Venice Biennale
Can magical thinking help us imagine new ways through troubled times?
Tau Lewis, “Vena Cava”, 2021
recycled leather, acrylic paint, coated nylon and steel armature, 130” x 122” x 48” (photo by Roberto Marossi, courtesy Venice Biennale)
In The Milk of Dreams, a beautifully illustrated book made by the late British-Mexican artist Leonora Carrington for her sons, the day-to-day world constantly transforms through the prism of magical thinking. This year’s Venice Biennale, which takes Carrington’s book as its theme, taps into the artist’s surrealist approach to access unconscious experiences.
The biennale’s main exhibition walks a precarious balance between the unsettled urgency of our times and a total surrender to the world of dreams, magic and the uncanny. A similar tension is found in the romantic city of Venice, which is sinking at a pace set by climate change. Many works on view are difficult reminders that nothing – from our fantasies to our dream life and bodily experiences, the sources of so much extraverbal language – can escape the deep wounds of politics, economics, warfare and environmental calamity.
Rather than an escapist mode, imagination becomes a tactic to access potential in crisis, to uncover fresh or renewed human and non-human harmonies, and to reflect upon our responsibilities to planetary bodies. The exhibition’s thematic areas explore the relationship between the body and other individuals, the body and technology, and the body and the Earth, while also considering the changing definition of the human.
Cecilia Alemani (photo by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy Venice Biennale)
It’s significant that Cecilia Alemani, this year’s curator, highlights the work of women, femme-identifying and non-binary practitioners among the exhibition’s 213 artists, centring a critical perspective otherwise relegated to the margins of history. In a multiverse model, Alemani proposes a wormhole towards disregarded genealogies that, nevertheless, are ongoing. She offers an encounter with strategies of worldbuilding and explorations of new or newly discovered synergies between forms.
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Simone Leigh, “Brick House,” 2019
bronze, 192” x 110” x 110”, installation view at Venice Biennale, 2022 (photo by Roberto Marossi, courtesy of Venice Biennale)
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Ali Cherri, “Titans” (detail), 2022
three sculptures (terracotta, wood and metal) 71” x 24” x 24” and six watercolour drawings (photo by Roberto Marossi, courtesy Venice Biennale)
The biennale, which includes some 90 national pavilions largely situated in the Giardini, a parkland created by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Arsenale, a complex of former shipyards and armories, demonstrates some clear trends among artistic methods and materials. They include a drive toward larger-scale objects and installations, as for instance, with American artist Simone Leigh. Textiles in various forms, such as large tapestries and carpeted works, are also notable, including 12 stunning textile works by Malgorzatta Mirga-Tas, who took over the Polish pavilion for the Roma people. There are also intricate embroideries, such as those by Britta Marakatt-Labba, who stitches the delicate cosmos of the Sami. Ceramics are here too, and I particularly like work by Beirut artist Ali Cherri. Finally, the exhibition includes surrealist, spiritualist and automatic paintings from the forgotten histories of the 19th and 20th centuries through to today.
Stan Douglas, “2011 ≠ 1848,” 2022
installation view at the Canada Pavilion, Venice Biennale (courtesy the artist, the National Gallery of Canada, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner; photo by Jack Hems)
Much has been written on Vancouver artist Stan Douglas, Canada’s official representative, who considers state violence and political solidarities through conceptual photography and film. His work, spread over two venues, has made multiple ‘best of’ lists. A New York Times review found it was “executed with vitality.” I enjoyed the liveliness of his off-site video, ISDN, a call and response between grime rappers in London and Cairo. This two-channel video sutures the rhymes using an algorithm that reforms them into an entirely new performance that takes three days to loop back to its original cycle.
Stan Douglas, “2011 ≠ 1848,” 2022
installation view at Magazzini del Sale No. 5, 2022 (courtesy the artist, the National Gallery of Canada, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner; photo by Jack Hems)
The video is beautifully installed and crisply juxtaposed by its setting at the Magazzini del Sale, a 16th-century salt factory in the Dorsoduru district. But together with the accompanying high-concept photographic installation in the main pavilion, I found the gloss of Canada’s overall showing too great a contrast with the main exhibition, which quietly emphasizes craft, traditional knowledges, spiritual intimacies and overlooked histories.
To be sure, works by Canadians, Canadian expats and Indigenous peoples were among the richest offerings in The Milk of Dreams. Tau Lewis, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Jes Fan, Kapwani Kiwanga, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Shuvinai Ashoona and Allison Katz experiment with softer methods that are no less political in their approach to issues such as race, sovereignty, gender, queer sexuality and technology.
Tau Lewis, “Angelus Mortem,” 2021
recycled fur (mink, beaver, fox, rabbit, lamb and sable), coated nylon and steel armature, 130” x 140” x 46” (photo by Roberto Marossi, courtesy Venice Biennale)
Divine Giants Tribunal, a 2021 series by Toronto-born Tau Lewis, now based in Brooklyn, is easily among the best works in Venice. She presents three epic-scale masks, each about three metres tall, that are shown alone on the wall. Made from upcycled fabric, fur and leather, they reference Yoruba masks. They also connect to her practice of quilting, textile sculpture and assemblage. Beyond their size, which alone is striking, is the use of colour and texture to yield facial expressions. These masks, depending how you approach them, can be read as talismanic, friendly or as humorous tricksters. These are works that maintain your gaze, challenging in all the right ways as they activate the artist’s labour through their scrupulous hand-stitched forms.
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Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, “Counterblaste,” 2021
pantyhose, tobacco, beer can tabs, wildflowers, thread and charms, 9.5” x 79”x 26” (photo by Marco Cappelletti, courtesy Venice Biennale)
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Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, “Counterblaste” (detail)
2021, pantyhose, tobacco, beer can tabs, wildflowers, thread and charms, 9.5” x 79”x 26” (courtesy Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Cooper Cole, Toronto)
I was especially excited to see Vancouver-based Métis artist Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s 2021 work Counterblaste, shown along with a small grouping of assemblages the artist calls “spells.” Her work, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art last year, incorporates tobacco, whether mixed into Crisco and other materials and set in collages or stuffed into pantyhose to create a many-teated rabbit woman. I thought of Aruna D’Souza’s Galleries West review of the New York show, which connects the casual act of bumming a smoke to a strained but enduring gift economy between Indigenous peoples and European colonizers. Counterblaste is languid and voluptuous. Her unhurried lusciousness gives a cheeky finger to rigid Eurocentric economics, “as if one token of value,” D’Souza writes, “is objectively more valuable than another.”
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Jes Fan, “Fragrant Harbour” (detail), 2022
glass, aqua resin, metal, wood and silicone, 75” x 45” x 31” (photo by Nicholas Knight, courtesy the artist and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong)
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Jes Fan, “Fragrant Harbour,” 2022
glass, aqua resin, metal, wood and silicone, 75” x 45” x 31” (photo by Nicholas Knight, courtesy the artist and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong)
Glass sculptures by the Canadian-born, Hong Kong-raised, Brooklyn-based Jes Fan are another highlight. Trained as a glass artist, Fan’s body of work incorporates biological materials into blown sculptures. Three 2022 works, Wounding, Apparatus and Fragrant Harbour, are bulbous gullies stacked like nesting tables. The glass has been injected with prolactin, the hormone that causes breasts to swell and produce milk. The glass swirls with resin and pigment. Nested in the bowls are delicate clear bulbs of varying shapes, about the size of two hands. I think of ikura, the pearly salmon eggs in sushi. The materials are imbued with an unctuous, life-giving quality – they are hybrid glassy wombs.
Hybridity is a shared theme across the exhibition. Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona populates her drawings with fused animal-human creatures, actively mining the unconscious and reflecting on persisting spiritual and cosmological forces. Only the third Inuk artist to exhibit at the biennale, she was awarded one of two special mentions by the event’s jury.
Elaine Cameron-Weir, “Low Relief Icon (Figure 1) and Low Relief Icon (Figure 2),” 2021
U.S. military body transfer cases, aluminium, flicker bulbs, electrical wiring, conveyor belt, pewter, chain, pulleys, aircraft cable and hardware, dimensions variable; and “Right Hand Left Hand, Grinds a Fantasizer’s Dust,” 2021, concrete textile, funerary backdrop stand, neon tubing, transformers, spotlights and silk gauze, 85.5” x 112” x 24” (photo by Marco Cappelletti, courtesy Venice Biennale)
New York-based Elaine Cameron-Weir, who was born in Red Deer, Alta., has a cooler approach, combining industrial, surgical-style objects with flame, scent and light. Her installation looks like a futuristic guillotine and is, in fact, a repurposed funerary backdrop, complete with steel caskets from the American military. The work is less successful in its aim to evoke a merging of body and techno-machine but does level a heavy Matrix-style critique of life’s disposability during war.
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Allison Katz, “Be Nice,” 2022
oil, acrylic and rice on canvas, 67”x 87” (courtesy the artist)
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Allison Katz, “Be Nice” (detail), 2022
oil, acrylic and rice on canvas, 67”x 87” (courtesy the artist)
There have been a few important critiques about the biennale’s nationalist model. Most recently, Toronto arts writer Jayne Wilkinson rightly observes in Momus that national pavilions may no longer serve the people in those countries. Several pavilions this year critique the sponsorship of their nation-states, including the Nordic pavilion, which ceded its space to Sami artists, and the Polish pavilion, which was given to a Roma artist. I hope these historic acts will push more countries to relinquish representation to the Indigenous nations that host them.
To this end, it’s difficult to write a review of Canadians at the biennale when it’s clear that much of the work is being made in diaspora or is clearly informed by the contested territories where it is made. But Alemani’s magic-infused theme allows the conjuring of imaginary spaces that dwell more deeply on bodies in relation, which, perhaps, will help erode persistent binaries and divisions, creating room to explore alternatives. ■
The Venice Biennale runs from April 23 to Nov. 27, 2022.
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