When the world is collapsing outside, when the feeling in your throat is tight in the face of endless images and bad news, when nothing comforting seems to be in prospect – then it helps to look at art that is fed by dreams and fantasies. Which emphasizes what distinguishes humans from animals and shows the astonishing way in which they are able to invent inner worlds and reflect outer worlds in such a way that abysses and longings become immersive images, so that there is suddenly hope far removed from daily politics comes up. The 59th Venice Biennale does just that – and it does it in a way that is pleasantly so museum-like and rested that it is a real pleasure to finally be able to walk through the main pavilion in the Giardini and through the halls again after three years to stroll along the arsenals.
The Italian curator Cecilia Alemani, who otherwise oversees the exhibition course “High Line” in New York, has designed for the first time an exhibition that not only shows over 90 percent women without making it a furious political issue – but stages them in a for the Biennale offers unusually relaxed spaces in which historical and contemporary works engage in dialogue and tell stories that we have never known before. “The Milk of Dreams” is the title based on a children’s book by the English surrealist Leonora Carrington, who hovers over this Biennial like a good spirit (and is being celebrated at the same time in the exhibition “Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity” in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection ).
Charline von Heyl’s The Garden of Cyrus from 2021
Source: Marlene Gawrisch
In the entrance to the main pavilion, whose labyrinthine architecture is anything but easy to play with, we first encounter the greenish shimmering, life-size, high-pedestal female elephant by the German artist Katharina Fritsch, who received the Golden Lion for her life’s work this year: “Bibi “ sets a sign for the intuitive, non-rational and yet powerful and clear that awaits us in the next rooms.
The greenish shimmering lady elephant by Katharina Fritsch. She receives the Golden Lion for her life’s work
Source: Marlene Gawrisch
Immediately behind, a place of honor was spontaneously given to the Ukrainian folk artist Maria Primachenko, 25 of whose works were burned in a museum exhibition at the beginning of the Russian war of aggression – “as a sign of solidarity and a comment on the social situation,” as Alemani explains.
Primachenko’s figuratively colorful, dreamlike gouache also fits perfectly with the style of the exhibition, which is fun right from the first room: Rosemarie Trockel’s large, monochrome crocheted pictures meet Andra Ursuta’s deformed, colorfully shimmering body fragments made of glass, which unfolds an enormous auratic tension. In the basement behind it is a golden-yellow chamber of curiosities with early photographic works, performance videos, drawings and small-format pictures, all of which have something fantastic, disturbing and often humorous about them.
We get to know artists who, like the Mexicans Remedios Varo and Alice Rahon or the drawing English poet Valentine Penrose, were only something for experts for a long time, coupled with the better-known but hardly world-famous surrealists Claude Cahun, Dorothea Tanning and Meret Oppenheim. There are folkloristic portraits of women by the Algerian Baya Mahieddine, abstract studies of movement by the Italian artist “Benedetta”, who visualized human forces, and writings, documents and ephemera of an avant-garde, which in art history has so far been pigeonholed primarily as male and European.
If Alemani effortlessly undermines this outdated assumption, she succeeds in an arrangement in which poetic, detailed historical elements in showcases and picture frames alternate again and again with generous, concentrated juxtapositions of sculpture and painting. The body is the theme par excellence – in all its morbidity and beauty, and as a deformed image of dreams and fears. One senses the occult, ghostly obsessions and a hidden sexuality that pulsates behind the picture surfaces. The hallucinatory, gloomy drawings by the poet Unica Zürn meet the concrete poetry of Tomaso Binga alias Bianca Menna. Animal pictures from the 1970s by the Chilean poet Cecila Vicuñas hang next to the collaged dream worlds by the Ethiopian Merikokeb Berhanu, born in 1977.
Again and again it is such dialogues that maintain the calm tension of the show – and that show that between generations, continents and centuries similar ideas and conceptions were often processed, albeit realized differently. And just when you think that the exhibition has left the contemporary, a room suddenly appears with new, shrill paintings by Charline von Heyl, Jana Euler or Christina Quarles, paired with the organic sculptural works by Kaari Upson or Elaine Cameron Weir : A feast for the eyes, almost like solo exhibitions, only in this context embedded in the higher idea of the dream as a state of mind that produces magical worlds never seen before – worlds that are human, sometimes comforting, sometimes frightening, unfathomable and sonorous, between ancient and science fiction.
It sounds simple, but it makes an immense difference: unlike her predecessors, Alemani avoids cramming just one or two works by one artist into one space with works by ten others. Her presentations give space to look and think, creating an atmosphere of naturalness and connection through a similar mindset, expressed in multiple forms without the show ever falling apart visually.
The Curator: Cecilia Alemani
What: AFP
It is a journey through a new understanding of art history, in which pioneers like Nanda Vigo and Lillian Schwarz, who anticipated op art, abstract film and techno, go hand in hand with the surprising minimalism of Sonia Delaunay and the reduced drawings, “hypertransformations”. the Hungarian Vera Molnár. None of this comes across as cold, and one wants to set aside plenty of time to appreciate the stories behind these foreboding, often spiritual, works.
In the large old warehouses of the arsenal, grand gestures dominate – but without neglecting the interruptions caused by small details. Folk art and ethnologically colored works are in the foreground here, “nature and myths, the relationship to our planet”, as Alemani describes it. The giant bust of an African woman by Simone Leigh, which also features in the American pavilion, welcomes visitors in the first room. It continues with figurative-folkloric textile paintings and drawings, of which it is difficult to say whether they are fresh or old, which can sometimes be problematic if one thinks with art-historical standards, but they are always intense in their decoration.
Big, Bigger, Too Big: Simone Leigh’s “Brick House” from 2019
What: AFP
The concept of kitsch is completely undermined here – and rightly so, because the glittering dances of death on tapestries by Mirlande Constant, born in Port-au-Prince in 1968, are in no way inferior to the demonic embroidery by Chilean Violeta Parra from the 1960s.
The fine plant drawings by Maria Sibylla Merian, who first interwoven art and science in the 17th century, stand wonderfully alongside the alienesque, curved, 3D-manufactured large-scale sculptures by Marguerite Humeau and the AI-developed faces of tech art pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson. Huge indigenous masks by Tau Lewis, born in Toronto in 1993, go very well with the archaic-futuristic masked dance figures by Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt from 1924.
Alemani has divided her exhibition into sections that you can use as a guide, but you don’t have to: The “cyborg” theme is a must here, and basically you can cover almost the entire Biennale under it, because what are magically charged faces and bodies? as well as atmospherically vibrating abstractions other than substitutes for the biological organism that has somehow connected with an apparatus – from the camera to the AI?
Alemani has succeeded in using the concept of surrealism, which is to be understood here not only as an epoch of art but as an inner mood picture, to create a time picture in which art raises its voice. It is she who spreads her wings, giving way to inner universes and creating a cosmos that trades the rational for poetry, calculation for freedom. It is not the day-to-day political gesture that dominates here, and not the power and market structure of the business, in which the art of the last biennials has often been crushed.
This Biennale is romantic, if you will, in the sense that it gives playful, spiritual mysteries a space they haven’t had before—and brings women artists together in such a natural way without being far-fetched. If historical surrealism was an art movement that emerged as a reaction to the increasingly rationalized world and the experiences of two world wars, “The Milk of Dreams” comes at the right time to show that the power of art is exactly that: That Turning the inside out, giving it a voice, body and space – and showing what creative powers the human spirit can unleash if you let it.