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 and gender non-conforming 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 gender norms, colonialism and climate change.
“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 ...
She is both headlining the U.S. pavilion and setting the tone at the main exhibit with a towering bust of a Black woman that Alemani originally commissioned for the High Line urban park in New York City. The exhibition features photos of the Fa'afafine mimicking paintings of Pacific islanders by post-impressionist French artist Paul Gaugin, reclaiming the images in a process the artist refers to as “upcycling.”
The Nordic nations of Norway, Sweden and Finland this year turned over their shared pavilion to the Sami, one of Europe's oldest Indigenous groups, touching on a different idea of nation as the Sami ancestral arctic homeland now spans four nations.The Sami Pavilion offered a more hopeful path out of the apocalypse, with artwork and performances depicting the struggle against colonialism by the Sami people, while also celebrating their traditions.
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