Venice Biennale 2022: The Milk of Dreams, presented by Virginia MacKenny, PART I
Tue Nov 15, 20:00 - Tue Nov 15, 22:00
Deer Park Cafe
ABOUT
A Witch’s Cradle - 100 years of feminist production
Part I: The Giardini and National Pavilions
Presented by Virginia MacKenny,
Associate Professor of Painting, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
The 59th Venice Biennale – titled The Milk of Dreams after Leonora Carrington’s book of children’s stories - took 3 years rather than the usual two to produce. COVID restrictions meant studios had to be visited digitally and that much was done at a distance. Curator Cecilia Alemani captures this moment in history when the very survival of the species is threatened, and engages our responsibilities towards the planet, our modes of coexistence and infinite new possibilities of transformation. She chose 213 artists from 58 countries anchoring this vast array of work by contextualising it within five deeply researched ‘time capsules’ engaging work produced by artists over the last 100 years.
With such a density of production and a transhistorical approach no overview can possibly cover the entirety of the exhibition. Instead, Associate Professor Virginia MacKenny guides us in a two-part presentation through:
‘an exuberantly female and gender-queer orientated exhibition full of story-telling and world imagining. Dominated by the body: sex and visceral entanglements, corporeal excesses, madness and abjection, we are accompanied by witches, mediums and ‘hysterics’ conjuring trances and altered states. Soaring creatures from ethereal realms, earth beings, peat and humus and soil, dirty fingers and ragged minds, incarcerations and freedoms of many kinds churn together. The abject and the beautiful, the brutal and blunt, the violent and bloody, the fragile and delicate, the ephemeral and light of touch, are introduced and framed by Katharina Fritsch’s life-size Elephant that welcomes viewers in the Giardini and Simone Leigh’s monumental black goddess in the Arsenale. This biennale has its roots well beyond the ambit of Europe, but also finds its home there. Can get one all shook up, but also settles the being’. VM