-0ba78e7e-eece-48e7-a241-5aa8c793bf25.jpeg)
Venice, April 23 (BUS): For the first time in the 127-year history of the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and most important contemporary art fair showcases the majority of gender-non-conforming artists, under the supervision of curator Cecilia Alemani.
The result is a biennial highlighting long-overlooked artists despite their prolific careers, while also investigating topics including gender norms, colonialism and climate change, the Associated Press (AP) reported.
Al Yamani’s flagship show “Milk of Dreams” opened alongside 80 national pavilions on Saturday after the pandemic was delayed by a year. The art exhibition runs until 27 November. It is only the fourth of the 59th editions of the Biennale under female supervision.
Al Yamani, curator of the Italian gallery based in New York, said this week that the dominance of women among the more than 200 artists Al Yamani selected for the main show “was not a choice, but a process.”
“I think some of the best artists today are female artists,” she told The Associated Press. “But also, let us not forget, that in the long history of the Venice Biennale, the dominance of male artists in previous cycles has been astonishing.”
“Unfortunately, we still haven’t resolved many gender-related issues,” Al Yamani said.
Envisioning him during the coronavirus pandemic and opening up as war rages on in Europe, Al Yamani acknowledged that art in times like these can seem “superficial.” But she also emphasized the biennial’s role over the decades as “a kind of seismographer of history… to absorb and record the shocks and crises that transcend the contemporary art world.”
In a strong reminder, the Russian Pavilion remains closed this year, after the artists pulled out following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nearby, the curators of the Ukrainian Pavilion have erected sandbags in the center of the Giardini, surrounded by stylized posters of new artwork by Ukrainian artists representing the horrors of the two-month-old war.
Among the women who received long-awaited recognition at this Biennale is American sculptor Simon Lee, who was mid-career frontrunner at the United States Pavilion and setting the tone in the main exhibition with a towering bust of a black woman who had been originally commissioned for the High Line urban park in New York City.
Turkey’s 85-year-old conceptual art pioneer Fosun Onur filled the Turkish pavilion with skinny cats and mice set into a storyboard facing modern-day threats like pandemic and climate change. While proud of her role in representing Turkey and the work she produced during the pandemic in her home overlooking the Bosphorus, she acknowledged that the honor was overdue.
“Why don’t I know,” Fosan said by phone from Istanbul. “The female artists work hard, but they are not always recognized. They are always the men first.”
Third New Zealand artist is represented by Yuki Kihara, whose installation “Paradise Camp” tells the story of the Vavavin community in Samoa of people who do not accept the sex they were assigned to at birth.
The exhibition displays images of Vavavin’s Pacific Islander paintings by French Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin, recovering the images in a process the artist refers to as “recycling.”
“Paradise Camp is really about imagining a Vavavin utopia, closing off the heterogeneous natural life of colonialism to make way for an indigenous world view that is inclusive and sensitive to changes in the environment,” Kihara said.
The image of the highly realistic statue of a futuristic chitty woman giving birth in front of her satyr partner, who has hanged himself, sets a grim, post-apocalyptic tone in the Danish Pavilion, created by Uwe Isoloto.
The Nordic Pavilion offers a more optimistic path out of the apocalypse, with artwork and performances depicting the anti-colonial struggle by the Sami people, who inhabit a wide swath of northern Norway, Sweden and Finland in Murmansk Oblast in Russia, while also celebrating them. traditions.
“We have somehow figured out how to live inside the apocalyptic world and do it while maintaining our ethos, our beliefs and our value systems,” said co-curator Lisa Ravna Vinbug.
This year’s Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement was awarded to German artist Katharina Fritsch, whose sculpture of the life-like elephant stands in the rotunda of the Giardini’s main exhibition building, and Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker Cecilia Vicona, whose portrait of her with her mother’s eyes adorns the cover of the Biennale’s catalogue.
Vicuna painted the picture while the family was in exile after the violent military coup in Chile against President Salvador Allende. Now 97, her mother accompanied her to the Biennale.
“She sees her spirit is still present, so the painting is like the victory of love against dictatorship, against oppression, and against hate,” Vicuna said.
M