The power of the female figure: woman, mother, nature. And then the relationship between the human being and the earth, and that with technology, the metamorphosis and the fluidity of genres. It is made of these ingredients “The milk of dreams”, the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale of Art curated by Cecilia Alemani, the first Italian at the helm of the largest contemporary art event.
The post-pandemic Biennial was built between remote talks and meetings via zoom, but it stands out for its record numbers: 213 artists from 58 countries, 180 first appearances, 1433 works on display, 80 new productions.
Many of the artists present created works specifically for this edition: they took advantage of the suspended time of the lockdown to conceive and create their works, and the sign of the times is certainly felt. Contemporary art is not consolatory, it was born to raise questions, to open the way to the multiplicity of meanings. What we are facing, crossing the Corderie of the Arsenale and the Central Pavilions at the Giardini, is a world in continuous transformation, in which genres merge, the meaning – even of existence itself – becomes fluid, nature is stepmother. and benign at the same time and the human body loses its identity and has to deal with the looming technology.
La Biennale donna
Cecilia Alemani’s Biennale is all female, starting with the two Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement: Cecilia Vicuña and Katharina Fritsch. She is the hyper-realistic elephant who opens the exhibition “The milk of dreams” in the Chini room of the Central Pavilion, amidst mirrors and stuccoes, a reference to the pachyderms exhibited alive in circuses or embalmed in natural history museums. Perfect, were it not for that dark green skin color that makes it dreamlike, anti-naturalistic.
At the Arsenale instead, to open the exhibition, we are welcomed by a gigantic sculpture by Simone Leigh: a bust of a woman (with a face without eyes) that looks like a huge hut in which to be welcomed. Women in this Biennale are in the clear majority: Alemani has preferred lesser known artists in the choice, mostly from countries that once we would have defined “developing”.
If Delcy Morelos makes us walk among blocks of earth to remind us that we are earthly beings ourselves, Mire Lee’s kinetic sculptures are all too similar to organs of a body in constant motion, in which bodily functions never stop. Nature, body and machine, in all their forms, can also be found in the “time capsules”, five historical micro-exhibitions scattered along the exhibition path that the curator wanted to create to connect past and present through the issues addressed and the comparison between old and new artists.