Female artists dominate Venice Biennale for first time
For the first time in the 127-year history of the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and most important contemporary art fair features a majority of female artists, under the curatorial direction of Cecilia Alemani.
The result is a Biennale that puts the spotlight on artists who have been long overlooked despite prolific careers, while also investigating themes including colonialism and climate change, AP wrote.
Alemani’s main show, titled ‘The Milk of Dreams,’ alongside 80 national pavilions opened Saturday after a one-year pandemic delay. The art fair runs through Nov. 27. It is only the fourth of the Biennale’s 59 editions under female curation.
The predominance of women among the more than 200 artists that Alemani chose for the main show “was not a choice, but a process,” Alemani, a New York-based Italian curator, said this week.
“I think some of the best artists today are women artists,” she told The Associated Press. “But also, let’s not forget, that in the long history of the Venice Biennale, the preponderance of male artists in previous editions has been astonishing.”
Conceived during the coronavirus pandemic and opening as war rages in Europe, Alemani acknowledged that art in such times may seem “superficial.” But she also asserted the Biennale’s role over the decades as a “sort of seismographer of history ... to absorb and record also the traumas and the crises that go well beyond the contemporary art world.”
This year’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement awards go to German artist Katherina Fritsch, whose life-like elephant sculpture stands in the rotunda of the main exhibit building in the Giardini, and Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuna, whose portrait of her mother’s eyes graces the Biennale catalog cover.
Vicuna painted the portrait 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.
“You see that her spirit is still present, so in a way that painting is like a triumph of love against dictatorship, against repression, against hatred,” Vicuna said.