Page 14 - La Biennale di Venezia 2022 issue of World of Art Contemporary Art Magazine

Biennale Arte 2022 LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA layers of meaning and bridge present and past. What
emerges is a historical narrative that is not built
59TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION
around systems of direct inheritance or conflict, but
around forms of symbiosis, solidarity, and sisterhood.
With a specific choreography of architectural
spaces developed in collaboration with the design
sections: miniature constellations of artworks, found
objects, and documents, clustered together to explore duo Formafantasma, these “cabinets” also prompt
reflection on how the history of art is constructed
certain key themes. Conceived like time capsules, around museum and exhibition practices that establish
these shows within the show provide additional tools hierarchies of taste and mechanisms of inclusion and
of investigation and introspection, weaving a web of exclusion. Many of the stories told in these capsules
references and echoes that link artworks of the past have not yet been absorbed into the official canon and
– including major museum loans and unconventional have been for too long considered minor and obscure.
selections – to the pieces by contemporary artists in
the surrounding space. These sections thus participate in the complex
process of rewriting and rereading history that has
This wide-ranging, transhistorical approach traces marked the last few years, when it has become clearer
kinships and affinities between artistic methods and than ever that no historical narrative can ever be
practices, even across generations, to create new considered final.

Merikokeb Berhanu, Untitled LVII, 2021. Courtesy the Artist; Addis Fine
Art. © Merikokeb Berhanu THE ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION
The fulcrum of The Milk of Dreams is a gallery on the
lower level of the Central Pavilion where the first of
the five capsules features a collection of artworks
by women artists of the historical avant-garde
movements, including, among others, Eileen Agar,
Leonora Carrington, Claude Cahun, Leonor Fini, Ithell
Colquhoun, Loïs Mailou Jones, Carol Rama, Augusta
Savage, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo. The
works of these and other women artists of the early
20th century – shown in an ensemble inspired by
Surrealist exhibitions – summon up a domain of the
marvellous where anatomies and identities can shift
and change, following the desire for transformation
and emancipation.

Many of the same lines of thought return in the work
of contemporary artists on view in the other galleries
of the Central Pavilion. The mutant bodies convoked
by Aneta Grzeszykowska, Julia Phillips, Ovartaci,
Christina Quarles, Shuvinai Ashoona, Sara Enrico, Birgit
Ju rgenssen, and Andra Ursula suggest new mergers
of the organic and the artificial, whether as a means
of self-reinvention or as a disquieting foretaste of an
increasingly dehumanised future.

The ties between human being and machine are
analysed in many of the works on view, as in those by

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