A WORLD REINVENTED

Venice Biennale’s The Milk of Dreams offers a surrealistic look at past and present.

BY BRIAN ALLEN

This year’s Venice Biennale, through November 27, is the 58th iteration of what’s become the art world’s Olympics. Eighty countries participated this year, each sending to its Venice pavilion the best art in the land. Given the Biennale’s postponement last year due to Covid, visitors were even more delighted to see so much to love and to provoke them.

Simone Leigh fills the US pavilion. Her exhibition, called Sovereignty, deploys superbly crafted bronze and ceramic sculpture to revisit old forms like clay jugs used by Southern slaves, African tribal headdresses and masks, and African raffia skirts. Sentinel, a sleek, 18-foot-tall bronze sculpture, draws from old African power figures. It’s grave and enigmatic, like work by Giacometti. Leigh covered the American pavilion building, which normally looks like Monticello, with thatch, so it now looks like an African hut.

Leigh won one of the Biennale’s two top-prize Golden Lions not for best pavilion but for best participant in The Milk of Dreams, the festival’s sprawling anchor exhibition. The Milk of Dreams, showing the work of over 200 artists, impressively looks at surrealism past and present. Leigh’s Brick House, a bronze from 2019, introduces the extravaganza. Looming in

Above left: 59th International Art Exhibition, The Milk of Dreams. Pavilion of the United State of America, Simone Leigh, Sovereignty. Photograph by Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia; below: 59th International Art Exhibition, The Milk of Dreams. Pavilion of Lebanon, Andrea Avezzù, The World in the Image of Man. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.

the middle of an octagonal gallery with mood lighting, it’s got presence. It’s mythical and mystical and feels like the stuff of the subconscious.

The second Golden Lion, for best national pavilion, went to Sonia Boyce, representing Great Britain. Feeling Her Way is a music-and-art take on why Black women artists have gotten short shrift in Britain. Walls are plastered with old CD and album covers, all by Black women performers and most bearing discount price stickers. The space looks like a music-crazy teenager’s bedroom, buoyant and wacky.

Boyce says she discovered her artistic chops through pop music, so the galleries feel like shrines. Though I take her overall point, it’s undercut by her very selection to go to Venice and her Golden Lion win. Also, extensive concert footage by Black performers makes her space feel like a documentary rather than art.

The Biennale is about countries sending art to pavilions, a “home” in Venice, so to speak, but concept of home figures in other ways as well. Lebanon’s pavilion is part collage, part video. It’s called The World in the Image of Man and starts with a hometown—Beirut—in crisis. Ayman Baalbaki did an expansive installation of battered, neon-lit street signs, torn textiles and posters, and blood-red splattered paint. It’s a view of a gritty, battered city and evokes 2020’s horrific port explosion at an aluminum nitrate storage dump, itself a metaphor for years of civil strife. Danielle Arbid’s video next to it takes us on a tour of Beirut’s art district, not war torn, but not pretty, either. Contemporary art in Beirut, we see, might exist in a climate of turmoil, but it’s tough and true enough to outlast it.

Latvia’s pavilion presents colorful, charming porcelains by the dozens, all made by Skuja Braden, another artist duo. Luxuriously painted dishes, animal, vegetal, and human forms, and a porcelain bed, evoke the free spirit of one of the pair, Californian Melissa Braden. The tchotchke-obsessed Inguna Skuja, who’s Latvian and remembers Soviet rule, sees her pieces as an antidote to Iron Curtain drab and uniformity. Color and whimsy at home helped make life bearable.

Something’s in the air in Scandinavia. We Walked the Earth, Uffe Isolotto’s installation for the Danish pavilion, shows hyperrealistic models of two centaurs, one male and one female, lying dead in their rustic home. It’s positively gothic, with a scifi twist. Is the subject the end of myth? Are we mortals today’s centaurs? Is home no longer safe from an upheaved world? Meaning’s up for grabs. In art, we don’t want pat answers.

Among everyone’s favorite pavilion belongs to the Sami people. Norway, Sweden, and Finland together gave their pavilion rights to this indigenous people living in the northern swath of these three countries. Once called Lapland, the Sápmi region is resource rich and, for many decades, exploited by big corporations.

The locals believe in tried-and-true sustainability, especially when it comes to their reindeer, woods, and rivers. The pavilion, a first for the Sami, introduces us to their art and culture. Sápmi is cold and sparse but, to the Sami, there’s no place like home. P

From top: 59th International Art Exhibition, The Milk of Dreams. Pavilion of Great Britain, Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way. Photograph by Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia; 59th International Art Exhibition, The Milk of Dreams. Pavilion of Nordic Countries—The Sami Pavilion. Photograph by Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia; 59th International Art Exhibition, The Milk of Dreams. Pavilion of Latvia, Skuja Braden, Selling Water by the River (installation view), 2022, porcelain, mixed media, size variable. Photograph by Eriks Božis. Courtesy of Skuja Braden (© Inguna Skuja and Melissa D. Braden ).