- Manuel Toledo
- from Venice, for BBC World
April 25, 2022
Image copyrightEPA
Subtitle,
Cecilia Vicuña receives the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022
This weekend, the 59th Venice Biennale opened its doors with the largest female representation in its 127-year history.
Latin America witnessed a significant moment on Saturday when the Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievementan award he shared with Germany’s Katharina Fritsch.
“For decades, Vicuña has walked her own path, with precision, humility and tenacity, anticipating many current debates on ecology and feminism and inventing new personal and collective mythologies,” said the Biennale’s Italian curator, Cecilia Alemani.
“Cecilia Vicuña’s artistic language is based on a great fascination with indigenous traditions and non-Western epistemologies,” Alemani added.
The Biennale, postponed due to the pandemic, will take place until November 27, 2022.
mother’s eyes
Born into a family of artists in Santiago de Chile in 1948, Cecilia Vicuña studied art at the University of Chile and the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, where she was at the time of Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in September 1973.
From 1975 to 1980 he lived in Bogotá and later settled in New York, where he still lives today.
Image copyrightManuel Toledo
Subtitle,
The exhibition of works by Vicuña in Venice. The work on the right is called Leoparda de ojitos and dates from 1976.
In recent years his work has earned great international recognition, especially since his Quipu Textile Plants will be presented at the Documenta 14 exhibitions in Germany and Greece.
This was recently announced by the Tate Modern gallery in London, which had acquired one of these installations, Quipu Womb (2017). Vicuña will carry out the next Hyundai order for its turbine hallone of the most coveted commissions in the international art scene.
Image copyrightLucy Dawkins / Tate Modern
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Cecilia Vicuña poses with her installation Quipu Womb, acquired by the Tate Modern gallery in London.
Image copyright Tate Modern
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Vicuña’s artistic language is rooted in a deep fascination with indigenous traditions, such as this installation featuring quipu—the Incan system of rope and knots—on display at the Berkeley Art Museum.
A series of paintings and an installation depicting his work from the mid-1960s to the present are on view in the Giardini Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
The installation NAUfraga (2022) was created especially for this Biennale using ropes and debris found in the city of canals, suggesting its slow demise due to climate change.
NAUfraga is a continuation of his so-called “precarious” work, with “Basuritas” he began making in Chile in 1966.
Image copyrightManuel Toledo
Subtitle,
The NAUfraga installation was made especially for this Biennale using ropes and debris found in Venice, a continuation of his “precarious” work he began in 1966.
Some of the paintings are new, like Virgen Puta (2021), while others, like La Comegente (2019) and Llaverito (2019), are based on lost works from the 1970s.
One of the surviving paintings from those years, exhibited at the Biennale, Bless me mamita (1977) – a portrait of her mother – was chosen for the biennale’s promotional material and catalogue.
The Chilean painter has highlighted on her social media that thanks to this, her mother’s eyes are everywhere in Venice.
Image copyright Tate Modern
Subtitle,
Bless me Mamita (2017) was selected for the Biennale’s promotional material and catalogue.
historical biennale
Other women have also made history at this Biennale.
American Simone Leigh was named the Biennale’s Best Artist and the British Pavilion, with the work of Sonia Boyce, was selected as Best National Representation.
It is the first time that two black women, Leigh and Boyce, have won the most prestigious awards in the contemporary art world.
The main exhibition, whose name The Milk of Dreams is inspired by the title of a book by British-Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington, features more than 200 artists from 58 countries.
According to the curator, the decision to have the majority of works by women rather than gender-biased artists reflects “a conscious reappraisal of the centrality of men in art history and contemporary culture.”
The exhibition includes works by other creators from Latin America, such as the Cuban Belkis Ayonwhose Afro-Cuban-inspired collographies open the Arsenale pavilion around a huge bust of a black woman whose skirt resembles a hut.
It was precisely for this bust called Brick House (2019) that Simone Leigh received the Golden Lion.
Image copyrightGetty Images
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Simone Leigh received the Golden Lion for the Brick House bust.
are also displayed three arpilleras by Chilean Violeta Parra and five gigantic oven sculptures by Argentinian Gabriel Chailerepresentative of his family.
One of the rooms is dedicated to a beautiful installation Colombian artist Delcy MorelosTerrestrial Paradise (2022), in which viewers walk among large landmasses smelling of hay, cocoa, cassava flour and spices.
In general, this Biennale features fewer video works than previous editions and more paintings, sculptures, ceramics, textiles and installations.
And perhaps because the female gaze predominates, many of the works have great poetic power and invite you to think.
For many of the visitors and the artists themselves, it is a historic and hopeful moment.
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