TalkEnglish.orgLet's talk about it.The Venice Biennale 2022

Between March and November every 2 years, Venice is even busier than it usually is, as people from around the world gather for ‘La Biennale di Venezia’, a prestigious international art exhibition that gets the art world and its fans very excited.

Featuring a diverse range of art forms, including painting, sculpture, video, installation art, and performance art, the exhibitions are always thought-provoking and experimental, showcasing the latest trends and ideas in contemporary art.

The massive expostion, which started in 1895, and has been dubbed ‘the Olympics of the Art world’ includes 30 permanent National Pavillions, which are owned and managed by participating countries, and a central pavillion, which includes a further 213 artists from 58 countries.

Curated by Celia Alemani, the central exhibition The Milk of Dreams, is taken from a book by Leonora Carrington “which celebrates a world where there is the freedom of transformation, of changing, of becoming something or someone else. And that was very much the spirit of the show. So it made sense to appropriate the book’s title for my show”, said the first woman curator of the Venice Biennale.

“The Milk of Dreams’ is articulated around three main thematic threads. They run parallel; sometimes they’re evident, other times they’re a bit more hidden. But the first one, the one I started with, is the idea of metamorphosis. At first I was working on the idea of how our bodies are changing, through transformation, and also issues of identity and gender and race. And then the pandemic exploded. So, the reflections that were very much on the theoretical side became very, very real. The second theme is how bodies are changing also with the impact of new technologies. And not necessarily just new, but thinking also back to the introduction of computers and other machines. And then finally our relationship with what’s around us: other people, but also the animals and plants, and the planet as a whole”.

While metamorphosis of both the body and the land were running themes in the main exhibition, many of the national pavilions this year sought to create distinctively corporeal experiences for audiences prioritising feeling over sight. These were our three favourite pavillions

The Danish Pavilion

Uffe Isolotto brings us into a Gothic Nordic fairy tale, and brought tears to our eyes.

Venice Biennale -Denmark — “We Walked the Earth” is a staging of the tragic story of a family of Centaurs says the 47 year old artist “I have transformed the entire Pavilion. As visitors enter, they will encounter an apparently idyllic Danish farmhouse, where they will find a haunting drama of life and death. There is a deep uncertainty in understanding what has happened to the centaurs and the world they live in. Is it a tragic or hopeful situation, or perhaps both? Even though the centaurs may not be real, we feel their struggle. The present time we live in is becoming increasingly complex and unpredictable as we face a lot of challenging realities, whether ecological, political or existential. There's much hope and despair in the air, and I want to make that a physical realityWe Walked the Earth also draws on experiences from my personal life that in a metaphorical sense resonate with more universal feelings and thoughts about life and death that I sense exist in the world today"

The South Korean Pavilion

Yunchul Kim, gave us a futuristic experience “Gyre” that left us slightly baffled!

The artist and electronic music composer transformed the Korean Pavilion with five large-scale kinetic sculptures inspired by a 1919 poem by William Butler Yeats called ‘The Second Coming’, in which the Irish poet describes how a ‘widening gyre’ would unleash anarchy unto the world.

At the center of the exhibition is the 50-meter-long Chroma V (2022). Tangled in one big knot, the snake-like sculpture links all the artworks and the surrounding spaces together, like the central nerves that connect different parts of the body. As it receives signals from another exhibit, Argos – The Swollen Suns, the sculpture begins to pulsate and breathe.

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“We are experiencing the pandemic, a war in Ukraine — the Russian Pavilion is closed. The turmoil that we are going through is part of the motion of the gyre,”

In the studio, I spent a lot of time trying to realise this, not to fit the artwork to the machine but to make a machine that fits the idea of the artwork, with numerous attempts and experiments. After the individual mechanical devices are completed, a work process in which software and mechanical devices connect is necessary to create an artistic event to enable communication between them.

Yunchal KIm

And the very best……….The Belgium Pavilion

“Something that interested me in terms of my experience as an artist was the way children’s games tended to have a universal quality.… A good example is rayuela, or hopscotch: there are an infinite number of variants but the basic mechanics remain throughout the many cultures I know. You depart earth to cross hell and reach paradise, and then you return to earth jumping over hell, that is, reborn! It is a game of redemption.”

—Francis Alÿs

The Belgium born, Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs, has been investigating and documenting human behaviour through the medium of children’s games for more than 20 years.

“I think that we, as adults, should be faithful to the children we were.” This appreciation for the necessity and beauty of childhood is apparent in his huge videoscapes of happy children playing freely. He filmed in Afghanistan, Belgium, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Hong Kong, Mexico and Switzerland.

The full series of Children’s Games is viewable online here.