30 ARTS
THE WEEK 7 May 2022Art
“With all the horror
emerging from
Ukraine, a festival of
contemporary art may
seem, more than ever, an
irrelevant indulgence,”
said Alastair Sooke in
The Daily Telegraph. Yet
for better or for worse,
the Venice Biennale is
“carrying on regardless”.
Delayed by a year due
to Covid-19, the 59th
iteration follows the
usual script: as usual, it
involves a massive main
exhibition – entitled The
Milk of Dreams on this
occasion – as well as no
fewer than 80 different
national pavilions, in
which the nations of the
world battle it out for
the coveted Golden Lion
award. This year, the winner of the national competition was the
UK’s Sonia Boyce, marking the first time a black British artist has
ever been awarded the top honour. The Biennale also involves
countless collateral events, from a huge Anish Kapoor show to
a hastily erected “Ukrainian piazza” outside the central display.
This Biennale is full of the usual silliness: “indecipherable imagery
projected onto suspended pink udders; a risibly schlocky set-up
inside the Danish pavilion, featuring a suicidal centaur”, but there
is also an unusual sense of purpose to it.The 59th Biennale signals an “epochal shift in attitudes”, said
Laura Cumming in The Observer. For one thing, the normally
conspicuous Russians have stayed away: the country’s pavilion
lies empty, and the oligarchs’ super-yachts are nowhere to be seen.
More significantly, it represents the first time that women artists
have outnumbered men at the event: in the main show, just 21 of
the 213 exhibiting artists are male, while the best of the national
pavilions are all designed by women. A “wildfire hit” is France’s
Zineb Sedira, whose show – a mixture of film and “walk-in” stagesets based on memories
of her childhood as the
daughter of Algerian
immigrants – is “a
living enchantment”.
Malgorzata Mirga-Tas
covers Poland’s pavilion
with a “colossal frieze”
made entirely in
appliqué, while Simone
Leigh has transformed
the neoclassical
American pavilion into
“a traditional west
African building” full
of large sculptures – the
best of them, such as a
“monumental” bell-
shaped figure, “stonewall
the viewer with their
sheer material force”.Boyce’s British pavilion
is a real highlight, said
Jackie Wullschläger in the FT. She has filled the UK space with
“films of black women singing jazz, folk music and blues-infused
a cappella” in an installation that champions values of
“collaboration and play”. It’s the most “joyful, vibrant” British
effort this century, and a deserving winner. The main exhibition,
The Milk of Dreams, is less impressive: by choosing almost
exclusively women, the curators have “paid a severe price in
terms of quality”. Nevertheless, there are some marvellous
moments in the show. A room of Paula Rego paintings and
sculptures is simply “magnificent”: her triptych Oratorio,
depicting “abandoned babies and traumatised mothers”, is a
truly “shocking” work that exposes the academic stiffness of
much else here. A “few excellent male painters manage to scrape
through”: the most “unforgettable” pieces here are from Noah
Davis, one of the leading American painters of his generation
before his death at the age of 32 in 2015. Full of “black figures
in eerie settings”, his canvases are mournful and “ethereal”.
Ultimately, though, this is a “fun” Biennale which has
“galvanised” its artists to reach new heights.Exhibition of the week Venice Biennale
Various locations, Venice (labiennale.org/en). Until 27 NovemberSimone Leigh recreates a west African building in the American pavilion© MARCO CAPPELLETTINews from the art world
Ukraine’s statue wars
Across Ukraine, statues commemorating
the country’s historical ties to Russia are
being removed, say Lorenzo Tondo and
Isobel Koshiw in The Guardian. In Kyiv,
an “imposing Soviet-era monument
symbolising the friendship between
Russia and Ukraine” was toppled last
week; when the figure representing a
Russian worker was accidentally
decapitated, hundreds of people
applauded. Even Serhii Myrhorodskyi,
the architect who designed it, approved.
“It is the right thing to do," he said.
Some parts of the “de-Russification”
plan, which aims to demolish about 60
“colonial” monuments linked to Russia, are controversial, though- such as the proposal to remove a statue of the writer Mikhail
Bulgakov (who was born in Ukraine, but held “derogatory views”
towards it) and to rename Kyiv’s Leo Tolstoy metro station.
Meanwhile, in the territories it has occupied since February,
Russia has been restoring monuments linked to the state’s Soviet
past, which have been removed since 2015.
India Jones and the looted treasures
By day, S Vijay Kumar works as a shipping
accountant in Chennai. In his spare time,
however, “he leads a team searching for
India’s looted treasures”, says Saptarshi
Ray in The Times. Dubbed “India Jones”
by his admirers, Kumar, 48, has helped
to repatriate hundreds of artefacts over
the course of the past decade, many of
which were discovered in the collections
of some of the world’s most prestigious
museums. His interest in his country’s
past began at an early age, with visits to
temples and museums. “I realised much
of our Indian art and heritage was not
available, in the way it should be
available.” Many of the objects he seeks through his detective
work were spirited away from India in colonial times by the
British and other European powers with a presence on the
subcontinent. Until recently, the Indian authorities have “been
lax in pursuing some of these artefacts”, Kumar says. “But there
is an increasing movement to repatriate objects” around the
world, and he believes that India must “use that in its favour”.A Soviet-era monument is toppled in Kyiv