Page 20 - La Biennale di Venezia 2022 issue of World of Art Contemporary Art Magazine

Biennale Arte 2022 LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
59TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION
ROBERTO CICUTTO WITH THE CURATOR CECILIA
ALEMANI. PHOTO ANDREA AVEZZU. COURTESY OF
LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
18 WORLD of ART
STATEMENT BY
ROBERTO CICUTTO
PRESIDENT OF
LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
I try to put myself in the shoes of Cecilia Alemani, Curator of the 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
Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee (ASAC) in the Central
Pavilion at the Giardini, curated by all the Directors of the six Artistic
Sectors 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.