This year’s event shines a spotlight on women for the very first time in its long history
The Venice Biennale has returned for its 59th edition, opening on April 23 in Italy after a year-long delay thanks to pandemic restrictions.
For the first time in its 127-year history, the biennale’s main exhibition—titled A Milk of Dreams—features mainly female and gender non-conforming artists. Of the 213 artists featured in the exhibition, approximately 90 per cent are female.
The main exhibition is curated by Cecilia Alemani, chief curator of the High Line Art programme in New York. The exhibition takes its name from a book written in the 1950s by the late British-Mexican surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, which was published in 2017, six years after her death.
Some of the female artists featured in A Milk of Dreams were under-recognised during their lifetimes, while others have begun to gain traction in the art world over the last few years at later stages of their career. Here are three to know.
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1. Ruth Asawa (1926-2013)
The late Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa’s ethereal wire sculptures are featured in a sub-section of the exhibition titled A leaf, a gourd, a shell, a net, a bag, a sling, a sack, a bottle, a pot, a box, a container, taken from Ursula K Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. The book, much like the exhibition, explores how technology is a cultural vessel in shaping the human experience.
The suspended wire sculptures, deceptively reminiscent of wicker baskets, were constructed using traditional basket weaving techniques. Considered avant-garde in her time, Asawa’s creations are now widely recognised across the international art community, almost a decade after her death. In 2021, an exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery New York titled All is Possible offered a retrospective of the artist’s work.
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