The 2022 Venice Art Biennale belies its name. Delayed by the pandemic, it is three rather than two years since the previous edition, which bore the foreboding title May You Live In Interesting Times. The ancient Chinese curse certainly worked.
Cecilia Alemani, the New York-based Italian curator of the 59th edition, which opened on Saturday, thus had extra time to prepare her exhibition, which occupies the large central pavilion in the city’s Giardini, as well as the immense spaces of an old rope-making factory in the nearby Arsenale. It shows. Her deep research has produced an unusually coherent show, which, aside from the acreage of new art, also deepens its frame of reference by showing historic work, often by surrealists such as Ithell Colquhoun, Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo. Such artists prefigure Ms Alemani’s contemporary preoccupations: the body in transformation, metamorphosis, the world considered from a perspective other than that of the white male.
