Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
April 23, 2022–November 27, 2022
Amy Sillman, Ruth Asawa, Noah Davis, Barbara Kruger, Andra Ursuţa, and Portia Zvavahera are among the artists invited to the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Cecilia Alemani. Titled The Milk of Dreams, the exhibition takes its name from a book by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.
Evoking a film strip or a home movie, Sillman’s new work for The Milk of Dreams speaks to the concept of change. From the position of the viewer, her horizontal and tightly packed images form a fragmented spatial narrative. Incorporating disjointed body parts both human and animal, as well as a mixture of formal, narrative, and compositional approaches, the works are also scaled to the viewer’s own body–whose position and perspective changes with every step.
Alemani stated, “This exhibition is grounded in many conversations with artists held in the last few years. The questions that kept emerging from these dialogues seem to capture this moment in history when the very survival of the species is threatened, but also to sum up many other inquiries that pervade the sciences, arts, and myths of our time. How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates plant and animal, human and non-human? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and other life forms? And what would life look like without us? These are some of the guiding questions for this edition of the Biennale Arte, which focuses on three thematic areas in particular: the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; the connection between bodies and the Earth.”
Among the national pavilions, Francis Alÿs represented Belgium in a Pavilion curated by Hilde Teerlinck, a curator at the Han Nefkens Foundation in Barcelona. Stan Douglas was selected to represent Canada.
Learn more at La Biennale de Venezia.