On view through November 27, 2022
By Kate Fensterstock
The 2022 Venice Biennale entitled Milk of Dreams is a reference to a book by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, in which a magical world is created based on constant re-imagining and re-envisioning. Whilst the text is hopeful and idealistic, emphasising freedom of thought, creativity and the ability to change and redefine our selves and our surroundings, the work simultaneously acknowledges the inevitable struggles, dangers and oppression that come with free thought, exploration and innovation. The 2022 Biennale radically re-addresses the themes from Carrington’s book and channels them through universally familiar themes of the present day. As society navigates the redesigned frameworks of sexuality, gender and race, we also accept a changing natural environment faced with climate change and increased digitalisation. The boundary between real and the imagined, through our politics, social infrastructures and economic systems are being constantly negotiated, and the artists featured in this year’s Biennale are the engineers in challenging us to consider these changes, good and bad, and equip us to confront the consequences.

The Biennale is chiefly split between the Giardini and the Arsenale, and contains works curated together or within their national pavilions. Each work very uniquely addresses the overall curatorial theme splendidly, and the displays were beautifully and aesthetically arranged to create a visually-driven narrative through each gallery. Such visually led curation had its risks, as the Corderie building fell into dangerous territory of exoticising works from The Global South, arranging imagery and materiality that transgressed cultures and religions based on appearance. Hugely problematic, but careful attention and care both in engaging with the work individually, whilst choosing to celebrate an artistic community previously excluded from the Western core and now given a long overdue platform, would evade this issue. An overwhelming representation of female and gender non-conforming artists has been criticised, citing a push for representation over quality of work, but we cannot agree.
A seamlessly organised and hugely accessible Biennale, we highly recommend a visit now that the weather will start to cool in Venice and the summer holiday crowds are beginning to disperse. Here are five must see works that largely address the body and its place within a changing world, as well as the society and communities we belong to. This round up hardly scratches the surface, we encourage our readers to engage with as much of the Biennale as time and energy will allow.
Andra Ursuta in the Central Pavillion
Andra Ursuta’s radical blend of past, present and the imagined generate an all too unsettling future ahead. Described by the artist as “hybrid beings”, Ursuta borrows signifying elements from the past, such as classical figuration and organic materiality to exploit our sense of memory as she reinforces the truths of a dark contemporary experience. Hellenstic bodies pose atop plinths and dot the gallery as if planted within the Metropolitan Museum’s Greek and Roman wing, but the marble-like material that features swirling cloudy patterns glows an acidic range of pinks, greens and purples, reminding the viewer of its artificiality and polluting nature. Many of Ursuta’s sculptures are 3D printed, pulling us away from traditional human skill and planting us in an assembly line of machine-made craft. Battling with these realities that have become all too familiar within our human experience, the viewer grapples with the humanoids that sprout enormous webbed feet and where arms are missing, plastic bottles emerge to form artificial limbs. We are challenged to consider the body as art history has presented it, and negotiate the changing landscape of form and its representation as times change. The Uncanny unapologetically assaults the viewer, using our understanding of past and present to design a future all too possible and legitimately frightening.


Christina Quarles in the Central Pavillion
Christina Quarles confronts the politics of gender, sexuality, race and identity using the body as a site for renegotiation. The ensuing struggle, euphoria, apprehension, anger and celebration are manifested in the contorted, flowing, stretching bodies dripping with paint that exudes a raw organicism. The figures writhe and dance within an alternative space, a dimension not of the natural world. Distorted planes at inconceivable angles shift and evolve, suggesting our environment and the experience within it is a construct. As a biracial and bisexual artist, Quarles collects from her own experience and that of her community to debate and grapple with reality, as well as suggest and design an alternative physicality composed of not strictly what the body is made of, but how we explore it and identify with it. In this way, memory, experience and individual will define the body.


Adina Pintilie in the Romanian Pavillion
In Adina Pintilie’s multi-channel installation entitled You Are Another Me- A Cathedral of the Body, the nuances of relationships are revealed and their complexities unpacked. Pintilie does so through challenging the viewer’s proximity to the image, its narrative and often pushing limits of comfort both physically and mentally to reveal the constructs that exist within our condition. The first gallery contains hanging screens where a film is projected, but the screens are arranged so different clips of the film are delivered on different screens facing different directions, where the viewer must walk in between. Scenes of a homosexual relationship in bed, in a gay nightclub, an of one-to-one interviews establish a unique invitation for the viewer to experience what is defined as private, acknowledge these boundaries and decipher how we react. A reimagining of how to absorb video installation through multi-screen engagement and shifting projections further displace us from what we know to be how, not just with what, to engage.

Diego Marcon, The Parent’s Room, 2021
In this chilling video work, Marcon creates an alternative dimension where the line between reality and the imagined are consistently blurred. The video tells the story of a father’s murder-suicide, whose victims are his wife, daughter and son. The narrative is delivered through a choir-backed monologue that features all four in succession, distorting the viewer’s sense of living and dead as well as time, as it is challenging to piece the story together in terms of when and what occurred. A technological blend of human actors dressed in doll-like prosthetics further forces the viewer to identify the real from fake, and summons our ability to relate to or connect to these characters. Overall, Macron exploits the effect of the Uncanny to create a space where we recognise and relate to the work, yet are repulsed and averted by its inherent abjection.


Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Beginning, Middle, End), 2022
In her traditional manner, Barbara Kruger’s three-channel video features a textual installation that plays on the viewer’s understanding of language and media imagery to communicate universal messaging. Acknowledging and harnessing these constructs, Kruger interjects words and expressions in place of alternate rhetoric that reveals the realities of American propaganda and reinforces the discriminatory and flawed socio-political systems. In juxtaposing the real and the fake through text, we are forced to acknowledge the hypocrisy of our reality which has in turn become a new and thoroughly dangerous normal. Installed at the very end of the Corderie building in the Arsenale, following the viewer’s sustained engagement (through previous halls) with alternative versions of contemporary realities, Kruger’s final statement is a warning, cautioning us of the consequences of succumbing to the dark side of the “unreal”.

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Kate Fensterstock holds a Bachelor of Art in Art History from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and a Masters of Art in Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London. She specialises in Client Management, Marketing and Communications within the art world through events, guided tours, and editorial for arts and lifestyle media channels. She is the Founder of Artscope International, a global media platform that aims to engage those curious and passionate about contemporary art through content, discussion and experiences.