveld Pavilion – which shaped an understanding of colonial relations – is poignant. In the exhibition, the viewer will access decolonial ecological imaginaries and the socio-political ramifications of colonial ways of being, thinking, misunderstanding and doing. Corina L. Apostol

Co-Producers

Tallinn Art Hall, Rühm Pluss Null Financed by

Estonian Ministry of Culture With the Support of

Cobalt Law Firm, Estonian Cultural Endowment, Estonian Film Institute, Kone Foundation, Post Theatre Collective, HIAP, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Estonian Artists Association, Estonian Academy of Arts, Pallas Art School, DSV Transport and Logistics, Punch Drinks, Lincona

Andres Saal (1861–1931) was a writer, journalist, photographer, and cartographer born in Tori Rural Municipality, Estonia. He lived and worked in Indonesia between 1898 and 1920, first as the manager of the E. Fuhri & Co. printing house then as a manager of the photography department at the Topography Bureau located in Batavia in the service of Holland’s colonial army. Saal (1871–1954) was born in Tartu, Estonia, studied art in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), then lived and worked in Java between 1899 and 1920. Her collection of 333 drawings and paintings of tropical Javanese flora was exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art in 1926. She became a naturalised American citizen, settled in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, and died in California in 1954.

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

Participating Countries

FINLAND

C L O S E WAT C H

Commissioner

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.

Raija Koli (Frame Contemporary Art Finland) Curator

Christina Li Participant

Pilvi Takala Organisation

Frame Contemporary Art Finland Project Manager

Maikki Lavikkala Project Coordinator

Francesco Raccanelli Exhibition Architect

Studio L A Graphic Design

Vela Arbutina Head of Communications

Rosa Kuosmanen

As the global private security industry continues to grow exponentially, tasks usually handled by state law enforcement agencies are increasingly being outsourced to the private sector. In an underpaid, undervalued, and underregulated industry, what does professional responsibility look like? What conditions enable or encourage the use of power, and to what end? Workplace culture defines the boundaries of acceptable behavior. As security guards, the role is learned almost entirely on the job and passed down from senior colleagues. In a high-stress environment, collegial support is imperative, but what if your colleague is the aggressor? Close Watch looks at how the limits of what is tolerated are negotiated, and when it is necessary to break ranks.

With the Support of

Saastamoinen Foundation The Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art AVEK The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture Helsinki Contemporary Carlos/Ishikawa Stigter van Doesburg The Finnish Cultural Foundation Embassy of Finland in Rome Arts Promotion Centre Finland

Pilvi Takala’s artistic practice exposes the often-unspoken rules and norms of politics, culture, and society through working undercover, staging social situations, and infiltrating communities. In Close Watch, she attempts to unravel the thresholds separating public and private spheres, underpinned by wider race, gender, and class politics. The multichannel video installation is shown within a site-specific exhibition architecture which transforms the grounds of the Finnish pavilion into an active field of spatial politics. 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.

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

Participating Countries

FRANCE

L E S R Ê V E S N ’ O N T PA S D E T I T R E

Commissioner

A French artist with a plural identity, Zineb Sedira has constructed her work on a personal journey spanning France, the United Kingdom and Algeria. Since the beginning of her career, her work has focused on personal memory in resonance with universal issues, including identity, memory, discrimination, racism, family and liberty.

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 Executive Producer

ARTER With the Support of

City of Gennevilliers For the production of the film

Fondation des Artistes Arts Council England National Center for Film and Moving Images – CNC (DICRéAM)

Zineb Sedira presents a new film installation that investigates the drive to make films infused with political and cultural militancy, which fuelled the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. This vibrant period of artistic activity was marked by the emergence of the first co-productions between Algeria, Italy and France, and the second wave of decolonisation that largely took place on the African continent. Zineb Sedira’s project is testament to and revives the cultural and cinematographic partnerships forged in the past between the two sides of the Mediterranean, against the backdrop of the changes resulting from Algeria’s independence.

In Partnership with

Gallery kamel mennour, Paris Cineteca di Bologna City of Paris (Centre international des Récollets) Cinémathèque française PICTO Foundation INA – National Audiovisual Institute CNC – National Center for Film and Moving Images In Collaboration With

Cinéma Jean Vigo of Gennevilliers French Embassy in Italy Institut français in United Kingdom French Embassy in Algeria French Embassy in United Arab Emirates Villa Médicis The Third Line, Dubai

Following the traces of disappeared images and drawing on extensive archival film material, Zineb Sedira has transformed the French Pavilion into a film studio. Les rêves n’ont pas de titre offers an experience of “fiction du réel” (a fiction of the real), blurring the boundaries between personal and collective memory. In her film 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 Les mains libres (initially titled Tronc de figuier) by the Italian director Ennio Lorenzini in 1964, the first feature-length film in independent Algeria; for this project, she found and restored the reels of this first Italian-Algerian co-production. Conceived as a “nod” to the journals of the 1960s and ’70s, those dedicated to political activism and to cinema, three issues of the same publication – titled Algiers, Paris, and Venice – complete the cinematographic installation. For this new project, Zineb Sedira has teamed up with a curatorial team made up of Yasmina Reggad and the duo Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath.

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

Participating Countries

G E O RG I A

I PITY THE GARDEN

Commissioner

I Pity the Garden by Tbilisi-based artist duo Mariam Natroshvili and Detu Jincharadze is an immersive artwork about a premonition of the end. Through large-scale video installation and VR experience, the viewer is led into a realm of magical realism within the Anthropocene Epoch.

Magda Guruli Curators

Giorgi Spanderashvili Khatia Tchokhonelidze Vato Urushadze Participants

Mariam Natroshvili Detu Jincharadze Organisation

In-Between Conditions Local Partner

Nuova Icona Active Partner

Spazio Punch Project Manager

Tamara Topuridze Sound Designer/Composer

Davit Khorbaladze CTO

Alex Lashkhi (StormBringer Studios OÜ) Exhibition Design

Luka Murovec (raumlaborberlin) Paleobotany Consultant to Scientific Advisor

Rafaël Govaerts, Head of Plant & Fungal Names, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London

For Natroshvili and Jincharadze, born a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the feeling of the end has always been integral to their experience of everyday life and has existed as a cornerstone of their collective memory. Living within the volatile environment of the Global South means to exist with the constant anticipation of various kinds of endings. This end does not necessarily mean disappearance; it can also embrace the beginning of something different in itself. However, the drama of how events unfold too often resembles a dystopian reality or a horrific fairy tale where the metaphorical garden dries out, dies, is set ablaze, and is ultimately rendered empty. I Pity the Garden1 takes the viewer into an immersive environment modelled by the mythopoetic forms of the artist’s narrative. It is an observation on the signs marking the end: a horizon on fire, an abandoned city, a barking dog chained to a wall made of words, a vacant office cracking, a place where supermarket shelves are taken over by a horde of insects. The central scene of the VR experience is a garden of extinct plants — The Ghosts Garden. This ecological crisis, in real life and represented here in VR, is one of the signs of the end. This virtual garden unites plants that have become extinct because of human intervention.

Text Editor

Gabriel Adams With the Support of

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth of Georgia

The work presents nonlinear storytelling of an Anthropocene era garden. 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. In-Between Conditions

The name of the project is sourced from the title of a work by Persia’s most famous poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1934–1967). In her poem about the dying garden, written in the author’s strong eco-feminist voice, Farrokhzad reflects on the sensory relationship between a woman and the changing world around her.

Mariam Natroshvili and Detu Jincharadze, Silence, 2022. Digital image from the VR experience I Pity the Garden. Courtesy the Artists

Participating Countries

GERMANY

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

Commissioner

In her project for the german pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2022, artist Maria Eichhorn focuses on the history of the pavilion and its transformation.

Ellen Strittmatter (ifa) Curator

Yilmaz Dziewior Participant

Maria Eichhorn Deputy Commissioner

Dorothea Grassmann (ifa) Assistant Curator

Leonie Radine Project Manager

Friederike Klussmann (ifa) Accounting

Tanja Spiess (ifa) Communication

Leo & Wolf – Leonie Pfennig and Corinna Wolfien Technical Management and Architectural Supervision

Clemens F. Kusch Martin Weigert Photography

Jens Ziehe Assistants to the Artist

Christian Eberhard, Ben Mohai, Monika Stalder Architectural Plans and Research

Arno Löbbecke Tours to Places of Remembrance and Resistance

Giulio Bobbo, Luisella Romeo; Istituto Veneziano per la Storia della Resistenza e della Società Contemporanea (Iveser)

The Bavarian pavilion, built in 1909, was renamed the German pavilion in 1912. Back then, its neoclassical architecture was more modest in scale and bore a closer resemblance to the neighbouring British and French pavilions. In 1938, the German pavilion was redesigned to reflect the aesthetics of fascist architecture. In addition to a new facade, rear extensions were carried out on both the side galleries and the main hall, with an apse added to the latter. The ceiling of the main hall was also raised by around four metres, significantly contributing to the pavilion’s intimidating appearance. Despite some post-war architectural modifications, the building still embodies the formal language of fascism. Maria Eichhorn uncovers traces of the original building, hidden behind its 1938 redesign, and makes the Bavarian pavilion from 1909 visible and tangible once more, both inside and outside. The project also includes 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). The first of these tours takes place on April 28, 2022, the 77th anniversary of the liberation of Venice from German occupation by the Allies. The publication, also a component of the project, includes texts by authors and conversation partners Dana Andrei, Marco Baravalle, Giulio Bobbo, Yilmaz Dziewior, Maria Eichhorn, Hans Haacke, Adrian Iordăchescu, Vittoria Martini, and Anh-Linh Ngo. Additionally, Nkisi aka Melika Ngombe Kolongo and Jan St. Werner contribute to the project with special performances. Yilmaz Dziewior

Performances

Nkisi aka Melika Ngombe Kolongo Jan St. Werner On behalf of the

German Federal Foreign Office In cooperation with

ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) Initial partners

ifa Freunde des Deutschen Pavillons / Biennale Venedig e. V. With the Support of

City of Cologne, Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North RhineWestphalia, Kunststiftung NRW, Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Russmedia, Galerie Barbara Weiss, City of Bamberg 54

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

Participating Countries

GHANA

B L A C K S TA R – T H E M U S E U M A S F R E E D O M

Commissioner

In its 65th year of independence, Ghana is still grappling with political, economic, cultural, social, and knowledge systems not made of or for its contexts. Systems created within its communities over thousands of years were deemed inferior to ones termed “universal” by dominant powers. As we outgrow and move beyond ill-fitting systems, new ones, not yet defined, that draw on rich histories, are forming. 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.

Akwasi Agyeman, CEO Ghana Tourism Authority Ministry of Tourism, Arts And Culture Curator

Nana Oforiatta Ayim Participants

Na Chainkua Reindorf Diego Araúja Afroscope

Na Chainkua Reindorf takes masquerade and secret society traditions that were largely male, and creates her own mythologies, in this case that of Mawu Nyonu, a fictional secret society made up of seven women, centred within their own stories, all in complete ownership of their bodies and sexualities, at one with the elements around them. A notion taken further by Afroscope’s work Sunsum Kasa, which explores the spirit that runs not just through humans, but through all elements, using technology as a translator of the flow of life. A theme that also underpins Diego Araúja’s work A Congress of Salt, in which the Atlantic Ocean that used to separate those taken from the shores of West Africa to its diasporas, now acts as a unifier. The exhibition is framed by curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim’s concept of the Mobile Museum, which travels into communities in Ghana in cocuration and exchange, with the aim of creating accessible, contextual, inclusive spaces. It operates within the art world spaces of support for experimentation and expression, and outside of its confines in arenas of exchange and of development; here, within the Biennale Arte, and also across Venice, in a series of workshops that explore the connections between Ghana and Venice, through the resonance of glass beadwork in Reindorf’s work, the preservation of the Sakumono and Venice lagoons in that of Afroscope, the protection of salt marshes and rain forests in Araúja’s, as well as through music and food. Nana Oforiatta Ayim

Afroscope, Dreamer #0009, 2021, from the Dreamers series. Mixed media. ©Afroscope

Participating Countries

G R E AT B R I TA I N

S O N I A B O Y C E : F E E L I N G H E R WAY

Commissioner

Sonia Boyce depicts intimate social encounters to explore interpersonal dynamics, often with a focus on unexpected gestures. Working across drawing, photography, video, and installation, Boyce’s artistic enquiry centres on how identities are performed, particularly when individuals are aware of being seen by audiences.

Emma Dexter, director of Visual Arts at British Council Curator

Emma Ridgway Participant

Sonia Boyce OBE RA Contributors

Poppy Ajudha, Jacqui Dankworth, Sofia Jernberg, Tanita Tikaram, Errollyn Wallen Organisation

British Council With the Support of

Burberry Therme Group, Christie’s Henry Moore Foundation Art Fund, Newlands House Gallery With Special Thanks to

Simon Lee Gallery Shane Akeroyd, Bianca and Stuart Roden The Lord Browne of Madingley Ebele Okobi Apalazzo Gallery, Girlpower Collection, Kiara Mughal, Oba Nsugbe, Simon Price, Andy Simpkin With kind Assistance from

Sigrid and Stephen Kirk, MarGin And those who wish to remain anonymous Funded by

British Council Production

Niamh Sullivan, Michelle Tofi, Richard Thomas, Rebecca Cooper, Claire Hayton, Louise Morton Murray, Claire Renfrew, Neil Dawes, Sarah Weal, Paul Wu, Jessica Lindgren-Wu, Zebastian Swartz, Stefan Boman, Abbey Road Studios, Atlantis Grammofon, BYOC Films, rtsound

Boyce was a key figure in the British Black arts movement in the 1980s, actively participating in critical discussions and exhibitions for racial equality. Her early drawings and collages reflected her experience of gender and race as part of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Britain. In the 1990s, Boyce moved away from her recognisable figurative works in which she is the subject, to develop new participatory forms of art making through open conversations, which continue her exploration of the intersections between personal and political subjectivities. Boyce’s Devotional Collection of memorabilia, which spans more than a century, honours the substantial contribution of Black British female musicians to the emotional lives of the public and to transnational culture. It is from this foundation that her new commission springs. Feeling Her Way, Boyce’s vibrant installation throughout the galleries of the British pavilion of 2022, immerses visitors in the sound of the acapella singing of five pioneering Black British female musicians. The exhibition is comprised of tessellating wallpapers, golden geometric structures, and colour-tinted moving-image works that immerse the space in the sound of voices embodying feelings of freedom, power, and also vulnerability. The central video installation shows a unique playful vocal game engaged in by the singers, recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London, as they meet, improvise, and perform acapella – all for the first time. It signals the vitality of collaborative play and intuitive responses as routes to new possibilities, both central tenets of Boyce’s art practice. Emma Ridgway

Fabrication

Beth Mills, Peter Bellamy, Mark Jenkins, Mark Curtis, Andrew Walsh, Nick Wesley, John-Paul Sommervile, Omni Colour, K2 Screen, Asylum SFX, A. Bliss, Squire and Partners Exhibition Production Management

M+B Studio Graphic Design

Twelve 58

Sonia Boyce, Untitled (behind the scenes Boyce at Abbey Road Studios, London), 2021. Photo Sarah Weal. ©Sonia Boyce Sonia Boyce, Untitled (wallpaper), 2022. Dimensions variable. ©Sonia Boyce

Participating Countries

GREECE

O E D I P US I N S E A RC H O F C O L ON US

Commissioner

A U T O P I C T R AV E L T H R O U G H T I M E A N D S PA C E Loukia Alavanou invites the public on a very special trip. The centrepiece of her installation Oedipus in Search of Colonus is a twenty-minute film that transposes an almost 2500-year-old drama by Sophocles into the present and tells the story through a combination of docu-fiction, video clip, farce, and the latest VR technology. Infamous for his horrible deeds, Oedipus is banished from Thebes at the end of his life and goes to Colonus to die. For the first time in his tragic life, he defies the will of the gods. In the face of their resistance, he chooses Colonus, a sacred site consecrated by the gods, as his resting place.

National Gallery of Greece – Alexandros Soutsos Museum (represented by Marina Lambraki-Plaka) Curator

Heinz Peter Schwerfel Participant

Loukia Alavanou Associate Curator

Giannis Arvanitis Research Advisor

Yorgos Tzirtzilakis Architectural Design

AREA – Architecture Research Athens & Dimitris Korres Sound Designer

Manolis Manousakis Production Advisor

Christina Pigaki Head of Production

Olga Hatzidaki Art Director

Phaidonas Gialis Communication

Ute Weingarten & Alexandra Saheb – ARTPRESS Exhibition Coordinator

Lina Tsikouta Pavilion Coordinator

Irini Sapka Communications Organiser

Efie Agathonikou Collaborators

Orestis Andreadakis Eleni Costopoulou Maria Mygadi With the Support of

Hellenic Republic Ministry of Culture and Sports

In Alavanou’s version, which is filmed in a shantytown inhabited by Roma, an off-screen chorus tells the story. All the roles are played by Roma, amateur actors who lend the narrative a grotesque quality through their over-the-top acting. Their biggest problem is identical to that of the aged Oedipus. Like him, the Roma who now live to the west of Athens in an area not far from Colonus also struggle against their fate. Often lacking any form of citizenship, these nomads are prevented by the Greek authorities from being able to choose a burial site close to their last place of residence. Oedipus in Search of Colonus is the first VR film shot in Greece that tells a cohesive story. It was filmed using a complex 360-degree technology, which enables the viewer not only to see but experience through their head movements the entire scenario of interior spaces and drone flights over the settlement. In addition, the sound design is directional, which, like the image, also responds to the movements of the viewer. Inside the Greek pavilion are built four hemispherical domes, in which there is space for three to five posture chairs based on the designs of the Greek utopian architect Takis Zenetos, who died in 1970. The entire pavilion is kept in semidarkness, creating a simultaneously theatrical and mysterious atmosphere, thus becoming a self-reflective island in the middle of the world’s biggest art exhibition. Contemporary art as an impossible place. Utopia. Heinz Peter Schwerfel

Onassis Culture Thesaloniki Film Festival

Loukia Alavanou, stills from On The Way to Colonus, 2020. VR360 film. Produced by VRS, powered by Onassis Culture. ©Loukia Alavanou

Participating Countries

G R E NA DA

A N U N K N O W N T H AT D O E S N O T T E R R I F Y

Commissioner

Édouard Glissant, French philosopher and poet from the Caribbean Island of Martinique, in speaking about the civilisation of the Caribbean said: “We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.”

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 Organisation and Other Collaborators

Ezio Balliano Ivan Caccavale Luciani Carini Cristina Corvino Franca D’Alfonso Arianna Fantuzzi Elia Inderle Fernando Mangone Rina Mills Neil “Bassie” Matheson Peter Nussbaum Cosmosarte Simone Pieralice Fedora Spinelli Armando Velardo With the Support of

CIC Cuomo Photography Galleria d’Arte Studio C di Luciano Carini Fondo FORTITUDE 1780 Arteo Living ARTinGENIO Museum Bar Kaneva Coinsilium Group Limited Land Vorarlberg Studio Tecnico Marco Regalli, Vercelli Turcato Immobiliare, Vercelli Casa della Cornice di Plassio Maurizio, Brandizzo Studio d’Arte 256 Vercelli Fondazione Velardo Grenada Ministry of Culture National Lottery Authority of Grenada Act—Art and Design, Grenada Insurance Consultants, Grenada The Tower Estate Grenada Pure Grenada – Tourism Authority McGuinness Foundation

Using the annual ritual of the playing of Shakespeare Mas, the Cypher Art Collective of Grenada explores the many inputs that have created the unique synthesis that is the culture of the tiny island of Carriacou, a sister island. It is a theatre of the street, of the open air. This intuitive performance art has been passed down through generations, sporting colourful costumes, lively physical exchange, and the quoting of the scripts of Shakespeare, particularly Julius Caesar. Crowds gather around the players, chanting encouragement. The punishment for making an error in the quoting is a lash with a whip from the other player – sometimes not so playful. The artists in the collective have in their research found the influence of West Africa, France, England, Scotland, and even Venice in Italy. A unique feature of this survey is the film of Billy Gerard Frank that takes a historical look at the life of abolitionist Cugoano or, according to his British name, John Stuart. Enslaved in Africa, brought to Grenada then England, he has been an overlooked person in history. His book Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, published in England in 1787 after he gained his freedom, is one of the most direct critiques of slavery by a writer of African descent. The exhibition, in accordance with the above, also reflects on the “right to opacity”, claimed by Glissant, which is related to the right to human and cultural diversity, to multilingualism and multiethnicity. The “right to opacity” means looking at the fertile cultural substratum of each people and individual. Hence, quoting the philosopher, an open boat that sets sail to undertake a journey where every abyss must be met and welcomed as a collective memory. The theme of the journey, as encounter and rediscovery, will therefore be the other main focus of the exhibition. Susan Mains, Daniele Radini Tedeschi

Susan Mains, Shakespeare Mas Synthesis, 2022. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 108 × 144 cm. Photo ©Susan Mains Asher Mains, Empathy of Place, 2022. Installation, dimensions variable. Photo ©Asher Mains Oliver Benoit, Whipping the Mind, 2022. Acrylic painting, detail, 60 × 100 cm. Photo ©Oliver Benoit Billy Gerard Frank, Palimpsest, Tales of the Sea and Memory Cuguano, 2022. Still from film. Photo ©John Johnston

Participating Countries

G U AT E M A L A

INCLUSION

Commissioner

Inclusion, the imposing painting presented by the artist Chrispapita, suggests to the observer a thought on the representativeness of the human being in society, their relationships and history. Chrispapita proposes 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.

Felipe Amado Aguilar Marroquín, Minister of Culture Participant and Curator

Christian Escobar “Chrispapita” Project Manager and Leader

Simone Piva With the Support of

Grupo Apolo ANACAFÉ Universidad Rafael Landivar Museo Ixchel CAMTUR Guatemala Invernowi

Born and raised in Guatemala, a multicultural, multilingual, and multiethnic country, the hyperrealist artist highlights in this painting of large proportions, the beauty and goodness of the Guatemalan people. The colour, diversity, strength, courage, and perseverance of those who forged the country and who do this based on work, hope, and faith. A work that summarises the emotions of the past, present, and future, the values of Guatemalan society in the last two hundred years of its independence. Guatemala’s bicentenary should be seen as a starting point to generate changes in a society that strives not to make the same mistakes of the past, learning to forgive and look to the future in a positive way, with entrepreneurship, empathy, strength, faith, and patriotism, an idea clearly expressed in the artwork. According to the artist, “Inclusion is the present and the future, we fill the suitcases of the past and take it with us so as not to forget where we came from, the importance of being different and unique, and that is the message we must give to our childhood”. The work, a canvas of 700 × 280 cm, in acrylic on canvas, is of great importance for Guatemalan art, not only for its prodigious proportions and excellence of the author’s technique, but also as a tribute to the great Latin American muralists such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, its inspiration drawn from the great Baroque and Renaissance masters such the great maestro (and Chrispapita’s major inspiration) Caravaggio. Also part of the exhibition is a room with a constant display of videos and images that allow visitors to better understand Guatemalan culture. Simone Piva

Christian Escobar “Chrispapita”, Inclusion, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 700 × 280 cm. Photo Roberto Andres. ©Christian Escobar “Chrispapita”

Participating Countries

H U N G A RY

A F T E R D R E A M S : I DA R E T O D E F Y T H E DA M AG E

Commissioner

The exhibition deals with the stages in the search for identity. Its concept, which is also linked to an earlier exhibition by the artist, reaches back to Arthur Schopenhauer’s porcupine dilemma. This metaphor was frequently used by the philosopher, and later by Freud and exponents of modern psychology, as a way of conveying the nature of intimacy. A human, as a social being, is incapable of living alone, and so constantly seeks others with whom to share thoughts, feelings, and love.

Julia Fabényi Curator

Mónika Zsikla Participant

Zsófia Keresztes Organisation

Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest Project Coordination

Géza Boros Anna Bálványos Zsigmond Lakó Communication

Zsuzsanna Fehér Gabriella Rothman Graphic Design

DE_FORM Design Agency Chief Technician

Béla Bodor With the Support of

Hungarian Ministry of Human Capacities

Continuing further with the Schopenhauerian train of thought, the associative starting point for the Venice exhibition was taken from an episode in the 1937 novel by Antal Szerb entitled Journey by Moonlight. When the protagonist arrives in Venice on honeymoon, he sets off alone to discover the mosaics of Ravenna, hoping to rekindle memories of his childhood. The porcupine dilemma fits in perfectly with the story of the novel: the relics of past cultures make the protagonist realise not only that individuals derive their self-identity from their own social and cultural background, but also that one’s present is unavoidably built on the fragments of the past. This exhibition does not paraphrase the events in the novel but utilises as a poetic analogy the protagonist’s mystical experience of seeing the mosaics, in particular that moment when his sense of wholeness is shattered and his previously unchallenged worldview is called into question. It is through suffering doubt that a person grows able to confront her or his constantly changing self. In four larger units, the exhibition explores the ambivalent relationship that links the past and the present to the future and examines the stages by which people map out their own identity. Set out within the rooms of the pavilion and gaining release in each other’s reflection from the burdens of common and individual experiences, the mutually referenced body fragments – separate and yet existing as one community – attempt to achieve their final form. Mónika Zsikla

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

Participating Countries

ICELAND

PERPETUAL MOTION

Commissioner

Throughout his career, the artist Sigurður Guðjónsson has explored the boundaries of matter and the enigma that underlies every object around us. In his works, he cultivates an artistic language that relies on a deep fascination for the transformations that take place in the interplays of form and environment. His inspiration is expressed in the desire to unveil the hidden things, and in so doing he magnifies them to understand what is inside. This creative process brings him to design minimalistic environments that are transformed into a poetic experience for the visitor through visual and acoustic elements. The gallery is transformed into a scenario of observation of phenomena in which the visitor is immersed.

Auður Jörundsdóttir, Icelandic Art Center Curator

Mónica Bello Participant

Sigurður Guðjónsson Soundscape

Sigurður Guðjónsson Valgeir Sigurðsson Project Manager

Þórhildur Tinna Sigurðardóttir With the Support of

Icelandic Ministry of Culture and Business Affairs Business Iceland Berg Contemporary Reykjavik Art Museum

In Perpetual MOTION, he brings attention to the continual flux of energy and an unperturbed level in nature. The artwork blends concepts of space, energy, and time into a multisensory sculpture, which conveys visitors into an exploration of materiality at the edge of perceptual boundaries. The artwork is staged as a gigantic screen split into two perpendicular axes intersecting at a right angle. On the horizontal axis, a large floor projection occupies most of the space while interplaying with a vertical axis that ascends six metres. The screens depict an amplified compound of metal dust moved and magnified by the artist’s lens. This material is distorted and misshapen to a point where the original frame of reference is lost. A monolithic sonic counterpart ebbs and flows beneath the moving image. The foundation of the soundtrack is an immensely slowed-down field recording, which evokes the tone of a transfigured pipe organ. In visceral synergy with the granulated texture of the video, it is stacked with electromagnetic sounds that have been manipulated via granular synthesis. The artwork adeptly combines an intriguing image and soundscape that transports us into a meditative visual and sonic experience. Perpetual MOTION confronts the desire of a disordered state by imparting an imaginary geometry that nature does not provide. Inspired by the space of the Arsenale, Perpetual MOTION becomes a celebration of camera and vision, poetic experimentation, and perceptual spaces. Mónica Bello

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

Participating Countries

IRELAND

G AT H E R

Commissioner

“And as matter makes matter and space makes space, I am a room and bear a room, just the same, whether you are looking or not.”1 Niamh O’Malley’s sculpture and moving image works hold us in the space for which they are made. Using steel, limestone, wood, and glass, she 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.

Culture Ireland Curators

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Participant

Niamh O’Malley Supporters

Ireland at Venice is an initiative of Culture Ireland, in partnership with the Arts Council of Ireland Curatorial Team

Clíodhna Shaffrey Michael Hill Partners

Office of Public Works Dublin City Council Temple Bar Cultural Trust Dublin City Arts Office Mayo County Council Mayo Arts Service Mayo Creative Ireland ARUP Dublin Port Company iGuzzini TU Dublin Limerick School of Art and Design, TUS Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire Lismore Castle Arts The Model, Sligo Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin

On the floor lie undulating limestone forms punctured by deep cuts and reminiscent of drains or the harsh fissures in weathered, sedimentary rock. There are hints at functional objects and familiar structures; architecture’s shadow. Shelter invites us to stand under its awning and look up into a fan of leaf-embossed translucent glass. Vent fills an entire LED screen, concentrated on a single, looped movement of flapping louvers, opening, closing, in and out. Breathing. Time and again, support systems dominate, becoming a part of, not just a means of displaying work. An outsize shelf carries an assemblage of coloured glass and concertinaed metal. A tangle of wooden contours is suspended via a steel rod. These are surfaces, and this is an exhibition, where one part depends on the other, filtering light, bearing weight, and holding together a system of planes and shapes. O’Malley’s works, writes Lizzie Lloyd, “are replete with edges that outline, overlap, and neighbour other edges. Their meeting points accentuate buffed, pitted, powdered, and polished surfaces over which our eye catches and slips.” This exhibition is a call to gather. It invites communality and mobilisation. It is both lure and demand, for touch, encounter, and occupancy. It draws attention to its location towards the end of the length of the Arsenale; a place of thresholds, windows, glass, holes, drains, vents, and a glimmer of water and daylight. 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.

Eimear McBride, excerpt from QUARK, Gather exhibition catalogue, 2022.

Niamh O’Malley, Vent, 2022. Still from HD digital video on LED screen, 4’23” looped, 160 × 150 × 30 cm. Courtesy the Artist

Participating Countries

ISRAEL

QUEENDOM

Commissioners

The Queendom envisioned by Ilit Azoulay is reigned by art: images assume power, break free, and demand to be seen, their frames pushing through walls, their shapes materialising, their gender transitioning – voices being heard. The Queendom asks: How sovereign can art be?

Michael Gov Arad Turgeman Curator

Shelley Harten Participant

Ilit Azoulay Organisation

The Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sports The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Collaborators

The Israel Lottery Council For Culture and Arts Partner

Jan Fischer With the Support of

Braverman Gallery Artis Outset Contemporary Art Fund Discount Bank The Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation Arkin Foundation

The question of ownership over images and of cultural appropriation takes centre stage. Casting off the restrictions of national and male representation, Azoulay opens pathways into an imagined nonpatriarchal, transregional, interconnected Middle East, where identities are fluid, ambivalences are welcomed, and complexities appreciated. The Queendom seems to have risen out of an all-encompassing system crash, flooding out of the digital realm, and spilling into our reality. Large-scale panoramic photomontages present a symphony of fracture and healing, while a collaborative audio work fills the venue with the sounds of a universal language. This is a rhizomatic, research-based fiction, where stories and histories coalesce, incorporating images from the almost forgotten photo and document archive of David Storm Rice (1913–1962), a researcher of medieval metal vessels of islamic art – precious objects that were manufactured in the Middle East, traded in the Levant, brought to Europe via Venice, and are now mostly displayed in western museums. Through digital craftwork, Azoulay disassembles objects photographed by Rice, then digitally “solders” and “inlays” them anew on metal panels. The resulting cartographies display voids, displacements, and replacements in the geographies of knowledge. Azoulay visualises the afterlife of images and their transformations. Within this virtual space, what do images twice removed from their source remember – and in an internetted world, can they be recontextualised? What may at first seem like an innocent foray into a realm of fantasy is, in fact, a call to take responsibility for one’s imagination. Shelley Harten

Ilit Azoulay, Queendom Panel 3, 2022. Inkjet print, 200 x 150 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Braverman Gallery. ©Ilit Azoulay; L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem Featuring: Homberg Ewer, 640 AH / AD 1242. Brass with silver inlay, Mosul, Jazira (present-day Iraq). The Keir Collection of Islamic Art on loan to the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, USA; Baptistère de Saint Louis, 13th–14th century. Hammered brass with silver and gold inlay, and niello, Syria or Egypt. The Louvre, Paris, France; Bowl, 9th–11th century. Copper or bronze, Iraq. Formerly Collection R. Ettinghausen, USA, present whereabouts unknown; Ewer, late 12th century. Bronze with copper and silver inlay, Herat, Khorasan (present-day Afghanistan). Galleria Estense, Modena, Italy; Ewer, first half of 12th century. Hammered brass sheet with silver inlay, Khorasan (present-day Afghanistan). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, USA; Bobrinsky Bucket, 559 AH / AD 1163. Bronze with copper and silver inlay, Herat, Khorasan (present-day Afghanistan), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; Mirror, 12th–13th century. Bronze, Iran or Rum (present-day Turkey). Max von Oppenheim Foundation, Cologne, Germany; Nisan Taşi, first half of the 14th century. Cast brass with silver and gold inlay, Mongol- Iranian, Iran or Syria. Mevlana Museum, Konya, Turkey; Plate, 4th century. Silver with gilding, Iran or Central Asia. The British Museum, London, UK

Participating Countries

I TA LY

H I S T O RY O F N I G H T A N D D E S T I N Y OF COMETS

Commissioner

Directorate-General for Contemporary

Director-General for Contemporary

Creativity – Ministry of Culture

Onofrio Cutaia Curator

Eugenio Viola Participant

Gian Maria Tosatti Ministry of Culture Minister of Culture

Dario Franceschini Under Secretary of State

Lucia Borgonzoni Head of Cabinet

Lorenzo Casini General Secretary

Salvatore Nastasi Head of Press and Communications Office

Mattia Morandi

Director-General

Onofrio Cutaia Unit I – Cultural and Creative Industries, Fashion and Design

Director Maria Luisa Amante Unit II – Contemporary Art

Italian Pavilion Commissioner

Onofrio Cutaia Curator

Eugenio Viola A work by

Gian Maria Tosatti

Director Fabio De Chirico

Scenic Arrangement

Unit III – Contemporary Architecture

with

Director Luca Maggi

Marco Cristini and Francesca Guarnone

General Coordination

Light Design

Luciano Antonino Scuderi

Pasquale Mari

Technical Coordination

Matteo Piccioni Staff of the Director-General

Eva Barrera Secretariat

Roberta Gaglione Support Staff

Sara Airò Chiara Francesconi Antonella Lucarelli Claudia Vitiello Administration

Graziella D’Urso Communication and Press Office

Silvia Barbarotta Francesca Galasso

Margherita Palli

with

Gianni Bertoli General Organisation and Organisational Secretariat

Chiara Bordin Curatorial Assistant

Matheew Steven Carrillo Marentes Coordination of the Studio Tosatti

Marta Ferrara Coordination of the Public Programme

Adriana Rispoli Graphic Project

Mosaico Studio Press Office

PCM Studio di Paola C. Manfredi Production

La Biennale di Venezia

Gian Maria Tosatti, History of Night and Destiny of Comets, 2022. Detail of the installation

Participating Countries

Art can highlight the complexity of the contemporary world, its contradictions and short-circuits, but it can also propose imagery capable of reinterpreting reality, stimulating visionary glances that open up to the future. With this in mind, the Ministry of Culture, through the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity, promotes, for the Italian Pavilion 2022, a project capable of constructing worlds that are both real and imaginary, that look at the present and its critical aspects, but also at its potential, projecting towards a tomorrow with undefined connotations which is yet to be constructed. The Milk of Dreams – the theme chosen by Cecilia Alemani, curator of Biennale Arte 2022 – is inspired by the book of the same name by the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. It stems from the idea that the instruments made available to art can produce systems capable of reinventing existence through an incessant process of metamorphosis and rethinking, which can question the very concept of the human being and the notions of identity, diversity, and responsibility towards the planet. Transforming worlds and sensitive attention to the ecosystem are also the focus of Eugenio Viola’s curatorial proposal, History of Night and Destiny of Comets, a monographic project – for the first time in the history of the Italian Pavilion – by Gian Maria Tosatti, whose title evokes the possibility of looking at the repercussions that the political and economic systems of the contemporary age have on today’s world with a decidedly critical but at the same time extremely poetic eye. So, the Italian Pavilion 2022 aims to present – through a multifocal vision of the languages of contemporaneity – not an exhibition, but an immersive experience within the spaces of the Tese delle Vergini at the Arsenale, profoundly transformed by the artist’s work into a visionary and at times dystopian path. Onofrio Cutaia Commissioner Italian Pavilion 2022 Director-General for Contemporary Creativity, Ministry of Culture

It is scientifically proven that there is a link between epidemics and progress. Today we speak of spillover (species jump) to explain the catastrophic epidemics of recent years: Ebola, Sars, Avian Flu, AIDS, Covid-19. These phenomena remind us how urbanisation and the consequences of anthropogenic development have changed ecosystems on a planetary scale. How can we think about the environment again in the light of current scenarios? What role can art play in building a better world after the crisis? And what potential does it have to bring about change within society? These questions form the basis for History of Night and Destiny of Comets, an environmental installation by Gian Maria Tosatti that, as is customary in the artist’s research, combines a variety of languages, from literary references to visual art, from theatre to performance. In a prologue and two acts, it is about the difficult balance between Humanity and Nature, sustainable development and territory, between the dreams and mistakes of the past and the prospects for the future. The first part, History of Night, metaphorically traces the rise and fall of Italy’s industrial dream from the mid-1960s to the present day. One thinks of the sprawling warehouses between Ragusa and Cremona, the only paradoxically homogeneous panorama of a hypothetical journey into the Italian provinces, which now shows us the tight muscles of machines that “would still like to work” and reflects the frustration of a working class that has reached the end of the line amid unemployment benefits and difficult moves. This scenario sets up the epiphany of the final act, the Destiny of Comets – that is, 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 true visionary and cathartic epiphany. Eugenio Viola Curator Italian Pavilion 2022

Participating Countries

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

Participating Countries

I V O RY C O A S T

T H E D R E A M S O F A S T O RY

Commissioner

Stories help elucidate the value of spontaneous creation when one is looking to interpret and represent the socioeconomic realities of the subject and of the collective. This reality, in turn, generates a concept highly characteristic of the creativity of Ivorian artists, in particular in the new generations’ capacity to merge – through art – traditions and innovations, memories and dreams of a destiny to be built in the contemporary art landscape. Art, in fact, is nothing more than the true intersection between dream and history. Between the subjects who act, create, and establish themselves as authors and their work, which becomes part of a shared heritage. And if this story has been denied to us, then we must dream of it.

Henri Koffissé N’koumo Curators

Massimo Scaringella Alessandro Romanini Participants

Aboudia Armand Boua Frédéric Bruly Bouabré Aron Demetz Laetitia Ky Yeanzi With the High Patronage of

First Lady of Ivory Coast Organisation and Coordination

Ministry of Culture and Industry of the Arts and Entertainment of Ivory Coast Embassy of the Republic of Ivory Coast in Italy With the Support of

Ministry of Culture and Industry of the Arts and Entertainment of Ivory Coast Ministry of Foreign Affairs, African Integration and the Diaspora of Ivory Coast Embassy of the Republic of Ivory Coast in Italy Academy of Fine Arts of Venice

Aboudia conveys an African society torn in its social fabric, in which young people provide new lifeblood. Startlingly sharp images composed of contrasting faces, erotic nuances, and newspaper clippings, in which today’s urban life emerges. Elements resembling street art, bring to life a complex visual symphony whose rhythm is the rhythm of contemporary life. Armand Boua portrays the human condition as a response to the inhumanity that dominates the world around him. His observations on children draw inspiration from street scenes in which urban migrations create a tangle of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and social threads. Frédéric Bruly Bouabré is one of the founding fathers of contemporary African art, a singular figure whose creations represent religion and philosophy, tradition, and legends. Aron Demetz is interested in sculpture as an epistemological tool, turning his attention to non-western plastic forms. The artist explores the world through a parallel sculptural universe inhabited by fictional creatures and mysterious forms. Laetitia Ky denounces the metamorphosis of bodies and the modern definitions of the contemporary human condition. The sculptures created by the artist with her Afro hair represent a powerful communication tool conceived to raise awareness on issues of race, gender, and social justice. Yeanzi reinterprets the biographical themes, the narrative, and the recent history of his country, developing an iconography capable of transforming the experiences of the past into an expressive form for the future. Through the materials chosen to create his works, the artist uncovers the incomparable beauty and aesthetics of the individual, thus questioning the mountains of waste suffocating today’s contemporary societies. Henri Koffissé N’koumo, Massimo Scaringella, Alessandro Romanini

Aboudia, Armand Boua, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Aron Demetz, Laetitia Ky, Yeanzi, The Dreams of a Story, 2022

Participating Countries

J A PA N

DUMB TYPE

Commissioner

A new work by the artist collective Dumb Type. Mirrors on four stands positioned to the north, south, east, and west of the centre of the exhibition room 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: What is the Earth? What is the shape of the Earth? Of what is the Earth composed? What is a Continent? How many Continents are there? On which Continent do we live? What is an Ocean? What is an Island? What is a Mountain? What is a Volcano? Who governs an Empire? Who governs a Kingdom? Who governs a Republic? Which is the largest Empire in the world? Which is the largest Kingdom in the world? Which is the largest Republic in the world? In what Division of the Earth do we live? When you look at the rising Sun, what Ocean is before you? When you look at the setting Sun, what Ocean is before you? Which is the largest Island in the World? How many Countries are there? How are they divided? What Country is farthest north? What Country is farthest south? In what Country do we live? Where is Cape Farewell? ... The sounds of voices reading the texts are emitted from rotating parametric speakers, becoming highly directional beams of sound that travel around the room, suddenly and unexpectedly reaching visitors’ ears. This work relates to the massive transformation in the ways in which people communicate and the ways in which we perceive the world, a transformation brought about by the evolution and growth of the internet and social media, and by the global pandemic. 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.

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 Voices

David Sylvian Maria Takeuchi Kahimi Karie Niki With the Special Support of

Ishibashi Foundation

Participating Countries

REPUBLIC OF K A Z A K H S TA N

L A I – P I – C H U – P L E E – L A PA . CENTRE FOR THE NEW GENIUS

Commissioner

In the inaugural national pavilion of Kazakhstan at the Biennale Arte 2022, we, the transdisciplinary collective ORTA, will set up an art and science 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. He called himself “the Genius of the First Rank of the Absolute Interplanetary Category” and had many alter egos of whom the most important was “the Great and Immortal Lai-Pi-Chu-Plee-Lapa”.

Meruyert Kaliyeva Curator and Participants

ORTA collective (Alexandra Morozova, Rustem Begenov, Darya Jumelya, Alexandr Bakanov, Sabina Kuangaliyeva) Organisation

Foundation for Contemporary Art in Kazakhstan A.Kasteyev Museum of Arts Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Republic of Kazakhstan With the Support of

Saby Foundation Nurlan Smagulov Foundation G&G Marusya Assaubayeva Foundation SAPAR Contemporary Gallery + Incubator Damiani Kazakhstan

Since the founding of our collective in 2015, we have been exploring the higher dimensions of creative human interaction. Our search brought us to the art of Sergey Kalmykov, who was never acknowledged during his lifetime, never had a personal exhibition, and does not even have a grave. Yet until his very last day he painted and drew, wrote and invented, and considered himself “the happiest science-fiction projector of all time”. In his endless manuscripts, he repeatedly wrote, “I will stay for the ages with Picasso and da Vinci because I am a modest professional genius”. He left more than 1,500 paintings, which are now in museum collections, and 10,000 pages of manuscripts carefully preserved by the State Archive of Kazakhstan. We have studied his texts and have decided to handle them as sacred. We discovered the unique set of principles that Kalmykov followed to live such a fulfilled creative life that has inspired so many people. We devised this stoic and imaginative approach to life and art that can transform reality with the power of fantasy and free creation and called it The Art of the New Genius. The whole project of the pavilion was created using The Art of the New Genius – including our self-curatorship and the creation of the real Centre for the New Genius. Composed of rusting robots, a forest of antennae for gathering the light of beauty, an inverted photo-pyramid, embroidered memory drives, and a monumental Circular CardboardLight Generator of Genius – the Centre is a functioning machine/ temple, an immersive performative installation, and a platform for scientific experiments, which will eventually lead to opening of the Portal to the mysterious Fourth Dimension. ORTA collective

ORTA collective, Alexandra Morozova inside the Circular Cardboard-Light Generator of Genius, 2022. Photo ORTA collective. Courtesy and ©ORTA collective

Participating Countries

K E N YA

E X E R C I S E S I N C O N V E R S AT I O N

Commissioner

Exercises in Conversation explores the 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, pedagogy, and history. Both as a conceptual basis and curatorial approach, the project assumes a philosophical and methodological stance, proposing through a theory of subjective reality a key role in understanding the actor or the subject regarding a particular event or phenomena relating to her/his life, and the dialectics between engagement on the one hand, and autonomy on the other. It also opens up conversations about the global and the local, language and translation, originality and mimicry, silence and noise as well as working to establish explorations into other on-going debates.

Kiprop Lagat Curator

Jimmy Ogonga Participants

Dickens Otieno Syowia Kyambi Kaloki Nyamai Wanja Kimani

The pavilion presents works by Dickens Otieno, Syowia Kyambi, Kaloki Nyamai, and Wanja Kimani, whose individual practices are strongly rooted in their respective identities and stories, while approaching their artmaking through a distinguished use of language, words, meanings, and forms, pushing the conceptual and material boundaries and in the process responding to the kaleidoscopic nature in which Kenyan contemporaneity continues to be conceived. The project explores the overlap between conversations, narrative, knowledge, and history, while proposing phenomenology as an approach to educate our own visions, define our diverse positions, to broaden how we see the world around us, and to study our individual and collective lived experiences at much deeper levels. The project further calls for a tone for conversations that have no authoritative moments and generate no authoritative claims and it suggests an understanding of consciousness as developed through experience, rather than through the work of a disembodied mind. It considers all consciousness as intentional – in other words when we try to make sense of something it is always with a purpose in mind. As a phenomenological framework, the project proposes new relationships between reality as a construct and the imaginary as a possibility. Biennale Arte 2022 asks artists not to reveal who we are, but to absorb the worries and fears of this time and show us who and what we can become.

Wanja Kimani, Image No. 1, Venus II, 2019. Still from film. Courtesy the Artist Wanja Kimani, Image No. 2, Expectations, 2018. Performance still. Photo ©Annabel McCourt. Courtesy the Artist

Participating Countries

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

GYRE

Commissioner

Gyre. Amidst the turbulence of endless openings and implosions, energy draws towards the centre of the oceanic void. The spiraling ends amass all the contiguous material with force as strong as its core, forming a vortex that expands continuously. Eventually, the knot of the gyre comes undone and new vortices appear. At this blurred, swollen boundary, where a spiral ends and another begins, there is a motion in stillness and stillness in motion.

Arts Council Korea Curator

Young-chul Lee Participant

Yunchul Kim Deputy Curator

Jungyeon Park Assistant Curators

Kahee Jeong Catherine (Hyun Seo) Chiang Production

Studio Locus Solus (Earl Park, Gisu Chun, Hocheol Shin, Jangwoo Choi, Jisan Lee, Minji Lee, Minyoung Jung, Oui An, Songin Bang, Yeongho Kim) Pavilion Manager

Eun Jeong Kim Editorial Manager

Kyoo Lee Graphic Designer

OOST Pavilion Bag Design

XLIM Website Design

OOST OKOK Services Signage Design

OOST

Consider the world as a labyrinth. While the planets in the solar system orbit the galaxy in their own spiral ways, auroras emerge radiantly with bursts of solar wind. There are overflowing waves, scattering dusts, the convection currents of the earth’s mantle together with countless fragments of light passing through the trees and slow swirls at the edge of the sea, all of them vortices, large and small. Everywhere, in life and in death, there occur circulations, and such knotted connections that constantly gyrate without settling in any place become things—things thinging again in a worlding world. In Gyre, the artist Yunchul Kim imagines the Korean pavilion as a body of entanglements, an embodiment of the “placelessness” of things, presenting his pataphysical approach where mattereality matters rather than materiality thus verbalised. Nameless objects and materials intertwine with cosmic events, such as a flare-like whirl of fluid, seawater flowing down through the microtubes, and the giant knots. As our bodies, senses, meanings, materials, non materials, machines, non-humans, events, and the outer world are in ceaseless intra-action, their potentials emerge and transcend the boundaries of their cultural and social values, all merging divergently into new horizons.

Communication

Scott & Co. In Partnership with

Hyundai Motor Company Research

In collaboration with Korea Institute for Advanced Study With the Support of

Barakat Contemporary Korean Air

Yunchul Kim, Argos – the Swollen Suns, 2022. Muon detector, Geiger Müller tube, glass, aluminium, micro controller, 389 × 210 × 180 cm. Photo Studio Locus Solus. Courtesy the Artist 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

Participating Countries

R E P U B L I C O F KO S OVO

T H E M O N U M E N TA L I T Y O F T H E E V E RY D AY

Commissioner

Jakup Ferri’s drawings mostly depict everyday scenes involving animals, children, acrobats, musicians, and sports activities (such as swimming, snorkeling, bicycling). And then there is this aspect of the vernacular turning into the surreal, or magic, like animals speaking or making music, people turning into birds, people making music for animals or even becoming animals or hybrid creatures. Very often, there are poetic interactions between people, animals, and objects, looking at each other, thus creating lines of sight – like silent dialogues.

Alisa Gojani-Berisha Curator

Inke Arns Participant

Jakup Ferri Organisation

Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport of the Republic of Kosovo

Ferri’s works are inspired by children’s drawings, folk art, and so-called Outsider Art. We see intimate scenes from everyday life, with joyous protagonists, mostly in bright colours. Recently, Ferri also became interested in topics like mobility and in utopian architecture from the 1960s, such as Archigram’s Walking City. Originally working with drawings, the artist started turning these drawings into various media – paintings, embroideries, and carpets – about ten years ago. For the textile works, he has found amazing collaborators: Women from Albania, Kosovo, Burkina Faso, and Suriname, with whom the artist created carpets and embroideries in traditional techniques such as cross work, tentene, hand embroidery, Gobelin, etc. The handwoven carpets from the series Tintirinti (2021) result from a close collaboration between the artist and his son Jip. Very much unlike the detailed paintings and embroideries, they show large-scale graphic patterns. Inspired by computer games and an 8-bit aesthetic, they consist of extensive contrasting colour fields. In fact, they are based on Jip’s avatar designs – heads or t-shirts – in the game Animal Crossing. Inke Arns

Jakup Ferri (in collaboration with Jip Ferri), Tintirinti, 2021. Handwoven carpets (wool), dimensions variable. Photo Leonit Ibrahimi. Courtesy the Artist. ©Jakup Ferri Jakup Ferri, Untitled, 2021. Oil and ink on canvas, 80 × 110 cm. Courtesy the Artist. ©Jakup Ferri

Participating Countries

KY R G Y Z R E P U B L I C

G AT E S O F T U R A N

Commissioner

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 to the myths and epics related to the idea of Turan.

Saltanat Amanova Curator

Janet Rady Participant

Firouz FarmanFarmaian Organisation

We R The Nomads Agency and Foundation

Elaborating on his ethnogenesis vision, the artist travelled to the remote highland regions of Yssik Kol and Naryn in Kyrgyzstan in 2021. Informed by the close cultural ties to his birth land, he channelled his ancestral heritage into researching current day crafts inspired by the Kyrgyz national epic, the Manas. His immersions within the tribal and nomadic cultures led to a collaboration with the local craftswomen and the creation of textile-based installations through a multiplicity of elements including raw yak wool, felt, Kyrgyz yurts, and local pigments. To step into the Gates of Turan exhibition is to enter a vortex draped in cosmic black banners and illuminated by a powerful interplay of cinematic strategic lighting, video mapping sequences, and soundscaped sound showers. The signature centerpiece, the Tunduk, a monumental, shafted cupola, poses as a ceremonial sacred space under which multigenre performances are held on a white felt Shyrdak rug. In the ten-piece Kayakalak panel installation, tapestries hang as imaginary tribal banners symbolising the allied tribes of the warrior-hero Manas, whilst highlighting the importance of Kyrgyzstan’s crossed shaft national emblem. Traditional hand-sewn felt pieces are reinvented to represent a mythical Unitarian Oïmo mandala, produced in collaboration with the Kyrgyz craftswomen. Gates of Turan offers the visitor a prism into FarmanFarmaian’s vision for communicating with the future within the ancestral; a tool for deeper spiritual reflection and as a means to emphasise the need to connect to the positive trace of our presence on this earth.

Firouz FarmanFarmaian, Kayakalak Zero One Study, 2021. Acrylic marker, china ink on paper, 36 × 27 cm. Courtesy the Artist

Participating Countries

L AT V I A

S E L L I N G WAT E R B Y T H E R I V E R

Commissioner

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition”, wrote James Baldwin, as if echoing the idea, rooted in Zen Buddhism, of a ceaseless state of presence and enlightenment. It was a Japanese Zen master who had written earlier, “For forty years I’ve been selling water by the bank of a river. Ho, ho! My labours have been wholly without merit,” asking us to understand that we already have everything we need.

Solvita Krese, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art – LCCA Curators

Andra Silapētere Solvita Krese Participants

Skuja Braden (Ingūna Skuja, Melissa D. Braden) Organisation

Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia in collaboration with

Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art Architecture

Līva Kreislere Graphic Design

Rūta Jumīte Production

Kitija Vasiļjeva Communication

Olga Procevska, Igors Gubenko, Jekaterina Firjane (Copywriter / Levelup) Sofija Anna Kozlova (LCCA) Alexia Menikou With the Support of

Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia

In this exhibition, a home, a river and a body become metaphors, used to signify states of consciousness and map the mental, physical, and spiritual axes of today’s society. This house is inhabited by Skuja Braden, a symbiotic whole and an integral being that the artists Ingūna Skuja and Melissa D. Braden have created by working and living together for twenty years. Skuja Braden merges two different personalities, skill sets, experiences, collected knowledge, and historical contexts. It is a body that changes, interacts, flows, and reacts to everyday phenomena, seeking ways of facilitating and perfecting different forms of human existence. In the exhibition, Skuja Braden’s multilayered installation comprises a full anatomy of the home: the bedroom, the kitchen, the studio, the guest room, and the areas with ritual meanings. The past and present converge here, along with illusions, religions, and convictions, allowing one to not only critically review different ways of reading history but also test our social readiness for weathering the challenges of the present day. The home is echoed by images in porcelain, a material that Skuja Braden has mastered superbly. The porcelain comes to life in everyday objects, fountains, bendy hoses, male and female physiques, and nature. One spacious porcelain takes the shape of a bed that appears to have been sent into the air by an invisible wave. The water that might surround a home is here charged with knowledge. The artists assert that we are all connected through the flow and continuity of different liquids, and that water flows through and past any differences. Skuja Braden’s home asks us to immerse ourselves in and dissolve into the globally connected current, and to make contact and include instead of creating and consuming in excess. Andra Silapētere, Solvita Krese

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)

Participating Countries

LEBANON

T H E WO R L D I N T H E I M AG E O F M A N

Commissioner and Curator

The World in the Image of Man illustrates the perpetual action of the human imagination on the reality of the world. Thus, more than ever, fiction inspires and nourishes our daily lives.

Nada Ghandour Participants

Danielle Arbid Ayman Baalbaki Exhibition Architect

Aline Asmar d’Amman – Culture in architecture Organisation

Lebanese Visual Art Association – LVAA Assistant Curator

Dina Bizri Graphic Design

Lara Nader Mouawad Media Coordinator

Nadine Katabi Project Team

Chérine Assouad Philippe Assouad Farida El Solh Charles Simon Thomas Advisors

Charbel Abou Charaf – White & Case Nicole Araygi – Araygi & Maalouly Dania Bazzy – Visionbuz With the Main Support of

Tariq and Diane Al-Ghussein Basel Dalloul – Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF) Adel Ghandour Dania Ghandour Randa and Ghassan Ghandour Souad Ghandour Groupe Begemot Groupe Vital Raffy Manoukian Nada Mikati Rana and Riad Zein

Nada Ghandour, curator of the Lebanese pavilion, invites us on a symbolic journey into our contemporary world through a theme, a city, and two artists who maintain a political and aesthetic dialogue from a distance, by presenting artworks which are so far and yet so close. Beirut, as a world city, is the place where this borderless theme is embodied: all individuals of all cultures can interpret and appropriate it through their own perception. Only art can make sense of the codes of our vision, transcribe them, and make them echo in one form or another. Thereby, 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 two artists have chosen, as their artistic reflection and creation, the subject of the polysemic urban character of Beirut, at the heart of the upheavals of the global crisis and the emotional instability of a technologised relation to the world. The dialogue maintained with Beirut by the two artists reveals the increasingly heightened competition between the material and the virtual: a paradigm shift that has impacted our environment and our most diverse activities. The architect Aline Asmar d’Amman designed a scenography respectful of the Artiglierie building and dedicated to the permanent dialogue between the artworks. Nada Ghandour

With the Additional Support of

Catawiki The Elie Khoury Art Foundation (EKAF) Website

lebanesepavilionvenice.com

Ayman Baalbaki, Janus Gate, 2021. Mixed media, 485 × 1100 × 290 cm. ©Marco Pinarelli Danielle Arbid, Allô Chérie, 2015-ed. 2022. Video still, 21’. ©Danielle Arbid

Participating Countries

LITHUANIA

GUT FEELING

Commissioner

Gut Feeling, by 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 a 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 a seaweed harvested from local waters. This species of algae, Undaria pinnatifida, also known as wakame, is an invasive plant that has spread from the Far East to the rest of the world – including Venice – as a result of globalisation. It is one of the most nutritious and rapidly renewable sources of food, with the ostensible potential to solve the nutritional problems of the Earth’s rapidly growing population.

Kęstutis Kuizinas Curator

Neringa Bumblienė Participant

Robertas Narkus Fermetation Solutions

David Zilber Research, Development and Realisation

Evelina Bartusevičiūtė, Tomas Bekeris, Antanas Gerlikas, Gaetano di Gregorio, Albertas Mickėnas, Lukas Strolia, Erik Vojevodin Visual Identity

Nerijus Rimkus, Vytautas Volbekas Architectural Interventions

Petras Išora and Ona Lozuraitytė 3D Modelling

Andrius Kirvela, Antanas Skučas Organisation

Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius Communication

Dovilė Grigaliūnaitė Simon Rees Local Producer

Marco Scurati Coordinator

Ieva Tarejeva Technical Team

Audrius Antanavičius, Almantas Lukoševičius, Ilona Virzinkevič Presented by

Lithuanian Council for Culture With the Support of

Justas Janauskas and Gabija Grušaitė, Lewben Art Foundation, JCDecaux Lithuania UAB Litena, autoriai, Girteka Logistics, Hotel PACAI, Sweden-Lithuania Cooperation Fund

Partially influenced by the collaborative and various social encounters galvanising art practices of the 1990s, Narkus’s work unfolds in the tension between the form of an artwork, the representation of the chosen ideas, and the temporal, collective experience of its development and perception. Gut Feeling brings together and engages diverse social groups and individuals – at times also characterised by contradictory interests and aspirations – while the project itself becomes a tool to provoke this type of encounter. As an initiator of numerous experimental art, management, and food production organisations, Narkus often draws inspiration from the world of business and start-ups. By juxtaposing the spirit of optimism and drive with the often-invisible by-product – the bitterness of disappointment – he creates tragicomic works. At the same time, in what may be viewed as an almost careless mix up of fashionable objects and trends, fragments of the latest theories and the strategies of various artistic practices, Narkus builds a multilayered and often deliberately hyperbolised reflection of the present time, open to our perception and engagement. Neringa Bumblienė

Galerija Vartai, Integrity PR, Technarium Lithuanian National Radio and Television Žmonės artnews.lt Website

gutfeeling.xyz

Robertas Narkus, So much time so little to do, 2022. C-type print, 150 × 100 cm

Participating Countries

GRAND DUCHY O F LUX E M B O U RG

T I N A G I L L E N . FA R AWAY S O C L O S E

Commissioner

Rooted in painting, Tina Gillen’s artistic practice examines the relationships we maintain with the world around us, namely through the themes of landscape and dwelling. Her artwork often stems from photographic imagery and purposefully nurtures a certain ambiguity, somewhere between abstraction and figuration, composition and improvisation, surface and the translation of a space.

Ministry of Culture, Luxembourg Curator

Christophe Gallois Participant

Tina Gillen Organisation

Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean With the Support of

Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg LuXembourg – Let’s make it happen

Faraway So Close was conceived in response to the Sale d’Armi, a site whose history goes back to the 15th century, particularly its past as a storage location linked to the military history of Venice: “How could I incorporate my paintings into a place like this? Instead of opting for an exhibition design in the traditional sense – the construction of an architecture – I wanted to work with the space itself”, says the artist. The exhibition brings together eight large-scale paintings that become part of an installation inspired by painted film backdrops, “as if they were only there temporarily, waiting to be moved again, rearranged”. The exhibition is an extension of Tina Gillen’s recent pictorial research on natural phenomena that elude human control. The paintings the installation comprises evoke both the four elements traditionally associated with the makeup of the universe (earth, water, fire, and air) and manifestations of climate and environmental changes brought about by human activity. They represent what the French writer Marielle Macé describes as “uncertain landscapes” in literature. At the heart of the installation is a sculptural component titled Rifugio (2022), whose shape was inspired by a seaside bungalow the artist previously depicted in a small painting on paper titled Shelter (2018). When transposed to the exhibition space, and placed in relation with the paintings, this form becomes a polysemic space to the artist, acting both as a place for withdrawal and a gateway into the world, a shelter and a space traversed by an abundance of information. Christophe Gallois

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Tina Gillen, Power II, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 380 x 270 cm. Photo We Document Art. Courtesy the Artist; Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. ©Tina Gillen

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Participating Countries

REPUBLIC OF NORTH M AC E D O N I A

LANDSCAPE EXPERIENCE

Commissioner

T H E A B S U R D I T Y O F T H E E V I L “Man is the only being who

Dita Starova Qerimi, NI National Gallery of the Republic of North Macedonia Curators

Ana Frangovska Sanja Kojic Mladenov Participants

Robert Jankuloski Monika Moteska Project Holder

NI National Gallery of the Republic of North Macedonia With the Support of

Ministry of Culture of the Republic of North Macedonia

consciously refers to its existence”, and in the context of the philosophy of existence if we continue with Sartre’s thinking about human freedom in terms of personal choice, choosing opportunities and taking responsibility for events and the risk to human existence, the conclusion or contradiction of the meaninglessness or absurdity of human existence is drawn, which is often confirmed in many examples throughout the history of mankind. The project Landscape Experience by Robert Jankuloski and Monika Moteska reflects on this topic as well as many other sublayers. It is a multimedia project that includes video installations, objects, and photos. The “aesthetics” of the abandoned (neglected) landscapes, placed in a new context, with new layers of transcription of the dispositions life-death, beautiful-ugly, healthy-toxic are present in the previous research of the artists, and in the project Landscape Experience they venture even deeper. In addition to the “transformed landscape panopticons”, the project questions the body – the individual as a symbol of power, but also as a fragile and easily vincible force, as well as the dominance of capital, colonial policies, ideologies, and technology that influence the distortion of balance of human life, wildlife, and natural environment within the ecosystem. Hence, with this multinational transtactical project, the Jankuloski-Moteska tandem point out, through a criticaldiscursive approach, the dangers that lurk if serious systemic steps are not taken to overcome the greatest challenges of the Anthropocene, which are a tax on capitalism and government policies, the uncontrolled misuse of the natural resources of the planet Earth in the form of mindless (explicit or implicit, real or psychological, physical or chemical) wars in the name of someone’s ideals, in which we are all victims, and most of all the youngest, the innocent and the idealists. Can the beautiful be at the same time insidiously ugly? Can the aesthetic become a servant of evil, but with the intention of finding the right path to transform into a warning? These questions, by reexamining the thesis of the banality of evil, are probably one of the key dispositions of the Landscape Experience project. Ana Frangovska, Sanja Kojic Mladenov

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Robert Jankuloski, Monika Moteska, from the cycle Landscape Experience 3. Multimedia project installation. Photo Robert Jankuloski

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Participating Countries

M A LTA

D I P L O M A Z I J A A S T U TA

Commissioner

Diplomazija Astuta reimagines Caravaggio’s seminal Maltese altarpiece The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist as a kinetic, sculptural installation that overlays biblical narrative onto the present – traversing 1608 to 2022, from the noetic to the metaphysical. By using induction technology, Sassolino’s molten steel droplets fall from a structure overhead into seven rectangular basins of water, each representing a subject in The Beheading.

Arts Council Malta Curators

Keith Sciberras Jeffrey Uslip Participants

Arcangelo Sassolino Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci Brian Schembri Organisation

Mary Ann Cauchi Romina Delia Project Managers

Nikki Petroni, Esther Flury Production Managers

Mauro Marcon, Diego Chiló Engineers

Ermene Spagnolo, Maurizio Munari, Michele Rodigliero Technical Production

Susanna Sieff, Laura Dequal, Aldo Marcon, Beniamino Piotto, Andrea Bertizzolo, Ilario Munari, Eros Munari, Marco Calabria Communication

Margaret London, Edoardo Monti Graphic Identity

Sam Sciberras, Massimo Penzo, Daniel Haettenschwiller / Maximage Patrons

DMM.COM, Lisa and Thomas Blumenthal, Umberta Gnutti Beretta, Giuseppe Fortuna, Lino Dainese, Rino Mastrotto, Paolo Kauffmann, Silvia and Stefano Gris, Piero Atchugarry, Massimo Cocco, Massimo Giammetta, Sabina and Marco Rosa, Manuela and Carlo Bonetti, Lauria and Cristian Zanussi With the Support of

Department of Art and Art History, University of Malta, Malta Embassy in Rome, Bank of Valletta, Malta Tourism Authority, TETIS Institute, Genova, Fondazione Gruppo Pittini, Marcon, C+Partners, Midsea Books, Valfer, C.E.I.A., Telwin, MTA, IZI Group, Matherika Group, En Joy Energia, Ailis, OMER, Ecobeton, La Barchessa di Villa Pisani by Agena

Upon contact with the water, the bright orange molten steel hisses, cools, and recedes into darkness. Schembri created a “percussive score” based on Ut queant laxis, the hymn attributed to Guido d’Arezzo in honor of John the Baptist, and rhythmical motifs derived from Carlo Diacono’s two hymns composed on the same Latin text and Charles Camilleri’s Missa Mundi, to choreograph the timing and frequency of each descending ember, while Schembri Bonaci’s incisions into the installation itself proposes a daunting salve that embeds knowledge beyond and within our grasp. By transposing the zeitgeist of the Oratory of the Decollato in Valletta onto the Maltese 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, the injustices of the past are reconciled, and shared humanist principles can be upheld in the future. Diplomazija Astuta posits that the skirr of Modernism’s industrial progress culminated in humankind’s capacity to destroy itself. In turn, for society to embody its future self in the present, the signal material of Modernism – steel – must be physically, metaphorically, and spiritually melted to create space for new progress to occur. Diplomazija Astuta is haunted by the specters of John’s beheading, competing political agendas, cultural mores, and instrumentalised geopolitics. Through the re-presentation of Saint John’s beheading in a contemporary sculptural language, biblical tragedy resonates with current world events, revealing the blind spots and failures of the humanist project across millennia: deceit, media malpractice, and the weaponisation of ideas. Keith Sciberras, Jeffrey Uslip

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Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (detail), 2022. Steel, water, induction and electrical systems. 590 × 1498 × 1498 cm. Photo Massimo Penzo

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Participating Countries

MEXICO

H A S TA Q U E L O S C A N T O S B R O T E N / UNTIL THE SONGS SPRING

Commissioner

Hasta que los cantos broten / Until the Songs Spring 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 the anthropocentric vision modelled by a univocal and unambiguous principle of progress.

Diego E. Sapién Muñoz Curators

Catalina Lozano Mauricio Marcin Participants

Mariana Castillo Deball Naomi Rincón Gallardo Fernando Palma Rodríguez Santiago Borja Charles Organisation

Secretaría de Cultura – Gobierno de México INBAL – Coordinación Nacional de Artes Visuales Fundación INBA Fundación Jumex Fundación Coppel

By questioning the practices of separation characteristic of hegemonic modernity – between nature and culture, body and reason, objects and subjects – Until the Songs Spring seeks to actualise ways of thinking and living the present that ontologically reunite humans with what modernity had deemed, in its epistemological model of exploitation, as “natural resources.” The project seeks to assert a wide and open notion of technology, freed from a mechanistic determinism, acknowledging ancestral practices – currently referred to as “crafts,” “rituals,” “popular art” – as advanced and effective ways of negotiation between different realms of experience and fields of knowledge. The exhibition aspires to build a more democratic, egalitarian reality mobilised by technologies that do not participate in the productive gears of capitalism, in a way that attempts to reenchant a desecrated world. The works included in the exhibition explore transactions between cultures and forms of knowledge that disobey the exoticist musealisation of dissident practices. Countering the colonial mandate of reducing nondominant languages to lesser cultural expressions, the works proposed offer the possibility of resisting the crushing expressions of an inoperative monocultural Mexican state. This exhibition is a collaborative effort that embraces the tensions inherent to the coexistence of different worldviews in a modern political construction such as the nation-state. By imagining decolonial futures that may rid us of realities of oppression subduing diverse human, nonhuman, and more-than-human life forms today, Until the Songs Spring proposes a rearticulation of myth and logos in order to offer an alternative methodology capable of unlocking new speculative realities. Catalina Lozano, Mauricio Marcin

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Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Installation view, Los Angeles, 2018. Dimensions variable. Courtesy House of Gaga Gallery

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Participating Countries

MONGOLIA

A J O U RN E Y T H RO U G H V U LN E RA B I L I T Y

Commissioner

Munkhtsetseg Jalkhaajav (Mugi)’s practice incorporates sculptures, paintings, videos, and performances, and explores the notion of pain, fear, healing, and rebirth. Mainly reflecting her personal experiences, Mugi investigates the complexities of female bodies, minds and souls, and the connection with oneself and nature, while capturing the tensions 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.

Nomin Chinbat, Minister of Culture of Mongolia Curator

Gantuya Badamgarav Participant

Munkhtsetseg Jalkhaajav – Mugi Organisation

Mongolian Contemporary Art Support Association With the Support of

Ministry of Culture of Mongolia

Inspired by Mongolian traditional healing methods and spiritual therapy, the process of her artistic creation is deeply intuitive and ritual-like. Through embodiments of the subject matter that evoke strong sentiments and juxtapositions of symbolic elements used for healing and protection, she meditatively examines the nature of her own anxiety and the process of its healing. Her ways of tearing, cutting, collating, and stitching imply pain, anxiety, fear, hope, and patience and creates a specific language that allows Mugi to articulate and manifest her inner feelings and visions. In her works, birds represent the pulse of life, pregnancy, healing, and protection, and female bodies represent her constant search for inner strength, linked with her aspiration of “becoming wholesome”. The concept of reincarnation is the foremost interest of her artistic journey. A Journey Through Vulnerability, the fourth edition of the Mongolian pavilion at the La Biennale di Venezia, presents a series of installations, including soft sculptures, collages and video pieces, created by the artist during the last fifteen years. Spread across three different rooms entitled: Miscarriage, Dream of Gazelle, and Pulse of Life, the artist’s works narrate the stories of women and animals, offering a journey through the intimate, fragile, yet powerful world of Mugi. Gantuya Badamgarav

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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

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Participating Countries

M ON T E N E G RO

THE ART OF HOLDING HANDS / A S W E B R E A K T H RO U G H T H E S E D I M E N TA RY C L O U D

Commissioner

The Art of Holding Hands / As We Break Through the Sedimentary Cloud resembles a sci-fi tale of possible futures, weaving through the intergenerational, multitemporal views of artists from various social and historical contexts and settling in present-day Montenegro. On this piece of Earth where wounded landscapes are breathtaking, that has been suffering from a broken heart for three decades, the future has already happened. We think about it through memories and explore its ruins and archives.

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 Organisation

Center for Contemporary Art of Montenegro Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports of Montenegro Website

montenegropavilion.com

This story originates on the margins of the “world”, which we now call global capitalism, from the space of acute dystopia of the disintegrated “body” (of society, nation, nature) which changes under constant turbulence, influences, and shock; it loses its solid membrane and, like a scattered cloud of ideologies, events, images, fears, and dreams, it floats in time and space. Embodying their visions through various media, from painting and installation to adopting ritual approaches to handicrafts in their practices, all the way to poetry and archives, the artists show us imagination, the healing potential of art that is conceived in, and despite, the postsocial desert. These artists absorb experiences and images of the world and the environment, in which they create and build alternative realities and personal cosmologies, but also acknowledge the possible outcomes of the anxiety produced by the grey present. This sedimentary cloud with its floating landscapes, documents, futures, loves, histories, and even people is detached from the tissues of a collective body that is constantly disintegrating; it can be seen as hopeless chaos and darkness, a constant source of anxiety and pessimism. Let us use this as an opportunity to rid ourselves of algorithms and competition, and weave new connections between actors and elements, exercise the possibility of a new language and imagine a new beginning. The experience of the exhibition envelops and weaves a whole record of experimental poetic text, leading us with the help of audio guides, through the projection of possible futures, broadcast by encounters of artistic visions networked in the exhibition body. Natalija Vujošević

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Darko Vučković, Soft Form IX, 2019. Porcelain, 13 × 18 × 13 cm. Photo Darko Vučković. Courtesy the Artist. ©Darko Vučković Jelena Tomašević, Guilty Knowledge, 2018. Installation, combined media, 10 × 10 × 6 cm. Photo Jelena Tomašević. Courtesy the Artist. ©Jelena Tomašević

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Participating Countries

NAMIBIA

A BRID GE TO THE DESERT

Commissioner

T H E L O N E S T O N E M E N O F T H E D E S E R T Since 2014, a series of sculptures made of desert stones and iron rods have been appearing across one of the most remote and uncontaminated corners of the planet: the north-western area of the Namib Desert. Resembling human figures, these sculptures become popular as The Lone Stone Men of the Desert. Could they represent different cultures set out on a quest for an encounter? Or, perhaps, people petrified by the beauty of untainted nature?

Marcellinus Swartbooi, Directorate of Arts – Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture Curator

Marco Furio Ferrario Participant

RENN Artistic Director

Monica Cembrola In Collaboration with

Namibian Embassy in France and Italy Namibian Honorary Consulate in Italy Namibian Honorary Consul in Milan, Petter Johannesen Namibian Honorary Consul in Rome, Valeria Tienghi Deputy Director of Arts Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture, M’kariko Amagulu

The complex formed by the statues and their surrounding landscape may be construed as a single, comprehensive work in the wake of Land Art, where landscape is not manipulated in a physical sense, but rather through the conceptual impact of the sculptures on the natural context’s perception. Together with the endless desert horizon, the dunes, rocks, and withered trees hosting these artefacts are certainly an integral part of the work, which thus crosses the boundaries of site-specific art: not a dialogue between a work and its context, but a form of indefeasible organicity of landscape and artwork.

Exhibition Creative Direction

Amebe Design Curatorial Research

Stefano Morelli Communication

Jessica El Hefyan Creative Content

Cleopatra Pavilion Architects

Irene D’Agostino, Philippe Rahm Architectes, Marco Marino Organising Committee

Lone Stone Men of the Desert Cultural Association With the Support of

Monica Cembrola for Art Foundation, Algorand, Anders Johansson, Antaares, Beatrice and David Pritzker, DB Schenker, Fritz Vorster, Gondwana, Hertz Namibia, Lucia Vullo and Angelo Varvello, Mowani-Chiwani Safari Camps, Okahirongo Elephant Lodge, Monica Cembrola For Art Foundation, Namibia Media Holdings, Onguma, Ruggero Ceriali, Tourismus Namibia of Namibia Media Holdings, Vellardi, Vento di Venezia , Windhoek Country Club by Legacy Hotels

These sculptures are somewhat akin to Street Art; for instance, in the serendipity of their apparition and the detachment pursued by the artist who has chosen to remain unknown. Still, their distance from any urban settlement marks their stark difference. An influence of Pop Art is also evident, such as in the ongoing game initiated by the artist, who periodically moves the statues around and engages viewers in a sort of treasure hunt. But this category, too, is not entirely fitting. Perhaps a new definition is called for, one which considers the elements of continuity and discontinuity with other artistic phenomena: “Desert Art”. Beyond definitions of genre, however, the distinctive features of this project make it both topical and engaged in a dialogue with a centuryold tradition rooted in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement: “Art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as Art while yet it looks like Nature”. Likewise, the elicitation of its creators – who prefer to remain unknown and be referred to by the pseudonym RENN – specifically highlights the need to refocus on the work of art. “Art Before Artist”: a reflection entrusted to the world’s most ancient desert for safekeeping.

A Special Thank to

Enzo Torri, Cecilia Montalbotti, Giovanna Saladanna, Simone Battani, Studio Architettura Caramob, Studio Grace 112

RENN, My Backyard, 2019. Iron rod and desert stone. Photo @ RENN RENN, Rain for Shade, 2016. Iron rod and desert stone. Photo @ RENN

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Participating Countries

N E PA L

TA L E S O F M U T E D S P I R I T S – D I S P E R S E D THREADS – TWISTED SHANGRI-LA

Commissioners

The highlands of Asia have always emanated a sense of mystique, sacredness, and remoteness. However, fluidity and mobility alongside intersections of knowledge in agriculture, warfare, arts, trade, philosophy, and diplomacy have flourished between communities for centuries.

Kanchha Kumar Karmacharya – Nepal Academy of Fine Arts Sangeeta Thapa – Siddhartha Arts Foundation Curators

Sheelasha Rajbhandari Hit Man Gurung Participant

Ang Tsherin Sherpa Organisation

Siddhartha Arts Foundation Nepal Academy of Fine Arts Global Presenting Partner and Lead Supporter

Rubin Museum of Art With the Support of

Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, Nepal Rossi & Rossi

Yet these complexities often get reduced through a “Shangri-La” effect, which persists in popular western imaginations. This fetishisation triggers paradoxical representations of Himalayan communities as primitive, yet wise; lacking historical accounts, yet rich in spiritual wisdom; sturdy physically, yet bereft materially. In contradiction to a mythical Himalayan utopia – shrouded in happiness, longevity, and bliss – is the reality of an intricately interconnected peoples who have repeatedly experienced displacement, loss, and the insurmountable task of reconstituting their lives. From the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, many Indigenous groups in Nepal were purposefully excluded and oppressed through state mechanisms that benefited both regional and colonial powers. When opportunity arose to exploit their art and livelihood through international trade, it created a scenario that essentialised and packaged numerous art practices into consumable goods, while simultaneously eroding their spiritual and vernacular meanings for the people who produce them. Accounts encoded in oral cultures, woven languages, quotidian rituals implicate the intersectional and intertwined histories of the Himalayas to the rest of the world. In effect, such artefactual fragments serve as a commentary on the uncertainty underpinning both the emic and etic narratives through which mountain communities from Asia are represented and understood. Tsherin Sherpa, who comes from a lineage of thangka painters, collaborates with other artists to draw upon concepts from a shared Himalayan history – nature spirits, nomadism, polysemic imagery – and explore how they have been adopted, muted, reappropriated, digested, and regurgitated, consequently transcending their respective valuations within Bön, Buddhist, Hindu, western, and capitalist worlds. Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Hit Man Gurung

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Ang Tsherin Sherpa, Clay models and bronze casts removed from their moulds in a workshop in Kathmandu, 2022. Dimensions variable. Photo Tsering Dorje Gurung Ang Tsherin Sherpa, Preliminary sketch for a bronze sculpture, 2021. Ink on paper. Courtesy the Artist; Rossi & Rossi

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Participating Countries

THE NETHERLANDS

W H E N T H E B O D Y S AY S Y E S

Commissioner

When the body says Yes is a new immersive video installation by melanie bonajo (they/them), a Dutch artist, filmmaker, sexological bodyworker, and somatic sex coach and educator. The installation is part of the artist’s ongoing research into the status of intimacy in our increasingly alienating, commodity-driven world. For bonajo, touch can be a powerful remedy for the modern epidemic of loneliness.

Mondriaan Fund Curators

Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg Geir Haraldseth Soraya Pol Participant

melanie bonajo Scenography

melanie bonajo in collaboration with Théo Demans Website

dutch-pavilion.com

About the project, bonajo says, “Love is not learned in isolation and, if you have felt it, someone else has probably felt it too. We created a collective spell in the form of a pleasure positive camp, an eco-erotic queer eros, celebrating our kin through skinship. A place of productive chaos and care, where we practised touch tutorials, set boundaries, gave and received consent, drank our own poison at the trigger bar, did weird therapies, and acknowledged feelings as valid. We brought together a group of international gender queer people where many have a bicultural identity and we expanded on sexuality beyond 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 this is embodied in different language structures. Do you know the sensational dimensions of your No? How do you feel when your body says Yes?” When the body says Yes invites visitors to reflect on the meaning of touch and intimacy in relation to their own bodies. Immersed in an atmosphere of softness and sensuality – a cushioned refuge from the outside world – they can explore their own “touch language”. For the Biennale Arte 2022, the Mondriaan Fund has decided to break with tradition and present the Dutch entry at a new location, the Chiesetta della Misericordia of Art Events, a deconsecrated thirteenthcentury church in Cannaregio.

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melanie bonajo, When the body says Yes. Photo Sydney Rahimtoola melanie bonajo, Big Spoon. Film still from When the body says Yes. Courtesy the Artist

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Participating Countries

NEW ZEALAND

PA R A D I S E C A M P

Commissioner

Yuki Kihara’s ensemble exhibition Paradise Camp reflects on pertinent local and global issues from the unique perspective of Fa‘afafine – “in the manner of a woman” or third gender in Sāmoa. She creates an alternate, queer world that is both confronting and hypnotic in its humanity, while redrawing the afflictions of colonisation. In so doing, Kihara amplifies voices within her own community in Sāmoa thereby “returning the gaze” in a profound gesture of empowerment while camping the notion of paradise.

Caren Rangi ONZM Curator

Natalie King OAM Participant

Yuki Kihara Project Director

Jude Chambers Initiative Lead by

Creative New Zealand Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Key Partners

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Sydney Supporting Partners

Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust Pātaka Art + Museum With Generous Support from

New Zealand at Venice patrons, donors, and Milford Galleries Digital Partner

Digital Art Networks Support for the Pavilion

Milford Galleries Pātaka Foundation

Kihara’s luscious photographs in Paradise Camp were shot on location in Sāmoa, from rural villages to churches, plantations, and heritage sites with members of her community comprising the cast and crew. Kihara’s performative photography upcycles select paintings by French Impressionist Paul Gauguin with fidelity to detail in a suite of incandescent images that repurpose Gauguin’s paintings, created during his time in the Islands of Tahiti and the Marquesas between 1891 and 1903. Kihara situates her photographs against a vast wallpaper of a landscape decimated by the 2009 tsunami. Despite its “picturesque” qualities, resembling tourist brochures with palm trees and sandy beaches, the backdrop includes Nu‘utele Islet in the distance which was a former leper colony during the German and New Zealand period of colonisation. Conceived eight years ago, after an extensive gestation, Paradise Camp comprises a suite of twelve tableau photographs in saturated colour; a five-part episodic “talk show” series whereby a group of Fa‘afafine comment wittily on select Gauguin paintings in First Impressions: Paul Gauguin interspersed with footage from Fa‘afafine pageants and Kihara’s personal research archive of posters, rare books by 19th century explorers, colonial facsimile portraits, pamphlets, news items, and activist material. Together, these components meld portraiture, moving image, ephemera, and performance to narrate stories of invasion and prejudice. By addressing the intersectionality between decolonisation, identity politics, and climate crisis, Yuki Kihara’s Paradise Camp takes the tempo of our times from a staunchly Pasifika perspective. Natalie King

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Yuki Kihara, Two fa‘afafine (After Gauguin), 2020. Hahnemühle fine art paper mounted on aluminum, 94 x 72.4 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Milford Galleries, Aotearoa/New Zealand

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Participating Countries

NORDIC COUNTRIES ( N O RWAY, F I N L A N D , SWEDEN)

T H E S Á M I PAV I L I O N

Commissioners

In a historic first, the Sámi 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 Sámi Indigenous sovereignty, this project revolves around three key elements: transgenerational relations, holistic Sámi knowledge, and Sámi spiritual perspectives.

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 Assistant Curators

Liv Brissach (2020-22), Martina Petrelli (2022), Raisa Porsanger (2020-21) Artists’ Collaborators

Nadjib Achaibou, Asta Mitkijá Balto, Birit Haarla, Katja Haarla, Gaby Hartel, Marja Helander, Satu Herrala, Oswaldo Maciá, Hanna Parry, Outi Pieski, Ánde Somby, Eséte Eshete Sutinen, Káren E. M Utsi, Ulyana Yulina, the Sunna family Guest Book

Hans Ragnar Mathisen International Indigenous Advisors

Brook Andrew, Wanda Nanibush Production and Coordination

Office for Contemporary Art Norway

As a Skolt Sami theatre director, artist, and nature guardian from the Finnish side of Sápmi, Feodoroff’s work is concerned with the collapse of Sámi collective life, land-care, and river biodiversity caused by modern industrial deforestation. The performance Matriarchy highlights the imbalance of colonial power relations, whereby Indigenous people are forced to give up what is essential to their lives, and offsets them with Sámi matriarchal performances activating a sovereign future. Matriarchy also stages an auction-viewing of Sámi landscapes under threat. Sara, who has lived first-hand the cultural and spiritual loss experienced when reindeer herders (her family included) are forced to abandon their way of life due to national laws, focuses on the reindeer as the cornerstone of Sámi life. Gutted – Gávogálši is a constellation of forms made from dried reindeer stomachs highlighting their sensate power, connecting humans and reindeer through their gut feeling. A monumental rotating sculpture Ale suova sielu sáiget of cured calves and dried plants stands as a carousel of death and rebirth, fear, and comfort. The trio of works is completed by the smell-duet Du-ššan-ahttanu-ššan, consisting of specially composed liquid-smells washed across reindeer sinew threads, and conjuring bodily and emotional responses.

Architectural Supervision and Production

M+B Studio, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design / Udaru Collaborators

Evergreen Arts, Hans Gremmen with Inga-Wiktoria Påve and Fredrik Prost, Snowchange Cooperative, ZodiakCenter for New Dance, Deutchlandfunk Valiz, Sámi University of Applied Sciences, International Sámi Film Institute, aabaakwad, Art Gallery of Ontario, Riddu Riđđu Festival, TBA21–Academy With the Support of

The Norwegian Ministry of Culture and Equality, The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Sámi Parliament in Norway, Nordic Culture Point, The Fritt Ord Foundation, The Norwegian Film Institute, Canada Council for the Arts

Born into a reindeer-herding family in the Swedish part of Sápmi, Sunna’s politically charged artworks address his family’s struggle against the Swedish state for their right to be forest reindeer herders. Illegal Spirits of Sápmi is the magnum opus of the family’s collective efforts, consisting of five paintings displayed in hand-made units, holding relevant trial documents. Each unit addresses one decade, beginning in 1971. Each painting is paired with a sonic diorama including recorded courtroom proceedings, a voice-over, and field recordings. The Sámi Pavilion’s extended program includes aabaakwad 2022, international Indigenous-led conversations on Indigenous art; and ÁRRAN 360°, premiering 360-degree films by Sámi digital artists, within the largest lávvu ever built. Liisa-Rávná Finbog, Katya García-Antón, Beaska Niillas

Website

oca.no/thesamipavilion 120

Pauliina Feodoroff, Matriarchy, 2022. Performance. Photo and Courtesy the Artist. ©Pauliina Feodoroff 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 Máret Ánne Sara, Gutted – Gávogálši, 2022. Dried reindeer stomachs, juniper solution (antifungal and antibacterial properties), fishline, variable dimensions. Photo Karl Alfred Larsen. Courtesy the Artist. ©Máret Ánne Sara

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Participating Countries

S U LTA N AT E O F O M A N

D E S T I N E D I M AG I NA R I E S

Commissioner

Destined Imaginaries displays 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 has tackled the questions asked by the artistic director Cecilia Alemani, specifically “What would life look like without us?”

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 Deputy Commissioner

Sayyid Hilal Al Busaidi Advisor International Development

Eman Rafay Pavilion Architect

Haitham Busafi Ministry Team

Samir Al Azri Balquees Hasan Mohammedi Ibrahim Saif Salem Bani Uraba Faisal Hashim Al-Shahab With the Support of

Occidental Petroleum Indian Fertiliser Compony Khimji Ramdas Omran Oman Air Asyad Institutional Collaboration

Ministry of Tourism Ministry of Information In Cooperation With

Venice Art Factory WeExhibit

Destined Imaginaries presents two seemingly opposing concepts, a destiny, a fate, or a design; and imaginaries, sets of ideas and values in which we might view our world as a whole. All inspired by the Omani landscape and by larger universal experiences, these works seek out what we may see in the future looking back at ourselves in the past, exploring our landscapes, ecologies, and memories. Anwar Sonya greets us as we enter the pavilion with a filmed performance seen through an airplane fuselage. This work, Speed of Art, is part of an installation proposed by the late Raiya Al Rawahi. Together they considered what had been gained and lost to “bridge the gap between art and technology”. Hassan Meer’s Reflection from Memories is an ongoing project engaging with life in Oman from during the period of the 1960s and 1970s. It invites viewers to reminisce alongside overlapping generations who might peer back through remnants of the past from our contemplative moment of the present. Breathe by Budoor Al Riyami is a sculptural installation that takes inspiration from the vast mountains of Oman. They are made from peridotite – an igneous rock that emulates the process of breathing – and when the rain falls or streams pass over the rock, mineralisation of CO2 happens naturally. Her work reveals the beauty of nature’s resilience in spite of the marks that we have left within the landscape. Finally, the site-specific work Under, Inner, Under by Radhika Khimji is an assemblage of textiles, sculptures, and walls inspired by the blind fish who reside in the Al Hoota caves. Khimji’s sculptures imagine these fish emerging from their caves, meeting the gaze of the viewer. Oman’s culture has long been enriched by these generations of pioneering artists. Together they present a perspective of what a future realm might look like in which we reflect upon our environments, our society and ourselves.

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Anwar Sonya in Raiya Al Rawahi’s Speed of Art, 2017-2022

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Participating Countries

P E RU

P E AC E I S A C O R RO S I V E P RO M I S E

Commissioner

In May 1980 Fernando Belaunde, who had been ousted in 1968 by the generals, was elected President of Peru once more. The illiterate population was allowed to vote and a vast majority of illiterate women exercised their democratic rights for the first time. But May 1980 was also the time chosen by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a subversive group of Maoist–Pol Pot tenets, to make its presence felt. Then, a long period of violence unheard of in Peru would begin, with civilians caught in the crossfire between the Armed Forces and small, compact Shining Path squadrons; and it would last until 1992.

Armando Andrade de Lucio Curators

Jorge Villacorta Viola Varotto Participant

Herbert Rodriguez Production

Patronato Cultural del Perú With the Patronage of

Fundación Wiese El Comercio With the Support of

PromPerú (Peru Export and Tourism Promotion Board) Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ministry of Culture With the Sponsorship of

Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano (ICPNA) Herlitzka + Faria Gallery Graphic Designer

Michael Prado Coordinator in Venice

eiletz ortigas | architects

Herbert Rodriguez abandoned Art School in 1981. In 1985, he wound up as part of the dissatisfied, angry young men and women of the subterráneos (underground scene), in Lima. Rodriguez would champion their anarchist/punk cause by producing all kinds of agit-prop material designed for underground concerts. Done on cheap paper and meant to be ephemeral, when not destroyed by rough handling, it would be patched up by Rodriguez and used again. There was an impending sense of doom and righteous indignation that resorted to revulsive imagery; but also a fully-fledged visuality. Consumerism incentivised by the new democracy, among a downtrodden population and in a landscape of structural violence, was a key issue in the agit-prop. Garish images of naked women that filled entire pages of tabloids and cheap pornography in magazines were cropped and used to trigger off scandal, but also as eye-opener to the hypocrisy of the older generations, seen as upholding a status quo where permissiveness only thinly disguised a will to control male population through selling sexual desire. Rodriguez left this scene when its ambiguity toward the raging military conflict struck him as unacceptable, and in 1989 engaged in his own personal answer to Shining Path. The theatre of war was the campus of Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, a Shining Path stronghold in Lima. His project Arte-Vida (Art-Life) involved the creation of mural newspapers in a mode derived from the agit-prop practices he had developed and employed. He was risking his life and he knew it. For the artist freedom is a never-ending process. Jorge Villacorta

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Herbert Rodríguez, Violencia Estructural Perú, 1988. Collage on paper, 130 x 72 cm. Photo Juan Pablo Murrugarra

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Participating Countries

PHILIPPINES

A L L O F U S P R E S E N T, T H I S I S O U R G AT H E R I N G

Commissioner

All of us present, This is our gathering [Andi taku e sana, Amung taku di sana] explores the diverse aspects of representation operating on the metaphoric properties of weaving: the warp and weft in all situations, the interlacing of things that produce patterns of categorical signification. The idea of language in its multivalent form of signifying presence is explored through the transmutation of several integral units of data that symbolise its original context, from one phenomenon to another, where the end result is interconnectivity and communication. A format of heterogeneity is followed here that initiates a collaborative and interdisciplinary process experimenting with sound, transcription, video, and textiles.

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 Cooperating Agencies

Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) Office of Deputy Speaker and Congresswoman Loren Legarda

Two components in the exhibition therefore interconnect by way of translation. Speaking in Tongue is a two-channel video installation inside a tunnel that showcases the translation of a traditional chant into a graphic score painted by the artist using only his tongue. The other is Renderings, a multimedia installation exploring the transmission of sound generated from indigenous weaving practices and translated into creative modes of transcription, design, video, and textiles. Each channel involves a collaboration between producer and receiver, an interactive process that breeds improvisation and transformation, essentially forming a unique visual language. For the two projects, the artistic translation creates an open system of interpretation that advances a worldwide audience for cultural exchange. The translation of everyday experience, of behavioural profiles and customary events into compressed data – flowing through larger networks of cultural, financial, and social junctures in the form of statistical analytics and symbolic denotations, as applied knowledge or aesthetic sign – tenders a critical attention to the process of making cultural connections that intends diplomatic universality. Reflecting on how culture survives in a new environment, and in the process of its transformation how it can challenge reception through a diversity of representations, to instigate engagement and cooperation by posing critical connections, would be the essence of an art that thrives on complexity and diversity.

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Gerardo Tan, Felicidad A. Prudente, Sammy N. Buhle, Rendering 1 (Iloilo – Ifugao) and Rendering 3 (Metro Manila – Ifugao). Installation view, Vargas Museum, Quezon City 2019. Photo Gerardo Tan

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Participating Countries

POLAND

RE-ENCHANTING THE WORLD

Commissioners

Re-enchanting the World 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 Renaissance astrological frescos. The symbols of the Palazzo Schifanoia, including zodiac signs, the decan system, the time cycles, and the migration of images across time and continents – between India, Persia, Asia Minor, ancient Greece, Egypt, and Europe – stand as visual and ideological points of reference, which the artist inscribes in a Polish–Roma identity and the vernacular historical experience of Europe’s largest minority.

Janusz Janowski (from 2022), Hanna Wróblewska (until 2021) / Zachęta – National Gallery of Art Curators

Wojciech Szymański Joanna Warsza Participant

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas Organisation

Zachęta – National Gallery of Art With the Financial Support of

Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland Partners

Adam Mickiewicz Institute European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture Polish Institute in Rome Media Patronage

Vogue Poland Website

labiennale.art.pl

Each of the twelve months of the calendar is divided into three parts. The upper band features the world of Roma mythology, history, and the past. It reappropriates and decolonises the 17th century prints by Lorraine engraver Jacques Callot, evidence of a quasi-colonial view of the Roma people, already being constructed as the Other of Europe. The middle band is a space of the re-enchantment of the world through female strength, astrology, and Tarot cards. Herstories of Roma women are combined with astrological signs and decans, and real figures with magic, turning them into guardians of fate or prophetesses. The lower band depicts scenes from everyday life in the artist’s settlement in Czarna Góra in the Tatra mountains. Many fabrics come from the wardrobes of the people depicted, “throwing the material into the painting”, making it a carrier of micro and macro histories. The title of the project derives from Silvia Federici’s book Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018), which recovers the idea of community and rebuilding relationships with others, including nonhuman actors. As such, re-enchanting – a nonviolent process in which women play an important role – reverses the unfortunate fate of the world, removing its evil spell. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is a Polish–Roma artist, activist, and educator who is turning the tide of social injustice by decolonising Roma, Polish, and European culture and building an affirmative iconography of the largest European minority. Wojciech Szymański, Joanna Warsza

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

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Participating Countries

PORTUGAL

VA M P I R E S I N S PA C E

Commissioner

Through a new film, poetry, and immersive exhibition design, Pedro Neves Marques’s Vampires in Space takes the form of a narrative installation that transforms the second floor of Palazzo Franchetti into an unexpected spaceship, within which the wistful existence, dramas, and routines of its five passengers unfold during a centuries-long trip to a faraway exoplanet. The project contrasts the Gothic Venetian style of the palazzo with a speculative sensibility typical of Neves Marques’s practice, known for spanning art and cinema, critical writing, fiction, and poetry.

Direção-Geral das Artes Curators

João Mourão e Luís Silva Participant

Pedro Neves Marques Public Program

Filipa Ramos With the Support of

Fundação EDP Fundação Carmona e Costa Fundação PLMJ Fundación Botín Galleria Umberto Di Marino Collezione E. Righi Matteo Novarese, Bologna Collezione Alloggia, Roma Collezione Renato Carraffa, Roma Collezione Agovino, Napoli AICEP Portugal Global RTP – Rádio e Televisão de Portugal CURA. Magazine Jornal de Letras

Vampires in Space resorts to the figure and expectations of what we consider a “vampire” to address issues of gender identity, nonnuclear families, queer reproduction, as well as the role of intimacy and mental health today. The vampire’s imagined longevity, reinforced here by a geographical distance from planet Earth and the notion of humanity, allows for a retrospective exercise in what could be called a “science autofiction” anchored in Neves Marques’s own trans nonbinary experience, as well as a political critique of an extensive history of control over bodies and desire. If vampires have always reflected epochal debates on gender, from the Victorian era to feminist emancipation and the AIDS crisis, how do they respond to contemporary biotechnology or the emancipation of queer lives and ecologies? As is characteristic of Neves Marques’s work, Vampires in Space is built on an equilibrium between forthright sociopolitical critique, an uncommon storytelling speculation, and the creative and emotional place of personal exposure, invoking a space of intellectual and poetic freedom for art. At once funny and tragic, kind and empowering, Vampires in Space presents a closed cycle between memories of past and perhaps future lives and the melancholic reality of a trip to a faraway planet – after all, in space it’s always night and, in their immortality, vampires are the perfect beings to deal with the incommensurability of spatial distances. João Mourão, Luís Silva

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Pedro Neves Marques, Vampires in Space, 2022. Film still. Courtesy Galleria Umberto Di Marino; Foi Bonita a Festa

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Participating Countries

ROM A N I A

Y O U A R E A N O T H E R M E —A C AT H E D R A L O F T H E B O DY

Commissioner

You Are Another Me—A Cathedral of the Body by artist and filmmaker Adina Pintilie is a multichannel installation that emerges from her ongoing research into the politics and poetics of intimacy and the body. Amidst the global resurgence of right-wing ideologies as well as the growing polarities between people and between belief systems, Pintilie imagines a space of togetherness beyond borders and binaries. Contributing to the current conversations towards reassessing the normative in gender, sexuality, bodily ability, and diversity, Pintilie’s perspective is rooted in her personal experience, context, and research. 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 installation’s protagonists, her artistic cosmos embodies practices and deep psychological investigations inspired by Family Constellations, psychosomatics, trauma therapy, and bodywork practices.

Attila Kim Curators

Cosmin Costinaș Viktor Neumann Participant

Adina Pintilie Project Manager

Corina Bucea Creative Producer

Bianca Oana Media Exhibition Design

Martin Backhaus Director of Photography

George Chiper – Lillemark Sound Design

Manuel Grandpierre VR Installation Design

Augmented Space Agency Mediation and Education

Daniel Neugebauer, Larisa Oancea Communication

Georgiana Petcu Sam Talbot Initiated by

Manekino Cultural Association Organisation

Romanian Ministry of Culture, Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Romanian Cultural Institute Co-Producers

Manekino Films, Avanpost, Snaporazverein In Collaboration with

Eidotech, H3 & Haustik With the Support of

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Goethe-Institut Bukarest, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media, ARCUB, ERSTE Foundation, UNATC National University of Theater and Film Bucharest, CESI – Center of Excellence in Image Studies Bucharest, Università Iuav di Venezia, Tudor Havriliuc and David Corbell, Andrei Dunca, UniCredit Bank, ARAC Romanian Contemporary Art Association, Anca Poterașu Gallery, KGP Filmproduktion, Vinexpert, Grup Transilvae, Sky Tour, Christa Gebert, Spector Books, Dispozitiv Books, Cărturești, mediaTRUST, Motivation Romania Foundation, Mozaiq Association

The Romanian pavilion is conceived as a site to reflect upon embodied forms of spiritual practice and on the body (one’s own as much as the other’s) as a device to process recognised and unrecognised history, trauma, and desires. It proposes possibilities to see, think, and relate, destabilising ingrained visual rhetoric and the politics of the gaze. Against the backdrop of complex histories of institutionalised normativity, their habitual denial of the body, and a traditionally corrosive climate of shame, Pintilie transforms the historically loaded Romanian pavilion into a contemporary cathedral that celebrates connections between bodies beyond any preconceptions and makes space for transformative experiences. You Are Another Me—A Cathedral of the Body marks the next stage of Pintilie’s multiplatform research on intimacy, which began with her feature film Touch Me Not, winner of the Golden Bear at the 2018 Berlinale. The exhibition finds its extension through a VR installation at the Romanian Institute for Culture and Humanistic Research. Cosmin Costinaș, Viktor Neumann

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Adina Pintilie, You Are Another Me—A Cathedral of the Body , 2022. Nine-channel installation, featuring (from left to right) performers Hermann Mueller, Dirk Lange, Grit Uhlemann, Christian Bayerlein, Laura Benson, director of photography George Chiper-Lillemark. Courtesy the Artist Adina Pintilie, You Are Another Me—A Cathedral of the Body , 2022. Nine-channel installation, performer Christian Bayerlein, director of photography George Chiper-Lillemark. Courtesy the Artist

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Participating Countries

RUS S I A

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On 27 February 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, the Curator Raimundas Malašauskas and the 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.

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Participating Countries

REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO

P O S T U M A N O M E TA M O R F I C O

Commissioner

Over the entire evolution of the human species, the material dimension of knowing how to make and modify things has often allowed itself to be led – at times successfully, other times unwisely – by the immaterial dimension of dream. More specifically, by a long-standing, enduring dream: the desire to prolong life, heal diseases, transform physical features, hybridise, or manufacture new species, or morph a body into a different one.

Riccardo Varini Curator

Vincenzo Rotondo Participants

Elisa Cantarelli, Nicoletta Ceccoli, Endless, Michelangelo Galliani, Rosa Mundi, Roberto Paci Dalò, Anne-Cécile Surga, Michele Tombolini Scientific Committee

Alessandro Bianchini, Cristian Contini, Roberto Felicetti, Fulvio Granocchia, Pasquale Lettieri, James Putnam Riccardo Varini, Angela Vettese Organisation

FR Istituto d’Arte Contemporanea Cris Contini Contemporary Project Manager

Sandra Sanson Graphic Design

Rovai Weber Design Exhibition Setup

Alfa Production, Baglietto Marine Steel, Aldo Cichero Design Consultancy

Alfredo Varone Lagoon Exhibition

Zepeling, Motonavi Giro Libero Fashion Show

Elisabetta Franchi With the Support of

Segreteria di Stato per l’Istruzione e la Cultura, FR Art Collection, Cris Contini Contemporary, Fondazione Donà dalle Rose, Comac International AM Elenka, CEFI, Art Style Magazine, Amoretti, D’Amico D&D Italia Additional Support

Alluminio Sammarinese, Baulificio Italiano Sorelle Roncato, Fondazione Orestiadi, Museo delle Trame Mediterranee, Università degli Studi di San Marino, Usmaradio Technical Support

Antonella Modica

Biotechnologies have been progressively turning this ambition into a reality: thanks to recent scientific discoveries, the shift from biotechnology to synthetic biology, supported by nanotechnology, is no longer restricted to the area of repairing or replacing imperfect or transient natural features and, instead, has been steering towards the actual creation of new artificial biological apparatuses. One may well wonder where the boundaries of what is human lie, or what the limits of nature are; that is, how far we can go while keeping within the definition of a human species which is integrated into a natural context and when, on the contrary, we are definitely out of those borders. Thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Leonardo Caffo take this contemporary dichotomy as a given, and register an increasingly apparent 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. To save human lives insofar as they are human, we need both technology and ethics in their mutual specificity and interplay. All of this demonstrates the impossibility of clearly separating human identity from a personal one. We are aware that to save human individuals, human life needs to be saved on the level of its deepest relationship (a Microcosmic one) with Nature (the Macrocosm). The Metaphoric 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.

Comunication

CSArt – Comunicazione per l’Arte, Frequenzagrafica Collaboration

Istituti Scolastici Iervolino

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Endless, The Endless Transfiguration, 2022 (detail). Digital and hand painted design collaged onto wood

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Participating Countries

SAUDI ARABIA

T H E T E AC H I N G T R E E

Commissioner

The Teaching Tree renders the drawn line in three dimensions, forming a monolith tree-like installation that occupies and consumes the space it inhabits. The site-specific work is carefully handcrafted with woven organic matter activated through intermittent tremors and vibrations, creating a visceral effect on the viewer.

Visual Arts Commission, Ministry of Culture Curator

Reem Fadda Participant

Muhannad Shono Assistant Curator

Rotana Shaker

Muhannad Shono’s work, from installations that have utilised robotics and natural and industrial materials to drawings and comics, is defined by his practice of questioning truths and ontologies; the very basic elemental concepts or practices of living, such as the impact of writing or the power of the line or generation of thought. Shono does so while juxtaposing technology with myths, histories, traditions, and nature. Ideas pertaining to regeneration and rebirth figure prominently in his practice, which includes a series of artworks that interrogate the potential of the drawn line. The featuring of the drawn line in Shono’s work stems from a personal, defining encounter with ways of the past and previous beliefs relating to figurative representations and the act of drawing lines. Similarly, Shono was inspired by the figure of Al Khidr to investigate life cycles and power of nature and regeneration. These references have created an imaginative practice that reclaims and depicts the line in a way that gives it power to become anew, to flourish, and to grow. The Teaching Tree references the drawn line, but it has overgrown to encapsulate many other dimensions. This object becomes emblematic and dichotomous in representing various structures of power, such as the written word, the engraved mark, and its irreversible effect on history. It also appears as the embodiment of technology or perhaps an adrift carcass drenched with spilt black oil. Ultimately, The Teaching Tree 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. The marks left over remain as warning signs of struggles past and yet to come. Yet Shono’s artwork also transmits a message of wisdom contained in nature itself and urges us to learn from it.

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Muhannad Shono, Artist impression, 2022. Courtesy the Artist. ©Muhannad Shono Muhannad Shono, Artist sketch (detail), 2022. Courtesy the Artist. ©Muhannad Shono

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Participating Countries

SERBIA

WA L K I N G W I T H WAT E R

Commissioner

E N T E R I N G T H E P I C T U R E You enter a space that is a fiction. It is an abstraction of time and space. It is pure modernist painting through which the artist returns reality to the picture. You enter a relationship mediated by technology, inverted by the artist. The relationship that you become part of underlines relations to technology and nature – in this case water as part of our body, but also water as our connection point rather than as a separation. It underlines a critique of art and its constant attempt to reinvent itself by moving away from reality.

Maja Kolaric Curator

Biljana Ciric Participant

Vladimir Nikolic Organisation

Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade Under the Patronage of

Ministry of Culture and Media of Republic of Serbia Space Design

Segolene Doubernet Visual Identity

Toby Tam

WAT E R A N D U S We are all bodies of water. Water within us and around us makes us think about relational ontologies and our own relationship to other bodies of water. Water movement challenges a western understanding of linear time. Its movement is such that it doesn’t allow us to determine its beginning and its end. Thinking with water suggests staying with the trouble, as Donna Haraway advocates. Our relationship to the sea has in part been established through cinema that emerged in the early 20th century when the moving image contained extractivist elements towards the sea at the same time as swimming became a hobby rather than a survival skill. T E C H N O L O G Y The artist’s relationship with technology is as obsessive as his relationship with water. The presence of this relationship is made invisible in moving away from the idea of spectacle and the celebration of new technology, but the artist provides the ground for re-thinking the tools and methodologies that we use to mediate the creation of the image. Technology here brings us into a position which proposes how to listen to images and how to listen to silence. Gestures are repeated over and over again in a constant loop. As Deleuze said, “repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but it does change something in the mind which contemplates it”. E X T E N D E D O B J E C T– B O O K

An artist book that accompanies the exhibition deepens the discourse around it. The book explores publishing as an incubator for different forms of editorial, curatorial, and artistic practices.

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Vladimir Nikolić, 800m, 2019. CinemaDNG image sequence converted to 4K video, 14’10’’. Courtesy the Artist

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Participating Countries

SINGAPORE

PULP III: A SHORT BIO GRAPHY OF THE BANISHED BO OK

Commissioner

Taking the form of a book, film, and paper maze, this solo presentation marks the midpoint of Shubigi Rao’s ten-year project titled Pulp that explores the history of book destruction and the futures of knowledge. Drawing on footage filmed in Venice and Singapore interwoven with prior research, Rao creates a densely layered work that is both a glorious tribute and a haunting elegy to shared stories of humanity and communities of print.

Rosa Daniel – National Arts Council Curator

Ute Meta Bauer Participant

Shubigi Rao Architect

Laura Miotto Graphic Designers

Benson Chong and Felix Sng – Studio SWELL Book Author

Shubigi Rao Editors

Leena Taneja Rao, Dan Koh Publisher

Rock Paper Fire Singapore Printer

Grafiche Veneziane Film Director, Writer and Cinematographer

Shubigi Rao Film editor

Daniel Hui Sound designer

Zai Tang Paper Maze

Artworks by Shubigi Rao Project Managers

Exploring the precarity and 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, Rao has sought out a vast array of stories told by individuals. From the antiquarian bookstore owner who rooted himself in Venice, to the vivid archive of IVESER (Istituto veneziano per la storia della resistenza e della società contemporanea) that collects memories of Venetian women partisans and antifascists, to the Eurasians attempting to revive the endangered language of Kristang, to a Singaporean print historian who retraces the cosmopolitanism of Malay print through lithography, to the Hannae archive of worker movements in Seoul, Rao gathers half-truths, hearsay, contested narratives, and secrets – vital histories that have often been deliberately obscured by those in power and by the expediencies of capital. Embodying her artistic method of trust and kinship, Rao’s work turns these stories over to the public as seeds of knowledge to germinate small libraries, resist erasure, and circumvent geopolitical and cultural divides: five thousand copies of Pulp Vol. III are waiting in the pavilion to be disseminated throughout the wider world. In a time of great human and ecological loss, the exhibition is a space for the persistence of human thought and connection, and a moment of listening generously and writing meaningfully together.

Mary Ann Ng, Tian Lim Curator Assistant

Kathleen Ditzig Artist Assistant

Davide Tolfo Fabricator

Attitudine Forma Lighting Designer

Jan Kroeze Audio-Visual Consultant

Eidotech With the Support of

Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, Singapore 142

Cover of racy Jawi novel published by Qalam Press, Singapore, as shown by Faris Joraimi, Singapore. Courtesy the Artist. ©Shubigi Rao Complaint copy of Venetian Red, by Pier Maria Pasinetti, censored and renamed by him to Amputations Bompiani, in retaliation to a heavily-edited edition of his novel by his publisher Bompiani, Venice. Courtesy the Artist. ©Shubigi Rao

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Participating Countries

REPUBLIC O F S L OV E N I A

WITHOUT A MASTER

Commissioner

Bursting from a pronounced vitalism, Marko Jakše’s stunning fantasy universe is articulated in a distinct painterly idiom the artist has been honing for three decades. Through his suggestive and eruptive motifs, Jakše gives free rein to his instincts and experience, which has earned him the reputation of an intuitive artistic genius deliberately going against the grain of contemporary postconceptual trends, opting instead to paint spaces of human imagination.

Aleš Vaupotič Curator

Robert Simonišek Participant

Marko Jakše Organisation

Moderna galerija Association for Culture and Education KIBLA Eiletz Ortigas Architects Aurora Fonda Gorazd Krnc Ana Korenini, Borut Kovačec (VIKIDA) Jaka Železnikar Narvika Bovcon With the Support of

The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia

Jakše ranks among those artists who find inspiration in inventive ways of spontaneous expression rather than theory and craftsmanship, with the artist’s body playing an important part in the process. He is an alert admirer of nature, which he penetrates with the innocent eyes of a child, exploring its fragments in their material and immaterial aspects, and ingeniously and sensuously bringing them into more discerningly physical, psychedelic, or cosmic perspectives. Rich in oneiric undertones, his canvases depict paradoxical, antithetical entities relating to the symbols and relics of sunken civilisations, spirituality, religions, mythologies, and art heritage. The painter’s visions unveil an antiworld of mysteries, curiosities, and miracles set in archetypal landscapes and timeless architecture. In the newly created spaces, silence merges with shrieks, physical reality with the metaphysical, the secular with the sacral. Numerous metamorphoses intertwine in his works: artistic, physical, and spiritual. Animals and strange creatures dominate over humans, actual species existing on Earth are joined by hermaphrodites and apparitions from dream islands, unknown expanses of the universe, or the future. In heightened emotional states, the figures, the shrieking animals, and the hybrid creatures forge complex relationships through ritual gestures. Like Leonora Carrington and other artists who tapped into their imagination as free play, Jakše, too, exposes the animalistic and divine or demonic elements in human beings, while underscoring the social aspects of animals and alien beings. In the context of this year’s Exhibition theme, Jakše’s paintings challenge the idea of controlling nature and the related categories of existence, the scientific systems, and the knowledge of what actually 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. Robert Simonišek

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Participating Countries

REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

INTO THE LIGHT

Commissioner

Like other nations, South Africa has been affected by Covid-19. South Africa’s national exhibition proposes that as ruinous as the pandemic has been, adversity can bring opportunity.

Nosipho Nausca Jean Ngcaba Curator

Amé Bell Participants

Roger Ballen Lebohang Kganye Phumulani Ntuli Organisation

Zapparrata Gering Project Director

Michael Gering Project Manager

Grace Rapholo Project Coordinator

Thuli Mlambo-James Editor

Richard Barnes Translation

Maria Gering Administrators

Amanda Ballen Sarie Pretorius Laura Buccimazza With the Support of

South African government, Department of Sport, Arts and Culture

The lockdowns led to a “new normal” with home isolation and restrictions. While this enforced isolation can be detrimental, it also provides the opportunity to turn our focus inwards. The theme Into the Light is an invitation to use this opportunity to step into the light of self-discovery. The featured artists come to the Biennale Arte 2022 with sophisticated use of photography, new media, and technology, representing widespread, dynamic artistic innovation from South Africa. Roger Ballen’s exhibition showcases his book The Theatre of the Apparitions. Ballen drew inspiration from etchings which inmates of an abandoned women’s prison created by scraping off the paint used to blacken the windows. He devised his own techniques to create backlit images which he then photographed. These transport the viewer into a fantasy realm of haunting images in which fossilised facial forms and dismembered figures interact with ghostly shadows in bizarre rituals. Lebohang Kganye uses photography, theatre, animation, cuttings, and sculpture to realise her autobiographical artistic vision. Her exhibits are drawn from B(l)ack to Fairy Tales. She portrays herself as Snow Black in cameos from her childhood fairy tales but set in an African township. Kganye questions the pervasive influence of western fairy tale mythology, its “happily ever after” ethos at odds with the poverty of her childhood.

Additional Support

Barloworld Akwethu Engineering and Development

Phumulani Ntuli’s work, such as Godide, is based on fictional geographies, simulation, archive, and representation. He explores these through a collision between documentary and fiction using collages, performance, and stop-motion animation. A common theme is how we come to define ourselves through reality and fantasy. 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.

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Lebohang Kganye, Untitled 5, 2011. Photographic inkjet print on cotton rag paper, 59.4 × 84.1 cm Phumulani Ntuli, At the see, episode 1, 2021. Film still from single-channel video 4K, 7’17”

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Participating Countries

S PA I N

CORRECTION

Commissioner

The project is, at first sight, straightforward enough: to shift the pavilion off its axis. Located in a corner of the Giardini, close to the entrance, the building is slightly skewed with respect to its neighbours Belgium and the Netherlands. Tucked away in the corner, it seems off-kilter.

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 Organisation

Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID), Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) With the Support of

Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin Meessen De Clercq, Brussels

Ignasi Aballí stumbled upon this apparent mistake while studying the floor plans. His proposal endeavours to resolve this dilemma by building new internal walls, identical in size to the original ones, at an angle of 10 degrees, the required amount to align the building with its neighbours. The intervention will disrupt spatial memory and modify the exhibition space, its location at La Biennale’s venue, and its relationship with the city of Venice. Why correct a pavilion previously validated by someone else? Why compare it with its neighbours? Why this titanic effort only to end up losing space? This is where the apparently simple conceit becomes much more complicated. On the one hand, the new architecture draws another image of the Spanish pavilion and clouds any single unified notion of national representation. On the other, the action of correcting the pavilion exposes the impossibility of the two spaces coexisting without both having to make concessions. At times the original walls are nullified while in other places there is insufficient room for the new ones. As with the architectural walkthrough, a visit to the pavilion is diverted by continuous digressions, by the play of size and scale, presentation and representation, literal versus recreation, simulation in the guise of truthfulness. In tandem with the shifting of the pavilion, the project is complemented by the publication of six books about Venice that attempt to “correct” what we typically expect from a tourist guide to the city. Aballí identifies another apparent error in relation to the city: Venice is one of the cities that attracts the most visitors in the world, and, in turn, it faces serious problems due to mass tourism, pushing it to the brink of collapse. This contradiction drives the artist to view it in a slowed down manner and through the lens of his own artistic practice. The entire project is a metaexhibition and at once a dematerialisation. It is like an oblique and concealed institutional critique. Like a broken image of Venice. A disjointed idea of Spain. Bea Espejo

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

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Participating Countries

SWITZERLAND

THE CONCERT

Commissioners

Stepping into the pavilion, feet crush the charcoal remains from the burned-down ruins of wooden sculptures. In front, the large window of the corridor is filtered orange like a sunset—or is it a sunrise? As we proceed, the crushing sound intensifies while the sculptures start to appear from their ashes, embracing the prototypical spatial progression of Bruno Giacometti’s building. 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.

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 Production Coordinator

Maud Châtelet Light Design

Anne Weckström Graphic Design

Norm Collaborators

Tamarine Schreiber Rebiennale – R3B, Giulio Grillo, Alessandra Dal Mos, Paolo Burinato, Stefano Mandracchia, Mihovil Markulin, Paolo Ripamonti, Sylvain Croci-Torti Communication

Swiss Arts Concil Pro Helvetia – Chantal Hirschi, Ines Flammarion, Silvia Fleck, Tania Luchena, Pickles PR – Caroline Widmer, Zeynep Seyhun Architectural Supervision

Maud Châtelet, Alvise Draghi Pavilion Manager and Local Coordinator

Tommaso Rava Production record The Concert Composers

Continuing through the orange-lit corridor, one forgets about the floor and enters the completely darkened main gallery, where echo fades out. The crackling sounds beneath one’s feet, the presence of own’s breath and of other presences take a renewed importance. In the room, ephemeral sculptures inspired by the folk statuary emerge in the orchestrated lighting of Anne Weckström, capturing the rhythms composed by percussionist Alexandre Babel. In this you can see the music, but you can’t hear it. The deeper one walks into the space, the softer and quieter the floor becomes, while sounds of the body become even more central, heart pulses react to the light composition, while a wave of fresh air opens the space. The rhythmic intervention of lights dictates the appearance and disappearance of the works, enveloping the spectator into an eerie, silent narration. Walking back is like going towards dawn after crossing through the night. One by one the senses return, sound, daylight and the heat of the sun revert, while the sculptures once again disappear in ashes.

Latifa Echakhch / Alexandre Babel Performers

Alexandre Babel with the soloists of Ensemble KNM Berlin Label

Shelter Press Assistants to the Commissioners

Anita Magni, Jacqueline Wolf With the Support of

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

While utilising Giacometti’s modernist building, originally made for the display of “ernste Kunst”, Echakhch subtly and unobtrusively confronts it with the explosion of life provided by popular Carnival art. The artist draws from the vocabulary of ephemeral chariot constructions and its prodigious thematic and formal realm, tackling concerns and disputes, dreams, and utopias, playing with harmonies and dissonances, with the mixed feelings of expectation, fulfilment, destruction, and memories. Francesco Stocchi

Additional Support

Allianz Swisse Websites

biennials.ch prohelvetia.ch

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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

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Participating Countries

SYRIAN ARAB REPUBLIC

THE SYRIAN PEOPLE: A COMMON DESTINY

Commissioner and Curator

Creations by Syrian plastic artists are known for being laden with experience, featuring a diversity of influences, taking endless directions, and using a plethora of tools. Art has always represented the key to shaping society, fostering love and hope, and providing an opportunity for rebirth. As expected, the forms and content in the works of the five contemporary Syrian artists participating in the Biennale Arte 2022 reflect all these important aspects.

Emad Kashout Participants

Saousan Alzubi Ismaiel Nasra Adnan Hamideh Omran Younis Aksam Tallaa Giuseppe Amadio Marcello Lo Giudice Lorenzo Puglisi Hannu Palosuo

Five artists from Syria, an alluring land with an ancient civilisation that was highly advanced for its time, a land of innovation capable of boasting a sculpture dating all the way back to the eighth millennium BC, exhibit examples of their works following a period of destructive war spanning a decade. Indeed, they were some of the most affected by its harsh repercussions. Nevertheless, it did not prevent them from clinging to life, from clinging to their beloved homeland. They soldiered on, continuing to manifest their creativity and embracing the noble mission of disseminating a culture of life, beauty, and freedom of expression. While they all have different visions of reality and of the universe surrounding them, forged by their experiences, each of them possesses a distinctive style, a particular technique, a philosophy, point of view, and attitude towards the events that inspire their works. However, they are all clearly united in their passion, humanity, and profound love for their country, as well as by their common cultural identity and ineluctable common destiny. These five artists, who are firmly established on the national and Arabian artistic scene and already count numerous participations at international events, grace the Biennale Arte 2022 and, together with international artists invited to exhibit at the pavilion, carry with them a message of love and peace from Syria, a land of civilisation and brotherhood, with a strong, eclectic cultural heritage that is deeply rooted in history. Loubana Mouchaweh

The Minister of Culture in Syria

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Ismaiel Nasra, Love in the Time of Corona, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 120 × 80 cm. Courtesy the Artist. ©Ismaiel Nasra Aksam Tallaa, Song, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 110 × 95 cm. Courtesy the Artist. ©Aksam Tallaa

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Participating Countries

TURKEY

ONCE UPON A TIME...

Commissioner

Füsun Onur is a pioneer of contemporary and conceptual art in Turkey. Over more than fifty years she has always pushed boundaries, worked beyond the confines of defined forms and movements, and produced works that are new and different by pursuing her instincts and intuition. Through her site-specific installations, her choices of material, and works as humble as they are striking, she has created a language all her own.

Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) Curator

Bige Örer Participant

Füsun Onur Exhibition and Project Manager

Selen Erkal Business Development and Project Coordinator

Duygu Şengünler Co-Editors

Bige Örer Nilüfer Şaşmazer

At the Biennale Arte 2022, the artist exhibits Once upon a time..., an installation in which she has developed a story that spreads through the space like clouds. Turning a critical eye on the pandemic and the contemporary condition, both of which pose threats to the future of the world, Onur narrates the story of a struggle waged by cats and mice, united against the governing logics of anthropocentrism, which harms nature and the planet by arrogantly ruling over them.

Design

Marcello Jacopo Biffi (Mousse) Exhibition Designer

Yelta Köm Project Assistant

Aslı Kocamaz With the Support of

Republic of Turkey Ministry of Culture and Tourism Republic of Turkey Ministry of Foreign Affairs SAHA Association

Bending and shaping her characters from thin metal wire, Onur manages to reflect not just their movements, but their feelings in these linear sculptures. Coloured crepe paper serves as clothes and pingpong balls as heads. Onur has included many other elements of everyday life in this miniature world, using materials found within the home, from beds, pillows, chairs, books, rugs, and clothes to the musicians’ instruments and the vehicles, such as boats and cars, that accompany the characters on their journey. Devised like the scenes from a fairy tale, a fable, or a stage play, the installation opens the door onto a new and exciting world. In her installations, Onur has always preferred to remain close to the ground, not attempting to occupy the gallery or to establish a vertical relationship with it but, rather, creating horizontal scenarios punctuated by empty spaces and places for pause. In this exhibition, the works are as fragile and delicate as they are down to earth. They have been installed on platforms at different heights through which the viewer will be able to sequentially follow the events in the story. In this way, Onur conjures up a remote microcosm, pulling in the viewer and showing how intertwined our worlds are with those of her characters. The artist, once again, casts aside all expectations to set her own scale; she tells us something meaningful about the times in which we live; and she offers a masterwork on creating alternative worlds, producing new languages, learning from nonhumans, loving and living together.

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Füsun Onur, Once Upon a Time..., 2022. Metal wire, crepe paper, ping-pong balls, variable dimensions. Photo Noyan Ayturan. Courtesy the Artist

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Participating Countries

U GA N DA

RADIANCE – THEY DREAM IN TIME

Commissioner

For every nation presenting in this global gathering it is a historic moment and Uganda’s inaugural pavilion at Biennale Arte 2022 is a fertile ground in which to present the artists Kerunen and Sekajugo’s ideas, for an audience to further understand the semantic intelligence of African and in this case Ugandan traditions and its modernity.

Juliana Akoryo Naumo Curator

Shaheen Merali Participants

Acaye Kerunen Collin Sekajugo Organisation

Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development With the Support of

Stjarna.art, Brussels UNCC, Uganda National Cultural Centre Website

ugandapavilion.org

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 time for contemplation, review, the reevaluation of several 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 embraces contemporary Africanity in terms of its relationship to design, text, exhibition-making, performance, and context. Acaye Kerunen and Collin Sekajugo have both been active members of art institutions, think-tanks, design centres, participating in seminars, workshops, residencies, and policy-making bodies. Both artists bring to this exhibition a postindependence perspective of Uganda through their art. Like the other two former British colonies, Tanzania and Kenya, Uganda faced an era of the battle over the history of signifying its contestations, that included recovering its precolonial modalities. The Ugandan ability to enter the broader world of global imagery is often duty bound as the nation drives towards new aesthetic reality, mapping over the multitude of public places where the imagery of emancipation becomes ubiquitous. Often national campaigns provoke people to talk, to develop a relationship to citizenship, including new banknotes, the national flag, stamps, and the consciousness built out of graphic consumption that illuminate goals and the interconnectedness of the country. It is these very heterogeneities and multiplicities in Uganda that allow its national pavilion in Palazzo Palumbo Fossati a suitable place to celebrate the country’s inaugural pavilion as the earliest model of a global art event.

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Acaye Kerunen, Kakare, 2022. Mixed media, 370 × 860 × 50 cm. ©Acaye Kerunen Studio Collin Sekajugo, Stock Image 017 – I Own Everything, 2019–2022. Acrylic, barkcloth and mixed media on canvas, 190 × 300cm. Photo Maximilien de Dycker. ©Collin Sekajugo Studio

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Participating Countries

UKRAINE

T H E F O U N TA I N O F E X H A U S T I O N . A C Q U A A LTA

Commissioner

The Fountain of Exhaustion. Acqua Alta project is an attempt to address the present from within the Ukrainian context, in order to retrace and reveal how a local concern eventually grows to echo the global conversation. The pavilion exhibits the works of Pavlo Makov, an artist from Kharkiv, whose practices in the 1990s included reconstructing the local mythology, superimposing topography on anatomy, juxtaposing rivers and reproductive systems, and transcribing narratives on yellowed paper, made to resemble abandoned archival documents.

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 Collaborators

Forma Architectural Studio 3Z Studio Perevorot.com IST publishing Vitaliy Kokhan With the Support of

The Naked Room gallery Internet Investments Group

The impressive number of city fountains out of commission inspired Makov to create several works, conspicuously connected by the motif of water. The Fountain of Exhaustion made up the climax of the series, presenting a paradoxical symbol of life: one river flows into another, and yet both become exhausted and run dry. As the artist recalls, “I then realised that society was not ready to comprehend this work, it could not face its diagnosis. They would ask me, ‘Why exhaustion? Wouldn’t abundance be better?’” 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. A five-meter-tall version of The Fountain of Exhaustion functions as an active object, which arranges and transforms the surrounding space by imposing itself on the viewer and producing effects of presence. The pavilion also includes archival materials and earlier works by Makov not only to represent the gradual development and reevaluation of The Fountain of Exhaustion but also present artistic practice in its continuity. Makov’s Fountain of Exhaustion speaks to us against the backdrop of the exhaustion of natural resources, the crisis of the still legitimate, but ever less trusted democracy, let alone the reevaluation of our social practices, our relationship with nature, and the role of the artist in the world of permanent change.

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Pavlo Makov. The Fountain of Exhaustion at the confluence of the Lopan and Kharkiv rivers, 1995. Augmented photo, pencil, paint, 22.6 × 41.3 cm. Courtesy the Artist. ©Pavlo Makov Pavlo Makov by The Fountain of Exhaustion mounted on Oleh Mitasov’s house, 1996. Archival photograph, 16.5 × 17 cm. Courtesy the Artist. ©Pavlo Makov

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Participating Countries

U NITED ARAB E M I R AT E S

MOHAMED AHMED IBRAHIM: BETWEEN SUNRISE AND SUNSET

Commissioner

The sun rises from the Indian Ocean, on the UAE’s east coast, over the port town of Khor Fakkan. By mid-afternoon, the rocky Al Hajar mountains have cast a shadow over the town, fading its colours. Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim was born here and grew up imagining the invisible sunset, on the distant west coast of the UAE.

Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation Curator

Maya Allison Participant

Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim Curatorial Assistant

Tala Nassar Collaborator

New York University Abu Dhabi Exhibition Design

Milk Train, Rome

Ibrahim developed Between Sunrise and Sunset as a single work commissioned for the National pavilion United Arab Emirates. 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 hues to earth tones, to stark black and white: from sunrise to sunset.

Graphic Design

Iain Hector Larry Issa With the Support of

UAE Ministry of Culture and Youth

These visceral forms evolve from what the artist sees “in the space between the pupil and the eyelid”, and from his physical dialogue with the materials. By hand he builds up papier-mâché over loose skeleton structures that shift and settle into their final position over time. Often incorporating actual earth, leaves, tea, coffee, and tobacco, the texture and colours of the forms derive from his raw materials. Ibrahim’s practice spans almost forty years of prolific experimentation and production. He is known as a core member of a tightly knit group of experimental, conceptual artists who have led the vanguard of visual art in the UAE since the 1980s – the group is often referred to as “the five” (though the actual number changes over time). This community is widely influential in the Gulf arts scene, but under-studied elsewhere until recently, when it began appearing in canonising surveys of the region. Members have included the late Hassan Sharif, Abdullah Al Saadi, Mohammed Kazem, and Hussain Sharif, among others. In his Land Art, painting, and sculpture, Ibrahim uses iterative repetition to create all-over patterns of lines or forms rooted in his “cipher” drawings. These often include finger and branch-like elements sprouting from circles and squares. His papier-mâché sculptures evolve from the lines and ciphers, and they further morph into organic shapes, both inviting and refusing figurative interpretation. Plants? Coral? Animals? Humans? Rocks? Cities?

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Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Dancer Contessa, 2020. Cardboard, tarp, twine, papier-mâché, tobacco, coffee, leaves, 120.5 × 62 × 42 cm. Courtesy National Pavilion UAE; Lawrie Shabibi Gallery

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Participating Countries

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

S I M ON E L E I G H : S OV E R E I GN T Y

Commissioner

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. For the American pavilion, Leigh presents Sovereignty, an exhibition that 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 both outside and inside the pavilion, Leigh intervenes imaginatively to fill gaps in the historical record by proposing new hybridities.

Jill Medvedow (ICA/Boston) Curator

Eva Respini (ICA/Boston) Participant

Simone Leigh Educational Partners

Spelman College Peggy Guggenheim Collection With the Support of

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in partnership with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State Ford Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation eu2be Bloomberg Philanthropies, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser, The Girlfriend Fund, Wagner Foundation Amy and David Abrams, Stephanie Formica Connaughton and John Connaughton, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, James and Audrey Foster, Agnes Gund, Jodi and Hal Hess, Hostetler/Wrigley Foundation, Barbara and Amos Hostetter, Brigette Lau Collection, Kristen and Kent Lucken, Tristin and Martin Mannion, Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick, Gina and Stuart Peterson, Helen and Charles Schwab, Terra Foundation for American Art, VIA Art Fund Suzanne Deal Booth, Kate and Chuck Brizius, Richard Chang, Karen and Brian Conway, Steven Corkin and Dan Maddalena, Federico Martin Castro Debernardi, Jennifer Epstein and Bill Keravuori, Esta Gordon Epstein and Robert Epstein, Negin and Oliver Ewald, Alison and John Ferring, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation, Peggy J. Koenig and Family, The Holly Peterson Foundation, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, Leslie Riedel and Scott Friend, Mark and Marie Schwartz, Kim Sinatra, Tobias and Kristin Welo, Lise and Jeffrey Wilks, Kelly Williams and Andrew Forsyth, Nicole Zatlyn and Jason Weiner, Jill and Nick Woodman, Marilyn Lyng and Dan O’Connell, Kate and Ajay Agarwal, Eunhak Bae and Robert Kwak, Jeremiah Schneider Joseph, Barbara H. Lloyd, Cynthia and John Reed, and anonymous supporters

From the monumental bronze D’mba occupying the pavilion’s forecourt, to the architectural intervention that transforms the building’s façade, and the autoethnographic film and suite of figurative sculptures displayed within the interior galleries, the works in Sovereignty collectively extend Leigh’s inquiry into the recurrent theme of self-determination. The exhibition’s title speaks to notions of self-governance and independence, for both the individual and the collective, and nods to the anticolonialist goals that were central to the Négritude movement. To be sovereign is to not be subject to another’s authority, another’s desires, or another’s gaze, but rather to be the author of one’s own history. In addition to the installation at the pavilion, Leigh’s Venice exhibition features Loophole of Retreat: Venice, a multiday convening of Black women scholars and artists in October 2022, organised by Rashida Bumbray. The project reflects the collaborative ethos that is characteristic of Leigh’s practice and pays homage to a long history of Black femme collectivity, communality, and care.

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Participating Countries

U R U G U AY

PERSONA

Commissioner

Persona 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.

Silvana Bergson Curators

Laura Malosetti Pablo Uribe Participant

Gerardo Goldwasser Organisation

Presidency of the Republic of Uruguay – President Luis Lacalle Pou Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Minister Francisco Bustillo Bonasso Riccardo Varela Pablo Scheiner Claudio Scarpa Ministry of Education and Culture – Minister Pablo da Silveira, Vice-Minister Ana Ribeiro Pablo Landoni Couture Mariana Wainstein With the Support of

Asociación Anna Lauram, Sao Paulo Brazil Fundaciòn Pablo Atchugarry, Uruguay Magma, Uruguay Herlitzka + Faria, Buenos Aires Argentina

Goldwasser proposes a tension between individuals and normative depersonalisation in a line of reflection that is linked to tailoring: as a trade, as a way of drawing a subject to precise rules, as repetition and institution of norms. All these issues are linked to memory and trauma, taking as a point of departure the artist’s family history. His work is based on a German tailoring manual inherited from his grandfather, a Jewish tailor who managed to save himself from the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp thanks to his trade. The tons of black cloth in the cutting reels, the rows of sleeves, the measuring instruments, and the tailoring moulds ordering each gap appear like a black nightmare that dialogues with the Milk of Dreams Leonora Carrington imagined while she was also subjected to that intolerable and standardising pressure in the mid-20th century, which has inspired this exhibition. Within the new postpandemic world crisis, the new perception and feelings about the danger of extinction of our species – the only one capable of extinguishing all others – this strongly humanistic exhibition confronts us with projects past and present, which seek to transform human beings into infallible machines, precision-timed, well-ordered, obedient, constructive, and at the same time destroyers of all that cannot be dominated, useful, ordered. Goldwasser’s Persona invites and urges us to make history. To look at and think about the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses, 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.

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Gerardo Goldwasser, Persona, 2022. Installation, mixed media. Dimensions variable. Photo Rafael Lejtreger

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Participating Countries

REPUBLIC OF U Z B E K I S TA N

D I X I T A L G O R I Z M I —T H E GA R D E N OF KNOWLED GE

Commissioner

The pavilion presents a reflection on the seminal work of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a scientist and polymath born and raised in the city of Khiva (present-day Uzbekistan).

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 Exhibition Design

Space Caviar (Joseph Grima, Camilo Oliveira, Sofia Pia Belenky, Francesco Lupia) Project Management

Madina Badalova Local Media Management

Nigora Tursunova Elmurod Nadjimov Installation

We Exhibit Graphic Design

Studio Folder Communication

Cultural Counsel Special Support

Saida Mirziyoyeva, Deputy Chairwoman of the Council of the Art and Culture Development Foundation of the Republic of Uzbekistan

Al-Khwarizmi’s book Kitab Al-Jabr Wa-al-Muqabala, written around 820 CE and introduced to Europe in a Latin translation under the title Dixit Algorizmi, was the first scientific text to systematically present algebra as a mathematical 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 complex and nuanced. It represents the apex of centuries of research spanning multiple civilisations – the realisation of a dream that is as old as humanity itself. Dixit Algorizmi—The 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. The pavilion engages divergent interpretations of technology as a medium, acknowledging in various ways the depth and complexity of its origin story. The fact that these distant origins are both forgotten and acknowledged – albeit almost by accident – in a word used universally on a daily basis is both ironic and fitting. Al-Khwarizmi’s most significant research took place at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, an international research and educational centre founded by Abbasid caliph Harun al Rashid during his reign (786–809). Al-Khwarizmi was instrumental in countless scientific activities, including introducing the Arabs to Hindu numerals (later adopted universally), writing about the astrolabe and sundial, and elaborating on Ptolemy’s geometric model to calculate the coordinates of hundreds of cities and facilitate navigation. The House of Wisdom was a place of gathering and exchange and it is widely assumed to have been centred around formal gardens planned in the Islamic tradition. The design of the Uzbek pavilion references this tradition, recasting the Islamic tradition of the garden as a place of gathering and exchange as a technologically augmented space of research, reflection, and experimentation.

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Garden of Knowledge

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Participating Countries

B O L I VA R I A N REPUBLIC OF VENEZUELA

T I E R R A , PA Í S , C A S A , C U E R P O

Commissioner

The exhibition proposes the understanding of the notion of body, as a presence that participates transversely on four distinct levels: as metaphor and life, from the ecological dimension of the earth, mediating between human beings 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 and self-determination, is deprived in the debate of ideas and systems of world that society aspires to.

Paola Posani Curator

Zacarías García Participants

Palmira Correa Mila Quast César Vázquez Jorge Recio Deputy Commissioners

Reinaldo Landaeta Díaz Tarim Gois Museographer

Servando García Photographer and Editor

Carlos Foucault Graphic Designer

Álvaro Arocha Paz Castillo Editor and Translator

The body, which is one with the house, that projection of its being that is constituted as the area of the most individual life, reproduces the biological functions and the delicate behaviours of our psyche. Finally, the body as microcosm, actor of life, and cell of that plot in which to exist is to go through situations, suffer the action of circumstances and their sometimes-painful effects, with its balance of injuries or disadvantages that nature and the human will wisely manage to redeem, restoring in a surprising way capacities such as creating, extraordinary example of recovery and resilience.

Karla Páez With the Support of

Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura Ministerio del Poder Popular para las Relaciones Exteriores Instituto de las Artes de la Imagen y el Espacio Fundación Museos Nacionales Banco Central de Venezuela

In its current state, the earth could be the best reflection of the metamorphosis that humanity is suffering in its body and psyche; it could be an integral damage of human beings to themselves and to the planet. Even so, we can affirm that in art and creation we are left with dreams, illusions, the need to build better worlds. The creators who represent us are testimony of the affect and will of recovery from art as a discipline and life choice. La casa de Palmira, by Palmira Correa, is the body that resurfaces day by day in creation, the body is the house, the workshop, and the reason for being. Dislexia, by Mila Quast and César Vázquez, is the psychic and emotional affectation of beings in isolation, determined by contextual circumstances that make creation impossible. Jorge Recio’s Suceso de Abril, is evidence of how in the commitment to processes of change and social justice, events can transform life and challenge human beings from their body, to recover capacities, its own redemption as a life project.

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Jorge Recio, Untitled, 2002. 35mm, 36 × 25 cm. Photo and ©Jorge Recio Palmira Correa, Paisaje de Caracas, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. Photo Carlos Foucault. ©Palmira Correa

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Participating Countries

REPUBLIC OF Z I M BA BW E

I D I D N O T L E AV E A S I G N ?

Commissioner

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.

Raphael Chikukwa – National Gallery of Zimbabwe Curator

Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa Participants

Wallen Mapondera Ronald Muchatuta Kresiah Mukwazhi Terrence Musekiwa

This is a map. We accept grief as a form of praise and celebration for what we have lost, and we grieve unapologetically in our own way. We unwind the grief and anguish with no name and put aside groundless fearful moments. We love and embrace death. We accept death as our great teacher in the fullness of living in balance. We care for the living, for the dead, for the future. We contemplate grave matters in a series of rituals to understand, interrogate, expand, and extend conceptualisations of what it means to be alive and dead. We semiotically create meaning and value and mediate and see and listen to what small actions offer new narratives. This is a manifesto of love and crisis. McLuhan predicted the sensationalised violence of our existence via the medium that preys on people’s fears and insecurities – no physical bodies, discarnate beings with a disengaged relationship to the world around them. We understand that the curated, disembodied presentation of oneself empowers agitators, but perhaps more dangerously, it gives each of us a voice without requiring people to see our true selves in our human complexities, a context without consequence. It is Cryptomnesia. We ponder how to navigate more than human worlds in a dehumanising and divisive media landscape. We are selective about which signs we leave. Genghis Khan can attest to this. We accept the invitation to open our hearts to attend to legacies. We nurture the place for the rooting of potentiality, of lives. We ask ourselves: do we need to give up or restrain to achieve greater possibility for harmony? What changes are necessary to guarantee a better future for everyone else? What stories energise and inspire inclusion, cocreation, kindness, magic, belonging, and safety? What routes restore the experience of a sacred connection with the natural world and technology?

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Wallen Mapondera, Next

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Participating Countries

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

A L L O RO

Commissioner

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.

Maurizio Carlin Curator

Giovanna Zabotti Participants

Paolo Fantin, Oφcina Pino Donaggio Goldschmied & Chiari Ottorino De Lucchi Artefici del Nostro Tempo Organisation

Comune di Venezia, Direzione Sviluppo, Promozione della Città Tutela delle Tradizioni e del Verde Pubblico Fondaco Italia Institutional Partners

Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia Fondazione Teatro La Fenice Università Ca’ Foscari Ve.La, gruppo AVM Scientific Committee

Marco Mastroianni Leonardo Cruciano and Baburka FX Nicola Ferrari Chiara Grandesso Nicola Picco Lorenzo Poggiali With the Support of

Pomellato

Movement begins where the mind is reflected on the threshold of enigmatic worlds, suspended between alchemy and magic, where the eye is bewildered in recognising various bewitched, mutant, and imaginary monstrous figures. The mind is free to see, to perceive itself: doors of perception and imagination, mirror images that reflect each other, like Rorschach mirrors and blots. A primal temple, the archetype, birth. As we paraphrase philologist Piero Boitani in his commentary on Ovid’s text, reflections, perceptions, changes, and metamorphoses are driven by the “principle of continuous transformation, because ‘everything changes, nothing dies; everything flows, and every image is formed in movement’. Saying how becoming is the truest form of being requires the ability to see bodies, to listen to their voices and reproduce them with an infinite echo: the ability to fully understand the passions that stir in the souls of women, men, and gods and shape, together with destiny and chance, our existence and the world”. The rhythmic movement of the music leads us on a journey through the Self, just like Daphne – one, none, a hundred thousand – who brings together the motherly and fatherly side, her link with the earth and her being lymph, vital liquid: synonymous with life, energy, strength, and choice, today, tomorrow, forever, eternally. Because everyone can choose to be born again. 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, of victory, fame, triumph, and honour, but which have their roots in the past, in the archetype, in the mind. Its branches, its beating heart, are the bond between the mystical, magical part and the earthly, material, natural, and real part of today, projected towards hope and the future.

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Participating Countries

Goldschmied & Chiari, Doorway, 2022. Print on glass and mirror, gold frame, 140 cm ø, polyptych, 300 × 230 cm, 4 works 150 × 115 cm each, gold frame. ©Goldschmied & Chiari

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Ottorino De Lucchi, Best Wishes, 2022. Mixed media, vinyl colours and watercolour, gold leaf 40 x 40 cm. ©Ottorino De Lucchi

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Participating Countries

C O LLAT

AL R E

Alberta Whittle, Lagerah – The Last Born, 2022. Film still – single channel video. Photo Jaryd Niles-Morris. Courtesy the Artist & Scotland+Venice. ©Alberta Whittle Alberta Whittle, Lagerah – The Last Born, 2022. Film still – single channel video. Photo Matthew Arthur Williams. Courtesy the Artist & Scotland+Venice. ©Alberta Whittle

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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 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 With the Support of

Commissioned by Scotland + Venice with co-commissioning and production support from Forma Arts & Media, London and Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh Funded by

National Lottery through Creative Scotland With Additional Funding from

The Elephant Trust & Henry Moore Foundation With Additional Production Support from

Art Night, Glasgow Life, Glasgow Sculpture Studios and Visual Identities in Art & Design Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, University of Johannesburg Scotland + Venice is a partnership of Creative Scotland, British Council Scotland, National Galleries of Scotland, Architecture & Design Scotland, V&A Dundee & Scottish Government Website

scotlandandvenice.com

Taking time to imagine and reimagine is at the core of Alberta Whittle’s work, and central to her new presentation deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory. In an immersive environment, the artist 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. Across two rooms in a former boatyard, Alberta presents new works in tapestry, film, and sculpture, connected through a shared vocabulary of motifs and ideas. Produced in collaboration with a network of artists, choreographers, and performers, the installation reveals layers of meaning through the collaging of imagery, materials, and form and continues the artist’s motivation to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling antiblackness. Entanglement Is More Than Blood, a new large-scale tapestry, is imbued with Alberta’s rich symbolism of water, gateways, hands, snakes, and shells. Acting as a portal, it continues the artist’s visual exploration into the notions of birth and death; transformation and immortality; health and healing. Imagery found in the tapestry echoes throughout Alberta’s ambitious new film Lagerah – The Last Born. Shot on location in Scotland, London, and Barbados and featuring footage from West Africa as well as from Venice, the film melds a collection of scenes that give focus to the strength of contemporary Black womxn, whose individual acts of resistance are bound together through the artist’s conceptual storytelling. Alberta situates Black love in proximity with historical sites of trauma, reinscribed with rage, hope, and exhaustion. Gestures, rituals, and moments of intimacy are poignantly underpinned by a deep reflection on grief, loss, and mourning, a resolute reminder of the trauma inflicted upon the Black body and of white privilege and power. Both the film and the tapestry are framed within gate-like structures, which divide and contain the spaces, drawing associations with enclosures, barriers, or thresholds. It is within these sculptural forms Alberta invites us to gather, to pause, reflect, and remember. Scotland + Venice

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Collateral Events

Angela Su, The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O, 2022. Performance for the video. Photo Ka Lam. Video commissioned by M+. Courtesy the Artist Angela Su, Laden Raven (detail), 2022. Hair embroidery on fabric, 290 × 140 cm Photo Lok Cheng. M+, Hong Kong. Commissioned by M+. Courtesy the Artist

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A N G E L A S U: A R I S E , H O N G KO N G I N V E N I C E M + , W E S T K O W L O O N C U LT U R A L D I S T R I C T A U T H O R I T Y H O N G KO N G A RT S D E V E L O PM E N T C O U N C I L

Curator

Freya Chou Participant

Angela Su Consulting Curator

Ying Kwok Commissioners

Lo Chung Wing, Victor Wong Ying Wai, Wilfred

As one of her most ambitious projects to date, Angela Su’s presentation at the Biennale Arte 2022, Arise, 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 a fictional alter ego to explore myriad cultural and political valences of rising in the air. Levitation speaks to both light and weighty matters; it moves between visceral bodily experience and dream-like states of rapture that leave the body behind.

Coordinator in Venice

PDG Arte Communications Websites

2022.vbexhibitions.hk mplus.org.hk hkadc.org.hk

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. The works on view invite the audience to take a journey in this fictional world built by Su. The world Su creates in Arise is an assemblage of various contemporary expressions of how an individual can confront a changed and changing world. Fiction allows us to create this hybrid world, a space where we can explore ideas that cannot be confronted directly.

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ANGELS LISTENING C E N T R O S T U D I E D O C U M E N TA Z I O N E D E L L A C U LT U R A A R M E N A

Curator

Annalisa Bugliani Participant

Rachel Lee Hovnanian Director

Minas Lourian Collaborators

Rosellen Scaglione Otrakji Gabriele Da Prato Leonardo Gasperetti

An installation conceived as a meditative space to reflect on pressing issues related to identity, knowledge, time, as well as on interpersonal experience and relationships. Elements strongly altered and transformed by the recent social distancing imposed by the global pandemic and the resulting technological and communicative effects, which have sanctioned the definitive dominance of technology over knowledge and faith, experience, and interpersonal relationships, causing a radical and widespread identity crisis.

Photographer

Giovanni Ricci-Novara

Linking everything, an inevitable metalinguistic reflection on the creative process and on the role of art in this unprecedented historical and social conjuncture. The angel is a universal figure, already present in Zoroastrian religious texts, as well as in those of the monotheistic faiths – Christianity, Judaism and Islam. A figure who shares a human and divine nature and, at the same time, is at the service of the spiritual progress of the human being. Seven mute angels, in white bronze, arranged around a confessional, renouncing their peremptory proclamation in relation to humanity, to transform them into mute listeners. Seven angels, as there are seven days in the week, seven frequency bands and colours that make up the visible spectrum and seven fundamental units of measurement. Seven bright stars that make up the Big Dipper and Ursa Minor constellations, seven heavenly virtues and musical notes and seven deadly sins and colours in the rainbow. Seven is the number of hills that comprise Rome – the core of Western culture – and seven is the Buddhist number of completeness. Rachel Lee Hovnanian is a Miami-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the complexities of modern feminism, ideals of perfection, and the often detrimental effects of media on our collective psyches. Hovnanian’s art practice merges photography, video, sculpture, painting, and installations to draw on her own upbringing as a woman reared in Southern culture in the USA, having been raised in Houston, Texas. Her work delves into embedded societal mores that reveal the dichotomy between our intrinsic value systems and our public selves.

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Collateral Events

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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 F O U N D AT I O N L O U I S V U I T T O N

Curator

Claire Staebler Participant

Katharina Grosse Website

fondationlouisvuitton.fr

Born in Germany in 1961, Katharina Grosse has endeavoured since the late 1990s to make her very personal painting practice a powerful contributory tool to transform the world. Her often-spectacular expansive works explore the potentialities of painting, well beyond the boundaries of a frame or canvas, embracing floors, walls, ceilings, objects, or entire landscapes to create multidimensional pictorial sites. In 2013, Grosse began broadening her artistic scope by printing photographs on fabrics, such as polyester and silk. In a dynamic dialogue with the architecture, her wall-sized prints – as seen at China’s chi K11 art museum in Shanghai (2018) or, most recently, at Finland’s HAM Helsinki Art Museum (2021) – display an imagery related to her painting practice, such as photos of her paintings, studio views, or her paint-steeped hands. As part of her exhibition at the Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia, Grosse gives the painting/printing/sculpture fusion a new dimension. In a black setting largely covering the floor and the wall, Apollo, Apollo features a compositive image of the artist’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. In the Venetian context and imaginative world – Fortuny fabrics, Terrazzo mosaics, omnipresent water, and reflections – the metallic fluidity and hued intensity of Apollo, Apollo take on special resonance. The surface reflects visitors’ movements and contributes to the quintessentially Venetian mirror effect. Apollo, Apollo blends the transparent with the opaque, letting light filter through, creating a gateway to a dreamlike world in which visitors question their own perceptions of reality and illusion.

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Collateral Events

Bosco Sodi, Untitled, 2021–2022. 195 clay spheres, variable dimensions. Detail of a sphere. Photo Sergio Lopéz, 2022. Courtesy the Artist. © Bosco Sodi

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BOSCO SODI AT PALAZZO VENDRAMIN GRIMANI. W H AT G O E S A RO U N D C O M E S A RO U N D F O N D A Z I O N E D E L L ’A L B E R O D ’ O R O

Curators

Daniela Ferretti Dakin Hart Participant

Bosco Sodi Director

Béatrice de Reyniès Organisation

Dario Dalla Lana Anne-Sophie Dusselier In June Park Camilla Sironi Artist’s Assistant

Manuel Ros Communication

Casadorofungher Anna Mistrorigo Molly Taylor Graphic Design

Tomomot With the Support of

Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp, Hong Kong Kasmin Gallery, New York Website

fondazionealberodoro.org

The idea of temporarily installing a studio for Bosco Sodi in Palazzo Vendramin Grimani comes from the recognition of certain elective affinities between the artist and Venice, the form of which originates from the action of the waters on the land. It is on this never symmetrical basis, and on the foundations of the old house-fondaco that the proto-Renaissance façade was built, perfectly inscribed in a square. In Sodi’s art there is the same dialectic between the aspiration to give form (a square or circular canvas, a sphere or a cube of clay) and the acceptance of the power and effects of the elements: for example, in the cracks, swellings, and burns given by the action of fire on clay. He listens to the material, in a creative process that is an always open dialogue, like the Kunstwollen that Sergio Bettini, reading Proust, recognises in Venice: a work of art whose form is not established “once and for all, but which continually dissolves and recomposes itself, and at each instant, is created anew within our time: precisely for this reason, it does not lie”. Sodi’s paintings employ pure pigments such as the cochineal red for which Oaxaca, Mexico, has long been famous, which Sodi applies to canvas without any one of the usual intermediary subjects: no cardinal’s robes or hero’s blood. The largely unprocessed materiality of his paintings and sculptures poses a direct question to the refined finishes and contents that constitute such an important part of the material structure of the palazzo’s heritage. Dirt is the precious matter of another consciousness. Sodi is just the latest addition to the long line of commercial alliances this house has made. The palazzo is his, for a time, but how to approach dominion? With what combination of deference and assertion does a son of the new world assume the mantle of the palazzo’s grand history? Surely not by stripping it to the studs and starting over. One does not join a five-hundred-year-old family because one wants to dismantle it. The value to the complex global legacies of these histories in adding new layers and new impetuses is undeniable.

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Collateral Events

Lara Fluxà, SILT, 2022. Designer Carles Murillo

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C ATA L O N I A I N V E N I C E _ L L I M INSTITUT RAMON LLULL

Curator

Oriol Fontdevila Participant

Lara Fluxà Collaborators

Barcelona City Council Government of Catalonia Government of the Balearic Islands Websites

llull.cat llim.llull.cat

A fusible stone at the same time as a solid juice. Glass is the very manifestation of ambiguity, according to the first traveller to describe its industry in Venice. The same can be said of the city: it has been cradled throughout the centuries in a precarious balance between a solid state and a liquid one. Venice emerges from the sediments supplied by the rivers that flow into the lagoon, although it is under perpetual threat of disappearing into the waters of the Adriatic. Llim (silt) discreetly adheres to the canals and the glass tubes, connecting them, and, through its circulation, progressively assimilates the layers that make up the place. Without being able to distinguish cause from effect, or interior from exterior, in Venice Llim conducts itself like a Klein bottle: it is a situated manifestation of the viscous behaviour of matter. That a city surrounded by water became the glass-making centre of the western world in the 13th century is a circumstance that is entirely due to viscosity: the ability of glass and water to reversibly mutate between states of matter keeps them open to collaboration and facilitates their coexistence. Water has fertile power because it becomes silt when in contact with the earth. From the black mud of the Nile, the fertile land, comes the Arabic word khemia, alchemy, which has historically found a source of inspiration in glass, and its practitioners used it for the transmutation of base metals. Llim does not aspire, in any case, to the obtaining of gold nor of the quintessence: it moves the foundation of Venice with the same calm that it metabolises and returns the materials to their origin. Oriol Fontdevila

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Collateral Events

Claire Tabouret, L’Errante 1, 2013. Acrylic on canvas, 27 × 22 cm. Photo Rebecca Fanuele. Courtesy the Artist and Almine Rech. ©Claire Tabouret

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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 FA B A F U N D A C I Ó N A L M I N E Y B E R N A R D R U I Z - P I C A S S O PA R A E L A R T E

Curator

Kathryn Weir Participant

Claire Tabouret Assistant Curator

Sonia D’Alto With the Support of

Almine Rech Website

fabarte.org

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 vernacular devotional objects drawn from archaeological and liturgical collections in Italy, 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. Tabouret’s works, drawn from the last decade of the artist’s multifaceted practice, articulate boundaries and fluidities existing within subjectivity and constructed identities through paintings, sculpture, video, and works on paper. Errant subjectivities and magical materialism constitute thematic axes of the exhibition. Gradually, a suspended potential and metaphysical friction inscribed in the works comes to the fore through associations interior and exterior, material and spiritual, visible and invisible. An enigmatic language of ritual and repetition in Tabouret’s amniotic worlds unfolds mysterious states of consciousness and entangles individual identity in broader forces. In the exhibition, a doubled and multiple condition of the self is also explored in relation to fertility and motherhood, notably through the inclusion of two Madri di Capua, celebrated ex-voto sculptures carved in volcanic tuff during the period from 500–200 BCE, a magical presence that introduces a renewed material connection to the earth. Processes of incarnation and transfiguration, monstrous and inexplicable creatures, all are linked in a miraculous possibility of transformation. As Hélène Cixous wrote in The Laugh of the Medusa (1975), “I am spacious singing Flesh: onto which is grafted no one knows which I – which masculine or feminine, more or less human, but above all living, because changing, I”. Kathryn Weir

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Collateral Events

Eugen Raportoru, Oh, We Loved Role-Playing, Didn’t We, 2022. Installation detail. Courtesy Ilina Schileru Multidisciplinary artist Mihaela Drăgan next to The Abduction from the Seraglio, installation work by artist Eugen Raportoru, 2022. Courtesy Ilina Schileru

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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 F O 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 E R I AC E U RO P E A N RO M A I N S T I T U T E F O R A R T S A N D C U LT U R E Curator

Ilina Schileru Participant

Eugen Raportoru Roma Women, Performative Strategies of Resistance Collaborators

Ethel Brooks Ioanida Costache Mihaela Drăgan Carmen Gheorghe Delia Grigore Angéla Kóczé Dijana Pavlovic Alina Șerban With the Support of

Council of Europe The Alliance for the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture Open Society Foundations Federal Foreign Office Germany ERSTE Stiftung Ufficio Nazionale Antidiscriminazioni Razziali (UNAR) Stiftung KAI DIKHAS Institutul Cultural Român (ICR) Istituto Romeno di Cultura e Ricerca Umanistica di Venezia

T H E A B D U C T I O N F RO M T H E S E RAG L I O

Building on the legacy of the three previous Roma exhibitions in Venice, Roma artist Eugen Raportoru’s installation series The Abduction from the Seraglio acts as a multifaceted and kaleidoscopic time capsule of site-specific items that populate the Roma domestic space. Commissioned by the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC), the exhibition, curated by Ilina Schileru, retraces the story of the increasing presence of oriental carpets in Eastern European households. 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. As a window into another world, the carpet acts as a volatile carrier of meaning and possibility, while on a deeper level it stands for a long tradition of using orientalist motifs as vehicles for fantastic escapism. The carpets reference orientalised tales of the Other, while literally being embedded in the western iconographic traditions of landscape, still life and genre painting. Accompanying programming – Roma Women: Performative Strategies of Resistance – invites interventions of a network of collaborators that prompt the audience to mine the history of the anonymous labour of Roma women to sustain their culture and community, and to honour the agency and power of Roma women, inhabiting worlds of their own creation.

Partners

RomaMoMA Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti Websites

eriac.org eriac.org/Abduction

The artists invite the viewer to meditate on the specific time-space configuration of notions of identity and history, but also trauma, hope, the body, and affect. Focusing a magnifying glass on the ongoing mystification, exoticism, feminisation, sexualisation, and criminalisation of the Roma body in Western society, The Abduction invites a critical interrogation of the links between power and realism, violence and the picturesque. ERIAC

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E WA K U RY L U K I , W H I T E KA N GA RO O S TA R A K FA M I LY F O U N D AT I O N A N N A A N D J E R Z Y S TA R A K

Curator

Ania Muszyńska Participant

Ewa Kuryluk Collaborators

Elżbieta Dzikowska, President of the Board of the Foundation Magdalena Marczak-Cerońska Kama Kieremkampt Website

starakfoundation.org

A meeting with Ewa Kuryluk is one with the full extent of humanism encapsulated in a single person, an insightful artist and writer, researcher, and traveller. She is full of inexhaustible curiosity and empathy and is interested in the great issues that concern us today, as well as the smallest ones; people close to us and those far away, neighbours and foreigners, plants and animals, the fate of the planet. She is an inspiring traveller, exploring both the innermost depths of her own biography and her own intimacy, as well as cultures, languages, traditions, and symbols. Fascinated by the diversity and wealth of the human world, she is fully aware of its fragility and its greatest vulnerability, which is mankind itself. She recounts its glory and wickedness based on her autobiography and the story of her loved ones: witnesses to the complexities and tragedies of the past century. “My antenna is set on the apocalypse and utopia. [...] I dream of the individual being rooted in humanity, and thus in the idea of a global community based on respect for the material and spiritual needs of everyone”, wrote Ewa Kuryluk in Podróż do granic sztuki (Journey to the Frontiers of Art, 1982). 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, the mythical “little Italy” in postwar Warsaw and Little Venice in London, and finally New York, where she lived for almost twenty years and participated as a fellow in the work of the Institute for the Humanities at New York University between 1982-1985. 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 is an important contemporary Polish artist, known worldwide, as she has had 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.

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Collateral Events

Samia Halaby, 911 Venetian Red, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 177.8 × 177.8 cm. Photo Courtesy Samia Halaby

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F R O M PA L E S T I N E W I T H A R T PA L E S T I N E M U S E U M U S

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 Project Executive Director

Faisal Saleh With the Support of

Samar and William Langhorne Leila Bakr Wasef Jabsheh Salwa and Monther Farah Gisele and Maher Nasser Hanan and Farah Munayyer Najwa Jardali Nabila Mango Eman Khadra and Essam Ansari Maha Freij Ronnie Malley Artscope Magazine The Washington Report DaSilva Gallery

From Palestine with Art, promoted by the Palestine Museum US, demonstrates the richness of traditional and contemporary Palestinian artwork. Nineteen prominent artists, currently practicing in varied media, styles, and themes, confirm the impact of Palestinian art on the world stage. Standing at the centre of the exhibition on a historic map of Palestine, a live olive tree holds keys to homes of refugees. Historic Palestinian dresses embellished with symbolic meaning feature embroidery patterns unique to specific villages. An installation of two Kufiyah bundles holds written stories of diasporic existence. Paintings and photography of Palestinian landscapes and architecture inspired by cultural memory and direct observation hang on surrounding walls. Painted fire is accompanied by bountiful greens of foliage and blues of the sea. A portrait artist celebrates Palestinian filmmakers, authors, architects, and artists. Sculptures visually recall remembered paths. Traditional oud and dabke dance music that resonates in the heart of each Palestinian as well as voices reciting oral histories add to the traditional signs, symbols, and patterns reintroduced by the exhibition for a contemporary audience. Optimism in colour, determination in bold strokes, reveal for the world a proud people who thrive and see surrounding beauty despite living under oppression and suffering decades of injustice. Palestine’s cultural legacy, in its richness, confirms a sense of place and collective identity, portrayed by its artists, played by its musicians, and displayed for the world to hear and see. Nancy Nesvet

Website

palestinemuseum.us

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Collateral Events

Aziz Hazara, Bow Echo, 2019. 5-channel digital video, 4’17’’. Courtesy the Artist. Photo Maksym Bilousov. ©PinchukArtCentre Agata Ingarden, Rescue Dummies, 2021. Found windows from an office building, videos of various lengths, sound, wooden sculptures, bronze sculptures, californian blinds, costumes, clothes, fabrics, shoes, harnesses, lights. Courtesy the Artist. Photo Maksym Bilousov. ©PinchukArtCentre

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F U T U R E G E N E R AT I O N A R T P R I Z E @ VENICE 2022 V I C T O R P I N C H U K F O U N D AT I O N

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 Assistant Curators

Oleksandra Pogrebnyak Daria Shevtsova With the Support of

PinchukArtCentre Website

pinchukartcentre.org pinchukfund.org

Future Generation Art Prize @ Venice 2022 presents the sixth edition of the first global art prize with twenty-one artists from almost all continents 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. It leads the way to proposals of future interhuman relations and an altered vision of what it means to be human. The exhibition unveils a fragile intimacy and tension in how queer identity has the potential to change our world today. Future Generation Art Prize is a biennial global contemporary art prize to discover, recognise, and give long-term support to a future generation of artists all over the world. Established by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in 2009, it is an important contribution to the open participation of younger artists in the dynamic cultural development of societies in global transition. Together with its financial award and commitment to commission new works, the prize sustainably empowers a global art scene. Artists around the world under the age of thirty-five enter the competition through an open call with a democratic application procedure. For the last edition of the prize in 2021, the final list of artists and artist collectives was selected by a committee from over 11,700 entries by artists across almost two hundred countries, spanning five continents.

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Ha Chong-Hyun, Conjunction 74-24, 1974. Oil on hemp cloth, 200 x 100 cm. Photo Sang Tae Kim. Courtesy the Artist; Kukje Gallery Ha Chong-Hyun, White Paper on Urban Planning, 1967. Oil on canvas, 112 × 112 cm. Photo Chunho An. Courtesy the Artist; Kukje Gallery

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HA CHONG-HYUN K U K J E A R T A N D C U LT U R E F O U N D AT I O N

Curator

Sunjung Kim Participant

Ha Chong-Hyun Project Coordination

Hyun-Sook Lee Tina Kim Jiwoong Jeong Soyoung Kim Stefano Coletto Sooyoung Choi Production and Logistics

Kay Park Pia Sofyanti Collaborators

Third Eye Palazzetto Tito (BLM) With the Support of

Kukje Gallery Tina Kim Gallery Website

kukjeacf.com

Ha Chong-Hyun is best known as a Dansaekhwa artist, but that designation applies only to a part of his varied practice devoted to exploration and understanding of materials and their physical and aesthetic properties. This retrospective exhibition featuring works from the last sixty years is intended to present the full breadth and variety of his materials and methods, and his ongoing passion for and commitment to materials and creative experimentation. Trained as a painter and quickly emerging as a leading artist during the period of post-war reconstruction in Korea, Ha began his career by developing his own artistic vocabulary beyond the bounds of painting, reflecting his broad interests in the contemporary social milieu. After graduating in 1959, he produced abstract works which were linked to the then prevalent Korean Informel movement, but his distinctive use of dark tones, which he created by burning the canvas surface with fire, distinguished his works from the mainstream evoking a powerful balance of aesthetic refinement and the bleak spirit of the time, an era still shadowed by the traumas of war. Upon returning from his participation in the Biennale de Paris in 1965, the artist shifted his practice, exploring Korean traditional decorative art methods such as daencheong pattern and colours and weaving. Between 1969 and 1973, as a member of the Avant-Garde Association, he experimented with space by producing site-specific installations; it was during this period that Ha began to make three-dimensional works with mundane objects such as barbed wire, plaster, timber, and newspaper. The year 1974 saw the birth of the Conjunction series, which would make him a leading figure of Dansaekhwa, as he began to push lumps of white oil paint through the weave of the fabric support from the back to the front. In this way, Ha continued to experiment, constantly challenging the status quo and innovating with his materials and techniques. Surveying his oeuvre from his Informel and AG years through his latest Post Conjunction series (2010–), this exhibition captures Ha’s endless creative and experimental energy and his pioneering role in the development of “contemporary” Korean art.

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Collateral Events

Heinz Mack, The Garden of Eden (Chromatic Constellation), 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 363 × 600 cm. Photo Weiss-Henseler Werbefotografie. Courtesy Archive Studio Mack Heinz Mack, In Memoriam Berlewi 1924 (Chromatic Constellation), 2000. Acrylic on canvas, 215 × 273 cm. Courtesy Archive Studio Mack

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H E I N Z M A C K – V I B R AT I O N O F L I G H T B I B L I O T E C A NA Z I ONA L E M A RC I A NA

Curator

Manfred Möller Participant

Heinz Mack With the Support of

Dirk Geuer, Geuer & Geuer Art, Düsseldorf Website

bibliotecanazionalemarciana.cultura.gov.it

H E I N Z M A C K . T H E E S S E N T I A L I T Y O F L I G H T Fifty-two years ago, Heinz Mack, who is one of the most important representatives of Kinetic Art, represented Germany at the 35th International Art Exhibition. In 2014 the artist, who developed his own language in Light Art in the 1950s, showed his installation The Sky over Nine Columns, consisting of nine outsized golden pillars, in front of the Church San Giorgio Maggiore. Now the German sculptor and painter, who turned ninety last year, returns to Venice with an extensive solo show that presents an impressive cross-section of his work over the past sixty years. In the form of an imposing spatial installation in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana’s historic Sala Sansoviniana, Mack’s monumental paintings, light steles, and a mirror sculpture meet there with masterpieces by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese.

Through the light-reflecting, partly rotating steles, which are made of polished aluminium and stainless steel, the atmospheric room with their Renaissance paintings are taken up and reflected by the sculptures. Through the principle of rotation, Mack, who founded the influential ZERO group in 1957 with Otto Piene, goes to the limit of what is technically possible to dematerialise materials and holistically capture and reflect the light through the movement of kinetic objects. The stele, which in Mack’s work can be read as a symbol of a person standing upright in space, also has a metaphysical dimension as a connecting element between heaven and earth. A pioneer of Land Art, Mack positioned his light steles and objects in pristine natural landscapes such as the Sahara and the Arctic already in the early 1960s with the goal of exploring light in its purity. Light, unfolding in colour and structure, also defines Mack’s characteristic colour field paintings. In addition to primarily black-and-white large-scale formats in which the topic of structure is foregrounded, the exhibition concludes with a monumental work in colour entitled The Garden of Eden. As the visible climax of the exhibition, the theme of light and structure, which Mack has been rethinking again and again for more than seventy years, culminates in an overwhelming coloured painting in which the rhythmic sequence and luminous intensity of the spectral colours give the work an emphatically contemplative character that will make the viewer realise one thing above all: how essential light is for our existence and the continuation of life on earth. Janine Campbell-John

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Taiwan Exhibitions, 1995-2019

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IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS TA I P E I F I N E A R T S M U S E U M O F TA I WA N

Forum Convener

Patrick Flores With the Support of

Ministry of Culture, Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan Taipei City Government Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government Website

tfam.museum

Dreams are vessels, stations, and visions that complicate time and dimension; they create chances of passage from reality to fantasy, from states of awareness to spheres of the unconscious; and ultimately set imaginations free. In the same breath, dreams flesh out fears, revisit pain and anxieties, and retell the stories of breathtaking origins. The exhibition faces both the tensions and risks of being in other worlds and becoming different selves. 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. Ever since the opening of the Taiwan exhibition at the 46th International Art Exhibition at the Palazzo delle Prigioni on April 21, 1995, Taiwan has organised thirteen iterations of engaged and inspiring presence. In a changing planet humbled by a pandemic and marked by a more patient rhythm, the effort in 2022 takes a pause as it brings together selected pieces from previous Taiwan exhibitions at the Venice Biennale. This collection reflects on the presentation of vital Taiwanese cultural contexts and perspectives through a wide range of contemporary art that sharply and decisively responds to the urgencies of history, society, and everyday life. It signals a time to gather. It gathers the signs of the times. The exhibition moves across two sections: archival display and public events. The archival display and public 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 (from talks to artistic interventions), and the archive comprises enigmatic objects (from artworks to performances). Both the archive and the discursive exchange revolve around the following questions and interests: “What makes a pavilion? What does a pavilion make?”, ”Time, body, technology”, “Ecologies of history”, and “Freedom of others/other freedoms”.

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Collateral Events

Kehinde Wiley, Sleep, 2008. Oil on canvas, 335.28x762 cm. Courtesy Rubell Museum, Miami. ©Kehinde Wiley Kehinde Wiley, The Lamentation, 2016. Oil on canvas, 243.84x487.68 cm. Courtesy Galerie Templon, Paris-Brussels. ©Kehinde Wiley

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K E H I N D E W I L E Y: A N A R C H A E O L O G Y OF SILENCE M U S É E D ’ O R S AY

Curator

Christophe Leribault Participant

Kehinde Wiley With the Support of

GalerieTemplon Website

musee-orsay.fr

Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence is a reflection on the brutalities of American and global colonial pasts using the language of the fallen hero. The exhibition will include a collection of new monumental paintings and sculptures, expanding on his body of work Down from 2008. Initially inspired by Holbein’s painting The Dead Christ in the Tomb as well as historical paintings and sculptures of fallen warriors and figures in the state of repose, Wiley created an unsettling series of prone Black bodies, reconceptualising classical pictorial forms to create a contemporary version of monumental portraiture, resounding with violence, pain, and death, as well as ecstasy. For this new body of work, Wiley has expanded the core thematic elements of Down to meditate on the deaths of young Black men slain all over the world. Technology allows viewers to witness these graphic depictions of violence against the Black body that were once silenced. Wiley states, “That is the archaeology I am unearthing: The spectre of police violence and state control over the bodies of young Black and Brown people all over the world”. The new portraits depict young Black men and women in positions of vulnerability that tell a story of survival and resilience, revealing the beauty that can emerge from the horrific. These poses, borrowed from Western European art historical sources, function as beautiful elegies echoing a central metaphor of youth and fortitude and stand as monuments to endurance and perseverance in the face of savagery, incorporating a scale that pushes beyond the mere corporeal and into the realm of spiritual icons, of martyrs and saints. The exhibition is curated by Christophe Leribault, President of the Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie.

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Collateral Events

Lita Albuquerque, Najma Returns, 2021. Performance at the Giza Plateau. Photo Rochelle Fabb. Image Courtesy the Artist

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L I TA A L B U Q U E R Q U E : L I Q U I D L I G H T BARD O LA

Curators

Elizabeta Betinski Neville Wakefield Participant

Lita Albuquerque With the Support of

Compound, Long Beach, California Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, California Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach, California Website

bardoLA.org

The imagined world of a hybridised landscape where science and fiction commingle and act upon body and body politic to transform the realm of the possible is the subject of the collateral event Liquid Light by Los Angeles artist Lita Albuquerque. The 25th century female astronaut of Albuquerque’s film commutes an otherworldly knowledge across the planes of the celestial and terrestrial. Hers is a subjectivity that is constituted in the space between the outer reaches of the imagination and the traumatised land she happens to discover. The world she encounters is one of salt and honey where the curative values of opposites embedded in their deeper histories of exchange and trade are upheld as projection and myth. Like traders arriving in the Venice of old, or tourists disembarking today, the encounter is one of wonder and apprehension – wonder at what has survived the corruption of time and apprehension towards its continued survival. Mirroring the in-between state in which humanity finds itself today, Albuquerque’s heroine is likewise caught between light and darkness, unable to avoid a metamorphosis triggered by her initial failure to communicate the poetics of Cosmic harmony to Earth’s inhabitants. An amalgam of iconography, personal history, and emotional landscapes that embody a deeply personal mythology, Albuquerque’s film is exhibited as a triptych video installation, immersing the viewer in the heroine’s journey. Filmed on location in Bolivia and edited and produced in Los Angeles, the film is exhibited in Venice in concert with installation components sourced and created locally in collaboration with Venetians, from glass blowers and artisans, to beekeepers and farmers. By sourcing materials locally in Venice and the region of Veneto, Albuquerque and bardoLA intend to be a part of the solution to the issue of a considerable carbon footprint created in the name of exhibiting art and support the local community in their efforts toward a sustainable future. The installation Liquid Light is thus a symbolic extension of the mission Albuquerque’s heroine sacrifices for: to reconnect humankind to our celestial origins that contain our planet, Earth.

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LOUISE NEVELSON. PERSISTENCE T H E L O U I S E N E V E L S O N F O U N D AT I O N

Curator

Julia Bryan-Wilson Participant

Louise Nevelson With the Support of

Pace Gallery Galleria Gió Marconi

Organised to mark the 60th anniversary of Louise Nevelson’s landmark presentation in the American pavilion of the 31st International Art Exhibition, this exhibition focuses on the genre that would prove to be Nevelson’s most definitive contribution to 20th century art: assemblage. Bringing together more than sixty works spanning thirty years of production, the exhibition underscores the artist’s extraordinarily inventive combining of materials, including well-known monumental black gridded walls and smaller, lesser-known collages that feature a range of colours and were made with everyday stuff like newsprint, flattened bits of metal, cardboard, foil, sandpaper, and fabric. Collectively, these works demonstrate a remarkable persistence: Nevelson’s brave commitment both to her steadfast aesthetic and to an ethics of reuse. The exhibition’s title also alludes to Nevelson’s unique status as one of the most influential figures in the history of modern art. In an essay published the same year as the Biennale Arte, Italian art critic Carla Lonzi, who later became an important feminist activist, described “a new, proliferating presence of a totally female ambiguity” in Nevelson’s work. Nevelson herself would describe her process in similarly gendered terms, explaining that “the word creation is like the earth, the volcanoes, the mother who has her labour pains...” Nevelson’s use of “low”, throwaway objects – and her repurposing of familiar items like wooden headboards, brooms, chair legs, and dust pans – evoked the domestic sphere, but also had special resonance in Italy during the emergence of Arte Povera in the 1960s. Today, Nevelson is widely acknowledged as a foremother of many feminist artists who recycle scavenged domestic things. Though the immediate critical reception of her environments in the American pavilion was mixed, the 1962 Biennale marked a definitive turning point in Nevelson’s career. Reflecting on this exhibit sixty years later gives us an opportunity to reconsider her prescient use of immersive environments and her ground-breaking incorporation of gendered objects. Installed non-chronologically to highlight the overarching continuities in her practice around assemblage, Persistence affirms Nevelson’s ongoing relevance for contemporary audiences. Julia Bryan-Wilson

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Collateral Events

Antony Gormley, Model Model 5, 2022. 3 mm Corten steel, 19.7x51.5x122.5 cm. Photo Stephen White, London. ©Antony Gormley Lucio Fontana, Scultura Spaziale, 1947. Bronze, 56x52x27 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Loris Barbano

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L U C I O F O N TA N A / A N T O N Y G O R M L E Y ASSO CIAZIONE ARTE CONTINUA

Curator

Luca Massimo Barbero Participants

Lucio Fontana Antony Gormely With the Support of

B17 GALLERIA CONTINUA In Collaboration with

Fondazione Lucio Fontana FAI – Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano

Lucio Fontana / Antony Gormley is an exhibition formed from an intimate 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 threedimensional capacities, the work of the artists “inhabits” space, and the viewers’ attention shifts from the object in space to the space itself. The viewer can interact with the work and feels the void that surrounds it. 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. Fontana and Gormley create sculpture beyond time. In Lucio Fontana’s works, space becomes a timeless place without history. “I make a hole; the infinite passes through it, light passes through, there’s no need to paint […] instead everyone thought that I wanted to destroy: but that’s not true, I built, I didn’t destroy” (Lucio Fontana). Sign and body interact intimately in the conceptual path underlying Gormley’s research. This leads to the total rupture of the boundaries imposed between inside and outside, space and time. “Can we think of our bodies less as objects and more as places? What is a human space in space, and – if we think of ourselves as inhabiting a body in space – what is our context?” (Antony Gormley) Thought of as a dialogue between the complexity of the sign in the oeuvre of the founder of the Spatialist movement, here represented by rarely seen sculptures from the 1930s, and the relationship between space and body in the work of one of the most searching sculptors of our century, the exhibition Lucio Fontana / Antony Gormley has a third element: the relation between artwork and exhibition space. The curator Luca Massimo Barbero and Antony Gormley have shaped the installation in relation and dialogue with Negozio Olivetti, connecting the artworks with the structures and the architecture realised by the great architect Carlo Scarpa in 1958.

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Collateral Events

Kamal Sabran, Kelas Tidur, 2020. Performance. Photo Mhd Sany Mhd Hanif. Courtesy the Artist. ©Kamal Sabran Kapallorek Artspace, Karoog Kiha Nyep, 2022. Still from HD video 15’ loop. Photo Ronnie Bahari. Courtesy the Artist. ©Kapallorek Artspace

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P E R A + F L O R A + FA U N A T H E S T O RY O F I N D I G E N O U S N E S S A N D T H E O W N E R S H I P O F H I S T O RY P O R T P E O P L E O F R E M A R K A B L E TA L E N T S

Curators

Amir Zainorin Khaled Ramadan Participants

Azizan Paiman Kamal Sabran Kapallorek Artspace Kim Ng Projek Rabak Saiful Razman Stefano Cagol

OWNERSHIP OF INDIGENOUSNESS AND THE SO CIAL C O N S T R U C T I O N O F N AT U R E Nature – might it only be a state

of mind? A dream: an idea inherited from someone who came before; an idea to relate to those who might come after? That may depend on the social construction of nature. Reimagining nature and indigenousness in relation to ethics and aesthetics demands a closer look at the state of the interrelations between man and nature. Some might even argue that the aesthetics of natural beauty can become a guide to socioethical behaviour and lead to the development of a better cultural persona.

Collaborators

Aida Redza Ronnie Bahari Curatorial Advisor

Alfredo Cramerotti Associate Curators

Annie Jael Kwan Camilla Boemio With the Support of

Perak State Government, Malaysia Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture Malaysia National Art Gallery Malaysia Tourism Malaysia Tourism Perak Universiti Sains Malaysia Universiti Teknologi MARA Danish Arts Foundation MUSE Science Museum of Trento Autonomous Province of Trento Laterna Magica Museum, Denmark Chamber of Public Secrets George Town Festival 2022 Jambatan UOB Malaysia Art Events RogueArt Project realised on behalf of

Perak State Government, Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia

In Art of Darkness, Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto argues that the aestheticisation of native populations and the propagandist production of photographs, drawings, and written accounts, especially of African natives, indicate that colonialism had found a powerful instrument for capturing the western imagination in depictions of the indigenous as a dark phantasm to be conquered. Such depictions and associated narratives continue to influence the perception of indigenousness. Therefore, visually capturing and representing nature as seen and understood in indigenous contexts and rewriting stories of indigenousness independently from the western mainstream sociopolitical consciousness remains an unachievable dream. Will this remain just a theoretical possibility or a futuristic romantic vision? The global aestheticisation of the notions of indigenousness and indigeneity are expressed in different ways. There is no consensual agreement on how to ethically or aesthetically document, archive or exhibit the historic narrative of indigenous populations across the globe, including in Malaysia. Can indigenous populations challenge mainstream history written by the nonindigenous? Can indigenous populations achieve the liberty to collectively claim “their own history and narratives”, antagonising the dominant mainstream discourse? Can practice of indigeneity provide strategies that resist or refuse the homogenising or divisive violence of nation-states?

Commissioner

Nur Hanim Mohamed Khairuddin Website

Pera + Flora + Fauna intends to address these questions drawing on different perspectives of humanity, nature, and their interrelation.

portipoh.com.my

Amir Zainorin, Khaled Ramadan

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Collateral Events

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 Wenhua Dai, With the Immutability of the Absolute, calligraphy and sound device, 2021. Construction, 2 × 3.5 m. Photo Wenhua Dai. Courtesy Huacai Art Museum

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R O A D O F FA I T H F O N D A Z I O N E E M G D O TA R T

Curator and Participant

Wenhua Dai With the Support of

Beijing Yixin Huacai shimmer Technology, Beijing HUA CAI ART MUSEUM, Beijing Thoth Hub Innovation Center, Shenzhen Musashino Art, Tokyo Academy of fine arts, University of Barcelona Website

emgdotart.org

O P E N T H E W O R L D , P E O P L E A R E W I L L I N G T O WA L K T O G E T H E R Road of Faith is based on Wenhua’s own experience

in the world. It is a path of awakening in science, philosophy, and art, where people’s existence changes from relying on intuition to resisting control of primitive desire and deity, from being made to making, from taking to giving. Ocean Bloom, Ode to the Nymph of the Luo River, and With the Immutability of the Absolute are the three sections of the exhibition. These sections intervene with the theme The Milk of Dreams and interrelate through body modification, human and technology, and mankind and earth. To an extent, this is an exchange and a mutual promotion of humanistic conceptions from the east and the west. Ocean Bloom is a work of intuition. Rice paper, brush, ink, felt, mud, and sand, as well as original music, colour ink, and photo are all integrated into one. The combinations of these materials show the most natural state of “deformation”. The literary work from Chinese classical Ci Fu (a literary form, sentimental or descriptive composition, often rhymed) Ode to the Nymph of the Luo River is presented with colour ink and VR technology. In this transmission from two dimensions to three dimensions, using original music containing phonemes of Chinese opera and western opera as a guide, the audience are able to see the consistent confrontation and struggle of human beings and their own greediness in the cycle of reincarnation. The sound sculpture and water ink device allow audience to wander in the space of dream and meditation and feel the immutability as well as indestructability. Wenhua believes beauty with no thoughts behind is pale. The bold thoughts, pure hearts, and wild souls of artists are the most attractive. In the modern east, people rarely integrate multiple artistic presentations into one, and Dai Wenhua shows us another possibility. The equality of arts and human beings reveals the infinite forms of human consciousness and faith. This is also the “ultimate” road that the world has led us to. The curatorial concept and the completion time of the works will also come to a perfect end on the last day of the Exhibition. Wenhua Dai

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R O N Y P L E S L : T R E E S G R O W F R O M T H E S KY H O US E O F A RT C E S K E B U D E J OV I C E

Curator

Lucie Drdova Participant

Rony Plesl With the Support of

PPF Foundation, Czech Republic The Ministry of Culture, Czech Republic Websites

dumumenicb.cz ronypleslbiennale.com

Rony Plesl ranks among the world’s top artists in the field of glass sculpture. His unique oeuvre emerges from his deep knowledge of quality glassmaking and his profound love for the ambiguous matter of glass. Fascinated by its constant metamorphosis, he seeks to find its natural form in his art while employing groundbreaking technologies in his designs. His Venice installation is a world premiere of a globally unique glass casting technology allowing the creation of a glass sculpture without any limitations. The artist chose the Church of Santa Maria della Visitazione, merging the sublime character of glass sculpture with the purity of the Early Renaissance space. Addressing the essence of human existence, the work navigates us as we seek our path in the world of today. The constellation of three vertical trees in the middle of the nave alludes to the Franciscan thesis of complementarity of nature and man as well as an imaginary representation of the human body. The larger-than-life pure crystal trunks are an imprint of live trees. The perfection of their bark is accentuated by the haptic character of the material, while their luminous and translucent surface invites us to look inside, encouraging interpretation: an imaginary journey through a landscape, an exploration of the true essence of things. The last tree on the symbolical journey lies deeper in the church, a horizontal intersecting the landscape. Its bark consists of human figures, the entire trunk covered by a bas-relief of the bodies of Jesus Christ. In a dreamy, surreal scene, the epic object made of shiny emerald uranium glass is reminiscent of ancient column reliefs. Its natural form merged with the multiplied bodies of the Son of God feels existential in terms of human history. The genius loci resonates with the birth of the Renaissance which revived the individuality of man, science, and art disciplines. Essential questions of human existence seem to shine through the walls of the glass monoliths, their urgency amplified by the spirit of the sacral space. The installation induces a pure moment of stillness that is becoming increasingly rare today. Through contemplation and introspection, it gives us a genuine and courageous insight into ourselves. This is what the artist sought to create, guiding us towards solitude with full mental freedom.

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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 B U F FA L O A K G A R T M U S E U M

Curators

Cathleen Chaffee Vincenzo de Bellis Participant

Stanley Whitney With the Support of

Virtuosic abstract painter Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of colour within ever-shifting grids of multihued blocks and all-over gestural fields since the mid-1970s. However, Whitney had only one solo show in New York between 1972 and 1989; it was not an easy time for an abstract artist of colour to find a place in the New York art world.

Lisson Gallery Website

buffaloakg.org

Rome, where Whitney and his partner Marina Adams moved in 1992, provided an escape from that scene and Italian art and architecture soon became palpable in his abstraction. For example, inspired by the construction of the Forum and the Colosseum, Whitney began collapsing the space between the blocks of colour in his paintings. The tightness of these stacked compositions announced a truly new direction, and he began creating the densely gridded paintings he continues to make today, works characterised by architectural geometries, spontaneous brushwork, and endlessly variable juxtapositions of colour. Whitney has kept a studio outside Parma since the 1990s and the pace of that region also became a key, albeit underrecognised part of his creative practice. This exhibition, cocurated by Cathleen Chaffee and Vincenzo de Bellis, is the first to consider the influence of Italian art and architecture on Whitney’s painting. It includes monumentally scaled paintings from the 1990s that demonstrate the transformation produced by his early time in Rome and a survey of paintings from the last twenty years that are characterised by improvisatory flow and Whitney’s experimentation within the givens of similar geometric structures. The installation also includes a major group of diminutive sketch-like paintings, ink drawings and gouaches on paper, and a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks from his time in Italy.

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Collateral Events

Francesca Leone, Space 1 (detail), 2021. Oil on recycled sheet metal, dimensions variable. Photo Sebastiano Luciano. Courtesy the Artist

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TA K E Y O U R T I M E N O M A S F O U N D AT I O N

Curator

Danilo Eccher Participant

Francesca Leone Editor of the Day of Research

Raffaella Frascarelli Cultural and Art Mediation Training

Raffaella Frascarelli Elisa Genovesi With the Support of

Allianz Bank Financial Advisor Dante&Associati F.P.A. Finanza – Previdenza – Assicurazioni Website

nomasfoundation.com

Through these works, Francesca Leone turns her gaze to the concept of Time: it is the time of rust that oxidises on the metal, scratches it, scars it; it is on this skin that the colour caresses the scars, indicates the expressions, and heals the wounds. They are metal sheets that preserve traces of their memory, memories made of work, fatigue, suffering, perhaps even pain. Every scratch, every laceration, every fold whispers its own story, offers to the eye the symbolic image of an event that has been lost in the embrace of time. The artist intervenes in this embrace, delicately insinuates the colour, confuses the rust, covers the wounds, lays her own story on that of the material. It is in this dialogue of memories that Francesca Leone builds her own visionary narrative, it is in this suspended dimension that the rough violence of the metal sheets bends its body in the image of suffering and sick roses. Here, then, the dismay for this contrast, for contradiction and conflict, requires us to look up beyond the appearance to let a coloured firmament of waste, scrap, and remnants that loom over our reality emerge. A painful Nature that demands a pause, as these works whisper, inviting us to stop, hold our breath, give time to our thoughts, and let our dreams emerge. Taking one’s time means allowing oneself the privilege of a glance, the indulgence of thought, the nobility of a pause, it means giving time to art to write one’s own story. A suspension that the artist has allowed herself in the choice of colour and in the control of the gesture. In a distracted and superficial everyday life, whose frenzy seems to overwhelm every thought, whose images appear dumb, whose history seems to have lost its memory, embracing one’s own time can be a revolutionary act, a rebellious gesture from which to give rise to a new utopian thought, a new political vision, a new enchantment. Danilo Eccher

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Collateral Events

Chun Kwang Young, Aggregation 03-BJ001, 2003. Mixed media with Korean mulberry paper, Ø 450 cm. Photo and ©Chun Kwang Young Chun Kwang Young, Aggregation09-D071Blue, 2009. Mixed media with Korean mulberry paper, 113 × 195 cm. Photo Choi Jun. ©CKY STUDIO

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T I M E S R E I M A G I N E D : C H U N KWA N G Y O U N G B O G H O S S I A N F O U N D AT I O N

Curator

Yongwoo Lee Curatorial Advisor

Manuela Lucà-Dazio Participants

Chun Kwang Young Stefano Boeri

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. In ecology, interconnectedness is an absolute factor for the reproduction and survival of all living things, including humans, and is essential for ensuring biodiversity and enhancing sustainability in any adverse conditions such as climate change.

With the Support of

Museum Ground Interart Channel Website

timesreimagined.com

Used as the prime medium by the artist, hanji (Korean mulberry paper) is a champion of ecological reproduction and circulation, which endures through time and redefines the notion of the life cycle. It was shaped by Chun into metamorphotic creatures reminiscent of living beings or spectacular scenes with historical and cultural symbolism. In particular, the paper used in Chun’s art was not originally massproduced, but a solid handmade product that originated from mulberry trees, thus embodying a cultural property that fermented for several hundreds of years. The paper lived as books and conveyed beautiful stories as well as flawed history, prejudice, wickedness, and antihumanism. However, with the advent of various communication media in the electronic society, the paper of literature books, medical books, epistles, or books containing all kinds of wisdom, knowledge, and information has become a relic of the past that is gradually being forgotten and is destined to be thrown away one day. But revived in Chun’s artworks, the hanji carrying fragments of painful memories suffocated by infectious diseases, scientific and technological omnipotence, social oppression, and political dictatorship due to human desire is now delivered to the audience as a healing object. In dialogue with Chun Kwang Young’s paper works, the Italian architect Stefano Boeri designed the Hanji House as a site-specific commissioned architecture of this project. This foldable architectural structure was built with timber and textile membrane on soil as a practical model of “papertree architecture”, which can be viewed as a “light box” from a distance. The outdoor self-standing object’s design is inspired by playful and yet meditative practice of folding the paper – in an infinite number of ways. The shape recalls ancient East Asian practices of paper-folding and tangram, besides the traditional Korean and Japanese houses, based on simple geometric modularity. It is made by a simple combination of volumes: four pyramids on the top of a parallelepiped leave a planar surface shaped as a regular rhombus in the middle.

225

Collateral Events

Tue Greenfort, Periphylla periphylla, 2014. Glass, 20 × 80 × 20 cm. Photo ERES Foundation Munich. Courtesy the Artist; KÖNIG Galerie, Berlin. ©Tue Greenfort

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T U E G R E E N FO RT: M E D USA A L GA LAG U NA ERES STIFTUNG

Curator

Sabine Adler Participant

Tue Greenfort With the Support of

König Galerie, Berlin Website

eres-stiftung.de

The history and success of Venice are deeply related to its location in the unique ecosystem of the Venetian lagoon. Medusa Alga Laguna focuses on diverse interspecies of life in the lagoon. Danish conceptual artist Tue Greenfort often brings in human and nonhuman relationship by reflecting on organisms that are mostly neglected and often barely visible. The fascination with scale is a point of departure for many of his projects. His micro/macrocosmos perspective is the basis for his installation, which transports us into the biodiverse world of Venetian waters and reveals the complexity of nonhuman lifeforms such as algae and jellyfish. His earlier project Medusa (2007), which consisted of Murano glass jellyfish, has now returned to Venice. Given the number of years gone by and considering the ideas behind the initial project, this is a propitious opportunity to examine the current situation. Around the time he was developing Medusa, beaches in Italy were closed to the public due to an overpopulation of the stinging jellyfish Pelagia noctiluca, which had severe repercussions on the tourist industry. Biologists explained the mass occurrence of these jellyfish as a result of the rise in water temperature due to climate change. Another reason cited was the lack of natural enemies such as sea turtles and tuna. Algae are prehuman lifeforms that are increasingly becoming a significant issue in the balance of oceanic ecosystems and the global impact of intensified industrial farming which has led to a glut of nutrients in the world’s oceans, a phenomenon known as eutrophication. These threebillion-year-old survivors, creatures of the planet’s breathable atmosphere, are now a curse as well as a blessing. They could lead to a collapse of marine ecosystems, creating a toxic environment for both human and nonhuman life forms. On the other hand, they are the focus of scientific projects because they may hold the key to sustainable energy systems, making them a powerhouse for counteracting climate change. Medusa Alga Laguna broadens Greenfort’s ongoing work and connects the exhibition in Venice with his show Alga at ERES Foundation in Munich, Germany (2021). Sabine Adler

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Collateral Events

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 Julian Charrière, And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire, 2019. 4K colour film, 16:10, continuous video loop, dimensions variable. Installation view, Towards No Earthly Pole, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland, 2020. Photo Jens Ziehe. ©Julian Charrière; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

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U N C O M B E D, U N F O R E S E E N , U N C O N S T RA I N E D PA R A S O L U N I T F O U N D AT I O N F O R C O N T E M P O R A RY A R T

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 With the Support of

Bareva Foundation G+B Schwyzer Stiftung Pro Helvetia Almine Rech Galerie Peter Kilchmann Perrotin Hauser & Wirth White Cube Atelier d’architectes Charrière-Partenaires Key Capital Steinfels Art Consulting Trinity Street Asset Management Richard & Claire Bruce Laura Colnaghi Calissoni Conor & Mary Killeen Bernard & Genevive Mensah Lukas & Dorothea Mühlemann Benjamin Nieto Iman & Jacques de Saussure Marwan & Tania Shakarchi Claudia Steinfels & Christian Norgren Berna & Tolga Tuğlular Ruth Whaley Yvonne & Peter Winkler Website

parasol-unit.org

Curated by Ziba Ardalan – founder and artistic and executive director of Parasol unit – Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained brings together diverse and thought-provoking works by eleven international contemporary visual artists who all share a deep concern for our world and a preoccupation with a phenomenon that in scientific terms is defined as entropy or the measure of disorder, randomness, and unpredictability within a system. In their practice, 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 various unfavourable phenomena that over recent decades have gradually reached a degree of significance in our day-to-day life and environment and within our social and collective history. Many of the issues, such as global warming, unrestrained globalisation, uncontrolled waste, racism, neo-colonialism, and excessive greed are seriously threatening harmony of planet Earth and the existence of its inhabitants. Understood as the second law of thermodynamics, entropy was formulated in 1865 by the physicist Rudolf Clausius. One particularity of entropy is that it can reach a dangerous level when external conditions, such temperature, pressure, and information overload continue to increase over time. Under such circumstances, the molecules within a system become sufficiently animated to act freely and unpredictably, and thereby cause chaos and irreversible impairment. The research into the history of humanity’s activities demonstrates that the level of entropy has never been as high as we experience it today. This shows the lack of respect with which we have treated our planet and, in the process, endangered the survival of all living species including our own future generations. Despite their heightened awareness and critical stance, the works of the exhibiting artists strive to deal with these topics with unbiased minds, thus fostering a hope of reopening a door to the future.

229

Collateral Events

Vera Molnár, Icône 2020, 2021. Murano glass and 24K gold leaf, 60 × 60 cm. Photo Cristiano Corte. Courtesy New Murano Gallery

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VERA MOLNÁR: ICÔNE 2020 AC C A D E M I A D ’ U N G H E R I A I N RO M A

Curator

Francesca Franco Participant

Vera Molnár With the Support of

Arts and Humanities Research Council UK Henry Moore Foundation Leonardo/ISAST/OLATS

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.

Website

ateliermuranese.com/icone2020

Starting from Molnár’s first successful computer-based artwork, created in 1975 (Computer-Icône/2) – which in turn originated from a series of computer plotter drawings made in 1974 (Trapèzes) – Icône 2020 takes for the first time one of Molnár’s key original concepts based on the dichotomy and subsequent search for balance, between order and disorder, to three dimensions as a sculpture. Icône 2020 is a sculpture that originated from a unique and unprecedented collaboration between Hungarian-born artist Vera Molnár, a Paris-based pioneer of computer art, and a traditional Venetian glassmaking team, whose members are descendants of one of the historic families of Murano where the ancient technique of glassmaking originated in 1291. This collaboration, initiated by Franco in 2019, creates a link that connects for the first time the history of computer art with the ancient tradition of glassmaking with the aim of taking both arts to new unexplored levels. Vera Molnár: Icône 2020 features a series of original artworks by Vera Molnár that look at the evolution of her original concept “order/ disorder” and how this has materialised over the decades in her production, from the late 1960s up to the present time, with this new collaboration, presented for the first time at the Venice Biennale.

231

Collateral Events

Ruth Gómez, Caves, 2022. Mineral pigments and Chinese ink on adhesive paper, 65 x 35 cm. Fragment of the set of drawings. ©Courtesy the Artist Nuria Mora, Xyz Transcending Physical Limits, 2022. Acrylic painting on linen, 230 x 292 cm, 324 x 243 cm. ©Courtesy the Artist Daniel Muñoz, Drag Image, 2022. Ink on paper, 32 x 24 cm. ©Courtesy the Artist Sixe Paredes, Paleolithic Futurism, 2021. Loom assembly, cotton ropes and wool, 313 x 250 x 20 cm. ©Courtesy Miquel Coll

232

W I T H H A N D S S I GN S G ROW F U N D A C I Ó N O D A LY S S I G N U M F O U N D AT I O N

Curator

Alfonso de la Torre Participants

Ruth Gómez Nuria Mora Daniel Muñoz Sixe Paredes Artistic Director

Juan Carlos Moya

At the beginning of the 20th century, art history began to consider the possible interrelationship between the painted manifestations in prehistoric caves and art, as well as their displacement towards what we could call “interferences” with the art of our time. With Hands, Signs Grow refers to the possibility that, between the cracks of time, manifestations of prehistoric wall painters can be found, as revealed signs, also in different tools that are used to paint the walls in our time, the so-called street art.

With the Support of

Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira (Ministry of Culture and Sport of Spain) Websites

signumfoundationpalazzodona.com odalys.com

The shelter of nature (the cave) versus the protection of the jungle of our world: the walls of the city, recalling that mysterious statement by Brassaï, “dans notre civilisation [le mur] remplace la nature” (in our civilisation [the wall] replaces nature). A true and complex display of images and artistic forms, tempted to move forward in the twilight in multiple directions. And thus, in Spain, Picasso or Miró, the artists of the School of Altamira, El Paso, Parpalló, or the Indalianos have looked at those mysterious first creators of prehistory. Also, Tàpies and his communication on a wall that was “cosmic”, as well as Chillida, Miró, Oteiza, or Palazuelo gained a part of their first immemorial inspiration there, in the manner of Brâncuși. In the Palazzo Donà, within its walls rich in history, With Hands, Signs Grow is proposed, a curatorial project conceived after months of working with a group of four young artists who believe in the incarnation of the word on the walls. An invocation to the transhuman values carried by these prehistoric signs like keys to images, in the manner of a marvel of figurability: resistance, a request for well-being with the environment and nature, an encounter with the animalia (both the existing and the utopian) or fixation of the personality and the body of the one who traces the traces. In such a way that their creation on the walls can meet a new time that has emerged from our recent despair and anxiety so that, in this way, art is found as a hopeful manifestation attempting the balance between human beings and the environment, bodies and this despised land (or did you say waste land, Thomas?). Alfonso de la Torre

233

Collateral Events

Zinaida, Without Women, 2017. 24 × 32 cm. Photo Zinaida Kubar

234

WITHOUT WOMEN V I S U A L R E S E A R C H S U P P O R T F O U N D AT I O N

Curator

Peter Doroshenko Participant

Zinaida Project Coordinator

Nataliia Rudnyk Media Coordinator

Victoria Butenko Website

en.vrsf.online

Stemming from extensive ethnographic research and close collaboration with indigenous communities, Zinaida’s practice revolves around the study of mythologies, national symbols, archaic imagery, and the role of women as carriers of sacred knowledge. Zinaida’s research journeys in different regions in Ukraine aim to study and preserve cultural heritage. She leads volunteer initiatives and carries out philanthropic activities in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The artist additionally founded the volunteer initiative ArtRehub and developed her Red Thread methodology for children with special needs and autism disorders. As part of the Venice Biennale Collateral Events, Zinaida presents Without Women, about the purity of sheep-breeders’ life in nature and the transformation of male energy. Everywhere you look, you can see practical traditions in action with a sheep breeding mentality among the masses coming through the depth of the modern world’s attributes. From childhood until they are too old and lose their strength, men leave their dwellings and villages to go to the mountains for five months. Among the abundance of sheep and cows they process milk into butter and cheese. Without Women consists of two exhibition sections: a video space where three projections create a triptych of living pictures and an installation, The Milk of Life, which will remind visitors of the warm scents of women’s skin. In the video presentation, the toned body of a young man who is immersed in milk to collect cheese from the cauldron, evokes a mythical deity who creates the world. His movements resemble sexual intercourse, the gauze used for squeezing the whey mimics a veil, while a hazy curtain swayed by the wind seems to be a bridal lace dress. In his solitary environment, a man fully and vividly expresses and renews his masculine nature. Balancing between discernible acts of sublimation and the poetic portrayal of shepherds as solitary monks, the video narrative is complemented by tactile-olfactory elements within the exhibition space. The “leaking”, milk-scented screen skin once again makes us aware of the notions of self-limitation and an appealing sincerity.

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Collateral Events

236

“ Y I I M A” A R T G RO U P : A L L E G O RY O F D R E A M S T H E M AC AO M US E U M O F A RT

Curator

João Miguel Barros Participants

“YiiMa” Art Group (Ung Vai Meng, Chan Hin Io) Coordinator in Macao

Un Sio San Coordinator in Venice

Carlotta Scarpa, PDG Arte Communications Commissioner

Paolo De Grandis Website

mam.gov.mo

Allegory of Dreams is a comprehensive contemporary art exhibition showing a total of eleven pieces (sets) of works consisting of documentation of performance art, photography, and videos, as well as indoor and outdoor sculptures. Curated by João Miguel Barros, the exhibition showcases the latest works by “YiiMa”, an art group formed by Ung Vai Meng and Chan Hin Io, two artists active in Macau. In line with The Milk of Dreams, the exhibition is conceived and developed as an Allegory of Dreams which takes the body to build bridges between dream and reality by using symbols of everyday life. Presenting the many challenges faced by today’s cultural environment through allegory, the exhibition elicits a deep reflection on different aspects. By featuring the documentation of the two artists’ continuous live performance, the exhibition presents 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.

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Collateral Events

LIST OF

R PA

TICIP

ALBANIA LUMTURI BLLOSHMI

1944, Tirana, Albanian Kingdom – 2020, Tirana, Republic of Albania

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF BANGLADESH JAMAL UDDIN AHMED

A RG E N T I NA MÓNICA HELLER

1975, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Lives in Buenos Aires

1955, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Lives in Dhaka M A RC O C A S SA RÀ

1984, Palermo, Italy. Lives in Palermo MOHAMMAD EUNUS

1954, Thakurgaon, Bangladesh. Lives in Dhaka

ARMENIA A N D R I US A RU T I U N I A N

1991, Vilnius, Lithuania. Lives in the Netherlands

P ROM I T I H O S SA I N

M A R C O F U S I N AT O

1964, Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Lives in Naarm/Melbourne

AUSTRIA JA KO B L E NA K N E B L

1970, Baden bei Wien, Austria. Lives in Vienna, Austria

1991, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Lives in Dhaka MOHAMMAD IQBAL

1967, Chuadanga, Bangladesh. Lives in Dhaka F RA N C O M A R RO C C O

1957, Rocca d’Evandro, Italy. Lives in Saronno, Italy GIUSEPPE DIEGO SPINELLI

1988, Palermo, Italy. Lives in Palermo S U M O N WA H E N

1986, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Lives in Dhaka

ASHLEY HANS SCHEIRL

1956, Salzburg, Austria. Lives in Vienna, Austria

REPUBLIC OF AZERBAIJAN

BELGIUM 1959, Antwerp, Belgium. Lives in Mexico City, USA

AG D E S BAG H I R ZA D E

C O L L E T T I V O WA R M I C H A C H A

S A B I H A K H A N K I S H I Y E VA

1990, Baku, Azerbaijan. Lives in Baku

Foumded in 2022 in La Paz, Bolivia. Based in La Paz, Bolivia

BRAZIL

R A M I N A S A A D AT K H A N

W E A A M E L M A S RY

1978, Santiago, Chile. Lives in New York, USA

1976, Cairo, Egypt. Lives in Cairo M O H A M E D S H O U K RY

D O M I N G A S O T O M AY O R

1976, Cairo, Egypt. Lives in Cairo

Born in 1985, Santiago, Chile. Lives in Boston, USA ALFREDO THIERMANN

Born in 1987, Santiago, Chile. Lives in Berlin, Germany

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

1983, Teheran, Iran. Lives between Helsinki, Finland, and the countryside of Estonia

Central Academy of Fine Arts ®CAFA© Institute of Sci-Tech Arts and Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence ®TLBI© CAFA Institute of Sci-Tech Arts established in 2021 TLBI established in 2017 L I U J I AY U

Z H U K ( N A R M I N I S R A F I L O VA )

1978, Veliko Tărnovo, Bulgaria. Lives in Vienna, Austria, and Veliko Tărnovo

C A NA DA S TA N D O U G L A S

1960, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Lives in Vancouver and Los Angeles, USA

FINLAND P I LV I TA K A L A

1981, Helsinki, Finland. Lives in Berlin, Germany

1990, Liaoning, China. Lives in Beijing, China

FRANCE

WA N G Y U YA N G

1979, Heilongjiang, China. Lives in Beijing, China

ZINEB SEDIRA

1963, Gennevilliers, France. Lives in London, United Kingdom

1963, Jiangsu, China. Lives in Beijing, China

G E O RG I A C R O AT I A

DETU JINCHARADZE

1984, Tbilisi, Georgia. Lives in Tbilisi

1967, Zagreb, Croatia. Lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

M A R I A M N AT R O S H V I L I

1987, Tbilisi, Georgia. Lives in Tbilisi

GERMANY

CUBA

MARIA EICHHORN

R A FA E L V I L L A R E S D E ORELLANA

KC H O

M I C H A I L M I C H A I L OV

KRISTINA NORMAN

B I TA R A Z AV I

1982, Maceió, Brazil. Lives in Recife, Brazil

BULGARIA

ESTONIA 1979, Tallinn, Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. Lives in Tallinn, Estonia

1989, La Habana, Cuba. Lives in La Habana

1977, Baku, Azerbaijan. Lives in Baku

1992, Baku, Azerbaijan. Lives in Baku

C A R L A M A C C H I AV E L L O

J O N AT H A S D E A N D R A D E

F I D A N N O V R U Z O VA ( K I M )

1997, Baku, Azerbaijan. Lives in USA

1981, Cairo, Egypt. Lives in New York, USA

T O M O S AV I Ć - G E C A N

BOLIVIA

1984, Baku, Azerbaijan. Lives in Baku

AHMED AL SHAER

1980, Santiago, Chile. Lives in La Paz, Bolivia

F R A N C I S A LŸ S

1989, Baku, Azerbaijan. Lives in Berlin, Germany

INFINITY

A R I E L B U S TA M A N T E

XU LEI

F I D A N A K H U N D O VA

1975, Baku, Azerbaijan. Lives in Baku

EGYP T

H A R U N -A R - R A S H I D

1976, Jaypurhat, Bangladesh. Lives in Dhaka

AUSTRALIA

CHILE

(born Alexis Leiva Machado) 1970, Isla de Pinos (present-day Isla de la Juventud), Cuba. Lives in La Habana G I U S E P P E S TA M P O N E

1974, Clusse, France. Lives between Bruxelles, Belgium, Teramo, Italy, and Rome, Italy

1962, Bamberg, Federal Republic of Germany (present-day Germany). Lives in Berlin, Germany

GHANA A F RO S C O P E

1991, Tema, Ghana. Lives in Tema, Ghana DIEGO ARAÚJA

Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Lives in Salvador de Bahia NA C H A I N KUA R E I N D O R F

DENMARK

1991, Accra, Ghana. Lives in Binghamton, USA

UFFE ISOLOTTO

1976, Aalborg, Denmark. Lives in Copenhagen, Denmark

240

G R E AT B R I TA I N

H U N G A RY

S O N I A B OYC E O B E RA

ZSÓFIA KERESZTES

1962, London, Great Britain. Lives in London

1985, Budapest, Hungary. Lives in Budapest

GREECE

ICELAND

L O U K I A A L AVA N O U

SIGURÐUR GUÐJÓNSSON

1979, Athens, Greece. Lives in Athens and Brussels, Belgium

1975, Reykjavík, Iceland. Lives in Reykjavik

G R E NA DA

IRELAND

OLIVER BENOIT

NIAMH O’MALLEY

Born in 1957 in St. George’s, Grenada. Lives in Grenada and USA

1975, Mayo, Ireland. Lives in Dublin, Ireland

G I A N C A R L O F L AT I

Born in 1953 in L’Aquila, Italy. Lives in L’Aquila and Rome, Italy IDENTITY COLLECTIVE

Established in 2011 and based in Germany

ISRAEL I L I T A Z O U L AY

I A N F R I D AY

G I A N M A R I A T O S AT T I

1980, Rome, Italy. Lives in Naples, Italy and New York, USA

ANNAMARIA LI GOTTI

Born in 1984 in Dallas, USA. Lives and works in Grenada SUSAN MAINS

Born in 1958 in Minneapolis, USA. Lives and works in Grenada ANGUS MARTIN

Born in 1964 in St. George’s, Grenada. Lives in Saba, Dutch Caribbean S A M U E L O G I LV I E

Born in 1985 in Kingston, Jamaica. Lives in Grena N I N O P E R RON E

Born in 1942 in Bari, Italy. Lives in Bari RO S S E L LA P E ZZ I N O D E G E RON I M O

Born in 1959 in Catania, Italy. Lives in Catania M A R I A L U I S A TA D E I

Born in 1964 in Rimini, Italy. Lives in Venice, Italy

I V O RY C O A S T ABOUDIA

1983, Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Lives in Abidjan and New York City, USA ARMAND BOUA

F R É D É R I C B R U LY B O U A B R É

1923, Zéprégühé, Ivory Coast – 2014, Abidjan, Ivory Coast A RON D E M E T Z

1972, Vipiteno, Italy. Lives in Val Gardena, Italy

S K U J A B R A D E N (Ingūna Skuja, Melissa D. Braden) Founded in 1999. Based in Lielvārde, Latvia I N G Ū NA S KU JA

RUS T E M B E G E N OV

Born in 1983 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Lives in Almaty

1965, Aknīste, Latvia. Lives in Lielvārde, Latvia M E L I S S A D. B RA D E N

D A RYA J U M E LYA

Born in 1990 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Lives in Almaty and Moscow, Russia

1968, Rosevild, USA. Lives in Lielvārde, Latvia

S A B I N A K U A N G A L I Y E VA

Born in 1994 in Atyrau, Kazakhstan. Lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan

LEBANON

A L E X A N D R A M O R O Z O VA

DA N I E L L E A R B I D

Born in 1982 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Lives in Almaty

Established in 2015 in Almaty, Kazakhstan by Alexandra Morozova and Rustem BegenovBased in Almaty

1970 Beirut, Lebanon. Lives in Paris, France AY M A N B A A L B A K I

1975, Beirut, Lebanon. Lives in Beirut

LITHUANIA R O B E R TA S N A R K U S

1983, Vilnius, Lithuania. Lives in Vilnius

WA N J A K I M A N I

1986, Nairobi, Kenya. Lives in Peterborough, UK

1979, Nairobi, Kenya. Lives in Nairobi

GRAN DUCHY O F LUX E M B U RG

K A L O K I N YA M A I

TINA GILLEN

S Y O W I A KYA M B I

1985, Kitui, Kenya. Lives in Nairobi, Kenya

1972, Luxembourg, Luxembourg. Lives in Brussels, Belgium

DICKENS OTIENO

1979, Migori, Kenya. Lives in Nairobi, Kenya

REPUBLIC OF NORTH M AC E D O N I A

1978, Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Lives in Abidjan, Ivory Coast

REPUBLIC OF KO R E A

RO B E RT JA N KU L O S K I

1969, Prilep, North Macedonia. Lives in Skopje, North Macedonia

YUNCHUL KIM

1970, Seoul, Republic of Korea. Lives in Seoul

MONIKA MOTESKA

1971, Prilep, North Macedonia. Lives in Skopje, North Macedonia

L A E T I T I A KY

1996, Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Lives in Abidjan YEANZI

1988, Katiola, Ivory Coast. Lives in Bingerville, Ivory Coast

REPUBLIC OF KO S OVO

M A LTA

JA KU P F E R R I

A RC A N G E L O SA S S O L I N O

1981, Pristina, Kosovo. Lives in Pristina and Den Haag, Netherlands

1967, Vicenza, Italy. Lives in Vicenza BRIAN SCHEMBRI

J A PA N DUMB TYPE

G U AT E M A L A

Born in 1981 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Lives in Almaty

K E N YA I TA LY

ASHER MAINS

A L E XA N D R BA KA N OV

1972, Tel Aviv–Jaffa, Israel. Lives in Berlin, Germany

Born in 1975 in Petit Martinique, Grenada. Lives in New York City, USA, and in Grenada

Born in 1940 in Zoppola, Italy. Lives in Conegliano Veneto, Italy

L AT V I A

O R TA C O L L E C T I V E

B I L LY G E R A R D F R A N K

Born in 1965 in New York City, USA. Lives in New York City and Grenada

REPUBLIC OF K A Z A K H S TA N

Founded in 1984 in Kyoto, Japan. Based in Japan

KY R G Y Z R E P U B L I C F I R O U Z FA R M A N FA R M A I A N

1973, Tehran, Iran. Lives in Tarifa, Spain

1961, Valletta, Malta. Lives in Paris, France G I US E P P E S C H E M B R I B O NAC I

1955, Valletta, Malta. Lives in Valletta

CHRISTIAN ESCOBAR M A R T Í N E Z “ C H R I S PA P I TA”

1982, Guatemala. Lives in Guatemala

241

List of Participants

MEXICO

NEW ZEALAND

PORTUGAL

MARIANA CASTILLO DEBALL

YUKI KIHARA

P E D RO N E V E S M A RQ U E S

1975, Mexico City, Mexico. Lives in Berlin, Germany and Mexico City

1975, Born Upolu, Sāmoa. Lives in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland; Aotearoa, New Zealand and in Apia, Sāmoa

1984, Lisbon, Portugal. Lives in Lisbon

NAO M I R I N C Ó N GA L LA R D O

1979, Raleigh, USA. Lives in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico F E R N A N D O PA L M A RO D R Í GU E Z

1957, Mexico City, Mexico. Lives in Mexico City SA N T I AG O B O R JA C H A R L E S

1970, Mexico City, Mexico. Lives in Mexico City

ANDERS SUNNA

MONGOLIA M U N K H T S E T S E G J A L K H A A J AV (MUGI)

1967, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Lives in Ulaanbaatar

1985, Čohkkiras / Jukkasjärvi, Sápmi / Sweden. Lives in Dálvvadis / Jokkmokk PA U L I I N A F E O D O R O F F

1977, Anár / Inari, Sápmi / Finland. Lives in Helsset / Helsinki, Sápmi / Finland MÁRET ÁNNE SARA

M ON T E N E G RO

1983 Hámmarfeasta / Hammerfest, Sápmi / Norway. Lives in Guovdageaidnu / Kautokeino

DA N T E B U U

1987, Rožaje, Montenegro. Lives in Rožaje and Berlin, Germany LIDIJA DELIĆ

1986, Nikšić, Montenegro. Lives in Belgrade, Serbia I VA N Š U K O V I Ć

1981, Podgorica, Montenegro. Lives in Belgrade, Serbia JELENA TOMAŠEVIĆ

1974, Podgorica, Montenegro. Lives in Montenegro and Bosnia and Hercegovina DA R KO V U Č KOV I Ć

1975, Podgorica, Montenegro. Lives in Podgorica ART COLLECTION OF THE N O N -A L I G N E D M O V E M E N T : Z U Z A N A C H A L U P O VÁ

S U LTA N AT E O F OMAN A N WA R S O N YA

1948 Bahrain. Lives in Muscat, Oman HASSAN MEER

REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO E L I S A C A N TA R E L L I

1981, Fidenza, Italy. Lives in London, UK, and Parma, Italy N I C O L E T TA C E C C O L I

1973, Republic of San Marino. Lives in the Republic of San Marino Breve

1984, Buckinghamshire, UK. Lives in London, UK

THE NETHERLANDS

RO G E R BA L L E N

1950, New York City, USA. Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa L E B O H A N G KGA N Y E

1990, Primrose, South Africa. Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa PHUMULANI NTULI

1986, Johannesburg, South Africa. Lives in Johannesburg

S PA I N 1958, Barcelona, Spain. Lives and works in Barcelona

1975, Montecchio Emilia, Italy. Lives in Montecchio Emilia

SWITZERLAND

RO SA M U N D I

L AT I FA E C H A K H C H

5° 26’23 ‘’ N 12° 19’ 55’’ E. Lives in Venice and Castello di Morsasco, Italy; and in Sinai Desert

A N N E - C É C I L E S U RGA

1977, Kuwait. Lives in Muscat, Oman

1987, Lavelanet, France. Lives in Ariège, France

RADHIKA KHIMJI

MICHELE TOMBOLINI

R A I YA A L R AWA H I

1963, Venice, Italy. Lives in Venice and Berlin, Germany

1987-2017, Oman

F E L I C I DA D A. P RU D E N T E

1950, Metro Manila, Philippines. Lives in Metro Manila G E R A R D O TA N

1960, Metro Manila, Philippines. Lives in Metro Manila

POLAND M A Ł G O R Z ATA M I R G A- TA S

1978, Zakopane, Poland. Lives in Czarna Góra, Poland

SYRIAN ARAB REPUBLIC SAO USA N A LZ U B I

1979, Oman. Lives in London, UK

1989, Ifugao, Philippines. Lives in Ifugao

1974, El Khnansa, Marocco. Lives and works in Vevey and Martigny, Switzerland

R O B E R T O PA C I D A L Ò

1961, Damascus, Syria. Lives in Damascus GIUSEPPE AMADIO

1944, Todi, Italy. Lives in Todi

SAUDI ARABIA MUHANNAD SHONO

ADNAN HAMIDEH

1962, Damascus, Syria. Lives in Damascus M A RC E L L O L O G I U D I C E

1977, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Lives in Riyadh

1957, Taormina, Italy. Lives in Monaco, Principality of Monaco; Milan, Italy; Noto, Italy ISMAIEL NASRA

SERBIA

1964, Salamiyya, Syria. Lives in Damascus, Syria

V L A D I M I R N I KO L I C

H A N N U PA L O S U O

1974, Belgrade, Serbia. Lives in Belgrade

1966, Helsinki, Finland. Lives in Helsinki

T S H E R I N S H E R PA

1968, Kathmandu, Nepal. Lives in Kathmandu

REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

IGNASI ABALLÍ

ENDLESS

B U D O O R A L R I YA M I

SAMMY N. BUHLE

N E PA L

1980, Bucharest, Romania. Lives in Bucharest, Hamburg and Berlin (Germany)

1962, Rimini, Italy. Lives in Rimini and in the Republic of San Marino

B E R N A R D M AT E M E R A

1912 – 1985 Havana, Cuba

ADINA PINTILIE

1972, Oman. Lives in Muscat, Oman

PHILIPPINES

R E N É P O RT O C A R R E RO

1959, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Lives in Mohorje, Slovenia

MICHELANGELO GALLIANI

1925, Kovačica, Serbia - 2001, Belgrade, Serbia

1946, Guruve, Zimbabwe – 2002 Tengenenge

M A R KO JA K Š E

ROM A N I A NORDIC COUNTRIES ( N O RWAY, F I N L A N D, SWEDEN)

REPUBLIC OF S L OV E N I A

LORENZO PUGLISI

SINGAPORE

1971, Biella, Italy. Lives in Bologna, Italy

S H U B I G I RAO

Mumbai, India. Lives in Singapore

MELANIE BONAJO

A K S A M TA L L A A

1963, Quneitra, Syria. Lives in Damascus, Syria O M RA N YO U N I S

1978, Heerlen, Netherlands. Lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands and Berlin, Germany

1971, al Hasakah, Syria. Lives in Damascus, Syria

242

TURKEY FÜSUN ONUR

1937, Istanbul, Turkey. Lives in Istanbul

UKRAINE PAV L O M A K O V

1958, St. Petersburg, USSR. Lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine

U NITED ARAB E M I R AT E S MOHAMED AHMED IBRAHIM

1962, Khor Fakkan, UAE. Lives in Khor Fakkan

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

T E R R E N C E M U S E K I WA

1990, Harare, Zimbabwe. Lives in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe

V E N I C E PAV I L I O N PA O L O FA N T I N

1981, Castelfranco Veneto, Italy. Lives in Treviso, Italy

A L B E R TA WHITTLE: DEEP D I V E ( PA U S E ) UNCOILING M E M O RY A L B E R TA W H I T T L E

Bridgetown, Barbados, 1980. Lives in Glasgow, Scotland

P I N O D O NAG G I O

1941, Burano, Italy. Lives in Venice, Italy GOLDSCHMIED & CHIARI SARA GOLDSCHMIED

1975, Arzignano, Italy. Lives in Milan, Italy ELEONORA CHIARI

1971, Rome, Italy. Lives in Milan, Italy

E U G E N RA P O RT O RU

ANGELA SU: ARISE, HONG KO N G I N V E N I C E

E WA K U RY L U K I, WHITE KA N GA RO O

ANGELS LISTENING

1946, Cracow, Poland. Lives in Warsaw, Poland and in Paris, France

E WA K U RY L U K

RAC H E L L E E H OV NA N I A N

Huston, USA. Lives in New York and Miami, USA, and in Toscana, Italy

1967, Chicago, United States. Lives in New York City, United States

U R U G U AY G E R A R D O G O L D WA S S E R

1961, Montevideo, Uruguay

B O L I VA R I A N REPUBLIC OF VENEZUELA PA L M I R A C O R R E A

1948, Cumanà, Venezuela. Lives in Caracas, Venezuela MILA QUAST

1989, Maracaibo, Venezuela. Lives in Caracas, Venezuela J O RG E R E C I O

1962, Caracas, Venezuela. Lives in Barcelona, Spain

A P O L L O, A P O L L O K AT H A R I N A G RO S S E K AT H A R I N A G R O S S E

1961, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Lives in Belin, Germany and in New Zealand

BOSCO SODI AT PA L A Z Z O VENDRAMIN G R I M A N I . W H AT G O E S A RO U N D C OM E S A RO U N D BOSCO SODI

1970, Mexico City, Mexico. Lives between New York, USA, and Oaxaca, Mexico

C É S A R VA Z Q U E Z

1974, San Cristobal, Venezuela. Lives in Caracas

REPUBLIC OF Z I M BA BW E

R O N A L D M U C H AT U TA

1984, Chirumanzu, Zimbabwe. Lives in South Africa K R E S I A H M U KWA Z H I

1992, Harare, Zimbabwe. Lives in Harare

F R O M PA L E S T I N E WITH ART GHASSAN ABULABAN

1964, Dhaisha Refugee Camp, Palestine. Lives in Amman, Jordan H A N A N AWA D

1973, Lodi, USA. Lives in Houston, USA IBRAHIM ALAZZA

1964, Palestine. Lives in Boston, USA JAC Q U E L I N E B E JA N I

1959, Beirut, Lebanon. Lives in Luxembourg KARIM ABU-SHAKRA

1982, Umm-al-Fahm, Palestine. Lives in Umm-al-Fahm LUX ETERNA

1978, Sydney, Australia. Lives in Sydney MOHAMED KHALIL

1960, Al-Zarqa, Jordan. Lives in Ramallah, Palestine MOHAMMED ALHAJ

1982, Gaza, Palestine. Lives in Gaza

C ATA L O N I A I N VENICE_LLIM LARA FLUXÀ

1985, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Lives in Barcelona, Spain

WA L L E N M A P O N D E R A

1985, Harare, Zimbabwe. Lives in Cape Town, South Africa

1961, Bucharest, Romania. Lives in Bucharest

Lives in Hong Kong

ANGELA SU

OT TORINO DE LUCCHI

1951, Ferrara, Italy. Lives in Padua, Italy

EUGEN RA P O RT O RU: T H E A B D U C T I ON F ROM T H E S E RAG L I O ROM A WOM 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

NABIL ANANI

1943, Palestine. Lives in Ramallah, Palestine NADIA IRSHAID GILBERT

1995, Palm Beach, USA. Lives in New York, USA NA M E E R QA S S I M

CLAIRE TA B O U R E T : I A M S PA C I O U S , SINGING FLESH

1984, Jerusalem, Israel. Lives in Jerusalem

C L A I R E TA B O U R E T

R U L A H A L AWA N I

R A N I A M ATA R

1984, Beirut, Lebanon. Lives in Boston, USA

1964, East Jerusalem, Israel. Lives in East Jerusalem

1981, Pertuis, France. Lives in Los Angeles, USA

243

List of Participants

S A L M A N A B U S I T TA

1938, Ma’in Abu Sitta, Palestine. Lives in Kuwait SAMAR HUSSAINI

1964, Northampton, USA. Lives in West Orange, USA S A M I A H A L A BY

1936, Jerusalem, Israel. Lives in New York, USA

L U C I O F O N TA N A / ANTONY GORMLEY

S USA N B US H NAQ

1963, Kuwait City. Lives in Kuwait TA Q I S A B AT E E N

1988, Beit Jala, Palestine. Lives in Bethlehem, Palestine

HA CHONG-HYUN HA CHONG-HYUN

1935, Sancheong, Korea. Lives in Seoul, Korea

1899, Rosario de Santa Fè, Argentina – 1968, Comabbio, Italy ANTONY GORMLEY

1950, London, UK. Lives in London

PERA + FLORA + FA U N A T H E S T O RY O F INDIGENOUSNESS AND THE OWNERSHIP OF H I S T O RY KAMAL SABRAN

Perak, Malaysia. Lives in Perak and Penang, Malaysia A Z I Z A N PA I M A N

Malacca, Malaysia. Lives in Perak, Malaysia

H E I N Z M AC K – V I B R AT I O N O F LIGHT H E I N Z M AC K

1931, Lollar, Germany. Lives in Mönchengladbach, Germany and Ibiza, Spain

KEHINDE W I L E Y: A N A RC H A E O L O GY OF SILENCE KEHINDE WILEY

1977, Los Angeles, USA. Lives in New York City, USA and in Dakar, Senegal

1964, Rome, Italy. Lives in Rome

Johor, Malaysia. Lives in Perak and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia SAIFUL RAZMAN

Perak, Malaysia. Lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia S T E FA N O C A G O L

Trento, Italy. Lives in the Dolomites, Italy K A PA L L O R E K A R T S PA C E

Based in Perak, Malaysia P RO J E K RA BA K

Founded in Ipoh, Malaysia

R O A D O F FA I T H W E N H UA DA I

L I TA A L B U Q U E RQ U E : LIQUID LIGHT

RON Y P L E S L : T R E E S G ROW F R O M T H E S KY

L I TA A L B U Q U E R Q U E

RON Y P L E S L

1965, Jablonec nad Nisou, Czech Republic. Lives in Prague, Czech Republic

TIMES R E I M AG I N E D : C H U N KWA N G YO U N G

LOUISE NEVELSON

1899, Pereiaslav, Ukraine – 1988, New York City, USA

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 S TA N L E Y W H I T N E Y

1946, Philadelphia, USA. Lives in New York City, USA, and Parma, Italy

1941, Washington, USA, in 1941. Lives in the Hudson Valley, USA R AY YA N E TA B E T

VERA MOLNÁR: ICÔNE 2020

C H U N KWA N G Y O U N G

1944 Hong Chun, South Korea. Lives in Seoul, South Korea

VERA MOLNÁR

1924, Budapest, Hungary. Lives in Paris, France

S T E FA N O B O E R I

1956, Milan, Italy. Lives in Milan

TUE GREENFORT: MEDUSA ALGA LAG U NA TUE GREENFORT

WITH HANDS S I GN S G ROW RU T H G Ó M E Z

1976, Valladolid, Spain. Lives in Madrid, Spain NURIA MORA

1973, Holbæk, Denmark. Lives in Hesnæs, Denmark and Berlin, Germany

1974, Madrid, Spain. Lives in Madrid DA N I E L M U Ñ OZ

1980, Cáceres, Spain. Lives in Madrid, Spain

U N C O M B E D, UNFORESEEN, U NCONSTRAINED DA R R E N A L M O N D

1971, Wigan, UK. Lives in London, UK

S I X E PA R E D E S

1975, Barcelona, Spain. Lives in Barcelona

WITHOUT WOMEN Z I NA I DA

OLIVER BEER

1985, Pembury, UK. Lives in London, UK, and Paris, France RANA BEGUM

1977, Sylhet, Bangladesh. Lives in London, UK D AV I D C O R N E Y ( H Y E TA L )

1982, Swindon, UK. Lives in London, UK

1975, Kiev, Ukraine

“ Y I I M A” A RT G RO U P : A L L E G O RY O F DREAMS U N G VA I M E N G

JULIAN CHARRIÈRE

1958, Macau, Overseas Province of Portugal. Lives in Macau, Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China

1987, Morges, Switzerland. Lives in Berlin, Germany D AV I D C L A E R B O U T

1969, Kortrijk, Belgium. Lives in Antwerp, Belgium, and Berlin, Germany

CHAN HIN IO

1964, People’s Republic of China. Lives in Macau, Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China

BHARTI KHER

1969, London, UK. Lives in New Delhi, India A R G H AVA N K H O S R AV I

LOUISE NEVELSON. PERSISTENCE

M A R T I N P U RY E A R

1983, Ashqout, Lebanon. Lives in Beirut, Lebanon, and San Francisco, USA

KIM NG

1971, Beijing, China. Lives in Beijing

1946, Santa Monica, USA. Lives in Los Angeles, USA

FRANCESCA LEONE

L U C I O F O N TA N A

S A N A FA R A H B I S H A R A

1964, Nazareth, Israel. Lives in Haifa, Palestine

TA K E Y O U R T I M E

1984, Shahr-e-kord, Iran. Lives in New York City, USA T E R E SA M A RG O L L E S

1963, Culiacán, Mexico. Lives in Mexico City, Mexico, and Madrid, Spain SI ON

1979, Dang Jing, Korea. Lives in Krakow, Poland

244

5 9 T H I N T E R N AT I O N A L ART EXHIBITION THE MILK OF DREAMS LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA Editorial Activities and Web

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