59th Venice Biennale to Explore Posthuman Conditions
By HG Masters
Portrait of (left) CECILIA ALEMANI and (right) ROBERTO CICUTTO. Courtesy the Venice Biennale.
The upcoming 59th Venice Biennale announced its lineup of 213 artists from 58 countries for the central exhibition, titled “The Milk of Dreams” and curated by Cecilia Alemani, as well as national participations from 81 countries. For the first time in the Biennale’s 127-year history, a majority of the participants are women and gender non-conforming, as the Biennale will look at shifting definitions of the human and non-human, composition of life, and interrelationship of humans, technology, and the Earth. Additionally, the Biennale will pursue its goal of carbon neutrality through the efficient use of resources—including recycling materials used in the exhibition and utilizing electricity from renewable sources—and other circular economy practices.
In her curatorial statement, Alemani described the Biennale as not based specifically in the experience of the pandemic, but in the many conversations engaged by artists around the place of humanity in the larger context of discussions about climate change, the survival of the human species, artificial intelligence technologies, and social conflicts. Drawing its title from a book by the British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011), the biennale echoes, as Alemani described it, the surrealist narrative’s depictions of “otherworldly creatures, along with other figures of transformation, as companions on an imaginary journey through the metamorphoses of bodies and definitions of the human.”
Following the larger cultural shifts away from Enlightenment-era, anthropocentric, and male-dominated conceptions of culture, “The Milk of Dreams” is rooted in exhibits by women artists from the historical avant-garde including surrealists such as Carrington, Spanish painter Remedios Varo, French photographer Claude Cahun, British painter and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, African-American artists Loïs Mailou Jones and Augusta Savage, and Italian postwar abstract artist Carol Rama.
Additionally in the central exhibition are five smaller historical exhibitions, dubbed “cabinets” of artworks, documents, and found objects, conceived like “time capsules.” The focus on these sections ranges from the design duo Formafantasma to a display of Visual and Concrete Poetry from the 1978 edition of the Biennale and the writings of science-fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin.
Alemani noted that the Biennale’s role “sums up all the things we have so sorely missed in the last two years: the freedom to meet people from all over the world, the possibility of travel, the joy of spending time together, the practice of difference, translation, incomprehension, and communion.” The 59th edition will run from April 23 through November 27, 2022.
