Previews from the national pavilions at the next Art Biennale 2022 opening in April; and Cecilia Alemani as the first Italian Curator
This year Venice Biennale is an ode to women. A few weeks have gone by since Lesley Lokko’s nomination as curator of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition (from May 20 to Sunday, November 26, 2023) and the protagonists of the 59th International Art Exhibition have already been revealing many new features, first the earlier opening: from Saturday, April 23 to November 27, 2022, with a pre-opening on April 20, 21, 22, 2022. In addition, both the artistic and curatorial selection is for a good percentage made of women.
Cecilia Alemani is the first Italian curator to be appointed to this role. She is currently the artistic director of High Line Art and previously she was the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 2017 Art Biennale; she chose for La Biennale Art 2022 the title The Milk of Dreams, the same title as the book written by another woman: surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.
Cecilia explains her inspired choice: “the artist describes a magical world in which life is constantly reinvented through the prism of imagination and in which one is allowed to change, transform, and become other than oneself. The Exhibition suggests an imaginative journey through the metamorphoses of bodies and the definitions of the human beings.”
Intrigued by the upcoming Venice Art Exhibition, we have put together an alphabetical list of all the participants announced so far: national pavilions, their artists, and curators.
From A to Z: the Venice Art Biennale 2022 pavilions
- Albania
Artist: Lumturi Blloshmi
Curator: Adela Demetja
The Pavilion is at the Arsenale
Born in Tirana in ’44, Lumturi Blloshmi is an artist in continuous transformation. Her serial works in constant metamorphosis are the result of incessant research of the self in relation to the dynamics of art over time.
- Argentina
Artist: Mónica Heller
Curator: Alejo Ponce de León
The Pavilion is at the Arsenale
Mónica Heller‘s art is developed through drawing, painting, 2D and 3D animations in an intense narration of either stories or fairy tales, where the protagonists are anthropomorphic people and objects inserted in fantastic imagination. Her work focuses on the emotional, social, and existential impact through the frequent use of images of technology as a means of interpretation and sublimation of reality.
- Australia
Artist: Marco Fusinato
Curator: Alexie Glass-Kantor
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
Marco Fusinato is an Australian artist and musician who combines different artistic practices: photography, installations, and music with live performances. This is his second time at the Venice Biennale: he exhibited in 2015 under the curatorship of the Nigerian art critic Okwui Enwezor in All the World’s Futures.
Alexie Glass-Kantor is one of Australia’s most highly regarded curators, currently Executive Director of Artspace in Sydney and curator of Encounters for Art Basel Hong Kong.
- Austria
Artist: Jakob Lena Knebl e Ashley Hans Scheirl
Curator: Karola Kraus
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
The artists have created an enormous stage-like installation – Invitation of the Soft Machine and Her Angry Body Parts – composed of paintings, textile works, photographs, objects, sound works and videos for holograms and interactive apps. The space is designed to alter the conventional ideas of museum presentations, break free from dictates, and experience a journey to imaginable and alternative utopian spheres.
- Belgium
Artist: Francis Alÿs
Curator: Hilde Teerlinck
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
Francis Alÿs is an artist of Belgian origin who, in 1986, left his profession as an architect and moved to Mexico City. He is known for his interdisciplinary work that includes art, architecture, and social practices.
- Brasil
Artist: Jonathas de Andrade
Curators: Jacopo Crivelli Visconti and José Olympio da Veiga Pereira
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
Jonathas De Andrade‘s art explores modern society through memory, objects, symbols, photography, and cinema. His works are installations, images and videos that examine the effects and dynamics of political power in society, people, and the concept of ethics.
- Canada
Artist: Stan Douglas
Curator: Reid Shier
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
The Vancouver-based artist is renowned as one of his country’s most important contemporary artists. His multi-disciplinary works, including films, photographs and, more recently, theatrical productions, reflect the dynamic potential of the pivotal moments in our history.
- Catalogna
Artist: Lara Fluxà
Curator: Oriol Fondevila
Born in Palma de Mallorca in 1985, Lara Fluxà considers the action of measurement a useless strategy to deal with the uncertainty of life, as it limits the possibility of perceiving what lies beyond the analyzed result. Thus, she modifies and alters the tools and processes of calculation, generating new outcomes, invisible perceptions such as transparent materials like water or glass and phenomenological ones like air or light into possible experiences.
- Denmark
Artist: Uffe Isolotto
Curator: Jacob Lillemose
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
The Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, thanks to the connection of visual artist Uffe Isolotto, will present a dramatic social-realist scenario with mythological and idyllic references.
- Estonia
Artisti: Kristina Norman, Bita Razavi ed Emily Rosaly Saal
Organisers: Corina L. Apostol and Maria Arusoo
The Pavilion is by the Netherlands Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale
Orchidelirium: An Appetite for Abundance is the title of the exhibition at the Estonia Pavilion 2022 inspired by tropical plants. The artists propose historical and new works to give a multifaceted view of colonial history and its problems.
- United Arab Emirates
Artist: Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim
Curatror: Maya Allison
The Pavilion is at the Arsenale
Innovative painter, sculptor and land artist, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim will represent the United Arab Emirates at the Venice Biennale in an exhibition curated by Maya Allison, Executive Director of the New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery. Known for being one of the UAE’s first experimental artists, Ibrahim is an influential member of the country’s avant-garde art community formed in the early 1980s.
- Philippines
Artists: Gerardo Tan, Felicidad A. Prudente and Sammy Buhle
Curators: Yael Buencamino Borromeo and Arvin Jason Flores
The Pavilion is at the Arsenale
Chosen among 11 curatorial proposals, the exhibition All of us present, This is our gathering/Andi taku and sana, Amung taku by sana curated by Yael Buencamino Borromeo and Arvin Jason Flores, will present the collaborative project of artist Gerardo Tan, musicologist Felicidad A. Prudente and weaver Sammy Buhle. The exhibition involves an interdisciplinary approach of the senses, mediated by sounds, performances, images, and objects that interlace the usual with the contemporary.
- Finland
Artist: Pilvi Takala
Curator: Christina Li
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
Pilvi Takala is a Helsinki-based performance artist who works with video. His artistic approach is in the research to elaborate and question the rules, like the ones we create in our behavior dependent on our context. Often in his works candid camera is art.
- France
Artist: Zineb Sedira
Curators: Yasmina Reggad and Art Reoriented (Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath)
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
Zineb Sedira is a French artist of Algerian origin who has always embraced the genres of autobiographical narrative, fiction, and documentary. For the French pavilion, a dialogue has been envisaged within the events of colonialism and the related historical testimonial narratives and collective heritage.
- Germany
Artist: Maria Eichhorn
Curator: Yilmaz Dziewior
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
Born in Bamberg in 1962, Berlin-based Maria Eichhorn is known for her process-oriented site-specific works and installations that investigate the issue of ownership or control, often in political and economic systems, revealing inconsistencies and complexities in the relationships of work, value, and time.
- Great Britain
Artist: Sonia Boyce
Organizer: British Council
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
The highly innovative and experimental approach between improvised and collaborative performance and audiovisual elements invite participants to come together and talk, either sing or move in relation to the past and present.
Formed in Kyoto in 1984, Dumb Type is a non-hierarchical art collective composed of artists working in visual art, video, computer programming, music, and dance. Dealing with various themes such as gender, race, AIDS, life and death, memory, and society; they intend to present in Venice an installation with the theme “post-truth”, which refers to a society where personal feelings influence public opinion rather than the objective facts.
- Hong Kong
Artist: Angela Su
Curator: Freya Chou
The Pavilion is in Campo della Tana, Castello
Angela Su is the first female artist to represent Hong Kong at the Biennale in a solo exhibition. The Hong Kong-born sculptor, who holds degrees in biochemistry from the University of Toronto and visual arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design, is known for her gothic-toned works, scientific drawings, and performances.
- Iceland
Artist: Sigurður Guðjónsson
Curator: Mónica Bello
The Pavilion is at the Arsenale
Sigurður Guðjónsson is known for his powerful dark and hypnotic video works where image, audio and spatiality create an organic ensemble. He is an artist who uses the potential of media to produce works that rhythmically engage the viewer in a synesthetic experience, connecting vision and sound in ways that seem to extend one’s perceptual reach and produce new sensations.
- Ireland
Artist: Niamh O’Malley
Curators: Clíodhna Shaffrey and Michael Hill
The Pavilion is at the Arsenale
Stone, steel, wood, and glass are shaped, composed, and assembled to make solid, visible, and physical a silent answer. Objects and spaces can speak as well as Niamh O’Malley‘s exhibition entitled Gather can contain and describe. There is comfort in contact, in knowing the boundaries of things, and during a time when we are so much in our heads, O’Malley reminds us that we are also, acutely, and collectively, in the world.
A series of conversations and a book (published by Temple Bar Gallery+Studios and coming out right at the opening of the Venice Biennale) designed by Alex Synge of The First 47 as a visual object, will enrich the exhibition, becoming a multi-location exhibition project on a national tour as a public engagement program throughout 2023.
- Italy
Artist: Gian Maria Tosatti
Curator: Eugenio Viola
The Pavilion is at Tese delle Vergini, Arsenale
Eugenio Viola, Eugenio Viola, Chief curator at PICA – Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in Australia and MAMBO – Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, is not new as a curator at the Biennale: we saw him in 2015 for the Estonia Pavilion. This year, he has chosen for the Italian Pavilion a solo show dedicated to a single artist, Gian Maria Tosatti, born in 1980.
- Luxembourg
Artist: Tina Gillen
Curator: Christophe Gallois
The Pavilion is at the Arsenale
Tina Gillen‘s works portray moments of everyday life, sustaining a degree of ambiguity between abstraction and figuration, construction, and improvisation. The project Faraway So Close for the Biennale Arte 2022 is an ambitious pictorial installation conceived specifically in dialogue with the historic setting of the Sale d’Armi of the Arsenale, exploring the pictorial and three-dimensional surfaces: a tableau vivant that ponders the relationship between internal space and the external world.
The exhibition is accompanied by a research project entitled Forms of Life that includes monthly seminars at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where Gillen teaches painting, and a workshop in Venice during the Biennale.
- Malta
Artists: Brian Schembri, Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci and Arcangelo Sassolino
Curators: Keith Sciberras and Jeffrey Uslip
The Pavilion is at the Arsenale
Diplomazija Astuta is the name of the project by the creative team consisting of Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci (Malta), Arcangelo Sassolino (Italy) and the compositions of the Maltese conductor and musician Brian Schembri, selected to represent Malta for the Art Biennale 2022.
It will be a conceptual, immersive, site-specific installation that will connect biblical narratives with contemporary culture. It will also include the work Metall u Skiet by Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, excerpts from Psalm 139 recorded in Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Greek, Maltese, Italian and English, rendered three-dimensionally giving sculptural form to the language and making the spiritual concrete in a Rosetta Stone of the 21st century.
- New Zeeland
Artist: Yuki Kihara
Curator: Natalie King
The pavilion is at the Arsenale
New Zealand’s small islands ecosystem, climate change, queer rights, Gauguin’s gaze, and decolonization are some of the themes explored by award-winning interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara for the New Zealand Pavilion. Paradise Camp is an eight-year project that includes photography, video, archival research, and social activities, filmed on the island of Upolu, Sāmoa.
- Holland
Artist: Melanie Bonajo
Curators: Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg, Geir Haraldseth and Soraya Pol
The Pavilion is at the Chiesetta della Misericordia
Melanie Bonajo is an artist-director, bodyworker and sex coach. Bonajo will create an immersive video installation exploring the importance of touch and intimacy in an age of increasing digital-driven isolation. After more than two years of social distancing, Bonajo’s work could become the re-discovery of that hug that many people need (or maybe don’t).
- Oman
Artists: Anwar Sonya, Hassan Meer, Budoor Al Riyami, Radhika Khimji and Raiya Al Rawahi
Curators: Sayyid Saeed Al Busaidi and Aisha Stoby
The Pavilion is at the Arsenale
Debuting at the Venice Biennale, from the Sultanate of Oman, Crown Prince Sayyid Theyazin bin Haitham Al Said will present the works of five artists, a local collective called Circle Group, representing the last 50 years of contemporary art in the country.
The multimedia exhibition curated by Aisha Stoby, an Omani and Middle East historian of modern art, will present the works of painter Anwar Sonya, Hassan Meer, photographer, and video installation artist Budoor Al Riyami, Radhika Khimji, whose feminist work includes sculptures and textiles, and the latest works of young sound installation artist Raiya Al Rawahi, who passed away 5 years ago.
- Poland
Artist: Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
Curators: Wojciech Szymański and Joanna Warsza
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
For the first time in the over-120-year history of the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, a Roma artist is representing a national pavilion. The project Re-enchanting the World by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, prepared specifically for the Polish Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2022, is an attempt to find the place of the Roma community in European art history. The exhibition proposed by curators Wojciech Szymański and Joanna Warsza was the winner of a competition organised by Zachęta — National Gallery of Art.
Re-enchanting the World is Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s manifesto on Roma identity and art, drawing inspiration from the astrological frescos of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara.
- Russia
Artisti: Kirill Savchenkov e Alexandra Sukhareva
Curatore: Raimundas Malašauskas
IThe Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
Raimundas Malašauskas explains the project for the Russian Pavilion: “Choreographed as a scene of gestures, Kirill Savchenkov and Alexandra Sukhareva‘s presentation at the 59th Venice Biennale is an attempt to address the complexity of bodily, material and technological times. It evokes a transition from one state to another, a twisted flow between future and past, a suspended division between dead and alive (and digital), day and night. Slipping between languages and representations, dwelling on the most recent social memory, freezing in anticipation of unexpected things, preparing for tomorrow, either catastrophic or bright or both.”
- Sámi (former Nordic countries: Norway, Sweden and Finland)
Artists: Pauliina Feodoroff, Máret Ánne Sara and Anders Sunna
Curators: Katya García-Antón, Liisa-Rávná Finbog and Beaska Niillas
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
The Nordic Pavilion has changed its name to Sámi and it will exhibit the works of 3 artists from the Sámi region of northern Norway. The selection of the artists and the name change is, as the curators of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway state, “a symbolic inversion of the colonial claims that have attempted to erase Sámi land and culture.”
- Scotland
Artists: Alberta Whittle
Organizers: Glasgow International and Scotland + Venice
The Pavilion is at the Darsena Arsenale of San Pietro di Castello
She works with film, sculpture, media, performance, and installation. Alberta Whittle responds to today’s events by digging into African research and diaspora among colonialism, xenophobia, climate change and pandemic.
- Serbia
Artist: Vladimir Nikolic
Curator: Biljana Ciric
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
Biljana Ciric is an independent curator based in Shanghai who presents, for Venice, the artist Vladimir Nikolic, born in 1974 in Belgrade, Serbia, where he lives and works. His work has been presented in several major galleries and museums, including the Whitechapel Art Gallery and The 88 Project.
- Singapore
Artist: Shubigi Rao
Curator: Ute Meta Bauer
The Pavilion is at the Arsenale
Ute Meta Bauer is a curator of exhibitions and presentations, connecting contemporary art, film, video, and sound through transdisciplinary formats. For nearly 10 years she has been the Founding Director of NTU CCA Singapore – Center for Contemporary Art, Singapore – a research center at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where she is a Professor at the School of Art, Design & Media (ADM). Her main research, supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education, is on the climate crisis and cultural loss.
Here she refines the art of artist and writer Shubigi Rao, which includes text, film, and photography. It looks at current and historical-critical issues as shifts in perspective in the examination of contemporary displacement crises of both people, languages, cultures, and knowledge.
- Slovenia
Artist: Marko Jakše
Curator: Robert Simonišek
The Pavilion is at the Arsenale
The exhibition is a tribute to painter Marko Jakše, winner of the Prešeren Fund Award in 2015. From the very beginning of his creative career, he has intensively devoted himself to painting with recognizable figural and landscape motifs, creating a mysterious universe in which dream and reality, lyrical and narrative, archaic and modern, intertwine.
- Spain
Artist: Ignasi Aballí
Curator: Beatriz Espejo
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
Corrección is Ignasi Aballí‘s work for the Spanish pavilion that aims to emphasize the idea of the wrong, hidden, unthinkable and unimaginable. According to the curator Beatriz Espejo, an important Mexican writer, teacher, and researcher, Aballì’s project stands as “an intervention that disrupts memory in spatial terms, that modifies the exhibition space, its placement at the Biennale and its relationship with the city of Venice“.
- United States of America
Artist: Simone Leigh
Curators: Jill Medvedow and Eva Respini
The Pavilion is at the Giardini Della Biennale
Brooklyn-based sculptor Simone Leigh devotes her exhibition entirely to the United States pavilion, titled Simone Leigh: Sovereignty, “to the experiences and contributions of black women” as co-curator Jill Medvedow states. The figurative sculptures of black women from Chicago carved life-size in ceramic and raffia before their castings in bronze, drawing on the artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora, blending disparate narratives.
Additionally, this October 2022, for the final component of the exhibition, Leigh will convene scholars and artists from around the world for Loophole of Retreat: Venice. After Venice, they will move to ICA, Boston’s waterfront museum, for the artist’s first major solo show.
- Switzerland
Artist: Latifa Echakhch
Curators: Francesco Stocchi and Alexandre Babel
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
Lives in Fully, Switzerland. French Moroccan background, the artist Latifa Echakhch is known for her interdisciplinary installations marked by the subtle balance between strength and fragility and for a conceptually surreal and visual language.
The exhibition entitled The Concert will be a unique rhythmic experience composed of visual, acoustic, and spatial effects created by the artist together with the curators: the Roman Francesco Stocchi and the percussionist Alexandre Babel.
Most of the materials used for the exhibition are recycled from previous Biennials to highlight the life cycle as an effect of a lasting transformation.
- Taiwan
Artist: Sakuliu
Curator: Patrick Flores
The Pavilion is at Palazzo delle Prigioni, Castello 4209, San Marco
“This is a special moment,” says Ping Lin, director of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, “the global pandemic has given us a reason to think profoundly, and it is forcing us to reexamine the relationship between people and other species and objects. Sakuliu is a talented storyteller. His various art forms tell us lost stories, cover contemporary culture, politics, and economics, and loosen the pre-established traditional knowledge structure, making us rethink how to thrive harmoniously together with the environment from which we are reliant.”
- Turkey
Artist: Füsun Onur
Curator: Bige Örer
The Pavilion is at the Arsenale
The Turkish Pavillion, which will remain at the Arsenale until 2034, will host for the 2022 Venetian event an installation by Füsun Onur, a contemporary artist whose works with autobiographical references deal with the potential of space, time, rhythm, and form.
- Hungary
Artist: Zsófia Keresztes
Curator: Mónika Zsiklai
The Pavilion is at the Giardini della Biennale
The exhibition curated by Mónika Zsiklai, curatorial director of Q Contemporary in Budapest, is the winning project of artist Zsófia Keresztes‘ public competition called After Dreams, I Dare to Defy the Damages. Keresztes is a visual artist whose sculptures and installations feature muted colors and mosaic compositions.
- Zimbabwe
Artists: Wallen Mapondera, Ronald Muchatuta, Kresiah Mukwazhi and Terrence Musekiwa
Curator: Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa
Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa is an emerging researcher, writer and curator based in Harare, Zimbabwe. She previously was the curator of the Zimbabwe Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and for the year 2022, she is presenting a group of artists with over ten years of experience, who are widely recognized in the international art scene.
Wallen Mapondera works with media, painting, drawing, sculpture, and installations to “challenge the linearity of time and history, evoking both social and political themes of power, domination, hierarchies and corruption.”
Ronald Muchatuta explores the issues of the Zimbabwean diaspora between migration, politics, postcolonialism and discrimination.
Kresiah Mukwazhi‘s art draws on personal experiences and gender-based violence, exploitation, and abuse, exposing cases of sexual assault in her country and the rest of southern Africa.
Coming from a long line of sculptors, Terrence Musekiwa creates pieces that “challenge and honor Zimbabwean tradition at the same time” in a dialogue between systems and ways of life.
Article by Lucia Pecoraro. Cover by Settimo Cannatella.
Venice Biennale photos are by Ekaterina Mishchenkova (@katia_mi), Rossana Viola, Lorenzo Cinotti, Lucia Pecoraro for Veneziadavivere.
For the Italian Pavilion with Milovan Farronato, the photo is by Lorenzo Bellio.
Christian Benesch for the Austria Pavilion.
For the Australia Pavilion, the photo is by Zan Wimberley.
Portrait of the artist Uffe Isolotto (Denmark Pavilion) photo by Nanna Starck.
Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, image courtesy of the National Pavilion UAE, photo by Mohamed Somji of Seeing Things.
For Mónica Heller photo by Piedras Galeria.
For the German Pavilion works by Maria Eichhorn photos by Mathias Völzke and Werner Zellien.
Photos by Tina Gillen and Paul Caeser of a work by Tina Gillen, Shelter, 2018.
For the Ireland Pavilion, portrait of Niamh O’Malley by Dragana Jurišić.
Portrait of Paul-Cochrane by artist Sonia Boyce for the Great Britain Pavilion.
Portrait of Shubigi Rao and Ute Meta Bauer courtesy of the National Arts Council Singapore.
By Mónica Heller the image is DE LA CONCIENCIA SATÉLITE AL SABER SATELITAL (2019) 3d monochannel video animation 6:18 min, Muntref.
Alexandre Babel, Latifa Echakhch and Francesco Stocchi ph. Sébastien Agnetti for the Swiss Pavilion.
For the Poland Pavilion, the photo is a work by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Esma Redźepova / Herstories (patchwork, 2021).
Photos for the Sámi Pavilion are by Erik Persson for the portrait of Anders Sunna, Marie Louise Somby for Máret Ánne Sara, and Per-Josef Idivouma for Pauliina Feodoroff.
Simone Leigh, 2021 courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, photo by Shaniqwa Jarvis.
