After three years Giardini and Arsenale reopened their doors to receive thousands of visitors eager to see what is happening in the world of Art. And what a surprise when we met a curator who proposed such a change that ninety percent of the works were made by women. In this world of femininity, the absence of works with an electronic component is striking. The artists weave, make flowers, collect specimens and paint, resulting in a biennial that is neither participatory in activation nor multisensory with a virtual component, but rather contemplative (although the word has fallen into disuse). Throughout the exhibition, but especially in Giardini, an extreme loving intensity of maximum sensitivity flies over and if the denunciation exists, it is attenuated by the color or the perfect execution.

Cecilia Alemani based her curatorship on the book The Milk of Dreams by Leonora Carrington, where the author tells a series of children's stories in a surreal tone, almost always with a hopeful ending. To compose this curatorship, Alemani chose more than a thousand works by artists from all over the planet, most of them with a surrealist tone. To open the exhibition in Giardini, she proposed Katharina Fritsch (Germany, 1956) with her elephant, a replica of a live model but in green and, as it could not be missing in these times, it surrounds the room with mirrors because selfies are the thing right now.

 

 

In the adjoining room we see an installation by award-winning artivist Cecilia Vicuña (Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement) and, in front of it, three monumental fiber sculptures by Mrinalini Mukherjee (India, 1949-2015). These totems in earth colors pivot between abstraction and figuration, in an upright position looking like deities.

 

This biennial is particularly interested in the presence of "time capsules" made up of artists from the 20th century, who fundamentally adhered to the surrealist movement, such as Ovartaci, an artist who was born a man, but who, as she perceived herself as a woman, was finally able to change her sex thanks to a surgery when she was an adult. This difficult life, in between psychiatric centers and with family contempt, caused the artist to create amorphous figures, entities between animals and humans that appear, in one of the paintings, formed in a circle, as if they performed some kind of pagan rite.

 

 

In this limited group that we chose for this post representing Giardini, we added Hannah Levy (New York, USA 1991), an artist that we already knew from other presentations, such as the Frieze Fair in London. Hwe objects provoke revulsion and admiration at the same time, since they look like dead animals with their skin dissected: an ambivalence of fascinating surrealism. In this biennial she presents four works, one of them simulates the thin legs of some unknown bird, another seems to represent a camping tent and a third suggests a transition between an animal with long legs and spurs towards a container object.

 

 

Without a doubt, the previous examples demonstrate Alemani's intention: to show us the transformation or metamorphosis of bodies and their relationship with other individuals but, above all, with the planet and nature. The entire curatorial corpus revolves between solidarity, symbiosis and brotherhood, represented by artists who reinvented the category of the human being.