Cecilia Alemani’s 59th Venice Biennale Highlights Cyborg Bodies – RisePEI

One of the memorable shows within the 59th Venice Biennale exhibition, “The Milk of Goals,” curated by Italian New Yorker Cecilia Alemani and titled after a Nineteen Fifties kids’s e book by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, seems close to the doorway of the Central Pavilion within the Giardini, simply previous Katharina Fritsch’s 1987 duplicate of a taxidermic elephant, which opens the present with a form of apparition. Sitting atop pedestals are 9 of Andra Ursuţa’s sci-fi-inspired lead crystal sculptures in vibrant, swirling hues. Solid from physique components and client trash, they emulate the creaturely eponyms of movies like Alien and Predator. On the encircling gallery partitions hangs an array of summary, jewel-toned panels from Rosemarie Trockel’s ongoing collection “Knitted Photos,” begun in 1984. The artist has alternately enlisted a programmed knitting machine and a human collaborator to execute textiles which are stretched over canvas like work. The imposingly giant Until the Cows Come Dwelling (2016), as an example, is a sq. of deep-blue yarn, satirically accompanied by a smaller-scale “research” for the monochrome.

This room—an early favourite on critics’ best-of lists, to not point out successful on Instagram through the opening—is emblematic of Alemani’s curatorial strategy all through the exhibition, characterised by visually gorgeous, typically sudden pairings of sculpture within the spherical with work or wall-bound works, deftly put in to fulfill the formidable spatial challenges posed by the Biennale’s essential venues. And but: what does putting Ursuţa and Trockel aspect by aspect inform us about both physique of labor? Principally that the 2 artists make use of complementary palettes.

I’ll admit that it feels a bit churlish, after two-plus years of distant viewing, to complain that an exhibition merely appears nice. Alemani’s juxtapositions do, in any case, are likely to flatter the works. Elsewhere within the Central Pavilion, a set of recent sculptures by Hannah Levy that includes silicone skins stretched over uncanny steel armatures anchors an association of effaced and distorted figures dissolving into abstraction: Christina Quarles’s raucous work of warped our bodies and Kaari Upson’s Portrait (Useless German), 2020–21, accomplished shortly earlier than her dying from most cancers, a collection of lurid, illegible resin and urethane casts of the surfaces of self-portraits she painted in thick impasto. Latest canvases by Jacqueline Humphries that travesty the expressive hand of gestural abstraction in allover compositions, that includes layered patterns of display screen static and emoticons, are set in opposition to 4 sculptures from Sara Enrico’s ongoing collection “The Jumpsuit Theme” (2017–), comprising pigmented concrete casts of workwear. Reclining on a shared low pedestal, the sculptures recommend each contorted limbs and looping script—and in addition, curiously, Humphries’s work, given their shared pastel palettes, white grounds, and evocations of bodily calligraphy.

Particularly robust is the pairing, greeting guests to the Arsenale, of Simone Leigh’s monumental bronze Brick Home (2019) with a set of black-and-white collagraph prints by the late Cuban artist Belkis Ayón. An eyeless bust of a Black lady whose torso takes the type of a domed hut, alluding to vernacular constructing traditions from West Africa and the American South, Leigh’s hybrid of physique and structure finds a haunting inversion in Ayón’s repeated renderings of the mythic determine Sikán, the lone lady featured within the lore of the secretive Afro-Cuban non secular fraternity Abakuá. Right here the princess, stated to have been sacrificed for possessing or betraying a secret, is depicted as a darkish silhouette whose sole facial function is a pair of vibrant white eyes.

Whereas the pandemic put Alemani within the unenviable place of curating the world’s most prestigious exhibition through Zoom, it additionally afforded her an additional yr to plan, enabling spectacular logistical coups like a mini survey of Portuguese painter Paula Rego. Lots of the chosen artists hail from outdoors the anticipated art-world facilities, and, for the primary time within the Biennale’s 127-year historical past, a small minority of them—21 out of 213—are male. (That is definitely a welcome demographic shift, although I might reside with out the celebratory invocation of “sisterhood” within the exhibition textual content.)

BUT HOWEVER MUCH THE SHOW succeeds as a proper train, it’s remarkably insubstantial as an exploration of concepts, regardless of the flowery theoretical and historic framework Alemani has marshaled round her alternatives. As she explains within the catalogue, the exhibition takes its cues from the mad dreamscape of Carrington’s tales, “a world freed from hierarchies, the place everybody can develop into one thing else, the place people, animals, and machines coexist in a symbiotic relationship that’s generally joyous, generally disgusting.” From this, Alemani extrapolated three essential themes—“the illustration of our bodies and their metamorphoses; the connection between people and applied sciences; [and] the connection between our bodies and the Earth”—linking Carrington’s Surrealist fairy tales, initially composed on the partitions of her son’s childhood bed room, to different, denser touchstones, particularly Rosi Braidotti’s Deleuzian posthumanist texts, Donna Haraway’s by now iconic “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), and Silvia Federici’s notion of “re-enchanting the world,” all of that are cited repeatedly within the catalogue and wall labels.

What this implies in follow is a sort of phantasmagoria of the Surreal-ish, the animalesque, and the machinelike, yoking collectively works in a fashion that too typically careens between the flimsily pretextual and the didactic and overdetermined. Strolling by the galleries, we face an infinite parade of mutant, mutating creatures: Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona’s drawings depict encounters between half-human platypuses and walruses chatting in tunics and mittens within the Arctic, whereas the late Vienna Actionist Birgit Jürgenssen is represented by pseudoscientific renderings of curious specimens, like an insect with the physique of a Swiss Military knife, or a sharply attired man with crustacean legs and claws sprouting from one aspect. Zhenya Machneva depicts anthropomorphized relics of Soviet business in handwoven tapestries equivalent to Echo (2021), which recasts the gaskets of an outdated furnace right into a face’s gaping maw. Each Marguerite Humeau and Teresa Photo voltaic assemble slick sculptural fusions of prehistoric fossils and aerodynamic vessels.

Extending the present’s theoretical matrix are 5 “time capsules” nested inside the bigger exhibition. These thematic mini-exhibitions of historic girls artists are organized in distinct galleries (designed by the Italian studio FormaFantasma, with coloured partitions, moody lighting, and plush carpet), and are supposed to tease out alternate art-historical genealogies for the Biennale’s modern works. Within the rambling Central Pavilion on the Giardini, the most important and most central of those mini-surveys, “The Witch’s Cradle,” which Alemani describes because the present’s “fulcrum,” gathers works by girls aligned with Surrealism and associated interwar actions who play with self-fashioning and the mutability of id. Alongside the anticipated names—Carrington, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun—are extra stunning ones, together with the Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage and Josephine Baker, represented by a movie recording of a 1925 efficiency on the Paris music corridor Folies Bergère during which she dances a bare-breasted Charleston. “Corps Orbite” focuses on language and female embodiment, proposing a provocative, if doubtful, alignment between the drawings and writings channeled by late Nineteenth and early twentieth century spiritualists, postwar concrete poetry, and Luce Irigaray’s conception of l’écriture female. “Applied sciences of Enchantment,” in the meantime, highlights girls Op artists and kinetic sculptors who had been marginalized inside Italy’s Sixties Arte Programmata motion.

On the Arsenale, the place the exhibition area dictates a linear path, two additional “time capsules” are extra immediately located as precursors to the newer works round them. “A Leaf a Gourd a Shell a Internet a Bag a Sling a Sack a Bottle a Pot a Field a Container,” occupying a suggestively uterine chamber with curving partitions and pink flooring, options an array of vessel-like sculptures and objects that vary from Ruth Asawa’s undulating wire constructions and Mária Bartuszová’s delicate plaster ovals that recall cracked eggs to Nineteenth-century papier-mâché fashions of the feminine reproductive system belonging to the pioneering Dutch doctor Aletta Jacobs. Simply outdoors are latest examples of Thai painter Pinaree Sanpitak’s spare renderings of breasts abstracted into the type of bowls, and British-Kenyan ceramicist Magdalene Odundo’s anthropomorphized clay vases.

The ultimate subsection, “Seduction of the Cyborg,” invokes Donna Haraway’s conception of the cyborg—as a subversive embodiment of boundaries dissolved—to hyperlink the avant-garde fascination with prosthetic our bodies to the turn-of-the-century determine of the unbiased, androgynous New Girl. The latter is represented in indirect self-portraits by Marianne Brandt and Florence Henri, and grotesque collages by Hannah Höch. Bafflingly overseen by larger-than-life archival glamour pictures of the Dada Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Futurist dancer Giannina Censi, these historic predecessors give technique to any variety of weird modern interpenetrations of physique and machine all through the Arsenale: Dora Budor’s “Autophones” (2022), quasi-industrial constructions in wooden that cross musical devices with intercourse toys; Mire Lee’s Countless Home: Holes and Drips (2022), a gory motorized set up of tangled PVC tubes oozing liquid clay; and Tishan Hsu’s artificial prints patterned with orifices and screens.

ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, ALEMANI’S strategy is much less transhistorical than pseudomorphic, flattening all of the works on view into one unusual, hybrid type after one other. Contemplate, as an example, Alemani’s impressively humorless catalogue description of Raphaela Vogel’s riotous set up Können und Müssen (Skill and Necessity, 2022), an oversize anatomical mannequin of a disease-riddled penis carted alongside on a wheeled plinth by a procession of skeletal giraffes: “A world the place animals have gained out over people.” Elsewhere, the implications of that flattening are extra pernicious, stripping away any sense of cultural or contextual specificity: quite a few works on view present our bodies communing and commingling with the panorama, starting from Afro-Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino’s commanding watercolors that depict standing or squatting nude females with knotted roots and vines sprouting from their genitals and extremities to Zheng Bo’s “eco-sexual” video Le Sacre du Printemps (Tandvärkstallen), 2021, imagining erotic encounters between queer males and forest flora, to not point out Delcy Morelos’s room-size set up Earthly Paradise (2022), which envelops the viewer in a muddy sensorium of scented earth. However Paulino’s drawings—notably the “Moist Nurse” collection (2005), a number of examples of that are included right here—replicate on the legacy of slavery and colonialism in Brazil and the methods during which worth has been forcibly extracted from each Black girls’s our bodies and the land, whereas Bo’s video proposes a radical imaginative and prescient of harmonic interspecies coexistence.

Lingering over Alemani’s shows, then, is an uncomfortable sense that the works on view exist in a state of generic timelessness. Certainly, the Arsenale even ends with a imaginative and prescient of a return to the backyard: Treasured Okoyomon’s To See the Earth earlier than the Finish of the World (2022), a large gallery remodeled right into a panorama of flora, butterflies, and gurgling streams, with hulking, earthen figures rising up from the bottom, all of which can be progressively overtaken by invasive kudzu because it spreads all through the set up, providing the hopeful chance of destruction catalyzing a brand new starting. That is, I suppose, the character of goals; and given how dismal the world appears past Venice, who wouldn’t wish to dwell right here for some time? However ultimately, all of us need to get up.