An enthralling show inspired by Leonora Carrington opens in Venice

Founded in 1895, the Venice Biennale has become the premier showcase for contemporary art, securing the reputations of artists and curators alike. Alongside the national pavilions, which present a country’s chosen artist or artists, there is always a main exhibition centred around a particular theme and organised by a specially selected curator. This year that show has been assembled for the first time by an Italian woman, Cecilia Alemani. Ahead of its opening on April 23rd, visitors granted early access suggested that it may be the best main exhibition at Venice for more than 20 years.

Entitled “The Milk of Dreams”, the exhibition takes its name and inspiration from a children’s book about shape-shifting youngsters and other oddities. Written in the 1950s by Leonora Carrington, a British-born Mexican Surrealist, the stories were produced for her children and featured characters such as Headless John, who has wings instead of ears. The tome combined fanciful tales with idiosyncratic imagery, mystery with darkness. Ms Alemani has said she set out to evoke a “magical world” where life is “constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination”; it is a place where “everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else.”

This mood is captured early in the show. In the first gallery of the vast Arsenale building, the walls are lined with a series of collographic prints by Belkis Ayón, a Cuban artist: there are ghostly faces with almond-shaped eyes as well as cockerels, snakes, fish and goats. In the centre of the room a monumental bronze bust of a black woman (pictured) by Simone Leigh, an American artist, rises goddess-like towards the ceiling.

This iteration of the Biennale was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Ms Alemani said the postponement helped her hone the questions that have been perplexing her, such as: “How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates animals, humans and non-humans? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and the different organisms we live with? And what would life and the Earth look like without us?”

At the same time, she was able to expand her search for artists who might proffer an answer. The result is one of the biggest Biennale shows ever: 213 artists from 58 countries, ranging from Brazil to Zimbabwe. The vast majority—over 180—have never been shown in Venice before. Fewer than ten percent of the artists in the main exhibition are men.

Ms Alemani is drawn to artists who explore particular themes. Her earlier work for a project for Art Basel, which brought art into urban spaces in Buenos Aires, shaped her interest in the artists of central and South America. With their tears and their carefully delineated veins, Rosana Paulino’s “Wet Nurse” series about black women in Brazil who breastfed their masters’ children, are especially haunting, as are Firelei Báez’s vividly colourful paintings and installations of her native Dominica.

As well as works that explore anatomies and identities, the show probes humans’ relationship with the natural world—a subject that inspired Carrington, too. One example is Delcy Morelos’s massive earth maze (see above). When you sniff it it gives off the scent of cocoa powder and tobacco, recollections from a slave plantation. Another is the the work of Tau Lewis, a young Canadian artist, who forages for textiles that she then embroiders and quilts into massive animal heads; hung on a wall, they become a riff on hunting trophies. Others explore a quite different relationship between man and nature: in a video by Egle Budvytyte a group of young people is lost in a forest in Lithuania, while in Zheng Bo’s films humans live in total—even sexual—communion with nature.

Towards the end, the show takes a colder turn (which you get to by passing through a series of diaphanous paintings on fabric by another Canadian artist, Kapwani Kiwanga) with an exploration of the cyborg. This section asks: what would life be like if people no longer inhabited the earth? Kiki Kogelnik’s X-ray-like imaginings of human bodies is one answer; another is the surreal mutating bodies (pictured above) by Tatsuo Ikeda, a Japanese artist who grew up close to military compounds and naval bases in the second world war.

Ms Alemani’s references to artists of the past is what gives this exhibition its heft. To emphasise the point, she has built into the exhibition five “time capsules” full of work by late artists who favoured the same themes: from Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s knitted Dadaist imagery and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s shape-shifting decorations of her own body, both from the early 1920s, going all the way back to Aletta Jacobs, who was the first woman admitted to a Dutch university and for many years the only female doctor in the Netherlands. Jacobs wrote an illustrated book of 1897, “The Woman: Her Structure and Her Internal Organs”, and later turned it into a series of delicate papier-mâché uteruses to show how the female body worked.

Each time capsule is shown within the main exhibition, but as little separate historic entities, as shows-within-shows. One in the Giardini includes work by 30 artists from the 20th century who have never been shown at Venice before: including Carrington, Leonor Fini and Gertrud Arndt. Another is about witches and witchery and a third features the Harlem Renaissance.

Where so often the main Biennale exhibition is a cacophony of artistic styles and ideas, Ms Alemani’s show has a surprising sense of harmony even among the riot of ideas, colours and materials. She has gone far in search of what artists today want to make, what ties them to artists of the past, and what people are hoping to see. The show is full of paintings, sculptures and drawings, with not a single nft or piece of virtual reality in sight. ■

“The Milk of Dreams” continues at the Giardini and the Arsenale, Venice, until November 27th