Andrew Berardini at the 59th Venice Biennale

WE SLIP INTO REVERIE. 

The standard loss of life notices alongside the passages and vaporetto stops round Venice have extra faces than common. The blue and yellow flag of Ukraine flaps within the chilly breeze blowing off the lagoon. The carnival masks stare from store home windows on the face masks of these on the opposite aspect of the glass. Mingling with the throngs of vacation vacationers, an artwork world sweeps in on boats and trains, buses and planes into the Most Serene Republic for the skilled days of the fifty-ninth Biennale di Venezia after an extended pandemicked wait of three years, and amid a battle of aggression in Europe.

On the prepare journey in, I learn a cynical article by a revered artwork critic proudly declaiming their intentions to skip the Biennale because it has rotted into corruption, a gangrenous limb of profane commerce and a champagne sink for the cruelly rich. However a group, even one so usually gangrenous and corrupt, can nonetheless really sparkle to me. As I struggled down slender passages bottlenecked by ambling our bodies, I spotted how a lot I had missed the multitudes below the spires and ornate structure of this ridiculously stunning if typically tough metropolis. In each nook of Venice, I acknowledged the faces of mates and family members from a scattered planet and an extended life in artwork, some rich possibly, however most not, a lot of whom I had not seen in three lengthy, diseased, and bloody years. The monsters of this world would love nothing greater than to strangle our pleasure, steal our poetry, smash our celebrations, and extinguish our hopes. There’s a pandemic; there’s a battle; we nonetheless embrace alongside the canals flowing with the milk of desires.

The Milk of Desires, a youngsters’s guide by British-Mexican Surrealist Leonora Carrington, supplies the title for curator Cecilia Alemani’s central pavilion on the Biennale: an exhibition imagined from the visions of an artist who was feminine, corporeal, occult, fantastical, darkish, humorous, heartbreaking, transnational, and nicely, dreamy. Within the face of sure horrors, we’d like our desires to assist us survive. In Alemani’s exhibition, I held again a number of maudlin tears watching Nan Goldin’s Sirens, 2019–2020, thrilling within the our bodies electrical with dance and the prices that may accompany such ecstatic launch. All through “The Milk of Desires,” in each the Giardini and Arsenale, I discovered dozens of works by artists who astonished and have been (maybe embarrassingly) unknown to me, from the voluptuous ropes of Mrinalini Mukherjee to the concrete poetry of Ilsa Garnier and Mary Ellen Solt.

Outdoors, the Giardini went from sunstroked to soaked day after day, the collected people breaking right into a sweat below heavy coats one hour and shivering from stormy winds the following. Standing in entrance of the vacant Russian pavilion, I attempted to persuade a queer Lithuanian architect I do know to piss on it, however they have been delay by the prowling policemen retaining it unmolested, and settled as a substitute for a center finger and a sigh. I noticed curator Klaus Biesenbach stand and stare on the constructing (with comparable ideas maybe?), snap an image, and stroll on by way of the dusty clay alongside the Giardini’s paths.

An elegantly dressed duo tangoed by way of a cinematic cafe set alongside a recreation of artist Zineb Sedira’s house, a valentine for post-liberation Algerian cinema within the French pavilion, titled “Desires Have No Title.” A household of uncannily hyperrealistic centaurs, one giving start, one other hanging from a noose, bewitched Uffe Isolotto’s pavilion for Denmark. A trio of {couples}, queer, trans, and disabled, discovered intimacy and bliss throughout the 9 screens in Adina Pintilie’s Romanian exhibition. Close by in Poland, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, the primary Roma artist to characterize the nation, reinterpreted the calendar frescos of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara as a beaming rainbow quilt depicting the on a regular basis lifetime of her folks. I entered an ear by Jonathas de Andrade in Brazil, and watched Yunchul Kim’s kaleidoscopic techno snake pulse and squirm in Korea.

One of the vital vital nationwide outings for me this yr occurred within the constructing that usually homes the Nordic pavilion, reworked for this flip right into a pavilion for the Sámi, the Indigenous folks of far Northern Europe whose ancestral lands span Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. The trio of Sámi artists Pauliina Feodoroff, Máret Ánne Sara, and Anders Sunna weren’t alone. The primary time (or so I used to be advised) an occupied native folks have obtained a nationwide pavilion, Indigenous folks from everywhere in the world turned up in Venice to assist and collect, and I spoke with Raven Chacon (Diné), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta), and Aqui Thami (Thangmi), among the many many Indigenous artists filling the streets of Venice. At 1 AM, Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore tells me, “I don’t know you, however I like you.” At 2 AM, sitting in an empty Piazza San Marco, I listened to Sámi yoik resound off the stone lions and Christian saints, the tune casting a spell I received’t quickly neglect. 

So many people didn’t make it, and don’t make it now, and we nonetheless wanted to mourn the lifeless and rejoice life collectively. And we mourned and celebrated, wept and danced.

Few artists I noticed talked straight in regards to the pandemic, however the reminiscence of isolation was at all times there. melanie bonajo, representing Holland off-site of the Giardini this yr (a pleasant commerce with Estonia) within the Chiesetta della Misericordia, crafted a den of contact and sensuality, intercourse and physique posi, satin and oil, lush with video of bare people lastly collectively after a lot sorrowful separation. (All in the identical Little Church of Mercy the place the French Pavilion had its legendary dance occasion final version; do the partitions bear in mind the crush of our our bodies?)

Across the nook, Ukrainian businessmen Victor Pinchuk had referred to as off his basis’s Future Era Artwork Prize to host “That is Ukraine: Defending Freedom,” an exhibition dedicated to Russia’s brutal, genocidal battle in opposition to his residence nation. Between the opening remarks, I watched a video of a younger girl from her basement beg us, the world, for assist. She was murdered days later by the Russian navy. A ceremony of mourning and a name to arms, a message from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reminded these gathered that each one free folks should stand along with Ukraine now because it defends itself: “There are not any tyrannies that may not attempt to restrict artwork. As a result of they will see the ability of artwork. Artwork can inform the world issues that can’t be shared in any other case. Assist the combat together with your artwork. But in addition assist it together with your phrases and affect.”

There I met Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan, who I later realized obtained particular dispensation to return to Venice this week and would quickly after return to Ukraine.

The battle goes on. The pandemic goes on. However for only a second, this second, we are able to strengthen our hearts with artwork and friendship and dance, renew our bonds and stylish for a second into one thing aside from sorrow, if solely to present us endurance for what lies forward.

One evening, a caped impresario guided me previous servers liveried in eighteenth-century finery at a dinner to rejoice Alexandra Pirici thrown by Audemars Piguet, which concluded with a efficiency of darkling camp mastery by #FLUID (Paula Dunker & Alex Bălă). Two boats later, iconic Detroit DJ Carl Craig shivered the wooden and stone of a cavernous warehouse with creamy beats (the milk of desires?) to honor Stan Douglas’s riotous flip within the pavilion of Canada.

The subsequent evening, I stood on the ft of Mykki Blanco as they referred to as to the viewers, “This ain’t no Biennial shit, come nearer!” earlier than launching into top-of-the-line live shows in reminiscence, stuffed with rapturous warmth and laborious poetry: “From the silence of Duchamp to the noise of Beuys . . . White supremacy is straight liable for local weather change.” And a day later in the identical venue, I heard the voice of the ethereal, crystalline Lafawndah combat the rain to salve the hearts of a rowdy crowd.

I’m positive for a lot of these opening skilled days ended, as so usually do, in a weary hangover, barely catching the boat again residence with puffy eyes and a smoky cough, however I want to conclude this diary barely otherwise, with two endings.

Select which most closely fits you.

The primary ending comes from a battle diary entry I learn by Ukrainian artist Yevgenia Belorusets in “That is Ukraine: Defending Freedom.” The assertion is easy and needed and if we repeat it sufficient, hopefully, the world will hear it:

“Fuck Battle. . . Fuck Putin.”

The second ending occurs a number of meters away, on a sunny afternoon the place on the steps of the previous church that homes “Defending Freedom”: Nikita Kadan, earlier than returning to Ukraine, married his accomplice AntiGonna in a ceremony presided over by Nan Goldin.

Artwork and love and dancing and desires are value combating for, in no matter method we are able to.

— Andrew Berardini